Let's be honest about Star Wars.
Now, if you know me, you'll know that the prospect of me being honest about Star Wars might seem as unlikely as the possibility that someday I'll be come a Boston Red Sox fan – it's simply never going to happen. I own an embarrassing amount of Star Wars novels and comic books, I have a lightsaber collection and two tattoos (Rebel Alliance and Jedi Order insignia, if you must know.) I'm what you would call a fanboy. Fortunately for journalistic integrity, baseball and fiction happen to be two very different things.
The Star Wars series is my favorite saga, hands down. There are many moments of sheer epic space opera badassery, be they starship dogfights, lightsaber duels or just a smuggler letting a princess know nonchalantly that he's quite aware of her affections. Those movies changed the way other movies were made. Star Wars has something for everybody – detractors included. The dialogue ranges from brilliant some of the time to atrocious most of the time. So bad, in fact, that I don't blame MacGregor or Portman or Hamill for sounding wooden while having to read some of it. The story has plot holes much larger than the thermal exhaust port that the Death Star engineers somehow didn't think anybody would be able to find out about, and Jar Jar Binks is an unspeakable abomination that I'm sure we'd all just as soon forget, along with Indiana Jones 4. There. I admitted it. Star Wars can be downright terrible sometimes. Video games are no exception. For every Knights of the Old Republic or Shadows of the Empire, there's a Jedi Power Battles or Episode I Racer. There's just something about being a Star Wars fan that means you have to be prepared to take the really good with the atrociously bad.
Watching the trailers for the first game, I thought that maybe my conundrum was at an end. Star Wars was going to be cool again. This time, you're a Sith Lord apprenticed to Darth Vader himself. And you're hunting down Jedi! The notion of dialing the
Force powers up to 11 was no less exciting. Yet, while the game did indeed have an award-winning story and infectiously fun gameplay, like every other piece of Star Wars it had its flaws. The controls were at times frustrating. Why even implement a combo system if the lag time between the pressing of the button and the on-screen action is going to be so ridiculous? Try to pick up a stormtrooper and you might just end up picking up a pile of crates. Okay, screw it – throw the crates at the stormtrooper, right? No. Accidentally heave them off the cliff to your right. The "Unleashed" difficulty was a challenge not because of the difficulty setting itself, but because the game refuses to give you enough enemies to kill and the controls prove ineffectual – but it was still doable. Loading screens for the options menu? You have got to be kidding me! I'm not even going to tell you how long it took me to pull that Star Destroyer out of the sky the first time I played the game. And the romantic subplot was a joke. How long did Starkiller know this girl? A few days? But still, laundry list of flaws concluded, I loved the Force Unleashed. It's one of the few games I got all of the achievements for, and I never tired of popping it in and maiming a few dozen stormtroopers or ripping an AT-ST limb from limb.
Before I even saw the trailer for The Force Unleashed II, I was excited. Certainly LucasArts would listen to the criticism that reviewers and fans alike had provided. Wouldn't they? Better or worse, I had faith in Star Wars. And then I saw the trailer. Starkiller is back. Didn't he die? It's fine, it's Star Wars. He probably got cloned or just didn't die in the first place. Who cares? I just want to take on that rancor-throwing skyscraper of a boss. Yoda doing voice-over? Promising, this is. Then I saw the second trailer. Dismembering stormtroopers? Turning them to dust with a blast of Force energy? Please, please, put out a demo. They did. I played it at least ten times, loving every decapitated head that rolled my way, reveling in joy every time I gripped a squad of the Empire's most unfortunate and threw them into a red-hot force field. It's safe to say I had forgotten all about the flaws of the first game: I was ready for this. Screw Fable III, come October 26th I'm getting TFU2.
Alas, idealistic youth. Have you learned nothing? Well, I'm only 23 so maybe I haven't learned everything. But the people at LucasArts – they're all older than that, right? Star Wars itself is ten years older than I am. Surely, they've learned a thing or two about making movies, or video games, or at the very least they've learned to make a Force Unleashed game. Right? Wrong. The award-winning story has been jettisoned out of the escape pod of a starship travelling at the speed of light. Starkiller is back, and he's trying to figure out whether or not he's a clone. That's pretty intriguing, right? Well, it's too bad that the clone question is never answered. The Boba Fett and and Yoda cameos that were teased preceding the release of the game are practically nonexistent. I was hoping maybe for a lightsaber duel against the Jedi Grand Master as a test of my skills, but maybe that was asking a little too much. Wait. I don't even get to fight Fett? Oh, well. I guess I have to settle for the thirty second boss fight at the end of the five minute DLC released in between games. And the Emperor, whose ass I thoroughly enjoyed kicking in the first game – is nowhere to be found. Not even a mention. Maybe he's so busy moisturizing that lovely skin of his that he doesn't have a spare moment to make sure his treacherous apprentice isn't cloning an army out of one of the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy.
The biggest tragedy of all, to me at least, is the relegation of Juno Eclipse to damsel in distress. She never really needed saving in the first game, (too much, that is) but in the newest entry it's seemingly her only purpose. To be honest, Starkiller's obsession with this woman seems pretty unhealthy. He outright states that he has no interest in fighting the Empire if it gets in the way of his quest to save Juno. Rebellion be damned!? That doesn't sound very Jedi, does it? On that note, nearly every line bellowed by General Kota has him sounding less zen-like Jedi and more power-hungry Sith Lord. Shut up, Kota. I know that I need to find a way to open the blast door. At the very least, maybe the campaign is long. It would have to be, to cram this many problems in, right? Wrong. This campaign takes only a handful of hours to complete, even on the hardest difficulty setting. The level on Dagobah, the planet of Yoda's exile, is almost literally one giant cut scene. No battling swamp creatures or keeping Imperials from discovering Yoda's hideaway. It's just a cut scene. Why is this a level? Why can I pick this for replay from the mission select screen? Without any multiplayer mode to speak of, this sort of brevity is unforgivable. The challenges offered in seeming recompense for this are a joke that offer no re-playability whatsoever. It's preposterous to think that Jedi Academy had online lightsaber battles on the original Xbox, yet TFU2 is apparently so good it doesn't need it.
So it is with a heavy heart that I admit that I have turned to the dark side. No, that doesn't mean that the light side is only playing good Star Wars titles and rejecting the bad, or something like that. I wish that was the focus of my metaphor. What I mean is that I'm a Sith apprentice, and LucasArts is my master. I'll keep playing these games and downloading DLC, achievements or not, because I'm a slave to the hope that one day, they'll get it right, or maybe just stop taking steps backward. Then again, maybe I'm just being dramatic. At least the pause menu doesn't have a loading screen, right?