I've played quite a lot of Star Wars games over the year, and I've been something of a fan of Star Wars for quite a long time too. In my head, I always knew that this game was quite popular, so I've been meaning to play it for absolute ages, but it's only now that I've finally gotten to playing it. I'm not the biggest fan of flying games, but given that this was more arcadey than sim-like, I figured this would be okay for me. It was clearly okay for me enough to beat it, at least! XD. It took me about 9 hours to beat the game's 16 missions, and out of those I got 3 silver medals and 6 bronze medals. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Rogue Squadron is the story of the titular squadron, who are a fighting unit in the Rebellion and then in the New Republic in the Star Wars expanded universe. This game has four chapters, with the first three having five missions and taking place in or around the respective first three Star Wars films, and the last chapter 4 only having one mission and taking place well after the 3rd film. You usually play as Luke Skywalker and it's following side stories around him specifically. The writing is nothing really amazing or exceptional, but it all makes for a fun time. This game exists to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff, and the story does a very good job of allowing that.
The gameplay is a more arcadey approach to a flight sim. You play in a series of missions with their own specific objectives, and sometimes those objectives evolve and expand as you progress through the respective mission. Your flying is far from complicated as far as flight sims go, but it's a lot more complicated than something like Star Fox 64. There are even some upgrades you can find hidden in some missions to empower your arsenal even further. They're quite hard to find and generally very well hidden, so I'd recommend a guide to find them, but there was no way I was ever going to beat the game without them.
I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of game, and I'm also not super familiar with this kind of game in general, but with my limited experience with these kinds of things, I found it fairly well designed. That said, there are some design choices and hardware limitations that really harm the overall experience. The missions have basically no checkpoints outside of 4 respawn extra lives you get. Player information is also quite poor, as you only ever know your own health. The health of the thing(s) you're guarding, where objectives are at all, or even where missiles/shots are coming from is never made clear and it can make it very difficult to survive missions, let alone complete them. On top of all that, the very often poor framerate really makes the whole experience that much more frustrating than it already is. None of these are totally game breaking problems, but they definitely show just how badly the game has aged, and it'll all likely make for a very frustrating time for people more used to more recent (and better optimized) flying games.
The presentation of the game is, like the story, perfectly suited to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff. All the ships you fly and fight against are just like they are in the movies and such. The voice overs and VA are good quality, and the sound-alikes they got for the characters from the films sound spot on. It's a bit of a shame that there's no Japanese VA, because I can only imagine how difficult it is playing a flying game while hurriedly reading subtitles, but at least that's something you can justify by saying that it makes it more like the films if we keep the original English voices. The music is also taken largely right from the films, and the presentation is really just what you'd want from a space-flying N64 Star Wars game.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I will fully admit that this just isn't a game for me, the technical issues of the hardware its on make it a pretty difficult game to recommend. If you're a fan of flying games or a BIG Star Wars fan, you very well might find this game a lot of fun, but if you're just looking for some casual Star Wars fun on the N64, this game is probably going to be quite a difficult game to get through, and it's likely going to be a pretty tough time to find fun with it as well.
Rogue Squadron is the story of the titular squadron, who are a fighting unit in the Rebellion and then in the New Republic in the Star Wars expanded universe. This game has four chapters, with the first three having five missions and taking place in or around the respective first three Star Wars films, and the last chapter 4 only having one mission and taking place well after the 3rd film. You usually play as Luke Skywalker and it's following side stories around him specifically. The writing is nothing really amazing or exceptional, but it all makes for a fun time. This game exists to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff, and the story does a very good job of allowing that.
The gameplay is a more arcadey approach to a flight sim. You play in a series of missions with their own specific objectives, and sometimes those objectives evolve and expand as you progress through the respective mission. Your flying is far from complicated as far as flight sims go, but it's a lot more complicated than something like Star Fox 64. There are even some upgrades you can find hidden in some missions to empower your arsenal even further. They're quite hard to find and generally very well hidden, so I'd recommend a guide to find them, but there was no way I was ever going to beat the game without them.
I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of game, and I'm also not super familiar with this kind of game in general, but with my limited experience with these kinds of things, I found it fairly well designed. That said, there are some design choices and hardware limitations that really harm the overall experience. The missions have basically no checkpoints outside of 4 respawn extra lives you get. Player information is also quite poor, as you only ever know your own health. The health of the thing(s) you're guarding, where objectives are at all, or even where missiles/shots are coming from is never made clear and it can make it very difficult to survive missions, let alone complete them. On top of all that, the very often poor framerate really makes the whole experience that much more frustrating than it already is. None of these are totally game breaking problems, but they definitely show just how badly the game has aged, and it'll all likely make for a very frustrating time for people more used to more recent (and better optimized) flying games.
The presentation of the game is, like the story, perfectly suited to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff. All the ships you fly and fight against are just like they are in the movies and such. The voice overs and VA are good quality, and the sound-alikes they got for the characters from the films sound spot on. It's a bit of a shame that there's no Japanese VA, because I can only imagine how difficult it is playing a flying game while hurriedly reading subtitles, but at least that's something you can justify by saying that it makes it more like the films if we keep the original English voices. The music is also taken largely right from the films, and the presentation is really just what you'd want from a space-flying N64 Star Wars game.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I will fully admit that this just isn't a game for me, the technical issues of the hardware its on make it a pretty difficult game to recommend. If you're a fan of flying games or a BIG Star Wars fan, you very well might find this game a lot of fun, but if you're just looking for some casual Star Wars fun on the N64, this game is probably going to be quite a difficult game to get through, and it's likely going to be a pretty tough time to find fun with it as well.