Jedi: Fallen Order was released to stellar reviews in late 2019, but E. Keogh goes through all the moments that saw controllers being launched at walls.
Lately, I’ve been on a bit of a Star Wars binge. Because of all the free time lockdown has allowed me, I’ve watched the entirety of the Clone Wars, Star Wars: Rebels, and even read into the extended universe. I always played the Battlefront games, but never got into the likes of Jedi: Fallen Order. If I’m being honest, I’m sick of the whole Skywalker saga. Star Wars started with the Skywalkers, and it seems like they’ll never stop beating the dead horse. However, at the expense of my sanity, I decided I’d play Jedi: Fallen Order.
I got the game with the EA discount of €3.99 for the month. The game cost €60 on its own, and thank god I didn’t pay the extortionate price for it. The story itself intrigued me greatly, as you start by playing a scrapper named Cal Kestis. With his scrapper colleague, you find a Jedi ship. Cal’s friend nearly falls to his death, but with the force and somehow nobody but Prauf seems to notice. I won’t spoil the game's story, even though it is over 2 years old, but regardless it is a great story of how the padawan survived order 66 and tries to find a holocron with a list of force-sensitive children to rebuild the Jedi order. You should’ve played the game by now.
Cal’s clothing has a life of it’s own. So much so, that it doesn’t obey the laws of gravity, and likes to attach to Cal’s face.
That’s not why I get so mad at this game. First off, for a 60 euro game, the textures regularly don’t load, characters and enemies disappear every now and then, and the clothing of characters regularly glitches so bad, that even during cutscenes and battles, Cal’s clothing has a life of its own. So much so, that it doesn’t obey the laws of gravity, and likes to attach to Cal’s face. I realise the Jedi can fight blindfolded and even when blinded, but he fought the Second Sister, a villain who appears in the last act as second only to Vader, with a poncho over his face while his connection to the force was so badly severed, he couldn’t perform the simplest of force manoeuvres.
If cursing was its own language, I’d have been fluent by the end of the game.
The second reason this game irritates me so much is that because of the glitches, the characters disappearing, the clothing acting up, Cal also seemed to have a mind of his own. While battling the Ninth Sister on the Wookie planet of Kashyyyk, the largest enemy of the game gained some unknown force ability to just disappear and reappear at will, just in time to slice Cal in half. 20 tries later, I still hadn’t managed to defeat her with a double-bladed blade. If cursing was its own language, I’d have been fluent by the end of the game.
The only way I managed to defeat her was on pure luck alone, and a lot of rolling around the convenient arena that showed up when you think she killed the big Kashyyyk bird, that I became extremely attached to. At that point, not only was I annoyed at the characters entering the void and reentering the game just to kill me, but I had a full John Wick moment where I just repeatedly slashed at her for killing the bird. Attempt 26 was the lucky one, and I found the bird hadn’t died, it just flew away. At this point, I was too mad to appreciate my pal had come back to give me another lift to the next section of the map.
Being the time it’s set in, of course the final battle is with Darth Vader, the asthmatic robot on an oxygen machine that has overstayed his welcome in the Star Wars media over the last 40 odd years. Don’t get me wrong, I love him as a villain and his redemption was really interesting, but Disney really needs to make some new characters free of the Skywalker’s overdone story. Seeing him in a game I thought was going to establish Cal and his story more than a minor part that contributed to the rebellion that we’ve known about for this long, was frustrating. I really hope I can get a PS5 soon, my PS4 controller can’t take much more abuse.