 I loved Star Wars Jedi Survivor, but I also didn't. What? What? What? What? When I examined Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, I wrote that it was almost a masterpiece. My evaluation of Jedi Survivor is a little less favourable. Such hatred. For all that it does right, this second chapter of Carl Kestis' journey has several issues that spoiled my enjoyment of what could have, should have, been an experience of pure delight. Some of these are known. If you have followed the buzz surrounding this game at all, you will have a passing awareness of the horrific condition Respawn Entertainment's latest game was released in. To say it was frustrating to experience Jedi Survivor's open-world gameplay at below 30 FPS, frames per second, in the first days after its launch is to state the obvious. Have you tried doing any kind of block-and-attied response window when the frames per second drop from 50 to 30 to 18 in a span of 3 to 5 seconds? And don't even get me started on the DLSS settings. They made this game look like some bland nightmare title running on early 2000s hardware. Speaking of, a further nightmare I had to face involved a launcher formerly known as Origin, though its trice health's down name is now simply a... its quality hasn't been even... marginally improved. Is it a pain to deal with it? You bet it is! Every update was a fresh challenge, giving me errors and refusing to install based on the claim that I didn't have enough space on my drive. This is a game of over 120 gigabytes. To have it update properly, I had to have as much space free on my SSD as the game install. Or I had to uninstall and re-download it. Care to guess how many times I let that? Launching the game itself was no easy task, funny how that is. Despite the fact that I had the game in my library, EA would often tell me that I was unauthorized to use the copy installed. For some such nonsense. Funny how that works. But hey, you get the game to work and it starts off great! Respawn hits it off with this extended sequence in the depths of Coruscant, replete with high-stakes, stunning vistas and a dastardly senator, whose self-interest is the stuff of legends. An old friend shows up, Carl makes a new friend and he's apparently made a whole lot more while the audience hasn't been looking. Sure, they all die within 30 seconds of our introduction to them, but I was already invested so the gut punch Respawn wanted to deliver. It worked. Getting away from Coruscant is fun in tow with our new friend, who alone among all the friends has survived. Only this getaway damages the Mantis, and so it's time to go running to yet another old friend with the hope of getting a fixer-upper. It's a good premise, the kind that quickly got me invested into what was going on. The story of Carl Kester's is this game's greatest strength. It's clear that he has been struggling since the Mantis' crew went on their own separate ways. Santa, let's hope this information does some good. We did it. His arrival to Kobo, the planet on which Greece is not, lives as the beginning of a journey of rediscovery for Carl. He'll build up new relationships, a whole new community of them, while repairing old ones. He'll do that thing that Jedi always do, where his compassion results in at least three boss battles. As is the way. Since I'm telling you about Kobo, I might as well point out how bad some of the optional boss battles you can walk in on are, especially early on in the game. Actually, it's crunched out, they don't get better. The Ogdu-Bogdu boss battle of the previous game was a thing to load. This one has rank calls and Ogdos spawn, which will kill you in two, three hits, if you're lucky. Better yet, there are attacks which kill you in a single hit. Whoever designed these, whoever approved these, should reconsider some life changes. Maybe practice alcoholism instead of spreading misery among us. I joke, I joke. Don't drink, don't get into alcoholism, unless you can afford it. And really, in this economy, can you? Can you? As to whoever played through these and enjoyed them. All the power to you, friends, for I have none. Not for this stuff. Unless you think it's only the optional boss battles that are monstrous annoyance, let me reassure you. There's a two-stage boss in this game who made me change the difficulty settings. That didn't happen in the previous game. I had more fun with nine sister in Fallen Order than I did with characters like the two-stage boss I mentioned. Dagen Garo, a Fallen Jedi from the exciting, if slightly derpy, high-republic era of Star Wars, makes for some of the most fun lightsaber combat in the game. Dagen Garo has a punchable, stabbable face and voice, which really help. He's one of those corrupt Jedi whose issues are reminiscent of a child's temper tantrum more than anything. I'll let you shape your own value judgments on the lad. Let's get into spoiler territory and discuss the highlights of what I thought was a really well-told story, true to the world and true to the characters, Respawn introduced four years ago. The Jedi Council is long dead and gone. And you know what that means? Our boy's about to get it on! Crows jokes aside, the reconnection and budding romance Carl experiences with Marin on Jedder and beyond is my favorite thing going on in Star Wars. That's a sentence I never told I'd say. This isn't a universe well-known for its romance, but Respawn Entertainment's writers are doing excellent job with these two crazy, fall-sensitive kids. Marin's datamirian witchcraft is always a thrill to watch and its users create the most memorable fight sequences in the game. Do you trust me? Yes, is that for luck? No, right. The most memorable fight sequences in the game, Bar 1. Which one is that, I hear you ask? Could it possibly have something to do with a cape-wearing lord of the Sith? Why yes, how did you know? In what is the most satisfyingly brutal scene in Jedi Survivor, the player is given control over Seer Junda, as she struggles to protect the Jedi archives she has been putting together on Jedder. This excellent scene culminates in a face-off against Darth Vader, actually getting to duel him rather than run away from him at the end of Jedi Fallen Order this time around is such a thrill. It's been a while. I was hoping you drowned on Noor when we blew a hole in your underwater base. It is delusion to think your actions have had any consequence. The fortress stands. The Inquisitorious continues its work. The battle has everything. Tension, panic, desperate screaming at Seer to just get out of there to run away and not look back. Of course she doesn't do that. Because she's a Jedi. All throughout I couldn't help but suspect Vader was only toying with Seer, and the way he finally dispatches her channels there is samurai DNA that plays no small part in old school Star Wars. Following Seer's loss, Colkestis is at his rawest. This makes for some of the strongest moments in Jedi Survivor's narrative. Moments I'll let you experience for yourself. I can't help but feel that Jedi Survivor misses out on an excellent opportunity to show us a few more worlds than it did. Opening on Coruscant is a vibe. But a short one, and unless you're clearing up the map to get every cosmetic and bounty hunting quest out of the way, you really have no reason to come back. Besides, returning there is a bit of a narrative stretch, considering Imperials were pew-pew-pewing at Carl and the Mantis only a few days ago. I would have preferred less of Kobo if it meant that we could visit a few other different environments. What we get to experience outside of it are stations. Imperials, separatists, high republic bases are all very cool, and the different aesthetics are fun. But I wish we saw more unique environments. It's not like Star Wars lacks in those. It is what it was. More limbs get detached, more things get cut off. Great stormtroopers, dismemberment animations. I love them. Fighting bigger, tougher enemies relegates your lightsaber to something as useful as a club. And that's why the power of fantasy of being an awe-inspiring Jedi takes a cold bath. It's frustrating, so so frustrating that so many types of enemies might as well be made of beskar. Certain enemy attacks are foreshadowed badly, and difficult to dodge, not because I'm that bad, which I am, but because their timing sucks. My big pet peeve. Events in Jedi Survivor don't make life for Carl any easier. Late in the game he starts to lose himself by tapping into the dark side, creating some of the most brutal and delightful moments of Jedi murder fun by basically making Carl unstoppable. It's an upgrade on the time slow ability which functions as Carl's ultimate force trick throughout Jedi Survivor. Carl's dark side rage is awesome, until it appears midway through a boss fight. If you don't activate it, you simply die. This, I found out the hard way. As the first time I got the prompt, I refused to click on it, thinking it was a narrative moment and I had some freedom. I get what they were going for by forcing the player to tap into Carl's inner darkness, the narrative function of his wrath and his fury and his loss, but that one moment acted as breaking the illusion of control by giving you this choice, but not making it in fact a choice at all. You're excused in believing that you don't have to take it, that something else will happen if you refuse to surrender to your inner rage. However, as I said, it's actually not a choice. There isn't any choice to make. There go my complaint about this small moment. Maybe I'm weird for fixating on it. Maybe someone else was struck by it too. Let me know if that was the case for you in the comments below. As I conclude this write-up, I've got another 6-7 hours of activities left in Jedi Survivor, a number of bounties to wrap up a bunch of collectibles to get my greasy hands on. If you ask me whether I'm planning on getting back to it, I'll shrug all non-committal-like. I don't know that I want to. I love Carl, Merrin, BD1, Grease and the community I've helped build up across my 20-ish hours with Jedi Survivor. There is actually a mechanic whereby you save all kinds of folks and send them to Grease's brand new container on Kobo. But I also feel a sense of fatigue, which is not at all what you want to experience after a mere 20-ish hours of play. I love so much about this package, but I didn't quite love it enough. Not to want to play more of it. When the third, and hopefully last, chapter of Carl's story comes out, I'll have meditated my way into more excitement for one of the Star Wars universe's premier redheads. For now, I think I might just let this one rest. If you enjoyed this video, please let me know in the comments down below. Tell me what you thought about Jedi Star Wars Survivor. No, that's not the name. Star Wars Jedi Survivor. So many, many columns in there. Don't forget to smash that like button and subscribe. Subscribing to this channel makes me keep going. That's not necessarily true. What makes me keep going is a sense of futility and an amusement, and that sense. Anyway, I will see you next time. I'm Philip Magnus, you're not. Bye!