Because what we all want in F-Zero is more story.
If you played F-Zero on the GBA and felt it needed a cheesy story mode like F-Zero GX, then look no further than F-Zero: GP Legend!
Like the story mode in GX, this game is balls hard; the second mission makes you play a track perfectly, I mean take every corner flawlessly, not hitting the sides once, and coming first. After that, you pretty much have to either come first or second in every race to progress through the story mode, which makes up most of this game. A more apt name for this mode would be 'random event generator', as increasingly bizarre and unrelated things happen, often mid-conversation. 'Oh someone has been kidnapped, but forget about that because another guy feels sad for losing all the time, so race Dr Stewart and feel better about it'. Perhaps the terrible cutscenes would have been less annoying if it meant doing unique objectives on the track, but all it boils down to is 'race and come first'.
The mission structure is strange as it forces you to repeat the same races as seen from the point of view from the other characters, but with the race track and conversations being exactly the same, it's kind of a pointless and repetitious endeavour. The cutscenes themselves are a mix of pre-rendered backgrounds and badly drawn anime versions of the F-Zero characters.
There are also some clunky audio decisions, such as when a pair of characters are talking they both have their own separate music, so conversations flick between the two tracks rather awkwardly. Music is a mixture of the original GBA/SNES tracks and a few new ones that are instantly forgettable. Voice samples make this feel more 'modern' than the original SNES game, but let's not get too excited about that.
Underneath it all though, it is F-Zero, and if you didn't mind the anime cutscenes and have no problem with going through endless story scenes before you get to the action, there's nothing fundamentally wrong here. However for me, the story scenes were too painful to sit through, which in the end is just delaying what little fun there is to be had anyway.
I could only recommend this to people who are huge fans of the floaty racing style of the originals, otherwise it's probably best to stay clear of this story-heavy off-shoot F-Zero game.
F-Zero: GP Legend
F-Zero: Falcon Densetsu
