Slippy’s Uncle Grippy Is the Tom Nook of Star Fox Guard

Star Fox Guard—a game that comes bundled with the upcoming Star Fox Zero—opens by dropping you straight into the game, as a newly-hired defense specialist for for Corneria Precious Metals Ltd., run by Grippy Toad, a mustachioed orange toad with a Texas accent. Grippy tells you with pride about his Aegis Cam security system, without telling you how to use it, and then gets hopping mad when you fail to protect his mining base from incoming robots.

Luckily you are saved by Team Star Fox, with Slippy—who turns out is Grippy's nephew—filling you on the controls after asking if Uncle Grippy even explained how to play. The older toad's response: "Learn by doin', young tadpole, that's what I always say!"

Grippy's laissez-faire attitude towards his workers, dropping them in a sink-or-swim environment without training, would make Tom Nook from Animal Crossing proud. In Animal Crossing, Nook runs the store and gives you the initial loan to purchase your house. As you pay off the house and make additions, Nook increases the mortgage amount while selling you desirable items, creating an incentive for more hustle. His seemingly ruthless capitalist ways have earned him many gamers' ire as the "villain" of Animal Crossing. It's safe to say that, with his industrialist ways, Grippy will be the "villain" of Star Fox Guard.

Video games have critiqued capitalism for quite a long time. Pac-Man has been widely analyzed as a game that's thematically about consumerism, with the character being essentially a living mouth whose only occupation is eating. In the grand scheme of things, it's kind of fitting that this critique has evolved to include the rugged individualist Texas-oil-baron stereotype that Grippy represents. 

It's also fascinating that Grippy's hands-off approach to the business extends to the upgrades. Star Fox Guard is a first-person tower defense game, where robots from an unknown source are trying to shut down the mining-base's cores. You can control one camera (tower) at a single time to destroy the robots. After a while I started to wonder, with all these precious metals being harvested, if Grippy couldn't hire a second defense specialist, if he cares so much about it. 

After you complete a mission, a robot named Re:Bot eats all the scrap left behind by the destroyed robots, which can be used to unlock special missions and buy upgrades to the camera guns. However, it isn't Grippy who provides the robot, but Slippy, who designed him to look like his uncle, a metallic toad that hops around the Pac-Man-like mining base maze and sucks up all the scrap into his gaping maw.

Of course, once you master an area, and take down it's big-bad boss, the company must expand on to the next planet. I found myself wondering how much Grippy's rapid expansion wasn't war profiteering due to the fight against Andross mentioned in the opening scroll. Naturally, Grippy expands the business onto new planets, with new dangers, obstacles, and enemy robot types. Whereas Star Fox proper has certain altruistic motives, in Guard, with Grippy, it seems you are singularly devoted to the prospect of making him money. Like Tom Nook, he's got a business, and he aims to make the most of it. 

Star Fox Guard will release on April 21st. It's being bundled with the disc release of Star Fox Zero, and will be purchasable through the Wii U eShop for $14.99 as a standalone download.