well it depends. for me GP Legend is better.

Hmm, maybe it's just the visuals then. I regret selling my gameboy micro though, the controls on it are far superior to the ds. As far as f-zero goes anyway.

I just got Climax 3 days ago, and I prefer GP Legend.  For everything Climax does better than GPL it does something worse.  Climax comes off to me as an attempt to make a 2D F-Zero game that plays like a 3D F-Zero game.  It didn't do this very well, in my opinion.  Although the racing graphics are pretty, the user interface looks like crap.  It's the ugliest I've ever seen in a racing game.  There are too many tracks, but they're even worse than GPL.  In GPL there are only 2 versions of each track.  In Climax there's 3 versions of each track.  So, really, there's only 15 "new" tracks in Climax, the rest are redundant.

One of the things that might be good or bad, depending on your opinion, is the standardization of goals.  In GPL some goals had airgoal objects, others didn't.  This made some shortcuts annoying, but also created copernicuts and the Lightning Volute Two glitch/technique.  In Climax all goals have airgoal objects.  It's nice that it's consistant this time, but it's copernicut city.  I've even been able to pull off Lightning Volute Two Technique on tracks created in the course editor, and it appears there's nothing to stop LVTT from being used on all the airgoals in the game.

My main complaint with Climax is the overcomplicated controls. It's still a great game, but I prefer GPL and MV.

I like the fact the AI is modelled in real-time and doesn't refer to checkpoint-generated respawns, a la SFC, MV and GP Legend. It's also a tad harder, and sometimes can catch you out.

I also like the breadth of cars available, and that Nintendo specified two drift styles so that there is at least a difference in driving styles available. The dearth of new original courses, and over-reliance on smaller modifications of these courses, doesn't particularly annoy me but I can see why they can.

I also enjoy the extra speed in this game, the newer modes, the course editor... yup, gimme this over GPL any day.

Graphics are much better than MV and GPL.

Musics are cool remix, not simple remake of original ones.

The controls are differents but not terrible, in my opinion just fine and like GPL.

More technics are available.

The track editor.

The IA of CPU is more accurate.

The japanese is not a real problem, I think (a lot of text is in english) I not even see the game was in japanese ! Oo

I was thinking about buying it only to play casually, not for hard core time attacking

I was playing it by an emulator but I just found it this friday on ebay (there was 4 of it). I'm glad to have this game, even if it's not like a 3D tracks game it's cool through.