I: The Glow
The Lylat system is once again imperiled in Star Fox 2026. Fortunately for us, well do we know the path to save it by now. But – and I’m coming from a place of appreciation for the games here – I’m not so sure that’s good news for the series.
As a remake of Star Fox 64, the game is gorgeous hands down, and its visceral improvement from Star Fox 64’s era-appropriate but relatively utilitarian visuals is easily on or beyond the level of the Resident Evil remake, which to this day has been my go-to benchmark for how to nail a lush reimagining of an older game. Every single area is lovingly translated, making Star Fox’s world feel more bountiful and alive than ever before.
The cutscenes bring us Star Fox’s cinematic side on a level we’ve never seen before, not just deepening the story but making everything about it more dynamic on a level that just wasn’t going to happen back in 1997. Even tiny details like the keep limbs clear text underneath the Arwing’s retractable mechanisms make the world feel more alive than it’s ever been.
The atmospheric smoke clouds choking Corneria City make that classic first mission feel – at least for a brief beat – like you’re in the thick of a brutal destructive war, in a way that makes SF64’s clear skies look like a day at the bay in comparison. The stages that just take place in black space on the N64 telling are redone with colourful atmospheric backdrops of stardust and nebulae; Sector X feels like such a massive sci-fi ruincore setpiece compared to the old version.
I could go on as the day is long about the glow-ups, and you know what, maybe I will. The encroaching sandstorm on Titania makes the planet feel magnitudes more inhospitable and apocalyptic once it crashes over you and coats the second half of the stage; they straight-up changed their mind about Katina, from a drab arid plain to wetlands.
The reimagined dialogue and new conversations feel fleshed out and subtly nuanced in a way the more direct lines from SF64 didn’t, and while opinions will vary on certain changes in tempo and tone, I really loved how Falco’s personality shook out in this one. Fox is more of a for-the-money mercenary in this take; the team’s tension against General Pepper when diverting to rescue Slippy from Titania is convincing and palpable. I grinned when Andross breaking onto the team’s comm line was met with Fox just declaring “ROB, secure the comms,” in a tone that smacks of a verbal eye-roll.
Those new conversations also lend extra context to the choices you make in the game; for example, the reason you don’t have to back up Katina if you go the Hard route is because with the fleet safe after the ambush at Sector Y, Pepper is able to route reinforcements to Katina without you. In the true-ending version of Venom, Fox goes it alone to fight Andross because his team are fending off endless swarms of Venomian hordes and not just because…no reason at all like in SF64.
Overall I do like the new voices. Wolf’s original (and dearly departed) voice actor and his condescending British accent is missed, and there are some moments that I think are decidedly lesser than the original (the train conductor’s “I CAN’T STOP IT” in 64 is screamed right from the part of his soul that will survive into his next reincarnation, whereas the SF26 version of that line just…falls short in comparison), but overall the new crew do a good job with both the new and old lines.
Every Star Fox reboot has brought on a different character aesthetic. This time, they went for a very realistic(?) look that I kinda feel hits way different depending on whether you’re seeing their upper half through a comm screen, or in fullbody.
I’m not gonna lie to you, I started out with this as ‘okay, I see what they’re going for here’, and then I sorta liked the lopsided little leggies less with each passing day, but it’s not a big deal (and your mileage will heavily vary), given the actual gameplay expresses the characters entirely through upper-body shots. Hell, even the cutscenes barely show anyone below the waist, so it really is a non-issue.
And those upper body shots do their share of heavy lifting. Star Wolf especially pops with personality, and I was admittedly won over quickly by Katt being reinvisioned as a heckin scrunkler who looks like she’s just done three-to-five, learned nothing from the experience and wants to bum some smokes off you that she will never, ever pay you back for.
Actually, Katt stands out because I really feel they were going for something distinct with her new voice and lines matching her aesthetic redesign; she’s the rough around the edges but playful companion who makes perfect sense as someone Falco knew before Star Fox, in contrast to the SF64 Katt whose defining personality trait was ‘is girl’.
There actually is one instance in the game where they used the music to radically alter the impact of a scene, and they saved it for the end: when James McCloud’s spirit manifests to lead Fox from the innards of Andross’s collapsing lair, the tense battle music falls away, replaced by an ethereal, melancholy track of mournful vocalizations and wistful strings. It caught me off guard in the absolute best possible way.
And if all you’re after is that classic Star Fox flyer-shooter action with the sparkliest coat of paint yet, to settle in and relive a revamp of your childhood with today’s visual fidelity and some new tweaks, you’re all set. You are actually all good to go. I’m not saying that in a condescending way, I mean it; the last thing I want to do is to yuck the yum, and if that’s all you want, your moment has arrived. You are in for an absolute treat, no notes.
But if something about all this has felt decidedly…kinda off for a long time now, keep reading, because have I got the deep dive for you.
II: Shadows In The Afterglow
Star Fox ’26 exists in a duality: we can acknowledge and celebrate that it’s pretty lit as a game, in a vacuum, while also understanding that it’s a symptom – perhaps even a breaking point – of a larger and much stranger issue with the structure of this series.
Regardless of gameplay quality or art style or graphical fidelity or additional depth of the redone interactions, there’s really no way around the fact that Star Fox 9 is the fifth telling of the Lylat Wars plot/arc/game. Star Fox, at long sight, is factually less a series as we understand the word, and more of an out-of-universe time loop. I cannot think of any other IP that’s like this, at least insofar as IPs that do in fact have an ongoing story instead of a looping excuse plot, IE the non-RPG Mario titles.
The closest I can think of are the Hellboy movies, which saw a duology under the loving stewardship of Guillermo Del Toro, then got rebooted twice after. But to their credit, both post-Del Toro reboots did enough different with the mythos to justify their own existence, all four were great in their own right, and the Hellboy movies are adaptations rather than the core origin media of the IP like the Star Fox games are, so even that doesn’t compare to whatever seems to be going on with Star Fox.
So all other considerations aside, those numbers alone make it worth visiting the questions, what are we even doing at this point, and how did we get here?
Star Fox 64 came by its nature honest as a reboot of the Super Nintendo’s OG Star Fox. After Star Fox 2 was wastefully scuttled late in development, SF64 was the kind of fresh start everyone hopes to get at least once in their life. It was the franchise’s golden hour: as close to universally praised as you can realistically get, beloved to this day and endlessly replayable.
Star Fox 64 taps into something about creative work that is sometimes understated but never unimportant: every maker, even those who’ve made timeless classics you look up to, was inspired by something else, and Star Fox 64 weaves those influences on its sleeves: from old shows inspiring various character and aesthetic choices, to taking direct inspiration from contemporary pop culture bangers.
(To wit, SF64 and its Not-Independence Day Katina mission came out just one year after Independence Day; a modern equivalent might be how after the MCU gave us the Infinity War/Endgame duology at the peak of its cultural cache, so many other creators worked a death-snap or a Portals moment into their own media within a couple years because they were like goddamn that was so sick we want that too. That was the ID4 saucer in ‘96/’97.)
And in making a work so exuberant about its own influences classic and contemporary, Star Fox 64 earned its way into becoming an icon all its own, sending out waves of inspiration for so many other burgeoning creators.
After SF64, Star Fox managed its longest hold on a consistent continuity, with three more games in that timeline: Adventures, Assault and Command. For a time, Star Fox was a series proper. You could do a whole analysis on the rocky road it traversed to make that happen, from cannibalizing what would have been an original Rare IP to produce Adventures to hastily transforming an intended multiplayer experience into a single player campaign with Assault, but for now I’ll at least attempt to remain on-message.
Then they followed that up with a shot-for-shot 3DS recreation of SF64 that utilized the handheld’s bespoke features and gave the game a graphical refurbish. Then they put out Star Fox Zero, which rebooted the series outright with another telling of the Lylat Wars plot and a forced motion control scheme that was awkward at best and painful at worst. Star Fox 2026 is another ground-up reboot, and another telling of the Lylat Wars plot.
I’ve seen people arguing about this for years. “This game wasn’t good!” “That game doesn’t hold up!” etc, “Everything else met with mixed reception so it’s no surprise they just keep remaking the one truly beloved game the series had!” are just some of the arguments I’ve seen advanced time after time.
…But that logic doesn’t hold for me, because no other series is expected to operate like that. We’re looking at the bizarre landscape of releases that is Star Fox and trying to diagnose backwards from the fact that something along the way has undeniably gone off the rails, but I don’t think that’s quite it. No other series does this, at least not to this utterly bonkers extent. So when I see arguments like that, I can’t help but think we’re tricking ourselves into asking the wrong questions.
I can’t even call what Star Fox is, ‘playing it safe’, because even that has a different connotation than what’s going on here; if you see a franchise called out for playing it safe, it tends to mean that the creators aren’t challenging themselves to tackle new ideas or themes or story structures with each new installment, but even then, that’s something different; even the most brazen possible examples of ‘playing it safe’, things like The Hangover 2 or The Force Awakens that go full boilerplate and lift entire story structures from their predecessors – even those are superficially different from the previous entries in that they continue the established story.
It’s one of those things where regardless of how we got here, Star Fox as a series has at this point become a thing that is a bit definitionally inscrutable. It made the old college try at being a continuing series, and there’s absolutely nothing stopping it from being that again, but as things stand, it’s just not.
This time around, I think the reception to the newest entry’s announcement was fascinatingly bifurcated: firstly, I noticed a lot more people were sort of unable to contain their befuddlement at the fact that the series took a full decade’s hibernation and woke up to produce another Lylat Wars retelling rather than a new adventure.
But even with the series in this baffling limping can-it-really-be-called-a-series state, what I noticed more was the passion. Everyone from new fans to classic stans to old hands were pouring out their love for this series and were so excited that there was a “new” one coming out, even with enthusiasm sandbagged by the fact that it was yet another SF/SF64 redo being babybirded down our collective throat.
If you’ll indulge me in a theoretical, given the sheer joy we saw from so many people at just the glimmer of a new Star Fox, imagine how thunderous and celebratory the response would have been if the game had been a new story. It could even have still been a reboot; but imagine if Nintendo’d dropped a Direct and it opened with Peppy stating, “Ever since Andross’s forces were routed at the Battle of Venom, insurgent activity has increased throughout the Lylat system.” And we’d be like, holy shit, they’re actually telling a new story.
I think for as much as this series clings to this one story arc like a safety blanket, and in doing so making the unspoken assumption that we as fans do too, that the wider response would be absolutely explosive if it was any new ground being broken for the series.
And I mean anything: drop us somewhere in the middle after the Lylat Wars; begin a new continuity with a different outset adventure entirely; I can take or leave the idea of a prequel starring James McCloud because I want this series to move forward instead of being stuck in its established loop for eternity, but it would be something new and different and I’m sure I would love it in practice; buy back the quadrilogy that SF64 started and commit to continuing from one of Command’s multiple-choice endings, like Krystal joining Star Wolf; swing for the fences and tie everything in with a multiversal crisis that recanonizes everything Across The Spider-Verse style; you name it.
Given how I often try to dust off some neurons to smack them together long enough to make some broader point in these pieces, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m about to dovetail into a larger indictment of a modern landscape of remakes and redos dressed up and shoved back out at us for a pretty penny. But if you’ve spent some time around here, you know that’s not who I am at all. We live in such a breathtaking halcyon age for entertainment media, both for media that’s already been produced, and stuff coming out now. And there are tons of great remakes; there are reimaginings that make the whole IP richer for having them. And in the teeth of such a landscape of joy, wasting your time grousing about the parts of it that aren’t for you in particular is spoiled, hobbyless behavior.
No, that’s not who I am and that’s not the point I’m spiraling towards. In fact, the purgatorial time loop that is Star Fox actually grants us greater insight into how some other IPs’ remakes actually pull off their intended function.
Batman Begins rebooted the Batman movies in service of its director’s singular and bespoke vision for the IP; the Spyro and Crash remasters (for example) upgrade the games with several generations’ worth of visual fidelity and bring to life how they looked in the heads of us 90s kids.
In close adjacency to Star Fox as a sci-fi Nintendo IP, Metroid: Zero Mission remains one of the most justified and heralded remakes of all time for so many reasons beyond the graphical overhaul; the original Metroid, unlike Star Fox 64, had long been in desperate need of an update because its quality of life dipped somewhere between ‘playable’ and ‘player-mendacious’, and Zero Mission just provides such an enjoyable experience instead. But it also took the opportunity to deepen the narrative and the world, helping the first entry in the Metroid timeline stand up alongside the level its successors were playing at. This is both how and why you do a great remake.
But I’d actually take the “what if this was a new Star Fox adventure instead of another remake” theoretical farther; let’s lie back and imagine a world in which Star Fox never needed rescuing from a time loop it had never gotten trapped in to begin with, where it functioned like most other series, where if an installment meets with mixed reception, you just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep going. I’m pushing my luck here, because now we’re in the realm of pure fantasizing, but I think it’s a telling theoretical.
Let’s say instead of being sucked back into the time loop after Command, we got a new game within a couple years after. Probably on Wii, so it probably would have utilized wiimote shooting as The Selling Mechanic. Let’s say that one did hella numbers based on the first few years of the Wii’s install base and fan hype for a new Star Fox that went back to more-or-less traditional gameplay after Command’s divisive play loop. With Star Fox then reconfirmed as a part of Nintendo’s ongoing core lineup, there probably would have been a brand new Star Fox adventure on the WiiU as well, and likely the Switch.
Nintendo is not immune to seeing what’s trending in the gaming sphere. This is all completely biased and baseless speculation, of course, but seeing the runaway success of the Mass Effect trilogy might have inspired them to try out a Star Fox with deeper characterizations and a more immersive world to play around in than before. And who knows, maybe that would have stuck. Maybe it would have been awesome, because it’d have shown the series interacting with the chain of inspiration around it, bringing its own spark and in doing so making whatever it came up with entirely its own.
But the point is, in that alternate world, I imagine that 2026’s Lylat Wars reimagining would have gone down an absolute joy, no notes, no baggage, because by then the series would have already established itself such that a Lylat Wars remake would feel not only earned, but even natural, a celebratory revisit to the series’ original bedrock, instead of whatever this is that we’ve been discussing. It’d be in the rare pantheon of remakes that are truly exciting because they’re remakes, like the aforementioned Resident Evil reimagining on Gamecube or Metroid: Zero Mission.
Again, I normally do not do this. I make a habit of looking on the sunny side and enjoying what we did get even if it’s not what I personally would have made. For example, Norse myth is just about the last place I would have plunked Kratos down in after God Of War’s timejump just because it felt so oversaturated from various other media, and yet the Norse duology is nothing short of art, and Ragnarok in particular is not only one of the best video games ever made, but a story for the ages regardless of medium.
But Star Fox is a bit of a special case for all the reasons I’ve been outlining. No other series has spent this long looping its first chapter like this; it’s in a league all its own.
But maybe the key to understanding this lies back in what I talked about with how Star Fox 64 is such a pure joy on the creative end, bursting with homages to its influences, clearly a love letter to the best-ofs and the blorbos of Imamura and the design team. It’s more than the sum of its parts because of that, bigger on the inside, a proud link in a chain of creative inspiration, and seems to be happily self-aware of that.
These things run bone-deep in any media: the themes, the character interactions, the aesthetics, all of it is striving for something, often borne aloft by a love for the things that inspired them. And in doing so, they create things bespoke by adding themselves to the chemistry, a new ghost joining the machine.
I don’t feel that kind of love with something like – to single out the worst of the Lylat Wars time loop – Star Fox Zero. I don’t have a sense of what it is striving for or what it thinks it wants to be. Not just as a video game, which I found miserable to play because of the wretched control scheme; I don’t feel like Zero is a game that possesses any particular cherishment for prior media that inspired the thing it remade, and in a way, I almost feel like on some level it understands that it is a dead-end of inspiration, a remake nobody asked for that is a love letter to nothing, a game made for the sake of making a game, without understanding why the game it remade resonated with so many people.
So that brings us back to the question of diagnosing this series’ big issue in reverse; it’s a bit muddy to point out when it happened, because regardless of how the 2000s games performed as games or as stories or experiences, regardless of how rocky the road was to creating them, they were happily willing to tell new tales, to bend expectations about what to expect from the series’ gameplay and just…be a normal series, flaws and all.
But looking back at things from long-sight, it’s beyond clear that something has gone terribly wrong with how the spirit of Star Fox perceives itself. And I think it might have something to do with that chain of creative inspiration I talked about. Namely, that Star Fox isn’t part of it anymore.
The Lylat Wars has been remade so many times at this point that the chain of inspiration has been bunched up, tangled, caught up in itself like those Christmas lights you dread taking out of the box every year. Outside ideas aren’t getting in, just the increasingly sparkly polishing of the adventure we had in 1997, or 1993.
It takes courage to put yourself out there and tell a story, and Star Fox no longer behaves as though it has that courage. And sure, you can come back and say it takes a lot of money to make a triple-A game like this so they keep falling back on the one golden hour they had but again, to uncritically accept this is to hold Star Fox to a different standard than literally every other IP with an ongoing story to tell.
And because it’s spent so long relitigating an adventure they nailed in ’97, the series has entered this limbo where the kind of creative joy and inspiration that gives us cool stories and interesting gameplay surprises no longer apply. All efforts are focused inward rather than outward, on continually looping chapter one rather than allowing these characters to learn or grow or suffer or strive for anything beyond this one present moment, only for it to be undone and eaten by the next present moment.
I want Star Fox to have the same audacity as every other series, to forge ahead and maybe come up with a banger or maybe fall on its face or maybe come up with something that succeeds at some things and fails at others. Just go. Just try. Just do something.
Ironically, there is one arena in which Nintendo’s treatment of Star Fox feels like it has that zest and zeal: Fox’s role in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The film itself is an utter joy, but when Fox comes into the picture and we get his backstory, the animation style shifts to a slick anime and Fox lays out how Lylat is in a different universe and how he fell through a wormhole to get here and holy shit, it’s more new Star Fox plot in thirty seconds than the games have offered in years.
That whole segment feels like it was inspired by that Across The Spider-Verse style of modern animation, and that’s the highest of praise. Fox himself is such a delight in the film as well. Hell, the whole film understands the assignment.
I want that caliber of inspiration for Fox’s mainline series because Star Fox means so much to my personal history that it’s difficult to quantify in words, and it deserves better on a structural level than what has happened to it. It deserves to rejoin the chain of inspiration it long ago earned a permanent place in. And when it does, I’ll be there, all systems go, ready to lift off again.
Star Fox 2026 (though the official name is just Star Fox, because they decided to Do The Thing and make it the same name as the original game) is available on Nintendo Switch 2. The Lylat Wars story arc is available on the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo WiiU, and Nintendo Switch 2.