So, it’s the punniest day of the year and time to wish everyone a merry Star Wars day. May the fourth be with you!
I haven’t played many Star Wars games since Jedi Academy back in the 90’s so I’ve been rather missing my fix, when Fallen Order came out I heard of the concept and had to play it. What’s not to love, Dark Souls-esque game play in a star wars universe with various force powers and settings across the galaxy (far, far away…). My personal love of Star Wars comes from the lore, back stories and expanded universe as opposed to the laser swords and space wizards so if you’re into the same sort of thing as me you will really get on with Fallen Order!
Glossary
Platform and Languages – 8/10
Star Wars Fallen Order is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One for anywhere between £16 and £40 depending on sales but it is also currently available on Xbox One Game Pass.
Language can be set through the settings menu in game and you can also add or remove the subtitles as well as editing their size and brightness. This is a rare feature but is really useful if you want to ensure you can clearly read the dialogue.
Usability – 9/10
As you play games in another language there are many ways that the language can be presented to you and each one is particularly effective at practicing certain skills. For instance, text boxes are slower and easier to follow when practicing your reading, clear UI allows for passive intake of language while you play and recorded audio helps build your listening and conversational skills. As a standard games usually have a handful of these but Star Wars Fallen Order gets a near perfect score for having almost all of them. To list off a few, you have a sharp UI with easily legible tabs, a packed options menu, a skill tree with descriptions of the effects (and video to help if you don’t understand), screen alerts and prompts for new discoveries, chatty dialogue between Kal and BD-1, angry dialogue between Kal and soon to be dead storm troopers, fully voiced cutscenes with or without subtitles, character logs, enemy logs and story records, lightsaber customization options with further descriptions… the language is everywhere.
This is a game where you truly can set how much or how little you want to follow the language, and to add to this, the balance is such that you are incentivized to play in a natural way. I would say that at no point is the dialogue intrusive. Quips that would typically be annoying in other games are light and jovial enough that you can catch them, acknowledge them and get on with the mission at hand. Pop ups give you a brief overview of the items you’ve scanned and invite you to read through them at every opportunity. More often than not I found it was too tempting not to try reading about the strange, new monster I’d just killed even if I was mid battle. I can only imagine what the enemies must of thought of some Jedi stood there reading his holotapes in the middle of a fight.
Throughout each chapter the vocab becomes more focused to the current goal and the races that are involved in the conflict. This helps when you come to the points where back tracking to previously visited planets is necessary as you can essentially turn Star Wars into a new and reinvented SRS system. Going back and collecting all logs and echoes from an area really does feel satisfying as it not only hits the completionist craving but each and every item you find comes with a more and more vocab. Another benefit to this method is that it paces you and prevents having 30 or so blocks of text to slog through! I have only one gripe with reading through this game and it’s that sometimes the font style and size in the logs can be a little hard to read, especially if you haven’t met the kanji before, but I think this can be forgiven for the quantity and quality we’re getting.
Lastly I feel that the voice acting and subtitling of this game makes it significantly easier to follow than many titles out there, even with so many katakana vocabulary from the hundreds of planets and races. Each character has a personality that clearly shows through and adds context to the events of the story. This game would not have been done justice if it had been textbox dialogue alone as this truly does feel like a fleshed out world that you can get sucked into. This gets top marks for immersive quality!
Challenges and Methods – 7/10
Collect and read all the logs
This is less of a recommended challenge but is a method I’ve been using while I’ve played and prepared this review. I truly believe that the best games for studying are ones where you don’t have to amend the way you play and you can do side quests and collectables as you wish. In Fallen Order I can hunt for collectables as I typically would and get knee deep in the story.
Trying to read through each log comes with its own unique vocabulary, I would encourage trying to read them all out loud, or at the very least, the starting excerpt that has clearer font. By reading them out loud you can ensure that you need to confirm the readings. You’ll also find that for groups of creatures or characters such as the storm troopers you will revise and refresh certain words again and again making learning them easier over time.
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