F-Zero: GP Legend was added to Switch Online + Expansion Pack this fall, not quite in time for its 20th anniversary. It's the sequel to F-Zero Maximum Velocity, which was essentially a sequel to the original F-Zero. Both Maximum Velocity and GP Legend recreate the 16-bit graphics of the SNES original for the handheld Game Boy Advance. The GBA was a gold mine of a system for fans of the SNES.
As in all F-Zero games, you first choose your hovercraft, then engage in single-player racing against computer-controlled racers going at breakneck speeds. At first, you'll probably find yourself bouncing off walls, losing energy, and then exploding, forcing you to restart the race. You get four extra lives before it's Game Over. To avoid this, you don't want to go around the game's many sharp turns at full speed. You should instead tap the gas (A button) rapidly to hit the sweet spot between going too fast or too slow. That was a surprise to me, and I wonder if I should try replaying the original F-Zero with that technique in mind! You can also hold R to drift right or L to drift left. If you tap the trigger twice, you do a side attack. A counter with a skull tracks how many racers you've eliminated!
Playing GP Legend for the first time, I was struck by how faithfully it followed the original classic. There are 23 courses divided into four cups. The fourth cup (platinum), which contains eight races instead of five, only unlocks when you've earned first place in the bronze, silver, and gold cups on standard difficulty (easy and hard are also available). These eight tracks are from the original F-Zero, which is cool. On expert mode, tracks are slightly different and gain a "II" after their name. And you don't get any extra lives on expert!
At the beginning of each race, if you press the ignition at just the right moment before the race begins, you get a boost. If you timing is off, however, your engine stalls out after a few seconds and you lose almost all your speed and have to rebuild it. After the first lap of a race, you can spend some energy to boost, by pressing R and L together. A poorly timed boost is likely to send you careening from wall to wall. In Super Mario Kart, hitting a wall costs you a lot of momentum, but in F-Zero it's far more problematic, as the vehicles ricochet around like rubber balls. To regain energy, you must hover across green strips. Many tracks also contain boost spots and ramps. Ramps can be tricky as you may fly off the course completely and explode—no Lakitu to the rescue!
There are 34 racers, each with their own machine. These are unlocked via story mode. Before each race you can customize the exact balance between acceleration and top speed (they are inversely proportional). Machines have a weight (in kilograms) and are rated in three categories: body, grip, and boost. Beginners may need a lot of grip (for taking turns) or body (if they collide a lot). The default racer, Rick Wheeler, has a well-rounded machine.
What sets GP Legend apart from its two predecessors is the inclusion of a story mode and individual challenges. The story mode is harder than Grand Prix racing. Anime-style cut-scenes before each mission are full of hokey dialogue. You can tell the game was made in the mid-2000s! It put a smile on my face just because it's so corny and typical of the time it was made. The story mode is divided into different characters, such as Rick Wheeler and Captain Falcon, whose stories/missions overlap. Even though I found the high difficulty off-putting and the dialogue terrible, I won't fault the game too much. After all, the story mode is in addition to the 23 race tracks that, in my view, already make a complete game.
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| A scene from Falcon's story mode |
And then there's the 48 challenges (labeled "Zero Test")! Divided into four difficulty classes (C, B, A, and S), each test is a short segment of track (or an entire lap) with a pre-determined machine and target times for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. I thought at first these would be like tutorials, but that is not the case, as, like story mode, they are a bit hard. I don't particularly enjoy these modes, but they give the game a little extra juice for super players.
There's also a time attack mode in which you set high scores on individual tracks, with the option to race against "ghost" save data (same as in Mario Kart). And in "Training" you can choose to race on any track for 1-99 (!) laps, with between 0 and 29 computer-operated opponents. I don't quite get the purpose of this mode, as I'd rather play either Grand Prix or time attack. Finally, you can play head-to-head against another player if you have two GBAs, two copies of the game, and a link cable. Ah, the olden days! The game can accommodate two sets of save data, which I suppose was made so two siblings could a cartridge? Cool, I guess!
F-Zero GP Legend aesthetically matches F-Zero on the SNES. The music in the F-Zero series has always been one of its selling points. In my original review, I wrote, "The songs are sort of jazzy and match the game's futuristic feel," which is true of this game, too.
As a lukewarm fan of the original F-Zero, I enjoyed F-Zero: GP Legend. It doesn't have any nostalgia for me, but it's great having more classic F-Zero tracks, the same as I said about Mario Kart: Super Circuit. Gamers younger than I, if they were raised on F-Zero X instead, might be less impressed, since it's a 2D racer that doesn't have loops, pipes, or any of the other things a z-axis enables. But as a 16-bit, solo-player racing game, it's good.
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| Grade: A- |
Linked Review
"Even though this Game Boy Advance classic comes with a steep learning curve, the thrill felt when nailing a perfect run and blurring across the finish line in first place hasn't become diluted by age."
— Dave Cook, Nintendo Life, 8/10
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