Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles - Platforming That Makes Me Feel Like Darth Maul

29/04/24

Star Wars! Whilst it isn’t the biggest franchise in the world any more, I think it’ll always be the one that affected the most people; seriously, I think the amount of people I’ve met who haven’t had a Star Wars phase on my fingers. And the games… oh man, the games! LEGO Star Wars, Battlefront, Knights of the Old Republic… few franchises can claim to have such a good run on the video game front… though, to be fair, much of that acclaim has focussed on the console games. The GBA? Well, whilst I had a good time playing Apprentice of the Force a few years back, the rest of the Star Wars lineup on GBA… Well, Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles does nothing to beat the allegations. Whilst its facade of average combat and repetitive gameplay loop makes it more forgettable than anything else, once you start engaging with the platforming - if you can call it that - mediocrity starts looking like the best this game has to offer.

I think a sad acknowledgement of growing up is learning (usually, but not always) that not everything that makes up your favourite thing isn't always the greatest. Case in point - when I was a kid, Star Wars was my world. The originals, the games - hell, I think The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith might be the movies I’ve seen the most, as I’d rewatch these movies ad infinitum, obsessed with every facet of them. Suffice to say, a few years back I rewatched Phantom Menace and MAN, has that film not aged well in mind… of course, sans the incredible Darth Maul fight. But if anything breaks the illusion of Star Wars perfection for me in a modern setting (I don’t hate the new TV shows, actually), it’s the franchise’s output on the Game Boy Advance; out of eight titles, I’d struggle to call more than two of them anything better than mediocre, but as the atrociously titled Star Wars Episode I Jedi Power Battles showcases, the handheld’s selection of Star Wars was far below any kind of acceptable standard.

Jedi Power Battles is an action-platformer that’ll take your character of choice - Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon Jin, or bizarrely enough, Mace Windu - through ten stages that roughly adapt the entirety of The Phantom Menace. For the most part, these levels follow a pretty standard formula; fight your way through a variety of carbon-copy foes - maybe two different kinds, at best - platform across some death defying heights, and more often than not, take down a boss or battle an encounter against a squad of stronger foes. There’s only a single swerve from this format, making the game feel samey at best and monotonous at worst - and the majority of time, at that. To put it plainly - this is not an innovative, nor ambitious title. It doesn’t need to be, but it could’ve helped it, just a bit.

I don’t really… hate the combat, per say, but I’m more indifferent from just how *nothing* it is. Combat is incredibly basic in Jedi Power Battles, with a few basic attacks, a jump attack, and the ability to deflect laser bolts back at foes. Each of the three Jedi don’t really pay differently in any noticeable way - again, why is Mace Windu playable!? - so really, just pick whoever takes your fancy. Smart people play Qui-Gon, by the way. There’s no real strategy to the combat - most enemies die in a handful of hits, and the majority of them can be cheesed by just spamming jump attacks since they just can’t deal with it. It is a good idea, too - some of them will just spam laser bolts so quickly it can kind of stunlock you, unless you’ve got lightning quick reflexes to block them. Beyond that… that’s it. Combat is so bare bones, with most of the game spent in far more… frustrating domains. I guess there’s a little more to the combat, in the form of the game’s boss encounters.

I’m not gonna lie, the bosses in this game are really, really rough. On one hand, sometimes they barely feel like boss fights at all; one of the Naboo stages ends with bizarrely gigantic Battle Droids that barely put up a fight, but on the other hand, there’s a random fight against a Gungan warrior who can just soak up dozens and dozens of hits, with nothing to indicate any progress in the fight. Outside of the climatic Darth Maul battle, there’s no emphasis or real point given to these boss fights, existing just to be ‘more’ game. Maybe I’m looking too far into shovelware, GBA film tie-ins, but I gotta have some standards, right? Don’t worry, I’ll give ‘ya something to rant about.

By the Force, the ‘platforming’ - a term I use to describe this game under great protest - in this title is nothing short of atrocious. Let’s start with a good ‘ol baseline - no matter which character you’re playing as, no matter how fast you’re moving, pretty much all your momentum is sucked out of you, making the most basic of jumps an ordeal. And considering the amount of ‘little’ jumps over bottomless pits this game will throw at you, ordeal is the tamest way I can describe it. Whilst it’s nice that upon death, you’ll just be dropped back, sans a life, at the start of the screen, but when you burn through your lives in mere minutes because of misaimed jumps born from the game’s atrocious depth of field, does that really help? Sometimes, they’ll throw enemies in the mix, and if you’re unlucky enough to be in the air and a stray laser bolt somehow finds itself embedded in your torso? Well, if you’re halfway through a jump, enjoy death, I suppose.

Do you know what the one thing worse than imprecise platforming borne from depth-of-field issues? That’s right, the mechanic you’d just expect to be in any such game - fall damage! Fall. Damage. And not just fall damage! INCONSISTENT FALL DAMAGE! Sometimes, I’d jump to a platform directly below me, and bang, I’m dead, just like that. Other times, I’d fall two, three, or even four times further, and I’d be perfectly fine. I just… I just don’t understand why it’s in the game. I never found a way to skip areas or anything like that, so… why is it here? Is it just to add another wrinkle of difficulty on an already frustrating title? It’s genuinely one of the most baffling decisions I’ve seen in the near 70 games I’ve reviewed for this website, period.

I’m simply so enraged by the platforming, it taints the rest of the game’s mediocre at best decisions. Let’s talk about something a bit stranger. Since the game is almost totally focussed on the platforming-combat standard, it kind of loses out on utilizing much of Phantom Menace's surprisingly action-free scenes. You don’t have ‘iconic’ moments like the Podracing sequence, the flight from Naboo, the underwater Gungan boat - instead, you get meandering levels taking place in random areas of Naboo, fighting mercenaries for… some undefined reason on Coruscant, and most bizarrely, massacring Tusken Raiders on Tatooine. It’s all just so contrived, creating content for content’s sake, when they really should’ve expanded on the fundamentals of the game and given us a bit more than just titular Jedi Power Battles… sans a random, sub-two minute side scrolling shooter that’s just kind of thrown in the last quarter of the game for no real season. Again, like many decisions involving this game, it’s baffling. Not as much of an atrociously baffling decision as the rest of the game, but yeah. As an aside, the game does have a password system, but the more annoying brand where the passwords are based on your lives AND the level you’re up to, making them a lot harder to remember. And considering how hard this game will stomp on you at times… better get the pen and paper out!

Whilst the game doesn’t look amongst the worst the GBA has to offer, it’s generic enough and p I suppose it looks enough like Phantom Menace? Naboo, Tatooine and Coruscant all look how they should, but you never really see anything beyond ‘the planet’s look’. No landmarks, no real setpieces or anything, outside of *maybe* the final fight with Maul. The music isn’t… particularly good, but it meets the Mitch standards of sounding kind of shite, but it’s butchering iconic tunes in a way that couldn’t help but make me laugh. Seriously, hearing the broken rendition of Duel of the Fates gives me nothing but giggles. I shouldn’t be too cruel - this was a year one title for the GBA, but it’s just a one-and-done title, it’s hard not to poke fun at it.

Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles initially gave me hope for mediocrity, based on its silly audio-visual experience and so-so combat, but as soon as the game’s platforming reared its ugly head, all hope was lost. Seemingly thrown together, Jedi Power Battles is a slog to play through at the best of times, frequently devolving into some of the most frustrating gameplay I’ve played on the Game Boy Abyss thus far. Is it the worst the GBA has to offer? Nah, but there is almost no reason to give this game a shot, unless you get something from boring, frustrating mediocrity and rage-inducing platforming. Be my guest.

Thanks so much for reading my review of Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles! Not a great time, really, but it’s short enough that it didn’t hit me with *too* much psychic damage. I don’t have high hopes for our next game, either, but that’s half the fun. As always, you can find me over on Twitter @Lemmy7003, email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com or cckaiju@gmail.com, or find me on Twitch under GameBoyAbyss. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next week.