Jedi: Fallen Order Got Me To Care About Star Wars Again

I went on vacation last week, and I’m happy to report that I did basically nothing of substance – no work, no writing – for nine whole days. It felt great, but I’m definitely glad to be back on the grind, as it were.

One of the things I did during my time off was put a lot of hours into Respawn Entertainment and EA’s late-2019 single-player action game, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. This was a game I gave a hard miss to last year despite liking Respawn’s previous output like Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends, and part of the reason why was that I had seen The Rise of Skywalker in theaters only a couple weeks or so after Fallen Order’s launch. I gotta say, the final movie in the Skywalker Saga really just put me off everything having to do with the Star Wars franchise.

When Fallen Order came out I remember there being some discourse about the casting choice for Cal Kestis and Cere Junda specifically, and of course there was the fallout from The Rise of Skywalker to contend with, but I no longer remember why I specifically decided not to kick down $60 to play it at the time. Trawling through my twitter history gave me no luck either. I just sort of skipped the game when it came out and then never came back to it after seeing Skywalker.

I’m glad I did eventually come back to it, though (thanks to EA Play’s merger with Xbox Game Pass). Because while it’s not the most well-polished game I’ve ever played, and does still fall short compared to Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends, I think Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a pure delight and an example of how to tell a good Star Wars story without resorting to “chosen ones” narratives.

The opening moments of Fallen Order are in equal measure exhilarating and terrifying. Respawn takes the chaotic and precarious environment in the Bracca shipyards as an opportunity to remind players that they are masters of video game character movement (but not completely: Cal doesn’t have access to all of the techniques and Force powers he learned as a Jedi Padawan, so while running, jumping, swinging from ropes and climbing all feel great, you won’t feel like, say, an accomplished wall-running and double-jumping Titan pilot until a few hours into your campaign). We get to see to what extent Cal has built a life here in the shipyards as he navigates through the skeletal hull of a Star Destroyer in the snippets of dialogue between himself and characters who pass by in a flash. Cal is not emotionally shut-off, even if he isn’t divulging all of his intimate details to everyone all the time; he wants to trust people and make friends, but this just isn’t the right time for it.

The rest of Fallen Order’s opening gambit shows us the consequences when Cal uses his hidden Force powers to help a coworker, also revealing how quickly Cal’s carefully constructed life as a nobody scrapper could have fallen apart this entire time. It’s only because the crew of the Mantis, ex-Jedi Cere Junda and gambling-addicted captain Greez Dritus, happened to be in the neighborhood that Cal was able to escape the horrific Imperial Inquisitors.

I love Cal, I love the family he falls into with Cere and Greez (and eventually Nightsister Merrin) and the way they interact with each other, but more importantly, I love BD-1. Holy shit, do I love BD-1. As droid designs go I’ll be the first to admit it looks like WALL-E got AT-ST legs, and it acts like a puppy in a way that makes me wonder why so many droids look or act like dogs in this universe, but I will defend BD-1 until I die. This little bastard can heal you, unlock chests, act like a zip-line sling and take over damaged droids. You can ask him how he’s doing and get hints from him in certain areas, and it turns out later in the game that he even went on his own hero’s journey like the brave little toaster he is. If Fallen Order had come out in January instead of last November I would be giving this game a GOTY spot solely because of BD-1.

You know what, though? Fallen Order is by no means a perfect game. It borrows its combat from Sekiro (I’m specifically thinking about the block-and-parry mechanics combined with whittling down an enemy character’s stamina) and acts like a Souls game in terms of how it handles checkpoints (meditation circles = bonfires that respawn enemies) and the health and leveling systems (if you die you have to find and kill the enemy that killed you to regain your experience points), but this particular implementation feels weird sometimes.

The Dathomir part of the game felt particularly crummy to me, and it’s no coincidence that it’s the area I died in the most. While I never had trouble with the Dathomirian wildlife (except fuck spiders, ugh), the Nightbrothers and Nightsister zombies gave me endless hassle. Part of this I think has to do with the incompatibility of the combat and multiple simultaneous enemy engagements.

When the entire game up to this point asks you to focus on dispatching one enemy at a time, then floods a room with six or seven enemies all attacking you at once, managing a room can become almost impossible (especially if some of them are shooting at you, others are doing their unblockable attack, etc). I felt like I was repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall often, and to make matters worse I contended with respawns that would take minutes on my now-ancient first-gen Xbox One. I even dropped the difficulty down to “Story Mode” a couple of times because of my frustrations with the janky combat, and still suffered in some spots.

With that in mind, what was it about Fallen Order that got me to care about Star Wars again?

To be honest, the scale of the story was refreshing. I don’t expect we’ll hear from Cal Kestis, Cere Junda, Nightsister Merrin or Greez Dritus again, not like we’ve heard from Ahsoka Tano or other principal characters in the universe. They were never going to save the galaxy, even though it felt like that’s where the story might go. Instead of each character being potential Chosen Ones, they’re simply bit players in a much larger war, and they know it. We get a chance to see them interact with each other like regular people in wartime. They’re all suffering from trauma of some kind, and it’s the relationships they build with each other that helps them soothe those tortured moments in their past, not the destiny they have to fulfill.

Star Wars, I think, works best when it’s focused on these smaller stories. I think that’s why those short story anthologies Penguin Random House has been publishing, From a Certain Point of View, have been so popular, and why The Mandalorian is far and away the most popular recent Star Wars media. It’s why there was so much Discourse underneath the mountain of bullshit surrounding The Last Jedi that dealt with Rey’s position in the galaxy as a nobody, and why it was so ridiculous when, in The Rise of Skywalker, Rey was made out to not only not be a nobody, but be related to the most consequential evil somebody in the entire Star Wars universe.

Cal Kestis is simply a Padawan that survived Order 66 and hid out on an obscure planet as a shipbreaker before being swept up by fate and propelled into heroics by his need to survive. He finds support, a family, in people who have been broken by the same Empire that broke him, and they help each other fix the damage that has been done. All the other stuff – the deep lore surrounding ancient force-using civilizations, the connections to the broader Star Wars cinematic universe with cameos by Saw Guerrera and Darth Vader, the wild goose chase of finding the Jedi Holocron with a list of Force-sensitive children in it – it’s all window dressing to what is ultimately a very personal and intimate tale that shows that it is possible to do great things without being A Great Person of History.