I can't decide if this game is a cash grab from Star Fox getting gamers-now-parents to take their kids to theaters to see the Super Mario Galaxy film for nostalgia of SNES era icons, or if it's actually refreshing the IP for the current crop of next gen gamers, and if this game is well received enough, Nintendo might actually do something more with the IP.
Nintendo has always had an interesting time with Star Fox as an IP, partly because it involves
3rd party devs teaching them how to make the Super FX chip or so I'd imagine, and also partly because Nintendo first-party games tend to be designed and built more like this:
- Build a game loop that's fun
- decide how confident you are on the popularity of the game loop
- make/pick an IP that is likely to buy this particular game loop
Most of the time, that process looks like "good enough for Mario? No? How about Zelda? Pokemon? Okay let's go to B team: Yoshi? Another Mario character? Would Kirby like this? Hmmm, C team it is: Metroid? Pikmin? Splatoon? None of these? Hmm IDK what to do with this. Hey, who's tugging on my shirt? ... what's that? ... Star Fox??? Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. No, this would probably make more sense as a Fire Emblem game. ... Okay, look kid, we can't make NEW Star Fox Games, it just isn't done. ... I know you are mad at that, but its true, so tell you what, what if we remade SF64 again, would that get you to leave me alone on all this abandonware IP business? Yes? Great."
Okay I had some fun in that paragrah, but generally smaller but formerly liked titles can all fall into that when it comes from Nintendo 1st or 2nd party devs...they don't want to go into 'just advancing the story' (unlike, say, Sega, who does IP / story first then tries to find game loop changes that sell, Sonic 06 shows the hazards of that approach), they want to do a fun gameplay experience, then clothe it in just enough IP and story to be coherent, push it out the door and start again.
That's why after Paper Mario: TTYD, we've had no actual paper mario games as us olds have wanted it for years, instead that was sent over the Mario & Luigi series and Paper Mario was used for odd experiments...Paper Mario had the action command and TTYD introduced a few twists, but it was mostly RPG heavy. Shigeru Miyamoto is not a big fan of RPGs, sees them as lazy as I recall.
Paper Mario, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Star Fox, Banjo & Kazooie (back before Rare got bought by MS) are all IPs in my opinion that fell through the cracks because there were not enough gameplay advances to justify a new story / expansion to the IP on its own, and the A-team players (Mario/Poke/Zelda) and B-team players (Kirby/Yoshi) and C-team players (Wario/Metroid/Pikmin/Splatoon) each need to have at least one game per console generation that fills out any given 1st and 2nd party game release schedule so there's little incentive to take a 'riskier' bet by, say, doing innovations or updates to the rail-shooter game with the Star Fox story on it, the closest we've had was that Star Fox cameo in that doohicky game by a 3rd party that I can't recall but bought.
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