4/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Star Fox.

System: Super Nintendo Started: March 8, 2025 Ended: March 13, 2025 Redemption Playthrough First Attempt: 1997/1998 Star Fox is one of the first wave of games that got me into video games. I remember it being so difficult that I only made it as far as the second level, which was the Asteroid Belt, and seeing that scary-looking Andross on the Game Over screen after losing all my continues. I never picked up this game and played it again; I mostly played Star Fox 64. Until now, I had decided to go back to this game and finish it. After replaying it, I found that Star Fox has a unique gameplay, lore, and soundtrack, which I consider to be the most overlooked SNES game during my time playing it in the late 90s and well into the decade of the 2000s. It was actually better than what I remembered it to be. Star Fox for the Super Nintendo was a different game for its time. I’m sure you would have gone to the arcade and seen classics like Sega’s Star Wars or Galaxy Force, which are on-rail space shooters. But what if you could take that gameplay and compress it into the home console of the Super Nintendo? That is what Star Fox accomplished. Star Fox (or Starwing in Europe) was developed by both Nintendo and Argonaut Games, the same developer company that made Croc for the PlayStation. Other than its special graphics upgrade, Star Fox is classified as a rail shooter where you control the ship on autopilot and choose your course, which is disguised as a choice of difficulty. You must navigate through planets and asteroid belts to get to Venom and defeat the main villain, Andross. With the power of a state-of-the-art graphics chip called the Super FX, it can render 2D objects into 3D extremely well. Star Fox was the first to implement this graphic technology, and later, this chip was used in other games and upgraded for titles like Stunt Race FX, DOOM, and even Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island for the SNES. The intro, where you have to scramble and launch your Arwing, is simply one of the coolest intros in video game history. Once that Corneria Stage theme played, it hooked me instantly, and that is how I got into Star Fox because of that scene. The boss fights and stages were cool. At first, they are challenging, but with key memorization and understanding of these bosses' patterns, you can defeat them surprisingly easily. Easily the best stage was Fortuna, though that boss was tough. Another great boss fight was the Level 3 Venom Orbit battle, where you joust with a giant command ship. The secret levels, such as the Black Hole, were noteworthy, especially the "Out of the Dimension" stage, where you battle a giant slot machine. Star Fox also has a very underrated soundtrack; even other stages in the game have really underrated tracks. For example, there’s the classical waltz music influence from Sector Y and the New Jack Swing-style music of Fortuna. Today, people might complain about how simple it looks, which is why I saw a copy of this game for as low as $7 to $10 at a retro store, and that was a decade ago. I’m sure the budget and effort for this game were significant since Star Fox actually used some puppetry to promote the game. There is even an official Nintendo manga story by Benimaru Itoh with only 11 chapters, which helps expand the world-building of the Lylat System and provides more backstory on the characters in the Star Fox universe. Even the instruction manual explains more about the planets and story exceptionally well. For its flaws, the original Star Fox’s difficulty is relentlessly tough as nails for any fan. This is classic gaming in which, when you lose all your continues, you start back at the very beginning. I could not beat this as a kid; in fact, no kid could ever beat this game unless they had outstanding quick reflexes and understood how the game is played. Fortunately, the game is short, which is a fair trade since it can take you around 45 minutes to finish, and that’s without losing a life. The Star Fox team AI is not very helpful. I know that is traditional for Star Fox, when Falco Lombardi, Peppy Hare, and Slippy Toad constantly ask for help, and when you do, they provide little assistance; all they do is shoot straight and miss a lot of enemies, and I mostly had to eliminate them before the team did. Lastly, as much as the Super FX chip does wonders, it often leads to the game dropping frame rates and suffering from slowdowns whenever there are too many enemies on the screen. Star Fox is one game I don’t mind everyone playing on a PC emulation due to a mod that allows for gameplay at 30 to 60 fps, enabling smoother performance with fewer slowdowns. The original Star Fox game was unique and innovative with its abstract art style and revolutionary technology at the time, bringing a rail shooter arcade game into a home-port console, the Super Nintendo. I would say play this game for getting into the Star Fox franchise and check out its technological significance. However, I would honestly recommend playing it through emulation and acquiring the FPS patch to avoid slowdowns and frame rate drops. As an honorable mention, I suggest reading the Benimaru Itoh comic strip, which is available on the internet. It’s actually quite good and explains more of the world-building of Star Fox. Nintendo could have re-released it along with the 2002 manga for the hype of Star Fox Zero.