I ended up posting this on  Angel85's submission regarding the 20th Anniversary Sonic game (I was actually searching for Star Fox stuff in the hopes of finding something cleaner than most things you'll find on FA, Star Fox was mentioned in her artist's comments) and I decided to post it here too.

A lot of Star Fox Fans (do note - a lot of Krystal fans don't really fit this profile. If Krystal was gone, they wouldn't give two shits about Star Fox) tend to look down on Adventure. It was a decent game, it just wasn't really a Star Fox game, and in fact wasn’t actually intended to be. “Dinosaur Planet” was going to be a completely separate game, and was in fact a good ways along in production when Nintendo decided to tell Rare to shove Star Fox into it.

As a result, we got Star Fox in an unfamiliar genre, with somewhat sub-par Arwing sequences, a bait-and-switch from what could have been a really cool staff-based boss fight into a rehashed boss battle using said sub-par Arwing mechanics, and Krystal shoved from one of two playable characters (originally, she would collect the Krazoa spirits while the character Fox replaced would collect the Spellstones, and the player would use the Warpstone to switch between them) to a classic Damsel-in-Distress. It also introduced story elements that are rather heavily out-of-place in the Star Fox universe, such as the Dinosaur tribes (keeping in mind, this is a universe of anthropomorphic characters), magic, spirits, and all that nonsense. The telepathy from Krystal is acceptable due to some of the lore around Andross, but she herself got turned into nothing but fanservice, which is frankly an insult to what could have been an interesting character. Instead, we got a blue furry chick with telepathy and a backstory that was completely forgotten and ignored once she met Fox and turned into a no-personality awkward love interest.

The point is, Dinosaur Planet was not created to be a Star Fox game. Star Fox was shoved in at the last minute, and it shows in many ways. As I said before, Adventure was a decent game, it was a fairly fun adventure sort of puzzle game, but people say that it’s not a Star Fox game, because it… really isn’t.