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Yeah, the great thing about TIE Fighter is that you spend like one mission being the idealized peacekeeper that Imperial propaganda would probably emphasize, and the rest of the game fighting against various middle managers all trying to murder each other to rank up. It's a shockingly honest portrayal of life in a giant fascist military machine.
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Dec 22, 2020 06:45
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Lord Hydronium posted:I kinda see a parallel between how Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi dealt with the NJO with how Rise of Skywalker treated The Last Jedi. Sorry we did something interesting, it won't happen again. I think that's the difference between TLJ and NJO. TLJ is setting up potential plot points and conflicts for future movies, while NJO is designed as and should have been the end. I'm inclined to give a little bit of leeway to the post-NJO stuff (but only just a little, cause they really are that bad) because really, how are you supposed to follow that up? I've never actually read the Legacy comics, and I know they got mocked for having grimdark drug addict Luke, but that seems like the proper way to do a sequel to NJO. Set it way, way far in the future after everybody from the movies has died, except Artoo and Threepio I guess.
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Dec 23, 2020 22:51
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Kemper Boyd posted:Have you considered that it might just be bad writing though? I think you'll find that the prequel era Jedi have completely lost the plot when it comes to the Force and it's badly written!
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Jan 2, 2021 11:40
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Baron Fuzzlewhack posted:I've always had a hard time reconciling the Qui-Gon-as-gray-jedi thing with the Qui-Gon-believes-in-midichlorians thing. With how dogmatic the Jedi Order is, it would make more sense for them to find a way to identify their fellow While Qui-Gon is written as running counter to the Jedi orthodoxy, he does also do the most orthodox thing in the prequels: ignoring the existence of slavery on Tatooine. So he's not running completely against the grain here. Also, he got Anakin's blood sample by pretending to give him a medical treatment, which is literally what the CIA did to catch bin Laden. Midichlorians are kind of dumb, but they're essentially a storytelling shortcut to show how powerful Anakin is, and in that regard they're far superior to the KJA method of "a weird bump in your brain, also, a Force thermometer."
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Jan 4, 2021 13:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:I honestly couldn't tell you. It was pretty obvious from the interviews about Legacy of the Force that the higher ups had no actual plan for how the storyline would go. John Ostrander wrote Legacy making it a lot further into the future to allow for a change to the status quo. But the old EU crept up on it as the newer books came out where there was only a century or so between the end of "current" EU and the future of Legacy. A century is a long time but when you consider that Jagged Fel is supposed to be the founder of an Empire that has been active for quite a while it puts pressure on the newer EU stuff to set up how the Fel Empire formed. And as I said, they had no plan. Imagine where we'd be if the Disney buyout hadn't happened and the books were still dealing with octogenarian Luke, Han, and Leia. Would we have seen a continuity split by now? I'd have to say almost certainly, since nobody on the novels side was interested in dealing with the Legacy stuff. Or they could have just erased it away, since time travel definitively exists.
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Feb 6, 2021 08:54
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OhFunny posted:The author Kenneth Flint wrote the book in 1992. He rewrote it in 2015 to slot into the old EU and allowed the whole thing to be uploaded online to a fan that's now defunct. You can read the whole thing here via web archive. Someone clearly copied that and published it on Amazon. I spent a little bit of time skimming this, and by the measured standards of mediocre Bantam books, this seems like one of the better ones. It avoids the standard plot of "nothing happens for 20 chapters and then the bad guy dies, plus Luke tries and fails to discover something about the Force." There's a big honkin' Force thing ala the Valley of the Jedi for a final setpiece! Leia isn't written quite as horribly as she usually is! There's twin shapeshifters named Kastor and Pollux! Downsides: it seems maybe a little too full of ideas. There's some plot elements, like a card game, that barely have any room to breathe. Not that you need a whole long sequence like in the KJA book where Lando wins back the Falcon, but it feels a little scattershot. Another couple drafts might have helped, but, well, we know what happened. It's also slavishly devoted to the original trilogy. I get that this was written early on, but like every 10th line is either a restatement or a direct quote from the movies, plus Luke goes back to Tatooine and has a fight with a robot-armed Ponda Baba. Han plays dejarik. There's an Ewok that's actually a shapeshifter. It's all a bit much. It's still bewildering that Bantam sat on this book. You could have probably published it as is and nobody but a few newsgroup readers would have cared about the supposed continuity conflicts with Truce at Bakura (and you could just shift these events forward a year). It's so weird since practically all of these books were NYT bestsellers. That's just money left on the table, especially since they (thankfully) let the guy keep his advance.
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May 8, 2021 11:15
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Corellia is clearly the New Jersey planet.
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May 9, 2021 22:33
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Likewise, I was in my early teens when the prequels and NJO were coming out. NJO was an absolute clusterfuck and had colossal shifts in quality between books, but hey at least they tried something new. I do think the general arc of the story was pretty good, and they went too grimdark with Vong culture but some of it was genuinely interesting. I'd much rather go back through that series instead of "what if Jacen was evil actually." I've not delved too deep into the new continuity stuff, outside of the various Kieron Gillen and Si Spurrier written comics, which are excellent. The only book I finished was Alphabet Squadron, which I basically liked, but if I were in the mood for starfighter stuff there's basically no world in which I wouldn't read the X-Wing books over this.
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May 14, 2021 10:57
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I have not read it in probably like 15 years but I remember really liking Star By Star when it came out. It helped that at that point, not everything was super dark so it stood out a little better. It also helps that it helped set up weirder stuff to come, like delving into the half-Vongshaped remains of Coruscant. Virtually everything else he wrote though, crap.
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Jun 3, 2021 05:37
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I vaguely remember some kind of droid rights organization appearing in the background of one of the goofier Bantam-era novels, though I have no way of pinning down which one it was. Probably one of the KJA ones?
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Jun 6, 2021 23:31
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Actually clones only double the u and the i in names, it's a little known linguistic reform dating to Hyperspace War era historians dealing with Sith clones from the planet Zioth.
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Jun 11, 2021 07:02
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Thrawn was basically done as well as you could expect from a show like Rebels, but given how The Mandalorian keeps threatening to bring him back, I'd really prefer they take the character in a different direction. Rebels and the Zahn books already have plenty of cool, analytic Thrawn, what if he comes back from years stuck in the vortex of hyperspace a little loopy? Still insightful, but more wild-eyed and spiritual.
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Jun 22, 2021 07:09
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Hot drat am I here for Luke Skywalker Superstar.
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Jul 15, 2021 23:09
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Given the books they were emulating it's not that surprising that Galaxy of Fear was poo poo. I have pretty fond memories of Young and Junior Jedi Knights, enough that there's no way I'm gonna go back and check and risk ruining them.
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Jul 19, 2021 07:58
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The Jedi Apprentice books are a real blind spot for me and I'm not sure why: I definitely read the first two or three but there were a whole lot of them. I think they might have been in a different section of the library from the other stuff. Chairman Capone posted:Also, looking up the YJK books now, I completely forgot that Raynal Thul originated in them, or that he was the son of some of the characters from the Han Solo Trilogy. Have to hand it to YJK, they really did bring in kid versions of pretty much the entire Bantam-era cast. Also have to give Denning credit for massacring most of the YJK cast in a single book. The NJO stuff started to come out just after I was getting into reading EU material, so very quickly after I got introduced to Tahiri and Raynar and Tenel Ka and all of them I got to learn about them dying and being tortured and dismembered and stuff. Great stuff for a ten year-old!
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Jul 19, 2021 22:02
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Balance Point was one of the only books I never managed to slog my way through in the whole of the EU. It was that and maybe like the end of the Corellia trilogy. At age 10!Lord Hydronium posted:Luceno immediately establishes himself as the reference guy; pretty sure the whole Bantam EU gets a reference at some point in these two books. Several of the books seemed like they were riffing on earlier Bantam-era stuff, and I always wondered if that was a specific mandate, wanting to keep continuity with Bantam after the Del Rey acquisition, authors just playing with their pet characters, or some combination thereof. Dark Tide is riffing on some X-Wing stuff and stars Stackpole's Very Favorite Character; Agents of Chaos calls back to the very original Han Solo books; and Edge of Victory and Star By Star systematically kill off all the major characters from the children's books.
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Aug 8, 2021 07:12
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OhFunny posted:This does not happen! Why do people keep saying this? Lowbacca, Zekk, Tenel Ka, even Raynar all survive the mission and the war! Perhaps traumatized would have been a better word, but I was always more familiar with Junior Jedi Knights, which featured Anakin (KIA), Ifrit (KIA), Lyric (KIA), and Tahiri (POW).
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Aug 10, 2021 20:48
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Star By Star is definitely grim, but it never really verges into grimdark, and that really says something for it, I think. Part of that is that it sets up some really interesting stuff going forward, and part of it is just it's a pretty good book by Troy Denning's standards. Outside of the Force Heretic trilogy, of which I have no memory, the remainder of the series is pretty strong. Dark Journey starts getting into anti-Vong psyops, Traitor is a stone-cold classic, the Allston books are pretty good absent a very silly character, and I remember Destiny's Way having some solid action sequences.
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Aug 18, 2021 03:38
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The Shame Boy posted:Since it comes so highly recommended maybe i'll do alphabet squadron or something after i've finished Legends off, just for a pallet cleanser. I was pretty down on the first Alphabet Squadron book, but ended up reading the other two and really enjoyed those. The biggest problem with the first one is that it takes forever to get to the premise. It makes you really appreciate how the X-Wing books get going after, at most, two chapters of setup. The character stuff that's paid off in the next two books is worth it, though.
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Nov 14, 2021 00:48
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Casimir Radon posted:The High Republic is getting a game made by Quantic Dream. It's impossible to measure how quickly my excitement deflated when the Quantic Dream logo popped up at the end of that trailer, and I didn't even know about the harassment stuff.
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Dec 10, 2021 08:12
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Casimir Radon posted:It’s really dumb that they haven’t reissued TOTJ in hardcover. Also dumb that we never got any novels from the era, excepting the TOR tie-ins. The comics move way too quickly, and major events often take place over a couple of pages. I wish we’d gotten a more intimate look at those stories. It's really bizarre how quickly they brush past things. They read like Silver Age comics but they were coming out alongside stuff like the Clone Saga and Hellboy, they feel almost out of time.
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Dec 24, 2021 23:29
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Ah shoot, I forgot that it was Tom Vietch who started it. I always appreciate (as a kid) the way he tied in Dark Empire and TOTJ together. Too bad Vietch lost creative control over it, for all the flak Dark Empire gets I genuinely enjoy it. Plotwise Dark Empire is maybe the stupidest SW thing ever released (until TRoS) but its storytelling is decent and the art is gorgeous. It absolutely nails the tone of pervasive corruption and light vs dark. You take away the dialogue bubbles and it's a masterpiece.
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Dec 25, 2021 01:50
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:I didn't see it in there. Isn't that more of a conspiracy thing because Chewie didn't get his medal in ANH? I think it's more a case of the abysmal writing that Leia is subjected to over the course of the EU, which frequently leaves her angry and flustered over the smallest of diplomatic kerfuffles. She'll yell at people in the Senate and go away and think something like, "Oh, those perfidious Quarrens!" She really got done dirty. I just reread the Thrawn trilogy and while Zahn's idiosyncracies are more apparent than ever, it is kind of refreshing to have a Star Wars story where the problem is that everybody is too competent. fartknocker posted:For all of the criticisms of KJA, and a lot of them are well deserved, I feel the Jedi Academy Trilogy are at least quick reads that move along for the most part. Compared to a lot of the other 90s EU stuff (Black Fleet Crisis, Children of the Jedi, Planet of Twilight, Crystal Star), where those books just drag and drag and drag. Yeah, KJA is a bad writer, but he does as least keep things moving. The Crystal Star is the worst, but you've got books and entire trilogies where literally nothing happens.
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Dec 26, 2021 22:07
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Animal Friend posted:Cocking brows never gets old. Point.
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Dec 27, 2021 03:45
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Around the time of Rise of Skywalker, somebody made the (salient) point on Twitter that canon doesn't actually matter except to IP holders, and that you can hold whatever set of stories you want as the important ones. Which is correct, but one of the first replies specifically mentioned the Denning series and I couldn't even imagine anybody liking that stuff. Even in comparison with TRoS, which is really more of a KJA bad than a Denning bad. Also, it's not strictly on-topic but all of the SW discussion in CD and TVIV is atrocious, so: has anybody been watching the Boba Fett show? I quite liked The Mandalorian but Boba Fett's never been a character I was hyped about, even as a kid. Is it any good.
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Jan 6, 2022 03:10
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Chairman Capone posted:There's definitely a KOTOR reference in the episode, with the Tusken talking about how Tatooine once had seas that dried up, causing the Tuskens to become nomads. Last time I played through I noticed that the quest you have to follow to get the Tusken chieftain to tell you about Tusken history doesn't have a reward attached to it. All you get is the story itself. I like that a lot. You hear another tidbit from the Jawas, I think, that Anchorhead in roughly 4000 BBY is the latest in a series of settlements on that very spot. Every few hundred years a mining expedition comes to Tatooine, builds a company town, tries to mine the planet, goes bankrupt, and abandons the settlement, leaving it to be reclaimed by the sands until the next corporation gives it a go.
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Jan 6, 2022 10:02
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Cross-Section posted:Nah in TLJ Rey brings up Vader's redemption a few times as evidence that A) the Jedi are worth saving and B) she could turn Ben back to the light like Luke did Anakin I always thought this was strange; there's no way that could be common knowledge, especially to someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere. Rey was only on the planet for like 18 hours (as much as I love TLJ it was a major mistake to compress things to that degree) and it doesn't seem like Luke would be in the mood to talk about it. It's a plot point in the Thrawn trilogy that Mara thinks that Luke and Vader teamed up on the Emperor, which is why she blames him for Palpatine's death. I don't remember if anybody outside of Alliance people know that Luke was involved at all; as far as they're concerned, the Emperor blew up with the Death Star.
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Jan 7, 2022 00:48
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Xenomrph posted:You'd better goddamn believe I'm going to defend this edit to the death, at the expense of all other aspects of my life. There's a lot of stupid retcon poo poo that NuCanon did that I didn't like (killing Hobbie WHAT EDIT: I'm starting to think something needs to be done about all these so-called "reference books." Rochallor fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 10, 2022 |
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Jan 10, 2022 01:20
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Especially egregious was having Leia, Luke, and Lando go back to Cloud City after ESB, and having Leia frozen in Carbonite in the comics. Good lord. It really bugs me how everybody and their mother has gotten frozen in carbonite, to the extent that in Mandalorian there's apparently a portable model. It seems pretty clear in Empire that it's an experimental process. cptn_dr posted:I dropped off the comics after Kieron Gillen left, and that seems like it was the right call, drat. Darth Vader stayed consistent for a while after Gillen left, I never kept up with Star Wars. The Soule run was decent, and I dropped off with the Pak stuff. His first arc had an incredible hook: Darth Vader meets up with one of Padme's body doubles from back in the day, but it seemed like he was struggling with having a character who doesn't talk a lot and his second arc was all about TRoS stuff and I couldn't be bothered.
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Jan 11, 2022 02:19
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Chairman Capone posted:But I think what's really killing me about Book of Fett is the complete lack of motive for Fett himself, and lack of characterization for Ming-Na Wen. I just thought that her character has been around for three years now on three different shows and I don't think there's been any kind of personality development, character arc, or internal life of any sort given to her. The rancor introduced in this most recent episode has more character development than her, and that's not hyperbole. Temura Morrison just seems kind of uninterested in even being there, it's like they didn't give him any direction beyond "stoic and pensive." He acts like he's the main character in an RPG where Choices Matter, but they only have the one voice actor and he needs to be appropriate for any playstyle. The opening scene with the hot rod water thieves especially felt like it could have been a sidequest from KOTOR. quote:
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Jan 14, 2022 22:52
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Arc Hammer posted:Admiral Daala. He said invincible, not inexplicable
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Feb 2, 2022 12:01
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Arc Hammer posted:She did spend time working with Pablo Hidalgo to properly arrange all the disparate Mandalorian depictions up to that point in time so it was somewhat coherent. I especially liked in the Clone Wars cartoon when they go to Mandalore and it's just your standard future city with gleaming glass towers and corporate lawyers, then an alarm goes off and people with Boba Fett helmets start causing a ruckus and the general reaction is, "Christ, not these guys again." It would have been so easy to just have a whole Boba Fett planet and I appreciate that they came at it from a different angle.
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Feb 2, 2022 23:09
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The Disney folks sure are convinced that their face-CG technology is top-notch. How many millions of dollars went into the creation of a guy who looks vaguely like Mark Hamill's German cousin? I mean, if they're hell bent on using young Luke they could just recast him. I'd say they could make it more palatable by dubbing Hamill's voice on top of the new guy, but whatever they're doing to his voice makes it sound like Luke is hammered but trying very hard to sound sober, so. Also, if this is the first glimpse into what the new canon's Jedi Order is like, I don't like it. Attachments being forbidden was what ultimately destroyed the Jedi in the first place, and Luke should know that since he's hanging around with someone who's explicitly rejected the Jedi on multiple occasions! I get that Luke's Jedi have an expiration date, but they should be making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones.
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Feb 5, 2022 00:39
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Chairman Capone posted:In any case, since dropping Full of Sith I hadn't really had any Star Wars related stuff in my feed, until I started listening to A More Civilized Age, which is four people watching The Clone Wars episodes. What really makes it for me is the four cohosts have a wide span of Star Wars interest. One of them has been a longtime fan and was deep in 90s EU; one of them has never seen it before this watch; and the other two are at various intermediary points. I find it makes for an interesting take on the show, especially as someone who was never really super into Clone Wars. I'll wholeheartedly second A More Civilized Age, it's been the podcast I look forward to the most basically since it started. Outside of some bonus episodes, it's exclusively about TCW show, but they can manage to get really into the weeds of the Republic's collapse in an episode where Jar Jar pretends to be a Jedi.
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Feb 26, 2022 07:00
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Tekopo posted:I went to see my parents and childhood home and managed to find pretty much every single X-Wing Series book that I read in my childhood (I think I'm only missing one). I was wondering if they are actually worth reading again: I haven't read an SW book since I was a teenager. Are there any books in the series absolutely worth reading? Any stinkers that I should miss out on? I'm reading through them again at the moment, about halfway through Iron Fist. As an adult, their flaws are a little more obvious: both Stackpole and Allston really love delving into minor tangents that read like they wanted to get their money's worth out of the notes they took, and some of the character arcs begin and get wrapped up rather quickly. But that also means that the books are trying to give arcs to multiple characters, which is not something a lot of the novels tackle. And on the whole they do a pretty good job. Allston's version of Zsinj is still probably my favorite villain from the old EU, just a guy playing the character of a silly shouty warlord to a tee as he builds a massive financial empire to support his rule. So far, The Bacta War was the only I didn't particularly care. It felt a bit extraneous, most of the series' plots having been wrapped up in the previous book. I also never made it through Mercy Kill despite having tried twice. It was pretty wrapped up in the bad parts of the EU which I'm unfamiliar with. I'm gonna give it another shot this go around. On a possibly related note, does anybody know when it was established that TIE fighters run without shields? It seems so much like a balance issue that I have to assume it was in the original X-wing game, but I'm wondering if that was an idea that might have been pulled out of a sourcebook somewhere. It's weird that something that likely started explicitly as a game mechanic became such an integral part of Star Wars lore.
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Mar 8, 2022 10:51
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I went to Disney World once when I was like 10 and have no urge to go back, so clearly this kind of stuff isn't for me, but it seems like the draw for a Star Wars thing at the park would be walking around a full-sized model of the Millennium Falcon or the cantina or something. The lightsaber fights are neat I guess but I have zero urge to stay in a Hotel But Star Wars. Do other parks of the park have like narratives and stuff going on? That would just turn me off to it immediately.
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Apr 4, 2022 04:12
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Arquinsiel posted:Honestly that's way less irritating than him not being in an X-Wing for it. Just such a baffling choice to half-rear end your blatant fanservice. I live in Japan and I went to see TRoS the day it came out. There were maybe five other people in the theater, three of whom were a family with a teenage daughter. The dad kept explaining every single reference to his daughter who clearly did not give half a poo poo. 45 second explanation of Palpatine? Check. Chewie getting a medal? Check. Why Carrie Fisher was saying random lines in a forest? Check. But not even he noticed Denis Lawson. fartknocker posted:Current canon isn’t fully clear. One of the stories in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back (Rendezvous Point) has Wedge and Janson forming a new Red Squadron after Hoth, since he doesn’t want to use the Rogue name again yet, but the Starfighter game set after Endor has him mention the Rogue’s are back and off elsewhere. It constantly amazes me how well the Rogue One retcon works. It really feels like this doomed suicide mission has always been there, even in ESB, even in the X-wing books which have a separate tale of the theft of the Death Star plans. It's an appropriately mythic origin for the Rogue name.
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Apr 25, 2022 12:57
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Vinylshadow posted:
I dislike Salvador Larocca as an artist but the biggest issue with this is the coloring, I think. His photoreferencing is... a choice, but it's really exacerbated by the lumpy photoshop gradient stuff. Larocca's art in Darth Vader was fine, if unremarkable, but when he's tracing over movie stills there it doesn't look anywhere near as bad. Arquinsiel posted:He's not the only one, Marvel and DC have constant problems with it. A lot of the Star Wars comics have really wonky art in a lot of different ways. Overall the new Marvel tenure has been pretty mediocre. Granted I haven't read any of Marvel's Star Wars stuff in a few years but I thought it was really impressive for a while. The flagship book was anywhere from acceptable to great, and I'm still impressed that they managed to put out multiple engaging volumes of a Darth Vader comic, a character you'd think would be really difficult to make the protagonist.
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Apr 27, 2022 22:54
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I wonder if part of it is that the books aren't important anymore. The old EU really starts with the Thrawn trilogy, which you could basically read as Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, and then the story just keeps going on from there. There were a LOT of stinkers in there, but there was the sense that these were all stories that mattered. Han Solo's half-brother or whatever the gently caress that was was a supporting character in Episode XXI. By emphasizing that everything matters in the Nu-Canon, you're restricted in the kinds of stories that you can tell because you have to squeeze in between the gaps between the movies. So Thrawn goes from being a credible follow-up threat to Palpatine to a guy who menaces some characters in a kids' cartoon. Everything feels really small-scale, and there are people (like me!) who enjoy those stories, but you're lacking in variety if those are the only kinds of stories you're getting. To bring it up again for the umpteenth time, Kieron Gillen's run on Darth Vader finds a gap in need of a story between the first two movies: in ESB, why has Darth Vader gotten a huge promotion after becoming the only survivor, and therefore fall guy, of the Death Star? That's a solid premise that feels like it needs telling, and there's only so many of those. Also it's weird that there's barely anything between the OT and the ST.
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May 6, 2022 03:56
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Casimir Radon posted:Sounds suspiciously like Dathan and Miriam from the Exodus story in the Bible For $10K Adam Driver will record a line of dialogue in a closet saying that Rey's parent is you--yes, you!
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May 19, 2022 23:06
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