You probably saw the surprise Star Fox Direct the other day. And if you’re like me, you’re probably pretty baffled. With the announcement of *another* Star Fox 64 remake, the series continues to be one of Nintendo’s most bizarrely-treated franchises. Despite the iconicity of Fox as a character—due in large part to his perennial place in the Super Smash Bros. series and recent appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie—the Star Fox games themselves are wildly inconsistent and relatively niche.
For a first-party Nintendo IP, Star Fox has had a very strange and tumultuous history. As far as mainstream appeal goes, it’s relatively obscure; to your average gamers (even ones familiar with the Nintendo mainstays), Fox and Falco are probably most widely recognized as “those dudes from Smash”. And the smaller base of fans of the actual Star Fox games tend to disagree about which games are actually good, with Star Fox 64 pretty much the only universally recognized masterpiece. Ask 3 Star Fox fans about 3 different games in the series each, and you’ll probably get 9 very different opinions. Outside of 64, the games never seem to see anything greater than modest critical and financial success. In pursuit of recapturing that moment of true success, it seems like Nintendo just reboots the series over and over, hoping each time that the new iteration will be the back-to-basics restart that sticks and provides a foundation to further build off of. This hasn’t always worked out so well, for one reason or another. Let’s summarize the series’ history with a brief overview.
A Repeating Cycle
The original Star Fox (Starwing, in Europe) was released in 1993 for the SNES, being the first game on a Nintendo console to use true polygonal 3D graphics through the implementation of the cartridge’s built-in SuperFX chip. The direct sequel, Star Fox 2, was cancelled in 1996 despite being finished and did not see an official release until 2017 on the SNES Classic Edition plug-and-play console. It would eventually make its way over to the Nintendo Switch Online SNES app as well. The game’s relatively primitive 3D was the main reason for its cancellation, with Nintendo opting to hold off until they could release something more impressive for the upcoming Nintendo 64.
That new title would end up being released as Star Fox 64 (Lylat Wars, in Europe); it was essentially a reimagining of the original Star Fox, telling the same basic story with far more advanced technology and presentation. The game included incredibly detailed (for the time) graphics, fully voice-acted dialogue, highly refined gameplay, and a branching story path system that encouraged repeated playthroughs. The game still holds up well, with the 3DS remake Star Fox 64 3D requiring very little to modernize the game other than a graphical spit shine and new control options. To most, this was the perennial pinnacle of the franchise that subsequent entries would always be compared to, for better and for worse. The game is undeniably great, but its shadow has been difficult to escape.
Case in point: Star Fox Zero, released in 2016 for the Wii U. After a few detours that we will get to in a bit, this was touted as both a back-to-basics Star Fox game and an innovative demonstration of the unique gameplay that the Wii U could offer. It was also basically another canon reboot of the franchise, reimagining the same story as Star Fox 64, which was itself a retelling of the original Star Fox. And keep in mind that 64 had already got its own direct remake for the 3DS in 2011. The things that Zero was most praised for was its return to the look and feel of Star Fox’s glory days; but the experimental, unintuitive controls collected most of the blame for its overall lukewarm reception. That, coupled with the fact that the Wii U itself was a notable failure, meant that Zero didn’t exactly move big units.
At this point, the franchise feels eternally frozen in its attempts to recapture its most prolific success. Most of the games that did try to evolve the formula between 64 and Zero failed to resonate or introduce mechanics that would stick around long-term.
The Art of Not Giving Any Fox
Let’s swing back around to the detours between 64 and Zero, since their messy reception seems to be the main reason that Nintendo is hesitant to ever even try to escape the gravitational pull of Star Fox 64 these days.
It took some time for Star Fox 64 to see anything that could be considered a true followup. Most fans would probably lay the blame for the series’ confused identity at the feet of 2002’s Star Fox Adventures, a game with a rocky and bizarre legacy. This early GameCube title is the end result of developer Rare retrofitting their original N64 project titled Dinosaur Planet (which was itself adapted from a concept meant to star Timber the Tiger from Diddy Kong Racing). The game had been imagined as a traditional, Zelda-style 3D adventure game starring original characters Sabre and Krystal, but was eventually merged with an early concept for a Star Fox game, eventually moving development from N64 to the newer GameCube. Kyrstal stuck around, being redesigned into overt furry bait, and Fox stepped in to replace Sabre. For better and for worse, this was the first game in the series to eschew nearly all of the traditional, on-rails vehicle gameplay in favor of a mostly on-foot adventure where players took direct control of Fox. While that’s not necessarily a terrible premise, the game had little to actually do with the wider Star Fox universe, and felt more like a weird detour than anything else. Fantasy elements were front and center instead of the traditional sci-fi trappings. And since fans were eagerly awaiting a true successor to Star Fox 64, the legacy of Adventures seems to have attracted some overly harsh attention that probably wouldn’t have been nearly as negative if it had stuck to being an original property instead. One can only speculate on all of the reasoning behind the decision to retrofit it into a Star Fox game, but I can’t help but feel that it was partially informed by Microsoft’s at-the-time impending purchase of Rare; it’s just a guess, but maybe Nintendo wanted to lock down exclusivity and prevent a high-profile game from ending up on a competitor’s console down the line by inextricably fusing it with a Nintendo IP. I mean, the purchase was finalized the very next day after Adventures was released. But as with everything, there were probably a wide variety of factors that went into the decision. Regardless, the final game didn’t really scratch the itch that Star Fox 64 fans were feeling.
In many ways, 2005’s Star Fox Assault was the true followup to 64; but like its direct predecessor, it wasn’t universally beloved or accepted by the fanbase. The knee-jerk reaction might be to place the blame on the heavy focus on on-foot gameplay. Some fans were already soured by Adventures’ abandonment of many series staples, and had already exhausted their patience by the time Assault hit the GameCube. So another game that drew focus away from the traditional vehicular gameplay wasn’t really what many were wanting at the time. The “perfect” opening mission might have been seen as something of a bait and switch, as the focus shifts away from on-rails Arwing gameplay into combined-arms missions shortly after. Personally, I see the core ideas at the center of Assault as a sensible evolution of the series’ gameplay, but the execution was lacking in many ways. The primary new addition here was a series of open-ended missions that allowed the player to roam freely and exit their vehicle; from there, they could swap to other vehicle types or continue fighting on-foot with handheld weapons. The player would often have to control Fox on foot to complete objectives inside of buildings. Of all of the experiments that Nintendo has subjected the series to, I personally think that this one holds the most promise. Not only did it take the series in a new, more serious direction narratively by introducing a new threat and resisting the urge to fall back on Andross being the final villain, its gameplay had a lot of very good ideas that were unfortunately not fully realized with the technology of the time.
The final game before the series’ first long hiatus was 2006’s Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS. Taking notes from the strategic elements of the cancelled Star Fox 2, Command focused on directing multiple units across a large battlefield by using the touch screen, with direct control over the vehicles given when they meet enemy forces on the overworld map. While containing some innovative ideas, it actually seemed to take things way too far story-wise. There are numerous branching story paths in the game, with many of them reading like bizarre, out-of-character fanfic. The Deviant Art-tier look of the cutscenes certainly doesn’t help dispel that feeling either. Despite its strangeness, the game was actually pretty well received upon release. But it seems like Command was forgotten almost as abruptly as it appeared, with a ~5 year gap between games. Nintendo has more or less ignored the game’s existence in the past couple of decades.
The series skipped the Wii entirely, which was absolutely baffling considering the proven effectiveness of the Wii Remote’s pointer for rail-shooter games. After Star Fox Zero on Wii U, the franchise would again completely skip a generation, with only emulated re-releases of past games and the obligatory Smash Bros. representation available on the original Switch.
The Current State of the Lylat System
And now, in 2026, we have the surprise announcement (barring leaks, that is), of what is simply called Star Fox for the Nintendo Switch 2. And it’s… another Star Fox 64 remake… Ho boy.
Getting past the initial shock of the hyper-realistic art style and character redesigns, the initial footage of the game seems like a polished and faithful ground-up remake of 64, with identical level layouts, some quality-of-life improvements, a heavily expanded story and emphasis on cinematic cutscenes, and a fleshed-out online multiplayer mode.
While I can’t help but be disappointed that 64 is getting yet another retread, one can only hope that this is the reboot that finally sticks. Every attempt to make Star Fox a household name feels like Nintendo timidly dipping their toe in the water, gauging whether there’s enough interest to properly bring the franchise into the future. I would have been happier with an HD port of Star Fox 64 3D and a brand new game shortly after, but I’m not upset with what I’ve seen so far. I personally hope that this reboot is a proof-of-concept designed to revive interest in the franchise, with a more ambitious, completely original title on the horizon after it. It could be similar to what Metroid Prime Remastered seemed to be: a smaller-scale test run to cut a development team's teeth in preparation for a larger installment down the line. We don't know who the developer is at the moment, but Next Level Games of Luigi's Mansion 2 and 3 fame seems to be a popular guess, as the timeline and pedigree seems to line up. The fact that it’s only $50 digitally is also a plus, as I doubt another 64 remake would sell all that well at full-price. We’ll have to wait and see if the final game is strong enough to carry the franchise into the future or holds any real surprises, but I think it looks promising. And we won’t have too long to wait before its June release date to find out for sure.
As for the future? The claim in the original leaks by NateTheHate seemed to have panned out, lending further credibility to their assertions of an Ocarina of Time remake this year and another Star Fox game in 2027. If the latter ends up being true, maybe we’ll finally have a true successor to 64 carry the series into new, more ambitious territory. I’m not going to sit here and predict what that might look like, but I’m honestly just sick of the same old Corneria and Andross; I’d take anything new at this point. For all of its faults, Assault expanded the universe and narrative in big ways, bringing in new galactic threats that forced characters to adapt and evolve their relationships. Whatever a new potential game ends up being, I’d like to see more of that spirit. This series has so much potential; if only it would stop cannibalizing itself and have enough faith in its strengths to venture into new territory.
The interesting thing will be seeing how well the new official Star Fox entry/entries stack up against the indie games that have arisen to fill the niche left by the series’ long hiatuses. We now have multiple contenders in the genre, including the ongoing development of the early access title Ex-Zodiac (largely inspired by the SNES Star Fox, with some elements from Panzer Dragoon and Space Harrier), two games in the Fur Squadron series, and the upcoming Wild Blue Skies (which is very heavily inspired by the gameplay and tone of Star Fox 64 and wrapped in a Saturday Morning Cartoon aesthetic). Each one offers its own take on the formula, but none of which contain hyper-realistic, oddly proportioned animals; so at least the official Star Fox series has that all to itself for now, I guess?
Even though I'm not entirely thrilled that this is the version we're getting, I'm glad Fox is back in the limelight for now. Let's just hope he can actually build and maintain momentum this time.