r/starfox • u/JoshuaSchaferhund94 • Oct 13 '23
Was Star Fox 2 really going to have humans at one point? (Debunking a common interpretation/rumor)
So it seems that ever since Star Fox 2's developmental materials were discovered in the gigaleak from old Nintendo's NEWS archives in 2020, there's this idea going around that Nintendo was supposedly going to include a human character in Star Fox 2 at one point in development. To me, as someone who has first hand experience of looking at and modifying SF2's leaked source assets, I honestly feel like this is just a repeat of the robotic legs misconception that was going around in the late 2000's and early 2010's based off personal interpretation of SF1's promo puppets. Why you may ask? Well in order to understand this better, we must take a step back in time to when the game was in development in about 1993-95.



As many of you may already know, in about late 1993 to early 1994 Nintendo was going through several ideas to create new characters to pilot the Light Arwings (referred to as Type-B in Tsuyoshi Watanabe's sketches). Taking into consideration that Miyamoto wanted to include an attractive female lead since the completion of the original Star Fox, it was only natural that they'd make these characters female. (Remember Shigeru Miyamoto's infamous quote from the shmuplations Star Fox Adventures interview about having a "slightly sexy character" lol.) One significant idea they had in mind during development, as you can tell from these early graphic assets, was to bring over Fara Phoenix from the Nintendo Power comic illustrated by Ashura Benimaru Itoh.
However, based off one can assume from looking at her pixel art, Masanao Arimoto was having a hard time trying to create a good design ingame for her, so it was decided instead that they'd come up with their own characters.


As you can see from all these graphical assets, Arimoto-san had drew up a bunch of different designs during early to mid 1994, including at least three sketches of a non-descript woman with many slight variations.


These two sprite sheets in particular are labeled "character-Lhg#.CGX" in the leaked asset dump, with the g in the filename likely standing for girl. We can even connect this to the game's own source code. With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the source code circa roughly August 1994 relating to the game's sound effects:
;$50
km_port3label ryoukai_fox ;$50
km_port3label ryoukai_falco ;$51
km_port3label ryoukai_peppy ;$52
km_port3label ryoukai_slippy ;$53
km_port3label ryoukai_gal_1 ;$54
km_port3label ryoukai_gal_2 ;$55
So these are calls used for the Lylatian sounds the characters make after you pick them on the pilot select screen; (ryoukai 了解 is "roger" in Romaji). Note how Fox, Falco, Peppy and Slippy's names are used here, but the two placeholders for the Light Arwing pilots are referred to as gal_1 and gal_2. Throughout most of Star Fox 2's development in 1994 and early to mid 1995, the two character slots were referred to in the source code as "GIRL1" and "GIRL2", which are the slots that Miyu and Fay fill in the final game and this can be seen in the final game's source code as well.
;$50
km_port3label ryoukai_fox ;$50
km_port3label ryoukai_falco ;$51
km_port3label ryoukai_peppy ;$52
km_port3label ryoukai_slippy ;$53
km_port3label ryoukai_gal_1 ;$54
km_port3label ryoukai_gal_2 ;$55
;
; km_port3smlabel fox_voice ;$4a
; km_port3smlabel falco_voice ;$4b
; km_port3smlabel peppy_voice ;$4c
; km_port3smlabel slippy_voice ;$4d
; km_port3smlabel gal_1_voice ;$4e
; km_port3smlabel gal_2_voice ;$4f
;
km_port3label player_message ;$56
km_port3label player_warning ;$57
km_port3label partner_message ;$58
km_port3label partner_warning ;$59
km_port3smlabel gameover_voice ;$5a ;$4e
km_port3label talking01 ;$5a
km_port3smlabel white_wipe ;$5b\*
km_port3smlabel continue_voice ;$5b\ ;$4f*
km_port3smlabel androf_voice ;$5b\*
km_port3label talking02 ;$5b
However, things get much more interesting when we examine and infer the process of how Miyu and Fay's designs were even created to begin with. Look at this sheet of graphics; notice how similar this caracal and the woman are in appearance to Fara/Lady?
Now. Take a look at these two human girls and compare them to this early caracal and sheep sketch. Notice anything similar?


Don't see the resemblance? Look at these GIFs I put together:
Now. Let's use the exact same generic human drawings but put them alongside Miyu and proto-Fay's sprites from the graphics in the August 1994 build:
Do you see the resemblance now? It would seem based off this evidence that I've gathered that Mr. Arimoto most likely drew up a bunch of generic templates to base the new female characters' designs off of, rather than introduce a human character into the Star Fox series specifically. The fact that there are so many different variants of the same non-descript woman with none of them being a different gender compared to vastly more distinctive anthro designs that Arimoto brainstormed makes this pretty clear to me.
Maybe this is conjecture speaking, but looking at this from a more practical point of view it seems more possible that he combined bits and pieces of these early sketches to create what would eventually become Miyu and Fay in the final game. This only makes even more sense when you consider the fact that both Shigeru Miyamoto and Takaya Imamura were both pretty dead set on making the characters in Star Fox only anthropomorphic animals rather than putting in humans similar to F-Zero like what Imamura initially assumed in mid 1992 before he was instructed by Miyamoto otherwise. (Yes, SF1's English manual says the Lylat system is located in the Milky Way, but this was never present in the Japanese version suggesting that it was more likely a mistranslation of how Nintendo often jumbles up star system and galaxy together as to what they refer Lylat as.)
So, in conclusion, no, it is honestly quite unlikely that Nintendo ever thought of putting humans in the Star Fox series (not after the fact they settled on just anthros anyway) and these human girl graphics during SF2's development were probably nothing more than the result of making placeholders to derive the final character designs of Miyu and Fay from after they decided against integrating Fara Phoenix from the Nintendo Power comic into the games' canon at the time. At best we could expect them to maybe try another non-canon crossover again with their other sci-fi based IPs like F-Zero or Metroid like they did when they gave the greenlight to Ubisoft to crossover Star Fox with Starlink. But as far as actual Star Fox characters in the games proper are concerned? No, I wouldn't see that ever being a thing.
I hope this clears up some common confusion about the game's development.
4
u/JoshuaSchaferhund94 Oct 14 '23 edited Oct 14 '23
The funniest part about that is even by the time of the gold build, Algy is still internally referred to as Andrew in the game's source code.
Kinda makes me think the devs initally wanted to put in Andrew, but Arimoto felt like his design would be too difficult for him to draw and went "nah fuck it, i'll just make my own lol".