The most beloved forgotten Nintendo franchises

     With E3 2021 just around the corner, tis the season for every gaming Youtube channel worth their salt to predict all of the things that will be announced at E3. Nintendo franchises all have their own fanbases, and every series won't release a new game this year of course. We already know about the Pokemon games coming out this year and in early 2022, though with this year being the 35th anniversary of Legend of Zelda and Metroid, along with many other franchises, people are speculating exactly what Nintendo could have up their sleeves in order to celebrate, if anything. Among all of these different franchises, there are quite a few that haven't had a new installment in a while which will most likely get passed over again for various reasons. Today I'd like to talk a bit about these beloved franchises that really don't get the amount of attention or love that they deserve. It's actually surprising how many dormant Intellectual Properties (IPs) that Nintendo has under their belt while constantly pushing certain others forward that probably sold better in recent years. I hope I don't come across as too negative in this post, there are just certain things that make me sad as a Nintendo fan, I love the games as a whole though.

Mythology is the name of the game (but not literally)!

    Kid Icarus was an NES title that came out in 1986, the same year that the first Metroid and Legend of Zelda games came out, but sadly this series never got the same amount of praise or attention from the company as those two. You play as Pit in this game, the captain of the royal guard for Palutena, the Goddess of Light, who resides over Angel Land (think Heaven). Unfortunately, Medusa, who rules over the Underworld, is jealous of Palutena and captures her and takes over Angel Land, sending Pit down into the Underworld alone where he's tasked with climbing his way back up to Angel Land while finding the three Sacred Treasures along the way. These treasures are the Wings of Pegasus, the Bow of Light, and the Mirror Shield, and to get them, Pit has to take on other characters from Greek mythology, including Cerberus and Pandora. While these characters are all named after creatures and characters in Greek myths, there are different artistic liberties taken in how they're represented. In the classic NES game, Pandora looked kind of like a Slime from Dragon Quest, and Cerberus is actually called Twinbellows, but looks very similar to the mythical dog with multiple heads. With the help of the Three Sacred Treasures, Pit is able to save the Goddess and Angel Land by defeating Medusa, the Goddess of Evil, and the day is saved. 

    The sequel to this game, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, came out for Game Boy in 1991 and once again stars Pit, though Medusa is replaced by the enemy Orcos. I can't say much about this game since I've never played it, but upon research, it seems that it took the gameplay of the original and expanded upon it a lot more, making it so Pit wasn't always just going up, he can travel in all four directions, which sounds nice. After this game, however, Pit was MIA from Nintendo's lineup until 2008 came along and he showed up in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, along with an appearance in cutscene of Palutena, the Goddess of Light herself. This was a great reintroduction to the character, and it brought many people to be fans of the series, perfect for Sakurai, the father of Smash Bros. to make Kid Icarus: Uprising in 2012 for the 3DS. This game was a weird one and wasn't loved by everyone, splitting its gameplay between "on rails shooter" for half of a level, then transitioning to foot combat on a console that didn't have a right analog stick built in. It was tough sometimes, but ultimately using the touch screen to control the camera was a cool idea, and I'd still love to see a sequel to this someday, though the sales probably weren't as good as Nintendo was hoping for. This game sees the return of Medusa as a villain, though you defeat her half way through using the Sacred Treasures, only to reveal that Hades was actually the main villain as he claws through the "ending" credits. This game has a lot of really cool twists and turns, which I honestly don't want to reveal so you can hopefully experience them for yourself if they remaster the game for Switch someday, but we'll see if that ever happens. I really hope a new game will be announced someday, but I'm not holding my breath really.

Chances are next to F-Zero of a new entry

    Among all the racing games today, it seems like the big debate is between the Forza series on Xbox and Gran Turismo on Playstation consoles. Many love Mario Kart, though it's not really the same kind of racing game, it's more about hoping that whatever item you get will be able to block or be better than whatever item your opponent gets, whereas the more serious ones are all about nailing the turns in a proper way and keeping your speed up. Nintendo had a game series starting back in the SNES era called F-Zero, and it's where Captain Falcon originally came from, though currently he's much better known for his iconic punch in the Smash Bros. games. This was a cool game all about going fast and beating your opponents at some good, old fashioned, racing. Did I say old-fashioned? Let me change that, I meant to say new-aged, I suppose, since this whole game takes place in the future and everyone drives rocket powered hovercars at ridiculous speeds. On the SNES, of course, there weren't many chances to get the full effect of how fast these cars could go, but in the following entries to the franchise, F-Zero X and GX for the N64 and Gamecube respectively, the graphics and visuals greatly impacted the gameplay all around. In GX, the most recent game in the franchise (other than some Game Boy games which I think came out around the same time), you really get the sense of speed that was always meant to be there. You see the futuristic city wizzing past you, and if you miss a turn, you immediately are met with the consequence for your actions, which is to say, you go spinning off the track and explode. People have been aching for a new F-Zero game for a long time, and though Captain Falcon has been in all of the Smash games since the original, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe actually has two F-Zero inspired maps, Mute City and Big Blue, it seems like Nintendo and their partners don't exactly know what to do, as was confirmed just last month by one of the directors of the series, Takaya Imamura, in an interview with IGN. He's worked at Nintendo for 32 years on numerous properties though announced his retirement in January. Among all of these projects and properties, he worked on all of the F-Zero games and took a major role in co-developing F-Zero GX with Sega. 18 years have passed since that title, and in regards to the future of the franchise, Imamura said, "...I've thought about it many times, but without a grand new idea, it's hard to bring it back." (Krabbe, IGN. 21 May, 2021) This doesn't mean a new entry is impossible, of course, but it also sounds unlikely that the franchise will come back in the near future.

Report in, Star Fox!

    Along with a lot of Nintendo Franchises, Star Fox has been missing for a large portion of the 21st century. It, like F-Zero, was a product of the Super Nintendo era and was actually a very advanced game by utilizing the Super FX chip inside of the game cartridge to make 3D effects on the 16 bit system. The game was a flight simulator of sorts, it could also be called an on-rails shooter, and was met with great acclaim. You play as Fox McCloud who leads team Star Fox through mission after mission of trying to protect the Lylat star system from the evil intent of Dr. Andross. The original game came out in 1993 and was met with immediate success. Even though looking back on it, it looks like a bunch of polygonal shapes shooting at other shapes, at the time it was incredible, and Nintendo really wanted to crank out a sequel quickly. Star Fox 2 was originally going to be the sequel that took everything about the original game and added lots of extra content, such as giving the Arwings the ability to transform into a walker mode. The game was actually never released until a few years ago when Nintendo added it to the SNES Mini which went on sale back in 2017, just a few years after the SNES ceased production in 1999. What was the sequel to the original space shooter then? That's right, Star Fox 64, a game that still holds the title for best in the series for most fans. It took everything that the original game had, plus was able to meet up with the artistic vision of the team thanks to the power of the Nintendo 64, allowing the style of the game to really shine through as you're flying through the cities on Corneria or through the desert of Titania. There was a branching pathway system as well, meaning there are many different paths you could take to get through all the missions by meeting different objectives. All around it was a great game, and one that people who played games were hungry for a sequel for. They got one in the form of Star Fox Adventures, a game which shall live in infamy. Created by Rare for the Gamecube, this was not the game that fans had been hoping for, mostly because it wasn't even intended to be a Star Fox game in the first place. Rare showed Nintendo a prototype of their game called "Dinosaur Planet" which starred a fox character, and Nintendo decided to let them use Fox Mccloud as their hero instead. Fox ran around and adventured on a dinosaur planet in this game, and didn't have much of the starship gameplay that the series was known for. Fortunately the next game was Star Fox Assault, a much better game (in my opinion anyways) that mixed gameplay of Fox and crew flying in their Arwings as well as walking on the ground. It was an interesting change, and one that a lot of people still didn't like, but I enjoyed it a lot. 

    To continue with this franchise, they put out a DS game called Star Fox Command. You would draw the flight path of several ships, and then if you ran into an enemy ship, you'd have to battle them in a dogfight (which didn't work that well and wasn't very fun). I will say the idea of the branching storylines was interesting, even though I couldn't get through enough of the game to get to even one ending, much less however many others there were. They then remade Star Fox 64 for the 3DS in 2011, which I can't say much about, since it was mostly a remake of the original game, but with a few minor tweaks. Star Fox 64 3D did add a few new ships and several new planets for the team to visit, along with some new guest pilots who would show up along the way, but at the end of the day, it was 64 once again. In 2016, they put out Star Fox Zero for the Wii U, which used the Gamepad to look around the cockpit and aim at enemies in all directions. It sounded like a cool idea, but in actual execution, it was really rough. It was impossible to look down at your Gamepad to aim at the enemies while also having to look up at the main screen to actually steer your Arwing without hitting a wall or some oncoming debris. While this game was essentially another remake of Star Fox 64, the controls were enough to turn people off with the concept. While this series hasn't been forgotten for as long as F-Zero, and clearly Nintendo is still kind of trying with Fox, as the team most recently showed up as DLC for Ubisoft's Starlink: Battle for Atlas, which was a Toys-to-Life style space shooter game. The team behind this series has had a rough few years figuring out what the fans want without actually listening to fan critiques. Let's hope they have better luck in the future.

    I've been going for a while, but as I can think of at least three other franchises that it's unlikely for Nintendo to announce a release for at this year's E3, I'll continue this on another day! I hope you've enjoyed reading about these little gems and learned enough to root for them to get a revival in one form or another very soon.

    Thanks so much for reading this, friends! I really appreciate your support and I hope you're having a great week. I hope I didn't come across as too negative here, my main goal with this post is just to inform people of what the histories and gameplay of these games looked like. As to why Nintendo has sat on so many different properties for so long, who knows? I just hope we can see them all in the spotlight again very soon. I've been your Self-Proclaimed Nintendo fanboy, and I'll talk to you again next week. 

(P.S. the article that I talked about is a really interesting interview and I think it deserves to be read, check it out here as it talks about not only Imamura's involvement with F-Zero, but also many other franchises such as Zelda and Star Fox, as well as what it was like to work at Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto.)