Intro


F-Zero is a game about honing your skill to move at the highest speeds possible through narrow roads, mine fields and sharp turns all while keeping your vehicle in one piece. In this video I wanna talk about my experience playing this game for the first time in 2023 and what lead to me to thinking that despite how old this game is, it holds up really well and is now one of my favourite games of all time.


Part 1: Game Structure, Difficullty and Progression


There are 3 tournaments: Knight's League, Queen's League and King's League. Each league has five courses and 4 difficulties: beginner, standard, expert and master. You might think that means that this game is welcoming to both casuals and hard cores alike. But I feel like the developers intended the player to beat one difficulty at a time going from beginner to master. I say this for a couple reasons: 1. Even of you play the game on 'beginner', it can be pretty difficult. Not incredibly difficult, but more challenging than you would expect for a mode called 'beginner' 2. Beating the game on beginner or standard doesn't even reward you with anything. No trophy, no achievment, it just takes you back to the records menu to see how you did compared to previous attempts. It only rewards you for beating expert or master. If you beat a tournament on expert, the credits will roll and you'll unlock master difficulty for that tournament, and if you beat it on master, you get a unique top down view of the course and a message from Captain Falcon himself, congratulating you for your achievment, which felt like the perfect reward to me since you never see or hear captain falcon otherwise, making this a very special and heart warming experience. As a result, the progression in this game comes from you as a player getting better at the game and constantly striving to beat a bigger challenge. There's no story to guide your hand or tutorial to tell you where to start, other than the manual of course. And I think this works as a nice change of pace, as most games at the time of it's release were more linear in their approach to progression.


Part 2: Gameplay


You can choose to play from 1 of 4 vehicles: the Blue Falcon, Fire Stingray, Wild Goose and Golden Fox. For this playthrough I went with the Blue falcon because it felt like a vehicle tailored towards beginners and because Captain Falcon. Each vehicle varies in top speed, acceleration, health and handling allowing for players to play in many different ways. In terms of controls, you have your standard racing game controls: accelerate, brakes and drift. Though I feel like drift feels very different compared to other games. It's hard to put into words but it feels tight and a lot more fun to use than your standard drift. Though you have to be careful not to use it too much otherwise you'll lose alot of speed. When I played in beginner difficulty I used it at pretty much every turn but as I got better and played harder courses and difficulties I realised that you don't need it as much as you might think. Once you pick your vehicle and tournament, the racing begins. Though it's not as simple as get to the end as fast as possible. Not only are there obstacles,ramps and many other vehicles to get in your way, but you actually have a health bar and there's an interesting ranking system in place that filters out the slower racers. You lose health at the slightest touch of a wall or another vehicle. Mines and exploding vehicles can be particularly damaging to your vehicle. To counter this, each course has a dedicated healing zone where you can recover any lost health. Think of it as a pit stop but you don't actually have to stop unless you feel the need to. If you lose all of your health by hitting something or flying off track, there's no Lakitu to save you. You lose the race immediately and have to start over the course. When you die you lose a life, or as the manual explains, a vehicle, and if you run out of spare vehicles you get game over and have to start the entire tournament from the beginning. And if the health system wasn't enough to make things more intense, as i said, there's also a ranking system. For each lap there's a threshold for how many vehicles are allowed to stay in the race. At the start of the race there are 30 racers. Which is kinda crazy but anyways, only the top 15 in the first lap can move on to the second lap, only the top 10 in the second lap can move on the the third, so on and so on until the final lap where only 3 racers are allowed to be deemed winners. If you don't meet the requirement in any given lap, you lose immediately and the game shows that you were ranked out. So if you were thinking that you can play it as safe and slow as possible and avoid taking damage to stay alive, you would still lose for failing to stay ahead. These systems along with the obstacles and other racers make for a really intense experience. I can't express enough how exciting it feels to bearly make it at the end of a hard course with low health. It's unlike anything I've felt in other racing games. Though I haven't actually played many. But anyways, if you find it hard to keep up with the other racers, you can use a super boost which you get at the end of each lap as a reward for making it. It's a standard boost, nothing more than what you'd expect but I really appreciate it's inclusion as it adds an element of strategy to the game. Knowing when to use the super boost can be vital as it can sometimes determine whether or not you make it to the end.


Part 3: Presentation: Art, Music and Sound Effects


In general, the game looks and sounds amazing. The colours are bright and the textures are rich with detail. I especially love the backgrounds you see at the horizon. It varies from cities filled with tall towers, to strange rock formations and in the case of death wind, mysteriously large bones and skulls (show footage of different backgrounds to fit text appropriately). The only thing that somewhat bothered me in terms of visuals is the land surrounding the track. Most of the time it looks fine but sometimes, like in mute city and port town, it can look a bit noisy and mind bending if you stare at it for too long while driving. Thankfully it's not something that affects the experience very much since you're not likely to be focusing outside of the track anyway. I think it goes without say that the music in this game is absolutely outstanding. You've been hearing it the entire time so I'd like to think you realised that by now. It's one of my absolute favourite soundtracks coming from the snes. Not only is it catchy and fun to listen to but it does a perfect job of adding to the tension and excitement of high speed racing. I particularly love the theme for Silence, as it starts off suspiciously calm and tame, but then starts going crazy. When it comes to sound effects, the game does a pretty good job for the most part. The only thing that was a bit annoying at first was the loud high pitch sound that your vehicle makes when you mash accelerate. Overtime it grew on me as I realised how much it added to the feeling of moving fast, especially if you were using a super boost, but I can imagine that some people would be a bit more annoyed by it.


Final Thoughts/Conclusion


I never expected to love F-zero as much as I do now. The thing that always intrigued me about F-zero was that it was a series made by Nintendo that hasn't been able to shine for over 2 decades. It had a similar status to metroid and pikmin in that it hadn't been seen for a significantly long time, except of course those series made their come backs and it didn't take nearly as long. I think the original F-zero is a masterpiece and I can't wait to continue trying later entries in the series to see what else it has to offer. I'm glad I can finally understand why people want it back so badly. F-zero offers very unique and fun gameplay, variety in the way you play, tons of replayability, a high skill ceiling, an amazing soundtrack and gorgeous visuals. I'm not sure how much I expected to enjoy this when I first started, but I'm glad to have found a masterpiece and I can't wait to try later entries in the series.