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Review: Starfox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet
gcn
12.25.02 / 06:14AM / Boris
What do you get when you cross a generic platformer with liscensed characters?
From its inception, this was supposed to be a different game. Rare unveiled Dinosaur Planet, which was a really compelling looking game, for the N64. Then the N64 began to decline (read: dropped like a hot potato) when the next gen consoles began making their debut, and the GameCube (aka Project Dolphin) really took the wind out of designer's sails. Somewhere between making the transition from N64 game to GC game, the Big N told Rare to make this a Starfox game.
I can see the poor toady who had to suck up this decision, throwing months of creative work into the crapper just to make the switch to Starfox. Starfox, which at best has recognizable characters, really didn't seem like a good pot to fish likeable 3D platformer characters out of. And indeed, it ain't. At least, not in this particular outing.
The plot: Times have gotten tough aboard the Great Fox, the main mothership of Team Starfox. Essentially, now that Andross has been defeated twice, there's no more villainy in the Lylat system to root out, meaning that nobody wants to pay mercenaries. Falco Lombardi even left the team to pursue other interests, leaving Fox McCloud, Slippy Toad, and Peppy Hare (who is not looking peppy these days, I'm thinking poor ol' Peppy might be due for that big hutch in the sky) to idly putter about in their ship. Suddenly, General Pepper calls, and says that there's work to do on Dinosaur Planet, a remote world that's threatening to blow up. Ordinarily, this would probably not be a major concern, but if this planet blew up, it might destabilize the other planets. Or some junk. General Pepper promises to pay the Starfox Team, and so, with that heroic aim, the main character arrives.
Oh, right, I forgot. Meanwhile on Dinosaur Planet, a blue vixen (female fox, look it up) on a pterodactyl squares off against a dinosaur named General Scales. She drops her staff in the fight, but manages to escape unharmed, promising that they'd fight again. She then goes to the Krazoa palace, which is sacred to the dinosaurs (except, I guess, for General Scales, because he raided the place), puts back one of the 7 guardian spirits, and is trapped in a sorta neat CGI sequence.. I mean, in some sort of energy field thing. That's the last you see of her for most of the game, so pretend as if it's not really that important, because it isn't. Obviously, she is your main love interest, being the only other female mammal on all of dinosaur planet, and conveniently of the same species. How 'bout them odds?
Back to Fox. He lands, is told by General Pepper that he can't bring along his blaster, but, surprise surprise, finds Krystal (the blue fox, sorry about that, forgot to introduce her)'s staff. Essentially, you're informed that General Scales has indeed defiled the Krazoa temple, so you need to find all of those and put them back, and get the four element stones back to the force point temples to keep the magical energy of Dinosaur Planet from tearing the place apart. There's also the matter of young Prince Tricky of the Earthwalker Tribe, who you need to rescue and then need to resist throwing into a meat grinder for the rest of the game.
The gameplay: Linear. Every thing, and I mean EVERYTHING in the game is a scripted line. Whenever you get to a place, Peppy tells you where to go. Whenever you pick up a new item, or learn a new move, it's simply to get you into an area you haven't been able to go. However, unlike in other platformers, you don't need these moves to get a few jiggies. Oh, no, you need these moves to advance the plot. At one point in the game, you return from a mission to see a mother stegosaur fretting that egg robbers are stealing her babies. If you ignore her, nothing happens, but you can't open the glowing doors which you are informed are important. So, you go back, and, surprise, she's still having egg robber problems. Once you wipe out all the little critters, she lets you into a staff upgrade cave that gives you, big shock, the open-doors power. You can't do ANYTHING out of sequence, because that's not how the game was designed. At best, this game should have been called "Starfox List of Things to do in Order" and not Starfox Adventure.
That's my biggest gripe with Starfox. There's nothing to it, and the 18 hours of game play are all because of the trudging you need to do. You're never stuck figuring out a puzzle, it's just an exersize in getting to the place you need to be. There's plenty to do along the way, but there's hardly any reason to care except for the fact that you can't progress unless you do whatever insulting task they want you to do. At one point, you return to the earthwalker tribe to find out that somebody has put out all their torches, and they're all afraid. "Well, that's too damn bad; if they want some light, I can get in my Arwing and shoot down a few trees," you think. But no, you have to help them. Incidently, you can now use the Fireweed Tree in the village square - hmmm, that's not suspiciously a CLUE or anything, is it? Once you solve the stupid problem, they give you a key so you can get to another new area. Why did they not give this to you earlier? What, was your goal of saving their whole damn planet not good enough? "Well, yeah, that's good and all.. but if you'd, like, light some torches and save some babies, that's like, really good, and we'll give you the key that lets you save the planet."
The only saving grace to all of this is that you can hit the earthwalkers with your staff over and over again, and they make a delightful groan and writhe convincingly. It hardly makes up for the indignity you suffer, but it helps.
Let's talk about moves. Fox doesn't learn any. Not a one. He does get staff upgrades, however, and these, plus Tricky, are how he does most of his stuff. The staff upgrades aren't useful for anything but solving puzzles; you can use your staff to shoot at bad guys, but most of the time, you'll be shooting switches with it. Tricky is useful only to solve puzzles; he can dig, breathe fire, and stand on switches, so that's pretty much all he'll ever do for you. Fox gets new items throughout the game, but unlike, say, the useful items in Majora's Mask, these items, you guessed it, have specific uses to solve puzzles. Moon seeds? Puzzle. Bomb spores? Puzzle. Mammoth horn? Puzzle. There's not a SINGLE item in the game that doesn't have an obvious "Use this here" spot. You can't even use them if you're not in the right spot. Why they even bother letting you assign them to a button is beyond me; if it's just an exersize in having Fox do something once he gets to a specific area, just have him automatically do it. Don't waste my time.
I've mentioned that Fox doesn't get to use his gun. Yet there are enemies for Fox to fight. So what does he do? He beats him with his staff (tee hee!). A lot. A crazy lot. You can do combos with the staff, but it's really not that important; once you land the first hit (which can be really hard, monsters block a lot, and it's pretty much a matter of timing that first hit to smack them when they drop their guard to attack), you can automatically land another one, and so you simply rapid fire out staff beatings until they drop, then beat them while they're on the ground some more. The result is a festival of beatings that make me think that Fox still has some serious issues with the loss of his dad. Two things take away from this honest, simple fun: It's boring, and it's too damn simple.
The latter I'll mention first. Starfox Adventures cribs Z-targeting completely from Zelda. That's fine, it worked then, but in Zelda, monsters will attack you even if you've not targeted them. This is not the case with Starfox; monsters will very patiently wait their turn until you kill their buddies and focus on them. If you linger for like 10 seconds next to a stray monster, it will hit you, but I think that's mostly out of impatience rather than any aggression towards you. "Please, Mr. McCloud, if you're not in too much of a hurry, I have theater tickets at 7, and I do need to get on to the business of being bludgeoned by you painfully." So you literally have time to spare while killing monsters. Add into this your shield - Fox can, at any time and for however long he likes, make a force shield around himself with Krystal's staff. So you can just sit there and ignore damage. You can, if you like, roll around and avoid attacks, but why bother?
Combat got so boring that I was regularly putting the staff away so as not to Z-target the nearest monster, which makes running by them very difficult. Since, barring the occasional door which won't open until you kill everything in a room, there's no reason to get into fights, so I didn't. Enemies were varied enough in Zelda that it was worth killing them, and they dropped stuff you could use. The only thing, barring one monster type which only drops one item of its own, monsters drop upon death is healing nuts, which you don't need because they're in EVERY DAMN CRATE IN THE GAME! AND THE CRATES RESPAWN!
Starfox Adventures also hosts the most godawful puzzles in the genre. What kind of puzzles do you not like? Box stacking? Check, but those aren't that bad. Box pushing? Big check there, but they're simply boring. Races? Check, and I'm sorry to say that they're one of the more fun puzzles. No, my friend, this offense against puzzle kind should send chills down your spine worse than any of those. I am talking about button mashing. Yes, twice in the game, you are forced to whale on your A button as fast as you can. You also have to do that for the final boss fight, but that's a different story. Get a turbo controller if you entertain any idea of playing this game. Trust me, you're not missing out at all by not sitting there like a monkey on ritalin, slapping your thumb meat raw onto your controller. An equally mindless - but well done - puzzle was the Test of Fear, where you have to jerk the controller left and right and keep a slider within a narrow box; it was difficult, annoying, and frustrating, but the effect was good.
The aesthetics: There's not a scene in the game that isn't lushly designed. Dinosaur Planet is a tropical paradise, except for those parts that are either snowy or lava-y, so expect lots of plants. Fox himself is really nicely done, and Rare outdid themselves with facial expressions here; Fox really yaps his muzzle off, and the sheer amount of contempt he shows on his face sums up perfectly most of the crap he gets handed to do. So that's very nice, and Rare did well on that score.
The voice acting is over the top, and generally, that's a good thing. Fox, however, sounds like a whiny teenager, which is in itself amusing, but hardly the dashing furry captain who avenged his father's death ten years ago. So it's a funny voice, and his whiny attitude is fairly Luke-esque (Luke from Star Wars), but unbelievable for the character. By far, my favorite voice is from the shop keeper. Her (?) barely restrained rage when you pick up something you can't afford is priceless. "Put that DOWN! You haven't got enough SCARABS!" complete with claws clenched into fists.
There's no way you'd enjoy hearing from Prince Tricky as much as you have to, so any voice would have worked for him. Essentially, he talks way too much, and it's always inappropriate. Every time you kill something, it's "Oooo" and "Yeah!", which gets tireseome really quickly. Tricky is otherwise an okay little sidekick, but there should be a "mute" command for him. Talking a lot doesn't give him any personality.
The music is inherently forgettable, and I can't remember any of the tunes. Sound effects are good, although you hear "whop" so much from hitting dinosaurs that I wonder if they could have done better with any other weapon, instead. Nothing particularly notable from the sound department, except for the Krazoa spirits themselves, who all sound nice and ethereal.
I can't leave this out: Who the hell thought it was a neat idea to have "dinosaur language" be nothing but scrambled english? And then not scramble proper nouns? The opening dialogue was just awful! "Oo oo ahh ahh pahoy hoy walla bing bang Dinosaur Planet?" "Fnord poit egad narf General Scales!" I kid you not, it's really that bad. It would be one thing if it was just written down, but the poor voice actors really had to say all that. Thankfully, they retire the effect VERY soon into the game as if almost to say, "we're sorry," but then they included the instructions on how to speak this way in the manual. Hey, parents, if your children are simpering idiots who have nothing better to do than learn how to speak a language more stupid than pig Latin, please take them out and get them neutered or spayed.
And yes, dinosaurs do call their planet Dinosaur Planet. From now on, I live on Human Planet. Suck it, bacteria, you've had this place for the last 3.8 billion years, but now we're taking over! I wonder if anybody told the dinosaurs that earth used to have those, too, but not so much anymore. Are we Former Dinosaur Planet? Less Dinosaurs Then Advertised Planet? Fossil Dinosaur Planet?
Major Beef: I have two major beefs, one's a spoiler, and one's not, so I'll put them in order of non-spoiler to spoiler.
Non-spoiler: Now, I realize that this was never intended to have Fox in it. So I will forgive them certain howling problems like Fox's blaster. I mean, sure, he's a starfighter pilot, a rogue ace mercenary, what have you; he's still out representing.. well, whatever group General Pepper is the general of. But after the first dinosaur twice your size bites your furry ass, I'd call Pepper back and say, "Hey, bowser, look. Look at the big hunk of me-meat that T-rex bit out of me. Now, I don't know what you're being taught in Starfleet or whatever the hell group you're a part of, but I'm thinking about screwing the Prime Directive and going and bagging me some wall hangings."
What I can't forgive is the gross misuse of the Arwing. Essentially, having the Arwing is just an annoyance; the only use out of it is going into space, flying through gold hoops and landing somewhere new. Now, I realize that Starfox has always been about flying through gold hoops and shooting down space ships and what not, and certainly such elements belonged here. However, Fox has to fly through these gold rings to land on Dinosaur Planet. Why? What difference would it make if he didn't? Furthermore, how did all these gold rings and spaceships get up into space to begin with? Did the dinosaurs put them up there? Folks, these dinosaurs haven't even discovered workable underroos yet, let alone build spaceships just to put gold rings in space for you to fly through. Yet, every time you fly to a new location, you have to fly through gold rings.
Now, couple that with the fact that Fox clearly forgets about the Arwing in later missions. At one point, you have to rescue a bunch of dinosaur prisoners, and for NO DAMN REASON, suicide bomber droids hurl themselves at you and your giant sized dino buddy. Now, Fox, let's think a moment, shall we? You fly a what now? And that thing you fly, what is it armed with? Would you say that the thing that you fly, with all of its weapons is better, or worse equipped to shoot down swarms of robots than you and your staff are? Yet, the Arwing sits, gently parked, with no orders to shoot at anything. It comes up several times in the game; you have to learn a new move to take down some giant T-rexes (Oh, sorry, "Red-Eyes"), you have to learn a new move to climb your way up to the tops of locations - hey, here's an idea, why not FLY OVER THINGS AND SHOOT THEM? Answer: Because the designers never intended you to have an Arwing, and clearly had no intention of implementing it once Fox was added into the cast.
Spoiler (but hardly one at that): The final boss is Andross. Oh, gasp, no, I've spoiled it! Except that it's always been Andross. Beyond Wario and Wart, the only enemies Mario has ever had have been Donkey Kong and Bowser, and Kong seems to be on good terms with Mario these days. So me telling you that the final boss is Andross should come as no big surpriseä except that General Scales has been advertised as the nemesis the whole damn time.
Think about it: General Scales caused all the trouble. He's the one who let out all the Krazoa spirits, he's the one who took all the Force Stones, he's the one who kidnapped all the Earthwalker tribe (or, at least the ones with half a brain), he imprisoned the Cloudrunner queen, he beat you up, he's your big fear in the Test of Fear, and he's the only bad guy even mentioned in the damn game. So, logically, you'd expect, oh, I dunno, to fight him. Even maybe a little? Perhaps a sharp rap on the knuckles and a scolding? Nothing. Andross just kills him. There's a little death door in the room with General Scales, and once he's done talking to you, he flops over and the death door opens up. Meaning that you don't even get to hit the guy once or twice, which is a real shame, because it's what you're geared up to do.
The only power up you pick up that helps you at all in space are the number of hearts you have, and you get those for free every time you beat a boss. So all the staff upgrades, all the collectibles, all the everything have no bearing in space. The boss fights, up until Andross, were neat AND you fought them on land. However, for the final boss, you have to go into space and shoot rocks until Andross dies. This isn't an ending, this is a cop out!
For those of you who I spoiled the ending for, I'm sorry. However, for those of you who were looking for an actual ending, and not some, "Well, it fits the liscence, so let's cram Andross in there somehow" kludge job, I'm HONESTLY sorry. You get no satisfaction in shooting up Andross because he's just a goofy boss. Incidently, why would Andross, who needed the Krazoa spirits to revive himself, want General Scales to mess with those same Krazoa spirits, thereby preventing Andross from joining them and using their power? Wouldn't it have been much better to leave the Krozoa in their palace and just glom onto them? Essentially, Andross has to get a minion to break the planet to the point where Fox has to come back and fix the planet, and in the process, revive Andross. So our villain subcontracted a villain and at the same time requires the service of a hero. For shame, Andross. I can see the big bodiless monkey head sitting in Video Game Bad Guy Hell, being openly laughed at:
Dr. Robotnik: Zo, it's zee big, bad Andross. Nice work on Dinozaur Planet, you got your revenge, for what, thirty, fourty seconds, topz?
Andross: Shut up! It's not like that! I had to get all the mystical energy into place before I made my triumphant return, that's all!
Dr. Wily: Tell me about your grand plan of making sure Krystal wouldn't be the one who rescued all the Krazoa spirits, thus ensuring that Fox was there, with his star ship, at the very moment of your ressurection.
Andross: Oh, yeah, like you're so hot, you keep giving Mega Man all the powers he needs to defeat you.
Dr. Wily: Perhaps, but at least I make sure that I keep my vulnerable ass as far away from Mega Man as possible when I announce my grand plan of world domination, instead of floating there like a pinata right in his crosshairs.
Bowser: I'm waaay too good to be in this crowd, any minute now, I'll just be called up to do another Mario game. Bots, Wily, catch you next time, alright? Monkey-face, next time I'm here, I don't even want to see you. Just pack up your giant space head and slink off.
Andross: (muttering to himself) I'm a cool floating space monkey head, I don't need them. I'll so totally suck rocks in and spit them out, it's not even funny. Plus, I can do that eating thing... next time, Fox, I'm going to come up with a different sub-bad guy and so totally whomp on you.
Incidently, I'm very glad that General Scales was promoted up the ranks of the Dinosaur Army. Private Scales sounds like a STD.
Final thoughts: Rent. It's a beautiful game, and you'll probably enjoy it ONE time. That is if you're not annoyed by the Test of Strength, Test of Fear, dull combat, tepid plot and easy puzzles to the point where you quit before getting the pathetic ending. If you want a game that can show you what the GameCube is capable of, definitely check it out; the fur modeling on Fox is really nicely done. If, however, you want a game that can show you what Rare is capable of, or indeed, what platformers are capable of, avoid this. Get Banjo-Kazooie or Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the N64.
I'm very sorry that they used Fox in this title; he deserves much better. Hell, I'm sorry they used dinosaurs in this title. They should call it "Stuff to pick up and carry Planet," it much more fits the theme. 12.25.02 / 06:14AM / Boris |
