F-Zero 99 is a waste of one of Nintendo’s best ideas
Nintendo's latest follow-up to the success of Tetris 99 is their worst such effort to date
Games Features Nintendo
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The difference between Tetris 99 and Nintendo’s latest attempt to imitate it, F-Zero 99—which is to say, the difference between a game we still play fully three years after it launched as Nintendo Switch Online’s one true killer app, and one we can’t imagine will still be installed on our Switch a week from today—can be summed up thusly: When the multiplayer elements of Tetris 99 don’t click for you, you still have the pleasures of playing Tetris. Whereas F-Zero 99, for all its concessions to modern gaming, is still, well … an installment in Nintendo’s decidedly second-run racing franchise.
It’s not like the idea of a battle royale version of a racing game is necessarily a bad idea or anything; Fall Guys, for instance, mines that territory to exciting effect amidst all its other oddball minigames. But if you strip away its (undeniably fantastic) soundtrack, F-Zero (and especially the Super Nintendo F-Zero, which 99 is explicitly modeled on) has never really had enough of a game to it to justify playing it instead of, say, Mario Kart—and adding 98 other players crowding the track doesn’t fill in what it was missing. Yes, seeing that many cars smashing against each other is kind of neat. Yes, there are occasional thrills, especially when you’re lurking at the back of the pack and the warning sirens are buzzing. But the franchise itself has never steered hard enough into either its racing side, or its automotive combat side, to really carve out an identity for itself, and it hasn’t managed to pick one up as it’s transitioned into the gaming trends of 2023. Worse, it has a fundamental flaw.
The basic challenge of F-Zero 99, besides the franchise’s fairly light arcade racing mechanics, is one of resource management. That resource is Power, which is what controls your speed boosts—but it’s also your health, forcing players to make frequent decisions about whether to play conservatively to keep themselves alive, or push the limits to try to stay out ahead of the pack. That sounds like an interesting idea, admittedly, with lots of strategic weight to it. In practice, though, it means you have a button that makes the game more fun to play—but which will kill you if you push it too much. At least a third of our deaths (which knock you out of the race entirely, of course) have simply been because we got bored, and decided to jam the speed-candy button; if high-speed racing is your game’s big selling point, then there’s something wrong when it has to be doled out sporadically in order to survive.
That kind of focus on more conservative, thoughtful play can work in a racing game like Gran Turismo, which is as much about the strategy of racing as actual reflexes. But unless we’re missing something massive, the gameplay in F-Zero 99 simply isn’t anywhere deep enough to support that kind of mental engagement. (We’re also not entirely clear as to why races don’t run until the entire pack has been whittled down to 1, in the style of every other battle royale game in existence; there are few “Well, that just happened” sensations akin to finishing a multi-minute race and seeing you placed, like, 53rd.)
Anyway: Call us, Nintendo, when you decide to get serious and launch Mario Kart 99. In the meantime, we’ll still be playing Tetris.
20 Comments
BRING BACK MARIO 35, YOU COWARDS!!! Or at least make an SMB3 version.
I don’t think I could disagree with this article more lol. F-zero has always been about going really fast along a twisty and crowded track. The whole point of making it a BR game is to fight through the chaos and then get defensive once you’re towards the front of the pack. There’s a ton of strategy with using the CPU bumper cars. I’m liking it a lot.
I’m not even a big racing fan but I’m loving 99. This author seems…uninformed? If the race lasted until 1 racer was left the race could last hours. You would have no incentive to go fast, just to survive.
Five laps, eliminate to 50, 25, 10, and 2. Seems straightforward to me.
This is literally the only negative article I’ve read on the game anywhere on the internet. The A.V. Club out of touching, what a shocker!
Damn, sounds like I’m a bold iconoclast standing out from the pack
Not your fault. F-Zero is a nostalgia franchise from Nintendo. The fanboys and fangirls will eat up anything they offer. Personally I played it for a day and forgot about it until I read this today.
Unless you’re some kind of retro fetishist, I’m not sure why you would build this game on the framework of the original FZero, rather than the far superior FZero X.
I have been having a blast with F-Zero 99. (For reference, I played but never got into the original SNES game, but I adored F-Zero X for the N64. Never played any other version.)I can understand your frustrations, and think maybe it’s just not the game for you. For me, the fun of this game has only increased the more I’ve played it and the better I’ve gotten. If you are usually at the back of the pack or blowing yourself up trying to keep up, I can understand the frustration. But once I figured out how to be competitive and be consistently in the mix of upper placements, that jostling for position, finding your path around a corner, and cars blowing up around you left and right has been pretty thrilling. (One of my favorite things to do when I’m on fire and about to die, is seeing another car in a similar predicament right in front of me and taking the chance to boost into them so they blow up and I get full health restored. I love it.)
I’ve had a few come back from the dead moments like that, and they’re the best part of the game, for sure.
F-Zero GX was one of the Gamecube’s best games and.. yeah, I’d say one of Nintendo’s best of all time, maybe top 10. Put 99 players in *that*.
If you don’t like F-Zero, then you will not like F-Zero 99, and it really sounds like you don’t like F-Zero.
Good point!
“F-Zero… has never really had enough of a game to it to justify playing it”I’m not a fan of the kid phrase “L take,” but dude, if you don’t think racers even COUNT as games then you may not be the best-placed person to review games.This is reminiscent of when AVC gave Street Fighter IV a bad review because “well it’s just punching and kicking and hadokens and whatnot, yawn, game bad” and thought that was insightful.
Good point!
I mean I’ll likely not play this since I am dogshit at F-Zero normally, but I appreciate what it is, which is racing distilled to “go extremely fast and try not to die” on bright futuristic tracks.Anyway I’m caught up on Mogtomes in FFXIV and what I wanted them for, so I’m diving back into Phantasy Star. I just picked up a hovercraft which opens up a lot of the map and I think I know where to go next. Really the only big issue with the game is the encounter rate, which is in line with other games of the era but is actually random enough that you do frequently get clusters of encounters within a few steps.
I love FZero as a kid, so this looks like something I’d love to play with my own kids. But could they have not updated the graphics just a little bit? I will probably still try this though. I love fast twitched racers.
For years, F-Zero GX was the latest game in this franchise and it was genuine news to your sister site that F-Zero was even asked about to Nintendo last year. https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-f-zero-40k-5-million-yen-stock-investor-1849131627For you to say that this apparent refutation of the news that there was no new F-Zero stuff in the works (even if that at the time of that statement it was true) I’m confused that there isn’t any acknowledgement that this was a revival of a dormant IP to perhaps gauge interest. The fact that it doesn’t shows a lack of interest or awareness in the topic. F-Zero 99 has it’s place and I expected this article to say it didn’t do justice to a 3D, over the top, blink and you miss it, futuristic, ludicris-speed racer that a 20 year old F-Zero showed there was a place for in gaming. That was the article I would have wrote and I’m confused that there wasn’t even a mention of the idea of what this portended for the franchise.
Halfway through this article, I had to scroll back up to see whether the byline said Barsanti, so blatantly uninformed was the take.
Respectfully, skill issue