AdrianRK said:
I personally love Star Wars and am a BIG die hard Star Wars fan and I hate all the star wars games that came out in the last 10 years and the prequels. The force unleashed is a HUGE middle finger to all us old school star wars fans from where i stand.
The idea of the force gave the whole universe a sense of magic and mystery. The manifestation of the force represented an inside to the character using it.
In the games the force got turned into mana basically, the force manifestations into spells, and the force users into godlike human bulldozers. This is complete bullshit. Who made these games completely missed the idea of star wars.
Pretty good summary of my opinion on the franchise: the best thing about Star Wars is the universe it's set in, and a couple of the adventures - the original trilogy, KOTOR, and the Zahn books.
There have been few good additions to the franchise, for two major reasons:
1) They treat the Force like D&D magic, and the
actual magic of Star Wars is lost when they do this. Partly it's the setting: there's little to no point in being able to throw fireballs from your fists if fireball-throwing weapons are plentiful and available at easily affordable prices. The original Star Wars films did an excellent job of adapting magic to face this problem: they focused its abilities on foresight, knowledge, understanding, and the like. The Force added clarity to the Jedi's abilities, and physical manifestations of this were rare and powerful. Remember how amazed we all were when Luke deflected the three sting shots fired by Obi-Wan's drone in Episode V, even though he couldn't even see them coming? How his destruction of the Death Star was made possible by the non-material aspect of his powers, the focus, concentration, and connection to the Force? Meanwhile, Marek crashes Star Destroyers with a gesture, or runs around hacking through millions of people with huge storms of Force Lightning. Something is lost when you do this, and it's not just your low cheesiness factor.
2) The original timeline is far too cluttered. Luke Skywalker can't find time for coffee breaks anymore, since he's too busy saving the world. I know all these adventures have to be significant, but seriously, this is getting out of hand.
-Has anyone noticed that KOTOR was set FOUR THOUSAND YEARS before the movies? You don't have to involve anyone named Skywalker. There's 25000 years of history in Star wars, and most of it is pretty empty.* There's room for a hundred times as many bad authors and rubbish games that don't have to tarnish an entire generation's childhood memories.
-The galaxy is big, and the heroes don't need to save all of it. Couldn't we have stories focused on liberating one planet, or one cluster, from tyrants/Sith/etc? When hundreds of writers make their individual works each critical to the survival of the galaxy, it diminishes from the heroes we want to pay attention to. If Luke Skywalker (or, if you prefer, Anakin) isn't #1 on our list of people who saved the universe, someone's doing something wrong. By having so many extremely important stories set in the same period of time with heroes exhibiting fantastically greater (and thus cheesier) Force powers, it makes the most important heroes (and their most important adventures) insignificant and lame.
*Not to mention untold aeons before the Republic was even founded. I must admit, my favorite thing about KOTOR is the idea that Lucasarts created a game that,
if it sucked, would not contaminate the timespan covered by the movies, and could thus be largely ignored. Want some ideas for storylines that fit the bill? How about a game based around founding the Republic 25000 years ago, throwing off your Rakatan oppressors? Since you can't leech off the existing franchise, it will have to be original and include characters we can relate to. Or one set on an outlying planet/cluster with a tyrannical government where one or more stranded Jedi have to escape/overthrow said government. Both of these are perfectly significant, but neither of them have to seriously impact the storyline, and if they suck, we aren't obliged to acknowledge their existence.
TL;DR: the two problems are that: (1) people overdo it on the physical aspects of the Force and somewhere lose the only thing that prevented it from being epically cliche and cheesy, which it now is. (2) people keep setting stories in an already-overfilled timeline, instead of following KOTOR's lead and trying to fill in 24500+ years of blank history.
As a result, we end up with stories and powers that ruin, obsolete and generally #$%^& up the original canon that we loved, and they're set in exactly the same time period, making it all the harder for us to pretend they don't exist, and relating them to characters we used to like.
lol
