YMMV / F-Zero GX

• Best Level Ever: While GX has its fair share of tracks that make players want to pull their hair out, it also has what many fans consider some of the coolest tracks in any racing game of its type. Some standouts include:
  • Aeropolis Multiplex has players driving through skyscrapers thousands of miles in the air on a track loaded with hairpin turns, chicanes, and rough patches, making for the first truly challenging level in the game, but becoming so satisfying to play once you know how to maneuver it. Especially so once the player learns how to use advanced techniques like Turbo Sliding and Quick Turning to trivialize said hairpins.
  • Big Blue Ordeal lives up to its name by being the closest thing to a Marathon Level not found in the AX tracks, riding up and diving over turns that almost make you feel like you're surfing over the water. And if you're really feeling yourself, it can end with one of the simplest but most satisfying suicide finishes in the game where you ride the rail at the final narrow portion of the track and fling yourself all the way across the road to the finish.
  • Aeropolis Dragon Slope combines the beautiful atmosphere of the aforementioned Aeropolis Multiplex and repurposes it into one of the most memorable setpieces in the entire game—a massive four-step dive that can make for insanely tense races when everyone is diving together simultaneously. And then you climb all the way back up the track, along the way going over a massive ice patch with no walls and only rough patches to save you from falling off, a narrow corkscrew climb, and a really cool potential dive at the very end of a track that skilled players can take as a shortcut.
  • Outer Space Meteor Stream is probably the most popular track to come out of the AX courses, and for good reason. The fact that it's the only track in the game that uses Outer Space as a biome already lets it stand out, but it also takes place inside of a massive elliptical pipe. That means that unlike other pipe tracks, where the physics of the cylindrical shape of the pipe can often get in the way of driving, this track allows for the cool setpiece of the pipe while also allowing players to drive normally through it, if they can. That becomes more of a challenge as players travel through the pipe and it starts doing corkscrews and having entire partitions of the pipe covered in ice, but it is immensely satisfying once you learn how to properly navigate it.
  • Green Plant: Spiral. It's the longest course in the game by far, but a fair number of fans are willing to forgive it as it is still one of the easier courses in the game in terms of fall-off hazards and it features some spectacular twists and loops through what appears to be a large Floating Island with a beautiful starry sky in the background.
• Breather Level: The AX Cup courses are noticably easier than the GX-native courses. While getting good times on them is still challenging, and the final course, Green Plant: Spiral, is particularly long, these courses have considerably fewer fall-off hazards than the GX courses, so it's less likely you're going to end up staring at the "RETIRE" screen ad nauseam while trying to do the AX Cup in GP mode.
• Broken Base: Is snaking a cheating technique? Or is it just a fair use of the game's physics engine?
• Common Knowledge: After an Action Replay code was found in 2013 that allows one to access a Dummied Out F-Zero AX menu in F-Zero GX, it became popular trivia to claim F-Zero GX includes a copy of AX in its code. This isn't quite right. The games were developed simultaneously and with the same code base so a menu simulating F-Zero AX's frontend does indeed exists in GX, but the final F-Zero AX has different physics and techniques from GX, while the Dummied Out mode uses the same physics as GX. As such, it cannot really be said to be the full F-Zero AX experience.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Generally speaking when it comes to playing for world records in this game, aside from Story Mode which locks you into the Blue Falcon, you will only see two of the 41 player machines: the Fat Shark and the Black Bull. Expand it to include custom machines and you see players gravitate to the Quick Star-G4 and the Gallant Star-G4, making the grand total of competitively viable machines a whopping 4 out of over 15,000 potential machines.
• Contested Sequel: F-Zero GX is highly regarded and respected as one of the best installments in the series, but opinions vary on how it compares to F-Zero X. Most of the discussion are caused by that it's by a different developer Sega, whose experience on other racing games like Daytona USA has permeated this game, and not everyone is happy with it.
  • On one hand, GX makes a massive improvement on the graphics, one of the most criticized aspects in X, and is a great looking game. New features like the first true story mode, shop, and arcade connectivity were also positively received. Physics exploits, both official (snaking) and unofficial kinds, are cited by fans as the game's highlight.
  • On the other hand, detractors argue that the physics exploits are detrimental to the game and make the machine balance more lopsided (already an issue in X), and dislike more gimmick based course designs, extreme difficulty of story mode, and removal of the features from X (X Cup, Death Race, and Level Editor in Expansion Kit). Furthermore, the soundtrack style is highly controversial; GX's electronica is often poorly compared to X's heavy metal, as most fans associate the series with the latter (not helped by that official remixes like Mario Kart 8 are also the latter).
• Disappointing Last Level: "Finale: Enter the Creators" is an underwhelming final mission, which not only recycles an existing track environment Phantom Road (whereas the previous missions had story mode exclusive levels), but is just a Time Attack mode against Staff Ghost. The stage becomes rail-less for this mission that makes it difficult, but it lacks excitement for a race against the Creators of the Universe, since ghosts are pre-recorded runs that don't interact with the player. Plot-wise, it's not particularly well-liked either, since the previous chapter seems to wrap up Deathborn's plot thread with Deathborn having an epic crash-out and the two championship belts forming a giant super-belt, but now in this last chapter a new unforeshadowed set of villains has been thrown into the fray. Once they're dealt with, Falcon just...takes his helmet off (and the camerawork obscures his face, so there's not much of a reveal either) and walks off into the distance, with no real payoff for the player.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The game's story mode is infamous for being atrociously difficult and its use and abuse of Rubberband AI, to the point where the mention of Chapter 7 in particular will cause horror flashbacks amongst many who played this game back in its heyday.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There are entire leaderboards and competitive scenes for max-speed runs, in which the player turns the acceleration dial all the way to max speed. This means most machines cannot snake (and snaking is a divisive matter, and instead opens up a plethora of other techniques and an entirely different set of Character Tiers.
• That One Level: Shared with the rest of the series here.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Deathborn mentions that the underworld has its own F-Zero Championship, but its F-Zero racing scene is never really elaborated upon, with Deathborn being the only representative to be depicted.