5th March 2021, 8:53 AM
I felt very similarly to that about Star Fox Adventures. That game has a lot of problems and, overall, is a disappointing game a bit below average. For some reason I've always had this idea that the original N64 version would have been a lot better...
As for how complete this build is, some of the things that seem to be the most incomplete, most notably the later parts of Krystal's half of the game, are things that they would end up cutting from SFA, so it's not clear if even a later build would help there. This is a late build of the game, but Rare did continue with the N64 version a little bit into 2001, past this build from December '00, before moving over exclusively to the Gamecube. DP was going to have eight Krazoa and six spellstones, while SFA has five Krazoa (kind of six) and four Spellstones. It's highly likely that those later ones from DP and the areas and dungeons that contained them were never finished, so the homebrew devs will need to decide about what to do with that part of the game.
So how complete is this build? It's maybe about a third complete when it comes to "how far can you get right now before it totally breaks and progression becomes impossible". It's maybe 70% overall, perhaps. Bug fixes, once done, will increase that percentage, but it's looking more likely that this isn't the legendary 90% build that supposedly is out there, it's a bit short of that... maybe? But it's close enough that a complete game can be made of it so that's more than good enough.
Oh, my main criticism right now is that a lot of areas feel empty. Rare built the spaces, but haven't put much stuff IN a lot of those spaces yet! Enemies right now mostly die in one hit and lots of areas don't have any at all. I don't know how much more stuff can be fit into the game -- despite the very empty areas it's already a 64MB game which requires the expansion pak so it uses all 8MB of RAM -- but hopefully at some point something can be done about that
As for how complete this build is, some of the things that seem to be the most incomplete, most notably the later parts of Krystal's half of the game, are things that they would end up cutting from SFA, so it's not clear if even a later build would help there. This is a late build of the game, but Rare did continue with the N64 version a little bit into 2001, past this build from December '00, before moving over exclusively to the Gamecube. DP was going to have eight Krazoa and six spellstones, while SFA has five Krazoa (kind of six) and four Spellstones. It's highly likely that those later ones from DP and the areas and dungeons that contained them were never finished, so the homebrew devs will need to decide about what to do with that part of the game.
So how complete is this build? It's maybe about a third complete when it comes to "how far can you get right now before it totally breaks and progression becomes impossible". It's maybe 70% overall, perhaps. Bug fixes, once done, will increase that percentage, but it's looking more likely that this isn't the legendary 90% build that supposedly is out there, it's a bit short of that... maybe? But it's close enough that a complete game can be made of it so that's more than good enough.
Oh, my main criticism right now is that a lot of areas feel empty. Rare built the spaces, but haven't put much stuff IN a lot of those spaces yet! Enemies right now mostly die in one hit and lots of areas don't have any at all. I don't know how much more stuff can be fit into the game -- despite the very empty areas it's already a 64MB game which requires the expansion pak so it uses all 8MB of RAM -- but hopefully at some point something can be done about that