Let me end the history lesson and talk about Star Fox Assault in a more editorial sense for a bit. When I played the game for the first time at the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo, I walked away with a very bad taste in my mouth. After spending some serious quality time with the finished title, I've come to understand the philosophy behind the game considerably more than before. Unlike Star Fox Adventures, Assault has managed to add to the original formula solidified in Star Fox 64 without compromising its core elements. As I had mentioned earlier, Star Fox 64 could be broken down into fast action and a drive to get as many points as possible. Every level in Star Fox Assault still centers around these two elements (especially on the higher difficulty settings), but manages to successfully add a third element: freedom and variety in movement.
For those that are unaware, there is not a single level in Star Fox Assault where you are confined to fighting on foot. Aside from the four Arwing-specific levels, the theory behind each level is that you will use whichever mode of travel best fits your current situation. Your primary goal is to evade enemy attacks and take out everything in your way, but the options presented to you allow you to fulfill this mission in a variety of surprisingly entertaining ways. Only occasionally is a certain option required to progress; you can usually meet your objectives in whatever way you see fit. While you are presented with a Landmaster tank early on in the second mission, you can continue on foot and ignore the tank until youre presented with a boss that can only be hurt by its heavy artillery. Similarly, there is a level where you can hop in your Arwing and use it to eliminate most of the larger enemies in an arena before you even bother to attempt to topple them on foot.
One key thing to note, and perhaps one of the coolest things, is that there is a very high level of interaction with your vehicles. You can hop out of your Landmaster right before an enemy destroys it to save Fox himself from taking any damage. If you are being attacked from behind, you can jump out of the tank, aim behind you to take out your foes with your normal ground weaponry, and jump back in all the time standing on the top of the tank. You can even do the same thing with the Arwing. Flying directly over a target that you want to attack? Press Z and you'll hop on top of the Arwing as it continues to fly. Just aim downwards with some of your ground weaponry, and when youre done just press Z to hop back in. You can land your Arwing and get out, you can jump out at the last second and crash it into an enemy, etc. This kind of stuff is especially entertaining in multiplayer battles.
I think what excites me the most is how much this system could be expanded upon in future Star Fox titles. Instead of a single arena where you just have to kill everything around you, imagine the following. There's a giant flying robot thats menacing a nearby city on Corneria. Unfortunately for you, the city is miles and miles away, and you're stuck on foot by an enemy installation that has your Landmaster and Arwing locked away. You want to get in the Arwing and save the city, but it's behind a wall that can only be penetrated by the power of the Landmaster's cannon. You infiltrate the place on foot until you can obtain the tank, at which point you can tear through the place until you can get the Arwing. You hop in the ship, maybe drop a nova bomb on the place for good measure, and speed off towards the city.
Without a scene or level change, the path to the city ends up mirroring a typical on-rails Star Fox stage, with branching paths and all. Once you get to the city, you can do one of two things: crash your Arwing into the giant robot right off to take it out, or fight it traditionally. Crashing saves you the trouble of battling it, but then you're without an Arwing when you discover another robot attacking another nearby locale. Had you kept your Arwing, you wouldve been able to fly through another rails-like stage to the next city, but since you crashed it you have to fight on foot in the first city and commandeer an enemy vehicle to get you to the next place. Note, this has all been one seamless area. You could have taken your Arwing off the path at any point, and even landed it to explore some hidden areas along the way. The number of things you could do with complete freedom of choice and motion is immense. The above is but a fraction of the potential that has yet to be explored.
Years ago, when I was imagining what kind of direction the Star Fox franchise could go in, the only thing I could come up with was a cooperative multiplayer system where your wingmen are actually controlled by your friends. While I still think that would be incredibly cool, Star Fox Assault has opened up leagues of other possibilities I had never even considered by ungluing Fox from the seat of his Arwing. Dont get me wrong, the game is far from perfect. It's certainly rough around the edges, but I will unflinchingly maintain that it offers a whole lot of fun, both in single player and multiplayer modes. I can't fathom how some people have managed to explode the game's faults to such proportions in their minds that they can say things like "this game is awful" and "Namco ruined Star Fox" without batting an eye. Its a pet peeve of mine, in fact, when people irrationally make the jump from a few issues to horrifyingly bad so quickly. Once you overcome the "hey, this isnt Star Fox 64!" shock, which I fear many critics never did, you can begin to appreciate Assault for all of the things it does right.
One fear I have is that many people are forming their overall opinions of Assault after a single play-through on an easy difficulty level. The game increases in fun at an exponential rate when you play on the harder difficulty levels, especially when you play to try and get the medals, instead of just playing to beat the stage. The gold medals for each stage require a lot more skill to acquire than the medals in Star Fox 64 did, and searching for the special flags gives you a reason to actually explore every nook and cranny of a level, instead of rushing through it without paying any attention. The multiplayer mode also deserves attention, as virtually every unlockable in the game is related to it somehow. You can unlock the majority of the single player levels for multiplayer use, as well as a significant number of other ones for just playing a lot of multiplayer matches. There are secret characters, secret weapons, secret modes of play, and even a couple secret modes of transportation. The depth really does increase the more you play, adding to my belief that this is a real "don't form an opinion until youve played it to death" game.
In the end, no one can really predict where the series is headed. Maybe it will continue down the path I had suggested above, or maybe it will return to the Star Fox 64 formula. After all, there are probably enough fans to convince Nintendo that leaving the Arwing is a terrible idea. Either way, though, what I'd like to see is a new Star Fox game developed by Nintendo themselves. I doubt it's a coincidence that the Star Fox name started to lose its luster when its development left Nintendo's hands. Hopefully they'll inject some love back into the franchise in the future, as there are a lot of cool things that they could still expand upon. Star Fox is just starting to grow up, and I look forward to seeing the kind of strapping lad it becomes.
For those that are unaware, there is not a single level in Star Fox Assault where you are confined to fighting on foot. Aside from the four Arwing-specific levels, the theory behind each level is that you will use whichever mode of travel best fits your current situation. Your primary goal is to evade enemy attacks and take out everything in your way, but the options presented to you allow you to fulfill this mission in a variety of surprisingly entertaining ways. Only occasionally is a certain option required to progress; you can usually meet your objectives in whatever way you see fit. While you are presented with a Landmaster tank early on in the second mission, you can continue on foot and ignore the tank until youre presented with a boss that can only be hurt by its heavy artillery. Similarly, there is a level where you can hop in your Arwing and use it to eliminate most of the larger enemies in an arena before you even bother to attempt to topple them on foot.
One key thing to note, and perhaps one of the coolest things, is that there is a very high level of interaction with your vehicles. You can hop out of your Landmaster right before an enemy destroys it to save Fox himself from taking any damage. If you are being attacked from behind, you can jump out of the tank, aim behind you to take out your foes with your normal ground weaponry, and jump back in all the time standing on the top of the tank. You can even do the same thing with the Arwing. Flying directly over a target that you want to attack? Press Z and you'll hop on top of the Arwing as it continues to fly. Just aim downwards with some of your ground weaponry, and when youre done just press Z to hop back in. You can land your Arwing and get out, you can jump out at the last second and crash it into an enemy, etc. This kind of stuff is especially entertaining in multiplayer battles.
I think what excites me the most is how much this system could be expanded upon in future Star Fox titles. Instead of a single arena where you just have to kill everything around you, imagine the following. There's a giant flying robot thats menacing a nearby city on Corneria. Unfortunately for you, the city is miles and miles away, and you're stuck on foot by an enemy installation that has your Landmaster and Arwing locked away. You want to get in the Arwing and save the city, but it's behind a wall that can only be penetrated by the power of the Landmaster's cannon. You infiltrate the place on foot until you can obtain the tank, at which point you can tear through the place until you can get the Arwing. You hop in the ship, maybe drop a nova bomb on the place for good measure, and speed off towards the city.
Without a scene or level change, the path to the city ends up mirroring a typical on-rails Star Fox stage, with branching paths and all. Once you get to the city, you can do one of two things: crash your Arwing into the giant robot right off to take it out, or fight it traditionally. Crashing saves you the trouble of battling it, but then you're without an Arwing when you discover another robot attacking another nearby locale. Had you kept your Arwing, you wouldve been able to fly through another rails-like stage to the next city, but since you crashed it you have to fight on foot in the first city and commandeer an enemy vehicle to get you to the next place. Note, this has all been one seamless area. You could have taken your Arwing off the path at any point, and even landed it to explore some hidden areas along the way. The number of things you could do with complete freedom of choice and motion is immense. The above is but a fraction of the potential that has yet to be explored.
Years ago, when I was imagining what kind of direction the Star Fox franchise could go in, the only thing I could come up with was a cooperative multiplayer system where your wingmen are actually controlled by your friends. While I still think that would be incredibly cool, Star Fox Assault has opened up leagues of other possibilities I had never even considered by ungluing Fox from the seat of his Arwing. Dont get me wrong, the game is far from perfect. It's certainly rough around the edges, but I will unflinchingly maintain that it offers a whole lot of fun, both in single player and multiplayer modes. I can't fathom how some people have managed to explode the game's faults to such proportions in their minds that they can say things like "this game is awful" and "Namco ruined Star Fox" without batting an eye. Its a pet peeve of mine, in fact, when people irrationally make the jump from a few issues to horrifyingly bad so quickly. Once you overcome the "hey, this isnt Star Fox 64!" shock, which I fear many critics never did, you can begin to appreciate Assault for all of the things it does right.
One fear I have is that many people are forming their overall opinions of Assault after a single play-through on an easy difficulty level. The game increases in fun at an exponential rate when you play on the harder difficulty levels, especially when you play to try and get the medals, instead of just playing to beat the stage. The gold medals for each stage require a lot more skill to acquire than the medals in Star Fox 64 did, and searching for the special flags gives you a reason to actually explore every nook and cranny of a level, instead of rushing through it without paying any attention. The multiplayer mode also deserves attention, as virtually every unlockable in the game is related to it somehow. You can unlock the majority of the single player levels for multiplayer use, as well as a significant number of other ones for just playing a lot of multiplayer matches. There are secret characters, secret weapons, secret modes of play, and even a couple secret modes of transportation. The depth really does increase the more you play, adding to my belief that this is a real "don't form an opinion until youve played it to death" game.
In the end, no one can really predict where the series is headed. Maybe it will continue down the path I had suggested above, or maybe it will return to the Star Fox 64 formula. After all, there are probably enough fans to convince Nintendo that leaving the Arwing is a terrible idea. Either way, though, what I'd like to see is a new Star Fox game developed by Nintendo themselves. I doubt it's a coincidence that the Star Fox name started to lose its luster when its development left Nintendo's hands. Hopefully they'll inject some love back into the franchise in the future, as there are a lot of cool things that they could still expand upon. Star Fox is just starting to grow up, and I look forward to seeing the kind of strapping lad it becomes.