Mnementh said:
You wonder why every Star Fox game in the last two decades was bad? Designing a game is hard and circumstances change. Some gameplay ideas that worked in the past become hard to work with modern gamers and modern hardware. Star Fox ever only was successful on SNES and N64. At the time games with similar gameplay ideas thrived on PC: Tie Fighter, Wing Commander. But also on PC these franchises struggle in the last decades. Nintendo gave Star Fox multiple times a serious try. But it never worked out. Fans complain, but they can't design a better game. So did it occur to you, that Star Fox isn't working out anymore? You say Fire Emblem and Star Fox are on equal footing. But you ignore that franchises rise and fall. The last good selling Star Fox game is 25 years in the past. Since then it struggles to break a million. For Fire Emblem it is the other way around: the franchise sells well since Awakening on the 3DS and the last console Switch holds with Three Houses the best selling title of the series. Star Fox is burnt out and every try so far to rekindle it has failed. Fire Emblem rides high. So yes, these days Fire Emblem is without a doubt the more successful series. Just look at franchise sales per decade. How much did Star Fox games sell in the 10s and 20s? How much Fire Emblem games? I doubt Nintendo suddenly finds the magic formula to make Star Fox workable again. As I said, other franchises like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander failed as well. Nintendo is just stubborn and keeps trying against better knowledge. So what do we think how Star Fox will sell? Better than Pokopia? No way. Better than Tomodachi Life? Doubtful. Better than Fire Emblem? Nope. Better than Rhythm Heaven? That actually could be a close fight. The Rhythm Heaven games on Wii and 3DS sold around a million. Star Fox might fall into the same category. So that is the comparison to look for. In the end I assume fans will say that this entry also did something wrong again. |
I don't wonder why every new Star Fox game in the 25 years was bad; I know exactly why each one was bad.
Star Fox Adventures: Temu Legend of Zelda that no one asked for from a developer that had lost its mojo before it was sold to another hardware publisher.
Star Fox Assault: Rough draft of a game developed by a third party studio that had some cool ideas that were never improved upon in sequels.
Star Fox Command: Touch screen controls with no on-rails portions that you'd expect from a SF game, instead replaced by a turn-based strategy mode. No one asked for Star Fox to be a TBS game. We wanted a shmup. Also developed by a third-party studio.
Star Fox Zero: Controversial control scheme thanks to the Wii U GamePad and Nintendo forcing Platinum (another third party studio) to build the entire game around it. People say that you can get used to them after a while, but that's far from the pick-up-and-play nature of the first two Star Fox games, and shmups in general.
Star Fox Guard: This is a tower defense game with the Star Fox name on it.
Notice how every game mentioned not only game I mentioned either is of a completely different genre you'd associate with Star Fox, or tries to incorporate a different genre you don't associate with shmups, and/or includes an unpopular control scheme that isn't intuitive by nature and turns critics and consumers off. Also notice how every single one has had a different third-party developer. The only consistency with this franchise is the inconsistency. If Nintendo was giving Star Fox a serious try, it would let someone simply develop a Star Fox game in the same vein of Star Fox 64.
You're right about Fire Emblem riding high while Star Fox has been wandering in the desert for the past quarter century, but like I said, Fire Emblem has the benefits of having quality new games on a console that people actually own. Both Star Fox games on GameCube broke a million despite both being ass; Path of Radiance sold half of their numbers despite being good (the quality of the games are just my opinion, of course). Star Fox Command and FE: Shadow Dragon sold similar numbers on the DS, so it's almost negligible discussing them. But FE Awakening, Fates, Echoes, Three Houses and Engage all have the benefit of being brand new games on consoles that were either reasonably popular (3DS) or super popular (Switch). The only Star Fox game on 3DS or Switch is the port of SF64 with a graphical update.
"I doubt Nintendo suddenly finds the magic formula to make Star Fox workable again. As I said, other franchises like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander failed as well. Nintendo is just stubborn and keeps trying against better knowledge."
Maybe Nintendo could try just making a straight up new game in which you fly down a path in a ship and shoot things with more intuitive controls like SF64 and without unwanted gimmicks like touch controls, needing two screens, or complete gameplay shifts? You're right, Nintendo keeps stubbornly trying against better knowledge to turn Star Fox into something else instead of just making a good, straightforward game. Imagine if Nintendo made a Zelda game with mandatory online that required exactly three people, or a Metroid Prime squad shooer that didn't feature Samus. How well would those games go over? Now imagine if instead of giving fans what they actually want later on, they kept chasing those kinds of ideas for three decades.
| IcaroRibeiro said: Guess we will discover in September |
Indeed.
