Star Fox Adventures notably takes place eight years after the events of Star Fox 64. In an interview with Nintendo Official Magazine in 2002, Takaya Imamura admitted that he felt it'd be better for Fox and his friends to grow and change over time, as opposed to other Nintendo characters like Mario and Bowser who never age.

Imamura would touch upon this again in an 2002 Nintendo Dream interview regarding Star Fox Adventures. In addition to wanting to come up with a justification for why Fox, Falco, Peppy and Slippy would reunite to fight the enemy, he also wanted to reflect the change in genre from SF64 to SFA and how the relationships between the characters had evolved since then.

As mentioned in the same interview, Imamura had already stated some years prior he'd like to make a sequel to Star Fox 64 taking place 20 years later (Fox would be 38 years old) in the official Japanese guidebook for Star Fox 64 released in 1997.