Jedi Fallen Order Archives - Page 2 of 2

Over the last few weeks I have been doing this series where I recount the games that were important to me during a specific year of the last decade. We have now reached the end and it is time for me to talk about this past year… a year that I seemed to have way more issue narrowing down than the others. I guess as time passes your thoughts galvanize around specific games as they stand the test of time. For this past year everything feels very fresh in my mind, and as a result I just look out at a great year full of a lot of games I enjoyed. For those who have not been following along, here are all of the other posts and links.

Now let’s dig into what is going to prove to be the longest of the posts. I am bad at whittling things down. Let’s start off with a few honorable mentions.

Anthem

This game is a controversial title for this year, and I have a bunch of mixed feelings about it. It was very much an important game to me this year, but also serves as the biggest disappointment. I had been tracking this title since it first showed up at E3 with what was apparently a cobbled together demo reel that did not represent anything close to what the game was like at that moment. We found all of this out after the failed release of the title thanks to a Jason Schreier tell all piece about just how bad the development cycle went. Why I am conflicted is that I loved the game that was there. I loved jetting around in an Iron Man suit and firing down heavy ordinance while bopping things in the head with my electrified mace and then detonating bombs as I jetted away. I want this game to find its feet and turn into what I hope it could be. For the time being however I am not playing it and based on my friends list… no one is given I added hundreds of people from one of the discord communities. I hope in 2020 it can have a resurrection story we will all be proud of, but for now I am giving it an Honorable Mention footnote.

Kind Words

This one is also going on the honorable mention list, largely because it is not really a game at all. It is more of a social experiment where you are placed behind the veil of anonymity and asked to say nice things to strangers. The funny thing is… this almost single-handedly dismantles the greater internet fuckwad theory, which assumes that anonymity leads to toxic behavior. This experience places you in a sandbox and directs you to say nice things…. and it works. I spent a few days messing around with this thoroughly charming “game” and have not touched it since. However if you need something good and pure in your life I highly suggest you checking it out.

Baba Is You

For the first real contender of the year we have the insanely charming puzzle game called Baba Is You. The game is deceptively simple and requires you to screw around with what feels like programming logic until you reach the “Is Win” condition. This involves you pushing things around until you can move whatever the “Is You” object over to the “Is Win” condition. This all sounds like madness I am sure until you have played it, but the end result is countless hours of making your way through puzzles that sometimes make you feel like a god damned genius when you finally arrive at the solution. I never quite beat the game but I often times wander away from things when a shiny object enters my field of view. I did however spend an awful lot of time playing this and enjoying every moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

Remember that whole rule I set out and then violated about not adding expansions to a list? Yeah I am breaking it again because Shadowbringers is quite possibly the best Final Fantasy game I have ever played and also quite possibly the best JRPG. I was enthralled the entire time this expansion was expanding before me and there were several times where it made leaps that I had no clue was going to happen. It also tells a fresh story that I had not really seen in a game like this before that while it in itself is a bunch of remixed elements we have seen, is presented to make something fresh, I still don’t want to dive into the spoilers of this story because it is that damned good and if you have not experienced it before then you absolutely need to do so. Post launch I have fallen back out of habit of logging into Final Fantasy XIV, but at some point I will come back and gobble up the story goodness that has arrived in my passing.

The Outer Worlds

A running theme of this year is about wish fulfillment, and one of the things I have wanted for years is a spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas. I like Fallout 3 and 4, and think they are good at doing the things that they are doing… but I will always have a deep burning fire in my heart for New Vegas. Outer Worlds is a completely new property set in a dystonian universe where capitalism has gone to its absolute furthest possible nefarious ends. It is a time of monolithic MegaCorps, but they are presented not in a cyberpunk future but instead of one of a space western that draws heavily upon similar genres like the Firefly series. What makes this game shine are its characters and the writing that brings them to life. Parvati is pure and precious and I will fight to my last breath to keep her and her fledgling relationship with Junlei safe.

Jedi Fallen Order

I am being completely honest here that this is a game I never expected to see the light of day. EA has had this habit of killing off anything that looked like a great new Star Wars game in favor of trying to create lootbox hell holes. When this was first announced, I fully expected it to either turn out to be vapor ware or get cancelled. I cannot explain how happy I am to be wrong, and to have what is seemingly the first “Soulsian” game that I have really loved. I am not sure what it is about the specific blend of elements but this is one of the best games of this decade, not just this year. The variable difficulty is key, but so is the way that this game makes you feel like you actually are a Jedi with lots of interesting tools to solve problems as they arise. BD-1 also is the best dog in video games ever, and I want a droid buddy that will sit on my shoulder as I go on adventures.

World of Warcraft Classic

For the longest time I have not really known if World of Warcraft was just a better game back in those early years or if I was simply viewing the world through rose colored glasses. While I have enjoyed a lot of the quality of life improvements, there was something lost along the way and Classic shone a spotlight on that with blaring clarity. While I am not actively playing it for various reasons, I fully expect to return at some day and push my character the rest of the way to 60. I enjoyed this game with my whole being right up until the point that the whole Hong Kong nonsense started and I felt bad for supporting anything made by Blizzard. I’ve stepped down off of that soap box and made my peace, but it was just enough time to knock me out of the rhythm of playing this game. It is still a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I hope I can figure out how to make my brain crave again.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

We are wrapping things up for the year with a bit more of that wish fulfillment. Castlevania Symphony of the Night is quite possibly my favorite game to have ever been developed. So when I heard in 2015 that Koji Igarashi was going to be creating a brand new franchise that would serve as the spiritual successor to this game I loved, I was ready to throw a near infinite amount of money at the screen. At that time it was slotted for a 2017 release and while the game ultimately was two years late, the delays were worth every moment. This is an example of a creator and team listening to the fans and going back to the drawing board to create better ways of delivering the end product. The only blemish however is the Switch release which ultimately still lags behind the quality of the other available platforms. The game itself is a masterpiece of the Metroidvania genre and introduces a brand new setting with its own deeply interesting lore and characters. I am hooked and I am hoping that the game as a whole made enough of a splash to warrant many future adventures.

That’s it folks… the end of my series on the games of this past decade. What are your thoughts, and what are some of the games that you felt I missed along the way? Drop me a note in the comments.

This morning I thought I would write up some of my thoughts about a game that several of us absolutely thought was going to be vaporware… Jedi Fallen Order. There is a specific reason for this because it seems like EA has cancelled more Star Wars games than it actually has made since getting the exclusivity deal to the licensing. However it appears that Respawn has decided to just give a giant middle finger to EA and make whatever the hell they want to make. All reports seem to indicate that Apex Legends was more or less a passion project that EA ignored, and Jedi Fallen Order is a game that EA just doesn’t make anymore… a Single Player non-LIve-Services game with absolutely no Micro-transactions and a boat load of cosmetic goodies that are unlocked through gameplay. Respawn should really share whatever dirt they have on EA with other studios so they can make awesome things as well.

During the game you play as Kyle Katarn… I mean Cal Kestis a wayard Jedi Padawan that managed to hide out in the time following Order 66. I like Cal fine but he seems to be purposefully bland as to allow you to more or less insert yourself into that character. He is voiced and looks like Cameron Monaghan who I mostly know from Shameless but others will know from Gotham. He does a perfectly cromulent job bringing this character to life and there is an adorable “a boy and his dog” relationship between him and the goodest droid boy ever… BD-1. The only negative is that I would have liked it if there was a Female option as well given that absolutely nothing about the character appears to give two shits about the gender. Cal Kestis is an equally generic name so they should have totally done a Revan here and just let you pick whichever gender you preferred to play as.

The game itself is gorgeous and I have been playing it upstairs on my gaming machine in 4k, which leads to a really awesome experience. The game presents you with a giant warning screen suggesting that while it is playable with a keyboard and mouse that you go ahead and use a controller, so I am begrudgingly doing that as well. Since I have nonsense large hands I am using my favorite Xbox One controller the Power A Fusion Pro 1.0 controller which is sadly no longer made. As far as gameplay itself it is this weird amalgamation of Uncharted and Darksiders… with a lot of tropes made popular with the Dark Souls games but play out in a way here that feels less awkwardly punishing.

The souls comparisons go basically like this. When you die you lose a bunch of experience and you can gain it all back… as well as completely heal your character by tapping the mob you died to. There are a bunch of meditation locations in the world and these function like campfires in Dark Souls games… as in you will completely heal up and restock but also all of the mobs you killed respawn as a result so it plays a tradeoff between healing up now or causing yourself hassle in the future. BD-1 has the ability to dispense healing stims which play the same role as the Estus Flask allowing you to heal up without invoking the respawn penalty.

The other connection that gets drawn is the style of combat. This is not a button masher and if you do button mash… your character will flail around uselessly as a result. You start with a single bladed light saber and at a couple of points during the game you will be able to upgrade this to a double bladed saber, and swap between the two freely as needed. The thing that I find the most interesting is that each weapon has its own feel and range of uses and the first time I tried to treat my double saber like the original single I also flailed around hopelessly until I got the swing of it. Combat is deliberate and involved you exploiting timing in order to unleash some extremely impressive looking combos that make you feel bad ass.

All of that said… there is still a large chunk of the game that is learning how to traverse the levels and figure out Zelda Temple style puzzles. When you are entering a puzzle area and you are seemingly struggling to grasp what needs to happen… you are offered hints in the form of conversations with BD-1. Often times these aren’t super helpful but are charming as hell and well worth listening to… and at least in a few cases reaffirmed that my idea was correct as to what needed to happen next. There are a lot of times this game feels like Uncharted or a modern Tomb Raider. The truth is… the mix of elements makes for an extremely compelling gameplay experience.

The game excels at giving you set pieces that make you feel like a Jedi, and does an exceptional job of set design that slowly teaches you the basics. It then takes those basics and repeats them over and over through the level, each time mixing and remixing the same themes that you have seen before and then finally chaining them together in a way that makes you feel like you really can use the force. There is one sequence that involves a zip line, to a wall run, to a wall climb that seems extremely daunting at first… but by the time you reach that area you have done all of those separately enough times to make you feel comfortable to chain them all together.

The game tells a relatively simple story, but it does so in a charming manner with a bunch of characters that are both interesting and acted extremely well. It isn’t so much that it is a storytelling juggernaut, but the complete package of how the game feels and the story blend nicely to give you an enjoyable experience. While it is not a role-playing game at all, I would say that this is probably my favorite Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic. The only thing that could have made it better was to make the character something you could create yourself similar to the original character in KOTOR.

I get the impression that Disney is wanting to enter this game in as part of the cannon as it mingles with other characters that are already firmly rooted in Star Wars history. I have to assume that is why we have a fixed character that we are playing. This is an unfortunate choice however given the levels of superfluous cosmetic choice you are given in the game, that the most important one is completely missing. If you can get past that one fatal flaw however the game is amazing and I would highly suggest it to anyone who is willing to listen to me. I’m on what is either the 3rd or 4th planet depending on if you count the starting area as its own thing. I will be playing more of it tonight because it is pretty much dominating my gaming schedule.