Re-release this: Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader
20 years and one day later, Rogue Leader is still a fantastic arcade flight game that the franchise hasn't managed to top for a number of reasons.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Will I ever be over there finally being a new Star Wars arcade flight game that controls and plays well, but I have no interest in playing because the game also has you play and try to relate to Space Nazis? Space Nazis who do bombing runs on civilians? No, because every time I go back to Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, I will be reminded of the fact that, regardless of the developer or publisher, the Star Wars franchise hasn’t been able to top this gem from the GameCube’s launch lineup. And I go back to it fairly regularly, because this game rules.
This article is being written on November 19, 2021, which is 20 years and one day to the day that Rogue Leader and the system it lives exclusively on, the GameCube, launched. My love for the GameCube is well-documented — it’s the Nintendo system that featured the most original titles on the Nintendo top 101 — but as I already spent a month celebrating the Nintendo 64’s 25th birthday earlier this year, I’ll just have to wait for the little purple cube’s own 25th to go big on that system. Otherwise, I’m going to develop something of a reputation, no matter how many Turbografx or Japan-exclusive Sega games I cover here.
So, instead, let’s demand the re-release of one of the Cube’s greatest third-party offerings, and what I consider to be its top launch title — which is no small thing, considering the GameCube’s launch lineup was actually loaded in North America, containing Luigi’s Mansion, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Super Monkey Ball, Crazy Taxi, and a slew of sports titles, too — as a birthday tribute to the behandled console.
Speaking of the Nintendo top 101, the original Rogue Squadron title ranked no. 82 on that list. While it was only published by Nintendo in Europe, they had a hand in its development thanks to its use of the Memory Expansion Pak — Rogue Squadron developer Factor 5 had convinced Nintendo to make this a commercially available upgrade for consoles, so developers could put higher resolutions and more content within their games. Unsurprisingly, Factor 5 created a game that, fog aside, still looks pretty great today. Making 3D video games back in the 90s that can hold up under the scrutiny of a spoiled, modern eye is a difficult endeavor, but Factor 5 managed to make the ships that are the focus of the game so detailed that you can see the decals on their bodies.
Given that, you will not be shocked at all that Rogue Squadron II, on the far more powerful GameCube that featured a Progressive Scan Mode that allowed for 480p output for those plugged in via component cable, still looks excellent 20 years later. I play Rogue Squadron II on my backwards-compatible Wii with Progressive Mode enabled, on a 55-inch HD television, and it looks great. It’s still stunning that this was a launch title, considering how good it all looks right out of the gate, how Factor 5 managed to create an experience that simulates the difficulty of seeing black-winged TIE fighters in the inky blackness of space without making that realism frustrating. It enhances the hunt, it enhances the dogfighting aspects of the title. The quality of the graphics actively makes Rogue Leader II a better game, especially since you are judged for things like shot accuracy: you have to know what you’re shooting at is something you should be shooting at, or if it’s time to shoot at it just yet, and since everything is clear enough that you can gauge the trajectory of a TIE fighter that’s way off in the distance even against the backdrop of space it shares a color with, well, it’s as I said. The look benefits the game for more than just aesthetics.
There are also these points to consider, which come by way of Nintendo Life. Gavin Lane asked, on the 20th anniversary of the Cube and Rogue Leader II, if there is a better-looking 20-year-old game out there:
Nintendo consulted Factor 5 while creating the GameCube platform, so it's not surprising that the team knew its way around the hardware. However, there are reasons that the visuals stand up so well in 2021 that are less to do with programming prowess and more with the nature of the game. The Star Wars universe is filled with flat, angular ships that are (relatively) easy to recreated with polygons, and having a big ol' star field as your background most of the time also simplifies matters.
The real thing that makes Rogue Leader look spectacular, though — even by modern standards — is its lighting. As any 3D modeller, photographer, or ageing actor will tell you, the right lighting makes all the difference. An intelligently lit scene can make a substandard 3D model look acceptable, or a great 3D model look incredible; Rogue Leader's lighting conveys the atmosphere of the original trilogy perfectly.
The lighting: you really have to see it in action to get a sense for it, but it’s true how much it helps everything out. The lighting is how you can see the glint of the grey, metallic portions of a TIE fighter against the black background of space as whatever light source is around in a given stage bounces off of it. It’s what makes the enemy troops and vehicles pop just right against the brilliant white of the surface of Hoth. And it’s what makes something as large-scale and epic, in the non-overused sense of the word, as the Battle of Endor feel like you’ve been plopped right down inside of Return of the Jedi.
I missed Factor 5 and their attention to detail and mastery of hardware every time I play one of their titles, and none makes me feel that way more than Rogue Leader II. I hope, now that they’re back, they get another crack at a Star Wars arcade flight game. One where you don’t have to play as the Empire, and you can use those ships the old-fashioned way: by stealing them for undercover rebel missions, or by putting in a passcode so there is a TIE Interceptor sitting in your hangar that you can use whenever you feel like.
As for the gameplay itself: the sizing of the ships is better than it was in the previous title, which also gives you a bit more visual room to play in on screen. It’s not just an aesthetic improvement, as Rogue Leader II takes advantage of that extra space with improved responsiveness in its control: you turn much more accurately, tighter, with more precision, and seemingly faster, too, allowing for a more realistic dogfighting feel. Which is good, because the number of enemies on screen at once has been bumped up significantly: the first stage you play in the game has you in an X-Wing assaulting the Death Star with Yavin IV overhead, and the sheer volume of TIEs, towers, and gun turrets on screen at once was mindblowing in 2001, and still impressive today — especially since it all plays so, so smoothly, as if there was nothing on screen to render at all.
You’ve got this tightening up of a system that already felt great on the N64 (and still feels good on that system to this day), vastly enhanced lighting, graphical prowess, processing power used to great effect, and all that we’ve already covered, but there is plenty of new here, actually new, that is what helps make Rogue Leader II the classic it is, and as enjoyable today as it was at launch two decades ago. You now have more control over what your wingmates are doing: you can send them off to take down guns or TIEs, or form up on your wing, with a simple press of the corresponding direction on the D-pad. Rogue Leader has got a tremendous balance between movie tie-in levels and a more original story that occurs in between them, with the idea being that the formation of Rogue Squadron began with Luke Skywalker showing up to join the rebellion, and ends with the destruction of the second Death Star. You blow up the Death Star on the trench run from A New Hope, defend the hidden base on Hoth and take down AT-ATs like in Empire Strikes Back, and focus on the non-Skywalker portions of the Battle of Endor, as part of a fleet that finds out just a little too late that this battle station is fully armed and operational.
Unlike with the original, you spend most of this game playing as Wedge Antilles, rather than Luke Skywalker: in Rogue Squadron, the movie tie-in stages were at a minimum, with the game basically set in-between movies but still featuring characters who existed elsewhere in the franchise, so Luke could stick around to do whatever since he wasn’t supposed to be off elsewhere being trained as a Jedi or getting his hand cut off or what have you. Rogue Leader, however, tells the story of Wedge — to the point that Factor 5 got Denis Lawson to come in and record new lines for his Star Wars character — and what Rogue Squadron was up to while Luke was busy having all that other stuff happen to him. It’s from a certain point of view before that was a story anthology, you know?
And man, does that other view kick ass. The trench run is good, and as said, the volume of TIEs and turrets will make you say wow the first time you play it, but it’s the other tie-in stages that really sing. The Battle of Hoth has been done a million times in video games at this point, but this is a real high point: you’re in a snowspeeder, of course, fighting off waves of AT-STs and Stormtroopers in their snow gear, defending the shield generator. And then, the AT-ATs arrive, and you get to take them down with your tow cable in a much more satisfying and accurate way than you were able to in the original Rogue Squadron. Endor is the true star of the show, though, and of the entire game: it features the entire rebel fleet as well as three Star Destroyers, and is broken into two distinct parts that must be completed in one attempt.
The first has you flying toward the Death Star until you realize it’s operational: when you turn around, the empire’s fleet is behind you. Just like in the movies, the decision is made to start fighting back and trying to take down Star Destroyers, which is no easy task. Before you attempt that feat, however, you must protect the medical frigate from seemingly endless TIE fighters and bombers. The rebels’ various ships will attempt to help out with this, and you’ll want to keep them from being destroyed, too, but your focus needs to be on the medical frigate, or else it absolutely will be bombed into oblivion, causing you to fail.
Once you’ve successfully protected the medical frigate, it’s time to assault the Star Destroyers. All three of them are firing everything they have at you at the same time while you dodge and weave in between laser fire, and also, you’re being chased by entire squadrons of TIEs. You’ve downed a Star Destroyer before, and it was the focus of an entire mission, such is the significance of the task, but now you’re being asked to do away with three of them: first by blowing out its various shield generators, found above and below the massive craft, and lastly by blowing up the now-unprotected bridge where the controls and commanding officers exist. The Star Destroyers don’t just go down and disappear when you manage to blow the bridge, however: they start to fall, to descend where gravity will take them, but they keep firing, and firing, and firing, so you’re never truly free of the ships until they’ve fallen out of range.
That all of this occurs on screen, smoothly, and that it feels so good to fly over and around your allies’ ships in order to pop out from behind a trio of TIEs and mow them all down before they realize what’s happening… basically I would like to stop writing about it and just go play it again.
The game is much more than its reproduction of battles you already know about, however: the other stages help flesh out just what was happening off-screen, in a logical way that also doesn’t seem forced. You’ll eventually go undercover as Wedge to steal an Imperial shuttle from an Imperial academy — the very same shuttle the rebels end up using in their assault on the Death Star’s shield generator in Return of the Jedi. It’s an interstitial design like that, just little nods to the movies whose existence makes sense, like in the second stage which sees you flying through a nebula, protecting the convoy of ships escaping the discovered Yavin base in order to find their new hideaway, which will eventually be Hoth. A squad of TIE Interceptors — faster than the standard fighters — arrives, and you eventually switch to the shield-deficient, but fast-as-hell A-Wing to counter them, all the while dodging trash and wreckage that’s flying through space until you reach the nebula itself.
Inside, visibility is at a minimum, the glow of the nebula masking the location of the Interceptors, but you can switch on your targeting computer and get a non-visible light spectrum reading of their location within the clouds. This targeting computer is always available to you, but be careful: you don’t want to overdo using it, or else it’ll impact whether you get a post-mission medal or not, and what rank of medal. As you can imagine, in order to get a Gold medal on the Death Star trench run stage, you can’t use your targeting computer even once.
The A-Wing is fun — and no ship saw more of an improvement in this sequel than this, thanks to the improved precision of the controls — but the B-Wing is the star of the ships this time around. Absent from the original game, the B-Wing is introduced to you as something of a jack-of-all trades ship. It lacks the pure speed of the A-Wing, but it can give the X-Wing a run for its money as a fighter, and it’s a far more flexible ship for a bombing mission gone wrong than the slow-but-steady Y-Wing is capable of being. And it’s just so much fun to fly, since the cockpit and pilot always stay level, with the ship moving around the cockpit, in addition to the fact that it’s two modes — vertical and horizontal — are a significant change from the X-Wing and the positioning of its S-Foils. Master the B-Wing’s strengths, and you’ll be taking down Star Destroyers with it in a way that nets you Gold medals in no time.
I say that, but even more than in the original, this is a game where you are going to have to work to get those Golds. They require you defeat far more enemies than is necessary to complete a level, and with sometimes absurdly high accuracy, too, and all done in a time frame that feels like it was as quick as any developer on the team was able to manage after hundreds of hours of testing. It will take familiarity, skill, and some instantaneous and correct decision-making to get golds in most of the game’s stages, and you better not get shot out of the sky, either. You might have three lives per stage, but consider a Gold medal the canon run of a level, where Wedge does not get blown up at all.
Plenty of ships, plenty of level diversity, a difficult but extremely rewarding medal system, and all in a game that serves the original trilogy’s movies well while producing plenty of greatness that is built on far more than “wouldn’t it be cool to play this battle you saw in the theater?” Rogue Leader II is a perfect sequel to an already great game, and it hasn’t been surpassed in the two decades since. No Star Wars arcade flight game feels as good: games like Jedi Starfighter just feel… off, in comparison, and their level design is absolutely no match for what Rogue Leader II put out there, either. Even the HD-upscaled Jedi Starfighter on the Playstation 4 doesn’t look as good as Rogue Leader II’s 480p experience, thanks to just how phenomenal of a job Factor 5 did at squeezing the GameCube’s capabilities for nearly all they were worth. And, of course, because of the lighting.
Star Wars: Squadrons might have been made with modern systems in mind, and has the full backing of the power of those consoles in its look, but again: it makes you play as Space Nazis in order to get to the good stuff, which is blowing up Space Nazis. Play Rogue Leader II, instead. Make more noise about the need for a re-release of Rogue Leader II — hey, if Factor 5 can come back and get to work on an anthology of every Turrican game ever, then they can surely ping Disney and whoever has the Star Wars license for video games at that moment to talk about releasing an HD Rogue Squadron collection. The jewel of such a release would be Rogue Leader, but even if we don’t get something like that, thankfully, this is not a GameCube game whose secondhand price has grown exponentially in the two decades since its release. Grab a copy on Ebay for $10-20, or download it to play through the Dolphin emulator. Either way, you’re going to be pleased that you did, and more than willing to dive in again if Rogue Leader ever does get a modern re-release or remastering.
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