Barring the mistake with calling Fichina "Fortuna" in Star Fox 64, there is only one other main planet in all of the Star Fox series to have a slightly different English name from their original Japanese counterpart, that being Katina, which in Japan is called カタリナ, or Katarina.

In comparison, Katina directly translated into Japanese would be カティナ.

Contrary to the Western version of the game, which more or less started over with a completely new and different cast, Star Fox: Assault's Japanese voice cast would actually bring back quite a few of the voice actors from Star Fox 64's Japanese dub:

• Hisao Egawa (Falco)
• Kyoko Tongu (Slippy)
• Tomohisa Aso (Peppy)
• Daisuke Gori (Pigma)
• Shinobu Satouchi (Leon)

Of the returning cast from Star Fox 64, the only characters to be recast were:

• Fox (voiced by Shinobu Satouchi in SF64, now voiced by Kenji Nojima)
• General Pepper (voiced by Daisuke Gori in SF64, now voiced by Michihiro Ikemizu)
• Wolf (voiced by Hisao Egawa in SF64, now voiced by Mahito Ōba)
• ROB 64 and Andrew (both were voiced by Daisuke Sakaguchi in SF64, now they're both voiced by Yusuke Numata)

According to Takaya Imamura in a Nintendo Dream interview regarding Star Fox Assault, Fox's new voice was meant to represent a middle ground between Steve Malpass' nasal sounding voice from Star Fox Adventures and Shinobu Satouchi's voice from Star Fox 64. Apparently, Satouchi was saddened when he discovered that he'd be returning to only reprise his role as Leon in Star Fox: Assault.

Despite the English version of Melee using Star Fox Adventures' voice cast in the game's Corneria and Venom stages, the Japanese version uses all of the original Star Fox 64 voice actors. Shinobu Satouchi, Hisao Egawa, Kyoko Tongu and Tomohisa Aso all reprise their roles as Fox, Falco, Slippy and Peppy respectively. The former two's voice clips are also used for Fox and Falco as fighters even abroad.

In Star Fox: Assault's campaign, it is revealed by Beltino Toad, Slippy's father, that the Aparoids had already attacked the Lylat System 17 years prior, where an entire Cornerian fleet was destroyed by a single Aparoid, the same type that destroyed Oikonny's flagship and attacked the Star Fox team on Fortuna.

In a 2011 Nintendo Dream magazine interview with Takaya Imamura, he explained that rather than having the Aparoids suddenly appear, he felt that it would be better have something that was already there in the past so there would be a connection and give the story more depth. This is also why it was decided to have Beltino, who was previously stated to have worked for Space Dynamics in ancillary material for Star Fox 64, to be in charge of the Cornerian army by the time of the events of Star Fox: Assault.

Imamura explains that, with Beltino being a genius scientist, he was doing various military commissions and Space Dynamics work in the form of a commissioned employee over the years, explaining how he fought against the Aparoids as apart of the Cornerian Army 17 years priors, later joined up with Space Dynamics by the time of Star Fox 64, and then eventually returned to the Cornerian Army by the time of Star Fox: Assault.

Many Star Fox 64 players have referred to the Venom army general piloting the mecha boss encountered in the Easy Route Corneria path as "Granga", presumably because of the Star Fox 64 Nintendo Power Official Strategy Guide referring to him as such.

In reality, or at least going by the official Japanese Star Fox 64 guidebook and also Star Fox 64 3D, the name "Granga" actually refers to the aforementioned mecha itself. Like most of Andross' lieutenants (with the exception of Caiman), the pilot himself seemingly never had a proper name.

In a June 1997 Nintendo Dream interview with Shigeru Miyamoto regarding Star Fox 64, when asked if he would produce a sequel, Miyamoto responded with:


Funny enough, both of these ideas would come to fruition with future titles such as Star Fox: Assault, which hugely emphasized its multiplayer battle mode, and Star Fox Command, which revisited many of the real-time strategy elements that were previously experimented with in the then-unreleased Star Fox 2.

The go-to term for the initial conflict of the Star Fox series, as told in three different installments (Star Fox on SNES, Star Fox 64, and Star Fox Zero), is the "Lylat Wars". This name originates from the original PAL release of Star Fox 64, where it was renamed to Lylat Wars due to trademark issues (similarly to why the first Star Fox was renamed to "Starwing" there as well). In comparison, its 3DS remake, Star Fox 64 3D, would retain the Star Fox 64 moniker in all regions. Nintendo would later actually canonize the "Lylat Wars" moniker as the official name of the conflict against Andross' forces in the opening prologue to Star Fox Zero.

Planet Zoness was originally a beautiful water planet similar to its twin planet, Aquas. It was famous for its resorts and was where Peppy Hare had taken his wife, Vivian, for their honeymoon. However, Andross' forces would invade and pollute its waters with their bioweapons, mutating the local wildlife to become larger and violent.

Early footage of Star Fox 64 circa 1996 actually show Zoness in its pure, unpolluted state, which seems to indicate that making it polluted was decided on later in development. There's actually appears to be dialogue remnants of this cleaner version in the developer's dub:


When finishing the stage:


But in the final polluted version, this exchange in the JP version goes:

Beta Star Fox 64 footage circa 1996 shows that Corneria was originally covered in snow. Early footage of the boss fight with the Granga robot even showed it capable of blowing snow as an attack, possibly indicating that it was responsible for Corneria's current state in this build.

According to Takaya Imamura in a Q&A in 2024, James McCloud, Fox's father, seemingly returning from the dead to help Fox escape from the depths of Venom at the end of Star Fox 64's hard route was inspired by Obi-Wan Kenobi returning as a ghostly mentor for Luke Skywalker by the end of the 1977 film "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope".

According to Imamura, whether James is actually still alive, or some kind of ghost or vision that Fox saw, is ultimately up to the players to decide. Curiously, while Star Fox Zero (whose story is mostly just a straightforward retelling of Star Fox 64) also contains a sequence at the end where an apparition of James guides Fox through Venom, it appears that Andross can also see him, even shouting:


Which further adds to the ambiguity on whether James is still alive or not.

In Star Fox 64's ancillary material, Planet Aquas is said to be an entirely water planet with its surface 100% covered by oceans. Star Fox Command however, would contradict this by showing there to be islands on Aquas in the Slippy's Resolve ending; Command's official Japanese guidebook even claims that Aquas' surface is now only 80% comprised of oceans.

In a Q&A with Takaya Imamura in 2023 on this subject, he theorized that perhaps, somewhere in-between the events of Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Command, the islands were created by underwater volcanic belts within Aquas' oceans, likening it to the emergence of Nishinoshima, a volcanic island in the Ogasawara Archipelago.

Hidden in the files for Star Fox 64 are what seem to be remnants of an unused first-person turret mode. Several files reference a stage with the initials "SB", with its header file, fox_sb_poly.h, being titled "スター ブレード 擬き" (Sutā burēdo ki). This translates to "Star Blade Imitation", named after the 1991 on-rails space shooter by Namco, where the ship's guns can only be used in first-person. Dylan Cuthbert and other developers of the original Star Fox admitted to being heavily inspired by Star Blade, claiming that one of their main goals was to recreate the experience of the game.

The file, fox_play.h, defines 3 scroll types of levels: corridor, all-range mode, and "JYUZA", or "銃座モード" (Jūza mōdo), which translates to "Gun turret mode". This file also defines five player modes: ARWING, TANK, SUB, HUMAN, and P_JYUZA, While the SB stage is listed with the other corridor stages, it still specifies that it's in the "JYUZA" category. The SB stage itself appears to be a shortened copy of the Area 6 stage devoid of any content except for one Moras enemy, suggesting that it and other stages were meant to be played in the turret mode during development.

In the game's source code, stages such as "SB", "CL" or "Colony", and Area 6 are subtitled "Great Fox", suggesting that the Great Fox mothership was also intended to use the turret mode. It would likely have been about firing lasers and guns from the ship while trying not to take damage, as there is a string for the ship's health bar named gfox_life. The game's levels, such as the Landmaster stages, are organized into overlay groups to save on memory; Area 6 strangely isn't grouped within the turret mode stages, but Sector Y is.

This unused game mode was restored via a fanmade patch on October 30, 2024, taking a few liberties to make up for the missing code and assets.

In the files for Star Fox 64 found in the 2020 Nintendo Gigaleak are references and assets for what appears to be a scrapped level named "Battleship". The string fox_map.c interchangeably calls it "Battleship", "Giant Battleship", and "Ground Ship"; it's possible that the latter could be a mistranslation of "Grand Ship", as they're spelled the same way in Japanese. The stage used a full 3D model, like Area 6 and Bolse, as its icon on the map selection screen. Its intended location was where Sector Y currently sits on the Lylat map selection screen, which is the hard path taken from Corneria, and its two branching pathways were known to be Zoness on the hard route and "Fortuna" (Fichina) on the normal route. According to the string fox_play.h, it was an all-range mode stage, and the audio_game.h string makes it appear that it was going to reuse Bolse's theme for its background music, implying that there would have been multiple phases for the level. This stage also had its own enemy data file, implying that it would have featured other enemy ships of some sort.

In October 2024, a group of modders and hackers responsible for the Star Fox 64 Decompilation Project were able to recreate this discarded stage via a fanmade patch.

Much like the original Star Fox on Super Nintendo, Star Fox 64's stages are split into three difficulty routes: Easy, Normal and Hard. However, unlike the original, SF64 only features two versions of Venom, one for the Easy Route and one for the Hard Route, the latter of which is where the Star Fox team has a final rematch with their rivals, Star Wolf.

It turns out the development team had planned on including another variation of Venom for the Normal route, where Fox McCloud would jump out of his Arwing and battle Andross on-foot with a bazooka. According to the staff, this was scrapped due to time constraints. The pilot mode option seen in Star Fox 64's battle mode is actually the repurposed remnants of this idea.

The way the characters in the game talk by opening and closing their mouths was inspired by Thunderbirds and other "English puppet dramas" (called "Supermarionation" by Thunderbirds co-creator Gerry Anderson). Shigeru Miyamoto was a fan of these shows and imagined that if the Star Fox series became popular enough, AP Films themselves would come from England to talk about turning it into a "puppet drama".

The planet of Katina is a clear reference to the movie "Independence Day". Similar to the movie, you have to dog fight aliens that are invading the world and if you do not finish off the mother ship in time, it will destroy the base with a blue laser. The new partner you get in this fight, Bill Grey, is a reference to the General William Grey from the movie.

On the title screen, you can use the analog stick to move the "64" part of the logo around. Fox and his crew will watch it as it moves.

In the Macbeth level, there is a time limit to fighting the boss even if the player missed the Supply Depot ending that leads to Area 6. If the player gets far enough, the boss will state that the player was too slow, and dive bomb the player, killing them instantly. If using a cheat to have infinite health, then the boss will continue to bounce the player upwards until the game crashes.

If the player takes too long to defeat the Golemech boss at the end of Venom's easy path (about seven minutes), the fight will end and the player will run into a wall, killing themselves and making the fight restart.

In the Japanese version, the character icons do not sync with their voices and simply animate the whole way. This was changed in the western versions of the game where the icons would sync with what the characters are saying.