Star Fox 2 is, for lack of a better word, infamous. Planned, designed, developed, and ready for release during the waning days of the Super Nintendo, it was abruptly canceled at the last minute to pave way for a newer game on a newer console (Star Fox 64), becoming somewhat of a holy grail for unreleased games. When a ROM of a test copy was leaked onto the internet, there was a call to action, and soon enough Aeon Genesis released a patch for the ROM that fixed some small bugs (removing debug functions from normal gameplay, for example) while also translating the game into English. The game became well-known around the internet for being not only practically finished and playable, but also being an excellent, engaging and fun game in its own right.
Some years later, a new entry in the Star Fox franchise was released for the Nintendo DS: Star Fox Command. This game was notable for being quite similar to the unreleased 2, sharing many design details with it while also building on them to go in its own direction. However, despite the two games' similarities, Command's reception ranged from being mediocre to being reviled for various reasons, and the game is consistently the least liked of all the Star Fox games (except perhaps Adventures, but that game is another can of worms entirely). So what this article comes down to is trying to dig into both games to answer the question: what does Command do differently from 2 to earn such criticism? And, in opposition, what does 2 do to make itself much better than Command?
To get into the nitty-gritty, an explanation of both games' basics are in order.
Star Fox 2 and Star Fox Command share an injection of both turn-based and real-time strategy aspects into the tried-and-true formula of flying around in ships and shooting at enemy fighters. Unlike the other games in the series, where you progress through a series of on-rails levels, 2 and Command have a more free-roaming feel, letting you guide your characters along a map screen to take on squadrons of enemy fighters, enemy bases or battleships, missiles, and so on and so forth however you please. Since the playable characters have different aspects to their ships, keeping in mind your strengths and weaknesses is important.
The goals of the games are roughly equivalent as well: you have a home base (Corneria in 2, the Great Fox in Command) that you must defend from harm, lest you risk getting a game over due to its destruction. To win the game, you must sweep all the enemy fighters from the map, culminating in a boss battle to end the mission proper. Since events on the map happen in real-time, even when you're in a skirmish and not flying around the map screen, pressure is placed on the player to manage their team and to pick their fights wisely.
However, beyond that is when the two games start to diverge into different areas. To make these differences clearer, I'll be tackling them one at a time, talking about how they work in both games and where they go right or wrong.
The first change is the way characters work, and while it might seem negligible at first glance, it has wider repercussions. When you begin a mission in 2, you can choose two of any six characters: Fox, Falco, Peppy, Slippy, Miyu and Fay. Fox and Falco have balanced ships, Peppy and Slippy are slower and more defense-oriented, and Miyu and Fay are fast and more about offense. Once you've chosen two characters, you're plunked on the map and can begin the game.
You can see the character differences, too. Helpful!
In Command, however, you start off only with Fox, and as you go through the game you slowly pick up more characters with their own unique properties to their ships. Once you've completed the game and gotten to the ending, you can start over at the beginning and take alternate paths in the game, potentially meeting other pilots.
What matters here is how the characters are implemented, and this ultimately unearths the biggest clash between both games. In 2, you choose two characters and are free to play the game immediately afterward, sticking with your two pilots for the rest of the mission. In Command, progression is much more like a role-playing game, getting more pilots to “join the party” as you go through missions. These design philosophies are ingrained deeply into both games: Star Fox 2 is designed as a single mission, while Command is much more like a role-playing strategy game.
The second difference ties into this quite neatly: it's how both games use their overworld map system alongside their standard “flying and shooting” gameplay.
2 has one single map for all missions, and each planet gets an altered layout depending on difficulty (and some planets don't show up at all on lower difficulties). Beyond providing an outlook of the map so the player can deliberate on what to do next, the map has no other bearing on gameplay. The flying and shooting doesn't change much either, but the all-range-mode planetside battles, as well as attacking the insides of battleships, also utilize a walker form of the Arwing, keeping things fresh. The dogfights don't last long, and the mission itself doesn't take long either (Normal mode can be completed in under half an hour if you're quick). Corneria, your home base, can be destroyed, but does have its own health meter – one missile will not destroy it outright, for example, meaning the player is allowed a few mistakes at the start.
See? You can see everything you need to here.
Command, however, seems to have some kind of strange love for its shiny new map, and goes out of its way to develop it throughout the game. In the beginning missions, there is not much to say about it: you attack bases and enemies. Later, however, new gimmicks emerge – things like missiles, areas that your pilots can't fly above, or the “fog of war” that covers enemy areas and can be scribbled away a little. The no-fly zones can take up a fairly large part of the map in some missions, which tends to have the effect of railroading the player into a single solution that works best. I rarely found myself in a position where I felt like I was actually strategizing, since trying to do things in my own way either led to me running out of time or getting the Great Fox shot down.
The flying and shooting is engaging at the start, with a similar "shoot down enemies" system, but involves finding specific enemies and collecting items they drop, as well as implementing a hard time limit on each and any battle. This can be engaging at first, but there's never anything remarkably new or interesting added to it to keep it fresh, meaning it gets tedious very fast. Lastly, the Great Fox is the opposite of 2's Corneria – it has no health bar, and a single missile can destroy the Great Fox and end your mission.
The player is afforded no cushion in terms of their strategy, and oftentimes isn't afforded any time to really strategize at all, leading to the map sections of the game becoming repetitive and samey as well. Both the flying-and-shooting gameplay and the map sections start off strong and basic but both end up boring as the game continues. One lacks focus and development, never throwing a curveball at you or adding new ideas into the mix beyond "here's a new pilot and a new ship". The other has so much focus and development, despite not being the actual meat of the game, that it becomes less of a strategy game and more of a "find the way to solve this map puzzle" game.
Despite the similarities to the map above, adding no-fly zones and fog turns it into a mess.
Command's greatest failing is the focus it places on being a strategy game, while forgetting to find ways to keep the meat of its gameplay fresh. For all the ways the overworld map changes over the course of the game, the flying and shooting ends up repetitive and boring, which guts the game from the inside out. Star Fox 2, however, is the opposite; its map is never heavily developed, but serves its purpose, and the flying and shooting is fast enough to keep itself from getting boring, while also adding enough new abilities to toy with, like the walker form and the all-range style of gameplay. 2 is a Star Fox game with strategy elements, while Command is a strategy game with Star Fox elements.
The most obvious change between both games, however, is the implementation of a story. 2 has a very basic, very unobtrusive plot: Andross wants revenge. That's it. Occasionally during the game, typically upon passing a benchmark and returning to the map, he'll cut in with a short transmission and may send in more troops or a boss enemy. The only cutscenes that occur are an introductory scene and the ending – thus leaving the actual gameplay uninterrupted aside from the short transmissions. There is never a point where the story drives the fast pace into the ground.
Command? I likened it to a role-playing game earlier, and the comparison still stands. Before missions, between missions, even during missions sometimes, characters will cut in to spout off dialogue. During missions this tends not to be intrusive, but it becomes an issue between the missions, where characters will blab at each other incessantly, taking enough time to shoot any possibility of pacing in the foot. Even if the quality of the writing was good (and it isn't), the way these story scenes break up the game into chunks hurts the experience.
Falco says what we're all thinking.
When summed up, the reason 2 fares better than Command comes down to the aforementioned design philosophies. The Star Fox franchise's main draw is the fact that the gameplay is brisk and running through the games won't take hours and hours. Running through Star Fox 2 will never take more than an hour or two at the most, and its pick-up-and-play nature adds to its replay value. Running through Command can take hours and hours, and replaying it to get a different ending (out of nine) is ultimately muddled by the fact that playing the game is too long and too boring for most people to bother.
For all the influence that Star Fox 2 had on Command, the team working on it somehow missed what made 2's mixture of genres work so well. Command seemed to try as hard as it could to add a new dimension to the familiar Star Fox gameplay that it ended up focusing too much on its new features, the opposite of what its predecessor did. Where Command is tedious, 2 is engaging; where Command is extravagant, 2 is simplistic; and where Command is jarring, 2 is smooth. Despite being so similar, one game crashes and burns, while the other soars.