LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Discussion Thing

Good day! Being back to work after vacation is hard, but I made it through the week.

Presently, I’m reading Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta; after that, I have a couple of other nonfiction books from the library (I got too many–I need to pick up a novel soon). Probably giving up the Percy Jackson show because, uh, the writing is dumb overall, so finishing up the Jurassic Park cartoon on Netflix, and starting season two of A Man on the Inside. 

Playing the “Valley of Memory” expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Mirage.

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Discussion

[I’m calling it a ‘discussion’ rather than a ‘review’ because Reasons.]

Okay, let’s start with a word on open-world games.

Because one of the big measures of a game’s success is how long players stick with it, many big budget video games are released with massive worlds in them, filled with tons of things to do. The problem is that not every activity in the game is actually worth doing. If you make a huge world full of things to do, you best make sure that you’re not wasting the players’ time.

There are over a thousand kyber bricks to collect in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. 

I gave up some time after four hundred.

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is, for the most part, a fun game to play. And it does most of what it set out to do, and there are parts of it that I loved. So I feel as if I’m being a little harsh on the game. I apologize! I mean, it’s the most complete video game adaptation of the Star Wars films that exist out there, and it has just about every character, and it’s very, very silly in the way it tells the story. You can explore just about every locale from the films.

But geez, I can’t help but think about how the entire point of the original 2005 game, and its sequel in 2006, were that they were fun, playful family games that are accessible to anyone: from children to adults who had little exposure to video games. It’s a game for everyone to play, that can be picked up with easy controls. The Skywalker Saga is not that. It feels like it’s built for gamers that have nostalgia for LEGO and/or Star Wars, with its massive world, hundreds of collectibles, and more complex controls. Now maybe I’m woefully behind on what the kids these days are capable of, I imagine working out some of these controls, especially with some of the timed shooting or platforming puzzles, will prove frustrating to the average kid.

Is this another one of those LEGO things that’s not actually aimed at children? That’s becoming more and more common.

And unlike the original game, that had a hub and level selection, this has an open world you can play through. This results in large chunks of the story of the nine films being played in the open world, rather than in levels/missions (if they’re not in cutscenes). The first actual “mission” of The Phantom Menace is riding the submarine on Naboo to Theed; before that, you’re wandering/fighting through stages in the open world. I got the feeling that a lot of the “missions” were either vehicle levels or boss fights.

Playing through the movies is, overall, great fun though. The lightsaber duels are very cool and cinematic, the cutscenes are full of cute and fun jokes, as is the rest of the game. I took quite a lot of screenshots of silly scenes and dialogue that I thought was great. You can unlock an indicator that makes finding those collectibles much easier. Attack combos feel very rewarding, and if you’ve got a shooting character, the game provides a lot of cover for you to hide behind and shoot from as enemies try to gun you down. If you quit the game part way through a movie, a nd start it up again, you get another opening crawl, explaining the Plot so far, and it often has a couple of jokes in there. And of course, just about every Star Wars character is present, so you can play as your favorite from the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

And there’s a Wandering Wookie. I loved him.

But after I finished the movies, and unlocked all the Jedi characters, I got really, really tired of trying to complete the game. Yes, I had some fun sidequests. But I don’t have a way of knowing which sidequests are fun, so I’m running around going from one collectible to another on over a dozen maps, working out how to solve random puzzles, or trying to complete levels at 100% when they have obscure optional objectives, or ones that aren’t entirely dependent on the player, and uh… look, I don’t have time for that. Especially because, as far as I can tell, the reward for those things is just bragging rights or something. Yeah, I could unlock every single character or bonus or cheat code or whatever, but that will take, even with guides, at least the next couple of months' worth of weekends, when I could just move on with my life.

I moved on with my life.

I want to play games for fun, not to do chores. I don’t want to quest for near endless collectibles; I want to have fun.

I say this isn’t a review, because it’s not a full review of the game–a lot of which is quite good! I just wanted to ramble about this aspect, and why I didn’t think this game was as good as the original ones. 

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