Previously - STAR WARS: DARK FORCES

Dark Forces was an unexpected pleasure in a lot of ways but I think the real surprise there is that it was genuinely innovative in its space when it came out, not just in its tech but in its approach to level design and narrative conveyance in the shooter space. This was especially impressive as Lucasarts’s first foray into a crowded genre. I theorized before that even though Dark Forces was in development before Doom came out, it was probably influenced heavily by Doom’s success, and it didn’t see its own release until after even Doom II hit store shelves – that’s a long time for a game like this to be cooking in the early 90s, even considering this license and its unique baggage. Playing Dark Forces II, then, made me feel like that hunch was uhhh extremely correct, because rather than feel like a real sequel to its predecessor, Jedi Knight is ALSO a game that has the vibe of a trend chaser.

This isn’t like, a dig or anything, of course; video games were changing very quickly in this era, and so were the tastes of their consumers. I imagine that in a post-quake world it would be a lot harder to sell another relatively straight Doom clone, even one that iterated on something as transformative as Dark Forces. The 3D-ness of the game omnipresent here, but I’m not also comparing it to stuff like Turok or Goldeneye, which it also arrives hot on the heels of, because it also has another strongly defining mark: PC Exclusivity. There’s shit happening here that would be just outright impossible on consoles in a way that even a compromised port couldn’t solve, like when Dark Forces 1 hid a lot of keyboard commands in a pause menu and scrapped most of the lighting effects on the PS1. Part of that is that there is a set of active powers that are if not necessary to completing most of the game, then at least necessitate real time action to implement properly. But everything being fully modeled, including your guy, for important reasons, puts a lot of demand on the game too.

That’s to say nothing of how much straight up video content is crammed into this thing; these cutscenes are already compressed to hell, they could not pull a Resident Evil 2 to put this on an N64 cart, I don’t believe it, Jason Court’s beautiful face would not survive. The mere presence of those live action cutscenes is itself a mark of the game’s inextricable Pcality. Jedi Knight arrived in this beautiful, crystallized moment in time between gamers foolishly deciding that pixel art was for losers but also 3D graphics couldn’t like, make a face look normal yet where a lot of PC and PC-adjacent console games were doing live action FMV instead of producing CGI cutscenes like they were doing on the PS1. Even as early as this game’s own expansion pack the following year we’ll stop doing this shit (that one might be a budget thing but 1998 is also the year of Metal Gear Solid and Half Life delivering at-the-time acclaimed stories entirely in-engine with puppetted models and it went fine!). So for only one beautiful game and what cane only possibly be a total of like 40 minutes of footage we get all these idiots rendered in beautiful live action, the closest thing to a Real Star Wars Movie this sleeping fanbase had tasted in fifteen years and buddy it fucking rocks.

Returning characters are definitely THEMSELVES but the VIBE is so so so different when I’m supposed to still take Kyle Katarn as the New Republic’s edgy buddy who does the dirty jobs but he is no longer the world’s most square craggy set of pixels but instead now 34 year old Jason Court with his feathery hair and loose shirt with a PERFECTLY TRIMMED neckline on his beard, saying all the same kinds of things he said in the previous game but looking vaguely confused most of the time and all gravitas totally consumed by an all-encompassing frat bro vibe that is iconic to the character now but obviously not intentionally and isn’t present in any other depiction of him. Every single character is like this, not at all embarrassing because of the complete and utter commitment that every actor brings to being a little bit silly. The very clear standout is main villain Jerec, played by British character actor Christopher Neame with an intense enthusiasm and dedication to just being a weird little freak, never saying words the way you would expect him to, getting WAY up in people’s faces, doing a lot of weird fucking sighing and moaning and just all around relishing being The Big Bad Final Boss guy in a way that truly you don’t get to see very often. But everybody in this game is like this, from his number two, the mysterious (and mysteriously accented) Evil Woman Sariss, whose choking gasp of “……….WHY” after she accidentally cuts one of her compatriots in half is burned into my brain; to Boc Aseca THE CRUDE (their appellation, not mine) whose thing is that he’s just a freak and whose actor is extremely dedicated to doing a Crazy Guy Laugh; to my personal favorite loser in the game – YUN, THE DARK YOUTH (again, I did not name him this), who is possibly the most homosexual character ever committed to Star Wars as a franchise, from Rafer Weigel’s smirking, foppish performance to the way Yun fights Kyle exactly one time and is immediately so committed to him that he would die only to give Kyle a chance to get murdered later rather than now, and Kyle spends the rest of the game fighting with Yun’s lightsaber! That’s gay, dude!!

All of these losers are introduced by a narration from uhhh, some guy? Some jedi guy who gets murdered by Jerec in the intro to the game and who is also guiding Kyle along his journey in spirit. The plot of this game is that Jerec extracts the location of the mysterious Valley of the Jedi from Kyle Katarn’s dad, and then kills him. This drags Kyle into a race with Jerec’s order of Dark Jedi to find the Valley, a burial ground for many ancient jedi whose residual spiritual energy Jerec vaguely plans to absorb so he can vaguely achieve godhood. Along the way Kyle is guided to resume the jedi training we didn’t know he had quit earlier in life and hone the force talents that Darth Vader comically hinted him to have at the end of the first game. There’s ultimately not much here, with basically the same structure of big cutscenes every three levels or so and occasional quips from Kyle during play, but everything is so endearing now that it’s performed with the verve of low budget CGI sets designed around real actors doing c-tier expanded universe novel plots that are kind of just playing the hits of what the residual Star Wars audience of 1997 would want to see, but it’s legitimately better than like, MOST live action star wars content including a lot of stuff in movies that have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars; more exciting, more entertaining, more fun to engage with, even as it’s also very simple and goofy. When Star Wars was nothing in the culture it could be anything too, and when it was this sometimes, that’s good for me.

It sucks how much I dislike everything else then. Level design is I think tangibly worse across the board, with the new engine affording an expansion in scope from what was previously possible and an iteration on some of the trends of the previous game but blown out beyond the range of what I can personally handle. I’m constantly lost in Jedi Knight’s bigger levels, partially because they are often bland to look at but also because they quickly become confusingly maze-like, less in a way that emulates Id design philosophies and more in a way that emulates motion sickness in me. This is exacerbated by the puzzle design, which was I think on the whole pretty well done in the first game, but is now leaning towards absurdity and obtuseness. There’s a ton of shit in this game that’s just there to Get You, and maybe that’s a timed level with hidden routes that make it much more doable or alternatively fuck you if you mess them up, maybe it’s hidden switches, or chutes that lead to a previous part of the level with nothing to do but wander your way back to the place you jumped down from. A lot more fiddling with switches without knowing exactly what they’re doing and making leaps of faith both metaphorical and literal in Jedi Knight.

Most offensive to me is the implementation of force powers. The powers themselves range from extremely situational to feeling borderline necessary to invest in. Some things come up rarely but in key moments like skills that specifically counter the skills that only the seven Dark Jedi bosses will use on you, but others like force speed and force jump fundamentally change the way you’re interacting with the world all the time and in a game where even with a lightsaber you’re gonna spend most of you’re time shooting guys in a late-90s engine, Strafing Faster is basically the best power up you can offer, while a fully upgraded force jump breaks the level geometry in ways that ARE intended but FEEL like you’re getting away with something, always a tricky balance for a developer to strike. This is all good. My big problem is that your upgrade points are directly tied to how many of the Level Secrets you find in each level and this sucks huge shit dude. Those things are deviously hidden a lot of the time and buddy I’m not gonna look up a walkthrough for Star Wars Dark Forces II Jedi Knight come onnnnn. This is the other half the puzzle design feeling more hostile, everything in the design feels just a little more hostile in that way that late 90s Lucasarts was just starting to get a little like, okay guys settle the fuck down. We all love the story and aesthetic in Grim Fandango but nobody’s acting like every single puzzle in that game doesn’t suck huge shit and the same thing is happening here.

The lightsaber itself is the biggest tangible addition to the Act Of Play and it slots itself into your repetoire beautifully; hugely empowering, completely transformative, and uniquely applicable to the way you interact with the world, it works on everything and everyone basically exactly the way you would hope that it would. They’re really smart about how they work around it, too, though. Creating a lot of situations with tight corners and narrow halls and enemy layouts where darting around in third person with a killer sword makes the most strategic sense and feels correct, often being subtly nudged into pulling the bad boy out, but just as often being so outnumbered or outgunned that the lightsaber becomes a liability and a more flexible set of weapons is more situationally practical. The lightsaber never feels like a crutch and it never feels useless, they tune the enemy distribution almost perfectly around it.

My last conflicted thought in the sack of conflicted feelings that is Dark Forces II is the game’s approach to its ludonarrative. I had a lot of praise for Dark Forces’ dedication to created a sense of place with the constraints of its level designs and game engine in addition to its cinematic elements. I’m less thrilled with Jedi Knight. There are levels here that are similarly impressive on that front, including the opening cityscape where you begin in the backrooms of a bar and make your way out of the seedy underdistrict of a busy metropolis that feels lived in, or a later level where you’re evacuating a ship that’s in the process of destructing. But then very shortly after this Kyle must visit his childhood home to, among other things, retrieve his father’s lightsaber, and we discover that Kyle was raised inside of a fuckin reality-defying labyrinth that would explode euclid's brain were he unfortunate enough to lay eyes upon it, one that barely resembles something people could live in at all, and that it's populated by dozens and dozens of tusken raiders, an offshoot of humans native to another planet entirely and not known to have ever left it, and you as Kyle will murder all of them. Really inconsistent with that shit!

That moment sticks with me as especially odd because this game does do something that I think is very cool and good, which is Have Two Endings tied to a morality meter. Unlike most video games at the time and still today though, Jedi Knight doesn’t tie your morality to big binary choices that you make for Kyle; rather it observes your behaviors – are you shooting the unarmed civilians that populate the game’s city levels? Which force powers are you using? You can see which way your meter is leaning but it’s entirely determined by this stuff rather than any big story moments where you’re an active participant. Then, when the big story moment comes along where normally you would make that choice, it’s taken out of your hands and Kyle behaves according to how you’ve been acting the whole time. You’ve already made the choice in your persistent behavior. That’s sick! So it is especially funny to have the friction of this stuff bumping up against the scene were a hologram of Kyle’s dad solemnly bids that his son use that lightsaber he’s just been given for the sake of good, as Kyle stands among the corpses of a ton of guys who didn’t really do anything wrong except move into a gigantic abandoned compound and then defend it from an attacker, having just committed basically the same action that only five years later will be implicitly depicted as the thing that cemented Darth Vader as on the path to nigh-irredeemable villainy in the short term of his life lol.

That kind of encapsulates my thoughts about Jedi Knight. There’s not nothing worthwhile here; there’s a LOT worthwhile here, actually. The game is really consistently doing cool and interesting things, it’s just that every one of those things is constantly matched or overshadowed by something that sucks or unfortunately the part where you have to play the game?? Which contains pockets of joy but the primary impression I’m left with is tedium. There’s fun to be had here but given the hoops I had to jump through to even get this bad boy to work on my computer I don’t know if there’s all THAT much more fun that you’d get from just watching all the fucking incredible cutscenes on youtube.

Next time - Mysteries of the Sith

Someday - Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast i think that's what it's called god the fucking numbering on this series goddamn

Reviewed on May 20, 2023


9 Comments


10 months ago

I never even realized you got force points for secrets, that’s fucked lol. But yeah, time was not kind to this game for me at all either. Even more disappointing to me too because I liked the game as a kid.

10 months ago

I BELIEVE the way it breaks down is one force point rewarded per level and then all additional points come from finding secrets, and when you can get three or four points from most of the levels and most of the levels have between 4 and 8 secrets it just gets out of hand quickly haha yeah it sucks

Yeah I never got to play these as a kid despite Jedi Outcast and Academy being huge with my age group so I’ve been excited and I did not like this very much obviously but I’m already like halfway done with Mysteries of the Sith so who can say if it’s truly good or bad

10 months ago

Sorry to well ackchully you but I think those Tuskens were locals working for Jerec to help raid the house, but whatev. And thank you for pointing out just how nightmarish the geometry of that property is, what in the actual

Most importantly, I think Jason Court might be the first man my little hetero self ever just absolutely knew was hot. Also, a foundational Beard in Media for me.

10 months ago

I'll take the well ackchully on what the tuskens are doing there BUT i do think that that holds with my criticism of the game's writing generally as more careless with the details of like what we're doing and why if this is literally the only time ever anyone thought tuskens should just be working for some guy vs their actual history and culture in what was at that point a well established mythology of them not being guys who did that and who were local to another place! It's something that like, I care about as much as i feel like it's something THEY should care about

jason court is extremely hot in this game and i can't decide if it's extremely in or out of character for kyle katarn to take such obviously fastidious care of his beard

10 months ago

Absolutely supports it! Even as a kid with a somewhat rudimentary understanding of SW lore there were tons of things going on in this game that had me thinking hey wait a minute ..., those random Tuskens included.

Oh and just in case, be warned, you have not experienced asinine JK levels until you've tried the expansion lol

10 months ago

most of this stuff in this game i think very pleasantly fits the vibe of post-jedi but pre-phantom menace star wars where it was just like all mid to bad sci fi novelists and comic writers just creating all actual star wars lore from scratch before george came back and hammered out what the EU actually looked like around the time these games were coming out but it does like, make the times where the game isn't fitting its own cultural aesthetic stand out more. i plan to talk about this a lot more when i do mysteries of the sith because being about mara jade makes this vibe like WAY more important to that story.

and yeah i'm i think like halfway through mysteries rn and it's truly a land of contrasts where i think a lot of what i like already in this game is better in it but everything i hate is WAY WORSE holy SHIT

10 months ago

I was hoping I'd be into this and like I'm gonna try it but that secret thing has be going jfc dude

10 months ago

like i beat it with shitty underlevelled force powers but i would have preferred to not have to do that

10 months ago

If you can beat the last level of Mysteries you deserve an award, I couldn't even do it with cheats lol. It is WILD