NGL, getting a new standalone single player SW game has been one of my biggest desires in a computer game for the better part of a decade. The reason I avoided Fallen Order for so long was a combination of being genuinely afraid that I wouldn’t enjoy it, but also that it wouldn’t have anything new to add to the SW universe. Because of that, I avoided everything. I’ve never read a review of this game. I’ve never watched a trailer. I didn’t know a thing about JFO before going into it. Not even the names of the characters. The journey I’ve been on with Cal and the gang has led me to the belief that JFO, and Star Wars in general, excels at speaking with its own unique voice while rarely having anything original to say.
Let’s start at the beginning. We open up on a bleak, desolate planet, five years after Order 66. The Empire has started its stranglehold on the galaxy and everything is looking pretty miserable. I looked up the opening song and it’s by The Hu, the band who did that banging Wolf Totem tune a couple of years back. The sombre tones of this track set the tone really well. Cal Kestis is a Jedi in hiding who survived Order 66. Sure, cool, fine. Purge Troopers! Ninth and Second Sisters hunting down the remains of the Jedi. Straight away we’ve got ties to Rebels, The Force Unleashed and the recent Darth Vader comic. Already I’m pumped.
The first level is a high speed hover train. And straight away I’m like “Sick. Just like the one in Jedi Academy, or the one in SotE”. I’m not mad, that’s Star Warsy as heck. Then once we’re climbing all over it I’m like “Oh nice, like Uncharted”. Climbing is nice, there’a few of those scripted set pieces like in Uncharted, where there’s no real danger. Again this is fine, I’m not against that. Cal is soon thrown in with his new crew and off they chip to the planet Bogato to rebuild the Jedi order! The first half an hour of this game made me very very happy. JFO was written by Chris Avellone. This guy wrote KotOR 2 and a load of Clone Wars comics so you know this is no accident. He’s using the vocabulary of the SW universe. It’s a bit of a busy period for another story, but it fits nicely alongside what we already have.
Once they’re on Bogato, Cal finds the outrageously cute BD-1 and it’s all “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi”. Jedi Master Eno Cordova had been researching an advanced precursor civilisation called the Zeffo. Cordova thinks their old temples will have mystical artifacts which will be useful to the Jedi. The Empire knows about the Zeffo too, so now we have a race against time on our hands. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. Precursor civilizations are sci-fi bread and butter. Forerunners, First Civilisation, Chozo. Echidnas. Ancient temples with powerful artifacts. A race against the baddies. It’s even been done in Star Wars before. The Jedi Knight games already did all of this but I’ll be damned if I don’t say it just works. It’s not original, but this is classic Star Wars. There’s so much authenticity and this continues throughout the game.
The story does actually get pretty complex from here. There’s a lot of detail, which means you really benefit from seeking out all the data logs. Which I absolutely love. Love exploring. We’ll come back to this because I was having a fantastic time until this big stupid frog. You probably knew I was going to talk about this, so let’s talk about the frog in the room.
WHY IS THIS GAME SO FUCKING HARD?
Full disclosure. I have never played a Soulslike game. I have played 30 minutes of Dark Souls and that’s it. Possibly my fault, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Possibly Respawn assumed I would have some idea, because there’s very little in the way of tutorials and the difficulty curve was horrid. Cal is a young Jedi apprentice who severed his link to the Force, so it makes sense that you’d have a hard time at the beginning. But I saw this as a real barrier for a brand which is famous for accessibility. I don’t think anybody watched Star Wars and said “I wish this was harder to get into”. I’ve said it before, there’s room in SW for anything. Especially in the games. So of course have Dark Souls x Star Wars. Doesn’t have to be for me to be good.
Anyway I dropped it to easy for a bit and I enjoyed it a lot more. As Cal reconnected with the force and learned a few force powers, it opened up. I would have preferred Health and Force Power to go up organically, so I could spend points on cool powers earlier in the game. Saber Damage should not be a thing. A lightsaber should carve through a stormtrooper in one hit.
This leads me onto my biggest gripe with JFO. You kill A LOT of animals in this game. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to kill animals in computer games. I’m saying it’s weird for a main character in Star Wars to kill so many animals. I get what’s going on. Respawn made a tier list of enemies and put stormtroopers down first, in the middle. Everything from stormtroopers up makes perfect sense. But I guess they thought they needed lots of little gribblies to farm for XP. The game says the way you become a better Jedi is to murder hundreds of crabs. There’s not a light side / dark side meter or anything. We’re sort of assured that everything Cal is doing is right. It says Jedi on the box, so he’s a Jedi. I don’t feel like I’m being a good guy all the time. This is glossed over so fast I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not.
I’m going to assume this comes from DS. Presumably you kill a lot of spiders in Dark Souls? I gather the DS games feel sad and melancholy. That’s what JFO felt like to me. I loved going to these planets and seeing creatures lifted from the old EU and new creations too, but chopping everything up made FO feel lonely and depressing. It’s not off-brand to fight some big angry space monsters. Dathomir was the perfect opportunity to fight rancors, that’s where they’re from. But imagine watching Luke or Rey chipping about Dagobah and just caning all the animals. Like FUCK there’s an iguana, there’s a snake. Whack whack whack!
Here I am about halfway through JFO and my only gripes are the two things which were basically imported wholesale from another game and are the two least Star Warsy things in it.
Back into it, the story opens up in the second half and I start to really enjoy the gameplay options on offer. Cals journey takes him to half a dozen different planets, some are planets from the existing Expanded Universe, some are entirely new. All of them offer fantastic opportunities for weaving JFO into the Star Wars mythos. There’s one bit where Cal ends up fighting in a gladiator arena and I was like “Wow, seriously?” I’ve been NICE by saying that JFO isn’t trying to be original but wow. Just off the top of my head I can name two other Star Wars games, one film and an episode of the cartoon with these. And that’s just in Star Wars! This repeating idea that SW is wheels within wheels of cyclical mythology. Linking up with Saw Guerrerra on Kashyyyk, we have visited this planet in a few games now. Going down to Dathomir was a bittersweet moment. Dathomir is part of the old EU so it was sick to see it realised in a game, but seeing the planet so desolate after the genocide of the Nightsisters was really sad.
I’ve said before how I find it really meaningful to be treading on familiar ground. Taking part in a bigger storyline, that I’m connected to the events shown in the films. I loved poking around places I’ve heard of and some I’ve not, finding little artifacts of events which happened. Drowning in authenticity. Exploring new parts of the map and then reaching a dead end, knowing I have to come back later. I ended up visiting each planet into double figures each. Each time getting a little bit further, finding a little bit more. Probably hideously inefficient, but lots of fun. BD-1 is very cute and helps me not to feel as lonely. Like the dog from Fable, he’s helping me dig up new shinies and new items I can use to customise Cal’s look. Cosmetic customisation is nothing new but it’s still cool, I like playing dress-up. AND fair play for all of this being included on the disc. Cosmetics could EASILY have been driven by microtransactions. Being rewarded for putting in the time feels nice. Customising the lightsaber is a cool feature. It’s not massively more complex than the customisation options in Jedi Academy but there’s more options than the one in Force Unleashed. There’s a FANTASTIC sequence toward the end of the second act, the climax of which sees Cal journey to Ilum to build his own lightsaber. This is a brilliant tie-in to ideas already done in the EU, and I’m thankful for that. You don’t get to see the actual building of lightsabers all that often and I really enjoyed the whole sequence.
From here the game breathlessly rushes towards its climax, which ultimately does nothing to rattle the status quo. I mentioned that this era was busy, Avellone was likely under strict instruction not to rock the boat. But that gave Respawn cast-iron justification for not doing anything original. Everything In here has either been taken from other SW games or other games from the last few years. The settings and history from the last decade of Star Wars stuff. Don’t think JFO has anything original to say and you know what? It all works because it turns out you don’t have to do anything original to make a good SW game. That’s a beautiful revelation to have. SW itself is a bit of Kurosawa, a bit of Flash Gordon, a bit of Dambusters, a bit of Butch and Sundance. Not original in the slightest. But it has its own authentic voice.. JFO doesn’t hide its influences. Respawn are openly embracing the cyclical, repeating language of Star Wars. It looks like SW, it sounds like SW, it feels like SW. Every time I saw or heard or read something which connected me more to the SW universe, I liked this game more. It’s true to itself, doesn’t compromise on its vision and by layering me over again with constant SW flavour, delivers the most delicious star wars trifle I’ve had in ten years.