Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

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Game Title: Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
Released: November 12, 2009
Game Length: 40 Hours
Grade: B+

Content

Clarifications: Things get a little weird when you are trying to talk about this game. For starters, do not get confused as this is not the newest game Lego Stars: The Skywalker Saga. Also, this video game is a combination of Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (2005) and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006). Although the game itself was released on consoles in 2007, the PC version was not released until 2009. Almost all the content from the previous two games are contained in this one in some form or fashion with a few alterations. The vehicle levels have been modified in the main campaign while the original versions were placed in the bonus section. A couple of things that were cut from the original games are now included. There are also 20 new bounty missions.

Time to Play: There is one more thing they decided to add to this version of Lego Star Wars that I must discuss - challenge mode. If a person is advancing through the main campaign with the characters that are available in those instances, it would take approximately the same amount of time it would to watch all 6 movies - 13 hours. This will get you up between 50 and 60 percent completion with less than half of all 160 gold bricks. The "second playthrough" consists of you cycling through all available characters and completing puzzles in each of the levels to obtain power bricks that change certain behaviors in the game. As one might deduce, this would bring your played time to 26 hours with about 75% completion rate (percentage is based on whether or not you bought things from the shop) and 120 gold bricks. But there's more! You now have to play a third time collecting 10 blue canisters within 10 minutes in every level and a fourth time completing an entire movie setting within one hour or collecting 100,000 studs. As one can tell, playing through the game 4 times (144 levels) can get exhausting.

Developers: From the initial splash screen, you'll see that the game was developed by Tt Games. Do not get them confused with Telltale Games. Traveller's Tales has a lot of games under their belt, now including all the Lego games since they merged with Giant Interactive in 2005. So if you find something unusual, like a weird grape icon with googly eyes laying around, know that it might be a reference to one of their previous games.

Minifigure Secrets

Characters: The main highlight of Lego games is the ability to unlock features in order to collect more things. There are a total of 160 playable characters. The first batch of characters contained in the first few rows will be unlocked as you gradually complete the main campaign. Pretty much every other character will be made available to buy depending on where you are in the story. Indiana Jones becomes playable after you watch the trailer in the bonus section. The last two spots are dedicated to customizing your own character. There is a huge list of possibilities (over 2 billion replicated from the second game) when creating your own character. Including the possibility of recreating Asajj Ventress and Saesee Tiin after 100% completion, you can create a number of characters seen from the Star Wars universe. 16 characters can be played on specific levels with the Extra Toggle ability turned on, including a hopping brick of Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

Abilities: A big portion of the game requires puzzles to be solved with a certain ability from any number of characters. Doors must be opened with a protocol droid, astromech droid, bounty hunter (or one wearing a disguise helmet), and stormtrooper/Loyal to the Empire (or one wearing a stormtrooper helmet whether or not it actually fits over their face in the case of Chewbacca). Things can be moved from a distance with a Force or Dark Force user. Certain areas must be reached by a smaller individual crawling through a hatch, those who can fly across gaps, or someone who can jump good. Silver things must be destroyed by a bounty hunter's detonator. Every now and then, you will need someone with access to a grappling hook or a blaster to advance.

Fun Abilities: Now let's talk about the characters who have abilities outside the scope of solving puzzles. There is a lot of them, and it is entirely possible to overlook them when there's so many characters to choose from.

  • Darth Vader chokes people, impatiently taps his foot when idling, and shows off a red glow when his lightsaber is out.
  • Luke Skywalker will choke a Gamorrean Guard.
  • Count Dooku can use force lightning.
  • The Emperor will spin his entire body forward when using his lightsaber in a forward thrust, prioritize force lightning on enemies, and cackle occasionally.
  • Princess Leia in a slave outfit will dance.
  • The palace guard will have some trouble pulling out his gun when he swipes down his attire.
  • Gamorrean guards will air guitar their axe.
  • Boba Fett and Jango Fett will launch rockets from their jetpack (with the power brick ability enabled).
  • R2-D2 and other astromechs will extend a device out from their chassis to shock people and extend a scope upward when walking around underwater.
  • Droideka will activate a shield around their body and roll their body across the floor.
  • Han Solo has a quirky smile, fire twice as fast as the other characters, and shoot tree times when jumping forward to fire.
  • Certain droids will be given the ability to self-destruct (with the power brick ability enabled).
  • Lando Calrissian will kiss Princess Leia's hand instead of hitting her.
  • Yoda will move really slow with his walking stick, but hop quicker once his lightsaber is drawn.
  • C3PO will slowly lose limbs when he is hurt until finally hopping around on one foot.
  • Chewbacca will rip people's arms off when in melee range, hold helmets at a slant over his humongous head, and carry around C3PO behind him (when power brick enabled).
  • Captain Tarpals, the Gungan warrior, will strike enemies with his shield first and then thrust his spear.
  • The ewoks will make funny noises and use a slingshot instead of a blaster.
  • A few of the bounty hunters will randomly make their own unique sounds depending on their race.
  • 4-LOM, the bounty hunter that looks like a bee, will spin his body around to attack like a ballerina.
  • The Imperial guard will drop an entirely black head upon death (since that is exactly how the minifigure is really built).
  • Certain leader types will elicit salutes from other characters.
  • Enemies will actively avoid attacking certain kinds of droids.

Does that cover everything? There are still a few things that I heard about but haven't tried like Jawas being able to freeze droids or the droid leaders pulling out a walkie-talkie. At some point, I just stopped seeking some of these more obscure features.

Level Design

Funny Moments: When you are playing a Lego game, there will always be some funny scenes to explore. The first three Episodes won't have many of these moments since technically it was the first of its kind. I felt the developers went above and beyond with the moments in A New Hope while extending the levels to greater lengths in the final two films. A lot are spelled out in achievements, like how you can sell your landspeeder to a Jawa, setting off three separate disco rooms (and the one in the cantina hub), and the chance of wearing different kinds of hats. I personally remember turning off the music will cause the Cantina Band to stop playing from all those years ago. Sometimes you will find characters loafing around. At one point, you can enter a theater playing a short clip of the video game. There's a moment while on the Death Star where you come across a couple of stormtroopers washing a window. Building a speaker while at Jabba's Palace will causing the Gamorrean guards to be temporarily distracted while jamming-out on their axes.

Attention to Detail: What the game does great with is properly extending the settings contained in the movie. You will explore more sections of the jungle, the locations out on Tatooine, inside fortresses, and the insides of a sandcrawler! The Clone Facility has to be my favorite level out of them all. Not only this, but the lego sets are also accurately presented, like how the gungan sub has that goofy-looking blue anvil in the front. There is a section where you use the moisture vaporators to pull water out of the quicksand. They added actual light beams to the ship docked at the Cloning Facility. I personally adore how precise and condensed the narration is before each chapter (even though you are given the option to skip it if you want). The Cloud City Trap, for example, beautifully adds that Luke was training for a few weeks, there was a vision, and Vader purposely made a trap for him. I love how they have all the original music and sound effects accurately reproduced for all the different ships and devices. They even thought to add little minifigs for the holographic star destroyer and tie interceptor, like how they are subtly mentioned in the movie.

Missing Pieces: Though, not everything is perfect. As much as I love the option to ride the black spider perimeter droid around, the figure isn't exactly as the one seen from the original Jabba's Palace set. Many of the more popular scenes had to be cut - traveling through the planet core or meeting the creature in the trash compactor. I'm not sure about that Wilhelm scream while crashing your vehicle during the Episode III flight sequence. Some awful backdrops are entirely noticeable, especially the Geonosians in the arena level. One thing that people will find missing, but also charming, is the fact that there is no dialogue in the whole game. So that one famous scene with Darth Vader is actually just him pointing to a photograph.

Power Bricks: The game does this thing where you decide if you want to play fair after completing a level. You have the option to enter cheat codes or turn on power bricks at any time inside or out of a level when things get tough. These red bricks allow you to do all sorts of things. There are a few cosmetic ones (highlighted in blue) that turn bombs into Death Stars, puts disguises on everybody and every ship, or turns grappling rope into flowers. Most of the perks will trivialize your game by automatically deflecting bullets back to the enemy, making yourself invincible, or building things twice as fast. But a few of these I feel are essential! To make the game less frustrating, infinite torpedoes & Super Jedi Slam are completely valid in your normal playthrough. When you are trying to complete the game, turn on red brick indicator, minikit detector, walkie talkie disable, disarm troopers, stud multipliers, and stud magnet.

Miscellaneous

Bad Parts: Nostalgia and age might play for a lot of people when it comes to playing this game, but there are some considerable problems that crept up in my playthrough. Although they improved the quality of the game for the remastered edition, controls can be a little rough. Speed is a perk like any other and those that don't move like molasses have no other abilities. There are some areas where they give you the option to distract enemies or allow friendly lightsaber users to deflect bullets, but the areas where large waves appear to the point where they are endless can get out of control without turning on some power bricks. Your allies will never defeat opponents. Doing a challenge level will automatically switch your power bricks off without turning them on again when you exit. There was this one section during Episode III where the camera was shaking way too much. As much as the camera angle is meant to hide secret areas, there are levels where it is difficult to see what you are doing. There were way too many puzzles that were confusing - pieces weren't connecting properly, a hidden marker in a random bush, the red dial spinner in Escape from Hoth not activating after pulling the lever 8 times, or jumping into a scary-looking beam.

Other: Having two actual players might have made this game much more enjoyable. There is an exclusive new Arcade. You will compete against each other if you are both playing upon reaching Episode III with Obiwan and Anakin fighting. Obtaining all 160 gold bricks will grant you a bunch of new abilities and a gold fountain that shoots out infinite amount of studs. The 20 Bounty Missions are a little too simple with their hide-and-seek premise that essentially copies those segments of a level that require a bounty hunter to find hidden objects. Seeing how a couple of these took me a total of 10 seconds to complete, it would have been better to have them available from the start instead of after collecting all the bounty hunters.

Summary

Review: While revisiting this game might not be as glamorous as some more modern renditions, it had a lot going for its time. You have to give this game some props when you consider that nothing like it was ever produced before. Providing you a huge list of characters to choose from, with their own set of unique features and animations, is definitely a huge positive. Allowing you to physically visit each chapter and adapt to characters that wander around the main hub was pretty cool. Then there was the bacta tanks you could customize your own character and seeing your played time displayed over the counter at the bar. Although you really couldn't swap out to any character during a level and it was less than clear finding the right character, your roster was always populated randomly with one of every type of character for solving the puzzles. There was quite a bit of improvement by combining both games, adding a central hub, and remastering the graphics. Although the bonus material could have been better, there was more than enough substance to hold the core part of the game together. For someone who wants to play through the Lego games, this is definitely one of the better options out there.

 

2-23-2023