Previously - Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II
Everybody told me you haven’t seen SHIT yet ina, you’re playing Mysteries of the Sith? Saddle the fuck up girl cuz everything you thought was bad in Dark Forces II is way worse in that one. And you know something, they were all right. Everybody who said that to me was correct. Mysteries of the Sith basically is just a large scale double down on everything that sucks in the main game BUT on the other hand it is also a doubling down on the stuff that I think is COOL in that game. The stuff that I think is great in Dark Forces II, philosophically, is even stronger here.
Frankly, the fact that I played this expansion hot off the heels of it kept me in that Dark Forces II headspace insofar as like, yes, I recognize that the level design is more winding and oblique than ever before, and that it is entirely unreasonable to put doors where this game puts doors, and switches where it puts switches, and secrets where it puts secrets, and that some of these puzzle solutions are absolute nightmare shit, BUT. Y’know? But. However. I’m already there. I’m cruising right along from Dark Forces II ending with a bunch of this exact same horseshit, so I barely feel the escalation. I enter a truly meditative zone when I’m clicking on the walls and the floors and testing force powers and shit. I have been trained to think the way the developers think. The way they think is twisted. Evil. But I, too, am twisted and evil, and not just from being transgender this time. So I don’t feel the friction as much as I did in the main game.
It does feel a bit weird calling Dark Forces II the Main Game and Mysteries of the Sith the Expansion Pack because while it was shot out in less than a year and it IS an add-on to Dark Forces II, Mysteries is like, the same length and a NOTABLE technological leap over the Jedi Knight. So much SHIT can be on the screen now. So many EFFECTS. They have modeled spaceships flying around outside the windows, they have flashy real time zone transitions. It’s all the same engine and of course the lack of time and budget means we’re missing those completely rad FMV cutscenes in favor of much more gangly in-engine stuff, but there’s a lot of really impressive work done that’s clearly putting the Sith Engine as it exists in this game through its paces.
My favorite stuff this time, as last time, is when the game is asking you to consider yourself as if you were in a real place, some sort of ludonarrative...consonance? I guess? And that’s been escalated here. There’s a whole level where you’re just wandering around a city trying to track a guy down without attracting too much attention to yourself, no gunplay, and it mostly resembles something like a real city. There’s a bit where you’re captured and you spend some time locked in a jail cell and the game does ask you to just sit in that cell for a bit, and when you do get out your escape is legitimately harrowing compared to how powerful your characters feel throughout the entire rest of the game. Towards the end when you enter the requisite fucked up force zone things take a radical turn towards the lightsaber and force powers after a full game of not really needing those that much and not facing a single guy who could stand up to your melee attacks, and the puzzles abruptly switch from bad cold machine logic to bad weird intuition logic, as befits weird naturalistic jedi bullshit.
The thing that TRULY endears me to the game though is its star, Mara Jade, or rather, what her presence signals about the intentions of the developers in making this expansion. Mara Jade, if don’t know her because you are the kind of person for whom knowing about Mara Jade doesn’t help you with girls (aka you’re cisgender), was a big deal character in the pre-Disney Star Wars expanded universe, one of the PREMIERE OC Do Not Steals, alongside Kyle Katarn himself in the pantheon of embarrassing but also very unironically cool non-movie Star Wars guys. She was an imperial assassin who looked like Mary Jane from spider-man and I guess is named after her, and she had a cool lightsaber and knew palpatine personally and tried to kill luke skywalker but he convinces her to turn good and then they get married and she outlives chewbacca. One of the most important things about her though is her omnipresence. Her story was so fractured, so piecemeal, like sure most of everyone’s stories happened in novels but Mara Jade showed up in comics and video games and anywhere else they could shove her. Because she was fucking cool!!! And she is. But she is also a character who requires basically the deepest cut knowledge to have understanding of, if not interest in. Because Star Wars was a bunch of messy bullshit even in 1998. So the vibe I get here is that Lucasarts kind of knew, right? This One’s For The Sickos. Only some percentage of people who already bought the game are going to play this one so we’re going balls out, we’re gonna stick like a kind of important piece of Mara Jade’s character development at the time, where she asserts her will to become a real agent of compassion and nobility for the first time after shedding her assassin life, into the expansion to the sequel to a game about a heretofore completely unrelated guy. This One’s For The Sickos. That’s me though so it’s fine.
They do a great job, too. There is such a specific style of novel cover that Mysteries of the Sith completely captures. If you know the ones I’m talking about then you INSTANTLY know what I mean. The like snarky dialogue that’s not really funny at all. The precarious situations with really anticlimactic outs. The incredible, unearned melodrama that deflates emotional arcs. The way everything is swimming in shades of green and brown. The very specific orange, heavily outlined hue of Mara Jade’s lightsaber. This is that Michael Stackpole shit. That Timothy Zahn shit. This strain of atmosphere has been part of Dark Forces’ spirit from the beginning, but never has it been so perfectly or totally captured like it is here. It’s really something, but only if you have a lot of affection for this particular flavor of mid-to-bad 90s sci-fi.
There is, I suppose, also the fact that the story itself does blow huge ass. Completely barebones, entirely boring. Nothing happens, and the three or four plot beats we get are stretched dangerously thin. Starting the game as Kyle for a few levels before he goes to find some force thing on some planet that he acts like was mentioned in the game but I’m pretty sure wasn’t. Mara Jade dicks around A LOT doing odd jobs for the New Republic like making deals with crime bosses for supplies, getting betrayed by crime bosses, escaping and extorting crime bosses, I don’t fucking care man. You’re chasing one guy for like three levels. Then oh man Kyle’s been gone for a while better go check on him oh shit he’s evil oh wait no it’s cool Mara Jade asked him to stop and he did. Great.
It’s weird because this is like, a pivotal moment for both of these characters and it seems like they just kind of threw it together narratively. There’s very little weight to any of these events, very little fanfare to any victory or defeat, very little drama considering the stakes Mara Jade is weighing are two souls that ostensibly she is struggling very hard to retain both of against insurmountable odds. SO much care was put into the levels themselves that it stands out when the stories told within them are so lacking in that same vibrancy and feeling of passion.
I don’t mind it too much, though. The game is obviously doing a lot for me aesthetically, and as I’ve mentioned, my brain was completely broken for most of it so I glided through the expansion without a lot of trouble from the play itself. A pleasant way to spend a few evenings with famous cool girl Mara Jade and her faildad Kyle. I have to be honest I am looking forward to the next game being developed by people who have made shooters before though.
Next Time - Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Outcast
Everybody told me you haven’t seen SHIT yet ina, you’re playing Mysteries of the Sith? Saddle the fuck up girl cuz everything you thought was bad in Dark Forces II is way worse in that one. And you know something, they were all right. Everybody who said that to me was correct. Mysteries of the Sith basically is just a large scale double down on everything that sucks in the main game BUT on the other hand it is also a doubling down on the stuff that I think is COOL in that game. The stuff that I think is great in Dark Forces II, philosophically, is even stronger here.
Frankly, the fact that I played this expansion hot off the heels of it kept me in that Dark Forces II headspace insofar as like, yes, I recognize that the level design is more winding and oblique than ever before, and that it is entirely unreasonable to put doors where this game puts doors, and switches where it puts switches, and secrets where it puts secrets, and that some of these puzzle solutions are absolute nightmare shit, BUT. Y’know? But. However. I’m already there. I’m cruising right along from Dark Forces II ending with a bunch of this exact same horseshit, so I barely feel the escalation. I enter a truly meditative zone when I’m clicking on the walls and the floors and testing force powers and shit. I have been trained to think the way the developers think. The way they think is twisted. Evil. But I, too, am twisted and evil, and not just from being transgender this time. So I don’t feel the friction as much as I did in the main game.
It does feel a bit weird calling Dark Forces II the Main Game and Mysteries of the Sith the Expansion Pack because while it was shot out in less than a year and it IS an add-on to Dark Forces II, Mysteries is like, the same length and a NOTABLE technological leap over the Jedi Knight. So much SHIT can be on the screen now. So many EFFECTS. They have modeled spaceships flying around outside the windows, they have flashy real time zone transitions. It’s all the same engine and of course the lack of time and budget means we’re missing those completely rad FMV cutscenes in favor of much more gangly in-engine stuff, but there’s a lot of really impressive work done that’s clearly putting the Sith Engine as it exists in this game through its paces.
My favorite stuff this time, as last time, is when the game is asking you to consider yourself as if you were in a real place, some sort of ludonarrative...consonance? I guess? And that’s been escalated here. There’s a whole level where you’re just wandering around a city trying to track a guy down without attracting too much attention to yourself, no gunplay, and it mostly resembles something like a real city. There’s a bit where you’re captured and you spend some time locked in a jail cell and the game does ask you to just sit in that cell for a bit, and when you do get out your escape is legitimately harrowing compared to how powerful your characters feel throughout the entire rest of the game. Towards the end when you enter the requisite fucked up force zone things take a radical turn towards the lightsaber and force powers after a full game of not really needing those that much and not facing a single guy who could stand up to your melee attacks, and the puzzles abruptly switch from bad cold machine logic to bad weird intuition logic, as befits weird naturalistic jedi bullshit.
The thing that TRULY endears me to the game though is its star, Mara Jade, or rather, what her presence signals about the intentions of the developers in making this expansion. Mara Jade, if don’t know her because you are the kind of person for whom knowing about Mara Jade doesn’t help you with girls (aka you’re cisgender), was a big deal character in the pre-Disney Star Wars expanded universe, one of the PREMIERE OC Do Not Steals, alongside Kyle Katarn himself in the pantheon of embarrassing but also very unironically cool non-movie Star Wars guys. She was an imperial assassin who looked like Mary Jane from spider-man and I guess is named after her, and she had a cool lightsaber and knew palpatine personally and tried to kill luke skywalker but he convinces her to turn good and then they get married and she outlives chewbacca. One of the most important things about her though is her omnipresence. Her story was so fractured, so piecemeal, like sure most of everyone’s stories happened in novels but Mara Jade showed up in comics and video games and anywhere else they could shove her. Because she was fucking cool!!! And she is. But she is also a character who requires basically the deepest cut knowledge to have understanding of, if not interest in. Because Star Wars was a bunch of messy bullshit even in 1998. So the vibe I get here is that Lucasarts kind of knew, right? This One’s For The Sickos. Only some percentage of people who already bought the game are going to play this one so we’re going balls out, we’re gonna stick like a kind of important piece of Mara Jade’s character development at the time, where she asserts her will to become a real agent of compassion and nobility for the first time after shedding her assassin life, into the expansion to the sequel to a game about a heretofore completely unrelated guy. This One’s For The Sickos. That’s me though so it’s fine.
They do a great job, too. There is such a specific style of novel cover that Mysteries of the Sith completely captures. If you know the ones I’m talking about then you INSTANTLY know what I mean. The like snarky dialogue that’s not really funny at all. The precarious situations with really anticlimactic outs. The incredible, unearned melodrama that deflates emotional arcs. The way everything is swimming in shades of green and brown. The very specific orange, heavily outlined hue of Mara Jade’s lightsaber. This is that Michael Stackpole shit. That Timothy Zahn shit. This strain of atmosphere has been part of Dark Forces’ spirit from the beginning, but never has it been so perfectly or totally captured like it is here. It’s really something, but only if you have a lot of affection for this particular flavor of mid-to-bad 90s sci-fi.
There is, I suppose, also the fact that the story itself does blow huge ass. Completely barebones, entirely boring. Nothing happens, and the three or four plot beats we get are stretched dangerously thin. Starting the game as Kyle for a few levels before he goes to find some force thing on some planet that he acts like was mentioned in the game but I’m pretty sure wasn’t. Mara Jade dicks around A LOT doing odd jobs for the New Republic like making deals with crime bosses for supplies, getting betrayed by crime bosses, escaping and extorting crime bosses, I don’t fucking care man. You’re chasing one guy for like three levels. Then oh man Kyle’s been gone for a while better go check on him oh shit he’s evil oh wait no it’s cool Mara Jade asked him to stop and he did. Great.
It’s weird because this is like, a pivotal moment for both of these characters and it seems like they just kind of threw it together narratively. There’s very little weight to any of these events, very little fanfare to any victory or defeat, very little drama considering the stakes Mara Jade is weighing are two souls that ostensibly she is struggling very hard to retain both of against insurmountable odds. SO much care was put into the levels themselves that it stands out when the stories told within them are so lacking in that same vibrancy and feeling of passion.
I don’t mind it too much, though. The game is obviously doing a lot for me aesthetically, and as I’ve mentioned, my brain was completely broken for most of it so I glided through the expansion without a lot of trouble from the play itself. A pleasant way to spend a few evenings with famous cool girl Mara Jade and her faildad Kyle. I have to be honest I am looking forward to the next game being developed by people who have made shooters before though.
Next Time - Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Outcast
2 Comments
realizing I have no distinction in my brain between Mara Jade and Ahsoka. I don't think they even have anything to do with each other
DJSCheddar
10 months ago