F-Zero Climax is a 2004 racing game published by Nintendo and the sixth installment in the F-Zero series. It's the third and final game on Game Boy Advance, developed once again by Suzak like F-Zero: GP Legend.
Climax is a sequel to GP Legend, reinstating most of the contents found in the previous game, but it also has plenty of new ones. Spin Attack from the console games is introduced, and Boost Power has an additional power-up called Boost Fire that makes you go even faster. In addition to new courses for Grand Prix, it has new features like Survival and Course Edit.
F-Zero Climax became the end of the original series, as Nintendo scrapped any plans for continuing the series, only putting it into second hand appearance like Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart. The series would only come back as a Battle Royale Game, F-Zero 99, 19 years later.
F-Zero Climax contains examples of:
- Adapted Out: GP Legend's story mode is absent in Climax. You can unlock the episode guide of the animated series, but it's simply unlockable pieces.
- Announcer Chatter: The announcer from GP Legend returns with more lines, such as warning you if you're about to be passed by the 2nd place racer or if you're low on energy.
- Arrange Mode: Survival is a new mode in Climax that applies new rules to the base game, such as "Speed 800" that demands always pushing the speed above 800km/h (similar to one mission in the story mode of F-Zero GX) or "Death Race" like the mode in F-Zero X.
- Art Evolution: Despite recycling the graphics of GP Legend, Climax polishes the looks of racing machines. For example, in GP Legend, your racing machine simply tilted left and right whenever you make a turn. This is remade in Climax so that the machines have a proper animation of spinning their vehicle, giving better 3D impression.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: This game features the usual Boost mechanic and the Spin Attack. Performing a Spin Attack and then boosting in mid-spin results in a Spin Booster attack.
- Breaking Old Trends: This game bucks the trend of pseudo-3D F-Zero games having five-lap races, instead using three-lap races like its 3D non-arcade counterparts.
- Cap: Machines have a hard speed cap of 1,920 km/h. For reference, the top speed when driving normally is about 900-1,100 km/h depending on the machine; reaching 1,920 km/h requires generous use of boosts in machines that can retain surplus speed well.note
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- One of the new techniques available is Spin Booster, in which you use a Boost while doing a Spin Attack (or alternatively, map Spin Booster to a single button). It consumes more energy than a regular boost, which can put your machine at risk. But it also lasts longer than a regular boost and the spin continues until the boost finishes, and it can be paired with a Reactor Might to make the effect (including the spin) last even longer at no extra energy cost, so strategic use of Spin Booster can help you catch up and knock opponents out of the way (including lapped opponents, if you are really far ahead).
- Boosting is already this due to being Cast from Hit Points, but in this game, depending on the machine and track layout, boosting back-to-back can allow you to keep raising your speed, as high as the hard cap of 1,920 km/h. Not only does this require being really risky with boosts, it also requires you to be familiar with each track so as not to go bouncing off walls and losing all of that momentum. But when you can consistently keep yourself at speeds in excess of 1,500 km/h and in control of your vehicle, the majority of courses can be done in less than a minute — not just per lap, but less than a minute for a full three-lap race or even less than 40 seconds — and you end up lapping your opponents.
- Earn Your Fun: The menu has only four modes (out of nine) available at start and only one of them, Grand Prix, is a mode that unlocks something. You have to unlock the others by pouring time and dedication.
- Go Fast or Go Boom: Downplayed. One of the Survival mode challenges is "Speed 800", where if your speed falls below 800 km/h, you lose instantly. However, you don't actually explode, you just slow to a stop as the "Mission Failed" text appears.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulties of Survival mode are, from easiest to hardest: Tour (easiest), Challenge, Battle, and Violence.
- Later-Installment Weirdness: The last installment of the original series, Climax has a lot of weird changes from the previous games:
- The Boost Power has a second upgrade, Boost Fire, which is stocked up like Super Jets from F-Zero (1990) and F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, that can be activated in the middle of a regular Boost for an even faster burst of sped..
- Its scope is rolled back from GP Legend,reducing the racer number to 24 and Grand Prix lap number to 3, although some of the courses are longer to compensate.
- It has incredibly busy controls, trying to put Spin Attack into the gameplay with less buttons on the Game Boy Advance, and as a result the game has customization that automates some of these.
- All opponents have absolute positions on the course now, even opponents behind you, rather than just having a marker for the opponent behind you with Rubberband AI that keeps up with you even on Sequence Breaking shortcuts. This can be seen on courses with jumps over previous sections of the course, where you can see the opponents further down the grid passing down the section you jump over, and it is possible to even lap backmarker opponents (as opposed to generic "bumper" cars simulating them).
- In the Grand Prix modes of F-Zero X, F-Zero GX, and F-Zero: GP Legend (all of which have fixed grids of racers) , the higher your standing is when you finish, the lower your standing will be at the start of the next race, all the way down to 30th place if you finish 1st on the previous round for X and GX and down to 4th place in GP Legend. In this game, you start at the exact same position you finished the previous race in, so if you finished 12th place in the first round, you'll start the next round in 12th, for example.
- Level Editor: Course Edit similar to F-Zero X returns for this game. It supports link cable to share the custom courses with other players or generates passwords for the courses if link cables are unavailable.
- Limit Break: By tapping Boost Power button twice, you can activate Boost Fire if you have one in stock, which increases the speed even more than Boost Power.
- Megamix Game: This installment includes a comprehensive list of features from every game installment before. In addition to polishing the Pre-Rendered Graphics of F-Zero: Maximum Velocity and the general systems of F-Zero: GP Legend, it introduced new systems like Boost Fire, which works like a power-up in F-Zero (1990), and Spin Attack from the console games. The Survival mode adds even more from the console games, like Death Race ripped from F-Zero X.
- Noob Bridge: Pressing down on the D-pad widens your drift allowing you to make sharper turns (notably, this is the only button that cannot be mapped to another function, other than the usual Select and Start). Not knowing this can make the game much more difficult...and unless you read the manual, read discussion about this game between players, or notice that there's a hidden tutorial that can be accessed from the title screen, you probably won't know about this technique.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: One of the possible objectives in Survival mode is No Crash, in which your Energy meter starts off empty and you race on a course with no pit zones. This means you cannot boost, and any contact with your opponent or the walls will immediately kill you. Somewhat downplayed as you'll just respawn back on the track after exploding rather than failing the mission, but it's still a considerable setback.
- Recycled Soundtrack: When playing the Platinum Cup courses, the game uses tracks from F-Zero: GP Legend rather than its own (arranges of the existing F-Zero) tracks. Strangely, this game's recreations of Red Canyon II and White Land II use the GP Legend arranges of those locales' F-Zero X tracks rather than the same game's existing F-Zero (1990) arranges, despite those two courses being recreations of the latter game's courses.
- Remixed Level:
- Playing Bronze, Silver, or Gold Cup on Expert difficulty gives you access to harder variants of the original courses. Playing on Master unlocks yet another set of variants. This makes for a total of 15 tracks for each of those cups.
- Platinum Cup features extended versions of four tracks from the original SNES game, in addition to copies of four courses from that game with a few differences (Sand Ocean, Fire Field, Red Canyon II, and White Land II). Unlike the other three cups, it does not have Expert or Master variations of these courses.
- Sequence Breaking: Similar to GP Legend, you can exploit jumps to take massive shortcuts on some courses due to the lack of any sort of countermeasure against such (like the flying saucer that moves your machine back like in F-Zero (1990) or spontaneous combustion like in F-Zero GX).
- Truer to the Text: The game has more elements of the anime F-Zero: GP Legend than the previous Suzak game, adding aura effect for Boost Power and introducing Boost Fire technique in the animated series. When Boost Fire is used by villianious characters like Black Shadow, the annoucing narrator reads it as "Black Fire", also a nod to the anime. The game has more Call-Back to the later part of the anime, like Hyper Zoda being playable, as the game was released just after the anime was concluded. Ironically, this game lacks the Story Mode of GP Legend, instead relegating the plot to a series of unlockable story recaps.
- Unlockable Difficulty Levels: In Survival mode, after clearing Battle difficulty (the hardest of the three available-by-default difficulties) with at least one character, the Violence difficulty opens up.
- Unstable Equilibrium: In Grand Prix mode, when you finish one race, you start the next race at the same position as the previous one. This means if you can get 1st place in the first round, you can more easily maintian that for subsequent rounds. Conversely, if you end up having a poor standing in the early rounds, it becomes significantly harder to push your way to a higher standing. This is a notable contrast to previous games that deploy a fixed grid of racers (X, GX, and GP Legend), where a higher finishing rank in one round results in a lower starting rank in the next and vice-versa.
