Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 82, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

Ah, the days when you weren't forced to also play as a Space Nazi when you wanted to fly an X-Wing.

I’m ranking the top-101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.

To understand why a game published in North America by LucasArts made a list of the top Nintendo games ever takes an explanation, but hopefully, it’s a convincing one. For starters, Nintendo published Star Wars: Rogue Squadron in Europe, but more than that kind of “technically” stance is one that’s, well, tech-based. You see, Nintendo worked very closely on the development of Rogue Squadron alongside Factor 5 and LucasArts, which is how they ended up publishing it in Europe in the first place. And that’s because Rogue Squadron was more than just a key console exclusive with the Star Wars brand attached to it: it was the game that was going to prove the importance and worth of an optional Nintendo 64 accessory that could improve the console for both players and developers.

I’m talking about the memory Expansion Pak, which Nintendo introduced to retail at the urging of Factor 5. Originally, this was developed for the 64DD add-on that would release in Japan — the DD is for disk drive — but Nintendo would break it out as a separate upgrade for the non-Japanese market. The Expansion Pack created an additional 4 megabytes of RAM for developers to utilize, which, in 2020 when the 16 gigabytes of RAM Playstation 5 is releasing, might not sound like all that much. In the 90s, though, it was massive. An extra 4 MB of RAM was the difference between blurred textures and crisp images. It was necessary to even be able to play games like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. And it created so many new opportunities for content that Perfect Dark’s box even warned you that you could only access about one-third of the game’s content without it.

Thanks to the Expansion Pak, Rogue Squadron was not limited in any meaningful way by the technology of the time. Sure, there is some “fog” hiding what’s in front of you sometimes, which means enemies can occasionally pop out of seemingly nowhere, but for the most part, Factor 5 used that in their level design by creating canyons, or actual in-game fog, for enemies to pop around the corner of and out of. You can really tell the difference the Expansion Pak makes when you play Rogue Squadron without it, because without, the higher fidelity just isn’t there, the details are lacking in both the landscape and on the ships themselves. With the Expansion Pak, though, Factor 5 was able to go so far as to make visible decals on the bodies of ships like the X-Wing, without having the X-Wing taking up 95 percent of your screen’s real estate.

Given the followup to this game was a launch title for the GameCube that managed to remain one of the most impressive titles, visually speaking, throughout the entire console’s life, we should not be surprised by Factor 5’s ability to make an N64 game that still, somehow, holds up visually today in a way that even many of Nintendo’s first-party titles didn’t manage to. And it’s all due to the existence of the Expansion Pak.

So, yeah, I’m comfortable calling this a Nintendo game, considering the depth of the relationship of the three players involved, Nintendo’s publishing of the title elsewhere, and the legacy that Rogue Squadron ended up leaving behind for Nintendo’s fifth-generation console even before you get into the fact that it, professionally speaking, whips ass for a lot more reasons than just the visuals.

“Rescue on Kessel” gameplay, featuring the game’s multiple ship viewpoints. I prefer the behind-the-ship third-person one, myself.

Let’s return to the GameCube followup for a second. That game featured not just a Star Destroyer, but levels with multiple Star Destroyers and dozens of TIE fighters on-screen at once. Factor 5 absolutely brought it, recreating not only a faithful adaptation of the Battle of Hoth, but also the Battle of Endor, which featured two entire fleets and their smaller fighters going at it. It’s still mind-blowing that this was pulled off, never mind back in the early aughts.

The N64 didn’t have that level of technical prowess supporting it, not even with the Expansion Pak, so the original Rogue Squadron is a much different game than its successor. Factor 5 didn’t try to force these massive engagements on the game: that would have showed off what the N64 couldn’t do more than what it could do, and that would have been a failure of game design. What it could do, though, was display a highly detailed world with immersive, world-building voice acting, excellent sound that not only played as authentic but also impacted your actual game play — the screaming of TIE fighters and sounds of firing particle beams whizzing by your ship worked to tell you where enemies were coming at or shooting at you from — and do all of this while focusing on much smaller engagements and skirmishes that still feel big and vital.

Rogue Squadron focuses on the formation of, well, Rogue Squadron, Luke Skywalker’s guerrilla force of X-Wings and Y-Wings and speeders and more. It formed in between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, and while it was relegated to the original version of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, it is more well-known than some of those other EU materials thanks to the existence of video games like this one. The story begins shortly after the end of Episode IV, and focuses on the rebellion winning small-scale battles against the Empire while trying to guard convoys, but eventually grows to the point where they are outright challenging an Imperial Moff (that’s a regional governor, for those who want English instead of Star Wars) by destroying the bases and Imperial supplies under his control.

This smaller-scale story, set between larger stories, works from both a storytelling perspective and in terms of the game itself. It allowed a slow buildup for the scope and size of the forces that Skywalker’s Rogues needed to defeat, allowing the system to kind of max out on the number of TIEs and walkers it could have on screen at a given time as the story and the players’ own ability progressed to the point where more were necessary, and it allowed Factor 5 to spotlight something and someones besides the Star Wars stories everyone already knew from the movies. If you played Rogue Squadron, you then knew that General Crix Madine ended up in the rebellion after he defected from the Empire with the help of Rogue Squadron. It doesn’t necessarily make Return of the Jedi a better movie knowing this, but it does give you a little bit of “hey, I know that guy,” and without requiring you to read all of Wookieepedia or watch a Crix Madine Disney+ origin story series that explains why his hair looks like that to get there.

Maybe it helps that the N64 controller looks like a piece of equipment from space or a spaceship itself, but the thing controls your X-Wing (or Y-Wing, or A-Wing, or snowspeeder) like that was its initial intended purpose. The balance of speeding up, slowing down, turning, firing on the move, pitch, roll, all of that, works so well considering that again, we’re talking about a game that needed an extra 4 MB of RAM to really sing, and while there were some improvements made in future releases in the franchise, there’s no shame to be found in the version of things the N64 houses. When you figure out how your ships move, you can learn to dodge turbolaser fire, incoming missiles, and TIEs playing a game of chicken with you, all while taking down enemy ships, walkers, and buildings.

And you will figure it all out as you master each level. You’re awarded either no medal, a bronze, a silver, or a gold depending on your performance — accuracy, enemies defeated, time to complete a mission, friendlies saved, whether you found the hidden upgrade or not — and unlocking all of the medals of a certain tier or better unlocks bonus levels like Hoth. The bonus levels are decent enough, though something like Hoth is lacking in translation for the technical reasons already discussed above. You need no reason other than “I want to score a gold on this stage” to go for it, though, because the gameplay itself is rewarding, and you’ll want to feel yourself improving. The medal system gives you a way to know your improvement and the good feelings from it are for real.

There are some minor complaints to be had, most notably in spikes in difficulty, but those are relegated to specific levels. Like Raid on Sullust, which features you flying a Y-Wing, a very slow but heavily shielded ship, among what feels like a countless number of anti-air missile batteries that will repeatedly shoot you down. You get just three lives per stage, and finding the bonus shielding for the ship in an earlier stage plus learning how to avoid those missiles will cut down on your lives lost and failures, but hoo boy is it still a frustrating level even if you know what you’re doing. If you get truly aggravated or stuck, though, there are passcodes Factor 5 made pretty non-judgmental and tongue-in-cheek: “IGIVEUP” gets you infinite lives, and isn’t permanently attached to your game save if you ever need to deploy it.

Despite my love for this franchise, I was honestly a bit surprised upon my return to it that so much of the original held up so well. Not that older games are inherently bad or anything, but this kind of game is such an ambitious idea, and ambitious ideas from the first era of polygon gaming don’t always age particularly well or are compromised in some kind of hard-to-ignore fashion. Rogue Squadron, though, through a combination of smart design and Factor 5’s sheer talent in pushing a system to its limits without sacrificing quality elsewhere, makes this one worth returning to even now, at a time when Star Wars games where you can fly an X-Wing are once again on the market, only in 4K HD etc. etc.

Of course, those games force you to take time flying as a Space Nazi murdering civilians if you want to fly an X-Wing and shoot down fascists, so it’s a damn good thing that Rogue Squadron holds up to scratch that itch for me.

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