Say Your Prayers, Andross
On Star Fox, the lightness of being, and racking up the arcade scoring
The best Star Wars-style space fighter battle is not in a Star Wars movie at all. Area 6 is the penultimate level on the “hard” path in Star Fox 64. If you played the game well enough, your three computer-controlled partners will flank you as you go through the teeth of the enemy’s army. They have at least 400 fighter jets, attack stations, dreadnought ships, targeted missiles, and space mines looking to destroy your Arwing fighter and leave you to suffocate in the vacuum of space. You have, at best, four of those Arwings to disable the bulk of Andross’ fleet and give your team safe passage to his stronghold on the planet Venom. If you’re successful, you will hear various ape corporals on comms panicked that your four ships have broken through various lines of defense. Andross himself will hijack your comms system and taunt you as you blow his ships out of the near space above Venom’s atmosphere. The stage’s final battle sees you tangle with a disc-shaped battleship with three prehensile tentacles and a rainbow-colored energy cannon.
I spent hours on this specific stage and several more on the game overall. The Nintendo 64’s library was small compared to the consoles that came before. Every Nintendo console’s library is paltry compared to that of the current gen Switch. However, the games that did hit, like Super Mario 64 or Goldeneye 007 or the random odd games like, for Marc Normandin, Sin and Punishment, or for me, Castlevania 64, oh, they hit with perfect harmonic resonance. As an aloof, unpopular teenager in the heyday of the N64, I logged obscene amounts of time on that console. Star Fox 64, with fast-paced action and incredible replay value, perhaps had the lion’s share of time spent playing with that weirdo controller. I never played the original title for the Super Nintendo. Well, that’s a lie. I tried playing it on the SNES Online for the Switch, but it was too slow and blocky. The wireframe aesthetic was not my deal from the start, and the controls were a lot more laggy than for other games. I have no real basis to compare the two titles, so for the sake of expediency, this will be the last time I mention the SNES title.
Star Fox 64 was an ideal arcade-style game. One of the last mainline Nintendo titles not to utilize a save function, each campaign was its own self-contained game. There are no items that you have to unlock, no secret levels to uncover. It’s all laid out in front of you to start, and the only thing that appears on the map of the Lylat system with each new run through the game is a marking on each of the stages as to whether you’ve beaten it or were awarded a medal for your outstanding completion of it. Even more pointedly, the rankings of each campaign are ordered by how many of Andross’ enemy fighters you shoot down.
When creating a game that could’ve fit in a cabinet among Street Fighter II and Aerosmith’s Revolution X in the last heyday of the arcade, you can’t bog the story surrounding it down like a jRPG. The thing is, Star Fox 64 does have quite a bit of lore baked into it, but it’s not presented through cutscenes or detailed exposition. The gist of this story is given through the various dialogue that buzzes in, either from your team, the enemies, or the two guest stars who come flying in at various stages. It’s a brilliant implementation of worldbuilding that is shallow as hell but creates the illusion of this deep, rich story. You know that Fox’s dad, James, was betrayed and apparently killed by one of his team members, who defected to Andross’ forces. You know that Fox, though talented, has a lot to prove, and that his team, Falco especially, has to learn to trust him. You get all of this but you’re left to imagine the specifics. It’s the perfect kind of set-up for a game that relies mostly on shooting at things on a bulk basis.
Half of getting a game just right is knowing the tone. Hell, you could say the same about any little piece of entertainment that comes along the pike. Games today spend absurd amounts of money getting cutscenes right, hiring actors to voice characters in their story-dense titles, and that’s okay, to be honest. Some games require immersive lore that might craft the narrative down to each tiny detail. I would be disappointed if a Final Fantasy title played as fast and loose with narrative as Star Fox 64. But different games serve different purposes. An arcade-style shoot ‘em up is not the same as a role-playing game, nor should it be. Star Fox 64 is meant to be played in a single sitting, sometimes seeing the player go over the exact same course of play over and over again to wring out a few extra kills on their way to a high score, which is the exact opposite aesthetic as your average Square-Enix game.
In many ways, Star Fox 64 captures the magic of what made the original Star Wars trilogy such an enjoyable series of movies, although it is clearly not a one-to-one comparison. Still, the magic of what made the original trilogy work was that so much of the lore was presented on its face, especially in Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. When George Lucas started expanding on that lore and setting it in concrete, even as early as Star Wars, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, the weight started to bear down on the fandom, and they’ve been arguing over minutiae ever since. Still, the same magic you found in Han Solo as he was first encountered in that cantina on Tatooine is the kind of stuff the entire narrative in Star Fox 64 is constructed from. And thus the space battles take on a similar feeling. There’s no big setpiece like trying to fit two photon torpedoes down an exhaust pipe to blow up an entire, moon-sized space station. Again, it’s not a one-to-one comparison. However, the spirit is the same. Even the spirit in the four-on-(hopefully)-four battles you have with the antagonistic Star Wolf team take on similar airs as the lightsaber fights between Luke and Vader.
It's funny to compare this game to the expansive trilogy because clearly, LucasFilm wanted to capitalize on the popularity when it teamed up with Factor 5 to create Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64. I played the hell out of both games, and if I’m being honest, the Star Wars game might be the reason I’m as much of a nerd for the franchise as I am today. But as a game, it didn’t compare to the Nintendo title. Few things did, even in my favorite gaming franchise ever, The Legend of Zelda. A huge part of that is the adrenaline-soaked gameplay, but there’s something to be said about how appealing the aesthetic and the narrative were.
Thankfully, Star Fox 64 was the pinnacle of the franchise, not so much for fans of the series or the game, but for its legacy. Yeah, there were some sequel games, but none caught the same kind of cache that this entry did. There were a few other space shooters, and then there was an incredibly bizarre attempt at trying to create a Zelda-style game starring Fox in Star Fox Adventures for the GameCube. But for the lack of games to latch onto, there was also no temptation to take the lore set up in Star Fox 64 and expound upon it, to bog it down, to take the imagination away from the gamers and put something more concrete in place that would make the genetic code of “shooting bogeys outta the goddamn sky” more mutant in unpleasant ways.
The plucky lore of Han Solo was mythical and cool in Ep. IV. While I will still contend that Solo: A Star Wars Story is a fun movie, it represents everything wrong with what Star Wars would become, not just after the Disney sale, but with what Lucas began with his overwrought narrative retconning he would start with the prequel trilogy. Every little mythical detail Solo bragged about himself in the original trilogy was painstakingly explained. Even things no one thought to ask for, like Han’s goddamn name, were given explanations. That movie exists in a dichotomy with one thread of it being this fun little heist movie that builds the lore of perhaps the coolest character in the entire saga, and one being this slavish bore of making sure that the Solo of the OT was NOT A LIAR, NOPE even though him spinning tall tales about himself is what added the most to his aura.
And so without any further, more popular titles that could’ve bogged down the story, the hunger to play Star Fox 64 never waned over the years. When the N64 Online announcement dropped, I was overjoyed, able to play some of the games I spent hours spamming in my bedroom. I’m happy to say that Star Fox 64, after some time to adjust back to using the controls the way I was able to back 20 years ago, holds up pristinely. Raiding Area 6, from the space mines to the interceptors flying in formation to the big missiles to the dreadnoughts that curiously look like Imperial Star Destroyers to the final boss, felt like just as much a pulpy romp as it did in 1997. Sometimes, you don’t need to know lineages or chapters of context to get elevated satisfaction out of a video game. Sometimes, you just need three missiles, the blue double lasers, and a gruff ape commander saying “These guys are crazy! Dang, DEPLOY IT NOW” at you over the comms.