Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s Ending Defeats The Purpose Of The Game
Featured
Just go and tear up the thing that we spent the whole game pursuing, why don't you...
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER
An ending can make or break a game. The ending of The Last Of Us is one of the most memorable endings in video game history with the simple but powerful lie Joel tells Ellie. It’s open and creates a very paternal feel – Joel lost his daughter in the very beginning of the game, and this made him protective over Ellie to a fault. Arkham Asylum’s ending elegantly closed the book on the legendary rivalry Batman and The Joker.
Those endings make everything you went through in the game worth it, and gave your actions even more weight. Your investment in the characters feels worthy and earned. The worst thing a video game’s story can do is have an ending that nullifies everything you’ve spent all those hours doing leading up to it. There is no worse feeling than pumping hours and hours into a game, only for the payoff to never come, which is what happens in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
In the game you play as Cal Kestis, a Jedi who after the Clone Wars is forced live in hiding, working at a junkyard on the planet Bracca. Everything is going as fine as it can, but during one of Cal’s shifts, an accident happens, causing him to use his Force powers to save his friend Prauf. Unknown to Cal, an Imperial droid captured his saving of Prauf on film, and sends the footage to the Empire. After Cal’s true identity is revealed, he finds himself on the run from inquisitors, trained by Darth Vader himself. Just as all feels lost, Cal is saved by two people, a former Jedi named Cere Junda, and her pilot friend Greez Dritus.
A bond between Cal and Cere is formed early on when she tells him she knows his Jedi Master Jaro Tarpal. Cere uses this information to have Cal to help her open an ancient vault on the planet Bogano. During your trek through Bogano, you encounter a tiny droid named BD-1 who displays a message from Cere’s former Jedi Master Eno Cordova. In the message Cordova reveals there is a way to bring balance back to the galaxy and save the universe. Cordova has hidden a Jedi holocron – a cube containing important Jedi secrets, which contains the name of Force-sensitive children. These children can help destroy the Empire’s rule, and so you set out to find the Holocron, and subsequently, the children.
RELATED: Why Deadpool Gives Hope That Star Wars 1313 Could Make A Comeback
Throughout the game you’re tossing your lightsaber at stormtroopers while combatting the inquisitors chasing you, one of whom is the Second Sister who acts as the game’s main antagonist. Up until its ending, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s story really does a tremendous job of making each location important.
For example, you travel to Kashyyyk – the home planet of the Wookies – to search for more of Cordova’s clues atop the planet’s Origin Tree. Later in the game, you need major repairs to your lightsaber, so you travel to a Jedi temple on the ice planet Ilum to find a kyber crystal. Every place you visit has a purpose, and every visit finishes with a legitimate subsequent purpose. But when you get to the game’s ending, you are met with an ending that undermines the 16 or so hours it took you to get there.
At the end of the game you retrieve the holocron and you open it on Greez’s ship, which naturally gets you thinking about the next step: finding the children! Well, think again, because even after Greez talks about how the Empire will be pursuing these kids, Cal turns around and says ‘It’s not our job to save them. Their destiny should be trusted to the Force.’
He then takes his lightsaber and cuts the holocron into pieces, destroying the list!
Nobody says anything about this moment of madness, not even Cere whose Jedi Master is the central part of the story. The game then closes with Cal looking at the rest of the crew and says “So, where to next?” So you bring balance to the Force, you can bring in and train new Jedi, but you’re going to let the Force decide?
How about we just open the damn Holocron that we spent the whole game chasing, and have it reveal one of the children who maybe has a distant tie to someone on the crew? We don’t know much about the story for the sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, apart from the fact that Cal is still one of the last remaining Jedi in the galaxy – well maybe he wouldn’t be if he hadn’t sliced up the map to the galaxy’s future!
So what if the Empire is chasing Cal, he literally just took on the Empire and won the battle while the war rages on. What’s a few more stormtroopers and inquisitors? Bring them on! The Empire follows him all game long in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and he’s sliced and diced their fighters and blown up their plans every step of the way towards the game’s end goal.
The franchise itself is about exploring new planets and adventuring all while galactic war is raging on, and this game just throws it all to the side on the whim of one person. Cal might think letting the force decide is the right thing, but for those of us playing, it’s kind of a bummer. Respawn have a bit of story salvaging to do in the sequel, in my eyes, but it says something about the quality of the rest of Fallen Order that I look forward to seeing how they do it.
Nick Battaglia
@mercwithonearm
Nick Battaglia is a Features Writers For DualShockers with a specialty in writing about accessibility in video games. Though his gaming journey began with Super Mario Bros. 3, he finds himself wandering Los Angeles looking for a Galaga cabinet to spend his time in front of. When he's not spending quarters he can be found returning the Lakers back to prominence in NBA 2K.
Read more of Nick's articles