Concept art of General Pepper for Star Fox: Assault depicts him wearing shades, an obvious callback to his design in the original Star Fox on SNES. This was not implemented in the final game, however.

Star Fox: Assault introduces a new team member for Star Wolf, Panther Caroso, who fills in the space left behind by the departures of Andrew Oikonny and Pigma Dengar. He reappears in its sequel, Star Fox Command, but with a slightly different name: Panther Caruso.

Both of these are actually mistranslations of his intended surname in Japan, which is カルロッソ (Karurosso), or Caluroso. "Caluroso" is the Spanish word for warm, hot, energetic, enthusiastic, etc., which is in line with his womanizer, Latin, and Giacomo Casanova-esque personality and archetype.

Star Fox Assault was actually informally announced in May 2002, several months before its predecessor, Star Fox Adventures, would actually hit store shelves.

On May 8, 2002, Namco and Nintendo announced that that they would be collaborating on several GameCube games, one of which being a new Star Fox game in the same vein as Star Fox SNES and Star Fox 64. Nothing else was revealed except for a tentative logo (dubbed at the time as "Star Fox GC") and poster, and the fact that it would be developed by the same team within Namco who worked on the Ace Combat series. This turned out to be not true, as the final game was developed by different Namco employees at the time, with Tsuyoshi Kobayashi as the producer, Toshiyuki Nakanishi as the All-Range Mode director, and Yutaka Yoshida as the Battle Mode director.

In Star Fox 64 3D's ending, the conference hall where the Star Fox team meets General Pepper after Andross' defeat was changed from its original appearance into a hangar, with fewer, more spread out Dog soldiers.

More notable, however, is how the generic planet Corneria image and lettering at the back of the room has been replaced by the Cornerian Army logo that first appeared in Star Fox: Assault.

During Star Fox: Assault's Fortuna mission, Andrew Oikonny, who is now leading a rebellion against Corneria using the remnants of Andross' army, pilots a flagship that transforms into a mode based on his deceased uncle (Falco even dismisses it as a "Andross wanna-be") complete with a floating head with disembodied hands. The official Japanese Star Fox: Assault guidebook reveals its name to be デスバブーン (Desubabūn), or Death Baboon.

Despite being seemingly destroyed by an Aparoid, Oikonny would reappear in Star Fox Command, working for the Anglar Army (who are revealed to be creations of his uncle), this time in another vessel shaped and named after an animal that's name also starts with "Death", the Death Crab.

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.

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.

The E3 2003 reveal trailer for what would become Star Fox: Assault showcased what appears to be a first-person perspective mode, which ended up being discarded in the final game. However, this scrapped first-person mode can still be accessed in all versions of the game through hacking. It is not fully complete, but has almost full functionality.

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.

Pre-release footage of Star Fox: Assault's Fortuna mission from the Club Nintendo Original e-Catalog 2004 disc shows dialogue between Fox, Krystal and Falco that went unused in the final game:

The first Aparoid boss of Star Fox: Assault is a giant butterfly looking creature that appears at the end of the Fortuna mission. This particular Aparoid would reappear as a trophy in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and also a spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, in both cases being dubbed simply as just "Aparoid".

The official Japanese Star Fox: Assault guidebook reveals this type of Aparoid to have a proper name: ゼグダリア (Zegudaria), or Zegdahlia as it's called by the provided English text.

Star Fox: Assault establishes the Sargasso region as the Star Wolf team's base of operations. Its name is virtually untouched from the Japanese version, サルガッソー (Sarugassō), but there exists an added pun in the latter, in that it begins with サル (Saru), the Japanese word for Monkey. This adds up, as Wolf's criminal empire here is shown to be made up of monkeys, presumably remnants from Andross' army.

Fichina, the ice planet that was introduced in Star Fox 64, is infamously erroneously called Fortuna in the English version of the game. Fortuna was previously the name of the jungle planet from Star Fox on SNES filled with monstrous and primordial creatures. It was also infamously dubbed "the Dinosaur Planet", years before the Star Fox series would incorporate another Dinosaur Planet with Star Fox Adventures.

However, looking through leaked SF64 files from the Gigaleak, there does seem to be evidence that Nintendo dubbed Fichina as Fortuna for most of SF64's development, only to change the name to Fichina at the tail end of it. Almost all of the source code refers to it as Fortuna, and the internal file system has “FO” appended to all of the stage’s assets. The image file Nintendo provided for the stage name to be translated is also labeled FO_E_FO. With the decision to rename it to Fichina seemingly being a last minute one, it's possible Nintendo of America were not brought up to speed by Nintendo's Japanese branch of this lore change when they were originally localizing SF64.

Nonetheless, Nintendo has since firmly established Fichina and Fortuna (as it was in the SNES game) as being their own distinct planets, with both appearing together in Star Fox: Assault and Star Fox Zero. Strangely, in the former game, Fortuna's Japanese name フォーチュナ (Fōchuna) was slightly modified to フォーチュナー (Fōchunā), which would translate into "Fortuner" in English.

Some of the Aparoid infected Cornerian ships that appear in Star Fox: Assault's campaign look very similar in design to its iteration of the Arwing. This is because, canonically, they actually are said to be mass produced Arwing models, according to both the official Japanese guidebook (where are they are given the fitting name of "P.A.W.N") and also the "Arwing (Assault)" trophy description in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.

Star Fox Assault's official Japanese guidebook reveals the name of General Pepper's Aparoid infected flagship, which is the boss of the Corneria mission, to be エアフォース・バウ (Eafōsu bau), which translates to "Air Force Bow" in English.

The name is actually a reference to Air Force One, the official air traffic control designated call sign for a United States Air Force aircraft carrying the President of the United States, similar to how General Pepper is the leader of Corneria. "Bow" is a reference to the onomatopoeia for a dog's bark, "bow wow".

Whenever a character speaks during a mission in Star Fox: Assault, their name appears above the message box. Curiously, when viewing the graphic with the full list of names found within the game files, Tricky is included despite him only being present during the end cutscene of the Sauria mission where there are subtitles instead.

This suggests that he originally either spoke to you during the Sauria mission in-game, or that the cutscenes were intended to have transmission boxes instead of subtitles.

Some of the characters during Star Fox Assault's briefing cutscenes feature details in the back that are typically unseen by the player, since the models are normally only viewed from the front. The only way around this is to move the camera using an emulator.

One such example is Beltino Toad, Slippy Toad's father. Rotating his model around reveals his coat has the logo for Space Dynamics, the manufacturer for many of the Star Fox team's vehicles, such as the Arwing, Great Fox and Landmaster.

This particular logo had actually first appeared in the official Star Fox Mission File Printout guidebook released for the original Star Fox on SNES in Japan, back in 1993.

Star Fox: Assault's development began with its Battle Mode, which explains why it was the first and only feature shown off at its E3 2003 showing. The battle mode in Star Fox 64 was merely just a last-minute bonus, so Takaya Imamura had desired to create a more fleshed out version in a future Star Fox title. This is where Namco handed Nintendo a couple of design documents patented as "Vehicle-Swapping War Action Game", and that's what would be the starting point for Assault's development.

It seems that work on the single-player mode didn't really begin until midway into development. Apparently, as the development team had focused so much of their energy into Star Fox: Assault's battle mode, there were serious talks to abandon the single-player aspect entirely and just make the title a pure multiplayer game. Of course, the development team recognized that many fans would wanted a proper story mode, so they pushed forward on it. Assault's director Toshiyuki Nakanishi explains that this is why the game had a lengthy development cycle.

The characters in the briefing room scenes in the Japanese version of Star Fox Assault are noticeably far more emotive than they are in the western version, which removed the facial expressions from the characters during these particular scenes. The reason for the removal is likely due to having the character's movements re-synced to their English dubbed voices.

The Aparoids are unique in Star Fox's rogue gallery in that they're the only main enemy forces, at least within the official game canon (which includes "Farewell Beloved Falco", the manga interlude between Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Adventures) to have absolutely no connections or ties to Andross whatsoever:

• In Farewell Beloved Falco, Captain Shears, despite being affiliated with the Cornerian army, was revealed to be a turncoat seeking to revive Andross through cloning.

• In Star Fox Adventures, General Scales and the SharpClaw were revealed to be the unwilling pawns of Andross' ghost, who manipulated them as well as Fox to revive himself using the power of the Krazoa.

• In Star Fox Command, the Emperor Anglar and his Anglar Army are revealed to be bioweapons created by Andross in secret within Venom's acidic oceans.

In particular, the Aparoid Queen is the only final boss in all of the Star Fox series to either not just be Andross again (Star Fox, Star Fox 2, Star Fox 64/Star Fox 64 3D, Star Fox Adventures, Star Fox Zero), nor a creation of his (Star Fox Command).