The Skywalker Saga was, undoubtedly, the most anticipated game of my life upon its release. As you may have seen, I really, really enjoyed The Complete Saga, and having not played a new LEGO game in many years, I was very interested to see what a new LEGO Star Wars game would be like. While we’d obviously get to play the sequel trilogy for the first time, the first six movies were also getting completely remade from the ground up. There were also plenty of new characters from the sequels, as well as other characters that had still been left out, even from The Complete Saga.

The game was set to release in 2020, and I’m sure you can guess how that turned out. It was then delayed until sometime in the first half of 2021. It was delayed yet again, until sometime in early 2022, and a release date of April 5th was given in January of 2022.

Being in college at the time, I managed to have that Tuesday almost entirely free, with no classes and only one other engagement. Once I started playing, I was enamored. Unlike The Complete Saga, where the hub was more barebones, The Skywalker Saga had many hubs, as each planet with a level there served as a hub of sorts. There are plenty of Kyber Bricks, characters, and ships in each hub, either behind doing a quest first or just hidden somewhere for you to find.

There are 5 levels per film, down from 6 levels per film in The Complete Saga. Also reduced are the minikits per level, cut in half from 10 to 5 per level. On the flip side, there are now 3 tiers of True Jedi, up from just one. And most noticeable of all, the levels themselves are much shorter than before.

This brings up my biggest complaint with The Skywalker Saga, that the levels just feel way too short at times. However, with The Complete Saga, the levels were the entire game. Now in The Skywalker Saga, you have all these planets to run around in and collect stuff. The planets themselves are very fun, and there’s of course plenty to do. There are some puzzles you’ll encounter that require a certain character class, but once you unlock just 1 character in each class, you can complete basically any puzzle.

One last thing I’ll say about the game is that upon release, despite being delayed multiple times and reportedly going through intense crunch on the developers, there were still some nasty bugs present. The nastiest in particular I fell victim to, which completely prevented me from advancing through the story in Episode 7; the NPC I needed to speak with to proceed was just not there. I had to wait I believe 3 or 4 weeks for the bug to get fixed, which felt like a long time. During that waiting period I ended up making a brand new save file just to experience the story missions in the sequels in the meantime. Since this bug more or less forced me to play through parts of the game first, I would like to replay the game at some point where I go in whatever order I want, and where I can use some of the sequel characters and ships more.

Despite some drawbacks, The Skywalker Saga is a worthy follow up to The Complete Saga. I hope that there are more LEGO Star Wars games played, because there is plenty of Star Wars media to be adapted into LEGO form. The first season of the Clone Wars was turned into a game in 2011, and it’d be great if they turned the whole series into a game. There are also the shows on Disney+, notably The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, and Kenobi. While I doubt all of them get their own game, it would be fun to play through them, perhaps with some slightly longer levels.

Two of my first video games were LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game and LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. I enjoyed them tremendously, so it was very exciting when The Complete Saga released.

In what is largely combining the levels from the first two games, there are many other improvements as well. The number of playable characters has increased, another level was added to Attack of the Clones to match the 6 from the other movies, and a challenge mode was added.

I first played it when I was probably 6 or 7 years old, when we owned it for the Wii. Eventually we got rid of that copy, and then I bought it again for the Wii, new in 2015 from a nearby Best Buy. I bought it yet again on Steam during a LEGO game sale.

I’ve played through this game so many times, even 100%ing it three or four times, easily more than any game I’ve played. This is one of the main games where nostalgia really hits hard. Despite the game now being supplanted by The Skywalker Saga, this one is still different enough and fun enough to go back to.

This game departs from the previous, and even future entries in the series by sticking two characters in one kart. This gives players the ability to hold two items at once, and swap the characters who are holding the items for another layer of strategy. Each pair of characters has their own special item; for example, Mario and Luigi have fireballs. What's great is that you can pair up any two characters, so you could have two different special items at your disposal. With the ability of having two items existing, there is also the addition of a double item box, which have designated spawning spaces in rows of item boxes, and can sometimes appear where single item boxes normally would. The 16 tracks provided, while few, are all pretty good. There are a lot of repeat songs used, but the soundtrack is good overall. All of these elements combine for quite possibly the craziest Mario Kart gameplay yet, while somehow managing to not be extremely frustrating despite the enormous amounts of items that will come your way. Despite this game being almost 20 years old, it's honestly aged really well.

Unfortunately, having only 16 tracks is a pretty big flaw; the previous entry, Super Circuit, had 40 tracks, and every game after this one had at least 32. This 16 track selection is probably the biggest reason why I can't give this game 5 stars, because it's pretty content-light despite it's amazing gameplay. The irony here though is that the game does contain 6 new battle stages, which remains unmatched by any newer entry in the series.

Overall, this game is a fantastic time, and is probably the Mario Kart that's most worth your time going back to if you've only played newer entries in the series. I really hope this mechanic returns as a mode or something similar in a future title, because it's too good not to.