This is the most baffling game I've played. This game is hard as fuck. There are no checkpoints in the levels meaning if you died you have to restart the whole level. The levels are super long. The only why to prevent that is to save manually in the level which is easy to forget. The combat is relentless and the developers love to fuck with you. You WILL die. Blocking blaster fire won't work when the game spawns enemies behind you or a droideka rolls up with it's shields. Pro tip never get on a turret. It's a trap. You have no protection. The game also has escort levels because the developers are insane sadist and feed of the player frustration. Level 5 made me lose the will to live. There is no way to see exactly how much health is left only vague "I'm fine" or "I don't know how long I can keep going". Plus there's no way to heal them. Did I mention the levels are long? And to top it al off we got platforming. In a game where the camera is top down most of the time. Good luck judging things like distance and height. But the difficulty isn't what makes it baffling. That honor goes to the truly unhinge things you can do in this game. Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace may be based on the movie, but it allows you to make Obi-wan & Qui-gon unleash the dark side with in them. Things you can do in this game. Genocide the Gungans as Obi-wan. Have Qui-gon become a cereal killer in Mos Espa. Skip an entire trading quest by killing to two people that have the items you need because the drop them on death. Save the son of a poor mother whose being held in a cage by some hunter, then kill them both.You don't just kill the men, but the women and children too. That's right. YOU CAN KILL KIDS IN THIS OFFCIAL LICENSE STAR WARS GAME! IN 1999! THIS GAME IS ONLY RATED T! How did this not make news in a post Columbine world? Who though it was find to put that in? All the little gungan kids: dead. Anakin's friends: dead. Anakins mom: dead. Jaba the hut: dead. You can kill EVERYONE. now, the game does want you to not do that and you will soft lock yourself or get a game over with a special message saying one of the main characters has died. For instance killing jab the hut will cause a game over screen to appear about 30 seconds later saying "Padme has died". Most major characters do that if you kill them. Except Anakin's mom. The game soft locks and Anakin calls you a murderer. Or some times you can get away with it. Padme will even comment if you are on a killing spree that "There's a murderer on the loose". The developers knew players would do this because why have that line in the game if not. Why give the kids death sounds? As I said earlier the developers were insane. You don't get a game over or soft lock if you kill Newt Gunnery in the last level as Padme though. Instead he drops a key card that I have no idea what for because getting to him ends the Padme segment in the last level so no time to use it on anything let alone find it. Speaking of the last level I've never beaten Darth Maul legitimately. I got up to him and saved right be for the fight but I was 2 hit's a way from dieing. The only way to fix that was to replay the hole level and do better. The final Level is the longest level in the game were you go back and forth switching from playing as Padme to Obi-wan so I did not want to go through all that again. That being said I did beat him once with out cheats via a weird thing the game does. When the game over message pops up every thing but the animations will freeze in place. You'll notice battle droids tend to walk in place while it's on screen. So I was fighting Darth Maul and theres something that explodes when you hit it near the pit in the center of the room. I hit it and the explosion killed me. However Maul was also in the blast so he lost some health too. Not much, but some. I then notice that his health was still going down despite the game over. My best guess is the hit box for the explosion was frozen on screen due to the game over but the animation completed rendering it invisible. Maul was still in the explosion's hit box and continued to loose health. I sat and waited as his health slowly went down until he died. It played the death sound and every thing. Sadly the game over screen prevented the last scene from playing. Another weird thing I encounter is at the start of level 4 Garden of Thead theres a cut scene that plays were a bridge get's blown up preventing you from just walking to the exit of the level. One time I paused at the start of the cut scene and left and didn't get back to it till the end of the day. When I unpaused the audio was out of sink. More importantly though was finding out that the audio and actions on screen are tied to gether and must happen at the same time meaning if one is delayed then both are delayed. When the scene ended and I got control of Obi-wan the audio from the cut screen was still playing and the bridge was still there meaning I could walk across it. When the Audio of the explosion played the bridge the collapsed. I fell like that could be a speed running trick if it could be replicated. I'm kind of rambling now and I still haven't talked about the fact the game has dialog choices or that you can make Obi-wan uncivilized because you can use blasters, grenades, and a rocket launcher not just light sabers. The game has a charm that kind of makes me forget about the gameplay issues. Then I die and realized I never saved and I remember.

That was a grueling 8 hours, I'd rather watch the Phantom Menace 4 times straight than play this again.

There is actually a lot of fairly ambitious ideas here, such as massive levels, a huge number of unique NPCs that can dynamically be interacted with, and some neat albiet silly looking CGI recreations of Episode 1 scenes. Unfortunately, this game blows!

The combat is janky and unsatisfying, the camera angle is asinine, and the platforming is in the shit hall-of-fame. I believe the devs were aware of how horrible the combat was, as they try to supply you with health packs pretty often, even the FINAL BATTLE with Darth Maul gives you two FULL health packs, and I doubt I'd have been able to win without them.

A large majority of the levels tends to be filler, for example, in the grand finale, most of Obi-Wans play-time on the level is spent doing obnoxious platforming and killing generic battle droids, another level involves captain panaka and the fake queen just trying to get to the senate. It vaguely goes through Episode 1 but also attempts to waste as much time as possible.

The worst level for me personally was Mos Espa, which is actually a GIANT Tatooine town that is technically very impressive, but a nightmare to traverse. It took me legitimately an hour and a half on this one god damn level to complete, a true nightmare.

It's quite possibly the worst way to experience Episode 1, and that says a lot. It really is not worth playing for anyone and I personally regret actually going through and finishing this one, onto the next Phantom Menace game!

(See all my Star Wars Rankings and reviews on my profile here, the list is titled "Star Wars Ranked.")

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).

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.

This feels like the cheap knockoff version of Jedi Power Battles which is odd because its the actual official movie tie in game to the film and came out before.

The graphics are bad even for 1999 and the voice acting is cheesy as hell especially by whoever voiced Qui-Gon.

I remember renting this back in the day but hating it because of the shoddy camera. Replaying it now and while its manageable it is one of the worst aspects of it. Admittedly it is an easer experience than Jedi Power Battles and while the platforming is nowhere near as egregious because there's much less of it and you can actually save whenever you want (Thank the maker!) the gameplay is very mediocre. At least in JPB you got to choose what character to play as and got cool fighting combos. Here you just wave your lightsaber around like a baseball bat and do like three moves at most combined with picking up other weapons such as grenades and blasters. There's no upgrade abilities or force powers outside of push which was lame.

Despite this not being a very good game overall its still oddly charming and nostalgic. It still has the iconic music from the films like most of the prequel era tie in games which adds a sense of legitimacy to them.

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.