Developer: Nintendo EAD / Argonaut Software Ltd.
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System / Super Famicom /
Super Nintendo Entertainment System: Classic Edition / Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo Entertainment System / Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Famicom
Release Date: 1995/1996
September 29, 2017 (NA/EU) | September 30, 2017 (AU) | October 5, 2017 (JP)
Genre: The Dark Souls of Star Fox
Official Site: Europe | Australia | North America | Japan
Game manual: English (PDF) | English (Web) | Japanese
Reviews: Here!
Star Fox 2 is the long-lost follow-up to the original Star Fox / Starwing. Originally planned for release in 1995 or 1996, the game expanded the scope of the original with all-range mode battles and strategic elements, powered by the enhanced SuperFX2 Chip used in Yoshi's Island. Star Fox 2's release was canceled in favor of Star Fox 64 for the N64. The interviews in the LEGACY section show how Star Fox 2 influenced later games in the series and how the developers kept coming back to ideas from this lost treasure. The leaked ROMs of Star Fox 2 that people have had access to over the years have never been of the fully finished, polished, and Mario Club-playtested version and even lacked some core features. It is now available for the first time as part of the SNES Classic emulation-based micro-console developed by NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development).
Below is a comparison between the original beta title screen and the title screen of the final build:
To access Star Fox 2, you have to beat the Corneria stage in the original Star Fox (the first level).
Andross is defeated. Or so you thought. The floating-head space wizard ape spitting polygons survived and returned to take over the Lylat system planet by planet. Corneria is the last line of defense. Team Star Fox has been called in to save the day, strengthened by two new crew members, Miyu and Fay (bottom row, mid and right, respectively). You need to apply all your skill and wits to fend off Andross' forces making their way to Corneria.
TIP: The game's official manual is linked at the top of this post in the info table in PDF or HTML format! A highly informative read that includes development insights, trivia, and images of original design docs!
You can select from six characters, split into pairs of two that pilot the same type of Arwing (prototype, armored, or light). The way the things unfold will be determined by your choice of main pilot and wingman.
BONUS TIP: NORMAL = EASY; HARD = NORMAL; EXPERT = HARD! Play this at least on HARD for the "real" experience that is Star Fox 2. Don't normal it through and then go all "meh"! The things you need to worry about in terms of strategy and threats changes greatly on the higher difficulty levels.
Next you go to the map screen. This map works similarly to a Rogue-like in that the enemy units move simultaneously with your movements on that map. If your Arwing and the enemy meet, battle ensues. While in battle view, the enemy forces will keep moving towards Corneria, but their movement will be slowed down so getting out of battles quickly is always a priority. There are various mission types, dependent on if it's a planet mission, a space battle, or a fight with a battle carrier.
This game is the origin of the Arwing's Walker Mode which will be coming in handy during various missions. Star Fox 2 is also where All Range Mode first appeared.
unlock a secret base where you can get powerups and the Homing Shot ability. It only appears when you get every coin in a certain difficulty though, so in Normal you have to get all 13 for it to appear, in Hard you need 19, and in Expert you need 20 (cumulative, over multiple playthroughs).
You can, when you pause there's an option that says "View 1", select it and switch to "View 2" for third person. Doesn't work the other way around though, in third-person segments like planets and inside carriers you can't change to first person.
Sao: How did it come about that you would include this game in Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo Entertainment System?
Miyamoto: The Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo Entertainment System's producer said he wanted to include it. He said it had been through debugging and was a complete game, so it would be a waste not to put it out in the world.
Sao: If it was complete, why did you decide against releasing it before?
Miyamoto: We finished it in 1995, but the next year…
Cuthbert: "I think there are a lot of game ideas in there that haven't really been explored in the Star Fox franchise so far; there's obviously a strategic element, but also a kind of Rogue-like element in the way the encounters and the story are automatically and randomly generated. Each time you play you'll get a different experience created from hundreds of hand-crafted arenas and puzzles."
In a neat twist, it would be during the production of Star Fox Command that Cuthbert was re-acquainted with his past, ill-fated project. "During development we received a copy of the mastered Star Fox 2 ROM to play, and it was quite a blast." This ROM would have been the final game, complete with QA tweaks and ready for a release that never happened. Cuthbert is keen to point out that this version is far superior to the numerous leaked prototype ROMs which are currently doing the rounds on the web - the leaking of which has been erroneously attributed to himself. "There are a few ROMs on the net in various conditions," he states. "But the ones I checked out are all old and they don't have the randomizing Rogue-like stuff working or all the encounters in place, so you don't really get the feel of the game we were making."
I always loved Starglider 2 on the Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg3uQM83dl8
Star Fox 2 reminded me even more of it, so I've asked Dylan Cuthbert directly. This little thread might be interesting to fellow Star Fox fans.
ArsTechnica: Star Fox 2 is an unusual game in terms of having a looser structure, letting players choose missions, and having a base-management element. It feels more like a '90s PC game, to be honest. Was there a culture clash between Nintendo and Argonaut in terms of how this game ultimately felt, or did the companies align conceptually on how Star Fox 2 would differ from the first?
Dylan Cuthbert: The main thrust of the game design came from [Animal Crossing creator and Star Fox Director Katsuya] Eguchi. At that point, the only person with design input on the team from Argonaut would have been me, and Eguchi and I were always on the same page regarding the game's direction. I think this is why the original Star Fox also turned out so well. He used to play a game in his youth called Star Luster, and he was also into board games such as a Monopoly-like game [Fortune Street] that was popular on the SNES [in Japan] at the time—so a lot of the more strategic ideas came from that background.
Miyamoto
Yeah. We had quite a script for Star Fox 2 and had it running, with robots morphing and running, and attempted an all-range mode in which you could fly a full 360 degrees.
Amano
Um…what's Star Fox 2?
Miyamoto
Huh? You don't know about Star Fox 2?
Yusuke Amano [Director: Splatoon; was a coordinator on SF643D]
No, it's the first I've ever heard of it!
Miyamoto
What?! No one told you about it?! It's the Star Fox game that almost was!
Miyamoto: Yes, in this title, the Arwing can turn into the Walker, which can travel on land. The idea for this goes right back to the legendary Star Fox 2 which was in development for Super Nintendo but got cancelled once we knew the Nintendo 64 was on the way. In Star Fox 2, you could transform into a robot in order to get into narrow spaces like enemy battleships. Now in this new title, you can press the A Button whenever you like and turn your ship into the Walker.
Nintendo of Europe: Imamura-san, why did you decide to bring strategy to a series that is most famous for being purely a shooter?
Takaya Imamura: "A game called 'Star Fox 2', which was not actually released, once existed. In that game, there was a strategic system, which we thought suitable for Nintendo DS. That is how we started the project."
Cuthbert: [...]We spent three months putting a lot of love into a copy of the original Star Fox, and we had one stage very similar to the original Star Fox running on the DS. We showed that to Imamura-san and he said "We'll redesign it to work with the DS better and maybe take some ideas from Star Fox 2 and make a fully fledged Star Fox."
Cuthbert: And Star Fox 2 was developed fully to completion and that was all range, there were no rails in that game either. And a lot of the people involved in that game were upset that it didn't get released. [...]
Published on Oct 2, 2017
Done on SNES Classic. This run uses the secret base that gives you back homing shot from the beta, as well as free goodies to start your run off. It also starts with double lasers on both characters, which is unlocked by beating the game with that character with a star rank or better (doing this with all characters unlocks Corneria's music during the character selection).
So, is anyone still chasing Expert Mode and high scores? I'm looking forward to seeing zallard1's Expert Mode Run on AGDQ in January. He's been posting multiple runs on his YT since the release.
Still haven't gotten my B Rank on Hard to unlock Expert yet :/
I've been putting more time into this game lately, having largely avoided coverage to not spoil anything. After being very meh'ed by "Normal" mode, I fell off my seat discovering all the wonders awaiting me in "Hard" mode. New enemies, new locales, new puzzle types... new everything, and so much more of it!! Strategy now fully comes into play, the game length gets decent, it gets so thrilling!
This really is what the game should have been all along, even on "Normal" mode, which is more of an appetizer to the real game than anything!
I thought I was getting pretty good at the game, and even managed to unlock Expert mode on my second attempt at Hard. And oh boy is that one appropriately named. I tried once and got my ass so far kicked it came out my mouth! The map quickly got overloaded with so many missiles and ships that I couldn't possibly manage to keep everything under control. The Star wolf one-on-one fights are brutal and I can't manage to ever clear them in a reasonable time. This is one place where I wish homing shots were still a thing, jee-zus! I'm really not sure how I'm gonna go about dealing with this mode... I clearly need to figure out whether I should go for carriers or planets first, and I clearly need to figure out how to obtain twin blasters reliably as quickly as possible. So far it seems like these power ups are randomly distributed on planets, but there has to be a better way..
So to anyone who's played only Normal mode and was disappointed... for the love of god play Hard mode. This is where the real meat of the game starts!
I'm really surprised at how no one seems to care about this game. Before people were constantly begging Nntendo to release the final build, and now that we have it, the threads are completely silent...
For what it's worth, I dug my teeth further into Expert mode and figured out that your mileage will greatly vary depending on how lucky you are with enemy item drops. On my last run I lucked out and an enemy in the very first carrier casually dropped me a twin laser upgrade, which makes a whole world of difference in this game and is an intense time-saver. Then not too long afterwards I found another twin laser upgrade on a nearby planet and that's it, i was set. I literally pulverized throughout the rest of the campaign and managed to pull off this score here:
I'm quite proud of myself for pulling through! Expert mode is truly exhilarating and some of the enemies and puzzles on display are really ingenious (and a bit delivish).
Now all that's left to do is hunting down the remaining General Pepper medals... and thank heavens for Nintendo publishing the design docs because some of them are hidden in ways I would have simply never thought of!
Now all that's left to do is hunting down the remaining General Pepper medals... and thank heavens for Nintendo publishing the design docs because some of them are hidden in ways I would have simply never thought of!
Yup if you look at the drawn maps of all the areas in the documents, the location of medals is shown! It's in Japanese but once you know where one medal is, you can quickly deduce and recognize which word to look for elsewhere. Or someone translated them into English here:
As a side note I find it very sad that the documents show that Nintendo for some reason changed the names of the difficulty levels at the last minute. The original names were way more representative of the actual difficulty. Normal is Easy. Hard is Normal. And Expert... well it could still have been called Expert hahaha. But Normal really has no right to be called that way. It's an unfulfilling appetizer more than anything!
