Star Fox Barely Holds On, And That's Fine

It is Monday, my dudes, and the UK physical charts are in. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced holds the top spot for another week, FC 26 and 007 First Light keep their podium positions, and Star Fox — whatever the latest one is called — is clinging to the bottom of the top ten like a fox with its claws dug into a flying Arwing.

I'm not going to pretend that's a crisis. Star Fox has been a franchise that Nintendo keeps alive out of a sense of obligation more than commercial demand. Every few years, someone at Nintendo EPD or wherever gets to make a Star Fox game, and it sells okay, and then it vanishes again until the next cycle. It's like the series is in a witness protection program — still alive, technically, but nobody's supposed to talk about it.

But here's the thing: I don't think Star Fox needs to sell millions to be worth making. The original Star Fox 64 sold about four million copies lifetime. That's good, not great. The series has never been Mario Kart or Zelda. It's always been a niche thing that happened to have really good rail shooting and Fox McCloud's weirdly compelling backstory. The fact that it's still charting at all, even barely, means there's an audience. It's just not a loud one.

Which brings me to Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, sitting comfortably at number one. This is a remaster of a game that originally came out in 2013. That's thirteen years ago. The fact that it's still selling this well on physical shelves tells me something about what people actually want from Assassin's Creed: they want to be a pirate. They want the ship combat, the islands, the sea shanties. They don't want the modern-day framing or the endless side quests that pad out the newer games. They want to sail, plunder, and listen to "Leave Her, Johnny" on repeat.

And I get it. I've replayed Black Flag three times. Each time, I skip the modern-day segments entirely. The game knows what it is, and what it is is a pirate simulator with a really good story about Edward Kenway. The remaster just polishes the edges. It's the same game I played on PS3, but now it runs at 60fps and the water looks even better. That's enough.

Now here's the connection nobody's drawing: Black Flag's success on the charts is the exact same phenomenon as the continued popularity of Pokémon Red and Blue on the 3DS Virtual Console. Both are games that people bought because they wanted to revisit a specific feeling — the freedom of the open ocean in Black Flag, the discovery of a new region in Pokémon. Neither game needed to be new. They just needed to be available.

Pokémon taught me elemental weaknesses. Dragon Age taught me party synergy. Black Flag taught me that sometimes the best game in a series is the one where the developers stopped trying to be clever and just made the thing they were good at. Assassin's Creed has been chasing its own tail for years, trying to be an RPG, a stealth game, a historical tourism simulator. Black Flag just wanted you to be a pirate. That's why it's still selling.

As for Star Fox — I hope it sticks around. I hope Nintendo keeps making them, even if they only sell 300,000 copies. Because every generation deserves a game where you barrel roll through a tight corridor while Slippy Toad complains about something. That's not nostalgia. That's a design philosophy that still works. It just doesn't work for everyone.

And that's okay. Not every game needs to be a blockbuster. Some games just need to be good at what they do, and find their audience. Star Fox found its audience thirty years ago. They're still here. They're just quiet, and they're buying physical copies, and they're keeping the fox in the top ten by the skin of its teeth.

That's not a failure. That's survival.

What's your favorite Star Fox game? And do you actually play the modern-day bits in Black Flag, or are you like me and skip them entirely?