*****SPOILER WARNING******
This is an addendum to my review of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to discuss the flawed story. The following critique gives away most, or possibly all, of the major plot points in the game and should not be read by anyone unless they have played the game already or simply don’t care about the story.
FLAWED FROM THE START
Often it seems games don’t like to explain the why of things. Perhaps it is believed that a minute of exposition will be too much for players eager to dive into battle. In Unleashed, a boy comes at Vadar with a light saber in an attempt to defend his soon-to-be-murdered father. Vadar lives, of course, and the game shoots forward a few years, at which time the boy, now known as Starkiller, is Vadar’s devoted apprentice.
How did Vadar win him over? He wasn’t a baby who could just forget that Vadar killed his father, yet there is no explanation as to how he wound up being completely, fanatically devoted to his father’s killer.
DARK TO LIGHT IN 10 SECONDS FLAT
The grown Starkiller not only serves Vadar without question, but seems to have absorbed his moral code. He is without an ounce of pity or empathy, a cold-blooded, ruthless killer. Then Darth Vadar kills him, brings him back to life and sends him on a mission to fire up the resistance and destroy the emperor.
At this point, Starkiller starts acting concerned about other people, starts being nice to his pilot Juno and seems to desire to do some good in the world. Why? Sure, he has some understandable hostility towards Vadar, but that in itself would not completely change his personality. So what does? It is not a gradual transformation, he is just suddenly nicer.
A lot can be done with a character when the course of his life is altered by a traumatic event. We could have seen Starkiller’s transformation as a series of small steps in which he gradually realized the error of giving in to the Dark Side. Alternately Starkiller’s motives could have come across as ambiguous: is he really becoming nicer or is this a cynical pretence? But these possibilities are ignored in the script. Starkiller believes he is really going to topple the empire and help people and he seems eager to do so. And there’s no good reason shown for him to feel that way.
ROMANCE
One knows from the first time Starkiller meets Juno that they will eventually kiss. They’re attractive people who seem antagonistic towards one another; a classic Hollywood-movie pairing. The writers know the audience will expect a romance, so they don’t bother doing anything to justify that eventual kiss. Starkiller and Juno snipe at one another, then he does something nice for her and stops acting like a sociopath, and eventually they’re making out. If only it were that easy in real life.
GOTCHA!
Eventually it turns out Vadar wasn’t interested in helping the resistance to kill the emperor after all. He simply fooled Starkiller into believing that.
Why?
Starkiller was Vadar’s devoted servant; if he’d been told to pretend to help the rebels he would have been happy to do so. What made it necessary that he really believe in the hoax?
And why kill then revive him? It wasn’t like the resistance knew Vadar had almost killed him, in which case the excuse would have been that this gave Starkiller some legitimacy. And surely it wasn’t the only, or even the best, way to convince Starkiller that Vadar was serious.
Learning Vadar’s real plan is the game’s big “twist,” but nothing leading up to it makes any sense at all. And if you have seen as many movies as I have, you woun’t even be surprised.
KILL ME: THAT’LL TEACH YOU
Eventually Starkiller has the emperor on the ground, but he doesn’t beg for mercy. Instead the emperor follows the strange tradition of super villains who encourage their mortal enemies to kill them. I don’t know how that would work out for the bad guy, since they would wind up dead, but heroes generally lay down their weapon at this point in the story anyway.
We are meant to feel Starkiller is rising above the Dark Side when he refuses to kill the emperor, but it is an utterly moronic thing to do. The emperor is dangerous, and it is obvious that if left alive he will wind up escaping to wreak more havoc and probably do something really bad with that Death Star of his like, say, vaporize a planet.
Yes, for the sake of Star Wars Episode III you can’t kill off the emperor, but that doesn’t change the fact that in terms of Unleashed’s story, Starkiller did something really stupid. As for the morality of his decision, well, he just killed a bunch of underlings to get to the emperor. Are we to believe that it is somehow more immoral to kill an evil despot responsible for the deaths of millions of people than a whole bunch of guys doing their stint in the military?
IN CONCLUSION
In Unleashed, there is no character development and the story is a mess. The storytelling is quite poor, so I was shocked when I saw reviews acclaiming Unleashed for its story. Unfortunately, it is common for video game reviewers to rave over scripts that would fail a Writing 101 course. Samuel Johnson once said that if you see a dog walking on its hind legs, even though it is not done well, it is a surprise to see it done at all. Video game critics seem to have a similar attitude; they are so startled to see a game attempt a story that all they can do is applaud the effort as though it were a success.
The enthusiasm for Unleashed’s narrative in the gaming press is a perfect example of why so few game developers put in the time to craft really effective stories; because hardly anyone asks them to.
