Fallen Order and The Game That Would Destroy Reality

I finally played Star Wars Fallen Order all the way through to the big reveal ending which isn’t really a reveal, if you think about it (Cough, there’s only one cyborg Sith that everyone knows, cough). There’s not much you can do with a story about a Jedi existing in the time between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy. I mean you can’t do the classic heroic journey about a lowly young Jedi who becomes strong enough to beat Darth Vader and the Emperor, simply because that’s not how all that went down. I guess you could do a Tarantino counter-factual kill-Hitler sort of thing. Does Disney allow for alternate Star Wars universes?

Why did I play a game with no punching in it in the first place? A: I do that sometimes when I like the premise or the execution of a game. 2: Before I realized that my purpose in virtual worlds was to find Punchalla, before I even knew these virtual worlds existed, my first transcendental cinematic experience was Star Wars. I loved it as a kid. I think it was the idea of fighting with a sword made out of pure energy, pure light; A kind of sublime perfection of martial art. The other transcendental experiences I had back then were watching Hong Kong Kung Fu and Samurai films. You can easily build a bio and back story for my IRL character from that.

I’ve also enjoyed some Star Wars games from the wild slash-a-thons of the PC Jedi Knight and Jedi Outcast to the in-depth story of the KOTOR and SWTOR games. It’s a good time all around. But there hasn’t been anything like that in a few years. So, when a game came out about running around as Jedi across a number of planets, I gave it a chance.

In my first playthrough, I couldn’t really get into it. But I tried again more than a year later and realized that I had beaten more than half the game the first time around. Like a lot of story games these days, it just seems too short with too few things to do. You don’t really get to customize your lightsaber fully until you get to one of the last planets. I’m sure there were sequels planned because how can you make anything these days that isn’t part of some grander plan, some “IP universe?”

The combat was okay. Swing your lightsaber and bad guys die. You can even block blaster bolts from near-sighted Stormtroopers. The game has some nice sky boxes and semi-interesting planets. I would have preferred more freaky alien worlds but what can you do? It seems everything in the game and the modern Star Wars films, shows, games, etc., is limited to the few stylistic choices made in the original films. It’s not bad that everything has a visual consistency to it, it just wears on me after a while, like the planets of our solar system and their samey elliptical orbits.

The most interesting and surprising thing I learned in Disney’s Star Wars: Fallen Order is that wookiees like to make giant mud slip-n-slides on their giant trees that they use to get around really quickly. Do I smell a potential theme park tie-in? Surf the Wookiee Life Tree slide and get covered in mud just like the hero of Fallen Order whose name I forget! New at Disney World/Land/City/State—whatever it will be in the future.

You can also jump in Fallen Order but not really far, which always seems like an oversight in these games. One of the few powers that Jedi like Luke, Obi-Wan, and Vader seem to show off in the movies is being able to jump really high or fall from high places without so much as a fractured pelvis. Chasms and jumping from flying cars don’t scare Jedi. It’s lava that’s the Jedi’s true enemy. The Emperor should have filled his tower on the second Death Star with lava pits, then Vader would have balked at betraying him because of the bad memories. 

I’d like to see crazy jumping done well in a Star Wars game. In fact, I’d like to see a lot of things that I’m going to get into below. I’m tired of the same old same old hack-and-slash-light-exploration-game, so I’m going to imagine something I would enjoy. If I can’t enjoy it in real life because no one will make it, maybe I can enjoy it in the unreal virtual space in my head. 

Let’s say that we’re in the far future of the Star Wars galaxy, so we don’t need to worry about treading on, or even reading any lore. Everybody we know is long dead and their kids are forgotten. Second, let’s say that in this future, the Sith have outlawed lightsabers. Let’s go further and say they’ve succeeded in destroying every source of kyber crystals in the galaxy. The Sith still have their lightning and more esoteric powers plus all the throwaway troops they constantly surround themselves with. There are now tons of Sith lords and they constantly wage galactic war with the systems under their command. That’s tons of level bosses to eventually fight. 

Without lightsabers, what remains of the Jedi have gone into exile, again. They really can’t catch a break, can they? But, one of the few remaining masters seeks to stop the madness of the Sith. We get Donnie Yen to do the motion capture for an Ip Man-esque Jedi Master who invents a lightsaber-less force-powered fighting style for his one padawan, you, the player. If you don’t know who Ip Man is, watch one of the many films about this real-life Kung Fu master. The Donnie Yen series of films is probably the best one I’ve seen.

And there we are, a game with Force-powered punches and kicks made with martial arts grace. You get to punch whole platoons of stormtroopers or do a force jump to a force uppercut into the jaw of whatever passes for an AT-AT in this future Star Wars. The punching madness possibilities are endless. The player then ranges the galaxy in their own ship, fighting one Sith after another, but only after punching out their endless flunkies and some monsters. You even learn the nerve clusters on a rancor so that you can hop around on it and paralyze it one limb at a time. 

In the climatic finale, you travel to the Death System-a whole planetary system that’s been built into a proto-Dyson-sphere-seized weapon—a dozen planets linked into an evil-looking cosmic molecule. And this ultimate weapon doesn’t do simple things like destroying a star or even a star system. It sends out a lightspeed wave (which is faster than light in Star Wars) throughout the galaxy that destroys entire genetic lines. There’s nowhere to hide from such a weapon and no one can survive.

Think about running around the surface of such a structure in some kind of Jedi-inspired mecha spacesuit as you punch and kick Sith Lords into deep space. 

Unfortunately, it seems you’re too late, the Grandmaster of the Sith readies the now fully-operational-Death System to fire, targeting your whole troublesome species across the galaxy. But just before the death wave is released, your Ip Man-esque Master finds the weak point of the whole structure, and in a final apocalyptic force blow, shatters it, sacrificing himself in the process.

Chaos spreads through the Death System as it begins to tear itself apart. But because of its size and the planetary distances involved, you have time to track down the Grandmaster and end their menace once and for all. The sky box of this final level is the Death System slowly disintegrating over the course of hours. I’ll leave the confrontation with the Grandmaster to your imagination.

That’s a game I would play again and again, even if it was Dark Souls hard, even if it was NES Punch Out hard. The only problem is that such a game would tear open the very fabric of reality and reveal Punchalla to the world. And I don’t think the world is metaphysically or existentially ready for the eternal combat of Punchalla’s Omnichampions. Their glorious struggles would destroy portions of the visible spectrum and their impossible blows would shatter entire modes of thought, disintegrate whole philosophies. We may never be ready.

And so, this pinnacle of Star Wars games must remain locked within the confines of my troubled imagination, along with other impossible creations, to protect the world, and reality itself. No thanks are necessary. I bear this awesome responsibility because someone must. Someone must always travel that long road to Punchalla, even if they can never actually find it. It is one of the foundational pillars of the panfoamic everythingverse that there are those who always seek the Final Rings of Battle. If the existence of one universe requires the perception by at least one consciousness, the everythingverse requires those who seek what can never be attained, a sort of quantum restlessness, a panfoamic drive and desire for there to be more than the mundane and the ordinary. It is what motivates the tension of creation and destruction at the most fundamental levels of topo-reality. And it is why I must play my part.