Can you imagine a game where your lightsaber can really cut through everything it can in the films? It’d be chaos for a game designer! Levels are made with places you can’t get to in mind, and enemy vehicles are typically presented as tougher adversaries, not things you’re meant to easily cut apart. For instance there were plenty of times in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic that you found yourself locked out of a door because you didn’t have a key, or in Jedi Academy where your lightsaber “cut” into walls only to leave little more than a scorch mark. This fantasy has rarely translated in any real way to the games. Speeder bike coming at you? Use your lightsaber to deftly slice the front half of it off like a hot knife through butter.
Durasteel door got you locked in? Cut a hole in it. Throughout the films lightsabers are used as much as tools for escape as they are for fighting. Of course, it makes a lot of sense from a design standpoint: Where’s the challenge in using a weapon that can take out any enemy in a single blow? Not to mention enemies using lightsabers - it would get really tiring really fast to fight against enemies that could kill you in a single blow. Instead of the weapon that only has to flash out for a second in the cantina scene of A New Hope, players have to swing their sabers repeatedly into enemies, bludgeoning them more than dismembering them. From Super Empire Strikes Back on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System to the more recent Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, it seems like just about everybody outside of the weakest enemies can take a lightsaber strike and keep on coming. If there’s one thing basically every Star Wars game has in common, it’s that the lightsaber isn’t quite as deadly in games.
How do you take a weapon so venerated in the films - a weapon that can cut through seemingly anything - and give them to a player that will try to use them in ways they’ve witnessed?Ĭhances are you’ve played some of the following Star Wars games, but allow me to take you on a bit of a journey through various games stemmed from the franchise, analyzing how they’ve augmented the lightsaber to better serve the design of a game. While the lightsaber seen in the Star Wars films is elegant, deadly, and possesses an almost superhero-like amount of power (c’mon it stops lightning!), games created in the series have always treated the weapons differently.
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