Remembering Lylat Wars
I was never a “gamer” growing up. I liked the experience of playing video games, sure. But I wasn’t very good at them. I’m still not very good at video games. My patience for tricky challenges is quite low, in part due to neurological deficits, but also because I’m naturally quite an impatient person. So I never really got good at games.
But regardless, I have fond memories of my old games consoles. The last television games console I personally owned, which I think is perhaps unusual for a person of my age, was a PlayStation 2, somewhere around the mid-2000s, which I recall asking my parents for because the graphics were so impressive (and to be fair, they were, in the mid-2000s).
But my first games console is the one I hold the most love for: The Nintendo 64.
The Nintendo 64 was released in Europe in 1997, a little under a year after I was born, succeeding the very highly-regarded Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a competitor of the Sony PlayStation, which had come out in Europe a couple of years prior in 1995. The Nintendo 64 was doomed from inception to live forever in the PlayStation’s shadow, which was in itself a sad irony, given that the PlayStation was, originally, a collaboration between Sony and Nintendo engineers; when Nintendo betrayed Sony by striking an underhanded deal with Philips for their disastrous CD-i console, Sony retaliated by taking the PlayStation project and running, launching their own console which would go on to knock Nintendo from the top spot.
And yet, it’s the N64’s scrappy nature that makes it so delightful. From its bizarre, Cronenbergian controller to its innovative Rumble Pak feature, I can remember whiling away countless hours over hot summer holidays, playing Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, and a copy of GoldenEye 007 that I “borrowed” from my older cousin and never gave back. (I think they call that “theft” in most jurisdictions.)
I got my N64 when I was three years old. It was translucent orange, which I hear is apparently quite rare these days and fetches quite a bit of money when boxed and with the original controller. Unfortunately due to a mishap with a Milky Bar yoghurt on the controller and the fact that the box is long since thrown away, my N64 is probably worth about fifty pence. But I wouldn’t sell it anyway.
There are many games I could write long love-letters to on that system, but there are none that I loved, and love, quite as much as Lylat Wars.
Lylat Wars, also known as Star Fox 64 in places where they use the correct title, is a remake/reboot of the SNES game Star Fox, or Starwing in places where they use the wrong title. It follows the adventures of the Star Fox team of ace Arwing fighter pilots – Fox McCloud, Peppy Hare, Falco Lombardi, and Slippy Toad, as they fight the forces of the evil mad scientist, Andross, imprisoned on the planet Venom, who killed Fox’s father James several years prior.
I think my copy of Lylat Wars was a birthday or Christmas gift from my grandparents, but I honestly can’t remember. What I do know is that it came in a strange VHS-style box, with a very dodgy-looking piece of card on which was printed some Microsoft Word WordArt giving the title: “LYLATWARS” with a small clip-art of a toad, as well as a list of the character’s names, which I believe was misspelled in places. The game did come with a manual, however, which I read until it fell to pieces. It ended up in the bin in 2012 during a clearout.
Lylat Wars is, to put it lightly, incredibly silly. Every member of the cast is an anthropomorphic talking animal. The voice lines are hilariously over-the-top, hammy, and, of course, incredibly memeworthy (Google “Do a barrel roll!” to see what I mean.)
The villains and bosses, too, are all one-dimensional, cackling and spouting off lines that sound like they came straight from a schlocky low-budget flick. Lines like “My emperor! I’ve FAILED yooouuu!” and “You’re good…but I’m bettah!” are indelibly seared into my memory.
The voice acting in the game isn’t good, but that’s part of the charm. Everything in the game is played with such an earnestness that playing it is like watching a cult B-movie. There are people who play Lylat Wars just with the intention of hearing the quotable lines. It’s like the Rocky Horror Picture Show but with more button mashing.
And yet, there was something that struck me while revisiting clips of Lylat Wars on YouTube recently (I can’t play it – my games console still resides in the attic). I was struck by how richly-imagined the world of the game is, how complex and thoughtful its environments are, how carefully planned every aspect of every level is, how much care and attention was put into every detail for a game that, bear in mind, wasn’t even really the flagship game on the system. I was struck by how surprisingly good the storytelling is. And I was struck by something else.
Lylat Wars…is kind of bleak.
At the game’s start, the Star Fox team are tasked with helping the capital of the Lylat system, the Earth-like planet of Corneria, to repel an attack by Andross’s forces. The mission starts off optimistically, all four wings check in and the team fly their Arwing space-planes over the river leading into Corneria City, shooting down baddies as they go. As they clear the water, reaching the perimeter of the city, they fly into the ruins of the city. A building smoulders and Andross’s forces immediately swarm the player. Flying deeper into the city, there are tanks on the motorway, and giant robots toppling buildings in an attempt to take out the player.
As Falco remarks, “This is horrible.”
By the time you’ve arrived on the scene in this game, Andross already has the upper hand. Most of the Lylat system is under his control. He has bioweapons and attackers stationed on every planet in the system. He even has a giant bioweapon stationed beneath the surface of the Lylat system’s sun, in one of the more harrowing levels, which involves trying to survive the intense temperatures at the sun’s surface while battling the monster.
The way Lylat Wars‘s gameplay works is that there are three paths to Andross: There’s an Easy path, coloured blue, a Medium path, coloured yellow, and a Hard path, coloured red. The Easy path is the route most new players will take, whereas more experienced players can find ways to take the harder paths.
On the harder path, players find themselves on the ocean planets of Aquas and Zoness – bearing witness to Aquas in the process of being overrun by Andross’s forces, who have begun polluting the ocean with his evil experiments. Zoness, on the other hand, is a toxic waste dump, having already suffered the apocalypse of Andross’s presence, inhospitable to all but the most hardy, and carnivorous, life.
Throughout the game, Andross looms large on the horizon, always there, always scheming. Villainous characters speak of him with the reverence normally reserved for gods. The small ragtag band of heroes, and their handful of allies, are all that stand between him and domination. His mere presence is oppressive, and his madness knows no bounds.
Andross first makes his presence and his proximity known on the satellite Bolse, when playing the Easy route, by tapping into Fox’s radio frequency. Unlike almost every other character in the game, Andross’s speech boxes are not navy blue, but a deep blood red. The game wants you to know what he is. He is the destroyer of worlds.
You may think I’m overexaggerating, but bear in mind that this is a game meant for children, and I was a child when I played it. Andross is a genuinely scary villain, because there is at least an hour of buildup before you face him, as you defeat harder and harder bosses on your way to Venom.
When I was a kid, I made it all the way to the end of the game, nearly. I defeated the nefarious Star Wolf team, contracted into Andross’s employ, on Bolse, and flew down to Andross’s lair on planet Venom, destroyed this big robotic golem he’d built, and finally went down with Fox to confront the man himself.
Fox pilots his Arwing alone through a tunnel. Andross booms: “I’ve been waiting for you, Star Fox. You know that I control the galaxy. It’s foolish to come against me. You will die, just like your father.“
And then emerges Andross.
Andross is, to my knowledge, my first memory of actually being terrified by a video game. I’m not sure what did it. Perhaps it’s the fact that up until this point, the player has mostly been fighting robots, and is now faced with a fleshy, organic face, at least as large as a building, and two enormous hands. Perhaps it’s because Andross shakes his head and the parts of his face flap all over the place meatily. Perhaps it’s the way Andross inhales deeply just before he vomits meteorites at you. Perhaps it’s because Andross will actually eat you if you fly too close to his mouth. Whatever it is, he is by far and away one of the scariest bosses in gaming history. The buildup pays off. The mad scientist, hiding away in the planet’s core, is about to complete his apotheosis, and you are merely the appetiser.
Again, all this sounds overdramatic, but try to see this through the eyes of a small child. I was petrified of this monstrous ape-man.
Sadly, my bravery faltered at the last minute, and I shut the game off, defeated. I went downstairs to report to my parents what had happened, and I broke down in tears from the sheer terror of it all.
Alas, to this day I still haven’t actually beaten Andross. I’m sure I could, of course, if someone let me have a go. But that pure, unbridled horror I felt when confronted with the mad god Andross is, in a strange way, one of my most fondly-held memories of Lylat Wars.
For all its schlockiness, its wonky dialogue and its silly plot, Lylat Wars is the first game that really had me so invested that I had a physical, emotional reaction to it. It’s a feeling not many things have ever given me. I’m not sure what it says about me that this is the case, but that’s how it is.
I tried to beat Andross several times after that initial encounter, and every time I balked at the last hurdle, switching off the console and resigning myself to the fact that I would never beat Andross. It seems silly now, but hey, I was eight.
At one point I even played the game to near-completion, then handed off the controls to my father and ran from the room. Imagining my thirtysomething Dad, sitting in my bedroom, fighting a giant evil space monkey on the TV screen while I cower outside the room until he tells me it’s safe to come back in is genuinely very funny.
Of course, I later found out by Googling it as a teenager that that encounter with Andross isn’t even a fight against the real Andross. It’s a fight against his robotic decoy. Once you’ve killed the robot, Fox flies off and celebrates with his teammates and then flies off into the sunset, at which point Andross’s evil face looms in from the clouds and cackles. After all that, I thought, the cheek of it!
One day, I’d like to get that N64 down from the loft, if we can find it. I’ve probably still got the cartridge for Lylat Wars stashed away up there, as well. And I’d like to beat Andross, for real this time.
*
Why did I write this?
I’ve been living under official government lockdown for 54 days now as I write this, and I’ve been out of work for about two months. We are living in frightening and uncertain times. The economy is falling to bits and a deadly disease is ravaging the land.
I don’t think it was conscious, but one day, I just remembered one of those funny little quotes from that game I used to play, and I searched it up, and I discovered that there is a wealth of YouTube channels dedicated solely to playthroughs of this game. I rewatched them, and immediately I remembered what it was like to sit in front of that Nokia CRT in my childhood bedroom.
I never did beat Andross, but I’ve played some of those initial levels I don’t know how many times. At one point, I was so obsessed with Lylat Wars that I press-ganged kids in the playground into play-pretending it with me, with varying degrees of success. I even loved wearing my denim jacket, because I thought the sleeves made me look like Fox’s Arwing.
While the world outside seems to be getting worse, there’s a comfort in revisiting those childhood simplicities. There’s a strange, funny little joy, and a sadness, in remembering a time when my greatest problem was defeating Andross.
I’m entering my mid-twenties, which is around the time a lot of people suffer their “quarter-life crisis” – the point at which one takes stock of their achievements up to this point, compares them against personal records of friends and relatives, makes a mental checklist of Things You Absolutely Must Have Done By 25 And If You Haven’t Then You’re Doomed To An Old Age Filled With Regret!!! like a listicle from Hell, before withering at the realisation that one has achieved barely an iota of what you are “supposed” to have done by the time you reach a quarter of a century in age, despite the fact that we all achieve different things, and at different times.
There’s something really nice about going back and watching playthroughs of old games I used to play. There’s a comfort in the reminder that none of that stuff really matters. There was a time not long ago, in all of our lives, when the most insurmountable obstacles we faced became trivial with age. For me, it was Andross and writing a novel. I never killed Andross, but I sure as hell wrote a novel before I turned twenty-five. Two, in fact.
Wherever we are in life, our current problems are transitory. The race and the road is long, but it ends in a wide-open field.
One day I’ll beat Andross. It won’t be any time soon, but I’ll do it. I have to someday. Just to prove that I can do it. For old time’s sake.
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