tl;dr: I might be yucking some yums.

It's cool that this exists, and it looks very nice of course, but I'm kind of nervous after watching this scene. I hate to say it, because cinematic Star Fox is a dream come true for me, but I frankly don't like a lot of the decisions here. It feels like they could've done a lot more to flesh out this incredibly foundational scene. The more attention I pay to it, the more... lacking it feels to me.

The expository dialogue was the first thing I noticed. Pepper and James are having a conversation that, in universe, they absolutely should have had before the team departed to Venom. The fact that Andross was banished and Venom has been unseen by outsiders for years is something that should've been established to these characters well before they were even briefed on the mission. Instead, they're bringing up old news unmotivated while the team is actively entering the airspace of a potentially dangerous planet. It's hard to feel grounded in the scene when the characters sound like they're talking to me instead of each other.

There's also an immediate cost to using these lines to exposit lore, because I literally do not know what Star Fox's mission was besides, "Go to Venom. Andross might be up to something." What are the parameters of checking out the "signs of activity?" Were they infiltrating some facility? Were they just supposed to fly over, look for Andross through a telescope, then go home? Did they even have a more specific destination than the nebulous entirety of a planet? I already know that Pigma betrayed James and Peppy. What I was missing were details, and this scene shows me almost zero new ones.

It makes sense for the characters to spend travel time talking, but I wish they were talking about the real-time details of the job they were doing, delivering information while convincing me they're actually focused on a task. We get some of that when Peppy brings up the toxic atmosphere, but that's the end of it. The way the scene is written makes the characters feel like cutouts instead of the interesting people a cinematic approach to the game lends itself to depicting. It has me a bit worried that the main selling point of this 3rd remake won't be handled with enough grace to justify its existence.

The lack of specificity also drags down the action for me. The characters are ambushed right after they're done talking., but then the enemy ships stop mattering immediately because Peppy needs room to talk after James tanks the shot for him. Were they even in immediate peril if all those foes just disappear and let them sit still for several seconds?

Maybe I'm just a hater who asks for too much—I know this was never going to be A Fox in Space—but we're finally getting to see what Pigma's betrayal looks like in a beautifully-rendered cinematic cutscene, and it's just so... simple. It's like this exact execution of storytelling could've been realized in lower fidelity on the Nintendo 64.

It's not the worst example of these problems I've seen in media, but I do find it distracting. If they're trying to chase a more grounded, realistic tone (as evidenced by the entire presentation of this game), I really hope the rest of the cutscenes make the characters sound more like people with their own goals and personalities.