Star Fox Zero was Nintendo’s biggest reveal by far at its E3 2015 press conference, and some people—such as this reporter—thought it was really freaking amazing. Other people thought the graphics looked terrible, like a very dated game, or a good Nintendo 3DS game. These people? They are manifold, and they are wrong. Star Fox Zero doesn’t have bad graphics. It has deliberate graphics.
Star Fox Zero Doesn’t Have Bad Graphics, So Stop Complaining
The Holy Grail and/or only really good game in the Star Fox series has always been Star Fox 64, released in 1964, as the name suggests (okay, it was actually 1997). Every Star Fox game since has fallen dramatically short, largely because they didn’t adhere to what Star Fox 64 did best: Space-fighting action. Not running around on land, not hunting for dinosaurs. Star Fox Command worked in theory, but just didn’t have the magic.
Star Fox Zero looks like it might. More importantly, it looks like Nintendo wants it to. If you watched Treehouse Live at E3, you learned that Nintendo made Star Fox Zero explicitly in Star Fox 64’s image. They kept saying that it’s not a sequel or a remake, and yet they kept hedging those comments. It’s not quite a sequel to Star Fox 64, but that is its biggest influence by far. It’s what the game is trying to achieve. Nintendo knows that Star Fox 64 is our favorite game in the series, and it’s going to give us what we want. Which is a modern version of Star Fox 64.
Star Fox Zero doesn’t have bad graphics. It has the modern version of Star Fox 64 graphics. That’s a good thing and a bad thing: Yea, it’s not pushing Wii U to its graphical maximum, which isn’t all that great anyway. Instead of pushing for maximum realism in a game about woodland animals that fly starships, Nintendo and Platinum Games are focusing on high fidelity. The GamePad and the teevee are both locked into 60FPS and all that sort of thing; Kotaku has the details, if you care. I don’t.
Think of Star Fox Zero like Wind Waker. It isn’t trying to have the best graphics; it has stylized ones instead. In this case, it has the style of… Star Fox 64, modernized. The character models probably look “worse” than in Star Fox Assault. That tells you this is a deliberate choice on Nintendo’s part. It’s Star Fox 64 come again.
