Star Fox (2026) Preview: Same as it ever was, but more so.

After the Nintendo Direct on June 10th, Nintendo spent a good deal of time with the upcoming remake of Starfox 64, now simply titled Star Fox. While the House Mario Built points specifically to 64, this is actually the 5th retelling of the scenario originally told in the initial release of Star Fox on the SNES.

I am a little cooler on the Nintendo 64 as a console than many players my age. I came to it a little late, my parents instead opting for the Playstation. I found it difficult as a child to return to Mario and Banjo’s collecting of trinkets when I had cut my teeth on the adventures of Cloud Strife and Chris Redfield.

Still, Star Fox 64 was something else. To this day, I think it has one of the the tightest, best designs of any game I’ve ever played. In 2026 we take full voice acting for granted, it was a groundbreaking innovation in console games at that time. The branching paths through the narrative based on player performance had been done before in 1990’s Wing Commander, but Star Fox made the concept digestible, but delectable for a child. Fox McCloud and Wolf O’Donnell shared the dubious honor of being doodled endlessly into my school composition books.

I am certainly not alone in my nostalgia, nor my assessment on the quality of the mission design. There is a reason Nintendo keeps choosing to revisit this particular title. Other forays into the Lylat System have been met with lukewarm reception.

The demo released Tuesday features the games tutorial, and interestingly, Meteo, the games traditional second level. The tutorial is framed as a VR training session that Star Fox veteran Peppy Hare is running to help develop group cohesion for the newly reformed mercenary squad (Star Fox being the name of the company formed by James McCloud, the MIA father of the protagonist). The central problem reveals itself to be the heated rivalry between Fox and Falco Lombardi, who is designated in his lower-third as the Star Fox team ace.

All of this expanded narrative, told through gorgeously rendered cutscenes, is probably going to be the largest selling point of this remake. In the past, the lore, relationships and drama of the Lylat War was usually implied through in-game dialog, and expanded on in the instruction manual and the official strategy guide. Here, we open on a prologue depicting James McCloud’s doomed mission to Venom and his betrayal at the hands of Pigma Dengar. James, who in the past was characterized simply as a brave but tragically absent father, is fleshed out as an idealist, Pigma calling him his “bleeding-heart leader” before he turns his guns on him.

As for the gameplay, everything has been translated directly from 64. Three gold rings expand your health, you can power-up your lasers twice, et cetera. I had finished a run of 64 just last week, and my flight through Meteo played out almost beat for beat here, including the secret warp gate.

I have seen some quibbling online about the performances being “worse” than the iconic soundbites from the past, and while I’ll certainly always probably prefer those golden oldies, I think the performances here are good in their own regard. Some line readings reminded me that I was watching what essentially amounted to a children’s cartoon, but the only real complaint about that is it reminds me how old I have become.

After I hit all of the warps, I was rewarded with a cutscene reflecting that the team had dropped into a position to either help protect a secret research facility on Fichina(Fortuna in the original release), or rescuing the troops at beleaguered base on Katina, effectively framing it as a trolley problem between prioritizing keeping dangerous military technology out of the hands of the enemy or the lives of the men fighting along side you. This is where the remake’s premise shows some promise, the additional narrative being able to add context and to what historically had been a simple result of mission objective being achieved.

The demo shows a lot of promise. I anticipate a lot of my fellow residents of the retirement community will approach this new title as disgruntled purists, but for my part I think I will enjoy seeing this classic story re-imagined one last time(presumably).