My fandom of Star Wars has been strained of late, of course, just as it has been for most Star Wars fans who consider themselves long-time fans who've been involved in more than just watching the movies when they first come out. That's just normie behavior. I'm an actual Star Wars fan who's more into it than that by a long shot. Not only did Lucas himself make a bunch of dumb moves in the 90s and 00s, but Disney Star Wars has mostly been an unmitigated disaster. Well; that's not entirely true. It's been slightly mitigated. The Special Editions were exciting when they were announced, but rather poorly received after they ended up finally coming out. I saw Star Wars Special Edition in theaters on opening day, after waiting in line for hours. I saw The Empire Strikes Back fairly quickly. I saw Return of the Jedi on video months later. The Prequel Trilogy was not only a dud of an idea—seeing Darth Vader as a whiny brat pleased no one, and there's not a ton of tension when everyone already knows how it's going to end before it even starts—but was very poorly done in general; the movies look very pretty, and have a number of great ideas, but are hampered by all kinds of poor craftsmanship issues: poor casting, poor pacing, poor dialogue, poor screenwriting, poor editing, poor directing, etc.
And, of course, there's very little about the sequel trilogy that's recommendable at all other than some of the visual design. And even a lot of that isn't all that impressive. Other than the visual design, almost everything about the sequel trilogy is not just poor, but actively insultingly so; as if it were done by people who didn't actually like Star Wars and actively hated its fans. Which, to be fair, is actually true, although the last minute attempts to assuage "the fandom menace" shows that at least someone at Disney has enough sense to step back from the edge of the cliff and not double down by doing an eff you swan dive off of it to the rocks below.
However, to mitigate that string of disasters, there has been some other good Star Wars content out there. The Old Republic material is flawed in many ways, but shines through with some genuine brilliance nonetheless. The Clone Wars cartoon was often quite good, and rehabilitated the prequel era quite a bit all on its own. It wasn't always great, and it was followed (as yesterday's post described) by the extremely disappointing Rebels show. And, of course, The Mandalorian is pretty decent, even if it is surprisingly cavalier with a lot of Star Wars canon. It doesn't seem to bother Star Wars fans as much as I'd have thought that it does, and I think that's a testament to the fact that decent quality material is generally acceptable. I also thought the Force Unleashed game from a number of years ago was quite good (although the sequel was not) even though it was also saddled with being set in a difficult time period in which to tell decent stories. My son tells me that the new Fallen Order game is pretty good; he's already completed it at 100%, although he also says that it is often very frustrating to play, and the story is only average (and even then is salvaged by the very final act.) There have been other, older games that are fairly well regarded, like the Kyle Katarn games from the mid to late 90s. And of course there are a lot of books, novels, comics and more of varying quality, although everyone pretty agrees much agrees that at least some of it is excellent. Especially the Timothy Zahn sequel trilogy. Fans of the franchise have just enough good content to keep us strung along for more, even when we now have to sift through a number of bad products to find the nuggets of good ones.
And I've heard mixed reviews of the Star Wars land at the Disney parks, and the attractions therein, although my wife loved it, and even my highly critical son said that he couldn't argue that it wasn't pretty cool (he was more critical of the ride itself, though.)
I've also said before that after I read The Secret History of Star Wars, which is quite an interesting book, even though it does get kind of repetitive about its core premise after a while, I found that the original vision for what Star Wars would be was better than what we actually got, even with regards to the original trilogy. Instead of an often dour space Hamlet, the ten movie Flash Gordon Universal Serial type model, except modernized in terms of technical excellence (special effects, mostly) and the fact that each chapter was a full-blown movie, could have been some great visual story-telling. (The original Flash Gordon serials had 10-15 episodes of about 18 minutes each.) Really, the format is somewhat less important than the storytelling conventions and the pulp feel.
Curiously, the closest thing Star Wars actually got to the Flash Gordon serial storytelling format was the long stories, including the expansions, told in the Old Republic game. Now, that doesn't mean that you should go look for a play through and expect to see a good Star Wars movie, because you won't. BioWare has a number of limitations that makes it impossible for them to give us that, and the medium of a video game has others. Namely:
- There's an awful lot of running around looking for McGuffins. A little bit of it is fine. In Old Republic, that's all you're doing, so it's kind of amazing that a better high level story is extractable from what is often tedious in game. It helps that if you watch cut scene edits, you get the highlights more than the tediousness. But even then, you can see that it's there. This isn't shocking for video game plots, though—most of them default to this kind of stuff, just to give you plenty to do and not end the game too soon.
- On the other hand, if you watch just the cut scenes, mostly all you get are talking heads talking at each other a lot. You miss any cool action, and you miss any of the cool scenery and exotic locations of the planets your on, not to mention some of the cool alien monsters and such. On the other hand, combat in the Old Republic isn't all that interesting to watch anyway, so that's mostly OK. Watching combat in the game isn't anything like a good action scene in a movie anyway. But this is a major miss from what you'd ideally want and expect from any competent Star Wars story.
- Much of the minor plot details are hoaky. I'm quite sure that the writers are thoroughly betas and/or women, and r-selected, and yet what they're trying to write are interesting alpha male characters running around in a K-strategist plot. They're in way over their heads, and much of what happens and how the characters behave and what they say is painfully cringy as a result. The romance plot lines are especially cringy, and many of the romance partners you're default assumed to romance are thoroughly unlikable (Kaliyo being the most egregious here, I think, although many of them suffer from some elements of this.) This only gets absurd in the expansions when you get [Flirt] dialogue options for nearly everybody that comes along. It's one thing to flirt with any reasonably pretty girl, alien or not (or guy if you're playing a girl character) but when you're given options to flirt with gay alien lizard people and gigantic tubby aliens, and all kinds of other options that no normal person would ever find appealing, it's just wasted effort at best, and opportunity cost because they could give us more and better dialogue options instead. At worst, it's seriously off-putting. There's a lot of this kind of "low grade" social justice nonsense in the game, most of which is... well, it's often low grade. The sheer number of "tough black women warrior" archetypes, which of course, isn't really archetypal at all except to an SJW, and other stuff like that, is tedious after a while.
- Admittedly, though, some of the characters are better written than others. I wasn't ever really annoyed by the twee-ness or beta-ness of the bounty hunter, for instance, although I frequently was for the Jedi knight, and occasionally for the smuggler, the agent, etc. And not every class story is created equal;
- The "hurry, we have to stop the bad guys from finding the lost, ancient super weapon of the week" routine gets old pretty quick.
- As an aside, the medium/format requires that the characters take a much more passive role than is natural, because it's not a film or even a novel, but a video game. They can only write so much, so you're assumed to pretty much follow the plot line along, which means the protagonist doesn't really get to make too many decisions on his own, actually. He mostly has to just go along with whatever the NPCs tell him he needs to do.
- The "morality" and dark side slash light side duality is both idiotic and insulting in this game. I don't know how many "Don't kill your enemy who just killed millions if not billions of people so he can be sad and then decide to maybe be a good guy... maybe," points are buried in this game, but it's a lot. Not to mention the many, many, "Oh, my gosh, they're shooting at civilians; abandon the battle plan and go save them; somehow it'll all work out!" moments there are. The Jedi knight play through I watched also had an enormous number of "But you'll kill thousands of people!" exclamations, only to have the villain say something that was a surprisingly polite version of, "Yeah, you moron, that's the whole point!" but then again, I wouldn't have picked those dialogue options myself, because I'm not a moron. It's an r-strategist writing team trying to make sense of a K-strategist scenario, and failing to do anything other than look foolish. But I admit that without my understanding of r/K selection theory, I'd find the whole thing bizarrely confusing.
All that said, it's still pretty cool, and a great concept for what Star Wars could be, if they'd get some better, more psychologically normal writers, and do this in a different medium, like a movie or streaming TV show or something. And it does have that long-running serial feel to it, just like Star Wars was really supposed to have, before George Lucas lost the plot for a variety of reasons, some good and some not so much, back in the early 80s.
I recommend looking up Youtube user Retale and watching his class storylines playlists. They're kinda long, but that's the point. And they'd be way longer if they weren't pretty heavily edited, but they're not edited to make good movies, they're edited to show you the story that BioWare put in, warts and all, by showing you most of the cut-scenes, and usually what he considers to be the "default" kind of dialogue choices, as well as pretty iconic visuals in terms of building and costuming the character. The exception is his kinda darker smuggler done up as a more iconic pirate villain, or at least pretty darn dark anti-hero. But I admit I haven't watched all of his playlists either.
And before you do, if you haven't already played it yourself, you might want to watch a playthrough of the earlier Knights of the Old Republic game. The Jedi knight class story in particular feels like a Knights of the Old Republic 3, and the Eternal Empire and Fallen Empire stories tie together stuff that comes from the earlier games quite well, making for a surprisingly cool epic arc out of the whole affair.
And before you do, if you haven't already played it yourself, you might want to watch a playthrough of the earlier Knights of the Old Republic game. The Jedi knight class story in particular feels like a Knights of the Old Republic 3, and the Eternal Empire and Fallen Empire stories tie together stuff that comes from the earlier games quite well, making for a surprisingly cool epic arc out of the whole affair.
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