Video Game / F-Zero GX

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F-Zero GX is a 2003 racing game published by Nintendo and the fourth game in the F-Zero series. It was developed by Sega's development division Amusement Vision, a predecessor to Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.

Nintendo made an atypical deal to make F-Zero GX happen. It worked with Sega and Namco (currently Bandai Namco Holdings) to develop the Triforce, an arcade board based on Nintendo GameCube and the same platform Mario Kart Arcade GP was on. Whereas Mario Kart Arcade GP was an arcade exclusive, it released both on GameCube (F-Zero GX) and arcade (F-Zero AX), both versions almost identical to each other due to similar architectures. In addition, as already mentioned, GX was developed by Sega, the first major collaboration between Nintendo and Sega after the latter became a third-party developer. It was co-produced by Toshihiro Nagoshi, future designer of the Like a Dragon series.

In terms of gameplay, at its heart, it is similar to the previous home console game, F-Zero X, reinstating almost all of the major systems. The story mode is introduced, where you follow Captain Falcon's through 9 chapter missions. Other features include Garage, a Design-It-Yourself Equipment mode, and F-Zero Shop that sells unlockable characters and other items. You can move save data between GX and AX to get an Old Save Bonus.

For the sake of convenience, examples in the page cover GX and will only mention AX when necessary.

F-Zero GX contains examples of:

• 10-Minute Retirement: Implied. Captain Falcon retired from racing after winning F-Zero X (seen by beating a Grand Prix as him on Master difficulty), yet he's back in the driver's seat yet again with no explanation to compete in F-Zero GX.
• Absurdly Short Level: Sonic Oval (Mute City) is a simple circle track that only takes 20 seconds to complete a lap without trying, with a total of one minute for full course. Perhaps because of this, it is not included in any Grand Prix cup.
• Affably Evil: Black Shadow in brief flashes: he says the below line as politely and calmly as could be.
  Black Shadow: Falcon, you've come to die? I needn't have wasted time looking for you then.
• All Amazons Want Hercules: Jody Summer may or may not have a crush on Captain Falcon.
• All Love Is Unrequited: John Tanaka harbors a crush on Jody Summer, who (if John's bonus video is anything to go by) is in love with Captain Falcon.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The "Phantom Road" venue, which appears as both the site of the final GX circuit (the fearsome "Slim-Line Slits") and the final chapter of Story Mode where Captain Falcon is challenged to defeat the Creators' best time around their course. Set in what can only be described as a "digital dimension" the background is a constantly color-shifting aura with various shapes phasing in and out of the scenery.
• Amazonian Beauty: While Jody Summer and Kate Alen have their physiques scaled down, Mrs. Arrow is emphasized as one, as her bonus video is a bodybuilding contest that values her assets.
• Art Evolution: GameCube allowed the game to be a lot more expressive in the graphics F-Zero X was lacking of. It's best seen in backgrounds, which have unique biomes like desert, ocean, space and such.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Using the custom machine maker to make a machine with A-rank in body (making it extremely durable), boost (huge punch of speed from the boost), and grip (no loss of speed when cornering) may seem like the logically best idea given that those three stats along with machine weight are the only practical information shown in machine select... until you try the machine out for yourself, and discover that your "A-A-A" machine handles and accelerates like a giant boulder. The customization interface in fact has a four-point radar graph detailing additional details about your machine's performance, and the parts that optimize aspects of this radar are not necessarily ones that have the best body/boost/grip rating.
• Badass Boast:
  • Many characters get this in their post-race interviews.
  • Deathborn gets a sinister (and extremely long) one in the penultimate chapter of Story Mode. Falcon then one-ups everyone when he tells off the creators of his universe.
    Deathborn: Falcon, shall I tell you something before you die? Dark and Light — the two great forces which make up our universe. These two forces are condensed in each of our belts. Didn't you know? At the moment when these forces become one — it is possible to seize that power. Then, I can turn this whole galaxy into a pile of ashes in an INSTANT! How I've waited for this moment! The world will fall into total darkness.
    Captain Falcon: Not if I can help it. I'll destroy you yet!
  • Captain Falcon finds the suggestion that even the lords of all creation can best him on the track absolutely ridiculous. And to back his bravado, he wins.
    Captain Falcon: Come off it... You think YOU can beat ME? NO WAY!
• Big "NO!": Deathborn pulls one during his Villainous Breakdown after Captain Falcon wins against him. He then drives off of the course and blows up in a sea of lava.
  Deathborn: AAAAAAaaaaaaargh! No, it can't be! How can I lose!? Nooooooooooooo!
• The Big Race: Most of the Story Mode chapters involves racing by nature, but the Grand Prix is the standout example, acting like the game's equivalent of a Climax Boss.
• Bland-Name Product: Captain Falcon's bonus video features a speeding locomotive belonging to Amtrain.
• Blood Knight: The lyrics to Captain Falcon's theme song in F-Zero GX seems to be from the point of view of one who idolizes Captain Falcon.
• Boring, but Practical: The Astro Robin has the best acceleration and is unusually sturdy, making it very easy to drive.
• Bowdlerize: Several F-Zero TV interviews were modified or outright censored in western releases of GX for various reasons, such as Digi-Boy espousing atheist beliefs, Black Shadow threatening to send Captain Falcon to hell, Baba mentioning dressing in drag, and Pico making a reference to Superman.
• Butt-Monkey: Samurai Goroh iscaught in the explosion of his Fire Stingray, is booed by the crowd at the GP, and few racers appear to like him (outside of his son and Princia, who has oddly taken a fancy to him).
• The Cameo: Port Town now has a giant rotating R.O.B. statue.
• Car Fu: The side attack and spin attack return from X, allowing racers to defend themselves from rival attacks or attack said rivals and potentially force them to retire.
• Casino Park: Casino Palace (called "Vegas Palace" in Japan) tracks all happen in a giant casino, and if Story Mode is to be believed, betting races are organized inside.
• Cast from Hit Points: The game also brings back Boost Power from X, where racers can sacrifice some of their health for a burst of speed.
• Character-Specific Dialogue: If the player gets first place in the Grand Prix, the character will be reviewed by Mr. Zero on F-Zero TV, where he will ask the racer a question. Most of the questions are shared by every racer, but on the Master Class difficulty, Mr. Zero can ask questions that are specific to individual racers.
• Classic Cheat Code: Remixes of the original "Mute City" and "Big Blue" become available when you type certain button combinations on F-Zero Shop.
• Color-Coded Stones: The four racing cups are Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald and Diamond (Red, Blue, Green and a pale Yellow respectively). AX Cup is the only exception, its logo being some kind of dark matter-esque sphere.
• Company Cross-References: When Captain Falcon is roped into participating in a race by Silver Neelsen, he competes under the name "Famicom".
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: GX is mostly fair in GP Mode, at least on the lower three difficulties, and even at the hardest level, it's still beatable if you know what you're doing. Story Mode, on the other hand, is an experiment in ultimate insanity. The computer opponents go faster than a mass-accelerator round, turn on a dime, have extra Hit Points (which translates to extra speed, since your speed boost is Cast from Hit Points) and never crash, unless you force them, which sometimes doesn't work. Because it's a Story Mode, you're required to play Captain Falcon, the Jack of All Stats whose handling characteristics may or may not be anything like those of the vehicles you're good at.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: According to this fan guide, a lot of the machine stats given in-game or in the manual do not accurately reflect how the racers perform. The stats might have been correct when they were first given in X, but it appears the Grandfather Clause didn't reach the actual gameplay aspect.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The interviewer at the end of Grand Prix cup is Mr. Zero, who first appeared in the comic that came with F-Zero (1990).
  • The Grand Prix of the last game is referred to as "F-Zero X", the same way it was in the manual of F-Zero X.
  • A sly one. Chapter 3 in the Story Mode of GX sees Falcon, in a goofy disguise and under the alias of "Famicom", entering a bet race at the behest of Silver. Falcon's odds in that race are 2560:1. 2560 is, canonically speaking, the year that the original F-Zero took place.
• Controllable Helplessness: In Story Mode's Chapter 6, you must complete the course without letting your speed fall below a certain threshold due to a bomb being strapped onto Captain Falcon's machine. If you fall below this speed, a 3-second countdown begins. Unless you are very close to the finish, there's nothing you can do to prevent the Blue Falcon from turning into barbeque charcoal.
• Cowardly Lion: While he's scared of some of the competitors he has to interview, the fans give Mr. Zero his due, as it takes guts to even be in the same room with guys like that. In-Universe, Black Shadow compliments Mr. Zero on having the courage to ask him for his autograph or requesting that he unmask, going as far as to inquire, "You want to come work for me?", for the former, or that it's brave of him to even ask the latter.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The manual claims Captain Falcon was the winner in F-Zero X, rendering other character endings non-canon.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Played straight with Deathborn, who is believed to have had his humanity eroded by the tinkerings of The Creators. Their dialogue implies that they were going to rip out Captain Falcon's soul if they won and transform him into Deathborn's successor.
• Cyber Punk Is Techno: In a toss-up from X's rock-heavy soundtrack, the majority of the songs found in GX are techno, electronic rock and industrial metal.
• Damsel in Distress: Jody becomes one in Chapter 5 of Story Mode.
• Deadly Walls: Some scenery objects will cause your machine to explode instantaneously upon contact... even if you're only going 10 km/h.
• Death Mountain: Red Canyon is dangerous for multiple reasons: the tight track which is easy to fall of from the right, the mountain itself you must not collide in on the left, and the falling rocks that slow you down or downright crush you.
• Demoted to Extra: Since GX cups are relegated to five courses each, AX's Sonic Oval got this treatment, dropped from the AX Cup and can only be played in the other game modes.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: GX modified the side tackle significantly, removing the speed penalty and changing the control input. This resulted in it being both easier to spam and easier to toss yourself over the edge with.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In the final Story mission of GX, you must defeat the Creators of the entire universe (who seem to be evil)... in a F-Zero race, of course.
• Double Unlock: Except for the Diamond Cup, every unlockable is not earned automatically after fullfilling the proper condition: instead, it only becomes available in the shop and must be bought for a certain number of tickets to "actually" be playable.
• Dramatic Wind: For some reason, most of the cape-wearing characters get it at the Settings screen.
• Eternal Engine: Lightning tracks are set on some kind of structure which seems to be powered by the perpetual lightning.
• Fat Bastard: Alongside the unpleasant at worst Samurai Goroh, this game introduces Don Genie, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who's involved in notorious criminal activities.
• Fiction 500:
  • Black Shadow is shown to have power in the underground, and he remarks that the prize money earned from winning the F-Zero GP (one billion space credits) is a paltry sum.
  • Don Genie fits, considering that he's extremely rich due to his position as the head mogul of an universal trading system. He also happens to be a narcissistic Corrupt Corporate Executive who illegally sells energy resources and weapons and is believed to have ties to Black Shadow. He's apparently so rich that whenever he's arrested, he gets off scot-free by paying an exorbitantly large fee that might as well be nothing to him.
• Final Boss, New Dimension: Of a sort, since both the Diamond cup and Chapter 9 of Story Mode end in the "Phantom Road" environment, which seems to be an illusion of "the Creators".
• Gainax Ending: A lot of character endings in Grand Prix are nonsensical, dancing or doing other ludicrous things without explanation of what's going on.
• Gangbangers: The Bloody Chain gang led by Michael Chain tries to run Captain Falcon off the road in Chapter 4 of Story Mode.
• Gemstone Motifs: The name of (most of) the cups in F-Zero GX are named after gemstones: Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, and Diamond, all with their respective gemstones in their logo. Then there's AX Cup as the odd one out, which has a dark matter-esque sphere in place of a gemstone.
• Generation Xerox: A downplayed example: Dai Goroh very much takes after his father, to the point that he shares his dad's rivalry with Captain Falcon, but not in all respects; his Silver Rat was modeled after Antonio Guster's Green Panther, and Dai plans to spend the money on himself if he wins the F-Zero GP.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere:
  • Michael Chain and his gang suddenly decide to antagonize Captain Falcon in Chapter 4 of Story Mode for no adequately explained reason.
  • After defeating Deathborn, the Creators, who had absolutely zero foreshadowing before that point, suddenly show up inside Falcon's champion belt and challenge him for a final race in another dimension.
• The Ghost: Spade is the only character never seen in the cockpit of his machine. Averted however, as he is seen inside of the cockpits of the custom machines.
• Go Fast or Go Boom: In Chapter 6 of F-Zero GX, "Black Shadow's Trap", Blood Falcon attaches a bomb to the Blue Falcon that'll detonate if Captain Falcon's speed drops below a certain limit, which varies based on the difficulty level. On Normal difficulty, the speed limit is 700 km/h, on Hard, it's 750, and on Very Hard, it's 800. Regardless, the chapter requires the player to complete the course without letting their speed drop to the specified level, otherwise the Blue Falcon will explode, instantly failing the mission.
• Goofy Print Underwear: The bonus videos show that some characters wear these:
  • Captain Falcon is revealed to wear red polka dots underwear when his pants crack.
  • In their laundromat videos, Antonio Guster wears camouflage underwear while Blood Falcon wears pink with some sort of pattern.
• Gratuitous Disco Sequence: In his bonus video, James McCloud tries a somersault when he should have done a barrel roll.
• Have a Nice Death: "OFF COURSE! RETIRE" and "BROKEN DOWN! RETIRE."
• I Don't Know Mortal Kombat: In Draq's bonus video, he's playing the game itself and suffers a humiliating defeat. See Painting the Medium below.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: However, in Draq's post-win interview, he reveals he trained for the race by playing the F-Zero computer game.
• I Am the Trope:
  Super Arrow: "I am Champion! I am Justice! I am SUPER ARROW!"
• Idle Animation: Each character was given three in the Settings screen: a basic standing pose, as well as two other character-specific actions that they'd break into from time to time.
• Image Song: Every character gets one, and quite a few have lyrics. Unfortunately, they only ever show up in the character profiles and during replays.
• Improbable Age: Digi-Boy, Princia, Lily and Dai Goroh are all minors, and yet are allowed to race in this incredibly deadly sport that even the most well-trained adults have trouble surviving. Digi-Boy himself might be the worst case since he's also an university student (despite being only 8).
• Lethal Lava Land: Fire Field takes this to the logical extreme, where you actually race inside the outer crust of the planet.
• Level 1 Music Represents: Metal covers of both "Mute City" and "Big Blue" themes are unlockable via classic cheat codes as alternate soundtracks.
• The Lost Woods: Green Plant is closer to a giant greenhouse.
• Mad Scientist: Zoda appears to be one as his bonus video shows him constructing a version of Mr. EAD in his image while letting out a mad fit of laughter. Not to mention that he's inside a creepy-looking lab while Dramatic Thunder brings his creation to life in a manner similar to that of Frankenstein's monster.
• Male Gaze:
  • If you're playing as Jody, she turns around to show off her ass once you confirm your speed setting.
  • The endings for Mrs. Arrow and Princia has the camera focus on their lovely assets and fine-looking rears a decent chunk of the time.
• The Man Behind the Man: It's revealed that Black Shadow works for Deathborn, and it's implied that [[spoilers:the Creators made Deathborn into what he is today.
• Marathon Level: Most of the tracks from the AX Cup suffer from this. This makes sense as it helps extend the playtime on the arcade machines. The most notable exception is Sonic Oval, but it isn't a part of the AX Cup Grand Prix, unfortunately.
• Metropolis Level: Alongside the traditional Mute City, there is Aeropolis, an aetherial megapolis managed by a supercomputer.
• Model Museum: GX allows you to admire the machine of every racer you have bought in the in-game store.
• Modesty Towel: Lily Flyer's bonus video in GX has her clad in a towel as she washes all her clothes at a laundromat.
• Nerf: In X, you get an extra life for every five opponents you destroy in a single race. In this game, you now only get it for the first five opponents, not for 10, 15, etc.
• No Fair Cheating: If the game detects that you are taking a Sequence Breaking shortcut, your machine will spontaneously combust, resulting in an immediate Retire. If Retire is disabled, you'll be merely set back by a flying saucer (the same saucer that hoists you back on the track if you go off-course).
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Fire Field is set in an abandoned mine close to the core of a dangerous fiery planet. In fact, many of the courses in the Diamond Cup qualify, since they mostly lack guardrails and are thus incredibly perilous to navigate.
  • Trident is notable for having long narrow roads with no guardrails on either side.
  • The Outer Space track takes place right in the middle of a meteor shower. Luckily, the space station features a force field to prevent the meteors from becoming a stage hazard.
• Non-Indicative Name: Unlike in X where it determines how well the machine avoids sliding on corners, the "Grip" stat determines how much speed the machine loses when turning. For example, the Fat Shark with its E-rank grip slows down to comparatively turtle speeds on gentle curves, but the Hyper Speeder with its A-rank grip doesn't lose a single kilometer per hour of speed when it's turning as hard as possible without sliding.
• Old Save Bonus: Plugging your GameCube memory card into AX unlocks the AX courses in GX immediately, instead of having to beat all four Cups on Master difficulty. If you created a license card in AX, you can purchase racers in GX, which normally requires beating story mode chapters on Very Hard difficulty.
• One Game for the Price of Two: GX was released alongside an arcade counterpart, AX, which contained a slot for you to plug in your GCN save card. Doing so would allow you to unlock AX's tracks and vehicles, plus components for the Create-A-Car function, on your save.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, AX/GXactually features two "Dais", Goroh's son and one of the Shinar triplets.
• Painting the Medium: In Draq's bonus video, he gets so frustrated when he loses to the other racers that he punches the screen. It's then revealed that he's playing a video game of F-Zero and is ticked off by the computer. We don't blame him.
• Palmtree Panic: Big Blue looks like a planetary resort.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In Chapter 3 of Story Mode, Captain Falcon is goaded by Silver Neelsen into entering a bet race as a supposed new challenger. Apparently, a jester mask, a cape, and registering under the name "Famicom" are all that's needed to avoid being recognized as Falcon by people who have raced with him before (Bio Rex and Dr. Clash even saw him put the disguise on) and to heavily skew the calculated odds to win Silver a fortune, never mind that Falcon races in his completely unmodified Blue Falcon.
• Port Town: The trope namer comes back, displayed as a space airport where flying airships trade merchandises, and where a giant R.O.B. apparently helps with maintenance.
• Racing Ghost: Both figuratively and literally with the Creators.
• Phantom Zone: Phantom Road, which is also used in an altered form for the final chapter of Story Mode.
• Planet Heck: Deathborn's underworld racetrack from Chapter 8.
• Recurring Riff: Blood Falcon, Black Shadow and Deathborn have the same sinister voice (saying mostly the same things) in their theme songs.
• Robot Buddy: QQQ to Phoenix, Speed Bird to Super Arrow, John Tanaka's small drone.
• Scenery Porn: All the tracks display a beautiful scenery and the game still runs at 60 FPS.
• Shout-Out:
  • A certain R.O.B has a cameo as a gigantic version of himself in Port Town.
  • In the Pilot Profiles section, the vehicle information for the Blood Hawk notes that its two engines pilfered from the Blue Falcon during the big crash four years ago are model BF2001, whereas the four used by the Blue Falcon are model BF2003. In 2001, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity was released; GX came out in 2003.
  • As far as additional Sega shout-outs in GX are concerned, Zoda's pilot video shows his own Zoda-themed version of Mr. EAD sporting Eggman's shades, while Billy's belt buckle depicts AiAi.
  • In Story Mode, Captain Falcon enters a bet race under the alias of Famicom.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: There are four five-star rated courses in GX (the highest ranking of difficulty) — Big Blue: Ordeal, Phantom Road: Slim-Line Slits, Lightning: Thunder Road, and Green Plant: Spiral. Of them you could really only argue that Slim-Line Slits actually deserves such a steep rating as the other three are downright tame by comparison (the only thing resembling difficulty any of them feature seems to be their length). Spiral does have a few obstacles (like slip zones) but nothing that will actually ruin your race while the other two are vanilla as ice cream (wide roads that are fully railed the entire race with nothing to really watch out for). Slim-Line Slits, on the other hand, is about as ruthless and disregards racer safety as much as you'd probably expect for such a high rating (for instance all the pit zones are located right before an unprotected dropoff). To put this in perspective the other Big Blue circuit, Drift Highway, only pulls a two-star rating yet trying to place first in this race compared to Ordeal is like night and day. It's the four-star courses like Mute City: Serial Gaps or Fire Field: Undulation that will likely test your mettle with the pedal.
• Sequel Escalation: GX raises the maximum speed the vehicles can reach to ridiculously awesome levels.
• Series Continuity Error: During Chapter 7 of Story Mode, Black Shadow is surprised to see that Captain Falcon is still alive, but it really shouldn't be too surprising since the Blue Falcon, the machine that he attempted to blow up in the previous chapter, is sitting right there in front of Black Bull.
• Serious Business: The titular races and the vehicles used seem to be how all the villains attack Falcon in Story Mode. It helps that there is a massive amount of prize money involved, though.
  • Black Shadow is explicitly stated to want to blow Captain Falcon up in a race, so that his thousands of adoring fans can watch him die.
  • To quote the original F-Zero's manual, winning a race means "earning the highest honor that could be bestowed upon anyone in the Universe". Now that's Serious Business.
  • GX's Story Mode attempts to justify this as the main world and Underworld's championship belts hold the essences of light and darkness. When combined, they possess enough power to turn its wearer into a god and destroy the universe. Of course, that was just a rumor made up by the Creators to cause chaos and fighting for their entertainment.
• Shark Tunnel: Both Big Blue tracks add one to show the underwater life of this oceanic planet.
• Shifting Sand Land: The two Sand Ocean tracks show how harsh this planet is, even adding Sand Worms in the background.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: While Black Shadow presumably wants to take over the universe, Deathborn wants to destroy it.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Story Mode features Samurai Goroh, Michael Chain, Black Shadow (and Blood Falcon), Deathborn and the Creators as antagonists, in this very order.
• Space Elevator: Cosmo Terminal is supposed to be one, but it's still unfinished for its actual purpose of transporting civilians, so a racing course was put there so it didn't end up as a waste of money for whoever invested on the idea.
• Space Zone: The Outer Space course is located in the middle of a meteor shower.
• Spirited Competitor: Several racers come across as this, according to their post-GP interviews. Quite a few refuse the prize money and/or give it away to charity, and others enjoy the challenge of the races and comment on trying to uphold the glory of the sport.
• Sultry Belly Dancer: Princia wears suitable attire and invokes a bit of it at the Settings screen before a race and during her ending.
• Super Title 64 Advance: A downplayed example: the game is titled GX on GameCube and AX on Arcade.
• Time Police: Phoenix has come from the 29th century to prevent some unspecified "disaster", but how it ties into the F-Zero Grand Prix is never explained. Phoenix doesn't even hide the fact that he's from the future, despite refusing to tell his audience any details about said timeline. His Robot Buddy QQQ is actually his Time Machine, but can't return the pair to the future until his A.I. is repaired.
• Transformation Sequence: Mighty Gazelle's bonus video in GX involves an epic transformation sequence into a moped.
• Truce Zone: The Bet Race Diner in Mute City is this. Many a racer converges here to drink, chat, and race. Even foes like the Arrows and Zoda are shown to be somewhat more amiable towards one another here. It's a general consensus that this is one of the best scenes of the games, as it gives a brief glimpse of life off of the track.
• Unexplained Accent: Characters like Princia and Phoenix come across as being British for no reason whatsoever.
  • Phoenix actually sounds more like he is from Australia at times, though since it sounded like a fake accent, that could've been the actor slipping up.
  • As Magica is a desert kingdom, Princia's accent might allude to Middle Eastern lands once under British rule.
• Unimpressive Progress Reveal: Baba's character video is made up of several of these. First, we see him jump into the air, apparently leaping a great distance, only to then reveal he hopped over a small puddle of water. Next, we see him scale a cliff, only to zoom out and see the "cliff" is barely taller than he is. Finally, we see him holding up a boulder using only his finger, only to zoom out to show that the boulder is being held up by a crane.
• Un-Reboot: The game ignores the Soft Reboot of F-Zero: Maximum Velocity and brings back the original cast again.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Done twice: Players are set up to believe that the Underworld will be the last race in Story Mode, only to play the final chapter on an ethereal racetrack against what is essentially F-Zero's God.
• Violation of Common Sense: The game has a quirk in its thrust physics in that once you go above your machine's speed limit, releasing the throttle causes your machine to decelerate more slowly than if you keep the throttle on.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Samurai Goroh in Chapter 2 of Story Mode. If you don't learn how to exploit his Rubber-Band A.I., he will always zip past you at the end and win.
• Watch It Stoned: Dr. Stewart, Jody, and Princia's bonus movies are essentially acid-trips. The first must be seen to believed.
• Wings Do Nothing: Phoenix's Rainbow Phoenix has wings that spread when boosting, but they're just for show. Same goes for the custom machines with wings... unless you're space flying.
• World of Ham: No one moves around like a normal person would, especially in the cutscenes.
• You Don't Look Like You: Since the in-game models in GX were developed by a team separate from the team responsible for the renders in each character's bonus movie and Story Mode in GX, quite a few racers look a tad bit different between the two mediums.
• You Have Failed Me: After Black Shadow loses the Grand Prix to Falcon, Deathborn kills him with an Agony Beam in front of everyone.
• Younger Than They Look:
  • "Digi-Boy" is 8, but he's taller and looks more mature than the 10 year old Dai Goroh.
  • Princia Ramode is 16, but she looks like she's in her early twenties.
• Your Size May Vary: Gomar & Shioh, as well as Dai San Gen shrink inside the cockpit when piloting an original machine, due to their machines having more than one for each racer.