Star Wars Jedi: Survivor likes to make you feel powerful, but it never trusts you to get there by yourself. I’ve been far less enamoured with the game’s action sequences than many, and part of that is because I never felt in control. You can run along walls and ride zip lines and backflip down into combat, but you push so few buttons and feel detached from Cal as you do it, it barely matters. Combat is better - that’s all you, baby. But in the two most climactic battles, when you should feel at your most mighty, even this is ripped away from you.
Spoilers follow for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. I mean, obviously.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s involved combat is one of its key selling points. With five different stances and various upgrades across them all, you can approach combat in your own way. It’s fast and crunchy, relying on parrying and timing to find an opening, rather than just slicing through everyone at will. It makes your victories feel earned, and even as someone who has only casual feelings about Star Wars, it never failed to swell a sense of pride when the John Williams score came in after a mighty battle.
So why, when it matters most, is this all taken away from you? When the game first came out, I wrote about the bike chase near the end, and this is part of the same issue. As Cal chases Bode through the dusty plains of Jedah, it should feel like a white-knuckle spectacle. It should be the apex of drama. Not only are you engaged in a high speed chase while enemies surround you and you swerve around natural obstacles, you’re chasing a close friend who betrayed you. You should feel everything. I felt nothing.
That’s because the scene is highly scripted. While you’re technically in control of swinging Cal’s bike left and right, you will always remain in touching distance of Bode, and the game snaps you into cutscenes and QTEs throughout the chase to ensure you stay on the perfect path that has been plotted for you. Aside from button mashing the QTEs, you can finish this sequence without doing anything at all. Cal will still ride the best route and still catch up to Bode in the end. The game is so determined to make you feel powerful that it circles back around and makes you feel like you don’t matter.
This is exactly how the two biggest boss battles feel. When you fight Darth Vader as Cere, it should feel like a major moment in the game. Playing as Cere and taking on the biggest villain in the Star Wars mythology is engrossing. But annoyingly, every time you whittle off some health, you’re forced to watch a long cutscene and completely disrupts the flow and momentum. You might feel powerful as you slice away Vader’s health, but that’s sapped away every time the game interrupts itself.
Combat is when the game is at its best, so it’s baffling that when it most has time to shine, it’s never allowed out of first gear. However interesting or narratively compelling these scenes may be, this is a poor way to deliver them, and since the boss battles are difficulty spikes, a lot of people will be forced to watch multiple times.
Then there’s the final fight: Bode himself. Initially, this is well paced. We track him down, interact with his daughter, big climatic speech, Merrin saves said daughter, fight. It’s near perfect, delivering exposition, setting up the conflict, and teeing up the battle with intrigue. But again, it interrupts itself. This battle is even worse because there’s a major and necessary break to the combat caused by Cal’s internal battle with the Dark Side, but this is robbed of significance when it’s just one of several interruptions that mostly do nothing more than change the set dressing.
These battles aren’t the only time this happens. The final confrontation with Dagan Gera is similar, but there’s power in those moments still. Gera is the first time you notice your agency stripped away, so it feels like a cinematic merging of combat and cutscene that elevates everything. This feels, at least initially, like the game is doing something different to play with narrative and interaction. By the time you reach Vader, the trick is old and you can see behind the curtain. It’s also a relatively easy fight that most players will finish on the first try, unlike Vader or Bode.
It took me until the fourth attempt to down Vader, which I’m going to blame on getting to grips with the switch to Cere and not my own skills. However, I grew increasingly bored of the cutscenes I had to watch over and over again while taking him out, and then accidentally skipped the final scene. You know, the emotional climax where Cere dies. Because I was playing it for review, I had to wait a week for the game drop and for others to get that far before I could watch it on YouTube.
That’s both my fault and a particularly specific situation, but it only existed because Jedi: Survivor messed with conventions. Put the cutscene at the end and I’ll watch with great interest. Put it in the middle and make me watch it every time I die, I’m skipping.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor sets out to make you feel like a Jedi, but it has a far too specific idea of what this means. Rather than letting you feel the Force flow through you, it relies too much on dramatic narrative to sell itself, and ends up annoying far more than it empowers.