Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It takes some bits of level design directly from Bloodborne, tries to emulate Uncharted’s set-pieces, mixing them with a Metroidvania structure while copying Metroid Prime’s 3D Map, and finishes the project with a Star Wars coat of paint. Fallen Order, however, fails to build a cohesive whole, not quite matching the quality of any of the games that inspired it.

The protagonist is young padawan Cal Kestis, who survived order 66 and is trying to lay low working as a scrapper, salvaging ships, until the day he is forced to break his cover to save a friend’s life in an accident. The Empire is right onto him, sending inquisitors to track him down and kill him, but Cal is rescued by a former Jedi, Cere Junda, and her partner in crime, the pilot Greez. Cere sends the padawan on a mission to find a Holocron containing a list of all the force-sensitive children in the galaxy, which will help them rebuild the Jedi Order.

To that end, Cal must follow in the footsteps of Cere’s former mentor, Eno Cordova. And for most of the game, that is precisely what the protagonist will be doing: going to each place Cordova passed through just to find a clue about their next destination. So, since Fallen Order is a twenty-hour game and not a two-hour movie, the lack of plot development and actual progression during most of its runtime hurts the pace of the narrative.

The protagonist’s final decision in the game can sound very anticlimactic because of this pacing problem, too: since not much has happened until the game’s final hours, the ending makes the whole journey sound even more useless. The thought process that leads Cal to that decision, for example, only begins to be built in those final hours, not having much time to be properly developed.

It doesn’t help that some character arcs and plot twists are blatant rehashes from classic Star Wars stories and that Cal’s personality is pretty bland. Despite some sparse attempts to copy Uncharted’s witty dialogue, Cal Kestis is no Nathan Drake, lacking the latter’s charisma and inability to stop talking about the things that are happening on the screen: Cal is mostly silent during normal gameplay.

His character arc is about trauma, but this serves more as a device to justify the game’s structure around repressed memories than anything else. Cal gets new abilities by remembering them at arbitrary points in the game: he looks at some animals running on walls, something clicks and he goes “oh yes, I could wall run too!” which can sound pretty silly at times, especially since the abilities in question are quite basic, like pushing and pulling objects with the force. But the main issue here is that Cal never comments about being unable to do those things when the player is standing in front of an obstacle they can’t overcome because Cal lacks those abilities. It would have been another situation entirely if he had tried to use the ability but discovered that he still couldn’t. His frustration would have paved the way for the moment when something finally clicked. Here, however, it’s as if he forgot that Jedis could even do those things, which is just ridiculous.

His trauma – and Cere’s too for that matter – is barely touched on in the game’s first half. Fallen Order decides to concentrate character development – and the best bits of the story – in its last hours, which doesn’t leave much room for these themes and subjects to be truly developed. There’s a certain character that joins Cal’s group, for example, that does so just before the final mission, which robs them of any chance to become truly memorable, despite the potential.

Gameplay-wise, Fallen Order is a mismatch of various different ideas that don’t quite fit together. It copies some parts of the Soulsborne series, such as building levels that fold into themselves, revealing shortcuts to the last save point, which recovers your health but respawns enemies. But Fallen Order is also a Metroidvania at heart, filling those levels with items that can’t be acquired before getting the necessary ability.

The first Dark Souls didn’t allow for fast travel at the beginning to force the player to immerse themselves into that world, memorizing the locales, the points of interest, and the overall geography of the world of Lordran. This worked because the shortcuts served as a form of progression, reducing the time spent to move forward after each death and because everything in those levels could be acquired on the first run through them. Metroidvanias, on the other hand, should encourage constant backtracking to acquire the items that were locked away, which means that this action should be rewarding instead of time-consuming or troublesome. The lack of fast travel in Fallen Order – alongside the number of “points of no return” in the levels – goes in the opposite direction, discouraging exploration and making the player unwilling to go back to previous areas to find new things, believing them to be more trouble than they’re worth.

The fact that most of these items are cosmetic changes just exacerbates the problem – and there are more than one hundred of them. Why on Tatooine would anyone try a new ability in a previous area if this will take them half an hour and get them just a bunch of new colors to Cere’s ship, the droid BD-1(he’s a good boy, though), and to the handle of Cal’s lightsaber? Fallen Order even takes this handle and divides it into four parts (material, emitter, switch, and sleeve), so the player can fully customize a minuscule thing that will remain covered by Cal’s hand whenever he’s fighting.

Talking of pallet swaps, Fallen Order has some hidden bosses for the player to find, but they’re just more aggressive versions of common enemies, requiring basically the same strategy. There’s also a full optional area to be explored, but it’s one that is visually uninteresting – unless you are really into the interior of broken Imperial ships – and that offers the same “rewards” as all the others. Just like Bloodborne, there’s an enemy that grabs you and sends you away to a new area – a space Hypogean Gaol, so to speak – but you can’t escape or beat that enemy – so it’s not a secret – and in the end, it just amounts to a single enemy gauntlet instead of being a full-fledged area. Just like the Soulsborne games, there are a bunch of doors that “can’t be opened from this side” because they will serve as a shortcut later, but here the protagonist is a Jedi with a lightsaber, which makes this design feel artificial. Fallen Order copies some good ideas, but there’s always a “but” stopping them from working.

Talking of useless lightsabers, the game makes them feel like a common sword. You hit a barechested man with one and it doesn’t leave a scratch – or do much damage to his health bar. Your blows are constantly blocked by stormtroopers with electrified batons. It takes three hits to kill a single rat with the lightsaber. You can only increase the damage of your weapon once, and only by the end of the game with a skill tree – and even afterward it still feels weaker than it should be. In an RPG, this wouldn’t be a problem, because they’re completely designed around abstractions, but in an action game with a more realistic aesthetic to make it look like the movies it just feels off.

But this could have been easily overlooked if the combat system wasn’t – just like the whole game – a collection of different ideas that don’t work together. Fallen Order has the high punishing enemy attacks of a Soulsborne: a single hit from a common enemy can take half of your health bar away. Like Sekiro, enemies can use unblockable attacks, which are signaled to the player. Here, enemies glow red right before unleashing one of these attacks. Like the Soulsborne games, you also lose your experience points if you die but have a chance to get them back: here, you have to just hit the enemy that killed you once, which will be glowing yellow to make it easy to be spotted. But this means that you can’t see this enemy preparing its unblockable attack until you manage to hit it, as they will be glowing yellow instead of red – and again, these attacks hit hard, possibly making you die one more time.

But the comparisons with the Soulsborne games end here. We don’t need to care about a stamina gauge when attacking, for example, and the game hides the heavy attack behind a skill tree – and ties it to the force meter for no good reason, as it ends up discouraging us from using it, since the push, pull, and slow abilities tend to be much more effective in killing.

When fighting against any enemy that is not a common stormtrooper, the player is encouraged to use a defensive approach: we should wait for them to attack us and then parry and counter. Otherwise, we will have to deal with troopers blocking our attacks until their “guard gauge” depletes – and this thing recharges if we take too long. It’s easy to throw words like “janky” and “clunky” when talking about this combat system because of things like this: besides Cal being really slow and the fact that we can’t cancel out of attacks, the common combat situation doesn’t have we trading blows with the enemies but having a hard time damaging them even after all three of our attacks connected.

Talking of janky, we can also evade attacks in Fallen Order, but dodging can be pretty unreliable. The player should only dodge during a very brief window right before the unblockable attack is about to connect; otherwise, they’re going to be hit by it. Unblockable attacks sometimes track us– and they really, really track us, homing in on us hard. If the player slows down a monster – say, a giant frog – believing they can go around it and hit its back, they’re in for a surprise: if we slow down the frog during one of these attacks, we can easily see it rotating 180º as if on top of a vinyl record – ignoring the slow effect – to still face Cal when the force effect is over. And if we slow down the frog after it has just launched itself at Cal, we’ll discover that it also has invincibility frames while doing so, which means that Cal’s super powerful lightsaber won’t damage the frog at all. The player slows down the frog and uses the force meter to make a heavy attack, and still fails because the monster was arbitrarily invincible at the time.

There’s an achievement in the game that illustrates one of the main problems of Fallen Order’s combat. It unlocks after we slice off the tongue of this giant frog, which sometimes tries to grab Cal with it, launching it toward the jedi. If we use slow when it’s in the middle of the attack, with the tongue sticking out, immovable in the air, and hits the tongue with the lightsaber… nothing happens. To unlock the achievement, we must use another force power and then the lightsaber. It’s not that Fallen Order is too difficult – I died more times in the final level of Super Mario 3D World than here – but that the strategy to defeat certain enemies is sometimes arbitrary: studying their attack patterns is not always fruitful.

The force powers, meanwhile, are either useless or overpowered. After Cal remembers that he can push things away with the force, for example, it becomes much simpler to just throw everybody out of ledges than to fight them with a lightsaber. It trivializes things. But if the enemy is immune to it – because it’s too big or because of reasons – pushing it doesn’t do much besides diminishing a bit of its guard gauge. Fallen Order could have used more ways of employing the force in combat: the situations where there’s debris we can pull and throw at enemies are very rare, for example.

There are also problems with the parkour and the set pieces. Movement is stiff and limited in the game. Call can run on walls, for instance, but only on clearly marked walls. If we see a wall that Cal should have been able to run on, but it’s not marked, he won’t be able to run on it. This applies to platforms as well: if the player thinks they can jump somewhere, but it’s out of the intended way, they will either fall directly through the platform or hit an invisible wall. This design wasn’t a problem in the Uncharted games because – save Lost Legacy – they were never about exploring their fictional worlds, but following a linear path. Fallen Order, on the other hand, tries to be a Metroidvania, so the artificiality of this design goes counter to the exploration. Moreover, Nathan’s mobility is also limited, while Cal Kestis is more like the protagonist of a Prince of Persia game, having the tools to get to hard-to-reach places. In other words, the jedi should have been able to move more freely around the levels than he’s allowed to.

The set pieces, meanwhile, are usually effective, but there is the occasional moment when they fall flat. The “Rogue One scene” at the end – you’ll know when you see it – is intense and exhilarating for the same reasons it worked so well in Rogue One. At the other end of the spectrum, however, there’s a scene where we fly on top of a big bird, and the music soars to encourage us to marvel at the visuals – but this will hardly happen since the bird flies too close to the top of the trees and the camera is too close to the action, meaning there’s nothing on the screen to marvel at. The whole scene ends up being silly instead: it’s trying too hard and not delivering.

The puzzles are the least problematic aspect of the game. Here, they finally manage to successfully pull an Uncharted: the puzzles are huge in scope but not complex to figure out. There’s an enormous room at the beginning, for example, with big metal balls, wind shafts, and circular holes where the balls should fit. Moving the huge objects around the room makes us familiar with our recently acquired ability and it the whole sequence feels epic because of the size of it all – the room even changes to match our different solutions, making different platforms appear depending on which holes we have activated.

Presentation-wise, Fallen Order isn’t going to take anyone’s breath away – especially if they’ve played any Uncharted – but it’s hardly an ugly game. The soundtrack, however, is a letdown, just reusing the classic themes without bothering to give a proper personality to the game. The Mandalorian is proof that something can exist in the Star Wars universe and still have a musical identity of its own to match its tone, genre, and story. Although… since everything here is generic, maybe the music indeed fits the tone.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not greater than the sum of its many disjointed parts. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, but there’s still much room for improvement.

March 09, 2021.