Jedi: Fallen Order’s story was almost incredible
How a few narrative missteps turned kept a good game from being something special
Jedi: Fallen Order is a fantastic video game by nearly all criterion. The action gameplay is fun and fast-paced, the levels are well-designed, the sense of atmosphere is immersive, and the characters are (mostly) likable. It’s also one of the few actually good Star Wars games to come out recently and thus reminder of how much potential there is for interesting stories and gamepla mechanics in this universe.
And yet, I can’t help but feel a little dissatisfied with the game’s ending. Fallen Order’s story is interesting and relatively easy to follow, but its final resolution felt soft. To borrow a phrase that I’ve seen a few other writers use, it didn’t stick the landing. This is interesting, because the writers did a great job of setting up the emotional stakes of the story, but the end left me feeling a little hollow. Ultimately, A better narrative finish would have elevated Fallen Orderfrom a fun Star Wars title to one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Warning: spoilers for the entirety of Jedi: Fallen Order follow in my discussion below.
In Fallen Order, players assume the role of Cal Kestis, a Jedi whose goal is to rebuild the Order after it was destroyed. The game is set between Episodes Three and Four in the movies, a time when the Empire was still growing and annihilating everything and everyone in its path. By the time the game begins, the Jedi Order is essentially gone so Cal’s job looks next to impossible. However, he and his friends quickly find out about a mysterious holocron, a list of Force-sensitive children that they hope to use to build a new Order.
As a whole, I think the story of Cal and company scouring the galaxy for the holocron is good, though some of its flaws keep it from being great. Cal himself is a little bland as protagonists go, but his supporting cast’s charm (The former Jedi Cere and the Night Sister Merrin, for example) more than make up for his deficiencies. The dialog is mostly solid and the motivations of every character always feel real and believable.
Fallen Order is at its best when it shows how much the odds are stacked against Cal’s success. And it’s not just the last dying remnants of the Jedi order that have suffered from the Empire, either. Every world players visit is filled with stormtroopers, purge troopers, and inquisitors (all of which are an absolute blast to fight against), and the friendly characters who live on those worlds tell emotional stories about fighting a losing battle. The Empire is a massively powerful opponent, and Fallen Order’s writers use its power to build real stakes into the central narrative.
My favorite part in the game was near the end, when Merrin (a late addition to the crew) asks Cal if he had ever considered whether or not finding the children on the holocron was a good idea. Her reasoning was that the Empire would almost certainly find Cal and his new recruits, torture them, and turn them into Jedi-hunting Inquisitors. Since one of the villains is a former Jedi Palawan who suffered that same fate, players already have an idea of how terrible that sequence of events would be. The Empire already destroyed the Jedi once, so why wouldn’t they be able to crush a few Palawan?
In one particularly memorable sequence, Cal walks through a visual depiction of what an Empire invasion of his fledgling Jedi academy would look like. We see students who are (at most) 12 years old fighting for their lives, losing, and cowering in the shadows. There’s a real sense of despair, and this part of the story is beautifully told. In the aftermath of this sequence, Cal has to choose between potentially rebuilding the Jedi order and subjecting students to a terrible death if they ever get caught. It’s powerful, and if the rest of the game had lived up to this high standard, Fallen Order would be one of my favorites of all time.
The problem with Fallen Order’s writing though, is that it can’t decide what kind of story it wants to tell. Most of the game feels like a triumphant, against-all-odds fight, the kind of story that Star Wars movies always tell, which clashes with the introspective questions about the holocron I just wrote about. The moments I love most, the questions Merrin asks Cal, are great, but they feel tacked on. In other words, I wish Fallen Order had decided to explore all of its ideas more fully before it was almost time to fight the final boss.
Fallen Order’s choice to leave out any and all questioning of Cal’s purpose until nearly the end is especially disappointing because of what our crew of heroes eventually decides to do. After beating the final boss and escaping an Empire stronghold, Cal chooses to destroy the holocron. This choice is defensible and certainly seems like the right one, but it flies in the face of most of the game’s tone. Maybe, if Cal had stopped to think about his purpose and choice at an earlier point, this decision would have felt more meaningful. Instead, if feels like a cheap way to explain how Cal could win every fight but still leave the Jedi Order nonexistent for Luke Skywalker, years later.
Part of why I thought Fallen Order would be interesting before I played it is that Cal was obviously doomed to fail. The Jedi Order was never rebuilt and the Empire continued to ruthlessly destroy everything until A New Hope appears in the canonical timeline. I was hoping for a well-told death scene, and I truly expected that I was going to get one when Darth Vader (!) walked out on to the screen. I understand why Cal didn’t die — and it’s even a worthwhile price to pay if that means a sequel or two is coming — but I was hoping for an ending more along the lines of Rogue One (my favorite Star Wars movie).
I’ve seen some people hypothesize that Fallen Order was a victim of the developer’s previous success. Respawn released the massively popular Apex Legends earlier this year, an online, battle royale game that must have eaten up a tremendous amount of resources. It briefly became more popular than Fortnite by some metrics, and some commenters I saw theorized that this took people away from the Fallen Order team.
Additionally, Disney and EA surely wanted Fallen Order to hit shelves before Rise of Skywalker, so there really wasn’t much wriggle room for a release date, no time to delay things to polish the writing. There are already some known technical bugs that seem a little odd in a game created by such a high-pedigree developer, so there’s at least a plausible case that the writers ran out of time as well. But this is all idle conjecture — all I can really do is judge the game by what I experienced.
Fallen Order tells an interesting story about loss, survival, and big decisions, but it could have been so much more. The best games don’t pull any narrative punches — they hit players with story beats that are often unpleasant, or characters that don’t do what might feel right to us sitting at home. Fallen Order plays with some really interesting ideas, but leaves some of its most important development until too late in the story to be most effective.
