Some Games Actually Have a Good Story. Enter: The Force Unleashed

There I heard a lot of opinions from game reviewers and from friends about The Force Unleashed (hereafter referred to as FU) and most of them have been, by and large, negative and that is mostly because of the story. I really enjoyed the story for reasons that I will get into in a moment. Most people seem to agree (with the exception of the tragic gamers that were foolish enough to get it on the Wii) that FU's gameplay is very fun. What's not to like? The player gets to destroy lots of things with plenty of cool force powers and can dispatch plenty of enemies in creative ways by utilizing the combos and the environment together. On the Sith difficulty, the player is confronted with some rough challenges, but they aren't impossible and in most cases a few tries and maybe some wisely allocated stat boosts. There is the notable exception to the first room in the final mission, which was infuriatingly difficult until I began hiding behind a wall (like a child or a Frenchman) and picking off enemies one by one as they approached me.

The enemies can be a bit frustrating because, for a good while, they can be dispatched by either Force Pushing them off into a wall or off a cliff, or using Force Lightning to stun them for long enough to get in a few good whacks. Toward the end, however, the Empire apparently develops a breakthrough technology that creates forcefields that are immune to the force, meaning I can't grab, push, or lightning them until I disable their shield by hitting it with my lightsaber, meaning I end up getting closer to the bastards than I really wanted to. This is especially annoying considering that one of my favorite things to do is to use Force Grip to hold someone over a cliff and just let them go or holding them in midair and impaling them with my thrown lightsaber. Killing Imperials with my lightsaber is much less satisfying. I can forget this, however when I play through earlier missions with my completely leveled-up character, force-blasting my way through entire crowds of enemies and generally reveling in mass-carnage.

Now onto the story. I should mention that I fully intend to discuss the entire plot, meaning that there will be spoilers in the ahead. Anyone not interested in reading about what happens before playing through it can stop reading now and know simply that I liked it and be off on his/her merry way.

Spoiler warning stated: I thought FU did some really good things as a story, and for the overall story behind Star Wars with a few exceptions. The character of the Apprentice is well developed from beginning to end. Even from the first cutscene of him as an adult (or as close to one as we get to see), he shows trepidation when confronted with the idea of killing Imperials. His plot is tied to his affection with the his new pilot and the larger part of his path to the Light Side is because of her. I should mention here that a romantic plotline is NOT ALWAYS A BAD THING. Please hold your tomatoes until the end. It's far too easy for a brainless sheep to see a romantic plot coming and call it a shoehorned-in, half-hearted attempt to develop character, but never actually look into what it does. The truth is that romance and love are very human emotions, and therefore, serve to humanize characters and make them more sympathetic and real to the player. This is why they are used so often, and sadly, misused enough that even I shied away from the sight of it like a beaten dog cowering from a petting hand. Luckily, the aforementioned brainless sheep is not you, gentle reader, you know better don't you? The romance here isn't shoehorned-in at all, it is, from the beginning a major part of the Apprentice's journey from the Dark Side to the Light. After he is betrayed and revived by Darth Vader, the first thing he does is to rescue the pilot even thought he himself didn't even know why. At the end, General Kota reveals that the light he saw in the Apprentice as far back as the first mission was the girl.

FU is ultimately, a story about freedom from the moral bondage the Dark Side represents. The final fight is determined by the player's choice of attacking the weakened Vader in revenge and succumbing to the Dark Side after all, or rescuing General Kota from the Emperor and finally embracing the Light Side. The Apprentice, before the end, makes great leaps (all justified by subtle plot development and character traits) toward the Light Side, but it is up to the player to ultimately decide if he can shed the Dark Side altogether or if it is too late for the young Apprentice. The player will also see the dominating nature of the Dark Side in Darth Vader. In the cutscene before the final level, Vader raids the newly-formed Rebel Alliance meeting and flings the Apprentice from a cliff. Before he falls the Apprentice shows the player that the relationship of a Sith to the Force is a slave/master relationship. “Without me, you'll never be free of [the Emperor].” This is an extraordinarily profound statement, made even more so by the fact that it is found in a video game. It not only develops Darth Vader's character by pinning down his hating slave relationship to his master, The Emperor, but it also reflects ideas of the dominating nature of evil as seen in the works of Tolkien. To lay it out flat: The Dark Side is like The One Ring, in that it's users grow to hate it yet cannot free themselves of it.

All that wonderful stuff aside, the ending scenes are somewhat unsatisfying. There was never a really good way to end this game. Whatever happens cannot change the events of the Original Trilogy and the Apprentice cannot take part, so his demise is almost assured from the beginning and it feels as if the designers just killed him an extremely well-developed character just to get him out of the story.

There are also some consistency issues in the Apprentice's use of the Force. As Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation Required points out, the Apprentice uses the Force to pull a fucking Star Destroyer out of the sky. Luke, who is supposed to be some sort of Force-using prodigy, never even hints that this degree of Force mastery is even possible. Or maybe that's part of the difference between the Dark Side and the Light: The Dark Side is more obvious with its power, and the Light Side more subtle.

You'll notice that this particular post is really fucking long. There is a lot more to this game than meets the eye. It's really a testament to the game developers that I can spend this long unpacking the thing and I'm still not even discussing other minor points of interests. But all the literary importance aside, FU is a really fun game with an astonishingly deep plot that actually does good things to the Star Wars Universe and was a surprisingly wise addition to the cannon.

Thanks for reading, now go play the damn game

-Zac