Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order is a unique game ahead of its time with amazing lightsaber fighting, solid acting performance, breathtaking graphics and an immensely powerful, in depth storyline. The title’s namesake took place years after Revenge of the Sith when the Clone Wars ended, and the infamous Jedi purge came into past bringing the rise of the Galactic Empire. A former Jedi Padawan named Cal Kestis survived Order 66 and hid out on a remote planet making a living as a scrapper. When an accident occurred when his co-working was almost killed in a fall, Cal used the force to slow his friend’s fall. When the Empire arrived to investigate the incident, the inquisitors who are Dark Jedi agents who hunt down and kill force sensitives. Cal had to fight his way out of the planet. Through his journey he became allies with Cere Junda who was a Jedi Knight who gave up being a force user because of her dark past and her co-pilot Greeze. Together, they must retrieve a holocron and bring back the Jedi Order.
Throughout the game you play a Cal Kestis one of the last surviving Jedi. Throughout his journey has partnered up with his trusty droid BD-1 who helps him throughout his perilous journey, he can heal him with healing canisters, help him hack enemy droids, and help him ride on zip-lines. BD-1 can also scan certain significant areas of the game and enemies that Cal killed which can be viewed in databank (if you are interested in reading details of what the various creatures native to many planets are and how to fight and defeat them). As the game progresses, Cal gains force powers and ends up constructing a double-bladed lightsaber. His force powers are force push, force pull, force jump, force slow which he can use on fast, moving platforms and foes that are about to attack him. The controls have just the right touch, although fighting multiple foes can be tedious and you must have eyes on the back of your head. Cal can gain skill level and spend those skill points on various skill through the skill tree on meditation sites found throughout the open world. He can also do a reset to restore his health canisters, but the downside of performing that act, respawns the enemies that you have already killed in your path. The boss fights are quite challenging and their attack patterns for every AI can be very unpredictable, when you attack and hit them you end up inflicting little damage and when you take damage it is a fair chunk of damage which I find quite unfair. Wielding a double-bladed lightsaber can be more effective than using a single bladed lightsaber, it can inflict more melee damage to foes, and it can deflect blaster bolt fire faster. If you are killed by an enemy or an enemy boss, your skill point gets taken away automatically. When you fight the enemy with a hit or a kill, you get your skill point back. Later on, in the game he can detach his double-bladed lightsaber and briefly use it as a duel lightsaber. The unfortunate thing is that special moves come later in his mission objectives and the skill points you spend to unlock special lightsaber and force skills. There is a New Game+, but don’t get too thrilled about it, you have to spend your skill points all over again, but the good news is that the unlockable items you have found and collected throughout the game will carry over to New Game+ such as colours for your ship, BD-1 skins, Cal’s outfits, lightsaber colours and lightsaber design hilts along with its colour designs.
The open-world type game is amazing, once you completed the game you are motivated to challenge yourself to explore more areas that you haven’t explored yet, which is a good incentive to find more items and get more rewards. You can use BD-1 to open the holomap and find out where you are supposed to go and find areas you have not explored yet. The most aggravating thing in the game, is that there is so much backtracking. What ever area you past by you will eventually end up having to go back. After completing an objective it is tedious and taxing on the brain to find your way all the back to the ship, I obviously find it easier to just teleport or pull up the map and perform a fast travel as long as you trespassed through that area on the map. Something that the game could have featured in the fashion that the Assassin’s Creed series and Horizon Zero Dawn has if you can’t be bothered to explore more areas in the game.
The plot is very amazing, while these days, as we see in most movies and video games, it seems like just basic cut and paste storylines written by a fan fiction author throwing in political agendas, you see in this game they brought to the table the art of storytelling at its finest. You see the hero’s journey of an underdog protagonist that we can all get behind, his struggles of his life, his past, his current situation, the odds being stacked against his fight against the inquisitors who more skilled with the Force than Cal who had lost his master Jaro Tarpol when Order 66 came down and never being promoted to Jedi Knight when his master was killed. Cal is an underdog hero we can relate to, another reason for that is that he faced challenges in a lightsaber duel against the second Nightsister inquisitor aka Trilla, he face her three times and three times he barely got away with his life intact because he hasn’t used his force powers for a number of years while he was in hiding being a scrapper. I find it very cool to have a female antagonist who poses’ a serious threat to the hero of the game. So, throughout his journey he must relearn the ways of the force. As you see, that’s how a story is meant to be built and I applaud game developer Respawn for providing the art of storytelling.
I say that every Star Wars fan should purchase Jedi Fallen Order along with watching the TV series the Mandalorian on Disney+. The video game should be given a Game of the Year Award. The game has solid gameplay, yet can challenging and frustrating at times, but fun. You get to explore the vast planets such as Kashyyk, Bogano, Dathomir. The acting is top down flawless, and the plot of the game can tug at your heart strings.