Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 18, F-Zero GX

The last F-Zero we got on a console was the best one, and it isn't close.

I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.

The original F-Zero, on the Super Nintendo? That’s a pretty good game. A different way of racing than we were used to, with a real arcade feel to it much of the time even though it was developed for home play. It was ahead of its time in ways that were and are obvious — it used the Mode 7 capabilities of the SNES to create a pseudo-3D environment that would later be utilized in other racers, like Super Mario Kart, and it was limited to just four racers at a time, likely in part because that’s all the SNES could handle at the speeds F-Zero ran at.

It’s still fun to play today, but it’s not really top 101 fun, which is why you didn’t see it ranked by now — I don’t have the original Mario Kart on the list, either, and I love that game, too. Much closer to getting a ranking was F-Zero X on the Nintendo 64. If not for the way I decided to handle certain series, it would have been listed in this project, for sure: like with Mario Kart games, though, I didn’t want to rank iterations of games that were extremely similar, generational updates. That’s why the only Kart you’ll see on this list besides the pinnacle of the series is Double Dash!!, which is so, so different than what came after it for a number of reasons. F-Zero X rules, to this day, and part of the reason it’s incredible is because of what Nintendo decided to prioritize while developing it: rather than super detailed backgrounds and tracks that took full advantage of the Nintendo 64’s abilities, like with what you got in Mario Kart 64, F-Zero X prioritized seemingly impossible player speeds and a locked frame rate in spite of 30 racers competing against each other on each track.

I’m not a frame rate guy most days — I love Perfect Dark too much for that, you’ll never hear me complaining about games being 30 FPS instead of 60 or whatever, and I respect that slowdown in shoot-em-ups was sometimes so useful for catching your breath that it ended up becoming an optional power you could use in some later ones — but when it comes to something like F-Zero? It’s absolutely critical that the frame rate is locked in, so, credit to Nintendo for recognizing that with X and sacrificing the look of the game to ensure it would play impossibly smooth.

One reason I didn’t like Mario Kart 64 much at all at the time of its release, and certainly don’t go back to it now, is because it felt so slow, too slow, and with weird delays between hitting obstacles and items and your racer’s reaction to it: part of the issue was the game’s focus on making these huge, memorable courses with landmarks to gawk at, to the detriment of the rest of the experience. F-Zero X is basically the opposite of that: it is extremely basic looking, but it runs in a way that makes it, otherwise, future-proofed, even all this time later. And you aren’t looking at the backgrounds much, anyway, since staring at those for too long is just going to cause you to crash, anyway.

Image credit: Nintendo.co.uk

If not for the existence of F-Zero GX, X would have made the list, easily, in the same way Mario Kart 7 would be here if not for Mario Kart 8. Here’s the good news, though: F-Zero GX does exist, and it’s incredible. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s kind of understandable why there hasn’t been another console F-Zero since*. GX, released on the GameCube in 2003, was finally on hardware that could produce the full F-Zero experience, with 30 racers going at absolutely ridiculous speeds on a diverse set of courses that expected as much from you as they gave to you, and this time around, with detailed backgrounds on the courses. Is there anywhere for the series to go from where GX left it? I’ve said before that what Nintendo should really do is upscale GX to HD, add online multiplayer, and put it on the Switch. You don’t even need new courses to justify the re-release, since we’re talking about a game that, compared to what Mario Karts manage, barely anyone played (around 700,000 worldwide sales) on a system that only sold around 23 million units worldwide, that costs as much or more on secondhand markets as a brand new game does today. Give us F-Zero GX HD. F-Zero GX DX. Whatever you want to call it, just give it.

*F-Zero: GP Legend, based on the F-Zero anime, released on the Game Boy Advance in 2004, and plays similarly to the original F-Zero, so it didn’t exactly make a huge splash when there already was an F-Zero GBA game out there and the DS was on the horizon. GP Legend’s sales numbers make F-Zero GX’s modest figures look like Animal Crossing’s in comparison.

F-Zero GX is so fast. Just… so fast. It feels like what I imagine trying to pilot a vehicle going 1,700 kilometers per hour would. You know, like you are always in danger of smashing your vehicle into an oncoming wall, or driving right off of a cliff, or like turning is too dangerous an action to attempt in most spaces so instead you have to worry about pointing the nose of your vehicle at exactly the right angle to survive any changes to the track.

F-Zero GX feels like you’re trying to fly a fighter jet at full speed through a crowded mall. Against all odds, with enough practice, you’re going to navigate your way through that mall without crashing into every obstacle in your path. It is such a chaotic game that even finishing in 30th place out of 30 racers isn’t necessarily enough to keep you from winning a given cup. Your opponents aren’t essentially locked into their finishing positions like in some other racers, but are instead just as subject to careening off course and into oblivion as you are.

There aren’t really turns in GX, so you don’t have to worry about the kind of drifting you do in most racers. Instead, what you do is utilize the left and right trigger buttons to quickly shift your car to the left or right, respectively, so you can stay on the course as it changes direction while you’re racing at 1,500 km/h. There are occasionally some actual turns, but they’re almost all of the U variety: you need to slam on the required trigger while you’re still pedal-to-the-medal on the gas, in order to turn so quickly on those U's that it feels like you teleported rather than turned. It’s important to use the analog stick to perfect where your car is pointed and to right it after touching the triggers for those quick shifts, but not to rely on the stick like you would in more traditional racers. You’re just going too fast, and the course changes where it’s going at a similar speed: you’ll end up driving off the side of a course, and there is no Lakitu to save you here. If you fly off a track, you lose. You have extra lives to try again, but use them up, and you have to do the entire cup over, not just the race in question.

It is easier than you might think to drive off of some courses, so please, get used to using the triggers for the more dramatic, immediate shifts in direction. The game will force an education on you if you don’t educate yourself, and you won’t like how it delivers its lessons.

As you unlock more racers and cars — the game begins with you just able to select just four of them, including Captain Falcon and his Blue Falcon, but eventually you can earn your way into using every racer you would face in a given cup — you’ll find yourself improving at the game not just because of the time you’ve put in, but because of these additional options. There are racers with better boosts or better grip than what you start out with, but you have to play to earn the in-game currency to purchase those racers and their cars. At least you’ll be in a better position to take advantage of their superior skills by the time you can afford them.

There are also another 10 unlockable characters that you get by completing the game’s story mode and then its individual chapters on the story mode’s hard difficulty, but I’m going to be honest: I’ve never managed it and am unlikely to ever do so. I love a difficult game, but I’ll readily admit F-Zero GX’s story mode is beyond the hours I have to put into a single game at this point in my life. For masochists, though, the story mode — a series of challenge races that fleshes out the F-Zero universe and causes you to pull out all of your hair — is a gift from the heavens.

You don’t need to ever bother with the story mode to enjoy GX, however. The four cups and multiple difficulties you can play them on are plenty. There are (eventually) so many characters to choose from, you can change whether your vehicle’s focus is more on top speed or acceleration just like in X, and there is basically always room for you to improve. My earlier example of finishing in last and then coming back to win anyway was based on a cup I was playing for the purpose of taking down notes for this game: I’ve been playing this game since I was in high school, and that shit can still happen to me.

The course design is stellar. The environments are varied enough, though there’s a similar aesthetic to quite a few of them: like with X, you’ll be spending most of your time focusing on what’s coming directly in front of you rather than on backgrounds, though. And what’s coming in front of you might be crucial recharging panels, boosts, jumps, walls, or the recognition that this entire course you’re racing on is a Mobius strip.

Those recharging panels are part of what make F-Zero, in general, so utterly fascinating and layered. It’s not just about going a billion miles per hour and trying to avoid crashing. Your vehicle has a health bar: it can only take so much damage before it explodes. With enough practice it’s simple enough to rarely be in danger of exploding, but if you’re in that scenario, then you’re playing too cautiously. And that’s because your car’s boosting function is powered by the same energy that keeps it from blowing up mid-race. After your first lap, you’re able to boost: from that point forward, every race is a balance between staying alive and staying ahead of the competition, and those two are directly tied together by your utilization of your boost. Boost too much too soon, and you’ll be left with little in the way of shielding for your vehicle. Fail to boost enough before you see a recharging panel to take advantage of its bounty, and you’ll know you screwed up and played things far too safe, likely to the detriment of your finish. You basically should always be playing F-Zero GX like you’re a second or two away from total, unavoidable disaster: create health crises where there aren’t any in order to jump ahead of the pack, and then hope you get to a recharge panel before you’re forced to pay for your gambit.

This balance of risk/reward and the adrenaline it injects into you as you race at impossible speeds while the competition continually nips at your heels… in my professional opinion, that’s the good shit.

It’s worth pointing out that F-Zero X was the last game in the series to be developed in-house by Nintendo’s core teams. NDCube is fully owned by Nintendo now and constantly on Mario Party duty, but back when the GBA’s Maximum Velocity released, it was a joint venture between Nintendo and an advertising firm. GP Legend was developed by third-party company Suzak, and F-Zero GX was made by Amusement Visions, one of Sega’s many internal developers. You might know them primarily from the Super Monkey Ball series, which, not coincidentally, is the engine F-Zero GX is powered by. F-Zero, during the GameCube generation, was initially an arcade game project running on a new board utilizing Cube tech, named “Triforce.” It was called such because, well, Nintendo, but also because the board was a collaboration between Nintendo, Namco, and Sega. F-Zero AX is the arcade version of the game, while GX is the GameCube one.

Amusement Visions was the developer for both titles, and one of the leads on the projects was Toshihiro Nagoshi: Nagoshi credited the original F-Zero with helping him to envision and develop Sega’s Daytona USA series of arcade and console titles. Daytona USA, like with F-Zero X, had 30 racers at a time, and at a locked in frame rate even on its home release for the Sega Saturn. (It also has this song that you do not want to listen to unless you want it on your head the rest of the day.) There probably wasn’t anyone Nintendo could have wanted to hand F-Zero off more to than Nagoshi and his team, and that’s probably also part of the reason we haven’t seen F-Zero since. Where else was there to go from there, where the same level of both care and progress for the franchise could be found? The developer is out there to do it, surely, but they haven’t asked Nintendo for their chance to prove as much, and so we’ve been left F-Zero-less for nearly two decades now.

The only real complaint you can throw at F-Zero GX (I’m not counting my preference for X’s more metal-based soundtrack here) are that it’s too difficult, to the point of turning off potential players. That’s fine, really. It’s not like the world lacks racers that do a better job of catering to all ability levels: it’s perfectly acceptable to occasionally make a game that is flipping you off and threatening to step on your neck for even attempting to play it. At least, it’s acceptable so long as they feel as good to play as F-Zero GX does, and, well, it’s rated number 18 on the top 101, so you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of how well it plays and feels just from that, even with the difficulty being what it is. And if you’ve played it yourself, you certainly don’t need me to tell you it’s great.

As mentioned before, if you want to play F-Zero GX, you basically can’t unless you get lucky on the secondary market, or already have a copy. You can, of course, play it on an emulator that might even have graphical upscaling, and do so on a GameCube controller using a USB-based Wii U GameCube controller adapter that will install the necessary drivers on your PC when you plug it in. I actually still have a copy of GX myself, but, you know, there are alternatives out there for those who don’t.

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