I’ve recently bought two new games for my Nintendo DS: StarFox Command and MegaMan ZX. I mentioned Command not long after I picked it up, and while I haven’t rambled on about ZX yet, there is a small link between the two that I feel I should express my feelings about: aging characters. Really, I just want to get the unsavoriness of that last post off the top of the page.
I don’t know how well you’re acquainted with MegaMan and all the various MegaMan spinoffs, so I guess I’ll give you a quick breakdown. The series started with the original MegaMan. Taking place many decades after that, you’ve got the MegaMan X series, featuring all new characters and whatnot. Taking place about a century after the X comes MegaMan Zero, which stars MegaMan’s partner from the X series, Zero. And now, another century after that, we have MegaMan ZX. Only this one’s main characters aren’t even robots at all. They’re humans who essentially dress up as MegaMan X. Now, the game is excellent, but every time Capcom introduces a new MegaMan series (that isn’t some alternate timeline like Battle Network or Legends), the characters get further and further away from the source material. I guess it helps to keep the games from getting stale, but really, will they even be able to call the next spinoff a MegaMan game? If the trend continues, there will likely only be a brief mention of the characters from ZX, nevermind any kind of MegaMan.
So what does this have to do with StarFox? Well, the thing is, Nintendo’s doing the same thing with those characters, just at a much slower pace. In the original StarFox, the team consisted of Fox, Peppy, Falco, and Slippy. After Star Fox Adventures, a new character named Krystal joined the team and Peppy stepped back from an active fighter position to just an onlooker. Now in Command, he’s gotten real old, and taken over for General Pepper, who’s been confined to a sickbed. By the next game, General Pepper will be dead, and I just don’t want to see that day come. Because then it’ll be Peppy’s turn, and damn Nintendo if they think they can just kill off Peppy. StarFox Command has a lot of different endings, and since we don’t know which one is the “true” ending, there’s no way to know how the next game will turn out, but some of those endings suggest that the next entry in the Starfox saga will star someone other than our beloved Fox McCloud. And that would be horrible.
But why does it have to be this way? Why have the StarFox characters been plagued by age, while Mario, Donkey Kong and Captain Falcon stay infinitely frozen in time? I guess maybe because StarFox is a little more story-/character-centic than those franchises, but that still isn’t a good enough answer. Just look at Metroid, for example. The Metroid series has developed a very deep storyline as of late, but Samus hasn’t aged a day. And the basic story structure between Starfox and Metroid is the same. They both star hired guns who fight on the side of good, who often go out of their way to help people even when no reward is promised. So why does Fox fall victim to time while Samus is forever young? Just because you have an sequential story doesn’t mean that you have to age and kill off the characters.
So I guess there’s something for you to think about. I guess it’s nothing really important, but it’s something that I thought might make a semi-interesting post. Maybe I was wrong, I dunno. I really just needed something to occupy my mind for a half-hour or however long it took to write that. And, you know, the unsavoriness.