Nintendo has a villain problem. Not in the sense that they have villains causing issues in their company (quite the contrary in my opinion), but they have a massive issue with recycling the same tired villains time and time again in their mainline series.
If you're a fan of franchise media like comic books, movie series, or video games, then you're likely used to villains returning against all odds to somehow thwart the heroes efforts or to enact their evil plan to conquer the country, world, galaxy, universe, etc. It's not uncommon for media series to defeat, kill or otherwise conquer a villain only for momentary peace before another takes their place, or for the villain to retreat only to rise again, stronger than ever before, bringing a sequel along with them. How many times has Batman defeated the Joker?
I think, for better or for worse, that's a part of the craft - good villains are just as impactful and memorable as good heroes, and people want to learn more about them, see them develop, and sometimes just see what new powers or technologies they'll develop to enable their ambitions. Where I draw the line is when there's only one damn person that the protagonists are allowed to fight!
This passion of mine came fully to heat with the release of Nintendo's old/new game, Star Fox (2026), a remake of Star Fox 64, one of my top 5 games of all time, which itself is a remake (or reimagining) of Star Fox for the Super Nintendo. It's worth noting that if you look at all of the Star Fox games in a row, you have Star Fox, Star Fox 2 (first officially released on the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017) Star Fox 64, Star Fox Adventures, Star Fox Assault, Star Fox Command, Star Fox Zero, and now Star Fox (2026). Of these titles, 5 of them tell the tell of team Star Fox in their rescue of the Lylat System from the evil Dr. Andross's plans for conquest. In Star Fox Adventures, Andross is tacked on as a deus-ex-machina final boss, and the ultimate villain of Star Fox Command are a race of fish bio-engineered by Andross himself, leaving Assault as the only game in the franchise that separates itself from Andross and his big brain's inventions.
As I mentioned earlier, Star Fox 64 is a game beloved to me; I would play with friends on sleepovers in elementary school through high school, and it stayed with me in college through Project 64, through my bachelor years on Switch Online, and I recently just acquired a new used cartridge for my Analogue 3D, which occupies the top shelf below my television in the living room today. I believe SF64 is a perfect game that has aged perfectly - there is little that I can find to criticize in its direction and decisions, and I'm endlessly entertained by having multiple branches to navigate across the Lylat System on my way to Venom to melt Andross or his Robo-self for the hundredth time. By all means I should be ecstatic that it's being re-envisioned for the modern console, with expanded story and new "high-quality" voice acting (which I find deplorable, but that's for another opinion piece). However I cannot help but be disappointed as Nintendo delivers us a nearly 1:1 remake of a game that plays as good today in comparison to the best of games as it did in 1997 on my basement's old CRT TV.
Why remake a game that has been remade 4 times already? Why can't Nintendo just move on from the Lylat Wars and give us a new conflict with a new force to rally against, and instead throws us once more against Andross and his animal cronies? This is when I realized: Andross' defeat in Star Fox 64 was absolute, or should have been (seriously, how did he come back in Adventures? That game sucks), and Nintendo doesn't know how to introduce new villains. For the same reasons Mario only fights Bowser, and Link only fights Ganondorf, Fox McCloud is fated only to battle Andross: the ages old conflict between fox and monkey.
The same way Valve can't figure out how to make a three-quel, Nintendo can't figure out how to introduce a new villain. At least Mario and Zelda are completely uninterested in canon, but Fox and the crew are characters that develop, grow, and change as the stories go on. I'd love to consider Star Fox Adventures to be non-canon, but we see Crystal take Peppy's place on the team in Star Fox Assault, then the hyper-dramatic fallout and reunion of the team in Star Fox Command, to different ends depending on your route (I found Star Fox Command to be incredibly underrated - it's probably my third favorite behind Assault and 64). If you keep it to the mainline entries of these series, there is never a new villain introduced. Only in the side-titles like the Mario RPGs, or the incredible Capcom-produced Game Boy Zelda games do we see new villains from origins outside of the standard Bowser or Ganondorf final boss fights, and I think the series' are worse for it, Zelda in particular.
I get it for Mario - the games have no real "story," just that Mario and his merry band of technicolor goobers must cross a grand Point "A" to Point "Z" journey to have a final culminating battle against Bowser and whatever new power he got his hands on. It's very primordial, like watching Superman fight against Lex Luthor for the umpteenth time only this time he has a Kryptonite gun instead of darts or something. At least Superman has a relatively round roster of arch-nemeses, whereas Mario only has Bowser. But because Mario games only use plot as a vehicle for the game to happen, it's easy to forgive and the endings usually result in return to status quo more than any meaningful change.
Zelda solves this problem differently: while being heavily story driven, they've written a narrative of repetition and reincarnation. Ganon[dorf] is always hungry for power no matter the age he's born into, and strikes against Hyrule to claim it. Zelda, always the princess (even when she's not - looking at you, Windwaker), must connect with and guide the hero Link toward his destiny of defeating Ganon up until she gets captured at whichever point in the story at which time Link then quests to save her and Hyrule both. The important loophole is that it's always a different Ganon, a different Zelda, a different Link, born into ages so distant from one-another that the prior cycle is nothing but a legend. I can't think of any games wherein Link immediately fights the same Ganon for the second time, though one could potentially argue Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, though that's a whole other can of worms differentiating Calamity Ganon from Ganondorf.
Even exploring outside the key Nintendo franchises, 2025's Donkey Kong Bananza fell back on Donkey Kong's old foil King K. Rool, despite carrying the majority of the narrative with a new villain in Void Kong. I'm proud to say that my beloved First Lady of Gaming Samus Aran, despite her arch-nemesis Ridley, faces different threats across all of her games. A proper comparison to Star Fox, Metroid introduces Mother Brain as the antagonist of the first game, only to have her return as the final boss of Super Metroid, and never again. Samus battles metroids, X-parasites, Dark Samus, and the Chozo Warlord Raven Beak across her adventures, which loosely develop a narrative that carries from one game to the next despite a messy canon of side-quels along the way.
What I think is the greatest shame, is that I found the antagonist force of Star Fox Assault to be an excellent and compelling new villain. The Aparoids, a insectoid faction of space robots with the ability to assimilate machines and organic life into their hivemind was fascinating. We got to directly see the consequences of their infestation through several characters from the series, as they absorbed Pigma Dengar and General Pepper, both to be used as weapons against Fox and his team. Despite the gameplay somewhat missing the mark (I wasn't a fan of the "on-foot" segments of this one) I think Nintendo put a strong and intimidating foe into place, with clear motivations that were simple enough to get the plot moving forward. I don't know if the game didn't meet their sales expectations, or they just had trouble finding a clear path forward, but Star Fox Command, the next game in the series, took us straight back to Andross' homeworld of Venom to deal with more of his bullshit.
I think it's easy to let Nintendo off the hook because nobody should be going to the Nintendo Switch for a moving, gripping storyline. If I wanted to have my ideals challenged and my paradigms shift, I'm looking for a NieR: Automata, or a Persona 5, or even a God of War since they rebooted that one. For Nintendo games, there just needs to be enough plot for the game to have an excuse to take to you to the next level, but since Star Fox from the first true sequel of Star Fox Adventures (again, yuck), it set the precedent that these are characters that require some amount of development and linearity.
What if we looked at this from the other direction? Is there a way Nintendo can continue to reintroduce Andross at each future installment and have it make sense without taking away from the impact of the ending of Star Fox 64? I imagine this would look something like Mega Man, which has its own issues with returning villains. I respect nothing less in media than the "that was just a clone" excuse, most frequently seen in Marvel Comics, but Andross is a brilliant, genius scientist. It's not unreasonable to assume he could, like Rick from Rick & Morty, have endless back-up clones or androids in his likeness that he could transfer his consciousness to upon his demise. While this could logistically work, then you have to deal with a true "here-we-go-again" from the cast and their voice actors. "Dr. Andross, time to blow your brain up for the fifth time!" Mario doesn't have the privilege to voice his thoughts, or else we might hear something similar against Bowser when they clash in (a volcano/space/the moon/an archipelago/a castle/etc.).
What we truly want to avoid is a situation from Star Fox's inspiration, so let's look outside of video games for a truly hated example of how a returning villain can completely alienate the audience of a beloved franchise: "Somehow, Palpatine returned." Given that Star Fox is a clear homage to Star Wars, I find the comparison quite ironic, but at least Star Fox did it first.
The sequel trilogy of Star Wars sucks bad, all three of them, you won't convince me otherwise. I believe Disney and Lucasfilm also believe the sequel trilogy of Star Wars sucks bad, or else why would they try and desperately recapture a mote of nostalgia by bringing Emperor fucking Palpatine back from certain death in Episode Nine, completely invalidating the point of the first 6 movies wherein they introduced a prophecy and brought it to fruition when Anakin chucks the fella into a giant endless space tube. By recycling this tired villain, they completely gave up on maintaining any self-respect and proved that the ones who make decisions at Lucasfilm can't recapture the lightning that was the original trilogy. If Nintendo chooses, when they inevitably try a sequel to this new rebooted Star Fox, to bring Dr. Andross back, I just hope they have a damn good reason for it and not just convenient plot magic that happens offscreen.
My hope is that Nintendo is investing in a team that can carry Star Fox into a golden age. I would love for Star Fox (2026) to smash all sales expectations and spawn a billion little Star Kits (that's a baby fox) and keep feeding me a steady IV drip of on-rails shooters until I die of old age on Mars in the year 2426. Forgive me if I can't convince myself that it'll happen, however, after watching Nintendo hit Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V on the same villains in their most successful franchises year, after year, after year.
Want to prove me wrong? Would love to hear your examples of fresh hot first-party Nintendo villains in the NoGameOvers Discord channel.
"Sorry to jet, but I'm in a hurry."