You know the moment? The moment where you fell in love with Star Wars?

Maybe it was from the opening moment of the 1977 original, as the crawl bursts onto the screen, then pans to an energetic, awesome confrontation between Leia’s escaping ship Tantive IV and the gargantuan Star Destroyer that follows just after it? Or perhaps you first fell in love with it when Darth Maul drew his lightsaber and then ignited both sides of the blade, and the Duel of the Fates kicks into gear. Or maybe you played some Star Wars games.

I love Star Wars.

The thing about Star Wars is that it retains a lot of its power today, despite being an undoubtedly commercial project. Now owned by (ugh) Disney, Star Wars is as carefully thought about, analyzed, and marketed as anything you could probably imagine. Sparks of imagination and wonder have fallen from the franchise in recent years; The Clone Wars animated series, The Mandalorian, and I am quite partial to both Battlefront 2 and Fallen Order. I am even a fan of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, though I found The Rise of Skywalker a predictable decline into fanservice and nonsensical retcons that serve to eliminate much of the point behind the other eight films. But I’m not here to complain about tRoS. No, I’m here to sing the praises of a Star Wars game that serves to remind the player of the power of Star Wars. It’s infinite in potential.

If I had to hazard a guess, Star Wars will outlive me. It seems to show no signs of stopping at this point. New shows, new films, new games, new toys, on and on and on. There seems to be no end to it. Partially, that’s a good thing – as long as they manage to remain good. The good thing about Star Wars is that it has inspired generations, and affected each person who loves it in a different way. This allows for a huge variety of different understandings of the material, and allows for everyone to get something new and interesting out of a huge galaxy, with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of unexplored locations. Actually, here’s an interesting tidbit taken from the Star Wars wiki: “There were 7,100,000,000 stars in the known galaxy, with approximately 3,200,000,000 habitable star systems. Only about a billion of these systems had life.”

It’s remarkable then how the lazier entries in Star Wars canon (both old and new) manage to squander this potential. There are so many different avenues you could take to make the galaxy richer, inventing new species, characters, or exploring fresh avenues of the ones we might already know. Instead, slap the name Star Wars on anything and you can make it a hit. Star Wars, as a cultural phenomenon, partially continues to exist because there’s hype around it, built up by media. As much as I love Star Wars (I’m a huge, huge fan), I have to recognize the fact that Star Wars is bloated. Not in the “I can’t believe how much good Star Wars there is”, but rather “I can’t believe how much Star Wars I’m expected to consume”. And it ends up blurring together, you know? There’s only so many times I can see Obi-Wan (and again, I’m a huge, huge fan) do his cool Jedi stuff before I roll my eyes and tap my fingers on the edge of my seat. I want more than an Obi-Wan show, dammit. This problem also applies to the gaming industry itself. How many times am I expected to get excited for a game that, get this, takes place in the post-apocalypse and has you crafting stuff in order to survive a harsh environment, while managing several status meters and shooting things in the face. In fact, you can probably just watch this Dunkey video to understand what I’m getting at.

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II explores Star Wars through the lens of what should ostensibly be a Doom clone, a quick FPS churned out to meet expectations in the marketplace. But the remarkable thing is, Dark Forces II is an FPS with character, and heart. It comes from a time when Lucasarts were at the top of their game. When a Star Wars game was automatically at the top of its class from the moment it launched, not a year after launch. I’m sick of seeing games with potential get announced too early and get pushed out to meet corporate deadlines.

There is nothing like this in sight in Dark Forces II. It’s a passion project from people who clearly love the material. The first-person gameplay still holds up, and the lightsaber combat, while not entirely marvelous (as it would become), is still very enjoyable. Much more enjoyable than the lightsaber combat ends up being in Fallen Order, which, while it mostly feels very Star Wars, makes combat feel like a standard hack-and-slasher / Dark Souls game.

My feelings on the modern gaming industry and Star Wars are difficult to sort out. I love Star Wars. No doubt about it. But where do you go when the things you love are monolithic? When they are slowly being sanded down in places, carefully and meticulously marketed, and spun to whatever angle will make the most money? Is that Art? I’m not sure this article is the place to resolve that. But safe to say, I love Star Wars, and Dark Forces II is a marvelous FPS, even today.