Star Wars The Clone Wars Republic Heroes

I am one of the many thousands of people who grew up in the age of Star Wars, loved it immensely as a youth and young man, and have been, somewhat regretfully, forced into reëvaluating the whole universe/multiverse/shebang, what with the “advent” of the latter three films, the spinoffs, the second major wave of mercenary merchandising, and of course the cataclysmically horrific Jar-Jar Binks. (Ain’t no apologizing for that guy.) The original three films are still somewhat enjoyable, but they seem to have lost that “touchstone” status for me as I realize that, honestly, they’re not all that great.

Which, really, has very little to do with the multi-coloned Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes, which I’ve recently been playing on my trusty PSP. But it is worth noting that this game is an ancillary of a spinoff of a sequel of a sequel of the transmedia, cross-platform … thingamajig that Star Wars has become. Proudly, the back of the box boasts that, by playing this game, one may “experience an original storyline that bridges the gap between Season One and Two of the hit TV series.” (NB: Storylines are now somehow experiential.) You can bet that that gap was placed there by design. If you like the TV show, you’ll want to play this game, since it’ll fill in, apparently, all kinds of story information that you can’t get elsewhere. This multiverse is infinitely expandable, and that’s the point.

I am faintly aware that a Clone Wars TV series exists, and I seem to recall a film version in theaters not too long ago. (And that it didn’t seem to make much of an impression with critics or audience.) Didn’t hold much interest for me. But I liked this game pretty well – with some serious reservations.

I am in no way aware of the complex storyline that lies behind Republic Heroes; I don’t even know which alien races its characters belong to, or whether they’re good guys or bad guys. It took me a little while to get used to the fact that, as far as I can tell, anyway, the clones are the good guys. See, they all wear outfits that strongly resemble that of Boba Fett. Boba Fett, for my generation of Star Wars fan, is the epitome of nastiness; he richly earned that plunge into the Sarlacc, or whatever the hell that thing was.

In any case: at various stages of the game, you play as one of the Fettlings; as a young Obi-Wan; as a young, pre-Darth Anakin Skywalker; and as some sort of octopus-head guy. Each of these characters has different moves, skills, abilities, and I enjoyed this variety, even as I couldn’t follow the story. (I liked the octopus-head guy the best, I think.) Which is actually another way of saying: if you’re familiar with the various strains of the Star Wars multiverse narrative, you may find this game rewarding, as it complicates them significantly.

One of the reasons that I avoided the Clone Wars movie was that I didn’t care for the chunky-style CGI. I thought it inelegant and inexpressive. But now, after playing this game for a while, I’ve developed a two-tier appreciation for the animation design. It is, first of all, very savvy: presumably, the animators elected this relatively low-detail style because it “ports” well across media: the characters don’t look appreciably different in the game than they do in the show or the movie. Beyond that, though, I began to appreciate the character design in its own right. The lines are clean and, while they permit relatively lesser degrees of expression in the characters, it’s sufficient for the actions and storylines of the game. And it’s a highly unified “look” that the game has – all graphic elements are pleasingly of a piece.

But there’s a significant problem with the graphics. The backgrounds, which are also chunky-style, do not effectively convey depth, angle, and perspective. Many of the spaces that the characters traverse are too obliquely angled, too dark and shadowy, and too featureless – especially on a small PSP screen – to be comprehensible. My characters were constantly running into walls or trying to turn corners that were not actually there. I take this to be a pretty major design flaw.

Gameplay was, for the most part, enjoyable, even as there’s really only ever one way of solving a given task. (I was playing on “Easy” mode; not sure how much difference this makes.) The tasks are reasonably well designed to encourage your characters to develop skills that they’ll deploy more richly in later stages. But Yoda did get pretty pesky, popping up at all-too-regular intervals in order to deliver sage advice in that stilted way he has.

But there’s a major problem with gameplay, too: after several hours of playing, in which I met with no insurmountable and fairly few genuinely difficult obstacles (though the safe-cracking thing is annoying), I was thrown into battle with what was, as far as I can tell, an unbeatable enemy. I’m sure that this boss (can’t recall his name; for some reason I want to say that it’s not unlike that of Eliza Dushku) is beatable, but I’ll be damned if I know how. This big metal dude flew around, lashing me and the octopus-head guy with some sort of laser-whip; he never flew close enough for us, as ground-bound Jedi, to even get in a single lick. In perhaps an hour of trying to defeat this guy, I never landed a single blow, and I tried every damn Jedi trick in the Jedi book. Not only does something like this take the fun out of the game, but it seems to me to, once again, represent a major design flaw: if you face only creampuffs for the first several stages of the game, you won’t be able to take out the big baddie. I’m not the world’s best gamer (even though I have an ironic mesh cap that says as much); you may have an easier time with Eliza than I did. But this was enough to encourage me to put down the game for good.