If you decide not to count F-Zero 99 as a brand new entry in the F-Zero franchise (you shouldn’t, it’s just a battle royale spinoff), then it’s been exactly twenty years since the last release of a proper new game in the franchise in the West. Back in 2004, Nintendo partnered up with small developer Suzak, as well as TV Tokyo, in order to release an F-Zero game based on an anime which was being aired at the time. Yep, there was a time when Nintendo actually cared enough about the franchise to the point of even commissioning an animated series, but this is not the focus of this article. F-Zero: GP Legend was the last mainline game to be released around here, and a pretty disappointing one to boot.

I’ve talked about my love for F-Zero ad nauseum in the past, but even back in the day, F-Zero: GP Legend failed to win me over. Don’t think it’s because of it being yet another Mode 7 game, coming out right after the audiovisual masterpiece that was F-Zero GX; Maximum Velocity, which was a launch title for the GBA, the same system F-Zero: GP Legend was released for, is still one of my favorite games for the portable. Maybe it was the fact Suzak tried to punch above the system’s weight in terms of visuals and content, which resulting in F-Zero: GP Legend being slow-paced, confusing, and ugly for the eyes.

F-Zero has always been about performance, not visuals. With the exception of F-Zero GX, which had the advantage of being coded by Sega and being released on an underrated nuclear power plant of a console like the GameCube, none of the games in the series have ever been about graphical fidelity. The SNES original was a Mode 7 tech demo at best. F-Zero X on the Nintendo 64 was a showcase of how many (ultra low-poly) cars could be rendered onscreen whilst still maintaining 60fps. F-Zero: GP Legend delivers the most detailed visuals in any of the Mode 7-esque games (even more than F-Zero 99), and that resulted in the game being confusing to look, at inconsistent in its framerate.

Hey, you’re that guy from the fighting game!

In order to accommodate such graphics, the game runs at half of the traditional refresh rate, resulting in some slight input lag. Those Mode 7 tracks aren’t meant for choppier framerates, as pinpoint precision is key in order not to turn your car into a pinball (oh boy, the physics here ain’t great, either). Some levels are too detailed as well, becoming a visual mess, especially whenever the track itself features some kind of transparency effect. I appreciate the attempt at making levels look less like a playmat, but not at the expense of making the game an endurance test.

The other main issue is the story mode, which is taken straight from the single-player missions found in GX. You are given incredibly small time limits in order to complete objectives inside ultra-messy environments, meant to make Mute City actually feel like a city in Mode 7. That resulted in an even busier screen, with more visual elements, to the point that the map itself has to blip in order to accommodate the framerate. I appreciate they tried to tie the story mode with the anime’s story (even if the anime wasn’t that good to begin with), but this wasn’t exactly a good side mode, even though it was actually touted as the main selling point.

A visual mess, especially on the GBA’s crappy screen.

What should have had been the main selling point was the sheer ludicrous amount of unlockable racers in F-Zero: GP Legend, which featured as many unlockable cars as X or GX. Granted, the amount of cars onscreen is not big (again, countermeasures in order to reach a mere 30fps), but there is a lot to unlock. The Grand Prix modes are still fun. Unlocking pretty much every single stupid schmuck from the older games, such as Mr. EAD or the guy who’s basically a human version of Fox McCloud is still great.

Sadly, F-Zero: GP Legend did not become the commercial hit Nintendo was expecting, at least in the West. The game came and went, just like its anime counterpart. It was the last hoorah for the franchise in the States, if you don’t count F-Zero 99, that is. It wasn’t a bad game per se, but it felt like a setback after the excellent Maximum Velocity or F-Zero GX. As a result, it probably did not sell that well, Nintendo saw it as a sign that Westerners weren’t into F-Zero, and we’ve been living in this hellish drought of antigrav races featuring bird-named racers ever since. Twenty years later, it clearly doesn’t hold up very well, with a lot of people barely remembering its existence, unlike F-Zero GX.