2003 · Game Boy Advance · Game story
F-ZERO ファルコン伝説 Turns Every Race into a New Route Through the Future
Nintendo’s 2003 Japanese Game Boy Advance racer straps an anime-sized cast to a deceptively exacting machine: learn a pilot, learn a corner, learn a ghost line, then try not to explode before the next finish line.
In this story
A future with a pulse
F-ZERO ファルコン伝説 is not content to send a hovercraft through a pretty tomorrow and call it a day. Its year 2201 is a place where the universe’s fastest race has everyone worked into a frenzy, where rising star Ryu Suzaku is locked in a hot rivalry with the impossible-to-read Captain Falcon, and where Ryu’s past is plainly bad news waiting to catch up with him. That premise gives the 2003 Japanese Game Boy Advance original an immediate charge. A championship race already supplies velocity; this one supplies suspicion, personalities, and the feeling that the next sharp turn might lead to a plot complication as readily as a better lap. 1 2
The game arrived in Japan on 28 November, just as the television animation that shares its name was on the air. Dengeki Online reported that the series began on TV Tokyo affiliates on 7 October, while a contemporary GAME Watch report described the cartridge as a racing game built around that animated world, with pilots such as Captain Falcon and Ryu at the controls and character-specific Story Mode episodes supplying playable side stories. The connection is more than a coat of animated paint. It explains why this F-ZERO wants a racer to notice who has entered the scene, why a mission can carry more than the usual pressure of first place, and why its gleaming future feels busy instead of empty. The road is a stage; the rivals have lines. 10 9 3
Trivia The rocket start begins before the countdown is finished. Hold A to warm the engine, then let the machine leap forward when the race begins. It turns the first second into a tiny wager: prepare the launch correctly and the whole field starts behind your decision; mistime it and thirty futuristic machines are already writing a less flattering opening scene. 5
See it in action
Ryu opens the first door
Story Mode is the feature that turns the game’s cast from decoration into a progression system. Nintendo presents eight side stories, each tied to a character appearing in the animation and each paired with missions. At first, the player can select only Ryu’s scenario. Meet another character during it and that character’s scenario opens. It is a clean little act of design mischief: encountering a person is not simply an excuse for dialogue or a portrait in a gallery. It unlocks another angle on the game. A rival, ally, or nuisance can become a doorway, and the player’s view of the season widens one meeting at a time. 3
Nintendo calls the arrangement a zapping system, because the eight stories are designed to overlap rather than sit in sealed compartments. That makes the mode feel less like a bonus anthology and more like a relay race with different hands taking the baton. Ryu is the logical opening runner. His character page introduces him as a pilot revived in 2201 after 150 years and identifies Dragon Bird as a new Galactic Police machine. The science-fiction melodrama is deliciously direct, yet it also gives the first scenario a useful incompleteness. Ryu has a history, but the game keeps handing the player other witnesses before that history can settle into one simple story. 3 4
Trivia Only Ryu Suzaku’s scenario is selectable at the start; meeting another character during a scenario makes that character playable in Story Mode. 3
The controls have teeth
All that story machinery would be a very expensive dashboard ornament if the racing were mushy. It is not. Nintendo’s overview points to acceleration plates and bomb traps, then names Blast Turn and Long Jump as techniques worth mastering. The Zero Test material is more practical. L and R let the machine slide sideways through a corner. Boost trades energy for a short rush. Repeated A presses produce Blast Turn, a tight-corner answer intended to keep more speed alive. Holding A before the start warms the engine for a rocket start; pressing down in the air stretches a jump toward a shortcut. Each move is an invitation and a threat, which is precisely what an F-ZERO control vocabulary ought to be. 1 5
The most persuasive thing about this list is that it does not ask the player to admire it from the manual. The original overview says the cars exceed 1,000 kilometres per hour, a lovely figure for the back of a box and a terrifying one for a newcomer holding a tiny handheld. Yet the game breaks that absurd speed into familiar physical questions. Can you move the machine across a corner without killing its line? Can you spend energy now and survive the next mistake? Can you hold your nerve when a jump becomes a route choice? The techniques turn a scary speedometer into a set of deliberate movements. That gets to the heart of the game’s appeal: it wants precision to feel earned, not merely demanded. 2 5
Trivia Long Jump is performed by holding down while airborne, producing a longer leap that can be aimed at a shortcut. 5
Zero Test makes a lab out of a track
Zero Test is where ファルコン伝説 quietly reveals its best teaching trick. Rather than saying ‘become an F-ZERO expert’ and sending a player into a full championship to be vaporised by a wall, it cuts small portions from Story Mode and Grand Prix courses and makes them Time Attack challenges. There are 48, and the short stretches invite repeat attempts. A player can focus on the entry to one turn, the timing of one boost, or the nerve required for one jump without dragging an entire cup along behind the mistake. It is practice with a pulse: compact enough to replay quickly, specific enough to make the next success feel like a discovered answer rather than an accident. 5
Every challenge has bronze, silver, and gold target times, so the mode also gives improvement a visible shape. Bronze says the technique has begun to land. Silver asks whether that understanding can travel at speed. Gold smiles politely, folds its arms, and asks for something very close to a clean run. Nintendo’s original page says the targets were designed to give beginners a natural feel for handling while still leaving ambitious times for stronger drivers. It is a rare training mode that manages to be welcoming and slightly rude at the same time. 5
Trivia All 48 Zero Tests award bronze, silver, and gold targets, three grades for the same short piece of road. 5
Grand Prix is the big tent
After Story Mode makes the future personal and Zero Test reduces it to a single knot of road, Grand Prix opens the gates and lets the whole circus in. Nintendo’s original page says 30 machines, including the player’s, contest the overall ranking. Novice, Standard, and Expert offer a tidy rising ladder; clear one and the next challenge comes into view. The cups have their own personalities. Bronze begins with simpler courses, Silver adds tighter corners and more strategy, Gold advertises complex and dangerous routes, and Platinum begins life hidden behind a question mark. It is an old-fashioned structure, but that is part of its charm: the game tells you what flavour of trouble is waiting without revealing every nasty surprise. 6
Machine choice prevents the ladder from becoming a one-note exam. The same page says additional machines become available as Grand Prix advances, and it lets a player set a selected machine toward acceleration or top speed before the race. More than 30 Grand Prix courses are in the mix. That small setup decision gives each new event a useful question before the lights go out: do you want the machine to claw its way back after a slow corner, or trust it to stretch its legs where the road opens? The game never turns the choice into a garage-management chore. It keeps it brisk, a final bit of intention before the course starts throwing plates, traps, turns, and opponents at your windscreen. 6
Trivia Platinum Cup is initially displayed as a question mark, while Bronze, Silver, and Gold describe their escalating course pressures in advance. 6
One cartridge, four racers
The original cartridge’s social trick is wonderfully practical. GAME Watch reported that link-cable competition was available and that an ‘otameshi’ trial-versus option let as many as four people play from one copy of the game. That is a very Game Boy Advance kind of generosity: a handheld racer designed for a small knot of friends, cables draped across a table, one owner sharing the noise and the speed. It also changes the texture of F-ZERO’s clean, individual discipline. A perfect line remains satisfying, but a perfect line becomes much funnier when someone next to you has just discovered that the track wall is not a suggestion. 9
This makes good thematic sense for a game so interested in passing viewpoints around. Story Mode reveals a future through different pilots; the link cable turns a single race into a future witnessed by several pairs of hands. It is not a loose party-game detour. The same terse controls that matter in Zero Test become legible in a crowd: a late Blast Turn, a greedy boost, or a jump that lands one machine ahead is instantly visible. The hardware arrangement may be humble, but it turns a solitary handheld challenge into a compact spectator sport, complete with the only commentary anyone needs: ‘You had that corner.’ 9 5 3
Trivia The trial-versus option allowed up to four players to race with a single cartridge and connected Game Boy Advances. 9
Cards put the extra road in your hand
The card e-Reader+ material is the game’s most gloriously early-2000s flourish. Nintendo divided compatible cards into machine, course, and challenge types. Machine cards could deliver hard-to-obtain cars and even special machines unavailable through ordinary play. Course cards supplied original routes absent from the cartridge alone. The four challenge cards carried eight code edges between them, offered a run from the fastest pilot, and included tips for winning. Extra content was not a silent download or a menu tab; it arrived as a printed object, a scan, and a little piece of ceremony. The collection itself became part of the racing ritual. 7
The ghost cards make the ritual even better. Nintendo’s instructions direct the player from the Communication menu to card e+, then through the reader process to a ghost replay. When the matching course was available in Time Attack, that ghost could appear during the run. The catch is perfect: the cartridge could save only one ghost at a time, and saving another replaced the first. A machine with such a loud fantasy of speed turns strangely intimate here. Instead of a limitless cloud of rival records, there is one chosen line haunting your track, a single opponent whose timing you have decided is worth carrying around. 8
Trivia Four challenge cards supplied eight code edges in total, and their ghost data could be displayed on the matching Time Attack course. 7 8
A racer built from small victories
What makes F-ZERO ファルコン伝説 memorable is not that it bolts a story onto a racing game, or that it includes a formidable pile of modes. Plenty of games can collect features. This one gives those features a shared rhythm. Encounter a pilot and a new scenario opens. Fail a hard corner and a short test gives the technique a name. Clear a cup and a machine decision waits before the next race. Scan a card and a new course or a single stubborn ghost becomes part of the cartridge’s world. The game keeps making speed feel like something understood in pieces, which is much more satisfying than pretending it arrives all at once with a loud engine noise. 3 5 6 7 8
That shared rhythm also explains why the game can be both welcoming and fierce. Its future is stuffed with melodrama, its courses carry hazards, its practice mode is generous, and its Gold targets are never obliged to flatter the player. The original Japanese GBA release uses all of that material to make every return trip feel purposeful. You come back to a route because one pilot has offered another viewpoint, one machine setting might solve a new problem, or one tiny section of track has started a private argument with your thumbs. That is an excellent reason to keep racing. Not just to be fastest, but to find out how much cleaner, stranger, and braver the next line can be. 1 2 5
Trivia Nintendo’s overview lists six modes in total, including Story and Grand Prix, rather than presenting the game as a single championship ladder. 1
A few more screens
1 official imagesSources & image credits
Facts were checked against the links below. Official media remains the property of Nintendo and the relevant rights holders.
- F-ZERO ファルコン伝説 | Nintendo Classics Nintendo ↗
- 「ファルコン伝説」とは？ Nintendo ↗
- ストーリーモード Nintendo ↗
- リュウ スザク Nintendo ↗
- ゼロテスト Nintendo ↗
- グランプリモード Nintendo ↗
- F-ZERO ファルコン伝説カードｅ＋ Nintendo ↗
- 操作方法／チャレンジカード Nintendo ↗
- 任天堂、テレビアニメ版を題材にしたGBA「F-ZERO ファルコン伝説」を発売 Impress GAME Watch ↗
- 『F-ZERO』のTVアニメが10月より放映！ゲームでは伝えられなかった物語が展開 Dengeki Online ↗
