Is Lego’s Skywalker Saga the best possible version of J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars movies?
At least some of those Rise Of Skywalker plot beats make more sense coming from the mouths of actual cartoon characters
Games Features SaGa
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I try not to think too much about the two J.J. Abrams-directed Star Wars movies—2015’s The Force Awakens and 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker—on account of my doctor suggesting that the blood pressure spikes I get every time I whisper “They fly now?!” to myself in my darkest moments will one day cause my head to explode.
That being said: When my partner and I started playing through the recently released Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, we quickly agreed to skip Episodes I and IV in favor of starting with the Disney trilogy of movies that contains Abrams’ two prime contributions to the franchise. Partly that’s because they’re the only truly original material in the game—Force Awakens got its own Lego adaptation a few years back, but the other two movies are new to this odd little sub-series. Partly it’s because I genuinely like Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, and wanted to see what a Lego version of its deliberate deconstructions of Star Wars mythmaking would look like. Partly it’s because I’ve done enough digital Death Star trench runs to last a lifetime.
But mostly, I was curious to see whether Traveller’s Tales’ Lego games—which I’ve spent a lot of time with over the years—could smooth out the more annoying bits of Abrams’ films, which I find to be slavish in their desire to repeat the beats of the original trilogy, and incoherent in their ability to tell a meaningful story set in one of the most beloved science-fiction universes of all time.
The answer is: A little? Certainly I had more fun playing through Awakens and Skywalker than I did while watching them—although even when abstracted out into Lego form, they still felt bloated and weirdly MacGuffin-obsessed. (I’d actually managed to forget how much of Rise is focused on finding the ship to find the knife to find the hacker to find the magical Sith-finding triangle thingy.) The Disney movies’ weird obsession with desert planets (Jakku and Crait and Pasaana) took a little bit of joy out of the exploration that’s such a big part of this franchise’s appeal. But I’d be lying if putting together a little puppet show for the kids at the Festival Of The Ancestors in order to claim a magic brick didn’t make me smile, or that shooting down TIE fighters with my partner didn’t capture some of that old Star Wars joy.
Mechanically, Skywalker Saga doesn’t play all that differently from the first Lego Star Wars game from way back in 2005: You run around, blast stuff, break stuff, build stuff, and do a slightly goofy version of the plot of the films. (Combat has been made slightly more complicated, in that you now have two attack buttons, instead of a single “smash everything” key.) Weirdly fittingly, the only part of the trilogy that offers anything really interesting in terms of level design is Last Jedi, which offers up some neat puzzles to make a game out of protagonist Rey’s trip into Luke Skywalker’s Special Sith Cave. And it all looks very glossy and pretty—although those nice looks certainly can’t justify the reports of awful crunch that have come out surrounding the games’ development.
On a less important note: The decision (dating back to 2012) to switch the Lego games over to voice acting, instead of the silly pantomimes of earlier games, remains kind of a bummer, although you do get to make a sub-game out of figuring out who’s doing the best impression of these films’ very famous stars. (Fake Harrison Ford is not at the top of the list, while Actual Billy Dee Williams and Actual Anthony Daniels definitely are.) And the ability to run all over a place like Maz Kanata’s castle from Awakens is genuinely cool. It’s just a shame that you’re trapped in, well, the plot of the Disney Star Wars movies. (Hey, kids! Who wants to watch your Lego friend Chewbacca die for an hour, before miraculously coming back to life?)
All that being said: I’m comfortable calling these the best versions available of the Abrams Star Wars movies. Sure, it’s no less silly seeing “The dead speak!” in the opening crawl of Lego: The Rise Of Skywalker than it was in a theater back in 2019. But at least “They fly now?!” sounds more natural coming out of the mouths of actual cartoons.
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Just how much has Rise of Skywalker affected people’s opinions of Force Awakens?
I wouldn’t say it necessarily “affected” as in “changed.” I’d say that it vindicated the people who weren’t so hot for the movie and made them more confident in expressing those opinions than they were when they were fighting the consensus of “nostalgia is great, thank God George Lucas is gone.”
Funny thing about the anti-nostalgia backlash, though, is how often it’s combined with nostalgia for the prequels, as in “at least the prequels tried new things.”
Well, in a way, I’m guilty of that, myself, and in another way I’m not. I can only speak for myself, but I think it goes to the same notion of having “permission” to express nonconsensus views. I’m guilty/not guilty in the sense that I have absolutely said “at least he was trying new things” in arguments about the movies, but that isn’t nostalgia and it didn’t start with “The Force Awakens.” I’ve been defending the prequels with that exact argument since they came out; again, suddenly, people are saying similar things to what I’ve been saying for years. I feel vindicated, to an extent, but not exactly happy about how little people actually trust their own opinions until they are “allowed” by the people around them. It’s no different from watching live theater. Laughter and emotion always build because people wait for others to give them permission to laugh or cry. It’s the human condition. In this case, I’ve always been shouted down for saying that I will always prefer an ambitious failure to a lazy success…and now I’m not shouted down anymore for THAT, just by the people who want to take it that extra step further and rant about what qualifies as a “true” fan and other tribal, self-serving nonsense.I respect the prequels more than I enjoy them; I enjoy TFA and R1 more than I respect them; I respect and enjoy TLJ; and I neither respect nor enjoy TROS or Solo. Regardless of my personal opinions I would never claim that anyone who doesn’t agree with me 100% “isn’t a true fan” or that I “love” or “understand” Star Wars more than any other fan or any of the people who’ve made those films.
Honestly, it’s the viewpoints like those that are the logical endpoint of this kind of thinking and it’s what has made me just give up on “fandom” as a worthwhile concept.
I admit that I generally don’t consider originality to be that important when it comes to quality(the first Star Wars borrowed from a lot of things), so that’s one reason I liked Force Awakens more than some people.
It’s been a pretty big gaming week for me. It started off with buying myself a Passover present, one that I’m roughly 4 years behind the curve on:Yes, I now technically have a current generation console in the form of the OG Nintendo Switch. Since I’m a big RPG fan, there are several games I want to get, with the obvious ones being The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Naturally, I eschewed all those and went all in with a Grass Monkey:
Yep. That’s Pokémon Shield, and I’m in the Grookey Gang. I also downloaded Super Animal Royale and Tetris 99 but haven’t played those yet. And once I get paid next, I will be adding Breath of the Wild.
Away from my new toy and back on my PC, I played a bit more of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’s Bounty Hunter class story, a short stream of which can be found at https://twitch.tv/lost_limey (plain text URL because Kinja eats links, and they’re never fixing that bug)I returned to the Final Fantasy I Pixel Remaster, and did manage to defeat the Warmech in the Flying Fortress, and have Excalibur forged before traveling back in time to confront Chaos, which took a while but eventually, I got to this:So I’ve officially beaten my first Final Fantasy game. Next up is the Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster.
Of course in the other Final Fantasy game where I have finished the base game, but not all the expansions, I carried on with the post-Shadowbringers, pre-Endwalker story quests in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve hit a small wall in that I haven’t been able to get past this Solo Duty where you play as Estinien: So rather than getting frustrated by that, I also did a bit of Relic Weapon grinding and am now also working on the nine books of the “Trials of the Brave” quests to upgrade my Gae Bolg (Atma) to Animus status, but that looks like a very, very long grind indeed.
In the world of tabletop gaming, our local gaming group that holds brewery events, held there first such event since 2021. Like that one, it was ticketed for head count, and everyone had to provide proof of vaccination before they could attend. The upshot was that I got to play my first in-person game of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition in forever. It was a one shot where the hook was we played kids trapped in a house on a rainy day pretending to be our characters, I didn’t get any pictures of the game in session, but here’s the character I played for it, a Fairy Oath of the Ancients Paladin: My clutch moment for our table’s party (which turned out to be a druid, a cleric, and two paladins) was casting Faerie Fire on a basement monster that turned out to be a reflavored displacer beast, causing the actual beats to glow in the dark and canceling out the disadvantage its abilities would normally have given us.
That wasn’t my only Dungeons & Dragons game this week, since our online gaming group resumed their Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign after a two month hiatus.. It was mostly a downtime session, but we did eventually go back down through the Yawning Portal. If you’re interested, the session was streamed on Twitch at https://twitch.tv/videos/1460286994 On top of that, I had the pleasure of a visit from son_limey, and he brought over one of his latest obsessions: Excuse the absolutely terrible photograph, but that’s the Stardew Valley Board Game. It’s co-op play, and we had a blast, just managing to fulfill all 4 Grandpa’s Letters and all 6 Community Center bundles before the end of the winter phase. While son_limey loves all things Stardew, I had struggled to get anywhere, tending to bounce off before introducing myself to all 28 villagers in the early quest. This time though, I fired up Stardew Valley on Steam, determined to get a different result:
And I did, I managed to find everybody, unlock both the the Community Center and the Wizard’s Tower, and even catch a few fish. It is however Day 9 of Spring and I’ve yet to harvest anything (my parsnips and potatoes should be ready for boiling, mashing, and sticking in a stew on Day 10)
Yup, I also find a nice long w*** soothing.
This is the third time I’ve seen/heard/read something about the Stardew Valley board game in the past month. I was aware they were making one and kinda thought it was out already, but it seems like it just got a big burst of interest. I didn’t realize until last week that it was co-op, which I guess makes sense thematically. I’m probably going to be reading up on the rules and trying to introduce it to my online board game group within the next few weeks.Hope you enjoy the video game. I put it off for like 5 years before letting it take over my life last summer. It was a great experience.
This goes without saying but holy shit please play Breath of the Wild.
Rise of Skywalker was hot garbage but I still enjoyed watching it more than Last Jedi. When I said TLJ killed by love of Star Wars a while back, I meant it. I haven’t even watched Mandalorian or Bad Batch.
Won’t be getting this until it goes on heavy discount like every other Lego game, but when I do, I’ll probably rush through the Sequel Trilogy and then take my time during the Prequel and Original Trilogies.
As for games I’m actually playing, aside from the my mobile games (Dragalia Lost, Mario Kart Tour, Pokemon Masters), I’ve been playing Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, since the Switch version finally went on sale for under $20 a few weeks ago. I suck at the game, so I’ve only gotten a single Story Mode S-Rank, but goddamn is it fun. Currently going through the Adventure Mode before tackling the Boruto expansion.
Also, there’s apparently an option somewhere in the Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga menus to replace the voice acting with the classic Lego Star Wars “mumble.”https://www.polygon.com/guides/23025307/mumble-mode-lego-star-wars-skywalker-saga
I finally found one of the bosses in Elden Ring! He immediately plastered me, but hey, there he is. Seriously though I’m loving the game- I’m doing a lot of stealth exploration, only getting in fights I’m confident in for the most part (except for the occasional time I screw up royally), and while I don’t have a ton of real progress to show, I’ve met some weird characters and had some weird interactions. In Final Fantasy XIV I finally discovered the retainer system and, accompanying that, have started to actually try and level one of my non-main, non-crafting/gathering classes. Mostly a question of finding side quests at this point. In the MSQ I’m still in the post-phase of Stormblood, and I’m fooling around with alts as well. Recently I switched from running Parallels on my Mac to just plain Boot Camp, which means I can actually run decent-sized applications on the Windows side. This is partly for my game project but also has enabled me to play around more with some Windows-only stuff I got from GOG. Trying to get the original Tomb Raider to work now, the mechanics are famously weird but I’m interested in struggling with them.
This advice is all over the internet, but it bears repeating: If something is too tough and you can’t figure out a strategy to get past it, just explore a bit more and see what’s out there. You would be surprised by how much stuff you can miss! Some of the best tools in your Tarnished’s utility-belt aren’t available (Torrent*, Ash Summons, Ashes of War) until you poke around a bit, AFAIK. For instance, I was planning on setting out for a serious attempt at [Redacted Area], but it was just too dangerous and cruel, so I just decided to go back to [Another Redacted Area]. I had defeated the shardbearer (Big Bad Boss of each area) in the latter area and I presumed that I had checked out most of the interesting stuff there, but I have proven myself wrong.*Once you do get Torrent, there are so, so many field encounters–blockades, big beasts, mean knights, sniper gauntlets, etc. that you can run right past if you just want to see what is on the other side. And if you can get the hang of horseback combat (I have problems with spatial orientation, so I’m not great at it), you can solve a lot of combat problems by just circling around your enemies and attacking at their back and sides.
Yeah I’m finding it interesting how much I’m able to avoid, and similarly dying is less frustrating because I’m losing runes but not necessarily progress. I can just say “Okay not ready for that part yet” and move on.
Christ, Rise of Skywalker was 3 years ago? That feels more depressing then it should.
There are a lot of game series that I just played to death and burned out on for life, but I think I could probably sit down with just about any Lego game, whether it’s one I played a decade ago or a brand new one, and just thoroughly enjoy the simple-to-moderate puzzles and low-stakes combat. It was just good, reliable fun. Haven’t played one since the Xbox 360, but it wouldn’t take much to convince me to pick one up.I had a moment during the past week when I was working on burning through the last 2, missable-goal-filled achievements in La-Mulana where I asked myself, “Am I still having fun?” And the answer was… actually, yes. So I continued. I probably had like 8 start-to-finish playthroughs of the game this month, and the game’s puzzle design philosophy doesn’t completely agree with me, and I’m never looking for another excuse to touch Hell Temple, but damn, I love the platforming and combat. I’ll probably be coming back to it at a later time, but it’s off my backlog, bringing me down to 27, within striking distance of my goal of 25. I haven’t fully committed to another big game, but I’ve been playing little 10-15 minute sessions of Cultist Simulator and trying to puzzle out its mechanics. I’m starting to get a better sense of how to manage some of the conditions that can end the game, and I’m trying to figure out if/how one game affects the next, as well as adjusting to the flavor of the different characters you can play as. This was a “what the fuck did I just buy?” game a couple years ago, but I think La-Mulana’s puzzles just got me acclimated to a certain level of obtuse mechanics that make this really intriguing. I’ve managed to start the process of forming my cult a few times, but most of the time I get walled trying to figure out how to reliably recruit my first follower, or what steps I’m supposed to take to research the various occult clues enough to actually start doing things with them. It’s a game you’re supposed to figure out through trial and error, and I’m kinda enjoying that right now. It feels like there’s a ton of game beyond the early stages I’m getting stuck on, and I’m sure the breakthroughs are going to feel great.Otherwise… lots of Tabletop Simulator. Played through games of 7 Wonders Architects, Wingspan, Don’t Let It Die, and Scythe over the past week, with a session of Robinson Crusoe planned for Saturday night. I’ve really been on a board game hot streak for the past month, and just seeing that we’re playing more consistently has attracted more people from our larger Discord community to join in, setting us up to split into multiple tables more often and give people more choice in what they want to play. It’s been fun taking on the roles of organizer, teacher, and referee, and I’m looking forward to doing that more IRL.
What gets me about Rise of Skywalker is how many egregious little moments and details drag it down. Like, I reckon it could be upgraded from terrible to mediocre just with some small edits:- Change the opening crawl so noone knows Palpatine’s back, and Ren’s just chasing rumours of the fleet.- Cut the “Chewie’s dead! Oh wait he isn’t!” That also cuts the dumb scene where Rey accidentally uses force lightning somehow.- Cut out Rey holding the knife up to the Death Star ruins.- Cut out Lando saying he’ll round up help for the final battle, or try and shift it to his earlier scene. Like, seriously Abrams, space is BIG.- Shift some dialogue or outtake footage in to make hyperspace jumps less instantaneous, because outside of E9 they fucking aren’t.- Get rid of the Reylo kiss, because that ship is fucking TOXIC.Bam! It’d still be pretty bad, but not aggressively so, and just for cutting a few minutes’ footage.I’m sick rn, so this weekend is for something easy-going like Grim Dawn on normal or some shit. Maybe continue my Dark Souls 2 replay. There’s talk in my group of playing some Civ 6 over the weekend, but idk yet if I’ll partake.
I would have changed it from The Force Awakens, make Rey fight like Starkiller in The Force Unleashed, where she wins by infusing force lightning and push into her swings. I also think it would be stronger if she used the force like a “gray” Jedi and used force lightning and chokes from the get go without knowing what she was doing and Luke teaches her otherwise. Or if the movies didn’t keep contradicting each other.
Nah.
I’ve never been a fan of lumping TFA and TRoS in the same boat. Sure, TFA is too beholden to the series’ past to really be its own thing, but at least it’s a well-told story that’s competently made. TRoS doesn’t feel like it was directed by the same person; it’s a nigh-incoherent slog that doesn’t even attain a basic level of filmmaking competence. Yes, it does call back to the original trilogy, but those callbacks are mostly surface-level, unlike TFA, which also takes its plot structure and themes from the first three films. TRoS’s major problem is that it’s a bad story badly told, badly filmed, badly directed, and badly edited.This weekend I plan to finish up ANNO: Mutationem. I think I’m just a couple of hours from the end now, and I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s just drenched in cyberpunk goodness, and I love the world that Thinking Stars has created. This game even made me like pixel art, a style I usually hate!I’m also going to finish up Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I think I have just one level left, but maybe there’s more after that. I’m impressed by what HAL has done here. On the surface, it’s just Super Mario 3D World with Kirby instead of Mario. But the traversal and combat challenges here are built specifically for Kirby: they account for his weaknesses rather than trivializing themselves by essentially being Mario challenges slapped into a Kirby world (this was one of Star Allies’s problems, at least from what I gleaned from the demo). HAL seems to have designed Forgotten Land around what would be challenging and interesting for *Kirby* to do, and the game is better for it.
yes, TFA is leagues better than TROS, but, no, it’s not a “well-told story.” It has entertaining moments, but it’s barely a story at all, just a lot of rehashed images, beats and ideas from other films with pretty terrible narrative choices, underwritten characters and astonishingly poor world-building. Does it have entertaining moments? In fairness, yes. But does it hold together? Not in the least.
I’m now halfway through Final Fantasy XIII and I have thoughts, and almost all of them are comparing the game to FFXII (a game I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did).XII had great characters and decent writing, but the plot was a total snooze. XIII, on the other hand, has an interesting plot, but the characters are dumb and/or annoying, and the writing is simply atrocious. Seriously, it’s like the dialogue was written by an AI. (Sidenote: Fang hasn’t given me a reason to hate her yet, but she’s still new to the party, so I’ll give her time.)XII’s combat fascinated me, because it mostly runs on auto-pilot, but you’re given so many to program your characters’ actions that it was a ton of fun. In XIII, I feel like the only meaningful decision I get is when to shift Paradigms. It’s no small decision, but the game leans into auto battle too much.Also, 2 things about the game goes against everything I associate with Final Fantasy, both which I was warned about before playing: the total lack of exploration, and having your party fully heal after each battle. (Not to mention getting a Game Over if your party leader goes down because apparently the rest of your party is too stupid to revive them.) XIII’s straight hallways are the polar opposite of XII’s vastly open world.The visuals frustrate me as well. One of my few complaints about FFVII Remake was the hyper-kinetic, quick cutting action scenes where you can’t tell what’s going on. XIII does the same thing. You know that scene in Taken when Liam Neeson hops a fence and there are 13 cuts in just a few seconds? These are like that, only the camera is circling around everything at 100mph as well.XIII is decent enough to have me see it through, but so far, of all the Final Fantasy games I’ve played (IV-X, XII-XIII, VII Remake, and about a half hour of I on NES), this ranks near the bottom.
I hate that people don’t like the “they fly now!?” thing when there are so many other issues with Rise. Jet Troopers have been around since the Clone Wars, it’s not a new thing, it was just new for the First Order.Fuck some of the most fun parts of Force Unleashed are giving jet troopers a quick force lightning zap and watching their jetpacks short-circuit and explode.
100 hours in on Forbidden West. Loving every minute. Working on unlocking legendary weapons in the arena right now.
Arena was the one of two things that got me to drop the difficulty down in HFW. I just wasn’t a fan of the pre-made load outs on a lot of the challenges. That being said, there were some cool scenarios, and I could see some multi-player grander scale arena things being a thing that I would enjoy.
The second thing was post-game weapon and outfit upgrading. The amount of items you need to upgrade everything was a little on the high side, so story mode enemy health and easy loot has made it a lot easier.
That being said, amazing amazing game. I always find myself up to just go destroy some more machines in post-game, waiting for what will surely be an amazing DLC campaign or two.
Safe travels in the West!
Someone hasn’t found Mumble Mode over in the cheats menu…
I’m really enjoying the Lego Skywalker Saga although I really appreciate that the last (TFA) game had all the OG actors, that’s obviously impossible with this game. I’ve never rewatched the prequels since they came out, it was actually fun playing through them again. Not so much The Rise of Skywalker.Having started playing Lego games with Marvel Superheroes, I have no nostalgia for mumble mode.