A long time ago, on a website far, far away, I reviewedJedi: Fallen Order. I did not care for it, but not for the usual reasons. I mean, sure, the balancing wasn’t great, the platforming was worse, and you spent more time fighting giant spiders than you did dueling Imperial Inquisitors, but those are all aspects that Jedi: Survivor’sgameplay trailershows are being addressed in one way or another.
But there are far bigger problems at the core of Fallen Order’s story thatJedi: Survivorstill needs to surpass.
First, and arguably easiest to fix, is Cal Kestis being an absolute bore of a lead. Even among those that enjoyed the game, there are few who’d argue that Cameron Monaghan has been given any real material to work with thus far as one of the last of the Jedi. Despite being a combo of Star Wars Expanded Universe favorites Kyle Katarn and Ferus Olin on paper, Kestis' dry, emotionless dialogue wastes all his potential. It’s clear that things have grown bleaker for Cal since the events of Fallen Order, so it’d be a refreshing turn of events to see that pay off in getting him to emote at least half as much as the surrounding cast.
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Secondly, and more worryingly absent from every trailer, is Merrin, the Nightsister of Dathomir that Cal uprooted from her home to join his team. Merrin was at the heart of many of Fallen Order’s weirdly written plot points - with Cal falling into a lot of White Saviour tropes. We were seriously supposed to believe Cal wiping out the men in Merrin’s tribe and refusing to stand down after Merrin repeatedly told him to leave was somehowheroic? Then, knowing that her people and culture are dying, Cal insists the best thing for her is to abandon Dathomir to join him on a suicidally bonkers plot to restore the Jedi Order.
We see that Cere, Cal’s surrogate Jedi Master, is still around in the Survivor trailer, but no one else from his crew is shown. This could simply be Respawn holding off on revealing their fates until a later point in the story, but it’s enough to make me wonder if they might just write Merrin out of the story, given how problematic that whole sequence on Dathomir was. It’s not like Respawn has been hesitant to throw out more compelling characters in the past. The Second Sister, the main antagonist of Fallen Order, faced a similarly grim fate despite having infinitely more charisma and motivation in a single scene than Cal does across the entire game.
While it would be an arguably efficient way to bury the plot thread, the more preferable thing would be for Respawn to own up in-universe to Cal’s missteps. For all the talk of a grand single-player story, Fallen Order doesn’t actually feature that much character development, so there’s room here for Respawn to take their mistakes and make some meaningful commentary. Do I expect that? Sadly, not likely, but it’d be a wonderful surprise given how tone deaf the Dathomir arc was.
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Finally - and this is by far the most crucial aspect they need to get right this time - Jedi: Survivor needs an actual goal that can be achieved. Restoring the Jedi Order in a time period where we know that won’t happen just doesn’t cut it. We don’t need galaxy-wide ambitions to care. Liberating a single world from the Empire was enough for Star Wars: Rebels, and it managed to run four seasons. The Mandalorian is just about protecting an infant from the Imperial Remnant and other opportunists who’d exploit his power as the titular Mandalorian makes a living as a bounty hunter. Even the retcon-filled Kenobi show put the focus on a goal we know has to be achieved so we can at least be excited to see the payoff matter.
Fallen Order was a macguffin hunt so pointless that it reused another story’s macguffin. If you have to copy another story in the same franchise to make your plot even begin to work, then something has clearly gone wrong. We need the charactersandthe plot to not be an afterthought this time.
Just saying ‘it’s a single-playerStar Warsgame’ isn’t a long-term novelty you can rely on. We’ve got multiple full-length Star Wars games on the horizon, even some VR titles that better let you inhabit being a Jedi. Survivor has to do more than meet the low barBattlefront 2’s campaign left for Fallen Order. It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask for either, given Respawn’s excellent campaign inTItanfall2, and that series doesn’t have half the lore to pull from in Star Wars.
Respawn are more than capable of doing better - hopefully this time we’ll get more reasons to care about the world besides a growing poncho collection.
