I was ten years old when Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles first released. In the days of demo disks and consoles set up in shops, I was able to try the demo at the time and it was the closest a game had gotten to letting you feel like not only a Jedi, but a Jedi of your choice. Nowadays, with the Star Wars Jedi series pretty much nailing the “be a Jedi” thing, you might think that a remaster of the side-scrolling Jedi Power Battles is fodder for nostalgia and nothing more. And you’d be right.
Graphically, Jedi Power Battles is a huge improvement with this remastered release. It’s sharp, textures are much higher quality, there’s even reflections in places! If all you’re after is to replay the game, but with it looking like how you remember it in your rose-tinted memories, then this is the game for you.
In fact, it goes further than graphical improvements, with all the playable characters and levels all unlocked from the very beginning. Did you always want to inexplicably be Darth Maul fighting off Federation droids? Well you can do that immediately upon loading the game here, rather than having to first complete the game as Qui Gon Jinn to unlock Maul. And there’s the Star Wars music in the background as well, along with some creative uses of Yoda noises when picking up power ups that still make me laugh. It’s clearly designed to invoke that nostalgia, provided you have some for this game.
But if you don’t have that nostalgia? Well, the issue here is that this was an original PlayStation game. Combat is stiff and doesn’t flow very well at all – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve run up to an enemy and pressed attack only for it not attack and for the droid I was attacking to punch me in the face instead. Because moves don’t really flow together very well, attacking feels like just swinging a lightsaber repeatedly with a brief delay between them that allows the enemy you’re trying to kill to get a hit in because lightsabers only take about a quarter of their health.
Meanwhile, you can deflect a blaster bolt back at an enemy with a well timed press of the block button – easily the most satisfying aspect of gameplay – and it’ll one-shot them, so blasters deal more damage than lightsabers do, it turns out.
The side-scrolling platforming fares a little better, you can at least judge your jumps well enough to pull them off with relative ease.
What could have made all this stiffness irrelevant is the Force. If you had great Force powers that are fun and make you feel powerful, you might settle for stiff combat. Each character you can play as (excluding those without lightsabers, such as Queen Amidala) has three force powers. One is long range, another short, and another is defensive. Unfortunately they’re incredibly inconsistent as well as inaccurate to the lore.
I started with Darth Maul, because he’s awesome despite the awful film he was in, and his long range power is to shoot a laser from his eyes for some reason. Even so, you’ll be lucky if it actually hits a single one of the crowd of enemies in front of you. Qui Gon Jinn has got a particular set of skills that should make him a nightmare for droids like these, except here his long range and defensive skills don’t seem to work at all for some reason. They just don’t trigger – I get lightsaber attacks or jumps instead and my force power doesn’t drop.
The end result is just inconsistent in the same way that many of Aspyr’s Star Wars remasters have been. It looks nice enough for a remastered PlayStation game, but I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to play it for longer than thirty minutes outside of an attempt to recapture the feeling they had when they were younger and playing it for the first time.
