Comic for Monday 11/18 (Early High Res) (Patreon)

Jedi: Fallen Order may be the best Star Wars game since Kotor. Amazingly realized and a great blend of challenging combat and Metroid/Uncharted style level design, with lots of retraversing with new powers that continually change the tactics available to you. As a game, it's fantastic, and as a look at the period immediately following the Empire's rise, it's a really cool story.

So it's disappointing to find that the game's "collectibles" aspect is so... boring. The ACT of collecting is awesome, because locating chests often involves creative puzzle solving or out-of-the-box thinking. So the reward is in the doing, because the prizes at the end are often lackluster.

When I think "Star Wars", I think of many of the cool, iconic outfits and armors we've seen the characters wear. Cal, on the other hand, has chosen a poncho as his primary attire. A big, frumpy horse-blanket, covering nearly all of his clothing, is his primary fashion statement, and thus all of your "unlockable" cosmetic options boil down to ponchos, or rather, the same poncho in a variety of colors (sometimes with stripes!).

Likewise his outfits, his droid and his ship are restricted to similar palette swaps as the extent of their customization. So while there are a good number of things to collect, the excitement wears off after your eighth slightly-different-shade-of-brown poncho.

Your lightsaber stands apart in this regard, in that you can collect and customize a TON of parts that drastically alter the appearance of your primary weapon. You can mix and match emitters, switches, sleeves and alloys to your heart's content to create a super cool looking lightsaber... that is then so small on Cal's actual person in the third-person gameplay that it makes no difference what it looks like. Still, it's cool that you can do it at all, I guess.

The game is so well-crafted that this complaint, the cosmetic side of things, barely registers against the overall quality of the game. They could have left it out completely, to absolutely no detriment to the game's accomplishments.

But I will confess, I am having such a good time with the game that ironically, despite championing the single-player-only, fully-contained approach to the game, I find myself willing to shell out a dollar or two if it meant clothing Cal in traditional Jedi robes, or perhaps some cool discarded bits of Clone Trooper armor. Icing on an already delicious cake.