The problem with the flight-combat is that there's not alot of room for growth into terms of innovation or story telling that you can do with it. Nintendo have done almost everything they can with the flight-combat for the series and the series has stagnated and died because of it. You have this massive world with a ton of unexplored planets that you could drop fox on and make a game out of and they should do it. Starfox adventures 2 would sell like hotcakes and they tell a better story with fox on the ground and meeting different characters etc.
You might want to give
Ace Combat 7 a try. Not only was it a major commercial success — selling over six million copies — but it also demonstrates how the flight-combat genre can continue to evolve both in gameplay and storytelling. It shows that there's still plenty of room for innovation when a developer actually commits to refining and expanding the formula rather than abandoning it.
Even back in the GameCube era, games like
Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader and
Ace Combat 5 were clear examples of the direction
Star Fox could have taken — cinematic, mechanically polished flight games with strong pacing and immersion. Instead, Nintendo chose the wrong path, diluting the series' identity and then blaming the audience for "losing interest," when in reality, the problem was their own poor handling of the franchise.
And it's not as if flight games are dead —
Star Wars: Squadrons,
Everspace 2,
Chorus, and even indie titles like
Project Wingman have proven there's still market demand and creative potential in the genre. So the claim that "there's not much room for growth" simply isn't true.
If anything, the downfall of
Star Fox came from straying too far from what made it special. Every post-N64 entry was criticized — often unanimously — for that reason:
- Star Fox Adventures abandoned the core concept entirely.
- Star Fox Assault suffered from clunky ground missions and poor controls.
- Star Fox Command introduced an awkward interface and slow pacing, replacing the iconic on-rails gameplay with repetitive "all-range" battles.
- Star Fox Zero overcomplicated things with motion controls that actively hurt the experience.
The lesson here isn't that the genre has no room left to grow — it's that Nintendo forgot
why people loved
Star Fox in the first place.
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