How F-Zero: GP Legend is a perfect adaptation of the anime series
F-Zero: GP Legend (2004)
F-Zero: GP Legend (2004)
You won’t want to know this, but there’s a lot of things they do in Japan that not many of us know about. We all wondered whether sexbots could actually be feasible, and they went and did it.
Their toilets have a dedicated button to powerhose what the Americans call fanny and what the Americans don’t call fanny. Go into just about any shop and the most hardcore hentai imaginable is available, not even at eye-level, but right in your face.
That brings us to anime adaptations, where the list is long, too long really. We all know about the Pokémon anime, and who can forget Sonic X? But there were also adaptations for game series that could never, ever be commercially viable. Kirby had an anime, for one. I recently found out about a PaRappa the Rapper anime, for God’s sake. But even I was surprised to find out there was an anime for that not-so-golden egg, F-Zero.
They sure kept that a secret from me. Although, considering the last scene of the series is an unmasked Captain Falcon leaping out of his F-Zero machine to deliver a Falcon Punch of the Gods directly into the main villain’s face, it was only a matter of time before such a work came to my attention.
Falcon’s last-ditch attack on Black Shadow, a mid-air leap mind you, burns the villain into oblivion and causes a massive explosion which can be seen from space, while a J-Rock theme blares in the background. I know I’ve just spoiled the entire denouement of the 51 episode anime, but why else would you watch it?
You wouldn’t watch it for the actual racing, because God, this is some low budget stuff. Whenever the characters actually stop flapping their gums and get onto the track, the racing sequences are these weird 3D animation sequences, very 2003. It reminded me a bit of those 3D sequences in The Bots Master, and I never thought I’d make a reference like that, but at least here you won’t need 3D glasses to enjoy this.
I may heavily criticise Nintendo for leaving F-Zero as dormant as they have, but I can’t deny that, with F-Zero GX, three GBA games and an anime series (albeit very sparse in budget), Nintendo properly gave the series a wrestling-style push. And it still didn’t work. I hate to say it, but F-Zero wasn’t even doomed to be a jobber, even after all that. All it could do is fade into obscurity, while its very few die-hard fans mourned.
It’s just a pity that one of the two Game Boy Advance games that spawned from the anime, F-Zero GP Legend, simply wasn’t much to write home about. Don’t get me wrong, obviously a fanboy of the series like me would’ve eaten up anything, even back then. These days? Never mind Switch or Switch 2, I’d accept a new F-Zero game in Turd Sandwich format now.
God, we were spoiled for choice back when in the early noughties - three GBA F-Zero titles, if you could source games from Japan. I was so adept at pirating GBA games back in the day that I was playing these before they even hit European shelves - that obviously didn’t help the series make any profit. Then a full-on GameCube game, and if you were really tremendously lucky, an arcade machine variant as well.
Having all this backed by an anime show as well seemed a bit… excessive. And it was. Everything about both the F-Zero GP Legend anime and the F-Zero GP Legend game is perfunctory, although the GBA game manages to be a lot less hardcore.
It is interesting to note that 4Kids Entertainment began dubbing a few episodes of the anime, until it became clear that almost nobody cared. You may remember 4Kids and the infamous censorship they used to impose on the likes of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh?
Well, trust me, guaranteed they would have neutered the famous Falcon Punch somehow. I can just picture some ridiculous references to the Shadow Realm, or to jelly doughnuts, so it was best that they didn’t sink their claws too much into the series.
F-Zero GP Legend seems to be a 4Kids approved game, that is, it has been sanitised for wetties. It’s not difficult at all, and very curiously it even lacks a Master Mode. I’m sorry, but F-Zero should snap you in two and piledrive you into the ground, especially on the harder difficulties.
The opposition machines in F-Zero SNES and Maximum Velocity could be cruel. The F-Zero GX Story Mode was famously heartbreaking at almost all times. That’s the way it should be, so when you go into this game with even a little bit of expertise with racing games, you’ll quickly find that five laps for each track is far too many, because you have the race all sewn up and the track mostly learnt by Lap 2.
I don’t know if it’s just me being a bit absentminded but I sometimes find I can go “into the zone” playing racing games if they’re too easy - I’m barely even watching the screen, and still I’m doing all the right moves. F-Zero GP Legend is essentially that 10% brain effort, stretched out to a full game. I suppose that’s another thing it has in common with the anime, how even the clinically dumb can follow along.
It’s not all just Grands Prix and boring Time Trials though, you do have link cable multiplayer, though I hardly think many will have tried that. More interesting is the Story Mode - it won’t tear welts and calluses into your hands like F-Zero GX’s story, although it isn’t very fulfilling either.
You’ve simply got eight different characters with their vignettes and different races or goals to complete, alongside some whack story between each chapter. It’s a bit like the story in Advance Wars, if that makes any sense - a load of talking in between the action, and it’s pretty much narrative garbage.
There’s also a fun Mission Mode, where you need to haul ass around sections of the game’s tracks with pre-selected machines to win Bronze, Silver or Gold Cups - it’s the same as Gran Turismo’s License Tests, essentially. That’s where the replay value lies, once you’ve breezed through the main Grand Prix mode. The tracks themselves, by the way, are just OK. You’ve also got some of the old SNES ones in there, some all-time classic circuits which will make you smile for a few minutes.
Even the music can be a bit dull, and that’s heinous for a series like this - I know that just about any GBA soundtrack ends up being thwarted by the system’s lack of grunt in the sound department. But the other two GBA F-Zero games offer so much more, and the composers for this game could have made a far better hash at the squealing pig-guitars from F-Zero X than they did.
Everything about this game is all just so beige, so uneventful, so passé, that I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nothing else to really discuss. It’s just sort of there. In that way, it’s just like the anime. So the only conclusion I can come to, if it makes any sense, is that F-Zero GP Legend may be the most average game of an anime of a game of all time. And that makes it a perfect adaptation.
19 June 2026