Review: Jedi Apprentice

If you are reading this on the Escapist (and you probably are, since at the moment only two people are following my blog. [and one of them is me.]), then you might remember my earlier review of Darth Bane (but probably not, for reasons I will get to in a moment.) If so, you would know that I am reading through every Star Wars novel in chronological order and reviewing them, because I am just that much of a pathetic excuse for a manchild.

If, against all odds, you do remember my Darth Bane review, then you may be wondering "what is taking this guy so long?" Well, my friends, the Jedi Apprentice series is twenty books long.

Sure, they are "Young Adult" novels and not very long individually (the series having started a year before Harry Potter came along and proved that the average middle school student actually does have an attention span longer than that of Fred Figglehorn.), but still, there are twenty of them. That adds up.

Anyway, Jedi Apprentice was conceived as a tie-in to The Phantom Menace, and book one was published roughly simultaneously with that film. Book one takes place several years before the film.

The series begins with a pubescent Obi-Wan (The main character is the same age as the target demographic! This is a new and innovative marketing ploy that has never been seen before! Boy, those folks at Scholastic sure are clever!) at the Jedi Temple trying to win the approval of Qui-Gon Jinn so he can become his Padawan (which is another word for apprentices in Star Wars for some reason.) The first couple of books get off to a bumpy start. Dave Wolverton's prose does not have much energy to it, and the fight scenes are just disorienting. The first book just raises lots of questions that will not be answered until later--not questions of the "What an intruiging mystery!" sort either, but rather of the bad "What are these people talking about? Who is that? Why did that just happen?" sort.

Fortunately another author, Jude Watson, picks up the series starting with book two, and carries it from thereon out. Watson answers all the questions Wolverton left dangling, then proceeds to make me ask a few more:

"Why have I never heard of these books before?" "Why were they not bestsellers?" "Why were they never nominated for a Newberry Medal?"

Sadly, I still have no answers to these questions.

The series follows what the good folks at TVtropes would call the "AdventureTown" format: At the start of a book, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are given a mission by the Jedi Council to go solve some problem on some planet. They go there, and either by the end of the book or by the end of the next one, they have solved the problem. On the way, character development happens, and lots of it.

The most commonly levied complaint against The Phantom Menace is that it has poorly-developed characters with little personality. I agree with that. That is why this series so surprised me.

In the movie, Qui-Gon was an emotionally dead piece of wood with no background or motivation besides "Dur, hur, I'm a Jedi." In the books, Qui-Gon is a legendary warrior who covers up his sorrow at his own past failures and his stress at suddenly becoming a father-figure to a boy he hardly knows with a mask of serenity. In the movie, teenage Obi-Wan is a winy waste of screentime who does nothing but complain and then kill one guy at the very end. In the books, teenaged Obi-Wan is an idealistic young person caught between boyhood and manhood, struggling to find his own identity and an understanding of the Jedi way.

Over the course of their adventures, the Hyphenated Duo have to not only work out the problems of the planets they visit but also of themselves, and have to learn to trust one another in spite of their own flaws.

Oh, and what adventures! Whereas the problem they have to solve in The Phantom Menace is simply evil robots trying to take over a planet for underexplained reasons, Jedi Apprentice deals with much more complex and darker issues, especially considering it is a kids' series. The worlds of the decadent Republic are torn by civil wars, racism, gang violence, corporate corruption, and interclass strife.

In spite of this, the series keeps a consistantly optimistic tone. Our heroes always meet good people on their missions, and always leave a planet at least a little better off than it was when they arrived. There seem to be no issues that cannot be tackled with the Jedi virtues of, as the back covers declare, "peace, honor, and strength."

Oh, and there is a really great villian named Xanatos. I will not talk about him here, since I already wrote an essay on what makes him such an excellent antagonist.

Basically, if you like Star Wars, read it. If you have no feelings about Star Wars, read it anyway!

Oh, and in case anyone asks: I will not be reviewing the two Old Republic novels that came out this year. One reason is that I am trying to enjoy Star Wars history in chronological order, and reading them would be backtracking. The other reason is that I doubt they will have much impact on the rest of the Expanded Universe beyond the computer game that they are tie-ins to. (I expect that computer game to crash and burn faster than a Star Destroyer in the Kothol Rift. That's an issue for another time, though.)

Delays

It took longer than I expected to acquire the rest of the Jedi Apprentice novels, and I have also been busy with more important things. As such, I am running a bit late on my next novel review.

Review: Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995)

Dark Forces is a first-person shooting game by (who else?) Lucas Arts, based on the Star Wars film franchise.

You play as Stormtrooper-turned-mercenary Kyle Katarn. The game opens shortly before the original movie, with Kyle having been hired by the Rebel Alliance to steal the schematics for the Death Star. While this mission is not a tutorial (Thank the Maker), it is much easier than the rest of the game and serves to gradually introduce you to the game's mechanics. Those mechanics are pretty standard shooter stuff: run around, look for ammo' and medicine, and shoot everything that moves.

After that first mission, the game skips ahead to after the first film and starts up its own stand-alone plot. The Imperial General Moch has completed the construction of the first wave of Dark Troopers, robotic super-soldiers that are capable of smashing a rebel base in just a few minutes.

Your job is to track down the facility that produces the Dark Troopers and destroy it. This story unfolds over the course of fourteen decently-sized missions. The plot is simple, but is well told. It contains some fanservice for Star Wars fans (such as a boss fight against everyone's favorite bounty hunter) but stands on its own and can still be followed even by people who have never seen the movies. Like most shooter-game heroes, Kyle is a man of few words, but he still manages to have a lot of personality and be a memorable protagonist.

The combat in this game is frentic and exiting. Your enemies are pretty ruthless, and the game is quite challenging. Unfortunately, it is even challenging on Easy mode. If I could, I would have renamed "Easy" mode as "Less Hard" mode. This is a game that only those who can already blast their way through a shooter should try. That said, I am always up to a challenge, and it is good to see a game that actually requires skill and strategy to conquer. Part of that skill comes from mastering the very different play-styles required with the game's ten (counting your fist) weapons, all of which are useful throughout the campaign and several of which have alternate fire modes for even more variety.

Sadly, one part of the challenge comes from the controls. While the game does support a mouse, actually using a mouse to play is pretty awkward, and mouse support was clearly just an afterthought. The game can be played entirely with a keyboard, which is what I ended up doing. This works well for the most part, but you need to use the Page Up and Page Down keys to pan the camera vertically. This means you have to take a hand off the directional keys (which are used for walking) and reach waaaaay over there to aim at enemies above or below you, leaving you open to their fire. Turning horizontally takes far too long, and several times I found myself being killed by a weak goon with a $1.00 pistol because he was behind me and I could not turn to face him in time. The game seems optimized for use with a joystick, but honestly, who owns a joystick in this day and age?

This was also the first fist-person game where you could jump. That sounds good, right? Wrong. The developers were apparently so pleased with this innovation that they designed most of the levels in such a way that you have to constantly jump from platform to tiny, slippery platform. You cannot see your feet, you cannot try to make an especially long jump or a purposefully short jump, and you have no sense of bodily balance, so everything that would make such acrobatic stunts possible in real life is absent. I spent way more time than necessary just hopping around in rooms full of dead enemies, trying to get out through a door built into the wall fifteen feet above my head. On every mission.

I think it is worth mentioning that you cannot save in the middle of a mission. Instead, you start out each mission with three lives. (You can acquire more from power-ups you find as you go.) If you "die," you are booted back to your last checkpoint. When you loose all your lives, you have to start the mission from the beginning. This is actually less frustrating as it sounds, as the checkpoints are frequent and extra lives are not too hard to come by.

Other than the platforming sections, the levels were varied, good-looking, and inventive. To complete his quest Kyle must traverse a gang-infested city, Imperial strongholds, claustrophobia-inducing mines, noisy factories, and frigid tundra. My favorite level took place on Jabba the Hutt's luxury starship, where you are taken captive and forced to fight a dinosaur-like monster--with your bare hands. The final level, infested with Dark Troopers, is also thrilling and ends with a very intense boss battle.

All the levels are stuffed to the brim with alternate routes, shortcuts, and secret areas. This lends Dark Forces a lot of replay value, as you can play through a level several times and always find something new. The fact that the different difficulty settings actually change what enemies and power-ups appear also helps.

I feel that I should mention the music. Most of the time, I do not pay attention or comment on a video game's soundtrack, but Dark Forces has some seriously good tunes. There are a few original compositions, but most of it is adapted from John William's soundtrack from the movies and heavily reinforces the adventurous Star Wars-ish tone of the game. As soon as the opening narration starts rolling along to a 16-bit rearrangement of the original Star Wars fanfare, you know you are in for a great retro experience.

By the way, Dark Forces is also playable on the Playstation. I have not tried it, but a quick Youtube search tells me that the two versions are nearly identical. The Playstation version has slightly longer loading times and slightly inferior graphics.

I had fun with Dark Forces, but the stiff controls and high difficulty setting will turn off younger gamers. If you really love Star Wars, then give this game a try. It perfectly captures the look and feel of the Original Trilogy and introduces one of the Star Wars Expanded Universe's coolest characters.

Update

The rest of the Jedi Apprentice books are in the mail, and I will have them by the end of the week. I will, therefore, likely have finished them and gotten ready to review them within the first half of October. See you then!

ALL HAIL XANATOS!

Unless you happen to be Roger Ebert, you probably found Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace to be at least a little bit disappointing.

However, it was still a Star Wars film, and that means merchandising, merchandising, merchandising! A veritable hurricane of video games, trading cards, toys, books, and almost humorously beautiful dresses flooded the market. Most of that stuff has now been forgotten (I challenge you to find one person who has actually played "The Gungan Frontier.") but there were a few diamonds in that ruff.

Most notable among them are the "Jedi Apprentice" books by Dave Wolverton and Jude Watson. I will properly review them when I have finished reading them. That will be a while, since there are twenty volumes and I have to buy them over mail-order. In the meantime, I want to talk to y'all about a funny little man named Xanatos Omega.

Xanatos first appeared in Jedi Apprentice #2: The Dark Rival in 1998 and was instantly awesome. In a bad way. Which is good because he is bad. Are you still following me?

Xanatos is, simply, the perfect villain.

Everywhere you look in the Star Wars universe, you will see a contradiction: the Jedi Knights are supposed to be keepers of the peace, and are to avoid violence whenever necessary, yet they are the heroes of a franchise with the word "Wars" in the title, and end up killing somebody in almost every movie, book, and video game they appear in.

This contradiction was clearly on Jude Watson's mind when she conceived of Xanatos, the primary antagonist of Jedi Apprentice.

Thus, Xanatos had to be a proactive villain. If he would just stop causing trouble, our heroes Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan could leave him be and continue their work as diplomats peacefully. However, Xanatos will never leave them alone. Jedi are supposed to be negotiators, but Xanatos is driven by straightforward hatred that can only be sated by violence. He can't be negotiated with. Thus, when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan clash with him, it doesn't create the same kind of dissonance that you find when Luke Skywalker cheers happily shooting down human soldiers. They are fighting Xanatos only because it is absolutely necessary.

Xanatos was born to be prince of the planet Telos. However, he was adopted into the Jedi Order as a child, and grew up to be Qui-Gon's apprentice. When he next met his father, years later, he and Qui-Gon found the King of Telos to be an evil man, a dictator whose despotic rule had led to an armed rebellion against him. Qui-Gon was forced to kill him, but Xanatos still identified the man as a father-figure. So, Xanatos swore revenge against Qui-Gon and left the Jedi Order, becoming a Dark Jedi. His reasons for fighting Qui-Gon are entirely personal. Qui-Gon cannot make peace with his enemy, because his enemy will never make peace with him.

Another thing that makes Xanatos a good villain is that he rarely engages the Jedi in a straightforward fight. He could, and maybe even wants to, but he cannot because he would simply lose. When he briefly skirmishes with Obi-Wan in The Dark Apprentice, Obi notices that he is "out of practice" when it comes to lightsaber dueling (which makes sense, since he's been away from any Jedi for years.) Instead, Xanatos follows his own motto of "Disruption+Demoralization+Distraction=Devastation." He causes trouble wherever he can, but he always avoids a proper fight to the death. Thus, the Jedi have to outsmart him rather than overpower him, making for some very interesting plots.

Also, since his turn to the Dark Side was a result of something that Qui-Gon did, and since it was Qui-Gon who raised the kid in the first place, Qui-Gon's psyche has been heavily effected by Xanatos's mere existence as a villain. Qui-Gon's own perceived failure colors the way he views himself and the way he treats Obi-Wan. Xanatos promotes character development and emotional complexity for one of the franchise's most underutilized characters just by being there.

What really makes Xanatos a great villain, though, is what he represents. Xanatos is corruption. Once, he was a Jedi, a symbol of peace and order, but now he is a disciple of the Dark Side. He runs the Offword Corporation, a mining company that poisons the natural environments of every planet it operates on, even to the point of turning the "sacred pools" of water on Telos into acidic pits of death. He infiltrates the Jedi Temple, the galaxy's most holy haven of goodness and truth, and messes with its security, plumbing, and elevator systems towards his own ends. He lures Bruk, a Jedi child not even old enough to be a padawan, to the Dark Side.

When Qui-Gon returns to Telos with Obi-Wan in order to confront Xanatos, he finds that the Dark Jedi has twisted Telosian culture itself into a corrupt mockery. Simply by investing money in the right places and being a good public speaker, Xanatos has turned a race of people known for their love of beauty and tranquility into decadent consumers, tricking them into funding the ruining of their own sacred grounds through lavish gambling and sports events.

Xanatos is more than a person; he is elemental, a force of evil that turns every good thing he touches into a perverse and evil mirror of itself. Xanatos defines everything that the Dark Side represents. That is what makes him one of the greatest villains I have ever read about.

A Caveat:

I do in fact plan to post my thoughts on some things that are not Star Wars here, just because there is only so much one can say about a fictional place. My next post will be Star Wars-related though; there is a character I want to talk about.

Review:The Darth Bane Trilogy

The first chunk of our centuries-years-long intergalactic saga is the Darth Bane trilogy by Drew Karpyshyn. Set about a thousand years before the movies and about two-thousand years after the popular video game Knights of the Old Republic (much of which was also written by Mister Karpyshyn), the three books chronicle the life of Dessel, also known as Darth Bane, Dark Lord of the Sith.

As book one, Path of Destruction opens, Dessel is in his late teens and working as an indentured laborer in a mine. You would think with all their technology, the Republic could automate their industry a little rather than rely on what basically amounts to slave labor (seriously, they have "protocol droids" and "battle droids" but no mining droids?) but whatever.

Within the first ten pages, Dessel has already bitten off some guy's thumb, indicating three things:
1. that this series is much darker than your usual Star Wars fare,
2. that Dessel does not let anyone push him around, and
3. that this is going to be awesome.

Then it happens....pazaak.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, pazaak first appeared as a tedious minigame you have to play in Knights of the Old Republic. It's a lot like blackjack except not as good and...uh....in space...?

This chapter is as tedious as the game itself was in KotOR, and you are forgiven if you just sort of skim over it. Anyway, through a weird sequence of events, the game ends up resulting in Dessel heading off to join the Sith army as a foot soldier to fight against the Republic. After a few displays of badassery on the front lines, the Sith notice that Dessel is Force-sensitive and haul him off to train at their academy, where he adopts the name Bane.

I know I've sounded critical so far, but other than the damn pazaak game, Dessel's rise from an enslaved miner to a badass Sith lord is engrossing and just plain awesome. It should be noted that even though this takes place in an academy for Force-users, Path of Destruction is hardly another Young Jedi Knights. This is an academy of Sith, which means both the students and teachers are all evil. There's plenty of interesting characters to be found here, and watching them plot convoluted schemes against each other is just plain entertaining.

Bane quickly becomes the most prodigal student at the academy and a suitable rival to any of the Sith lords. At this point, Bane has the potential to become a dreadful, irredeemable Mary-Sue, but Mister Karpyshyn is a skilled enough writer to keep that from happening: whether tearing down buildings with his mind or killing all his rivals so he can be the one-and-only Dark Lord of the Sith, you always have the feeling that Bane earned it.

That's not to say he or the side-kick he gets in book two are sympathetic characters. Darth Bane is as utterly evil as his name implies, and while the reasons he commits the monstrosities he does are well explained, the reader is never asked to agree with him. Bane kills all innocents and supposed allies who get in his way, and his end goal is nothing short of galactic domination. His apprentice Zannah is just as bad, but as her villainy tends to be more insidious and, well, shocking, so I won't spoil it for you.

This will be the deciding factor for many Star Wars fans on whether to read this series: do you mind that the "hero" is a child-murdering bastard? If having a protagonist whose moral compass is far removed from that of normal folks' bothers you, then you'd best resist the lure of the Dark Side and stay away from this series.

However if you don't mind, then give Darth Bane a shot. Since the books are set in a time period that is pretty much untouched by other Star Wars writers, Mister Karpyshyn was free from many of the continuity and setting constraints that sometimes hold back other expanded universe novels, and here he vividly paints an intriguing new cast of characters and a detailed era of galactic history that has not been much explored.

DISMEMBERMENT: Check

BIG NOOOOOOO: Check

A BAD FEELING: Check

The Saga Begins

A long time ago in front of a laptop far, far away....

If you have come this far, odds are good you are a Star Wars fan. Whenever there is a discussion about Star Wars these days, one subject always comes up and swallows up any hope of reasoned conversation, so I will try to put it aside first:

I was born in the 90's, and I enjoyed the prequel trilogy.

....

There, I said it.

In my own defense, hardcore and/or elderly fans, I did see the original trilogy first, on VHS. It was not the, er-hem, "special" editions either: Han shot first and the Ewoks used only acoustic instruments. Like the early-comers, I was already a fan before I saw The Phantom Menace. However, I did not have twenty years to mull over the original trilogy, conclude that it was insurpassable, and then be disappointed at the prequels. The Phantom Menace came out almost immediately after I watched Return of the Jedi for the first time, so it just seemed like a natural continuation. Plus, I was a child and therefore had no taste.

Okay, now that Most Momentous of Issues has been addressed, let me explain the purpose of this blog.

About a year ago, I happened upon a used copy of the PC game Jedi Academy. I played the single-player campaign and found it to be comprised of bullshit and finely-ground meh, but thoroughly enjoyed the multiplayer mode--and I still am.

I got involved with a roleplaying clan whose "campaign" was set two-hundred years after the films. It was fun, but the other members kept making references to things which had occurred in the Expanded Universe during the interim. I was lost.

I decided, then, to read the Star Wars novels. At this point, I was only dimly aware that there was a book franchise based on Star Wars, and I expected to make quick work of this task.

Ugh.

When I looked up a list of all the books online, I felt overwhelmed. Where to start?

I am a patient man, and I expect to finish reading all the books. However, I had no idea what to read first.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the very first Expanded Universe novel, published in 1978 and set a year after the original blockbuster. However, I was unable to find it within my county's library system, and was not yet certain enough that I wanted to read the books to track down a copy I would have to play for.

Internet forums informed me that THRAWN would be a good place to start reading, and low my local library had both books in a two-part series called The Hand of Thrawn.

Of course, those forum-goers were referring to the "Thrawn Trilogy," an entirely different series that just happened to be written by the same author and involved a character named Grand Admiral Thrawn.

I ignorantly dove into The Hand of Thrawn and found myself even more lost than before..

Sigh.

Well, I decided one foolproof way to keep things organized would be to simply read all the books in chronological order in terms of the fictional galaxy's own timeline.

A Star Wars saga told IN ORDER!? Unheard of! But that now is my project. Starting with Darth Bane and ending with Fate of the Jedi (or whatever books may be written after it in the future), I am experiencing the history of the galaxy in the way its inhabitants would: from beginning to end.

I am not going to be reading the comic books, simply because I do not like comic books, nor will I be playing every video game, due to the fact that most video games are very light on plot and of little consequence to the greater Expanded Universe.

As I go through the novels, this galactic travelog will be where I express my thoughts, feelings and opinions about the strange goings on in the galaxy far, far away.