Star Fox is a fantastic spaceship-flying video game series from Nintendo. It follows the exciting adventures of Fox McCloud and his crew as they battle evil across the galaxy. The series has been mostly ignored by Nintendo, unfortunately. When they do acknowledge it with a new game entry, though, they’re usually unsure of what to do with the story.

The original story had the Star Fox crew take on the evil Andross, the dastardly villain who killed James McCloud, Fox’s father and the original leader of the Star Fox team. The second game in the series, Star Fox 64, retells this same story, except Fox sees his father flying alongside him at the end, leading fans to debate if he’s actually alive or just in Fox’s head, and Andross is a monkey instead of a blank pale face.

The game that followed, Star Fox Adventures, took the characters out of their ships to fight dinosaur creatures. It has its fans, but it was quite a large departure from what fans wanted from the series. Star Fox: Assault followed the events of Adventures and tied things back to where the original story was heading. However, it was met with mixed reviews because some of the gameplay segments were on-foot like they were in Star Fox Adventures while fans mostly wanted to control the space-traversing vehicles like the Arwings.

Star Fox Command was a huge step in the right direction gameplay-wise, and the story caught up with where Fox, Falco, Slippy, and the rest of the crew were in their lives. However, there were nine possible endings depending on which paths the player wanted to take. This is a cool mechanic and allows fans to choose the ending they want or to play until they get to see them all, but that sort of brings the canon to a halt. The only way to continue the story from there would be to eliminate either all the endings or eight of them, which would make much of the game feel pointless.

After that, Star Fox 64 was remade on the Nintendo 3DS with Star Fox 64 3D. Since this was a remake, it obviously retold the story of Star Fox 64. Nintendo then released Star Fox Zero on the Wii-U console. Star Fox Zero had Fox and his friends battle Andross to save the galaxy and avenge Jame McCloud… again. Once again, Fox sees his father flying alongside him. It takes years for a new Star Fox game to release, and when it does, it features the same story that fans have already experienced. It’s a rather baffling decision.

It seems like Nintendo never wants to move on from the original story they set up for the series. No matter what progress is made after it, they continually return to it. When they do move on to other plots, it goes to weird places like being stuck on a dinosaur planet.

There’s a lot of potential for where this story could go. It could be revealed that Fox’s father had been alive this whole time. The Star Fox crew could face any sort of alien threat in their adventures through space. With potentially endless worlds to explore, there’s also endless worldbuilding to be had. There’s really no excuse to not do more with the story they had set up. 

Nintendo, please make a new Star Fox game and actually expand the canon instead of retreading the same story for the fifth time. 

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