Spin the Wheel get an Animal

Not really, no. The Nintendo Hire This Man look is generally when something gets chucked into Unreal Engine 5 with all of the visual effects cranked to maximum, but without any effort to harmonize the look and aesthetic with either the game's genre and themes or even with the actual world design.

So a fuckton of bloom and glow and raytracing and 4k resolution textures, but it's all slapped onto Mario 64, a game whose entire design is shaped around low-poly, low-resolution art design and limited graphical processing power.

It's the look produced by a creative who confuses fidelity for quality, who confuses surface level appeal for artistic merit. "If the light is raytraced, that means it's better! If the texture is 4k, that means it's better! If the model has more polygons, that means it's better!"

So if the new Star Fox game looked Nintendo Hire This Man, I would expect the character designs of Fox and the gang to be mostly unchanged, except for being much more detailed. I would expect especially a character like Katt to look unchanged except for being even more yassified, (because, again, confusing appeal for merit) and I also wouldn't expect Falco and Fox to be redesigned in a way that so many people find instinctively uncanny (because they're not used to furry characters that actually look like animals). Basically, I would sooner expect a Nintendo Hire This Man approach to produce designs like 2016's Star Fox Zero than I would expect it to produce designs like Star Fox 2026.

The Nintendo Hire This Man aesthetic is ultimately one which is incapable of meaningfully challenging its original game on the merits of its design language, because it's an aesthetic driven by nostalgia. All it can do is crank the graphics settings up to max with all the modern bells and whistles and go "look how cool the thing you already like is! Look how cool it is now that we fixed the problem of the hardware not being good enough to make it look this cool!" It doesn't want to change the original, it wants to dress it up in the gloss of legitimacy that comes from realistic, high-fidelity rendering technology. I would not expect that design approach to produce animalistic, off-putting furries, I would expect it to produce high-gloss versions of the original designs, unchanged in their fundamentals. Star Fox 2026 does seem to want to challenge the original a little bit—or at the very least, if it's trying to pull for nostalgia, it is a nostalgia for the original 1993 box art puppet designs, rather than the 1997 Star Fox 64 designs.

Honestly, right at the moment I'm more concerned about the Ocarina of Time remake being a Nintendo Hire This Man situation, since the only brief scene they showed of it was one of Child Link looking overdesigned and weirdly quasi-realistic, laying in a scene of glow and bloom lighting... but I need to see more of the actual game before I make that call. I want to see how (and if) the world design and art design of the whole game has been changed to suit the new look.