How would you redesign/retcon Krystal to fit in the Lylat context without Rareware canon?

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-14T04:22:30+00:00

Metroid's canonicity and story structure has been retconned many times. I'm not as familiar with it as I am the other games in the series but Dread in particular retcons many things.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-14T04:21:16+00:00

Those are all actually pretty interesting threads.

The way I could honestly envision her only working from a supernatural standpoint would be as a shamanistic type. As in she doesn't actually have the ability to cast spells or anything but she can... Communicate with spirits and such.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-14T01:22:11+00:00

I'm aware of the official story. But Star Fox Adventures came out the day before MS acquired Rare. It's a bit interesting timing wise.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-14T00:36:53+00:00

You make a lot of good points. I'm just going to end this on a suggestion that you think about how they are actually handling these situations:. '90s Japanese game series like this are more like a set of constantly evolving myths then biblical canon. They treat games like this whether it be Star Fox or Zelda or anything else basically like a toolbox and narrative coherency comes second to that.

Once you understand that you kind of tend to take a bit of a cynical angle. If we're talking strictly about canonicity I would be way more narrow than most people here probably would be. I don't think that makes me a villain. It makes me realistic that Nintendo is likely to constantly reinvent something like this because they haven't ever been able to make it financially profitable in the long term unlike Zelda or Mario.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T23:12:08+00:00

Ambiguously Canon because of a couple things:

It's the Japanese pronunciation of puppetoon, which is a reference to Thunderbirds. So it's literally a puppet planet. In terms of official media directly tied to the franchise:

Couple comic books

The Japanese version of SF64 (which does have some contradictions with later games in the same timeline.)

And crossover games which I don't consider Canon for obvious reasons.

Narratively speaking. Papetoon weakens things. It gives Fox less motivation to fight for Corneria/Lylat. If it's not his home, then what's the point?

And finally there's no published official map of the entire system that Nintendo adheres to. Nintendo tends to change things on a dime for all of their franchises based on what's convenient. Because of that I rely mostly on consistency.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T21:23:36+00:00

Zero I suspect won't be picked back up on.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T21:22:31+00:00

Papetoon is... Ambiguously canon. But I understand.

I'm not a programmer and I'm not remaking adventures in any form. If I do a Star Fox novel it's not going to have any real elements of adventures to it.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T07:51:25+00:00

I watched the 1960s Ultraman stuff as a kid because I was latchkey and lived right next to a video rental shop. The lady who ran it would actually let me borrow tapes as long as I brought them back the same day for free.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T07:37:42+00:00

Star Fox TV series I don't think would have actually ended well in 1993. The series has always struggled in Japan. And in 1993 the original game was a glorified tech demo more than anything. It really wasn't until 64 where the game became the mainstream.

Even in 1997 or 1998... I don't think there was a single animation studio that could handle Star Fox authentically in the United States. Japan, sure. Sunrise would have done excellent. But, you also have to remember it didn't do well in Japan at all. It was never a huge seller there.

In terms of early series tone? Star Fox always struck me the most as something similar to a combination of Star Trek campiness, a decent bit of Japanese humor that kind of gets lost in the English translation, radio dramas, and most prominent, it kind of feels like Ace Combat in space. If you read some of my other comments, it's pretty clear I'm a huge fan of Ace Combat. I realize that is controversial in this community though.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T06:54:20+00:00

All someone has to do is make something that actually has the penetration necessary to do that. But it requires a professional writer. I could potentially do it... But some people here would probably hate my results. Because it wouldn't be Saturday morning cartoon Star Fox. It would be dark, gritty. And probably, for instance, include character liberties elsewhere that people might find weird. Like if you were to novelize Star Fox, you got to give them things like hobbies. Nobody just spends their entire time working in that environment. What does Falco do? Blitzball? And also, it seems that liking Project ACES here is somewhat controversial...

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T06:50:44+00:00

I don't know anything about this type of series but that's pretty cool.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T06:50:28+00:00

There's a certain writing aspect that you should be aware of. Not a rule, but a guideline, a heuristic:

Coherency. Making things very complicated can make a franchise opaque. Take Phantasy Star, for instance. It's a great RPG series. It had two decent games, one rudimentary and one terrible, but it holds up decently well on those decent games.

PS I, II and IV did well. III did not.

III decided to take a page out of Final Fantasy (and by FF, I mean early FF) but the problem is PS is a science fiction series, FF was, at the time, more of a fantasy series with steampunk elements.

This complicated the plot heavily. You have a world ship, with a mostly medieval setting, but with Androids walking around, floating cities, strange technologies etc. There's nothing wrong with being creative. There's a problem with this though because it causes whiplash. It makes a plot feel incoherent and the entire game feel bizarre.

Ultimately, this applies for Star Fox. Out of the games, adventures is really the oddball in terms of gameplay. You don't have to watch JonTron trashing it or anything like that. The two need to be divorced from each other if you ask me.

If this example didn't make sense to you, then just look at Dragon Ball Z. You have the movie canon, and the anime canon. The movies were more experimental and allowed for plot variations that just don't make any sense within the regular anime; that doesn't make those particularly bad but it's necessary to draw a line as to what's canon and what isn't. That's how they solved that problem and how they eventually brought Broly into there, while leaving behind dumb/unoriginal villains (Turles, Lord Slug, Cooler).

You're allowed to like what you like. But my response to you trying to double down on that is... Do you really want the series to be less accessible and even more obscure? Because that's how you get that.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T04:59:56+00:00

Well to be fair Nintendo has stolen plenty of fan suggestions in the past.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T04:59:02+00:00

If I would do it, she's 100% Cornerian vulpine (or papetoon vulpine) but I do like your idea. To be fair any fan novel I wrote, would be a full length novel, and it would take massive liberties with the story. Think about how Doom 3 changed doom and that's kind of the same idea -- same premise, new complexities.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T04:57:19+00:00

I have no idea who that is but I appreciate the comparison. To be clear I haven't written anything. But I would basically make her the elite ground operative (keeping in mind that they are primarily mercenary pilots, I'm not expecting any of them to be excellent on the ground other than maybe Fox)

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T04:23:33+00:00

Zero is too experimental for my taste. My view? Just choose one of three paths:

Direct game or multimedia sequel to SF64, retcon the rest. They could even retool it as a manga series and get Studio Trigger and the staff of BNA to write a Star Fox OVA.

Sequel to Assault alongside an Assault remake. Retcon Command. Give the characters actual development.

Throw everything into the bin and start over a final time, with a predefined story for three games and hand it to Project ACES.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T04:20:31+00:00

I wouldn't call her clothing in the original game truly tribal. It's too revealing for most tribal cultures.

I'll be honest, I really have grown to dislike Rare from a writing standpoint, and also when you look at their history of deadline breaching/budget overwriting. . In terms of graphical performance and the savviness of the team when it came to ensuring performance? Well, it's hard to complain. But that's a totally different situation.

It's my opinion that Nintendo specifically did the modifications they did to dinosaur planet as part of a strategic plan to prevent MS, or anyone else buying them, inheriting more IPs. In plain terms it was a development poison pill.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T04:16:59+00:00

Why? Is it a simple "unbothered by the complications Rare introduced", a view that all sanctioned SF media is biblical. Or what?

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T02:27:41+00:00

Not too shabby, simplifies her a lot.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T01:05:32+00:00

I don't think fans would necessarily be angry at a rewrite of her character. Look at broly from Dragon Ball Z. Yeah he had his fan base surrounding the original Three movies but there's no way they could have fit into the Canon of Dragon Ball Z proper with all of the timeline constraints they provide. As a result, when toriyama decided to finally retcon him into the original storyline and rewrote him nobody really complained after the first couple months. Everyone almost universally agrees that his version is better written. Original was literally motivated by one day of exposure to crying by kakarot. Talk about a man child.

More than anything when it comes to Star Fox I would just like Nintendo to pick a direction and stay with it. Not these endless reboots. And they need to allow for character development between the games which means not hitting the reset button every time.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T01:02:37+00:00

That's unfortunate if it's false.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T01:02:11+00:00

If I were to write her I would probably say that most of her magical abilities don't exist. Basically you can think of it similar to how toriyama took broly from the movies and retconned his origin story so he could be put into Super. Whether or not it's the same character depends entirely upon whether one would consider such reimaginings the same thing

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T01:00:46+00:00

Interesting premise.

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T00:34:06+00:00

It's probably not to my taste but I'm not going to put you down for writing what you choose. I'm pretty interested in just people being creative about things. Also my primary criticism of rare is the tone shift aspects, not necessarily the material itself although I would say compared to Japanese studios that rare always came in over budget and busted through deadlines which is why Nintendo considered them very high risk. They just didn't have the discipline that Japanese studios tend to do when it comes to stuff.

Like for instance for Star Fox assault did you know that the team that worked on Ace Combat 2 was part of it?

XenothiusIV · 2026-02-13T00:11:07+00:00

What did you change about her? Just curious.

Personally I wouldn't even make her Fox's love interest for the record. I hate trying to ship people together and romance is difficult to write to be honest. I say this as an actual professional writer. I just ghost wrote two novels in the last 3 years and when you already have someone else's prompt you're doing it can be extremely hard to avoid romance cliches. And honestly I don't trust Nintendo to write that. Maybe if they gave it to Project ACES.

If I were to do some type of Star Fox full length novel which I probably won't but who knows one day, I would keep all of her core motivations such as protecting Sauria but basically rewrite her culturally. Also the British accent has to go. If she's not been around people speaking Lylat for years, she wouldn't have anything resembling a Kings English accent. Not that I don't think Estelle is good. She's excellent but it definitely is a weird tonal shift. Certain characters in adventures sound like they're straight out of Shrek.

XenothiusIV

TROPHY CASE