FZ is known as the fastest and most extreme race in the known universe this is a short excerpt from the f-z GX game manual on page six describing the series and it's a quote that I truly believe encapsulates F Z's brilliant yet tragically short life FZ was a Masterpiece series made up of enthralling challenging physics defying incredibly stylish fast as racing games it didn't matter how skillful of a player you were or whether you're playing it on the Super Nintendo or the GameCube FZ was one of the only Nintendo series that ever dared to push you out of your comfort zone while other racing games became boring glorified time trials while in first place fzero kept you on your toes no matter what position you were in while other racing games would be content with using items to mask their mediocre racing mechanics f-zero challenge players to focus on the racetracks and hone their racing abilities while other racing games kept things simple to appeal to wider audiences fzo increased their game complexity to push their racing mechanics to their absolute limits as a fan of FZ I can confidently say that we'll never see another racing series like this ever again so with all that said I'd like to spend some time talking about the life of fzero highlighting some of their accomplishments the major events throughout their life my own personal fond memories of the series and their inevitable cause of death FZ was born on November 21st 1990 in Japan and was first released on the super famicom as a launch title for the system alongside Super Mario World the setting of The Game takes place in 2560 where Intergalactic multi-billionaires who earn their wealth through interplanetary trade devised a plan to create an entirely new form of entertainment by replicating the old school F1 races held on Earth and expanding it across the Galaxy in this new Grand Prix Racers would ride in hovercrafts floating one foot off the ground using super magnetic technology and the race courses would be designed with obstacles and traps in mind in due time the Grand Prix itself almost became a ride of Passage where winners of the grand PR were lotted as the highest honor you could be bestowed upon in the universe and this new F1 Style Grand Prix was later simply called F0 the gam play was very similar to your standard racing games with a throttle and break button but the hovercrafts and the Magnetic tracks provided some pretty unique experiences you can shift your weight to the left or right which allows you to strafe with the hovercraft you can cut tight Corners by turning and strafing at the same time you can point the nose of the hovercraft forward or back in the air to increase or decrease your jump flight distance and you can also get access to a super jet turbo boost after completing a lap the game featured four Racers you can choose to play as either Captain Falcon Dr Stewart Pico or Samurai Goro and each racer had their own unique hovercraft with various stats that affected their speed acceleration hovercraft health and handling much like the lore of f-zero the goal of the Grand Prix wasn't necessarily to get to first place and ACR the most points but rather to just survive and make it to the end in one piece the race courses were littered with rough terrain landmines environmental hazards magnets that will pull your hovercraft off the track slip zones that will block your magnetic grip and cause you to slip out and tons of boosts and jump plates to cross over dangerous gaps as you race through the track your hovercraft would take damage when you hit obstacles and if you completely depleted your health bar you would instantly retire from the race and only continue if you had additional lives yeah this was a racing game that had lives that's how you know this was up meanwhile falling off the track was an instant death okay this wasn't your baby ass Mario Kart game okay laceto wouldn't come save your ass if he fell off now what's really funny about this was that FZ canonically did have a lacu system that could pick you up and save you from a fall but it was only used as a penalty when he took an unintended massive shortcut so in fzo L if you strategically take a massive jump to get ahead to first place and avoid an intentionally placed massive landmine field the owners of the Grand Prix will pick you up and carry you back in front of the landmine field to keep the race exciting but if you fail an intended jump on the race course and you fall off and die well that's too bad you should have made the jump yeah we have the technology to save you from dying but we're not going to use it you welcome to FZ now Nintendo intended f-z to be a game that highlighted the super Nintendo's new rendering technique in which the background Sprites could be scaled and rotated allowing the typically 2D console to create pseudo 3D Graphics by manipulating the perspectives of the Sprites in real time this rendering technique is called mode 7 it was truly an Innovative technology that allowed the Super Nintendo to play Sprite based games in a new dimension and f-zero was on The Cutting Edge of realistic graphics with its shitty fake 3D however with all that said fzo was arguably one of the better ones to play FZ created an optimal 30° downward View From The Horizon where the racetrack and the other Racers take up almost the majority of the screen it was a rare instance of mode 7 technology where you could actually see turns on the track coming up ahead and you could accurately judge and react to when to make those turns and avoid other Racers without having to flash arrows on the screen every five seconds or wasting 50% of the screen with a useless mini map or a giant elaborate background you don't give a about FZ was one of the rare 7 racers where you could haul ass 500 M an hour and cut Corners with absolute precision and it was one of the most adrenaline rushing enthralling experiences you could have if you knew how to play you see every f-zero game is very different Nuance methods for controlling the hovercrafts at top speeds and in order to have the most fun f-zero games basically required you to learn certain techniques the single trick with the original f-zero that makes it much more playable is to strafe into the turn without accelerating to to maintain your magnetic grip which allows you to turn more tightly and preserve most of your speed after the turn and the second you figure this out the game suddenly becomes extremely playable and really fun now I know what you're all thinking wow Sam you must be a freaking fzo God how did you figure out this insanely hidden turning Tech are you some kind of f-zero speedrunner well yes I am this is actually a very complicated trick the f-zero speedrunners call the Sammy Slammer I humbly named it after myself of course being the f-zero master who discovered this broken Tech in fact I was so good at this game I submitted myself into the anals of history for this game in the ass so hard with the goddamn Sammy Slammer oh wait never mind it's in the game manual remember that thing you would read on the way home after buying the game well believe it or not they actually tell you how to play the game in that thing and you were supposed to read it like what what Captain Falcon gives you all the tips and tricks at the end of the manual the Sammy Slammer is literally right there isn't that crazy anyways the original FZ was awesome it was one of the best case uses for mode 7 on the snst it aged pretty well and it quickly established f-z as the new Mainline racing series from Nintendo in fact Nintendo seemed to have taken pride in f-zero success that they continue to use the series as a test subject for cuttingedge technology for many years to follow especially with projects exclusive to Japan in the mid 90s Nintendo partnered with Cento Giga to create a satellite modem peripheral for the super famicom called The satella View and two sqls to F0 were released exclusively for this system add-on called BS F0 Grand Prix 1 and bf0 Grand PR 2 now if you haven't heard about these games and the history of the satell view or how it works this explanation will probably be the most confusing you've ever heard in short The satella View was an add-on that you could attach to the bottom of your super famicom that would allow the system to download satellite broadcast data what kind of data was that well apparently all sorts of you you could view Cento Giga radio broadcast like the tide of sound broadcast you can view magazines like famitsu Nintendo power and special newsletters and in f- Zero's case you can download sound link games so what the is a sound link game well the CEOs at Nintendo were smoking crack cocaine going Bonkers at their Japanese headquarters they're just like oh we just bought this failing radio company for no reason let's just uh make a video game with the radio satellites we'll make radio video games it's like what okay dude imagine this we take Zelda on NES we radio broadcast a live actor pretending to be the old man through satellite radio we remake the whole game with voice acting and live orchestrated music the old man does random Thunder strikes at the enemies and we syn the game on a timer and you get 1 hour to beat the radio video game broken up into multiple Parts listening weekly through the radio meanwhile we make them buy a satellite tuner and subscription feed to this tell of you to listen to the radio parts of the radio video game and we Rigg the game so they can't even beat it until the last 15 minutes the very last broadcast we make all the subscription Revenue easy money what do we call this woo sound link games what okay so I spent an extremely long time researching this aell of VI trying to piece together what the this was but I think I have a good idea essentially Nintendo would take their existing games and restructure them in such a way that they could be synced in real time with a sento gigo radio broadcast allowing their games to be enhanced with CD like audio quality and Live commentators this was accomplished by programming the sound link games with a live in-game timer that the radio broadcast could plan for ahead of time in order to play back the correct audio for BSF Z Grand prix's case the radio broadcast would play updated and remixed music mostly taken from the 1992 Jazz album and Live commentators on the broadcast would act in character as the announcers for the Grand Prix of course with all the audio being synced with a live radio broadcast players were only allowed to access and play BSF Z Grand Prix during specific times of the day with four cups being broken up into four separate radio broadcasts that would air in weekly installments almost like a live in-game event to access the sound link game while the broadcast is airing players would have to use the bsx game cartridge that was included with the satella view in order to temporarily download the game data onto an 8 megabyte memory pack that would be inserted on top of the bsx game cartridge the bsx game features a city created in a graphical art style similar to Earthbound and players would control a custom avatar and travel between buildings to interact with and download different kinds of satellite data with bsx itself essentially just being a glorified menu that allows you to interact with all the satell viw features once the radio broadcast for BSF Z Grand Prix went live players could then access the memory pack data they downloaded to actually play the game during game play players would perform practice runs on all five tracks in the cup for exactly 3 minutes each and then after the practice run is finished players would then be able to race against computer players players in the proper Grand Prix mode for exactly 6 minutes on each track outside of the sound link features the only major difference with this game was that you could race with four brand new vehicles as well as four new racetracks spread out between the four cups BSF Z Grand Prix 2 was a sequel sound link game that functioned in the exact same way only two weeks of sound link events were ever broadcasted for the sequel with the later cups in the game being cancelled and never seeing the light of day there was also an offline practice mode that was available for players who could practice five courses anytime they wanted now due to the nature of these sound link games a lot of the data and information about them has mostly been lost to time which is probably why I never knew these things even existed however I suppose since both of these f-zero sound link games are essentially remixed versions of the original SNES game they weren't that important in the grand scheme of things honestly I normally would have glossed over these sound link games for literally any other Nintendo series but since fzero has has lived such a tragically short life and there aren't that many games to begin with these incredibly obscure sequels that were exclusively released in Japan for the satell of you are now noteworthy things I have to talk about which is kind of sad meanwhile back in the rest of the world we're all just sitting around just like oh man f-zero was pretty fun 8 years ago where's the sequel luckily despite Nintendo's drug fuel lunacy working on radio video games they were also working on an actual sequel to f-z on the Nintendo 6 4 called f0x which was released worldwide in 1998 now the original f-z was a standout racing game that was pretty unique for a SNES mode 7 racer but f0x truly established what made FZ special with the Advent of actual 3D Graphics f0x was able to push the futuristic racing theme to its fullest potential by massively increasing the complexity of the racetracks many courses feature large Loops gravity defying upside down inversions tunnel and pipe sections where you ride on all sides of the track much larger and riskier jumps halfpipe sections with no guard rails and of course all the same kinds of obstacles and traps from the original game meanwhile the new method for boosting in f0x push players to their absolute limits instead of getting one super boost after each lap that you could only consume once you now have the ability to use a shorter Boost after completing the first lap by consuming a small percentage of your hovercraft Health this single change to boosting created a massive risk and reward factor that made f0x extremely fun you can use consecutive short boosts to quickly gain and stack massive amounts of speed to get ahead and maintain your position but doing so drastically lowered your health and greatly increased the risk of crashing into a wall and instantly dying so figuring out the perfect balance for using the most boost possible without killing yourself was the most important aspect of fzx another major change to FZ X was the way players could approach in corner turns this time around players didn't lose their magnetic grip accelerating through a turn but you now have the ability to either lean into a turn to perform a slide turn or to lean in the opposite direction to perform a drift turn slide turns where your standard turn from the original game where you lean into a corner to take the turn tighter but a drift turn would force the hovercraft to lose its magnetic grip in order to rotate the hovercraft and possibly turn even Tighter and depending on the stats of your hovercraft C some of these techniques were more useful than others for example if you have a vehicle that has high top speed at the cost of low acceleration losing your magnetic grip and drip turning would basically cause you to lose a massive amount of speed and barely manage to turn at all so using the control stick and slide turns were basically your only options on the other hand if your vehicle has high acceleration with a low top speed you would actually be able to utilize the drift turn to effectively Corner hairpin turns and gain speed at the same time with the downside being that You' go slower on straightaways because of this new game mechanic players could now view a mini map of the race course ahead of time and alter their vehicle engine settings to take advantage of these techniques when necessary now while this was a really cool system these new methods for turning were probably the only frustrating aspect of f0x the main problem I personally had was that making sudden adjustments with the control stick could cause your hovercraft to lose grip and enter a drift turn State unintentionally so if you're prioritizing top speed when this happened you basically just slid out lost most of your speed and most likely crashed straight into a wall of course there's definitely a lot of skill and finesse required when turning with the control stick that will mitigate this from happening but it's still a pretty massive penalty in comparison to the first game regardless of this system each pilot in f0x still had personal hovercrafts with their own unique stats with the body boost and grip now being simplified from rank e to a repres presenting worst to best stats respectively and although all this can feel a bit complicated to learn in tandem with the new engine settings it mainly just comes down to your own personal preference speaking of the roster f0x added 26 new pilots you could play as alongside the 4 OG Racers from the SNES game meaning all 30 positions in the Grand Prix were now represented with unique pilots and hovercrafts the f-zero lore surrounding these new characters on the roster was also insane you got your standard human characters and aliens from distant planets but now we also got cyborgs and superheroes and monkeys we got a literal incarnation of evil we got a Batman super villain who also created an evil clone to Captain Falcon we got goofy ass Nintendo Easter eggs like James McLoud riding a goddamn arwing hovercraft and we got a skeleton who used black magic and science to reincarnate themselves back to life just to race an f-z like this was nuts the new lore surrounding fzx also resulted in rule changes for the f0x Grand Prix where Pilots were awarded points at the end of each race depending on their position and whoever got the most points at the end of the cup won to shake things up this time around CPU pilots who have accured the most points during the cup were given a rival icon and players were now incentivized to kill them this could be accomplished by attacking their vehicles directly with a side attack to crash them into a wall or by using a spin attack and pushing them off the race course once again highlighting the brutality of FZ now you might think I'm playing up how barbaric and brutal FZ was but fzx did also add the new Death Race mode where the goal was to kill everyone so I guess it could go either way so with all that said f0x was awesome it took the concept of the original game and brought it into the actual Third Dimension with tons of new features and while the graphics have aged terribly Nintendo prioritized running the game at 60 frames per second making the game play age like five wine by the beginning of the 2000s the f-z series was absolutely killing it the original f-z was a classic f0x up the anti with Superior gameplay and those sound link games were a result of a rough Coke field binge but no one outside Japan knew what that was no one knew what happened and now Nintendo was on the straight and narrow and nothing could possibly go wrong meanwhile the Nintendo CEOs were smoking crystal meth going absolutely ape at their Japanese headquarters they're just like FZ X was nuts bro we got to put the sound link radio technology into fzx make it a radio video game again meanwhile Cog Giga is just discontinue their broadcast it's all going to they're going bankrupt so now Nintendo is like whatever dude those guys suck dick anyways we don't need the radio we got the 64 DD so what the is the 64 DD well just like this a tel of viw the 64 DD was a peripheral add-on for the Nintendo 64 that was once again exclusive to Japan it attached to the bottom of the Nintendo 64 and utilized 64 megabyte floppy discs to temporarily download and save data much like the same functionality of the bsx cartridge for the satell view the 64dd was released in December 1999 but was effectively discontinued near the end of the following year as the GameCube was already just around the corner and sales for the add-on were incredibly poor in this incredibly long lifespan of a couple of months Nintendo released 10 whole games for the 64dd and one of them was the f0x expansion kit this game was basically exactly what it sounds like by inserting the f0x expansion kit into the 64dd while using the f0x game cartridge players could access additional content for the game the expansion kit included two new Grand Prix cups with 12 new tracks an updated stereophonic soundtrack as well as a machine editor and a track editor the machine editor involved putting together pre-existing parts with corresponding stats in order to create a unique hovercraft which was pretty straightforward and simple to understand the track editor was surprisingly much more complicated it allowed users to create f-zero racetracks in such high detail that's supposedly the same tool that the developers used themselves overall the expansion kit was basically f0x with some more stuff meanwhile back in the rest of the world the 64 DD didn't even come out no one knew what the that was it's 2001 we got two f-zero games they were pretty good and now Nintendo decided to release a third game called f-zero maximum velocity as a launch title for the Game Boy Advance now this game was a pivotal turning point in the series because this was when f-zero stopped being developed by Nintendo EAD and third party Studios were hired out by Nintendo to help pick up the slack for f-zero maximum velocity Nintendo tasked their Japanese subsidiary company and dcbe to help create the game which was mainly made up of EX Hudson soft employees story storywise the game takes place 25 years after the original SNES game and featured an entirely new cast of Pilots with the OG Racers from the first game being lauded as legendary Racers of the past right off the bat one of my gripes with this game was that the new cast of Pilots weren't nearly as interesting as the previous games and the entire roster basically gave off RC Cola Vibes the gameplay was very reminiscent of the original sest game and featured pretty much the exact same style of Graphics boost mechanics and Grand Prix structure but what of the most notable differences was that the Turning mechanics have been slightly altered this time around the most efficient way to Corner turn while maintaining your speed was to repeatedly tap the throttle button for whatever reason when you tap the throttle off and on it causes the hovercraft to reset some of its horizontal momentum and it gives the hovercraft an incredibly short nudge forward when you press the throttle so the most efficient way to maintain your grip at top speeds was to mash the a button through every single turn overall it was a pretty fun game to play but having to constantly mash the a button on Sharp turns was honestly really annoying and I would have much preferred how it worked in the first game now I know what you're all thinking wow Sam just because you're an epic f-zero God who's using some crazy speedrunner Tech unbeknownst to the masses it doesn't mean that the game is bad because you're forced to mash buttons at the top 0.01 percentile of play not everyone could invent the Sammy Slammer like you did back in the day well believe it or not that's exactly what I thought when I was playing the game I was like oh if you mash the a button you maintain your R while going fast as I'm calling this move the Sammy spammer because you spam the throttle however despite my ambitious discoveries and all the accolades and sexy females I've acquired with my speed running prowers the Sammy spammer was actually an intended gameplay mechanic the whole time you know why I know that you know why I know that because it's in the game manual oh that's right you thought I didn't read that but I did the Sammy spammer turning technique was called blast turns they knew what they were doing it's an intentional gameplay mechanic made for this game and I don't like it it's annoying another small gripe I had with this game was that the race courses were just absolutely littered with NPC random ass pedestrian hovercrafts that were essentially designed to just be a nuisance now the first game also had the same mechanic and it's sort of a weird Trend amongst older racing games that's kind of died out but it's a major problem with maximum velocity specifically like these will just be on the r course going 10 mph stacked up against each other and intentionally merging into you while you're passing it's so annoying overall fzero maximum velocity was a pretty decent game for a handheld system but it's definitely the weakest game in the series The mode 7 Graphics were pretty dated at this point it obviously wasn't as Cutting Edge as the games on Console were during the time and let's be honest here I mean it didn't even have Captain Falcon like what the luckily none of this actually mattered as f-zero was about to come out with their greatest game game yet because a couple years later in 2003 Nintendo released FZ GX on the GameCube Nintendo hired sega's Amusement Vision to develop FZ GX and this was one of the first major collaborations between both companies after Sega pivoted away from creating consoles and became a thirdparty studio now in most cases when Nintendo hired an outside company to pick up their slack the quality of those games were usually not as good and the resulting subpar games would slowly kill off the enthus iasm for the series over time but f-z GX was the rare exception where the third party developers Nintendo hired out were actually more competent than Nintendo Amusement Vision was headed by Toshi hero neosi who created Daytona USA in Super Monkey Ball and the company later reorganized to become new entertainment R&D and went on to create the entire Yakuza franchise so Nintendo definitely landed on some masterclass Talent meanwhile the fundamental Mechanics for FZ GS X were already established by Nintendo with f0x so all Sega had to do was use all their skills to build off fzx and push it to the next level which they did tfold in short FZ GX was not only the best f-zero game in the series but it's the best racing game of all time all time unlike every previous f-zero game that had a couple of weird little quirks to maintain magnetic grip or figuring out how to actually Corner turns F0 GX just intuitively worked the controls for this game were Flawless you don't have to mess with the throttle going through turns you don't have to read the game manual to figure out some obscure minute gameplay mechanic that sucked ass it immediately felt amazing to play right off the bat even if you were completely terrible at f-z you could pick this game up for the very first time and play it on the lowest difficulty setting and have an absolute blast first and foremost they fixed the shitty drift turns from f0x by actually allowing you to use them with a top speed engine configuration without Aira sliding straight into to a wall so with this one and only change you can just take f0x and throw it in the trash I mean it's still a good game but like come on bro meanwhile the rest of this game just slapped the controls were smooth as eggs the Boost went fast as the graphics were goddamn amazing it had the same awesome cast of pilots and hovercrafts from f0x with tons of extra unlockable content and it even had the machine customization features from the expansion kit but the most notable aspect of f GX I personally enjoyed the most was the god tier soundtrack Sega created for this game that dynamically changes phases for each lap of the race a race would start with some strong guitar riffs and then transition to an epic guitar solo once you unlocked boost power on the second lap and then transition again to a 200 BPM futuristic Drumm and bass beat for the final lap like this soundtrack was so good FZ GX also included an entirely new story mode with nine chapters and although that that may sound really short it was honestly so obscenely difficult that almost no one ever beat it like whose idea was it to have the final boss fight being chapter 2 like come on bro that was impossible lorewise the story mode itself wasn't all that interesting it was mainly just a foundation for creating some unique challenges but it was still pretty cool seeing the CG cutcenes and getting a new glimpse of the f-z universe besides that there weren't that many major mechanical differences between f0x and F GX because Sega basically took fzx and just made it better in every single way of course this wouldn't be an f-zero game without Nintendo incorporating some technological gimmick they designed in a drug fueled Haze so with F0 gx's release Nintendo and Sega also teamed up with Namco to release FZ ax which was the arcade version FZ ax featured 10 unique Pilots alongside the og4 racers as well as a new set of six racetracks the gameplay was was incredibly similar to the GX version although the physics of the game and the controls were slightly altered to accommodate for the arcade cabinet setup the cabinet itself featured a steering wheel with two pedals at the bottom with the wheel featuring a giant blue button in the middle used for Boost and two yellow paddles on both sides to perform strafing slide turns and side and spin attacks the most notable change to the game was that drift turns were performed by slightly breaking before a turn like you would in a traditional racing game which I assume was done to be more intuitive to General audiences the arcade cabinets also came in three different variants one was the regular sit down model one was the deluxe model shaped like the Blue Falcon that utilized a hydraulic tilting seat to simulate movement in the cockpit and there was a hyper Deluxe cabinet called the f-zero monster ride that utilized a supended machine and three Servo Motors to simulate 3D movement on the racetrack the solo racing mode had players race through a single course against 29 CPUs and each track featured different numbers of collapse depending on the length of the course and if there were multiple cabinets connected together three other players also had the option to join in to open up versus play now the main gimmick of FZ ax was that players could bring their GameCube memory card and insert it into the FZ ax cabinet in order to use their unique custom machines in FZ ax as well as being able to unlock FZ ax content that you could bring back into FZ GX this content included the new pilots some arcade exclusive machines parts and six exclusive ax tracks that would become the ax cup surprisingly while it may seem like this content was only available to those who had access to the FZ ax cabinets you can actually unlock all the ax content in FZ GX by itself but the catch was that it was so hard that most players never did it to unlock the ax Cup in FZ GX alone players have to complete all the grand pris on Master mode which I finally completed myself after playing the game for over 10 years and you could unlock the ax exclusive machine parts and Pilots by being the story mode chapters on their hardest difficulties which I've never attempted and will never do I mean Jesus Christ if you get past chapter 2 on normal difficulty you were a FZ God that story mode was up so with all that said unless you're one of the greatest players of all time tracking down an FZ ax arcade cabinet is basically the only legitimate way to unlock this stuff so good luck with that have fun traveling halfway across the country to whatever rundown movie theater you can find that has one of these things so you can unlock D sonen from the planet Shar now for me personally there's already 30 of these on the roster and I only use like two of them maybe one day I'll finally get bored replaying the Grand Prix mode and I'll actually attempt the harder story mode missions to legitimately unlock Phoenix the time traveling space detective but I'm good for now so with all that said fzr GX aged incredibly well the gameplay was Godlike no other futuristic racing game has ever topped it it's way more fun to play than all the realistically simulated forsa this game alone carried the entire series on its back and FZ was on top of the world just absolutely killing it but there was one problem a problem that quickly resulted in the immediate death of the series you see while f-z GX received tons of critical Acclaim and was widely considered to be one of the best racing games ever made even to this day the series overall had only received mild success financially which was why Nintendo EAD stopped developing these games back in 2001 in fact FZ GX even sold less than f-z maximum velocity on the Game Boy Advance which sold less than f0x on the Nintendo 64 which sold less than FZ on the SN no matter how you looked at it the popularity of f-zero was on a continuative downturn with every single release release and the writing was on the wall because of this Nintendo needed to immediately course correct and come up with an Innovative plan that would reinvigorate the series in a brand new way so they did what they do best and decided to smoke crack the CEOs of Nintendo went OAB boonga ape at their Japanese headquarters devising the next Cutting Edge technology they could slap onto f-zero but despite their best efforts their drug fueld minations failed to manifest and appeared like f-zero would be lost forever however at a last ditch effort Nintendo pulled out the big guns and shiru Innovation mamoto came to the rescue to provide his unique Insight With His Brilliant Wily Wonka esque brain he was like oh how about instead of using a control stick you instead control an AR augmented steering wheel projected onto the ground and you activate boost power by slapping your ass will create a mechanical peripheral that attaches to your TV that simulates movement on the racetrack by shaking and moving the TV in real time that's a unique experience that no one has ever seen before so it must be good we can even package the game with f-zero scratch and sniff stickers so you can smell the future meanwhile the one normal CEO who didn't OD off Crystal tar heroin was just like hey how about we do online play that would be pretty Innovative we haven't done that yet we're making an f-zero anime is this for real fzero GP Legend was a 51 episode anime that began to air on TV Tokyo in Japan in 2003 the story was non-canon and took place in a reboot Universe about 300 years prior to the original games but it did feature a similar Universe with the same characters from the video games on top of an anime release Nintendo also released an anime tie-in game with the same name on The Game Boy Advance about a month or so after the anime aired on TV Tokyo and they quickly followed this up with a sequel anime tyeing game called f-zero climax that was released after the series finale aired in 2004 these three projects alongside FZ GX which released a couple months prior were essentially Nintendo's final Hail Mary to revive f-zero and bring it back into the spotlight so with nothing to lose Nintendo released everything within a year enacted their worldwide f-zero media blitz Creek and clench their teeth waiting to see if the f-zero brand would finally take off again and gain a second wind so did it work well no obviously not but in the spirit of FZ I figured we should reflect on the final moments of F's hospice care and talk about the Fawn Memories We had up until The Bitter End now I know this is going to be heavy for some people but there's a lot to unpack here within this very short time frame so let's start off just talking about each project individually starting with F0 GP Legend the anime now talking about anime is a bit out of my wheelhouse and it's not something I've ever done before however I do do think FZ GP Legend played a pretty significant role in F Z's final moments on Earth so I do think it's worth talking about after all this anime was unique in the fact that it was the key Source material directly linked to the last two games in the series so while I would normally gloss over this kind of stuff it's surprisingly relevant to the conversation so is FZ GP Legend a good anime well for the most part it's a pretty standard anime from 2003 and I wouldn't exactly re recommend it to anyone but as a pure f-zero fan service show it does a pretty good job the one major aspect of the anime that might throw off f-zero fans is that the main character isn't Captain Falcon but rather a new pilot exclusive to the anime named Ryu suzaku whose main purpose is to essentially be a sort of self-insert Fish Out of Water character that interacts with the f-zero universe with fresh eyes now FZ GP Legend actually accomplishes this in a pretty unintentionally funny way you see Ru suzaku is actually a police detective F1 racer from New York City in 2051 but after chasing down a notorious criminal named Zoda he gets killed during the Chase and is unexpectedly cryogenically frozen and is awakened by the mobile task force 150 years into the future with the New York City of the past now being known as mute City meanwhile zodo was also cryogenically frozen at the same time and also awakened 150 years into the future as well by an evil Criminal organization known as the dark million so after Ryu learns that Zoda is still alive this motivates him to team up with the mobile task force and get his revenge much like the video game lore the dark million and other criminal organizations race in the f-zero Grand Prix in order to win the prize money to fund their nefarious purposes so the mobile task Force's goal is to enter the f-zero Grand Prix as a counterinsurgency operation to win the prize money for themselves and take it away from the bad guys and this was basically the entire foundation for for the show as the story progresses Ryu gets introduced to the world of f-zero learns how to become a better pilot working with the mobile task force and he meets and interacts with all the other pilots on the f-z GX roster to the show's credit it does an amazing job pleasing fzero fans by serving up tons of remix game music as well as crafting tons of episodes that revolve around singular Pilots that gives all the characters on the roster a decent amount of screen time and introduces all their backstories there's a samurai Goro episode there's a Kate Allen episode there's a blood Falcon episode and so on and so forth there's also an incredibly viral moment during the final episode that you've probably seen before where Captain Falcon defeats black shadow by Falcon punching the out of him and blowing up the entire universe which honestly is the hype as the anime's existence was worth it for that moment alone so with everything I've seene I can confidently say that FZ GP Legend was a decent show for what it set out to do and it's honestly not that bad but that's not telling the full story for how things inevitably turned out after all FZ GP Legend wasn't just a passion project for the fans its ulterior purpose was to promote the f-zero brand while also being a marketing Vector for the anime tying games so when we're examining the show under those circumstances it ends up being a very questionable business decision of course I'm definitely not qualified to talk about the proper marketing and business strategy they could have implemented during the time to save fzo but it doesn't take a genius to realize how financially risky this was when comparing it to much more successful video game adaptations like Pokemon now this may seem like a very unfair comparison but it actually isn't because after watching both animes I discovered that Pokemon is word for word bar for bar the exact same show both animes have a self-insert main protagonist who are not canon in the video games who both go out on a new adventure Venture and experience their own respective in-game universes by interacting with the actual in Canon characters and places both shows are pretty equal to each other as far as their writing and animation quality is concerned and both shows even serve the same exact purpose of promoting a video game brand however despite these extreme similarities one show was clearly vastly more popular so why was that the case well obviously the reason Pokemon was more popular was because Pokemon was more popular the anime aired on TV during Pokémon's absolute peak in popularity and because the video games were already immensely successful on their own an anime adaptation made perfect sense meanwhile f-zero GP Legend was released as the f-zero series was going into a massive decline Not only was this arguably the worst time to Branch out into other mediums but now they're also depending on the anime to boost the popularity of their video games which was clearly putting the cart before the horse overall this anime just felt like a fiscally irresponsible marketing Venture and putting it in the position where it also had to help promote two anime tiing games that would go on to determine the entire future of the franchise was insane especially for a series that was already declining in popularity so with all that said f-z GP Legend was basically set up to eat it was a show that was almost guaranteed to never meet the wild expectations they had planned for it and the f-zero media blitz Creek that Nintendo was planning was already off to a bad start still despite this obvious setback it's not like the anime was the only thing keeping things afloat after all f-z GX just came out a couple months prior and that game was awesome and now there's also two GBA games being released that might be just as good so now that we've talked about FZ GP Legend let's talk about FZ GP legend for the Game Boy Advance Nintendo hired the Japanese company suzak to develop this game and as the name yes it closely followed the established Universe from the anime while it's once again another mode 7 F0 game it did feature the modern mechanics introduced in f0x which made the game playay so much better you had the fzx Boost system you had access to side attacks to help Corner turns more effectively and the hovercraft controls didn't require you to constantly mess with the throttle to perform blast turns or require you to read the game manual to learn some unintuitive gameplay mechanic the story mode this time time featured five missions for eight Pilots that tell their perspective in the overarching story which plot-wise was about as simple and Bare Bones as FZ GX was but you also didn't instantly fight the final boss in Chapter 2 so I suppose that was an improvement the most unique new mode for this game was Zero test where players would be challenged to use a specific pilot and complete a small portion of a racetrack within the allotted time overall the addition of the modern mechanics greatly enhanced the experience and f-z GP Legend with was easily the best mode 7 F0 game ever released although that's not really saying much after all the graphical art style was very old at this point and there was already a very similar f-zero Game Boy Advance game that came out a couple of years ago so despite the awesome improvements this game brought to the table and how fun it was it's ultimately just more of the same adding to the mode 7 f-z pile once again was f-zero climax which was also developed by suzak and was also released on the Game Boy advance in 2004 the major gameplay change with f-z climax was that it featured a combined boost system from the original f-z and f0x players could still unlock boost power after completing the first lap as was standard in f0x but they can also unlock a stocked Boost after completing each lap that activated boost fire which was a longer singular use boost similar to the first game for context the Boost Fire Mechanic actually originates from the anime and it's introduced in the later episodes once Captain Falcon teaches Ryu how to use it in the show they sort of do a spin attack to activate it and the hovercraft turns into a spinning super boost that they use whenever they need to go fast as so it's basically like the fzo equivalent to going Super Saiyan other notable modes were the new survival mode which essentially functioned as the story mode with a new code of paint and they also added a track editor that players could use to create and save levels besides that it was basically a slightly expanded reskin of FZ GP Legend there were some incredibly minor changes like the new boosting system and the track editor and the Grand Prix announcer never being able to shut the up but for the average consumer both of these games were IND discernible from each other at the end of the day it was just another fzo mode 7 Game Boy Advance game that they out as fast as possible solely to cross-promote it with the anime like the fact that Nintendo was pushing one tie-in game right after releasing an f-zero game on the same handheld a couple of years prior was already pushing it but now they were doing two games within a year that's three Game Boy advaned games like that's borderline suicidal so with all that said we now have a complete understanding of these projects we now know all the pieces in play and the time finally came for Nintendo to enact their worldwide f-z media blitz cre to save FZ so how did this all play out well things technically started off with F0 GX they relased the game worldwide and it sold roughly 100,000 copies at its launch in 2003 and it went on to sell roughly 600,000 copies for its entire lifetime on the GameCube it wasn't exactly the best start for their grandm plan but the game did receive critical Acclaim f-zero GP Legend then began airing on TV Tokyo in October and the first GBA tie-in Game was also released in Japan a month later the sales it launched for f-z GP Legend in Japan were even worse than FZ GX with roughly only 10,000 copies ever being sold the game also received slightly worse reviews than f-zero maximum velocity for being a bit derivative despite being the much better game reviews for the anime during the time of its release are incredibly hard to find and I couldn't find any definitive ratings but we do know that it continued to air on TV Tokyo for all 51 episodes and the final episode aired on September 2004 it's unclear whether or not the Ane directly hindered the sales of the tiin game but overall the enthusiasm for f-zero in Japan was at an all-time low meanwhile the English dub of f-z GP Legend also began airing on Fox box in the United States during the same month and the US version of the game was also planned to be released alongside it a couple of weeks later and it's at this moment in time where everything started to collapse after the final episode of the anime aired on TV Tokyo the Japanese version of f F Zer climax was released in October 2004 and it sold even less than FZ GP Legend with a measly 5,000 copies ever being sold Japan didn't give a now did it review worse than GP Legend well if I know the reviewers in Japan didn't even play this either I mean Jesus Christ the Nintendo DS was about to launch next month like who gives a meanwhile despite Fox Box's consistent promotion for the English dub the anime was already a massive flop in the United States everything was on fire was super however despite not a single soul watching the English dub FZ GP Legend supposedly sold around 100,000 copies in the United States but that wasn't nearly enough to salvage the situation the first 14 episodes of the English dub continued to air to bad ratings until December in 2004 where the show went back into reruns during this period foxbox was rebranded as SP kids TV in January anuary 2005 with the TV block assumingly being Under New Management so when the new episodes of FZ GP Legend were set to continue on March 5th 2005 and the 15th episode continued to be met with abysmal ratings the rest of the scheduled episodes were immediately cancelled and the English dub was evaporated from existence the remaining episodes of the English dub were lost to time the English versions of f-zero climax were never released and Nintendo's plans to revive FZ completely failed FZ was pronounced dead shortly after now when we look back on the life of fzero it's easy to focus on the diminishing sales and the downward Trend and the barrage of Game Boy advanced games that no one gave a about but when I remember FZ I remember the amazing moments I had playing FZ GX I remember the countless hours I spent replaying the game and slowly progressing and getting better better I remember all the amazing music I think about all the times looking up world record time trials and thinking wow how the is that actually possible sure the Falcon Punch was pretty cool sure Super Smash Bros fans claimed to love Captain Falcon but didn't actually play f-zero when it mattered most that's fine I'm not putting the blame on anyone I'm not Petty f-zero left behind a legacy of being one of the best racing series of all time with uncompromising difficulty and Relentless speed and even after all these years there's never been anything quite like it rest in peace so with all that said that concludes the main portion of the funeral service I'd like to thank everyone for coming out and supporting each other it's a bit awkward putting together a funeral a decade or so after the fact and also posting it as a YouTube video but I guess with the Advent of Nintendo directs it seems like that's just the way things are progressing anyways I appreciate everyone who's watched so far I'm sure it would mean a lot to fzo knowing that so many of their fans showed up and stayed to watch so now that we've talked about all the Fawn memories we've had I suppose now it's time to continue celebrating the life of fzero by heading over to the funeral reception loosening up a bit and start talking hella now I've seen plenty of video game series die off in their own spectacular ways but even after a decade of Silence I still haven't been able to move on from F Zero's death and I think that mainly comes down to never feeling a sense of closure I mean FZ GX was only released about a year prior to the series Death the fact that f-zero was killed off immediately after releasing one of the greatest racing games of all time was ridiculous and I feel like we were completely robbed of a bright future where we could have at least seen a couple of more f-zero games on Console meanwhile the clear justification for killing off the series after releasing FZ GX was that a bunch of unrelated subpar game Boy advanced games sold really poorly which was like yeah obviously the derivative mode 7 anime tying games that were built off outdated Super Nintendo Graphics that they out on the Game Boy Advance solely to release it alongside the anime that got canceled in the US because no one watched it was going to sell poorly I mean even f-zero maximum velocity sold 600,000 copies between Japan and the US by 2005 and that was only relased at least two years prior to the anime tie-in games like people's opinions of f-zero didn't drastically shift that fast within two years you dumb at the end of the day the extremely poor sales of the anime tying games were clearly Amplified by the shoddy nature of their releases and the higher ups of Nintendo should have taken that into consideration but instead it seems like Nintendo just completely in utterly lost confidence with the series now do I think that f-zero may be revived from the dead someday and we finally get a proper sequel to FZ GX well honestly I don't know I'm not a fortune teller who predicts the future maybe a new f-zero game is already in development and it'll come out in the next decade or so but at the end of the day this entire video was just a snapshot of the current times and right now at this very moment in 2015 this sucks anyways I was trying to think of a positive note to end things on and maybe recommend people to check out fzg X or something but honestly talking about FZ is just depressing so I'm going to head [Music] [Music] out I don't care if no one gives a about Pikmin we're making a goddamn Pikmin game suck my my dick get the out of my office stupid ass check it out dude the latest gameplay footage for the new f-zero game we've been working on just got sent over to us this game is so Innovative it's going to blow your mind what the was that it's a battle royale f-zero game they'll never see it coming oh oh okay that's cool but I just have to ask for my own personal sanity if is this game going to have online play no why the would we do that all the other Battle Royale games already have online multiplayer that's not very Innovative we have to be different and subvert expectations so that's why we're releasing the same mode seven game for the seventh time in a row that's what everyone wants if you don't put an online multiplayer in this goddamn f-zero game I'm going to kill you it's been 20 years where's the online play fine we'll put it in f99 is an online multiplayer battle royale version version of the original FZ and was released in 2023 on the Nintendo switch as a free download through the Nintendo switch online subscription service this time around Nintendo actually developed the game themselves with the help of Nintendo software technology which is their in-house development team based in the United States the main mode features 99 players racing against each other on a classic f-zero race course at the same time players begin each Race by choosing between one of the four classic hovercrafts and voting on the race course but before being thrown into a giant starting line and beginning the match at the start of the race players enter the race course through a massive section of track that slowly funnels all the players together that then dumps them all straight into the starting line of the selected race course where all 99 players then have to race against each other for four laps since the original game has been transformed into a battle royale a lot of the core mechanics have been drastically changed players have access to the fzx boosting system to gain a Competitive Edge on other players and they also added a Spin Attack that functions more as a self-defense tool that can knock other players away and prevents you from losing Health the most notable addition to the game is the Skyway by collecting super Sparks created by Machine collisions players can fill a super meter and briefly gain access to the Skyway track above to gain a slight boost in speed and to avoid some of the absolute bedum taking place below the most interesting aspect of the Skyway is that it slightly deviates from the course below and allows players to some times take shortcuts and Alternate paths that wouldn't be possible otherwise now while this new mechanic seems completely busted the most challenging aspect skilled players face aren't the players in the back using the Skyway but rather avoiding the complete onslaught of obstacles the game will be spawning right in front of you in first place in order to survive until the end of the race players in the top positions have to constantly alter their optimal racing lines to avoid hitting all the bumpers and since most of the top players will be constantly boosting to to maintain their position they will almost always be a couple of hits from Death players who died early in the race can also sometimes gain control of a blue bumper that they can briefly control for around 30 seconds and due to the nature of these bumpers they can be incredibly hard to predict so with all these mechanics happening all at once f99 is by far one of the most cluster racing games I've ever played even more than Mario Kart Wii however despite how nauseating this game looks at a first glance it's somehow still surprisingly fun driving through race courses in massive groups can be pretty daunting for survival but player onplayerstatechange can be disappointing to never win first place you can still feel a little sense of progression by defeating your Rivals during your matches and ranking up there's also no denying that online multiplayer for fzero is just fun winning first place amongst 98 other real Racers is a lot more rewarding than it would be against computer players pushing real players off the track and blowing them up is very satisfying and even the simple Act of being a blue bumper and knowingly ruining at least one person's day does give you a bit of joy that you wouldn't be able to have otherwise ultimately while f99 is the same rehashed mode 7 racing game that they've released time and time again the online multiplayer component does completely justify The Experience so with all that said f99 is a surprisingly fun experience that came out of nowhere and I'm glad that Nintendo has finally dusted off the series and actually made something worth playing but there's still a part of me that feels incredibly unsatisfying IED I mean not only did Nintendo release yet another mode 7 F0 game that recycles the same SNES Graphics we've seen time and time again after 19 years of absolutely nothing but they also somehow managed to make it an online only experience that will become completely unplayable in the future the previous 99 title games that this game was based off of are already famous for their temporary existence and it doesn't make much of a difference whether Nintendo decides to either take it down themselves or graciously keep it alive and allow the player base to slowly dwindle down to nothing at the end of the day f99 is just bound to become the same kind of unplayable lost media as the sound link games of the past and there's really no other way to look at it I mean if Nintendo still hasn't released a new f-zero game by the time f99 inevitably gets killed off then that just means we're back to square one and FZ will continue being a dead franchise meanwhile Nintendo is like like sucking their own dicks and claiming that fzero is finally back after all these years which is technically true but I don't know why anyone is giving Nintendo praise for releasing a project that's barely meeting the absolute minimum requirements for even being considered a new f-zero game I mean why the do f-zero fans let Nintendo get away with this like f-zero fans just let everyone trample all over them like we just let Nintendo release the same mode 7 games over and over again again we just let Super Smash Bros take Captain Falcon we let Mario Kart 8 Just Jack our we don't even have any games to show for it we only got FZ GX cuz Sega made it and now we're supposed to be happy that we're getting a goddamn free download for a glorified browser game after 19 years of nothing like come on meanwhile now that Nintendo is technically release this new Battle Royale f-zero game that no one asked for now we all have to play play this song and dance where we all just have to fake our excitement like the peasants we are like oh my God guys we all got to download FZ 99 and play it all for months because we'll never get an f-zero game ever again till 2042 oh we all got to prove Nintendo that f-zero is popular Ken like off you listen the fact that FZ isn't popular is Nintendo's fault they're the ones who up the series it's not my respons ibility to fake enthusiasm over yet another mode 7 FZ game if Nintendo genuinely wanted to attempt to revive the series they would release an actual sequel to FZ GX and if that future game underperformed or sold badly then at least we could say that they gave it an honest chance and we could finally move on with our lives but until that day comes I'm not letting Nintendo off the hook with the same mode 7 we've been getting for the past 30 years like I know you made fzx you know how to make games in 3D just make a 3D fzo game how hard is that so as far as I'm concerned the series as we knew it is still very much dead and while f99 is technically a new f-zero game it will also eventually die so with all that said rest in peace F0 and rip f99 they ain't dead for when they die cuz you know it's coming up
