Earlier this month, I played through both Star Wars Jedi games and I really enjoyed them.
I'm coming at this a bit later than I usually do with these sorts of posts, but I thought I'd write a little something on these two games since I had a good time with them earlier this month. This'll be a bit disorganized, and pretty short, as a result but, well, people aren't coming to me for excellent prose or incredibly insightful commentary. At least, I hope they aren't.
I'll start with the first game, Jedi: Fallen Order. This was a solid game that in a lot of ways feels like a mashup of a bunch of different genres. It's part narrative-heavy action game, part Metroidvania, part Dark Souls. It may sound like an unnecessary mix on paper, but the notion of a story-driven Soulslike worked surprisingly well for me. The combat is reminiscent of the Souls games and it has its bonfire equivalents, but it's strung together with high-quality cutscenes and a narrative that has you logically going from one location to the next.
That story is a bit bog-standard as far as Star Wars goes: set a few years after Revenge of the Sith, you play as (former) Padawan Cal Kestis as he's trained by a (former) Jedi while running from the Empire. There are some nice callbacks to the prequel-era within, such as an extended Order 66 sequence and the inclusion of a Night Sister, so it fleshes out what is probably my favorite era of Star Wars. This might just be because I played The Force Unleashed as a kid, but I've always found this middle-period, post-PT/pre-OT period to be fascinating. The characters are largely one-note, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but the setting elevates it a bit for me.
Jedi: Survivor, then, is a followup to that. Some years have passed and Cal, now a fighter for Saw Gerrera's resistance, regroups with his old allies to try to rebuild the Jedi Order. It once again sits in that gray area between Prequel and Original Trilogies, and it adds to that by making droids one of the main enemies you fight. Encountering battle droids and stormtroopers in the same place was surprisingly novel, and it complicates things by also bringing in elements of the old-in-universe-but-recent-in-reality High Republic. All in all, I found it an even more engaging setting than the first game and what makes it even better is that the characters were more fleshed out as well. Cal is no longer the same somewhat-generic Jedi-to-be he was in the first, he's now a more developed character with his own struggles, and the supporting cast is similarly nuanced.
As you may have noticed from that picture above, there's now a ton of added variety to how you can customize Cal. While you unlocked different ponchos in the original game and could customize your lightsaber and BD, you have way more options when it comes to Cal's clothing and, interestingly, his hair and facial hair. Sure, you could make him look pretty silly (you have the option for a handlebar mustache and the option for a mullet) but I happen to like the way my Cal looked by the end. Customizing characters is a way Ii like to engage with games so I was very happy that I got to play dressup with my Jedi.
The combat, too, is an improvement over the original game. While that game had two combat styles you could switch between: a standard single lightsaber and a Darth Maul-esque dualsaber, this game adds more ways to approach situations by introducing three more styles. You've got those same two, plus the option to use two lightsabers, a lightsaber and a blaster, and a broadsword-lookin' heavy lightsaber. It still has the same Soulslike format with respawning enemies and resting at "meditation points", but combat in general just feels better and more interesting as a result of the new additions.
I don't know that I have too much more to say about these games, if I'm being honest. They're very well-made, Survivor in particular, and as Star Wars fan I had a great time. I know I haven't said much of value here but I wanted to give a shoutout these games because I liked them quite a bit. The world can be an unhappy, exhausting place and I think it's worth being open about the things we enjoy because it's otherwise very easy to get lost in negativity and criticism.
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