Artist Takaya Imamura, who designed the look of Fox McCloud for the original Star Fox, has some thoughts about the character’s controversial new appearance, recently revealed in the remake of Star Fox 64 for Switch 2.
“I wake up in the morning,” Imamura wrote on X, according to the platform’s machine translation. “A ton of messages have come in. Oh! Star Fox is finally making a comeback… I’ve gotta post about this… wait, this isn’t a dream, right?”
Imamura, who retired from Nintendo in 2021 after over 30 years at the company, was one of the core developers on the first Star Fox game for SNES back in 1993. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted the cast to be based on animals with the main protagonist being a fox. Imamura set to work designing them, and even based Fox McCloud’s “essence” on that of Miyamoto himself, the game’s producer.
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“Fox is based on Miyamoto-san, and the rabbit, Peppy, is based on the game’s director [Katsuya] Eguchi-san,” he told Edge magazine last year. “I think, if you look closely, you can see the similarities.”
He continued, “Falco was based on [Tsuyoshi] Watanabe-san on the graphics team. When I looked at his face, his nose was quite big, like a Roman nose. And Slippy was based on the assistant director, [Yoichi] Yamada-san – he just kind of gave me that impression, and he liked frogs as well.”
The Switch 2 versions of these characters have all been accused of now looking too realistic and, in the case of Fox McCloud, aura-less.
“I guess this is how it turns out if I’m not supervising… or something like that,” Imamura wrote on X. “I think the concept is good,” he added when asked about the new character designs. “Personally, I prefer the movie version,” he continued in a separate post, “but I thought this one was good in its own way, with a clear direction!”
Not everyone agrees with the latter part of that sentiment.
