Media in Review: Star Wars - Jedi Fallen Order
I'm a little late to the party on this one considering it came out in 2019, but I really needed to play something that wasn't a 50 hour RPG, and thus I found myself diving into a $4 purchase in a franchise that I generally don't really care for. And yet... it's pretty good? I would not have pegged it for a Metroidvania, but Jedi is clearly following the blueprint of Metroid Prime when it's not trying its damnedest to Star Wars all over the place, often to its detriment.
As someone who does not really give a shit about Stars Wars, Jedi is...fine? The story it tells is extremely generic, complete with a superfluous Darth Vader boss fight, but it gets the job done. Cal is the most boring, white-bread protagonist they could have come up with, but he managed to come home with a weird necromancer girlfriend, which is more than a lot of the other Star Wars OCs can say. Cere is an okay mentor and Trilla makes a good villain but nothing is particularly good, it's just functional.
As an exploration game, Jedi fares a lot better. It has all the classics dressed up with a Star Wars coat of paint (It's the Force Pull not a grapple beam, etc), complete with a double jump that feels completely out of place given that Cal is otherwise a very weighty character. He doesn't move very fast, his jump is very low, and most of the movement upgrades are things like a short wall run, but yeah, he can just do a front flip on command, why not? I suspect these are animations that Respawn had lying around after Titanfall 2 because they really don't fit with what the game is otherwise telling us about how Cal moves. Anyway, I didn't get all the secrets, but I had every planet up to 95%+ explored so clearly the level designers were doing something right. I will say, it really sucked that there was only one landing spot per planet, because if you needed to get somewhere deep in the level to check out a new path, it means you need to traverse the entire planet, get whatever goodie you missed the first time, then haul your ass all the way back to the ship to move on. If there's a fast travel system, it is extremely poorly documented because I missed it entirely.
Also, for reasons I do not understand, Jedi is trying to be Sekiro? I guess the idea is to be like "oh look at how seriously you need to take these lightsaber duels" but in practice it just means that you get stunlocked by a bunch of trash mobs and have to rest at the nearest "meditation point" where you will get all your health and stims back, but respawn all the enemies. When you get into a groove, the parrying genuinely does work pretty well, but I really don't get why it needed any of this. It was a perfectly fine Metroidvania without these mechanics, was anyone really demanding a healthy dose of Dark Souls?
All in all it was...fine? I liked it a lot, but I think I would have really liked just about anything I played that was outside my usual wheelhouse. I certainly can't tell you much about the experience now that it's over, and while I will definitely pick up Jedi Survivor at some point, Fallen Order has not left me going "Hell yeah I need to pick this up RIGHT NOW." It was the right game at the right time, but not much more, if that makes any sense.