Played it as a kid.

Fond memories as one of the early games I played.

Probably not worth anyone's time today.

As broken and ridiculous as its source material. In some ways it's an interesting approach to gameplay with dialogue trees and a fairly impressive amount of voice acting, but in another more accurate way it's an extremely frustrating game with lousy combat, abysmal escort missions, and an overall level of jank that leads to hilarious glitches like Qui-Gon leaping through a floor and plummeting to the core of Tatooine or Obi-Wan dying in a cutscene by getting trapped in the laser walls while trying to reach Darth Maul. A part of me will always love it for being so weird and unique, but I have no reason to ever play it again.

Probably the biggest shock I've had in a while. Phantom Menace as a film is something I have rewatched endlessly at points in my life. I only started playing this because it came with my PS1 when I bought it and I was shocked at how fun it is. The camera chosen is questionable but the controls are solid and the gameplay is super fun, it really wasn't too hard to get hooked into the game. As far as adapting the film goes the best route with it, it expands settings that were completely unexplored and removes the heavy dialogue scenes, which work in the film but wouldn't translate well to a game. One of my favourite things about this is the ending, which employs the same intercut editing style that is in the film and it works very well here too.

A fun game, worth a go but I have a strong connection to the source material here.

This was given to me by my uncle for Christmas in 2001, the same day I got my PSone (yeah i was late to the party).

I never made it past the second level and it was quickly traded into GAME when I realised that was a thing you could do.

Now it's 2024 and the game has been added to Sony's (so far) dismal emulated "classics" line up as part of PS Plus Premium. Although you can buy it as a standalone title like I did for pocket change.

Is it good? No -- but I had unfinished business.

The game itself is actually quite ambitious for the hardware with lots of interactive NPCs and dialogue trees. It also includes an odd level where it essentially turns into an old school adventure game as you try and find the right thing to say to the right market traders in the right order to get some daft fucking pod parts for Anakin. Took me hours.

It's scuffed, but it more accurately reflects the experiences that most causual players likely had with the original PlayStation than those who played FF7/MGS/Silent Hill/Resi Evil and then wouldn’t shut up about them for the next 25 years.

Just like the movie it's based on, this is not a particularly good game. But unlike the movie this actually does a few ambitious things that I find very charming and interesting, even though they're rarely executed in a particularly decent way. First of all, it really is as open as I remembered it, but often for no reason whatsoever since there's usually no reward for going off the correct path, and some stages have side quests that give you no reward at all. I think both of these things are just symptoms of a very rushed development cycle where some things were added without being fully completed. However, it also makes the game world feel a lot more real and like the galaxy far, far away doesn't just exist for the player to find something cool wherever they go (it's actually pretty stupid to not rush towards where you're supposed to go when you're in a hurry and there're enemies everywhere!), or that a Jedi should need a gameplay beneficiary reason to help someone in need.

The game's also just plain weird. There're small dialogue trees for most conversations you can have, and you're really allowed to act like the biggest Jedi asshole that ever lived. You can even kill most NPCs in the game without much repercussion, even being able to beat the gungan stage by killing every gungan rather than talk your way through on the way to release Jar-Jar Binks from prison. From absolutely nowhere, the middle of the game also almost completely abandons its action gameplay and turns into a fairly simplistic adventure game where Qui-Gon Jinn has to trade with people in Mos Espa to get the right parts for Anakin's Podracer, and later has to trick a man to lead him to Watto by buying him enough drinks (and after having taken money from Jabba the Hutt for fighting some weird monster of his). Maybe strangest of all, though, is how one stage lets you play as Captain Panaka, who I'd be surprised if most people would remember even appeared in the Phantom Menace movie, but is given a weirdly large part in this game.

So Phantom Menace is kind of a whirlwind of a game that would probably not get made today since it is a strange as it is, but that's not all it is, because it's also quite bad. I would genuinely recommend everyone with an interest in the game to play it because it really is a memorable experience with a lot of ambitious ideas and weird combinations of genres, but I would warn them that it controls like absolute garbage (too stiff with the d-pad, too sensitive with the stick), guns are almost impossible to aim with, enemies do an insane amount of damage very quickly, the isometric camera is way too zoomed in on the player, and the platforming is a nightmare whenever it rears its ugly head. There's also quite a bit of slowdown as soon as there are more than, like, two enemies on screen, and loading saves (which is a frequent occurrence since death comes often in this game) certainly takes a PS1 amount of time.

The escort missions are kind of a nightmare since the AI you're escorting is dumb as bricks and just walks into enemies' lines of fire, get stuck on geometry which sometimes forces you to restart the entire stage, and I even had Padme fall through the floor and despawn once which gave me a game over. Playing this game can be real pain at times, is what I'm saying, and it's really only my love of its many idiosyncrasies that makes it fairly enjoyable to me. It is also a bit charming to go through the movie's locations in these charmingly primitive 32-bit graphics, and John William's soundtrack is still some of the best scores he's composed (though it's bizarre how Duel of Fates appears in the game, but not when you're fighting Darth Maul at the end).