Humans are, at least in some groups, a controversial species with regard to Star Fox games. It's not that people don't like human characters. Rather, they just want to keep humans out of an otherwise all animal-character universe. And so far, that's MOSTLY been the case.

We all know about Starlink and how many humans appear in that game. Sure, it's technically a spin-off game, but there they are: humans along side many Star Fox characters.

Then, there's a close association with several characters and scenarios between the Star Fox and F-Zero universes. However, these are homages. No actual characters from Star Fox appear as their same selves in F-Zero and vice versa, unless you count secondary enemy Octoman.

There was also a long-running rumor of a development concept for a Star Fox x Metroid crossover, which would bring humans into Star Fox from another Nintendo franchise in a main-line game, at least, that was the claim. That rumor, if it was ever true, ultimately ended when the original source of the rumor said that the project was ultimately canned before any real development started, dying in the concept stage.

But what if I told you there was already a main-line Star Fox game that referenced humans? A reference few people were aware of until recently...

I don't want to spoil it, so only read more if you want to know the truth.

That's right! I'm talking about the Japanese version of Star Fox Assault! More specifically, during the credits crawl, the flavor text for the recovery of the planet Fortuna says "The aparoid raid was concentrated in the norther forests, so human casualties were held to a minimum." Here's an actual screenshot from the Japanese version.

In all honesty, it was probably a mistranslation of something like "civilian casualties." The text is different in the English version, which says "The aparoid raid was concentrated in the northern forests, so casualties were held to a minimum."

What? Did you think I was talking about code leaks? Heh heh.