STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor Goes West
Jedi: Survivor is excellently designed, and takes the franchise to an old "new frontier".
Jedi: Survivor is like many games you’ve played before, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The original Star Wars is a synthesis of a handful of influences; Sci-Fi serials, spaghetti westerns, and jidaigeki (literally “period drama,” for Japanese samurai movies) by Akira Kurosawa. Jedi: Survivor isn’t much different, deploying the world building and environmental storytelling techniques unique to games to tell a story with classic Western themes, and tell that story well.
Survivor continues the tradition of adaptation in more than its narrative structure or cinematography: an entire buffet of popular and successful game systems and mechanics are here on display. The Souls-like combat, Breath of the Wild inspired exploration, and Metroidvania-esque progression all coalesce into a cohesive whole, a refinement of different games and genres into a familiar yet exciting experience.
Most obviously, almost everything about Survivor’s combat is adopted from Souls-likes. The focus on animation based attacks with strict timings, stamina management and a checkpoint system, with respawning enemies and push-your-luck XP loss, are all proudly adopted from From Software.
Survivor, and its predecessor Jedi: Fallen Order, sit as shining examples of Souls-like combat that are more approachable than the genre’s namesake, without sacrificing difficulty for players that want it, mostly in optional bosses and other large encounters.
Dark Souls isn’t the only game Respawn Entertainment draws from though. Many of those optional bosses are hidden away in little nooks of its largest worlds; Koboh and Jedha. Both serve as open world spaces, filled with upgrades and cosmetic unlocks behind nearly every corner.
The game has binoculars to help plot your route around its worlds, and lets you place 5 colored beacons1 as waypoints while looking through them, exactly like the genre reforming Breath of the Wild. Where BotW frontloaded its powers so players could be unleashed anywhere in Hyrule, Survivor doles them out evenly over its nearly 20 hour main story path.
Survivor immediately informs players who look at the map that a path they’ve come across is or isn’t accessible yet. These areas are signposted as places you should return to later, and the game is full of them. Metroidvanias popularized environments that are recontextualized and opened throughout the game as you get new abilities, and Survivor has only improved on Fallen Order’s backtracking level design.
Jedi: Survivor has something for everyone, because it’s been refined and distilled from some of the most prestigious games of the last decade: Uncharted, God of War, Elden Ring, and Zelda. There might not be anything groundbreaking or brand new about it, but what’s there is achieved with a level of finesse and prestige, all set in a franchise that has long felt tired, conceited, and trite.
The game follows the titular Jedi, Cal Kestis, and his faithful droid companion, BD-1, as they get the old band back together again after a falling out in the three years since the last game. A mission breaks bad on Coruscant, leading Cal and the only surviving member of his new crew, Bode Akuna, to regroup on Koboh.
Bode, and returning love interest Merrin, both take a couple of opportunities to follow Cal around the various locales, and help with combat and traversal. Where your crew were charismatic but almost entirely stationary around the mantis in the first game, Bode and Merrin open new paths, and are with Cal in all the climaxes of the game, both in the plot and in combat.
Every member of the cast feels alive and it’s a treat to get to know them better. Where the first game had Cal running around nearly deserted planets and environments, (save for the incredible Kashyyyk sequence in Fallen Order) Koboh, and later Jedha, are settled planets on the outer rim.
Pyloon’s Saloon acts as a safe haven for Cal, his crew, and an entire Wild West town’s worth of people with stories to tell. Monk, the old timey droid bartender, always has reassuring words wherever Cal is concerned. Zee, the High Republic droid, reminisces with Cal about the Jedi order and its lost history. Skoova Stev, the knee-high Scottish fisher-slug with a walrus mustache, regales Cal with fish facts and tall tales in equal measure. A cantankerous couple of old men stand outside the saloon and relentlessly make fun of everyone in sight, like Statler and Waldorf, if one of them was a giant worm person.
All this contributes to making Rambler’s Reach Outpost an archetypal town we’ve all seen before, in between booms and under threat by outlaws like the Bedlam Raiders. It’s a well worn setting for good reason, and not one the franchise is new to. Indeed, The Mandalorian very consciously adapts Western films, and positions its main character as a lone cowboy who becomes a father when it’s thrust upon him.
If Cal was a lone cowboy, he isn’t anymore. He goes through a lot of change throughout his time on screen, and the ensemble cast surrounding him have more parts to play in that than ever. Their disparate motivations have pulled them apart, until they are reunited by the promise of being able to put as much distance between them and the Empire as possible. That manifests as Tanalorr, a planet obscured by a nebula called the Koboh Abyss, that tears ships to pieces.
Survivor is a Wild West story at its core. While the game revolves around finding Tanalorr, a paradise untouchable by the Empire, it takes place on Koboh, the largest planet in Star Wars to date. Out here in the sticks, the land goes seemingly forever. Biodiversity actually exists, compared to planets with one biome that stretches across their entire surface. A mining town is full of good people just trying to get by. Those rugged individuals, everyday people, are portrayed as heroic for sticking it out on their own, and surviving their environment and its varied native species of giant monsters.
Survivor trades in the language and structure of our Old West stories, and, at first glance, carries the same assumptions and biases those stories have into the outer rim of a galaxy far far away. The frontier, as it exists in most Americans’ imagination, is a myth, and Star Wars has told stories in that mode from the very beginning.2 Morality forms the basis of the universe, and Jedi and Sith have so much agency over their galaxy that they act as gods.
Richard Slotkin, in his book Regeneration Through Violence, defines the frontier myth as “America [being] a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top.”3 The stories that romanticize European American colonization across the continent are so powerful and prominent in American pop culture that they become hyperreal; where the general understandings of reality and fiction are seamlessly blended together and clear distinctions between the two fall away.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier thesis is that the appropriation of the American frontier gave rise to American exceptionalism.4 This inherently paints the necessity of complete domination over the land and its indigenous peoples as an essential step towards forming American democracy, despite democratic ideas predating even recorded history itself. Even if held unconsciously, the ideas of Manifest Destiny and the Frontier thesis form an essential pillar of American patriotism as an ideology, and its creation myth. The legends of Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill are taught in schools as part of our nations history.
Unfortunately for Turner, there are two Old Wests in America: the historical West where opportunistic individuals — like farmers, prostitutes, miners, and criminals — all pursued happiness, and the mythic West he based his thesis on. Most stories told about the American frontier were apocryphal if not fabricated outright, and most ethnic, racial, and gender minorities were completely excluded from them. While Buffalo Bill’s America is easily understood, he was simply a showman, and was criticized by his contemporaries for depicting Native Americans as savages even during his time. The stories he told in his shows about people like Davy Crockett are just stories.
Jedi: Survivor doesn’t blindly fall into the same pitfalls as the historical revisionists of the past, and Turner’s thesis has been discredited since the 1970s. Historians like Patricia Limerick have critically analyzed and torn apart Turner’s ethnocentric, nationalistic, and otherwise limited theory for American exceptionalism.5
Survivor isn’t afraid to hold Koboh’s many prospectors (and other opportunistic visitors) in contempt for their blind disregard for and destruction of the native environment around them. Life in Rambler’s Reach was made much more difficult thanks to previous generations of colonizers poisoning the water supply with their faulty water treatment practices. Most of Koboh’s settlement is only made possible by the golden age technology built there by the High Republic, long since lost in the transition to a Galactic Empire.
STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor uses its writing and world building to approach western stories — and the concept of the frontier — with more nuance and depth than the franchise’s previous attempts, without straying from its mythological storytelling roots, by switching out the space opera for the space western. Thankfully, it treads that worn path carefully, respectfully, and importantly, well.
The game tutorialized the binocular beacon feature and then it never worked again in my playthrough. It’s likely a symptom of the lack of polish on the game at release.
Part of the draw of 2022’s Andor is the shift away from a mythological storytelling mode, and towards a commitment to depicting systems of oppression and how people can fight institutions of power.
Slotkin, Richard (1973). Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. p. 5.
Turner, Frederick Jackson (1920). "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Company. p. 3.
Limerick, Patricia (1987). The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 21.