#331: Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1994, SNES)

It's really quite remarkable to go back and see how repetitive games used to be. The Super Star Wars series was really a sort of a Gears of War for its day - a very straight forward sci-fi shooter. Gears takes care to ensure that the core gameplay is fun and robust enough to support the several hours of gameplay, and is also mindful of when things are beginning to get boring or old, and shakes things up accordingly. It also features enemies that are interesting to fight and provides any number of ways to go about (in a strategic sense, not just a mechanical sense) killing them.

The Super Star Wars series, however, seems to think that offering up some confusing force powers and the choice between a lightsaber and a blaster is enough to sustain several dozen levels of gameplay - provided some janky mode-7 sequences get shoehorned in every couple levels. Most egregious is how dull the levels are - there will be a ton of variety from level to level, but within a level if it weren't for the fact that you're always going to the right it would be incredibly easy to get lost - levels also have a habit of lasting 5-10 minutes past when it stopped being interesting seeing the same corridors and enemies. This is especially problematic later in this particular title as you move to sparser levels (like the Death Star or Endor) that are suspended in space without a ground level to use as a frame of reference - the entire level becomes a blur.

Return of the Jedi here actually deserves quite a bit of credit for sporting far more variety than either of its predecessors. They have the sense to eliminate the more free-roaming mode-7 levels that bogged down the earlier games, although it now includes a terrible and frustrating Death Star escape sequence. They also manage to turn pretty much everything from the movie into a level, sporting a good timing balance - this is a dramatic improvement over Super Empire Strikes Back, where literally 2/3rds of the game is on Hoth. It also continues the series tradition of doing a remarkably good job of recreating the Star Wars soundtrack through the SNES hardware.



Still, none of this helps the fact that the base gameplay here isn't very good. The Mega Man X series, for example, sports better combat mechanics, much better platforming mechanics, far better level and boss design and has the good sense not to overstay its welcome (well, the levels have the good sense, the series sure didn't).

Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Publisher: JVC/LucasArts
Developer: Sculptured Software
Released: 6/22/1994
Obtained: July 2006 (Used)

6.0/10