Tets Finishes Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

 Not so long ago, I was playing Star Wars Fallen Order and I typed this post as I struggled at the start of the game.  The other day I finished it and I shall continue with my thoughts and my final wrap up.

It was decent enough, probably a 7/10 if I were to score it.

Reading back on my first post, it seems that I didn't get the hang of the combat.  Well, towards the end I guess I mostly did.  I finally properly understood the bars and the ways to fight the bad guys.  It would seem that I just needed more skill options for dealing with enemies.  Luckily your guy, Cal, has upgradeable skills.

What a lotta skillz

So at the end of the game, your general bad guys weren't really much of a challenge, but were quite good fun to spar with.  They weren't a cake walk, but if you played right, then it was a great feeling to get in there and take out a bunch of dudes like a total bad ass, but it was also pretty easy to make some silly mistake and find yourself getting your ass handed to you.

Generally :

Play well - Badass

Play badly - dumbass

Sounds fair enough.  It does make me think about one particular aspect of modern gaming though (and also old skool RPG-ing).  You start out having a real struggle to survive at the start of the game, but as you get more skills and further into the game, it becomes easier.  Shadow of WarDor, Mad Max, The Witcher 3, Batman Arkhams (not so much though) and countless other games all have this too.  The start of the game is really tough, but by the end, you are super powerful and often enemies aren't a threat.

Should it be this way?  Shouldn't the enemies at the start be easier to deal with while enemies at the end are tougher?

Anyway, back to Fallen Order (FO).  It was fun enough, the light sabre made the required noise and having the option to have the double sided one was cool.  Even cooler was when I got the skill to switch between them during a combo.  The story was all right and the end I kinda saw coming, however googly eyed leader of my team did not betray me, which was nice.

What was kinda crappy though was the forced feeling and connections between the characters.

Hairy guy, googly eyed, Cal, Hard-to-get-almost-love-interest(HTGALI)

Somwhere along the lines, the writers felt that Hairy Guy would go from being "Smarmy space savvy guy" to "You've grown on me kid" kind of shenanigans.  Is he a Han Solo Stand in?  One section has you kidnapped by Bounty Hunters, and you fight your way out, then your pals crash the party and give you a lift out.  Then Hairy Guy is all apologetic about putting your life in danger.  I didn't understand WTF was going on until much later where he randomly mentions his gambling debts being owed to the Bounty Hunters.  It was very sloppily done.

Googly eyes is fine, aside from her eyes, and when she gets pissed can kick a lot of ass, which you see only once in the final level. 

HTGALI is probably the one you most connect with, she is alone, fooled by some guy and the goodness of Cal and his Jedi ways convinces her not to be a pain in the ass anymore. She joins your team.

The game looks fine and I did find there was a photo mode to it.  I loves me a photo mode, but sadly there was no option to make Cal pull funny faces.

Ponchos are great by the way.

You know, I don't really know where I am going with this post.  So I'll just keep rambling for a bit.

There are plenty of collectables such as colours for the ship, colours for BD-1, new ponchos, light sabre customisation bits and a few colours for Cal's clothes.  I thought I would be motivated to get them all, but when I finished the game, I had done pretty much 98% of each map and really couldn't be bothered hunting down the final bits.

The general interface was pretty good.  The skill tree you accessed when at a meditation point, the map was a hologram broadcast from BD-1 over your shoulder, so you had to be careful that you weren't facing a wall when you wanted to see it and you fixed your light sabre and upgraded BD-1 at workbenches. 

It's a MAP!

The maps are pretty convoluted and I would've liked to be able to put a marker at places so it could indicate ways to get to certain areas.  I often forgot the ways to get to specific parts resulting in a lot of aimless wandering.

It was nice to hear lots of Star Wars noises and also harass droids when you saw them.  Also cool was the slicing that things received as one would expect from a light sabre.  Droids would have burn glows if you cut them in half.

General character models, were, er acceptable.  Except for the Wookies.  I think they spent so much time modeling the physics of Cal's hair, they couldn't budget any time for decent Wookie models.  They look like shit.

The troopers looked fine, but even as I progressed through the game, I still had trouble wokring out when an attack hit and when it was blocked, possibly because there was a lot of this going on:

Some enemies, you had to parry a number of times, and eventually I noticed that Cal would go into a certain pose meaning you could attack, but Half the time it was a bit of a PITA if you had more than one enemy around.  Also when you wore down an enemies stamina, they recovered it super quick.

The only super major threat are the baddies that have force powers.  You encounter 3 in the game.  They are quite good fun to fight because of that, but require some learning of their patterns.  Since dying to them doesn't really have any consequence, it's fine to fight them, fail and come back again to learn their tricks.

HOWEVER

The respawn load times are so goddam long.  I would try for a few deaths, learn a bit of the patterns and then mess it up and have to respawn. Long load time, rinse and repeat.  This is fine, but if that's your idea for the game, make the load times SHORT FFS. I felt this way about Little Nightmares too.  I ended up lowering the difficulty due to time constraints.

HOWEVER

Then the game was a complete pushover. 

Before, where I could take possibly three hits before dying, I was now able to withstand an assault just shy of an atomic bombing and still be standing afterwards.  It completely took any challenge from the game whatsoever and was a huge over correction. 

Oddly they have what looks like three sliders describing the challenge to each difficulty level (Damage, aggression and something else), you know, being able to adjust those sliders yourself would've been pretty cool.  A shame really.

There were also some cool set pieces, like one time you climb up an AT&T walker thing, break in and take control.  That was good fun.  Another was when you climb up a tree and meet this dragon thing, but that wasn't so cool, as there is a remarkably long and pointless flying section as it flies you around while you... watch everything happen...  sadly they only happen once.  Also, after the AT&T section, this asshole shows up.

I was incredibly bummed.

I'm sorry, but I have always hated Forest Whitaker.  I have no reason why, the guy is a good actor and has been in some great movies, but whenever I see him, I'm just "Ah, shit, this guy again."  Sorry Forest, I really am.  Naturally I thought "Ah shit, what's he doing here?"  It turns out (and I was unaware) the character he plays is in some of the movies.  Oh, okay.

That's one flaw with the game (and Star Wars in general I guess) they are always so linked to everything, even when it's kind of tenuous.  Like this game.  Guess what, right at the end Darth Vader shows up.

After you fight the final boss, Vader comes. Naturally since Cal could barely hold his own against the "Sisters," Vader is obviously not going to be a proper fight now is it?  

What happens?  

You run the hell away like the bitch you are, meanwhile Vader is tearing the base apart trying to get you.  Why was this included? 

Because Star Wars

Because Darth Vader.

FML

Towards the end of the game, you get to make Cal's light sabre (instead of using his Master's old one), but it can look exactly the same due to customisation. However, you can finally have a few more colours to use.  It's a shame this option appears so late in the game, as I would've liked that much earlier.  I guess in a way, I rather liked the look of the initial light sabre too.  I just wanted more flashy lights.

Using my Matrix dodge move was fun

My sexy yellow light sabre(s)

Back to the gameplay and to finish this up I think.  After I finished, I thought I would hunt down the remaining things. However I had encountered all types of enemies, been to pretty much all the areas and gathered most of the things already and while the game was fun, it wasn't fun enough for me to want to find everything left.  So I uninstalled the game and think I am pretty well satisfied with my experience so far.  

It was decent enough, not the perfect Star Wars game by any means, but also not the worst I've ever played.  Considering the story, the lack of force powers make sense and they wanted you to feel vulnerable and that the Empire and the Storm Troopers were a threat so that was successful.  I see there is a sequel, but I am without a PS5, so cannot get it.  So far, this game was enough.

It was decent and worth the 20 or so hours I played it.

For the next game, I've started Playing Fatal Frame II on the PS2.  It's very slow, but the atmosphere is excellent!