Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (PS4, 2019)
This review is going to be, broadly, about three things. The Soulslike genre, and my first experience of it. The story, and its place in my experience of new Star Wars. Finally, and least significantly, the game itself.
I've never played a Dark Souls game or any of its derivatives. The Dark Souls series seems like something I would find interesting in terms of of its world building and lore. I think all of my knowledge of these specific games is entirely second-hand, but the impression I get is something dark, mysterious and heavily detailed with a profound sense of significance in everything you come across. I know that it's a concept which has inspired many copycats, and since I was in the mood for a Star Wars game I thought I'd give this a try.
If you're reading this you probably know what a Soulslike is and how it works. One thing that did interest me about the concept is the deliberate, almost fundamental way the gameplay mechanics work. The notion of pressing a button to attack an enemy isn't a new concept in video games, but a third person game which is centred around precisely timed attacking, blocking and dodging sounds like such a deceptively good, simple idea for a game you wonder how it took so long for the genre to exist at all. Knowing that this concept is effectively distilled into something so precise and challenging it effectively becomes an art I went into the game pondering one of modern TV's greatest pieces of wisdom: How hard could it be?
Very hard, as it turns out. Fallen Order has four difficulty options - Easy, Medium, Hard (or some Star Wars version of these words) and Story, if you just want to go through with minimum fuss. Since going through this with minimum fuss defeats the purpose I went for Easy just to see what it was like. It was terrible. I was terrible. I play a lot of video games of varying genres and I can be very good at several of them, but there was no chance I was ever getting good at this. Each enemy has its own attack patterns and its own unique way of approaching them, and there are plenty of them. Lots of Stormtroopers obviously and lots of alien bug type things. It's great. I just couldn't get near any of them.
Part of this was down to something I might expand on later but ultimately, there's a bit of a problem with making a Star Wars Soulslike. It's Star Wars. If you give me a video game where I'm controlling someone with a lightsaber I am going to batter the attack button like a lab rat with electricity wired up to its genitals. But that's not how this game works, and it's not something I think I ever adjusted to. Reflecting blaster shots to kill Stormtroopers was a given and was definitely very cool. So was Force pushing Stormtroopers off of cliffs. That's about the only enjoyment I got out of the combat. Even when you turn the difficulty down and get your button mashing fix there's something hollow about killing enemies. It's not visceral. It feels as if the game's waiting for you to time your presses properly before it shows you the nice kill animation they've put together rather than something physical you're actually doing. And that's just for the humanoid enemies, the creatures just end up being an annoyance after about an hour.
In addition to combat there's some platforming, and when I started the game and realised it was made by Respawn, the people who brought us the fantastic Titanfall 2, I was surprised and newly hopeful. I don't think I knew at that point there was actually platforming in the game, but there is. You eventually unlock running along walls and double jumping, and you can move some objects around with the Force to climb walls and stuff. I think there are about four times in the whole game where you move a wall into place, then slow it down so you can climb on it before it snaps back. The notion of unlocking skills or abilities and your progression methods changing as you progress through a game certainly isn't new, but here the upgrades feel oddly tokenistic, as if they're there to add something that's obviously missing from the story or the combat. Outside of wall running there's some basic climbing and shimmying on ledges, but that's it.
The other thing about the player movement in general I never got used to is how bad the character animation is. Whether it's running, wall running or double jumping, any time you employ any of these skills your man looks like he defaults to a default character model with two different poses. None of it looks natural at all. I actually found it quite hard to judge the wall running sections because of how strange the arc of his run would look against the camera. The best way I could sum up the non-combat movement is that it effectively looked unfinished. Mechanically it was sound. Everything worked the way it should. It just looked terrible.
There are huge sections of the game too where you don't actually do anything. You know in third person games where you slide down something apparently in mortal peril but not actually doing anything? There's lots of that here. On one or two occasions the slide hits a bend and if the running animation looked bad, this is genuinely broken. There's one on Dathomir where the only way I could get round the bend consistently was to get stuck at the outside and then jump back into the middle. Aside from those, there are huge scripted sections where you're on a bird, or a train, or something, and a good minute of apparently intense action might see you press a button, or move a stick once. If a game is exciting it can get away with this now and then, in Fallen Order I found myself pointedly holding the controller up to show I wasn't doing anything.
I'm not going to look it up but I'm pretty sure that when I played the new Battlefront II a few years ago I mentioned how the only new Star Wars films I'd seen were The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and they did nothing for me. I've since seen The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, so obviously I have an even lower view of Star Wars content since 2017. The thing is, I like Star Wars. When I was younger they were on TV and I recorded them and watched them so much I can't hear the music without thinking of Frank Skinner popping up at the side of the screen doing a bit to advertise his chat show. Imagine if Peter Cushing married Whoopi Goldberg. The original three films, and even because I was the appropriate age when they were released and because they concluded the story, the prequels, are a complete circle. They're a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. That works for me.
The problem with Star Wars is it's effectively an unlimited source of content. If you want to make a film, or a TV show, or a book, or a comic, or a video game, anything at all, you can get someone to write something. Scratch that. If you want to make money, you can get someone to write something and call it Star Wars. Make up a planet, make up some names, bang. Part of the galaxy. But to me there is "Star Wars" - everything seen and mentioned in Episodes I-VI and then there is "other Star Wars" - literally everything I've seen or heard of second hand in the time since then. So a game like Fallen Order is starting from a position of weakness. I'm always going to think it's effectively fan fiction with a really large budget to start with, and it needs to bring me around.
Fallen Order does not do this. You play as Cal.... something or other. Apparently in a universe of unlimited possibility and creativity there is only one ginger person to be found, and you're finally hearing his story. The game starts with him working in a scrapyard and it turns out he's a Jedi in hiding after Order 66. So far, so fine. It turns out there's an Empire Jedi hunting squad on the go, and that's fair enough. Good start, good premise. After they catch up with Cal he escapes on to a ship driven by a small sarcastic grey thing with four arms and a woman.
Shortly before the end of this game I thought about writing this review and realised I had no idea what the story was. Fortunately the game seemed to realise it had allowed this to happen and just before the end of the game the woman on the ship gave me a handy recap, telling me where I was and what I was doing. The problem with a plot this bland is that it makes the entire thing seem inconsequential. Nothing truly galaxy-defining happened around the time of the Empire rising and all the Jedi disappearing. We know this, because it would have been mentioned by now. The problem with doing a story here is that it obviously has to seem worthwhile to the person watching or playing it, but can't be so large as to be on a par with the Bothans stealing the Death Star plans or Leia being chased by Darth Vader.
Speaking of Darth Vader, after referencing no notable Star Wars characters, the game throws him in as a boss fight near the end. The game absolutely one hundred percent did not do enough to earn the right to invoke Darth Vader. He's in the game for about fifteen minutes and it just feels like a joke.
There isn't really much to say about the story and the characters other than they're all really bland and feel as if every bit of dialogue and every aspect of the story was written by committee to be as bland and non-specific as possible. There's some potentially interesting stuff as Cal has flashbacks to remember his training with his Master to unlock new abilities in the present, but these appear so infrequently they virtually feel like something from a different game.
If the characters are all forgettable, do the environments make up for it? Nope. You can visit five planets in total including some Star Wars classics like Kashyyyk and Dathomir. Each of them is different in terms of how they look and some of the platforming/environmental interactions, but they all fall foul of a Soulslike trope - dungeons. From what I know of Souls games there are optional branching paths you can take through levels to explore and find things and enemies. You can do that here, but the minimap your droid companion shows you is so awkward to try and interpret you'd be as well trying to write down where you were on a bit of paper and trying to retrace your steps. It doesn't help that almost everything is a narrow series of linear corridors (and that the story path itself is entirely linear), so near enough everything looks the same.
Some of the planets are much more detailed than others too, both the optional and the story stuff. When you get to Kashyyyk you think great, the Wookies are here, now stuff is going to be happening. By the way, how useless are Wookies? They're nine feet tall fearsome warriors and every time you see their planet they all seem to be enslaved by people they could kill with one punch.
Anyway, while you're on Kashyyyk you get to shoot some stuff with an AT-AT. You get out and Forest Whitaker shows up and you think okay, now there's some story. Nope. He's made out to be this really important person to what's going on but he disappears and is never seen again. It doesn't feel as if every planet is treated equally, and it shows in how much of them you can (or need) to see. Your time on Kashyyyk ends with an extended sequence of climbing a tree, going down a slide and hitching a ride on a giant bird. It's as thrilling as it sounds.
And what is the reward for this exploration? There are quite a few collectables actually. There are boxes your droid can open that give you a new outfit, a new skin for your ship, or bits to customise your lightsaber. I forgot about the lightsaber bit, I could complain about this for hours. It's a third person game, so your lightsaber is either at your waist or in your hands. There are I think five bits you can change the colour of, with a nice lovingly rendered close-up view when you're at a customisation bench. The problem here is that it doesn't make any difference to anything because you can't ever actually see it. These unlocks feel like a panic happened shortly before the game was released because they didn't have anything in the world to interact with. I know, unlocks! Customisation! Make the robot a different colour! Make the ship a different colour! Why even bother? There's well over a hundred of these things to find too. It's cosmetics, but cosmetics you can't see. What's the point?
The other collectable-adjacent objects are Force Echoes which act as the game's attempt at world building. Find some glowing stuff on the ground and press a button to feel the actions of someone who was here, previously. A mother shielding her children, a Stormtrooper abusing a Wookie, that sort of thing. The story is done in part through this as well, and now I think about it the story is following some old guy's breadcrumb trail to find a thing. So you get Force Echoes from him telling you what's happening. Only they don't, you get a brief snippet of it then a prompt to pause the game and read a text log explaining it to you. The same goes for enemies, there are things you can read about those too.
It's at this point I'm going to quote one of my favourite Zero Punctuation moments from a review of Final Fantasy XIII: "This is not good story-telling; you're supposed to weave exposition into the narrative not hand the audience a f***ing glossary." How am I supposed to be immersed into a world and characters when I need to pause the game to read some gibberish every five minutes? And let me tell you, it is gibberish. I realise complaining about names being silly in something as large as Star Wars is a bit futile but here some of the names of creatures and characters honestly sound like something you say when you're trying to make fun of something stupid by making up names on the spot. I'm actually going to look up what some of them are called:
Oggdo Bogdo. Scazz. Splox. Jotaz. The place where you find Darth Vader is called the Fortress Inquisitorius. Bounty Hunters spawn randomly looking for you with names like Chonk, Pango Two-Teeth and Sir Chogs. I was genuinely expecting to walk into a room and be met with Big Chungus at one point.
Reflecting on all of this it's almost impressive that anyone could take Star Wars - one of the most iconic, beloved stories and set of characters ever and derive something as bland as this from it. The gameplay is what it is. It's functional enough mechanically and does what it does. I'm not the person to review it in any detail, but for my first encounter with it I found it difficult and wasn't really inspired to spend any time learning it. I don't know if it's a good Soulslike, at least from a gameplay perspective.
Everything else is just so cold and forgettable. At no point when I was playing this did I think anything mattered. At no point did I think my perception of the Star Wars universe was being altered, or that I was seeing anything or anyone important. I finished the game a week ago and I'm honestly surprised I could remember as much now, when I've sat and written this out in one go. That's probably the most impressive thing I'll take from this.
