F-Zero 99 is a waste of one of Nintendo's best ideas
Nintendo's latest follow-up to the success of Tetris 99 is their worst such effort to date
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The difference between Tetris 99 and Nintendo’s latest attempt to imitate it, F-Zero 99—which is to say, the difference between a game we still play fully three years after it launched as Nintendo Switch Online’s one true killer app, and one we can’t imagine will still be installed on our Switch a week from today—can be summed up thusly: When the multiplayer elements of Tetris 99 don’t click for you, you still have the pleasures of playing Tetris. Whereas F-Zero 99, for all its concessions to modern gaming, is still, well … an installment in Nintendo’s decidedly second-run racing franchise.
It’s not like the idea of a battle royale version of a racing game is necessarily a bad idea or anything; Fall Guys, for instance, mines that territory to exciting effect amidst all its other oddball minigames. But if you strip away its (undeniably fantastic) soundtrack, F-Zero (and especially the Super Nintendo F-Zero, which 99 is explicitly modeled on) has never really had enough of a game to it to justify playing it instead of, say, Mario Kart—and adding 98 other players crowding the track doesn’t fill in what it was missing. Yes, seeing that many cars smashing against each other is kind of neat. Yes, there are occasional thrills, especially when you’re lurking at the back of the pack and the warning sirens are buzzing. But the franchise itself has never steered hard enough into either its racing side, or its automotive combat side, to really carve out an identity for itself, and it hasn’t managed to pick one up as it’s transitioned into the gaming trends of 2023. Worse, it has a fundamental flaw.
The basic challenge of F-Zero 99, besides the franchise’s fairly light arcade racing mechanics, is one of resource management. That resource is Power, which is what controls your speed boosts—but it’s also your health, forcing players to make frequent decisions about whether to play conservatively to keep themselves alive, or push the limits to try to stay out ahead of the pack. That sounds like an interesting idea, admittedly, with lots of strategic weight to it. In practice, though, it means you have a button that makes the game more fun to play—but which will kill you if you push it too much. At least a third of our deaths (which knock you out of the race entirely, of course) have simply been because we got bored, and decided to jam the speed-candy button; if high-speed racing is your game’s big selling point, then there’s something wrong when it has to be doled out sporadically in order to survive.
That kind of focus on more conservative, thoughtful play can work in a racing game like Gran Turismo, which is as much about the strategy of racing as actual reflexes. But unless we’re missing something massive, the gameplay in F-Zero 99 simply isn’t anywhere deep enough to support that kind of mental engagement. (We’re also not entirely clear as to why races don’t run until the entire pack has been whittled down to 1, in the style of every other battle royale game in existence; there are few “Well, that just happened” sensations akin to finishing a multi-minute race and seeing you placed, like, 53rd.)
Anyway: Call us, Nintendo, when you decide to get serious and launch Mario Kart 99. In the meantime, we’ll still be playing Tetris.