You might have seen that IGN dropped a fresh nine minutes of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor footage over night. If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, you can check it out in the handy dandy embed below. It’s pretty good — there’s a wandering, aimless quality to the footage. The clear mandate was for whoever was on the stick to stuff around get into a few fights, show off the combat and Force powers a little.
All fine, all part of the marketing machine. We all love hitting things with a lightsaber. They don’t even need to sell this thing, just confirm lightsaber biffo and I’ll see you on launch day.
However. There’s a couple of things in this trailer that I think are going overlooked. The first is that Cal Kestis has finally moved past his poncho era and thank god. Cal opens boxes around the dusty world of Koboh and they contain actual items of clothing. At one point he pulls a leather bomber jacket out of one of these crates. Cal’s discovering a sense of personal style and I love that for him. The ponchos were one of the worst parts of the original, one of many little irritations Respawn’s sequel aims to fix.
But there’s another facet of this trailer that’s going under-reported and that’s all the accidental slapstick comedy. The reason I love this trailer is that whoever is on the stick makes honest mistakes. They get sucker-punched, they create accidental havoc with their powers. Let me offer a few examples.
At around 1:15 or so, Cal charges down a pair of battle droids on a rocky cliff face. He hits the two of them with a Force pull, sending them both arse-over-tea-kettle. As he rushes by them, one of the two droids, almost off-camera, awkwardly tumbles over the cliff edge. Cal hustles onward as if pretending not to notice its plight.
This is followed by a sequence at around the 4:30 mark where Cal has to leap up a vertical shaft by hopping from wall-to-wall. It’s a standard video game trope nowadays, but the sequence goes on just a little too long, to the point where it starts to seem like a genuine hardship or an approach he didn’t think through.
At 5:50, a dog-like creature gets abruptly cut in half by Cal’s lightsaber in a way the game does not telegraph at all, the moment made all the more absurd by the fact that Cal swings the lightsaber horizontally and the dog-thing splits from the top down. At around 7:45, while fighting a pair of heavy combat droids, Cal accidentally puts one droid between himself and the other in such a way that it gets nuked by its comrade’s own rocket. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but the way Cal dances around the droid before the rocket strikes it clean in the back had me cackling.
I am not the only one that noticed these moments. Austin Wood over at GamesRadar noticed it too so I know I’m not crazy. Cal Kestis is a bungler that lives in a galaxy far, far away and I love him for it.
This is the kind of stuff I love. Sea of Thieves, while obviously an entirely different kind of game, is full of these delightful little moments. You get these moments when many different systems are left to interact in surprising ways, and I love that Respawn has included a bit of room for them to happen. I love that they weren’t cut out of the trailer! It would have been very easy for them to hide these moments for sake of making the game look cool. If any of these moments were on a list somewhere, destined to be patched out or smoothed over, I’m begging Respawn to leave them. They’re perfect just the way they are.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was roundly criticised for its occasionally angular jank. This? This is the kind of jank I want.
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