Star Wars Fallen Order or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Parry

 

“Failure is not the end, it’s a necessary part of the path. Hope will always survive in those who continue to fight.”

I never really was the biggest Star Wars fan if I’ll be honest here. I haven’t even seen the original trilogy till last year, and I’ve barely seen any of the shows. My biggest experience was just catching the sequel trilogy with my family when they came out, but that was years ago and I haven’t watched them since that first watch. This has changed in recent times though, as I’ve joined a friend group in a project to watch every single piece of canon Star Wars media in timeline order. It’s been an utter blast, whether it be watching The Acroylate, trudging through the Clone Wars, discovering an underrated gem in The Bad Batch, I think I can call myself a Star Wars fan now, and I’ve been excitedly looking forward to every single watch we do lately. We got a few games to do as well, and recently I got to replay Star Wars Fallen Order. I remember this game kinda being a big deal when it was released, due to the fact it was an actual decent Star Wars game after forever, and I remember enjoying it quite a lot when I played it. That was years ago though, and I was a little cautious going into it now considering how much my taste in games has changed. Does being a Star Wars fan enhance this experience now, or does it make the journey a lot rougher?

Taking place in a post order 66 timeline, you play as Cal Kestis, a former Jedi in hiding from the empire, who’s been using a squad of Inquisitors in order to hunt down and slay any last few Jedi stragglers. Cal’s been avoiding them on his own fine, but a recent use of his force powers attracted the Inquisitors to him, and he has to go back to a life on the run. During his escape, he encounters a ship known as the Mantis, piloted by Greez, a Latero male with a gambling problem and Ceres, a former Jedi also on the run with Cal. Cal finds out from Ceres about a holocron that contains a list of every single force sensitive child in the galaxy. Seeing this as an opportunity to rebuild the Jedi Order and fight back against the empire, Ceres ask for Cal’s help in retrieving the holocron before the Empire gets their hands on it. Wasting no time, Cal sets out to find the holocron and hopefully get a fighting edge against the Empire that’s ruled the galaxy with an iron first for too long. It’s an alright plot honestly, it’s very by the numbers. You can kinda predict where each plot point is going to go and in terms of Star Wars stories, it’s nothing too crazy, but it’s still a fun time regardless. I think it makes up for it with how enjoyable the characters can be. There’s a lot of character interactions in this game, and each one is usually a treat to witness. Seeing Cal bounce off of Greez and Ceres is genuinely a good time, and there’s a few moments that are pretty great to witness, like the final boss fight and anything to do with the Inquisitors. In terms of what this game brings to the greater Star Wars lore, nothing too much, and the ending of the game has the holocron be destroyed anyway, so in the grand scheme of things, this doesn't affect much of the universe, but it’s still a decent enough side story to sink your teeth into if you’re craving some Star Wars action and despite being generic, it’s great to witness as the story goes on!

Fallen Order makes up with it in its gameplay though, presenting itself as a pretty fun action rpg. The big focus here of course is the Lightsaber combat, and it’s some of the most fun Lightsaber combat I’ve ever gotten to try out. You aren’t just swinging at everything like crazy, you’re instead focusing on learning how to parry properly. Parrying is the name of the game here, and knowing how to parry will mean life or death throughout this entire game. WHen you go to attack an enemy, they’ll usually block it, making getting damage pretty hard. The only way to break the guard is to lower their stun gauge, which is done by either attacking them recklessly (which is too risky),or properly parrying their attacks, lowering the gauge like crazy and letting you rack in massive damage. It’s a really fun system, and while the game doesn't really get that challenging besides a few annoying enemy placements here and there, it’s still immensely satisfying parrying each and every attack, and you can even adjust the parry timing yourself if you’re craving much stricter timing.

It’s not all perfect though, one of Fallen Order’s biggest issues is its rather lackluster map design. In between combat you’ll be running around these huge open maps, collecting various collectibles (usually cosmetics) and climbing up walls like you’re playing an Uncharted game.I’d enjoy these segments more if every single planet didn’t feel the same. Sure they look different environment wise, but the main issue with each planet is the fact that they're basically just giant circles.  You’re just looping around the same areas over and over again, with the different revisits having you take a slight different path. This makes the game feel super tedious overall, and I found myself just wanting to get to the combat portions instead. It’s especially egregious when you’re doing cleanup because everything feels so far apart, and it takes forever to get to different areas due to how bad some of the shortcuts here can be. I understand that it wants to have these huge connected areas, but in execution it falls apart horribly, and when the exploration part of your EXPLORATION based action rpg isn;t that fun, you’re left with kind of a mixed package. It doesn't help that there’s barely any planets here, you’re really only gonna be exploring 3 of them, it feels rather limited in terms of what Star Wars can do, especially with the fact that two of them are just iconic Star Wars planets we’ve seen before. Sure it’s cool to explore these planets in a new perspective, but I’ve seen them time and time again, and I‘d rather see something new than old.

It feels strange coming back to this and feeling so mixed on it. It’s a shame because there are a lot of good ideas in this game, but a lot of them just feel horribly executed, and it leads to a package that just leaves me feeling confused by the end. Thankfully, there is a sequel now, and a sequel is always a good opportunity to improve upon what didn’t work in your first game, so hopefully Survivor sticks the landing better. For now though, I really don’t see myself returning to this again, and I’m happy to finally be done with it.