So I’m taking a slight break from the Gamecube library and reviewing two older Star Wars games that I replayed recently and feel like talking about. They were released during the Gamecube era, so it is at least tangentially related. The final two installments of the Jedi Knight series, both games were reasonably well received at the time they came out, but it’s been about twenty years, and while both are still good, they do have their fair share of flaws.
My relationship with these games is rather different. I grew up with Jedi Academy as a kid, whereas I didn’t play Jedi Outcast until I was an adult. As a result I have a bit of a nostalgic attachment to Jedi Academy, while I have none for Jedi Outcast. Still, both games are similar in a number of ways, yet still feel distinct.
Both try to capture the feeling of Star Wars, and the thrill of playing as a Jedi, but they take slightly different paths. Jedi Outcast focuses on the personal journey of Kyle Katarn, while Jedi Academy lets players create their own custom avatar. Jedi Outcast has a more rigid and focused narrative and gameplay structure, while Jedi Academy allows the player more freedom in terms of how they want to play and what order to do the missions in. But both games also have their fair share of similarities, including some of the same problems. One admittedly minor flaw both games have is that apparently they didn’t feel like hiring an actual composer for these games, and so just reused the soundtracks from the original three Star Wars movies. The music itself is nice, but it is rather distracting to hear music that was clearly originally intended for another work of fiction, as the music doesn’t always mesh well with what’s happening in the game, and both games would have been better if they’d featured original music, or at the very least had original arrangements of the music to fit better with the game’s tone and atmosphere.
Both games also feature some awkwardness in terms of design and appearance. Graphic wise both games are fine, but they definitely show their age, and even by the standards of the time some of the character models looked off. The voice acting is pretty good and is able to counteract the uncanny valley jankiness of the character models to an extent, but it’s still noticeable. I think the most awkward moment was in Jedi Outcast when two characters kiss, as the models and animation just aren’t good enough to make the action look natural, and what should be a touching moment ends up being rather laughable and uncomfortable.
Both games also have a slight issue with prioritizing making the levels look like a real place over making it clear what the player needs to do in order to make progress. Okay, you’ve managed to make the layout of this place look convincingly like an imperial base, well done, now where the hell am I supposed to go? Jedi Outcast is particularly bad about making it unclear where you’re supposed to go next, with some truly baffling decisions when it comes to the level design. When you look things up in a guide, ideally you want to be thinking “Oh, of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” and not “Really? That was the answer? How on earth was I supposed to figure that out?”
These games also sometimes have a bad habit of arbitrarily deciding that the level has to be played a certain way, player choice or logic be damned. In Jedi Academy there’s one level where you have to rescue some prisoners from a Rancor. Now what you’re supposed to do is lure the Rancor away while the prisoners escape, then leave to free the next group of prisoners. But realistically if you just kill the Rancor you won’t have to worry about it anymore. However, the game arbitrarily decides that despite the fact that you are armed with a lightsaber, something that can cut through almost anything, you can’t kill the Rancor. I remember as a kid I couldn’t really wrap my head around this, and so I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to kill the Rancor, dying countless times in the process. But eventually I succeeded in killing it…only for the game to immediately spawn in another one. Because you’re just supposed to run away from it, not kill it, no matter how much that doesn’t make sense.
In a later level in Jedi Academy you have to fight Boba Fett, and once again logic is thrown out the window. Again, as a kid I could not wrap my head around the idea that you couldn’t kill him, and it wasn’t until after I’d poured enough damage into him to kill the final boss several times over to no effect that I finally conceded and just ran through the level doing my best to avoid him. But while these two examples annoyed me both as a kid and an adult, I think the crowning jewel of stupidity regarding arbitrary restrictions has to go to the forced stealth section in Jedi Outcast. After Kyle is able to handle large groups of enemies throughout the entire game, it suddenly decides that it wants to be realistic all of a sudden, so now Kyle has to stealth around the enemies instead of fighting them head on. So if you get spotted, it’s almost instantly game over. What makes it especially infuriating is that not only do you have to contend with the level design that doesn’t always make it clear where you need to go, but every time you get caught the game forces you to watch the same unskippable cutscene every single time before you can try again. It got so frustrating that I ended up rage quitting and immediately started working on this review.
Even aside from the really aggravating and bad design decisions which crop up more often in Jedi Outcast, on the whole it just doesn’t click for me the same way that Jedi Academy did. In Jedi Academy you get to use a lightsaber and the force right out of the gate, while it takes a little while in Jedi Outcast to get to that point. Another thing that works in Jedi Academy’s favor is that it’s a self contained narrative. While it does have characters and references from the previous games, you don’t need to have played the previous games to understand what’s going on, and the game stands on its own just fine. Jedi Outcast on the other hand is very much tied into the events of previous games, and if you haven’t played the previous games the story of Jedi Outcast won’t make as much sense or have the same impact. On top of that, the previous games are rather archaic, primitive, and even more janky than Jedi Outcast, and unless you’re a diehard Star Wars fan who wants to experience everything they’re really not worth playing anymore.
In fairness to Jedi Outcast it is reasonably well paced and well structured in terms of both the core gameplay and the overall narrative, and is a bit more cohesive and structured than Jedi Academy. It also has a better villain than Jedi Academy. But having replayed both of these games recently, on the whole I had a lot more fun with Jedi Academy. I think it captures the feeling of being a Jedi better, and the fact that you can customize your own avatar and decide what powers you want to focus on does make it easier to project onto them. Jedi Academy also leans more into the power fantasy, while Jedi Outcast is more about trying to present a challenge. Challenging the player is all well and good, but at the end of the day Jedi Academy is more fun, and while Jedi Outcast is more challenging, considering that a lot of the challenges can only be beaten by trial and error, it feels like Jedi Outcast isn’t trying to test the player’s skill but the player’s patience. Jedi Academy does have some mildly annoying moments here or there, but there were quite a few spots in Jedi Outcast that actively pissed me off, the most severe of which was the previously discussed stealth section that caused me to give up part way through. I did beat Jedi Outcast once years ago, but after reliving just how frustrating getting through it was I’ll probably never do it again.
Which is not to say that Jedi Academy is devoid of its own problems. While the story is self-contained, it’s still rather predictable and standard for a Star Wars story. Jaden is fairly bland as a character, and while that’s probably intentional to help them serve as a self insert for the player, I still think there were better ways to go about it. Perhaps making there be a few different dialogue choices, or allowing the player to customize Jaden’s personality to an extent. I do think it’s neat that you can choose your characters gender, species, and appearance, this was actually the very first game I ever played that allowed you to do that sort of thing. But it’s all a bit superficial and surface level, and it’s rather jarring that Jaden’s dialogue and interactions with the other characters is always exactly the same regardless of their gender or species.
The game also feels a bit off in terms of its morality. It is called Jedi Academy, so you’re supposed to be training to be Jedi, force users that strive for balance and only fight when they have to. But most of the gameplay consists of the same kinds of things you did in Jedi Outcast, namely third and first person action where you kill lots of bad guys. There’s never any penalty for killing too many people, very few ways to solve problems that don’t involve killing people, nor is there any incentive to not kill people. It is possible to use the Jedi Mind Trick to get through some of the levels without killing anybody, but the game never acknowledges your choices one way or the other, so it feels pointless, especially since not killing all the enemies could easily backfire on you later. I don’t know, it just would have been nice if the game had leaned more into the RPG elements instead of restricting them to the more superficial aspects of the game.
One last problem worth touching on in Jedi Academy is the ending. Towards the end of the story you have the choice to either stay on the light side, or switch to the dark side. Staying on the light side is fairly bland and predictable, but it at least makes sense. Switching to the dark side on the other hand makes no sense whatsoever. There’s no foreshadowing for it, it comes out of nowhere, and it frankly makes Anakin’s turn in Revenge of the Sith seem rational and well paced by comparison. It’s so illogical and unsatisfying. Either the game should have properly established a good reason for why Jaden would switch to the dark side, and given the player some indication that it might happen ahead of time, or they should have just not done it at all. As it is, the option to turn to the dark side in this game is like including a button that will drown a bunch of kittens. Sure, it technically gives the player more choices, but unless you’re a sadist or morbidly curious it’s a choice that you have no rational reason to pick.
But while it’s not perfect, Jedi Academy is still fun. You do get to use a lot of cool powers, you do get to duel against a lot of sith, and you do get to be the hero of your own Star Wars story. It is janky and rough around the edges, and it’s not as deep as it could have been, but I still greatly enjoy it.
If you’ve never played either of these games but are curious, I’d recommend playing Jedi Academy first, and if you like it and want to play something similar to it go ahead and give Jedi Outcast a try. Both games do clearly exist at least in part to capitalize on our nostalgia for Star Wars, but honestly that doesn’t bother me because they do it pretty well, and unlike the sequel trilogy they do it in a way that doesn’t completely invalidate the events of the original movies.
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