Hall of Classics: Jedi Academy

It's always nice to see a strong, ambitious game series develop to its full potential. Sequels are always tricky business, so when each successive game in a franchise improves upon the last while adding new content it's encouraging. Few series have evolved so interesting or so well as the Jedi Knight games.

Produced by Lucasarts and Activision, Jedi Academy is the most recent game in the series, coming out in 2003. On its own, JA is a fun, engrossing action game that does a good job of mixing up missions and level designs so it's not just one long slog of hack-and-slash. But in the context of where it came from, the game is even more satisfying.

The story starts way back in 1995 in the middle of a minor golden age in computer gaming. Lucasarts released Dark Forces, a first person shooter with a Star Wars theme. The game introduced the character Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial who becomes a rebel mercenary after learning that the Empire killed his parents. The story retcons Kyle into the main Star Wars plot by making him the person who stole the plans to the original Death Star. For its time, Dark Forces was an impressive FPS, sporting its own game engine and promoting a sort of "thinking gamer's" approach to the shooter genre.

Two years later, Jedi Knight, the revolutionary sequel to Dark Forces, came out. With excellent 3D graphics and the introduction of the lightsaber, the game solidified the appeal of the franchise. Jedi Knight had some huge environments and some pretty nice physics, especially for 1997.

When it came time for another sequel, Lucasarts put Jedi Outcast in the hands of Raven Software. Using a modified version of the Quake III: Team Arena engine, Raven drastically changed the format of the Jedi Knight series. Players spend the first third of the game playing another first person shooter, but then the lightsaber gets re-introduced into the series with a completely new approach to its use in combat. Instead of being the fun but clunky hand-to-hand weapon it was in the previous game, the lightsaber changes Jedi Outcast into a third person hack-and-slash augmented by a significantly improved system of Force Powers.

As good as Jedi Outcast was, it had its problems. The game is obviously designed to show off the new lightsaber combat, so the pre-lightsaber missions are imbalanced and overly difficult. The game still operates much like a first person shooter, in that it involves wandering around maze-like levels solving small puzzles along the way. The whole experience is hardly intuitive.

With Jedi Academy all of these problems were fixed. For the first time in the series, players don't control Kyle Katarn. Instead they take the role of Jaden Korr, a new student of the Jedi Order whom they can customize to be male or female, and also several non-human species. Players have a lightsaber from the very beginning of the game and they once again get to choose which force powers their character will wield, a feature that played heavily into the original Jedi Knight but was taken away for Outcast. In addition, the levels are broken up into smaller, more unique missions. No two are exactly alike and several don't even have a direct combat element to them. It's not a perfect game by any stretch, but it's one of the most fun in the wide range of Star Wars games.

The amazing things about Jedi Academy is that it slowly evolved from other, similar games even if none of them were really the same in terms of gameplay. What began as a state-of-the-art FPS eventually became the quintessential lightsaber simulator. For those who want a satisfying Star Wars gaming experience but don't have the time to invest in the dialog trees and learning curve of Knights of the Old Republic, the way to go is definitely Jedi Academy.