Re-release this: Super Star Wars (trilogy)
Re-release this: Super Star Wars (trilogy)
Certainly not the faithful reproductions of the original films the marketing might have led people to believe they were, but they're still quality run-and-gun games. And absurdly challenging, too.
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.
Despite the original trilogy of Star Wars movies airing on television every holiday season in my youth — a tradition that holds to this day — I did not actually ever see the original, A New Hope, until it was re-released in theaters in early 1997. This was in the age of TV Guide, you know: you couldn’t DVR anything because DVR didn’t exist, and there wasn’t even the cable guide you could peruse to see what was on the various channels at this juncture, either. You either did some channel surfing to see for yourself what was on, or you had a physical TV Guide to peruse to warn you that hey, A New Hope is airing on such-and-such a day at 7 p.m. eastern, I’ll have to remember that!
So what would inevitably occur is that, while flipping through the channels, I’d see X-Wings combating the Death Star, and then (spoiler!) the Death Star blowing up thanks to young Luke Skywalker’s trust in the Force. And that would let me know that, hey, The Empire Strikes Back will be the next Star Wars movie they show! I saw Empire and Return of the Jedi countless times before I ever saw anything but scattered bits of the tail-end of A New Hope. I also played through the Super Nintendo game, Super Star Wars, dozens of times before ever seeing the original movie. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered Luke didn’t have to blast his way through a small army of Jawas in order to acquire his droid companion, R2-D2, and instead just like, paid for the little guy in a safe and legal transaction with the desert dwelling people.
The answer of how to convert everything from A New Hope into video game form was basically the same: let’s have Luke blow things up. He kills the Sarlacc pit monster from the third movie in the first level of Super Star Wars, but not before gunning down dozens of womp rats on your way through the treacherous desert of Tatooine. While driving his landspeeder to the sandcrawler to rescue R2, Luke mows down Jawas that are lobbing grenades from their own little hovercrafts. Also there is a giant lava monster inside of the sandcrawler for some reason? It’s best you just roll with everything: Super Star Wars isn’t meant to be a cinematic experience, despite its inclusion of cutscenes and (an extremely limited amount of) voice acting and such. It’s a run-and-gun action game with no shortage of difficulty, that will absolutely test you and your patience. If something like Contra never appealed to you — dying and dying again and again until your platforming, dodging, and aiming were all perfect — then you’re probably not going to enjoy this trilogy of Super Star Wars video games, released in order in ‘92, ‘93, and ‘94, either.
The length of Super Star Wars is in the retrying. It’s a little over an hour long if you know what you’re doing and can get through without having to use up any continues. You’ll play as Luke Skywalker, as Han Solo, and as Chewbacca, with each having something a little distinct about them. Luke eventually gets a lightsaber, and can switch between that and his blaster. Han’s starting blaster level is higher than that of Luke or Chewie, which makes him useful after a death in a place where there aren’t any blaster upgrades around. And Chewbacca has a higher starting health bar than everyone else, though, he’s also a larger character, in a game where the hit box is, often annoyingly, already much bigger than you think it is. So the extra health is maybe more a necessity than a bonus.
The platforming is of the pixel perfect variety, where you must time your jumps from the exact correct location at the exact right time, or else you’re going to miss that moving platform you can only half see, and then fall all the way back down to the bottom of whatever it is you’re climbing. Enemies often exist simply to push you around in the air or as you attempt to jump, in order to cause you to land off target, or not land at all. You’ll spend a lot of time learning patterns, of both your foes and the platforms you want to jump on, or else you’re going to fail. These can be frustrating jumps and moments, but they’re also oh-so-satisfying to pull off.
Platforming and run-and-gun levels aren’t the only ones in the game, either. Mode 7 is used to great effect here — though, in much more impressive ways in the later titles in the trilogy — with third-person vehicle levels. There is the landspeeder, as mentioned, but you’ll also fly Luke’s X-Wing at the Battle of Yavin, taking down enemy TIE fighters and laser towers on the Death Star before transporting to the trench run and a cockpit view. While you’re free-ish to fly the X-Wing around the surface of the Death Star in the previous section, in the trench run, you’re continually firing your weapons at incoming fire and the TIE fighters responsible for it, until you finally unleash your torpedoes into the thermal exhaust port that proved to be the Death Star’s undoing.
I have played the original game in this trilogy so many times that I basically forgot that it was supposed to be difficult. Muscle memory for timing- and twitch-based video games is a real thing, as I recalled while repeatedly spin jumping over TIE fighters leaving the dock inside of the Death Star without taking any damage in the process. It is tough, though, as it took a whole lot of practice and replaying to get to the point where I could feel the rhythm of the jumps, know when the enemies you can’t see are going to pop on-screen and hurt you if you’re not prepared for that very thing, and remember exactly where all of those invisible platforms you’re supposed to land on are hiding off-screen. This is the sort of thing you develop patience for when you’re like, eight years old and no one is going to buy you a new video game after this one for months.
Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Super Empire Strikes Back for short) is an even more difficult game. The developers, Sculptured Software and LucasArts, made for some quality of life improvements so that you wouldn’t need to retry things so many times in order to perfect them — you could now move the screen up or down in order to look for hidden enemies and platforms you would need to contend with, and a double jump was added, Luke could reflect beam weapons with his lightsaber, too — but they also ramped up the challenge in a number of other ways. Enemies now respawned even more easily: if you so much as looked in the direction you came from, the enemies you just defeated there would reappear and give chase. Levels were now much longer, and bosses more complex, often requiring you cause a significant amount of damage to them well before you could actually start to chip away at their health. You also no longer had the option of choosing a character to play as, like you did late in Super Star Wars after meeting up with Han Solo and Chewbacca: since Empire is a story focused on the characters often being separated, the game has preselected who plays what level for you. It wouldn’t make much sense for Han to be on Dagobah to train with Yoda, you know. Even J.J. Abrams knew better than try to pull some nonsensical bullshit like that.
Empire was one I did not own, but only rented, until it released on the Wii’s Virtual Console service in late-summer 2009. So returning to that now is… well, it’s not a chore, exactly, because it’s still a worthwhile and challenging experience. But it’s far more of an exercise in patience for me than Super Star Wars is, considering it’s one I’ve completed a couple of times instead of one I used to fire up constantly because it was one of the few video games I had permanent access to as a kid. It really is a truly difficult game, however, to the point that my replay of it for writing purposes came not on Virtual Console, where I do have it, but on my SNES Mini, since that has save states and a rewind feature that lets me undo a lot of the game’s annoyances for the sake of progressing through it all. I had to rewind a lot. A real lot. And that was just playing on the “normal” difficulty of “Brave.” I’m not sure I have the energy to play the game on “Jedi” difficulty, but if you do, well, I am in awe of your persistence.
Still, it was worth it — I would not have remembered that you can punch Boba Fett’s ship, Slave 1, to the point of retreat with Chewbacca if I hadn’t replayed — and I would have spent the time brushing up on my skills the old-fashioned way, without the conveniences of modern emulation, if I wasn’t trying to work my way through a newsletter schedule in a timelier fashion than that would have allowed. Even with the vastly improved Mode 7 vehicle levels*, though — the X-Wing shooting down Cloud City’s security cars is pretty funny, sure, for the same reason taking down Jawas in the first game is, but by flying through the clouds you no longer have Super Star Wars’ problem of constantly banging your ship against the surface of the Death Star, and it’s kind of shocking how good the Hoth stage is, considering — Empire is a little much. You have to really want to challenge yourself to get through Empire, whereas Super Star Wars, with its shorter levels and less militant respawning, is a bit more welcoming, and Super Return of the Jedi is basically a full redesign that allows for the game to remain challenging, but far more accessible and forgiving in a number of ways.
*The vehicle levels have been done a million times and better in later games, like those in the Rogue Squadron series, especially, but still, it’s hard not to be impressed by what the developers managed in a 2D space only meant to give the impression of 3D, especially when it came to Hoth and having to circle around AT-ATs to take them down.
If you’re just going to play one of these games, it should be Jedi, which seemed to have been the consensus at the time of the trilogy’s release, too: Return of the Jedi lost some points with critics for its similarities to the previous entries, but it also pulled in the highest overall scores and score average of the three titles despite this.
Super Return of the Jedi introduces Leia as a playable character, and she’s the star here, in part because she’s a chameleon. You can play as Leia while she’s disguised as a bounty hunter named Boushh, using a staff and spin-jumping her way through enemies like she’s Samus with the Screw Attack in Metroid. Leia is later available in her slave outfit inside of Jabba the Hutt’s sand barge, whipping her chain around and spinning with an attack similar to Chewbacca’s own move. You can use her on the surface of Endor’s moon, too, to assault the Imperial stronghold there that’s protecting the Death Star’s shield generator, and even ride on one of the speeders in the moon’s forest.
Luke is a lot of fun because his force powers are streamlined now — he has just five instead of nine, and you just have them, instead of needing to collect all of them in one specific stage in Dagobah lest you just not have access to them at all in Super Empire — and his lightsaber is at its most versatile, but he’s hard to use against bosses where range is your friend. Luckily, you get to choose a character after every death, so if Luke gets absolutely washed by a boss you need to keep your distance from, you can always turn around and choose someone armed with a blaster, like Chewbacca or Han Solo, depending on where you are in the game. Most of my deaths in Jedi, actually, were because I had selected a character I felt like using for the stage in question — say, Luke in the Rancor’s pit in Jabba’s palace, because Luke is the one in said pit in Jedi itself — who was just not a fit for the boss. The actual Rancor takes up most of the screen to the point that it’s heavily pixelated in appearance and also you can’t get behind it. It shoots streams of fire from its mouth, and touching it causes you significant health loss. Luke is a short-distance fighter whose ability to throw his lightsaber is useful, but you don’t have enough Force power at any time to defeat a Rancor with just that. So, you’ll want to switch to Han or Chewie after Luke inevitably succumbs to the Rancor, is all.
Luckily, extra lives are easy to come by in Super Jedi, at least in comparison to the previous two games in the series. There are now rebel logos scattered throughout the stages, and collecting 100 of these will earn you an extra life. Previously, you only found hidden extra lives around that would briefly appear if you happened to shoot in the exact right place, or you could get an extra life by hitting a score milestone, but the addition of the collectable emblems jumped the number of lives I had on me at any time nearly exponentially. And that’s good, because, as much as Jedi is easier, it’s really just comparatively so. The end of this game is as tough as anything the other two had: you’ll need those extra lives.
There is much to be said about the presentation of these three games. Graphically, they improved with each entry, but even in the first one, things were mostly pretty good. The lightsaber didn’t look quite right in Super Star Wars — not just in its color, but in its animation and movement, too — but otherwise, the art direction and all of that was on point. The scenes from the movie were kind of a pixelated mess that didn’t look like they belonged at the resolution they were displayed at, but as for actual gameplay, things were good. Super Empire cleaned up much of what was wrong with its predecessor graphically, with the cutscenes looking improved while everything, in general, just looked a little more colorful and cleaner, but Jedi is really where it’s at. The backgrounds are more detailed, and the game messed around with graphical effects in both the backgrounds and the foregrounds. You can really see the difference in the Tatooine of the original vs. the more vibrant, detailed Tatooine of Jedi, and levels like the Rancor pit play around with lighting effects that the original likely never would have pulled off if the story had called for it. (My evidence: again, how poorly the lightsaber is rendered in that game.)
Musically, you’re not going to confuse the quality of the sound with that of ActRaiser, but that game is why I ended up playing this trilogy again in the first place. ActRaiser’s composer, Yuzo Koshiro, was heavily inspired by John Williams and Star Wars for the soundtrack of that SNES cult classic. So, the natural place for me to wander to following ActRaiser was a game that utilized John Williams’ original scores for the movies, for its own SNES-era orchestral soundtrack. The Super Star Wars games didn’t just program in versions of the music found in the movies: the composer, Paul Webb, used Williams’ original handwritten scores and converted them for use in these games. Again, they’re not quite as impressive, quality-wise, as Yoshiro’s work on ActRaiser. But this is still John Williams’ music converted to a system with sound hardware that intentionally leaned towards the orchestral. It’s Star Wars music, it’s good, and it’s all you’ll hear in these games.
If you’re just curious about how these games play, then you can skip the first two in the trilogy: Super Star Wars is good, but it’s not a great representation of the trilogy as a whole, and Super Empire is a rewarding but infuriating experience. Super Return of the Jedi, on the other hand, is basically the only instance in which you can say Jedi is better than Empire, and it earned that right with its more varied level design, quality of life improvements, and the addition of Leia to the cast of characters, and for more reasons than just “hey, Leia is here now.”
For some reason, the only one of these three titles available right now, however is, the original one: through the Playstation Network for use on the PS4 and Vita systems, you can get Super Star Wars for $9.99, or play it for “free” with a Playstation Now subscription. Super Empire Strikes Back and Super Return of the Jedi, though, are nowhere to be found. Super Star Wars released on the Playstation Network back in 2015, and a Google search tells me that Super Empire Strikes Back was, at one point, thought to be available, too, but that no longer seems to be the case. If it ever was: the same Google search results show confused message board participants who believe Star Wars’ website accidentally announced a sale for the wrong game, one that was not actually available at retail. Whoops.
Regardless of what was or wasn’t available a few years back, though, the entire Super Star Wars trilogy should be available now, and it isn’t. Nintendo published the originals in certain regions back in the day, which is also likely how they ended up on the Virtual Console the first time around. Why aren’t they on the Switch, even if Nintendo’s rights to them are long expired? Why didn’t the other two release on the Playstation 4 and Vita like the original did? Why is Microsoft seemingly uninterested in these popular retro games at all? I don’t even want answers, so much as I just want them to be available again for the first time since the Wii’s shop shut down in early 2019.
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