The Wheel Turns

"Hey!  Where's my tow cable?"

Despite making a mess of the sequel trilogy, Disney seems committed to churning out more Star Wars media.  They have continued this pursuit with the disparate "Mandalorian" mini-series and garnered hitherto unachieved amounts of praise for it.  So, what other kinds of media can the IP revisit with a fresh outlook?  Because Star Wars media in general relies on a lot of visual and acoustic flash mixed with kinetic on-screen action, I feel like video games are the next best fit, after film and television.

Surprisingly, the storytelling in Star Wars video games has more consistently meshed with the original Lucas material than the novels or comics.  I'm sure most fans of the franchise will look to Jedi: Fallen Order as an example of quality.  In truth though, the original Knight's of the Old Republic or even Tie Fighter had compelling plotlines in their day as well.  Of course, in the vast library of Star Wars video games there are some real stinkers.  Even so, a good story isn't an absolute necessity.  

One of my favorite Star Wars video games growing up was a shoot'em up for the Atari 2600 that consisted of the player (in a lone snowspeeder) against an endless procession of AT-AT Walkers.  As long the gameplay is engaging the Star Wars setting can compliment a variety of experiences (frosting on the cake and all that...).  I also think it's worth mentioning that a narrow scope is perfectly doable in terms of design too.  I'm sure that there are Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting an expansive open-world title by Ubisoft or a triple-AAA action/adventure tour-de-force by Visceral Games, but when you get down to it Dark Forces was basically a DOOM clone, X-Wing a traditional space combat flight-sim, and Episode I: Racer was pretty much F-Zero...and yet these three games are some of the most highly regarded of them all.  Conversely, the problem with the Battlefront reboot wasn't it being a purely online FPS, rather it was the egregious microtransactions and loot crates that rubbed people the wrong way.  Most of the criticism directed at Jedi: Fallen Order come in the form of bugs and glitches, not a lack of scope.  If there is one thing in need of improving it would be some fine tuning of the combat controls to bring the overall feel in line with similar titles like Sekiro.

I guess the ultimate point here is, developers don't screw up Star Wars unless the gameplay is outright terrible.  It could be a puzzle platformer staring R2-D2 or a survival crafting game about Yoda on Dagoba and it would still work as long as the mechanics are sound.  The force is strong with Star Wars video game so long as there is substance beneath the sheen.