More like ground Fox!
First and foremost, and everyone already knows it by now, this didn't start off as a Star Fox game, and it shows, as ship dogfighting is little more than a brief minigame in this entry. Diehard Star Fox fans may cry foul, and fair enough, but I never cared too much about Star Fox, so I'm fine with the change. Now then, this entry feels more like a Zelda clone than anything else, with a few collectathon elements. The brunt of the game is about exploring the eponymous Dinosaur Planet, solve puzzles until you learn of where a SpellStone is hidden, thereupon take flight and travel to that area, bring back the spellstone to either the Lava Force Point temple or the Ocean Force Point temple, then complete the Krazoa Challenge, get the Krazoa Spirit and take it to the Krazoa Temple. It's pretty formulaic, but it's not too bad.
You get three inventory/ability menus, one for Tricky, your pint-sized triceratops-esque companion, one for Staff abilities, as Fox now fights with a Staff, and one for other items. This menu system is a bit cumbersome when it comes to Staff abilities, since while you area able to equip one to the X button shortcut, you'll need to use various abilities to sort various obstacles, and going through the C-Stick menu to get to an ability never feels quite right.
There were a few things I wasn't too comfortable with either, like Tricky, your companion. You can ask him to sniff out secrets or breath fire, but every action costs a 'mushroom' from a total of 6 or so. You must then collect mushrooms to feed them to him in order to restock his energy. You can store up to 15 extra mushrooms. Why? Why do his actions cost energy? It's not like they are any use in battle. And why cap the mushroom storage at 15? It really makes no sense and feels like having you collect mushrooms for the sake of collecting stuff. To add insult to injury, when you feed him you have to sit through a micro-cutscene that exists only to waste your time. And it's not the only one of its kind, other interactions trigger these dull, unskippable, micro-animations. And if you die to a boss... you can't skip cutscenes.
And there's a lot of time wasted. Pretty much every item you need to progress is consumable. Bomb seeds, to grow seeds. Moon seeds to grow vines, fireflies to light the way.... everything runs out. That means either trying to stock them when you come across them or running around searching for scarabs, AKA money, to buy these supplies. It feels like total waste of time. Compounding to this is the fact that Fox is very slow, and climbing ladders is a nightmare. You can slide down ladders, to be fair, but no way to climb them up any faster. And if it's a rocky incline you can slide down, heck, you can't even let go of Fox's grip to just fall down, oh no, that'd be just too convenient. If a game EVER needed a fast travel, it was this one, heck, some routes require solving the puzzles AGAIN in order to take them, which is kinda ridiculous, and, once again, a waste of time.
Remember how I said the on-rails shooting stages are a minigame? You must engage in it whenever you travel to a new planet, Every planet, including the Dinosaur Planet, gets their own very brief unique ship stage in which you must collect X amount of Gold Rings. It's rather lame and it feels as it was just tacked on because it's Star Fox. But the worst part about it... every time you must return to Dinosaur Planet, after you get a Spell Stone, you'll have to sit through the Dinosaur Planet ship stage. And it's always the same. Thankfully you never need to return to other planets, sans one time to the Outter Wall, but it's ridiculous how much unnecessary padding the game. Oh, and you need to search for Fuel Cells in order to travel outside Dinosaur Planet.
The game features a 'Hint' system, that you'll need to use a few times in order to know where to go next. On the Start menu, you can talk with Skippy, who will help you with the puzzle the developers thought you'd get stuck at that part of the game, and they usually correctly figured out which one it'd be, or Peppy the Hare, who'll show you where to go next on the map. The night useless map that doesn't show you the proper routes to anywhere. A few times your goal is just to run circles, breaking boxes and turning stones searching for money so that you can buy whatever the plot demands that you buy.
Other two things that were a bit annoying: A) You can't invert aiming controls, which is supper annoying since I DESPISE inverted controls. And B) If you fail the Krakoa challenge at the end of the shrine, and there are two Krazoa Challenges that may require multiple attempts, you need get back to the center again, solving every puzzle again. And since I'm at a it, there are many puzzles that involve you carrying a barrel bomb from point A to point B... sometimes, if your throw doesn't land perfectly right on the cracked wall... it won't break it. It was so annoying, since the explosion quite clearly covered the cracked wall, but the game would decide it didn't count. Shameful.
It's not all doom and gloom. The game is gorgeous, Rare managed some pretty cool looking fur, which is very impressive for the era it released in. I also enjoyed travelling around Dinosaur Planet, and even though the combat was passable at best... it was still an enjoyable ride. I'm sure that if I had played this game back when I was younger I would've loved it. Most of the puzzles and platforming challenges were actually fun to figure out and attempt.
I think Star Fox Adventures is a good, but very flawed and dated game. There are many little timewasters that maybe, on their own, wouldn't be too bad, but they all add up together, making what is an otherwise decent adventure game into a bit of a chore. At times.
7.0
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