Star Fox Adventures primarily takes place on a planet filled with dinosaurs known simply as "Dinosaur Planet". It would return or be referenced in future games like Star Fox Assault and Star Fox Command, as well as "Star Fox Zero - The Battle Begins", a promotional anime released to commemorate the release of Star Fox Zero, but it would instead be referred to with a different name: "Sauria".

It turns out Rare had always intended Dinosaur Planet's real name to be Sauria, as leaked voice clips from the implied climax of the original Nintendo 64 Dinosaur Planet feature the Krazoa name dropping it as they begin the alignment of the "Majestic Eight" planets to wreak havoc on the universe using the power of their god, the Quan Ata Lachu. An edition of "Ask Uncle Tusk" on Rare's old website revealed Dinosaur Planet's name to be Sauria as well.

Outside of the SNES titles, Star Fox Adventures is the only Star Fox game on a home console to not feature any sort of Japanese voice acting, instead relying on Japanese subtitles for its localization in Japan. This is because Rare preferred to use their in-house staff for voicing characters in their games, rather than having to travel over to London to find professional voice actors.

Since Krystal and Tricky are the only new characters introduced in SFA to reappear in future games such as Star Fox Assault and the Super Smash Bros. series, they are the only Dinosaur Planet/Star Fox Adventures characters to ever have any Japanese voice work done for them, with Krystal being voiced by Teiya Ichiryusai and Tricky being voiced by Hirohiko Kakegawa. Ichiryusai would reprise her role as Krystal in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, with her voice clips being reused for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Shigeru Miyamoto had actually teased the existence of Star Fox Adventures at least an entire year before its actual announcement at E3 2001. In an interview with Miyamoto in a February 2000 issue of 64 Dream (so several months before Dinosaur Planet was revealed at E3 2000 that year), he had mentioned that, while a sequel to Star Fox 64 was not currently in development, he'd like to make a game titled "Star Fox Adventures" for the then-coming GameCube. Similarly, in an interview with Miyamoto at E3 2000, when asked about how he felt about Rare's recently unveiled Dinosaur Planet, he had this to say:



Further interviews reveal Star Fox Adventures' origins indeed actually came from within Nintendo in Kyoto, Japan, even before Rare and Dinosaur Planet were involved. Towards the end of the Nintendo 64's lifecycle, Takaya Imamura, who had created Fox McCloud and had been heavily involved with the series since the first game, had begged Miyamoto to let him work on the Star Fox series again. Miyamoto obliged, but had requested for Imamura to instead create an action-adventure title starring Fox as the main character as opposed to a traditional arcade shooter in the vein of Star Fox on the SNES or Star Fox 64. This led Imamura and other Nintendo staff like Kazuaki Morita to begin experimenting with various ideas, like having Fox run around on-foot and shooting down enemies with a gun.

However, with it being a late-stage N64 title, the project was not making much progress as many of the staff were being pulled away to work on bigger projects for the then-upcoming GameCube such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda. This was when Miyamoto noticed Rare was making their own action-adventure game starring Star Fox-esque characters known as Dinosaur Planet. Impressed by their demo at E3, he and other Nintendo staff arranged a meeting with Rare employees to discuss the prospects of merging their similar projects into one, and from there the game that today would be known as Star Fox Adventures would be born.

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.

Star Fox Adventures began development as Dinosaur Planet, which originally began development as a direct sequel to Diddy Kong Racing, starring Timber the Tiger (who himself was intended as the main character of DKR when it was Pro-Am 64, before Donkey Kong characters were incorporated into it). It was pitched as an adventure/racing hybrid where Timber, equipped with a rucksack, little fingerless gloves, and a baseball cap would go back in time and team up with a younger version of Tricky, a boss from the first DKR. Wizpig, the main antagonist and final boss of the first Diddy Kong Racing, was also involved. It would seem a working title for this iteration of the game was "Dino Island", going by several posts on former Rare employee Ed Bryan's Twitter account.

Eventually it was decided to rework the concept into an entirely new original IP with no story connections to DKR and two new main characters, named Sabre and Krystal, and also make it a full-on action-adventure game directly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. DP/SFA's various racing segments are said to be remnants of the original DKR successor concept, and while he retained the name of the DKR boss (something Rare seems to regret), Tricky would wind up becoming his own distinct character. Several files within DP/SFA's data also mention Timber, obviously a remnant from when he was the star.

Sabre and Krystal were in turn eventually replaced by Fox McCloud as the main playable character when the game was rebranded into what we know today as Star Fox Adventures, though Tricky would remain as his sidekick and Krystal would remain as a main character.

Many fans today recognize Star Fox Adventure's Shopkeeper's name as "Shabunga". However, the game's development team never intended the Shopkeeper character to have a name, even as far back when it was still Dinosaur Planet.

"Shabunga" was initially the name of a cut NPC character from Dinosaur Planet, a mutant creature that Sabre/Fox and Tricky would come across in an area known as Willow Grove, the bridge between SwapStone Hollow (ThornTail Hollow in SFA) and Dragon Rock, which was becoming a strange and mutated land as a result of General Scales' and Drakor's actions within the latter area, which was also mutating its inhabitants. As such, Shabunga, and supposedly other mutants according to the Dinosaur Planet condensed story (though none appear in the leaked December 2000 build) were cast off and sealed away within Willow Grove by the ThornTails that lived in SwapStone Hollow, frightened by their now warped appearances.

This mutant character was said to be an alchemist and also one of the SpellStone guardians, and thus was required to revitalize General Scales' Kamerian Belt (or "Krazoa Star" as Shabunga puts it), to allow Sabre and Tricky to enter the mutated wasteland Dragon Rock unharmed, and would later be required activate the SpellStone acquired from defeating Dragon Rock's boss, the Kamerian Heart.

With Willow Grove removed in the final game, Shabunga would appear in SFA as an enemy type known as the "FireCrawler" that appears in Moon Mountain Pass and also all over Dragon Rock. His role as the SpellStone GateKeeper of Dragon Rock would then be given to a generic quiet ThornTail that resides in ThornTail Hollow.

Curiously, SFA's Nintendo Power guidebook and also official English website would both re-appropriate the mutant's name to the Shopkeeper, claiming his name to be "Shabunga", despite the actual game just merely referring to him as the Shopkeeper. It turns out there's a reason for this: looking at the Japanese localization for Star Fox Adventures, it appears that NCL did indeed repurpose the "Shabunga" name behind Rare's back for the Shopkeeper as he's called that both in-game and also all over its ancillary material. For example, in the Japanese version of SFA, the ThornTail Store is renamed to シャブンガの店 (Shabunga no mise), which translates to Shabunga's Shop in English.

Another notable example is when Fox is talking to the Blue SnowHorn in SnowHorn Wastes; in the English version, the latter has this to say:


Retranslating the Japanese subtitles in the Japanese version of the game, however, reveals:


It would seem that whoever wrote the Nintendo Power SFA guide was given the memo about this.

Dragon Rock, Star Fox Adventures' final SpellStone area, was considerably larger and more complex in earlier versions of the game than in the final release. Both the leaked December 2000 build of Dinosaur Planet and also the E3 2002 kiosk version of Star Fox Adventures show that Dragon Rock featured a slew of additional areas that didn't make the final cut, such as an underground quarry area where Sabre/Fox would have to save the imprisoned EarthWalker from being eaten by a group of creatures known as Skeetlas, and also a large underground mining facility Sabre/Fox could only access by flying the imprisoned CloudRunner to the top of the titular Dragon Rock (a giant tower in SFA) at the center of the map. In SFA's case, Fox would have to solve a puzzle that would involve powering the portal at the back end of the room that would grant him access to Drakor, Dragon Rock's boss.

In the final release, both the underground quarry and the mining facility were removed: Fox simply frees the EarthWalker from a corral on the surface by hitting a switch located nearby the imprisoned HighTop from across the map, and Fox immediately skips to fighting Drakor after being dropped off by the CloudRunner at the top of the center tower. Funny enough, when Fox lands on the platform in Drakor's arena, it bizarrely shows electricity spewing around him, which was a remnant of the portal he was supposed to activate in the cut mining facility segment in order to access the boss.

The SFA dev team admitted on a 2003 Rare Scribes that Dragon Rock was massively scaled back from its intended design due to "approaching deadlines", presumably referring to the impending Microsoft buyout in 2002. It's worth pointing out that the mining facility area can actually be found in the files of the final retail release of SFA and surprisingly in a much more complete state than the kiosk's version, which indicates that the dev team continued working on this area in the final months of development but ran out of time to polish it to their liking.

Rare had originally considered removing the character of Krystal in the transition from Dinosaur Planet to Star Fox Adventures entirely. Former Rare artist Kevin Bayliss recently posted a glimpse at an earlier form of SFA's cutscene sequence notes that shows zero trace of Krystal, instead featuring Fox McCloud in her place in the prologue, riding the CloudRunner onto General Scales' galleon, and eventually arriving at Warlock Mountain (which would become Krazoa Palace in the final game), where he would then communicate with Slippy Toad and General Pepper, the former beaming him the projectile upgrade, obviously filling in for Randorn granting Krystal the projectile spellpage in Dinosaur Planet. It seems an earlier idea Rare had in the transition from DP to SFA was to have Fox crash land his Arwing over Dinosaur Planet, forcing him to traverse on-foot.

Rare would proceed to have multiple meetings with Nintendo's staff in Kyoto, those including Shigeru Miyamoto and Takaya Imamura (the creator of Fox McCloud and godfather of the Star Fox series), to iron out their new story for what would become Star Fox Adventures. Miyamoto and Imamura requested for Krystal to remain in the game, feeling it'd be a waste to scrap her entirely, and Imamura would help redesign her to fit better aesthetically alongside the main Star Fox cast. According to Imamura, his redesign of Krystal was inspired by Vampirella, a Warren Publishing comic book character known for wearing risqué outfits. Reportedly, this was because he and Miyamoto wanted to add sex appeal to the Star Fox franchise, as the latter wanted the series to have mature elements wherever possible.

Another old piece of SFA concept art Kevin Bayliss posted features a To Do list with one of the bullet point saying "We use Krystal again". This was obviously after one of the meetings the DP/SFA dev team had with Miyamoto, Imamura, etc in Kyoto.

Since Star Fox Adventures was in development at the same time as Melee, the cast of Adventures would voice Fox (Steve Malpass), Falco (Ben Cullum), and Peppy and Slippy (Chris Seavor) within the English versions of the Corneria and Venom stages in Super Smash Bros. Melee, despite both stages being based on Star Fox 64.

Concept artwork for the ShopKeeper, Shabunga, shows him to be more corpulent than compared to how he appears in the final game.

There is evidence in the game's data that General Scales was meant to have a full battle with both Fox and Falco, but it was cut from the final game.

Star Fox Adventures was at one point called "Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet". This name referenced both original incarnations of the game, Rare's "Dinosaur Planet" and also Nintendo EAD's "Star Fox Adventures" that was in development around the same time; both ended up being merged into the same project, hence the original title, though sometime before release, the "Dinosaur Planet" subtitle was dropped, leaving the final game named as just Star Fox Adventures.

Curiously, when looking at Star Fox Adventures save data on a GCN memory card through the Wii, it actually includes its original "Dinosaur Planet" subtitle, as well as using the Star Fox emblem present in the beta logo for the save data icon. This was not the case in the GameCube's data card management menu.

Star Fox Adventures was originally a game called "Dinosaur Planet" and was unrelated to the Star Fox series. The game featured Krystal as the main protagonist and was to be for the Nintendo 64.

When Shigeru Miyamoto noticed the similarities of the characters to Star Fox, he asked Rare if they could change it, resulting in Star Fox Adventures.