It’s true. There are a few things that go into my decision on this matter of extreme importance, so I’ll just outline them each in one paragraph. I don’t know how controversial this opinion is, but since the team that normally makes F-Zero can’t see how they can improve on the series (despite the last entry being made in part by Sega) and online discussion tends to focus on GX over X, I think it’s at the very least different. F-Zero GX was made in part by Sega’s development company amusement vision (av), this will come into play multiple times in my explanation. Personally, I am a fan of av anyways as they also made the Monkey Ball series.
#1: Soundtrack
While it doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, the soundtrack in any game is something that is pretty important since it’s what you are going to be listening to throughout your entire playtime unless you of course you want to listen to your own music. F-Zero GX’s composer (or at least one) also did music for Super Monkey Ball. I always say that F-Zero GX’s soundtrack has this sort of ‘Sega stink to it’, not in the sense that I don’t like Sega but rather the DNA of the company as a whole can be heard in the music first and foremost. They chose the same sort of samples and similar instruments I feel. Listen to the soundtracks for the Green Plant stages and then this SMB song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dput_o1PZtU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5bUpJ5mGoI
You can tell they’re made by the same person in the same way you can sort of tell when you are listening to a Jun Ishikawa Kirby song. And I’m not saying that as a bad thing, identity bleeds through for all composers. The main complaint I have is when your competition is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUSxabS5_qM
…you have a lot to live up to. While F-Zero is a futuristic anti-gravity racer, I never saw that as its main identity. The setting and era of the games is a way to explain how gritty and hardcore these races are- split second decisions are the difference between life and death and not just winning or losing. Literal superhero comic tier villains, bounty hunters, gang members, assassins, soldiers, cyborgs, etc, have no qualms about ramming your machine until it explodes. So in a lot of ways, I think the original vibe of the entire series is better matched with X’s soundtrack.
#2: The X Cup
F-Zero X came out in 1998 in an era where true 3D gaming as a whole just started to get popular. That was really the selling point for a lot of games at the time; there was this entire new dimension and space to play in for a lot of games. Nintendo had the foresight to put in something else into F-Zero X which really exemplified mastering this space compared to how a lot of other developers were doing things.
The X Cup is a special cup unlocked at the very end of game. It is the last thing you unlock alongside Master difficulty when you get the first four cups completed on Expert difficulty. The really special thing about it is the fact that these tracks are all randomly generated. This means that you have a ton of replayability both for playing alone or with friends. If having a bunch of static courses and 30 ships with differences wasn’t enough already, you pretty much have an amazing selection of generated courses that complements the arcade style of the racing genre that you can just boot up and play which keeps things refreshing. GX didn’t have this; they put in the arcade tracks from F-Zero AX as a bonus instead. GX also has a story mode, but this doesn’t compliment the pick up and play style of arcade-y racing games. Kind of ironic when you think about it.
The X Cup isn’t without faults, as the random generation doesn’t work well for cylinders and some stages will straight up cause the CPU players to run off of the stage because the turns are too sharp, but overall it’s an amazing experience to pretty much always have something different to play, assuming that the four cups already in the game are getting stale for you.
#3 Physics
av reused the Super Monkey Ball engine for F-Zero GX. This really shows, like if a small incline suddenly makes you fly off the stage entirely. Additionally, running into enemies is a single button press that doesn’t feel like it has much weight to it. In F-Zero X, ramming opponents was something that you wouldn’t want to do all of the time because it messes with your speed and the angle in which you are taking your turn. Plus, if you really wanted to hit them, you’d have to really commit to it. F-Zero GX on the other hand uses a single button press for side attacks that looks like a red spin around your vehicle, and the impact leaves a lot to be desired for game feel. You also cannot truly free fly off the track in a controllable manner, which isn’t really that much of a bad thing and this probably has to do with the fact that the game is faster than it was in F-Zero X. Drifting doesn’t feel as fun because the acceleration bonus was toned down. It still kind of exists, but not as much as it used to.
I could probably find more differences which make GX weaker, but the last thing I want to say is that all things considered I still enjoy GX and what it brings to the table, albeit less than what X has. GX has really fun customization for both stock and custom vehicles, and it does have some really good tracks (I think of Multiplex, Ordeal, Aero Dive, Slim-line Slits whenever I think about GX) among some really dreadful ones (Cylinder, Dragon Slope, the Casino stages). Story mode is… fine. Like I said, not really my type of thing when I think of the series and the challenge there is downright unreasonable for people that don’t want to look up perfect lines or people that want to spend 10 hours on the first mission. Even Hard to a certain extent isn’t a good progression. It’s also confirmed that the AI literally will cheat and use more boost than they should be able to, and I have had enough of AI cheating for an entire lifetime.