Relishing the Opportunity to Be a Star Wars Game: A ‘Jedi: Fallen Order’ Review
It is Ben’s recommendation that you listen to Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab’s score of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order while reading the review
Jedi: Fallen Order relishes the opportunity to be a Star Wars game, taking great care of the way it uses the franchise’s universe. The process isn’t always pretty, and especially early on, Fallen Order struggles stumbles to find an identity. Through time, however, the game experiences an impressive metamorphosis. Alongside its protagonist, Cal Kestis, Fallen Order begins to figure itself out as the game unfolds. Part of this success is due to Respawn’s ambition, which takes influence from many of the generation’s best games. That ambition leads to some painstaking issues, like unnecessary backtracking and jarring bugs. Still, the methodical combat, gorgeous planets, rich lore, and impressive late-game story beats help make this the single player Star Wars game that I have been aching over a decade for. Fallen Order’s path toward being an excellent Star Wars game isn’t always smooth, but the end result is one of the best games in the franchise’s prolific library.
Exploring the Star Wars’ Universe
Fallen Order follows the results of the Great Jedi Purge and Order 66, a movement that left few Jedi to fight back against the Empire. This is where Cal Kestis comes in, one of the few remaining survivors (only a child at the time) of Order 66. Cal, at least at first glance, is far from the most interesting character in the Star Wars universe. His survival of Order 66 meant living mostly in secret, which is where Fallen Order begins. After an hour-long opening that is one of the better attempts to mask its true nature as a tutorial, Cal escapes the clutches of the Empire who is now aware of his ability to use the Force. His new goal is to find a list of “Force-sensitive” children hidden inside of a fault. Even if it’s missing some of the better tools that help make Fallen Order finish so strongly, it’s a fantastic start to the game. Giant set pieces, with TIE Fighter ships zooming overhead and the universe in constant motion, help set the stage: Fallen Order is not interested in sparing any expenses.
The benefits of this big-budget mentality shine in the planet development, of which there are five. The first, Bogano, is structured in a way that greatly resembles something out of Metroid Prime. Its earth is muddy but colorful. There are ziplines and alleyways that connect with unlocked shortcuts and are guarded by one or more enemies – most of which can be handled with the swipe or two of Cal’s lightsaber. Bogano is by far the least ambitious of the available planets, but it’s also the one that makes Fallen Order’s design philosophy most clear. The entirety of the planet won’t open up until Cal learns new abilities, and often times those abilities can only be found on other planets. Bogano is a well-established mix of pushing for exploration, but also learning Cal’s limits and taking mental notes on which areas are worth coming back to later.
If there is a flaw that exists for the entirety of Fallen Order, it’s that the prize for thorough exploration is often superficial. Most chests include something that Cal can wear, like an orange poncho, or attachment to his lightsaber. The game is so attractive that customizing gear can actually be a lot of fun, but it was hard to justify the often difficult navigation it took just to obtain something like a new skin for the Mantis (the ship Cal and his crew use to make their way to new planets).
The exceptions are extremely useful and fun, however. Sense echoes, which can be found in choice physical locations, serve as voice-recording type lore drops, helping expose the planet’s history. They also give experience, and some of Fallen Order’s most useful tricks, like being able to Force grab or push several enemies at once, can learned by spending skill points. These echoes can also come in the form of Force pools, that are similar to The Legend of Zelda heart pieces. Finding three of them gives Cal additional health or Force (which is limited by a meter). Especially on higher difficulty settings, Fallen Order can be challenging enough to make the extra health or Force really useful. Similarly, the rarest collectibles in the game are “stimpacks,” which allow Cal to heal up in battle. These come inside of gold chests, which are usually locked behind hard-to-find areas and difficult puzzles or boss battles. Thankfully, they are really useful in areas that pack a lot of enemies between checkpoints.
Handling a Lightsaber is Always Fun
Fallen Order’s combat ranges from exceptionally good and pretty to frustrating and a little buggy. Most of the time, it’s in the former category. The lightsaber-focused combat is plenty strategic, and I found myself having to learn enemy habits just to find small windows I could get an unblocked swing in. Even though Cal is very much still a Jedi in training, Fallen Order does a wonderful job adhering to the standards the Star Wars’ universe has set: 99% of whatever a Jedi encounters will be powerless to stop them. My handful of deaths on the two hardest difficulties frequently resulted from boss fights and long stretches of exploration that required handling dozens of enemies without a checkpoint to re-heal at.
Many of the early game boss fights in Fallen Order are regurgitated enemy designs with an extra move or two attached. Thankfully, after about the midway point, the bosses take an excellent step forward. Their presence is dominating, and often feature animations like a lightsaber being dragged across the ground menacingly or sent hovering in the air just as a show of power. Fallen Order takes the presence of the Force seriously, embedding power in those that wield it.
The game’s primary antagonist, The Second Sister, is domineering and powerful. Her array of skills seems to expand from toying with Cal early in the game, to using her full set of powers pulled from the Dark Side. Fallen Order does an exceptional job establishing the difference between those with the Force and those without it, but one of its best boss battles comes from Gorgara, a lethal beast that takes on the look of an extremely large vampire bat. The difference in fighting a boss like Gorgara versus the Second Sister is palpable. The former requires learning its predictable habits, and the latter takes precise movement and reflexes to take down. Both instances are intensely gratifying, it’s just unfortunate that many of the other boss fights don’t share the same impressive display – but perhaps that’s the point. Star Wars has always done whatever it can to define the differences between merely skilled foes versus truly dominating antagonists.
A Small Crew Tells an Expansive Story
Cal’s arc from a confused young adult lacking an identity to a fully powered Jedi with a strong sense of right and wrong is sharply told and focused. It’s aided by a short-list of interesting characters, like Cere Junda, who escaped the clutches of the Empire, but not before being reached by the Dark Side. Cere is conflicted by her past and fears her own power, which almost directly reflects Cal – who grew up in the Jedi academy but was unable to save his mentor from death. Both of them are concerned that they don’t deserve the powers that they wield, and the story largely focuses on both of them confronting that psychological fear.
Greez, a four-armed pilot who captains The Mantis, is also along for the ride. He mostly serves as comic relief, most of which is useful filler between more impactful moments. Still, the writing is clever and tonally familiar to the original George Lucas trilogy. The supporting characters have enough one-on-one moments with Cal that by the third arc of the game, I felt tremendously close to both Cere and Greez. Though, there was no relationship quite as impactful as the one between Cal and his droid, BD-1.
While exploring, BD-1 (who Cal finds during his exploration of Bogano) will speak with Cal in droidspeak. At no point during Cal’s journey in Fallen Order was I ever able to translate anything that BD-1 communicated with him. Cal, of course, can understand BD-1, but the game never concerns itself with translating the material that they exchange. The most fascinating part is that it never felt like Fallen Order needed to, because Cal’s inflection served as more than enough to accurately convey the growing bond between the two. At various points in the journey, BD-1 will chime in with droidspeak and Cal will laugh and say something like “that’s a good one, BD.” Sometimes the exchanges are more serious, with BD-1 providing meaningful boosts when Cal is feeling hopeless. The relationship ranges from fun and adorable to tragic and suggestive of the deeper burden that droids carry in the Star Wars universe. It’s the highlight of Fallen Order, and representative of how video games can serve as fertile grounds for developing meaningful relationships between characters.
BD-1 is also used to scan physical areas and items in the game to help provide Cal a greater understanding of the world. Even as a self-proclaimed Star Wars dork, it feels like I learned more about the universe in Fallen Order than I ever could hope to in the span of a film. By reading all of the database logs that came alongside the BD-1 scans, I learned things about creatures like the legendary Shyyyo bird and how Wookies would revere its presence. It’s a get-out-of-it-what-you- put-in situation, and allows for extremely flexible storytelling. Those who don’t want to be bogged down by the details of Order 66 can easily ignore them, but for fanatics, it’s really easy to dive head first into all of the game’s lore. Once the puzzle pieces began to fit by the end of the game, I felt assured that Fallen Order was the best Star Wars story I’ve played in a video game since Knights of the Old Republic in 2003.
Fallen Order Looks and Sounds the Part
The first thing I noticed about Fallen Order is how good it looks. Whether it’s up-close shots of Cal’s lightsaber reflecting incoming Stormtrooper shots or background drops of water clashing against a surface, everything feels purposefully presented. Fallen Order rarely goes very long without reminding you that it’s a Star Wars game, too. Whether it’s TIE Fighters zooming overhead, or AT-ST Walkers being organized by larger ships, the game soaks itself in the universe.
Furthermore, the planets are all incredibly diverse and beautiful. One of my favorite moments in the game was encountering the semi-hidden crash site area on the planet on planet Zeffo. Across a calm bed of water sits a crashed ship and its broken down parts. Intimidating creatures guard its presence, and it’s one of the many areas that has an abounding number of secrets and lore to discover. Much like the rest of Fallen Order, its presence is both gorgeous and meaningful.
Unfortunately, these hidden areas are often hard to get back to and require convoluted ways of access, such as the game’s far overused slides, which are usually just a muddied surface that sends Cal surfing downward. It would have made a lot of sense for Fallen Order to include some kind of fast travel mechanic, even if it was finite in use. Many of the game’s most frustrating moments come from looking for ways to get Cal back on track after exploring.
While the game is almost always wonderful to look at, things do have a tendency of falling apart at the seams. Often times when jumping or running around, Cal will clip into the side of a rock or areas will disappear underneath him altogether. I also ran into frequent issues where the game would stop all at once, begin to load in, and then reappear a dozen seconds later. It was enough to detract from the experience, especially during moments where I was just trying to get back after exploring.
Luckily, even during the worst moments of Fallen Order, Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab’s score is a delight to listen to. It mixes and matches familiar Star Wars composition with new sounds, and only pulls out the franchise’s most notable scores at precise moments to mark their weight. On more than one occasion, the game’s story is really aided by music that represents not just a feeling, but specific characters or areas in the universe.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order becomes better as it unfolds. With each planet, backtracking became less frustrating. The story and characters felt sharper and more nuanced. Combat benefits over time from the wide array of learned skills and more powerful enemies. It’s clear to me that if anything limited the experience of Fallen Order, it was just by way of the impressive ambition to emulate the Star Wars universe in the best way it possibly could. Fallen Order is a Star Wars story that shoots for the moon and experiences some turbulence along the way. Much like its characters, however, Fallen Order grows as a result of those mistakes and becomes something much more dynamic and powerful by the last act.
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