Star Fox Adventures is a game that is presented well but ultimately just isn't any fun.
For starters, while one of the most impressive aspects of the game's graphics are the graceful and slow transitions from day to night. While this does look fantastic, it has very little effect on gameplay. Most non-player characters sleep during the night time but this rarely changes your progression through the game at all. There is nothing you can only do one time or the other and the monsters don't get stronger at night or anything like that. Effectively, the difference between day and night is that it's more annoying to move around in the night time because it's harder to see. I bring this up first because it is indicative to the overarching problem in Star Fox Adventures: the spit and polish is there but it seems to have been done at the expense of compelling gameplay.
Infamously, Star Fox Adventures started life as an N64 game called Dinosaur Planet which was developed by Rare and which had nothing to do w/ the Star Fox series. At Nintendo's insistence, Rare tacked on the Star Fox characters and up-ported it to be a GameCube launch title. The end result was something along the lines of a 3D Zelda game only w/ chipper Star Fox characters starring that seem somewhat out of place in the rather darker setting of Dinosaur Planet.
Unlike Zelda though, there isn't varied combat or satisfying puzzles. Nearly all enemies can be defeated by simply mashing the attack button until one accidentally gets the timing right to get past the enemy's defenses. Attempts at subtly and subterfuge work but frequently provide more chances for the enemy to deal damage making for little incentive to do anything but take all-comers head on. The game's puzzles tend towards either being superficial easy or frustrating. Some obstacle oriented sections, even towards the end of the game, do so little damage that jets of fire and flying enemies can simply be ignored. On the other hand, when there is a challenge, it tends to be based on split-second timing w/ imperfectly responsive controls like having to shoot several targets in succession w/ shaky aim. Overall, the game is not hard--in fact, it is rather easy--but those few sections that do pose a challenge do so cheaply and provide a fidgety challenge for the fingers rather than a deeper challenge for the mind in almost all cases.
There are numerous small details overlooked as well. Your main weapon is a staff to which you can assign one specific function to the Y button on the controller for easy access. Every time your character dies or you save and quit game, it forgets this setting and you have to set it up once again. This is an inconvenience at first but gets more and more irritating as you have to replay some of the already frustrating sections. Additionally, there are often cutscenes that must be watched and rewatched before trying a particular section again. Any of these things could be reasonably ignored on their own but together they become more and more of a problem.
Another thing I take issue is the platforming sections. I would like to direct the reader now to use a search engine of his or her choosing to find an electronic copy of the Star Fox Adventures manual. Please take note of which button is used for jump. There isn't? Well, then how does one make platforming sections in games in which there is no jump command? I can't honestly answer this question and apparently neither could Rare in 2002. There are platforming sections and there is no jump button. It doesn't work and it's not fun.
And I think that is the problem w/ Star Fox Adventures in a nutshell. It is pretty--breathtakingly so at points--but the fun-factor simply is not there. It feels like a game that was designed for the soul purpose of looking good in promotional videos---and it does! it does!--but I can't think of a rightly reason that I would ever want to play this again when there are far superior challenges to be had in this genre on basically every platform in existence.