DINOSAUR PLANET!

[A Black Falcon]

For anyone interested in reading more about this build and such, the group working on fixing it have set up a wiki now at http://www.dinosaurpla.net .  Check it out.

Storyline-wise, it is becoming clear that the biggest difference between DP and SFA is that DP is a much more serious story.  In SFA they dumbed everything down, making the game more of a fun adventure through the planet of dinosaurs before you beat Andross again at the end.  But in Dinosaur Planet there is more story, a more complex story, and a more serious story.   This tone is set right at the start, as after the intro teradactyl-back battle you land in the central palace and Krystal finds a dying dinosaur, killed by Scales' troops.  The early cutscenes are more verbose too; DP has a somewhat 'en medias res' feel, as you join Krystal (and then Fox/Sabre)'s quests after they have already gotten underway.  She's talking to Scales about 'the wizard' and such, and you need to figure out the context later.  DP has an hour and a half of voiced story cutscenes that have been found so far.  The DP story is both more coherent and more interesting.  The big thing that's missing is an ending of course, as far as anyone has found there isn't one.  The cutscene from before the final boss raises a lot of questions, but there's no answers to any of them, only a credits sequence.  I wonder if they hadn't made an ending yet, or if it was removed from this build for some reason...

Oh, and Krystal's partner character, Princess Kyte the pteranodon, is way less annoying than Fox/Sabre's, Prince Tricky the triceratops, I think.  Both have pathing issues and such though, the partner AI is definitely still flawed in this build.  But as far as the characters go Kyte's probably better.

As for that final boss, I think the battle is on foot?  The whole fight hasn't been found though, if it was indeed finished.  The cutscene that plays before the bossfight is viewable online but the actual battle mostly doesn't work yet I believe.

Thing is, Fox being in the game isn't much of a stretch at all, but Andross most certainly is.  Fox was responding to a distress call and he ended up caught up in a long adventure to save the world.  That worked perfectly fine for me as far as a setup goes.  It even goes a long way towards differentiating Krystal from Fox.  They're from very different cultures and it shows.  Too bad they didn't actually get to capitalize on it by working in that character switching component.  Still, even if they had worked it in, from what I can tell it would have basically just split up what we did get across two characters rather than actually add more content.

That's a good point, Fox himself does fit better than Andross.  You can explain Fox's presence much more reasonably than Andross's, it's too bad that they eventually decided to shoehorn Andross into the ending of the game as they reworked it for the GC...

Here's why the final boss fakeout failed so badly.  You've been working on one combat system, the staff, for the entire game and that final battle against Scales was the culmination of all your practice.  Then he just dies and it's an Arwing fight.  Would the final fight against an evil dragon have used your staff, or would you have been on teradactyl back?  If the former, well that could redeem itself, if it's the latter, it's really no different from what we got.

To be fair SFA does have those Arwing sections here and there, it's not like Andross is the first time you fly in an Arwing in the game... but yeah, that battle definitely doesn't fit well with the gameplay of the vast majority of the game.

A complete reimagining of the game for me would take the arwing and make it a method of fully controllable travel in an open world environment, Jak and Daxter mixed with Fury 3.  No need to be ready to warp when you can fly in real time to the various locales in the game.  It could have been "all range mode" all the time.  The arwing is a single seater, but there's room to work another seat in there for the purposes of using that as the relay point to switch characters.  Prince Tricky?  Gone!  Just... get rid of him

Yeah, if they remade it it probably would be much more open world, I'd expect.  But on a related note, much like SFA, one thing is missing from DP, and that's any sign of side content.  Neither SFA or DP seems to have much of any side content around the main quest, which means both games are missing a pretty big part of the Zelda formula there...