@black-leg:
While I love replaying certain games, replay ability and mastering a game is not neccessarily what people are after anymore. Even if it had various difficulties and asked you to master the game entirely, a game that's main campaign can be beaten in one sitting by even the most casual of fan will not fly for a $60 release game.
NO ONE is going to "casually" beat that game in one sitting, even on the easy route. I'm an original starfox master and I still have trouble on some stages if I haven't played in a while, despite playing the original game for decades now.
(also, there's a shit-ton of games that can be beaten in one sitting, or clock in at less than 10 hours total, that are beloved and praised for being consistent high quality rather than fetch quest or grinding padding)
And yeah starfox 1 only has 1 vehicle. Starfox 2 and 64 were both made with the mindset of having loads of different vehicles to play. The chicken walker is from starfox 2 and for starfox 64 miyamoto took a lot of influence from thunderbirds, a puppet show that starred a bunch of hero pilots and their various different vehicles to save the day.
Starfox 2 was scrapped and no one has played it without hunting down the bootleg rom to play on emulator.
(and the released rom is glitchy as hell, despite being "100% finished" the game just breaks in some areas)
In 64, the submarine sucked while playing basically the same as the arwing,and the tanks added very little. The on-foot mode in multiplayer was a novelty, but was difficult to unlock and required playing the game a ton before getting to silly mode. Change of pace sure but all the good levels were the flying ones.
Adventures wanted desperately to be a Zelda game and had almost no vehicle combat whatsoever and was universally hated. Hell, it wasn't even a Starfox game for most of its development.
Assault was Arwings and on-foot. And again, the not-arwing part sucked.
Command was completely aircraft based again… but it sucked since they made it into an overhead strategy game.
Starfox is NOT about the different machines. It's been all over the place but its also been mostly terrible when it moves away from the air combat.
@Green_vs_Red:
It was?
I personally kept playing through these games simply to see where the story or game would take me.
Yes, because you have to play it enough to get good enough to beat the stages to move forward.