Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Every review is going to have its biases, as every reviewer is going to have his or her own background influencing their opinion. I bring this up because as a cultural phenomenon Star Wars has created a lot of division in the last five years. My philosophy is that bias cannot be completely avoided, so it’s better to put it all out on the table instead of pretending it doesn’t exist in a misguided attempt to make my opinion seem more superior than it is. If you enjoy or hate Star Wars at this point, I’m not here to change your viewpoint, I’m just here to share mine as humbly as I can. I grew up with Star Wars as something my father loved. For him Star Wars was the great magnum opus of his own youth, and it was a perfect set of movies that he was excited to share with his children. This made me a sort of a second generation fan. I always liked the movies as a kid, but I never really appreciated them until I became an adult and really found my own personal magic within its universe. Star Wars is on its surface just a cheesy and campy space opera, but as the original movies and subsequent works have proven, it can go far deeper than that. Unfortunately finding and defining my own reasons to love Star Wars has also left me disappointed when the franchise has seemingly left those reasons behind. Therefore, when I had heard there was a Star Wars Metroidvania coming, I didn’t exactly jump at the opportunity, even with my commitment to try and play every Metroidvania ever made. So I went into Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order with my guard raised high. However, it didn’t take long for its gameplay elements to win me over. It made me feel relieved early into my playthrough that I had reasons to make my May the 4th review be a more positive celebration of Star Wars, but it didn’t stop at just gameplay; Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is more than that. With this game, the Star Wars that I fell in love with is back.

Let’s talk about the Gameplay first. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to From Software’s Souls-like games, and yes, on the surface there are a lot of similarities. When you die, you lose all of your experience points since your last level-up, and you have to damage the creature that killed you to get them back or you lose them completely. When you meditate, enemies respawn, and you reset your supply of healing items. Enemies crowd around you and heavily telegraph their attacks, and you must counter them accurately or be punished. But I think the less you compare this to Dark Souls or Sekiro the more easily you’ll find appreciation for the design.

For what it’s trying to accomplish the combat really is well designed, it’s just a little different than the expectations a “Souls-like” descriptor might bring. To me it feels a little closer to something like Batman Arkham Asylum than it does to any Souls game. The telegraphing isn’t quite as tight or consistent if you’re looking only at the windup of enemy swings, but instead the animations indicate danger with sparks and the occasional really obvious telegraph that their next attack is going to be completely unblockable. Fighting with just the lightsaber is feasible, but to be really successful you need to utilize your force power meter as much as possible. Playing on the hardest “Grand Master Jedi” difficulty came with a lot of trials, but by the end of the game it was especially gratifying to have conquered the challenge.

Part of that gratification comes from the game’s leveling system, since success means you have more access to skill points to add even more depth to the combat. Less than 1/3 of the skill tree are options that simply make you deal more damage or take less. The rest expand your moveset and provide fun options to deal with a variety of specific situations rather than just making you more overpowered using a single dominant strategy. None of the skills seemed completely useless, although every individual is going to have their preference on which is best. Just like with any game with souls-like death mechanics having desirable level-ups that you can lose through failure can lead to “ruined” save files. But it really makes you feel like you earned your power which serves the game thematically as well. Interestingly, a new feature they added to this formula is that when you get your experience points back, you also heal all of your health and force power completely. This means you can go all out when trying to recover from death and get a free reset, which also helps on some of the game’s harder bosses.

As it should be, the lightsaber fights are the great highlight of Jedi: Fallen Order’s combat. Each attempt feels like a training exercise and every opposing force user has their own unique personality to learn and become intimate with as you get better. Executing exactly when to be aggressive, when to block, when to dodge, and when to force push their face into an adjacent wall rewards you with a seductive feeling of control when you finally nail it. By the end of each fight you’re relieved that you’ve won, but for both story reasons and because the fight was just so good, the finality of victory is bittersweet with your opponent’s defeat. It’s absolutely delightful.

The platforming isn’t nearly as challenging as the combat, but it helps to give the planets you visit a keen sense of place. Jumping from vine to vine and then running across walls isn’t so much about skillful execution as it is finding the places where it’s possible. Niggles like sliding down hills and having to frustratingly start over take a backseat to the verticality the platforming enables in the level design. On at least two of the planets everything is intricately interconnected, with shortcuts doubling back on previous areas and connecting checkpoints. There are also large completely optional areas to be discovered, and to surprise you.

Some planets are more linear, which can feel disappointing coming off of the larger planet you had just experienced. It can also be disappointing that the most abundant rewards for searching around are mostly useless aesthetic options like a new paint job for your space ship or your droid. Finding the health upgrades or the important healing item upgrade does however offset this disappointment, especially as you get more powers and can heal your force meter. Even finding only lore entries gives you a measure of experience points that make them worth seeking out. The thing I want to emphasize the most about the exploration though is that it’s rewarding just to see the gorgeous areas that the team at Respawn Studios have created. They really make it so you have to observe your surroundings meticulously, both with the level design and with the also excellent puzzles. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order draws you into its world and immerses you with its mechanics in a marvelous way.

That isn’t to say there aren’t a few “AAA”isms that bog down the experience a little. The higher fidelity the graphics are, the more noticeable “errors” become. For all of Fallen Order’s magnificent direction there other parts that don’t carry the same level of quality. Occasionally these less polished pieces seep into the gameplay. You have to pay close attention to where your character’s animation is when executing a new command because very few actions cancel the previous one. It can get frustrating when you really need BD-1 to give you a Stim Pack and he just doesn’t. Besides technical issues, there are also some of the more tired AAA tropes present, such as the occasional “mash the X button to win” quicktime event, and the walking cutscene (although the mashing X button can be turned off as of an update that came out just a few hours after this review was posted.) The entire “metroidvania” aspect of the game is stifled a little in order to service the narrative. If you had access to all of the planets from the get-go, and didn’t have anyone telling you where to go next, Jedi: Fallen Order would be perhaps the most “Metroidvania” 3D game I have played. Instead you have scripted events, some even being mostly fan service rather than actual “game”, that generally distract from what Jedi: Fallen Order could have been as an entry in the Metroidvania genre.

I would be a lot harder on Jedi: Fallen Order for putting a stronger focus on the narrative, but that story is just so worth it to me. It isn’t breaking any new ground or anything. You’ve got your smarmy scoundrel who gambles too much, your mentor character, the padawan Jedi, and his droid companion – a setup that’s all too familiar in Star Wars. However as this game takes place between the third prequel and the original movie, unlike Luke Skywalker and his companions, Fallen Order’s group is canonically doomed to failure. It gives a more frightening angle to the threat the Empire actually poses, and Fallen Order plays with its themes of hopelessness, and redemption, in a meaningful way. Without diving deep into a spoiler-filled analysis of it, in my opinion, this is the best Star Wars story I’ve seen in anything that has come out in the past 15 years. The high production value scripted scenes serve to enhance the narrative experience. While it would be fun to see Respawn take a stab at making a 3D Metroidvania that has a more subtle storytelling method, making Jedi: Fallen Order feel more like a movie is not only appropriate for Star Wars, it was the best decision for this particular game.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order takes timeless game mechanics and puts just enough spin on them to make them unique, and to make them belong with Star Wars. I think that players looking only for a gameplay experience can be satisfied here if they’re patient enough to adjust to its idiosyncrocies. Star Wars fans who just want a story have the option to play on the lowest difficulty, and I highly recommend doing at least that because it’s a story worth seeing. If you happen to be both a fan of its brand of gameplay and are a Star Wars fan, Jedi Fallen Order is basically a masterpiece. For me at least, it’s a return of the Star Wars I fell in love with, and for that it will always be a special game in my library.