Star Wars as an IP is incredibly popular with fans in each corner of modern entertainment, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Lightsabers are obviously fully iconic at this point, but Star Wars’ diverse alien races and remote planets are also instantly recognizable as coming from the established IP. There are fans who may instantly associate any snow-blanketed landscape with Star Wars’ Hoth, for example, even though the ice planet itself is hardly distinguishable aside from being a perpetual tundra that is home to tauntauns and wampas. So when Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s Cal Kestis went to Ilum, fans likely thought they were on Hoth.
Ilum would later become home to the First Order’s Starkiller Base and is iconic in its own right, but distinct biomes have all sort of been established already with planets appearing in Star Wars games. That is why Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s implementation of new planets was exciting - it meant that the franchise was paving the way for new environmental storytelling and new regions that fans would not be familiar with. In a franchise as large as Star Wars this is paramount, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor already looks to be following that pattern with Koboh.
Fallen Order’s Bracca and Bogano Set a Great Precedent
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s Bracca provided excellent exposition for the brief time players experience the dim junkyard planet. Here, Cal Kestis takes refuge as a Jedi Padawan who narrowly fled the Empire and is then hiding in plain sight while trying not to bring attention to himself or his Force abilities.
Bracca serves as a tutorial level that players never return to, but its environment is dense with cinematic, Uncharted-like platforming sections and the wreckage of colossal ships and vessels stretching out into the distance. Players are then taken directly to Bogano, which is another new planet in the Star Wars franchise that Fallen Order introduces.
Bogano is a ruin of fractured platforms with remnants of flora strewn about that tutorializes combat and puzzles, chiefly in Fallen Order’s Oggdo Boggdo encounter and Metroidvania level design. Bog rats, Oggdo, and splox all present their own combat challenges in the game’s opening hours and are a great way for Fallen Order to show enemy designs fans are unfamiliar with on a new planet in order to showcase Respawn’s creative freedom with flora and fauna.
Of course, players do eventually travel to planets such as Kashyyyk and Dathomir that fans may be fairly knowledgeable about already. But Fallen Order is still able to insert its own charm into each map’s design to create new enemies such as wyyyschokk and contribute to an iconic planet’s established lore.
Jedi: Survivor is Bolstered by Fallen Order’s Originality
The best part of this approach is that it keeps the Star Wars Jedi franchise fresh, and when iconic planets are inevitably traveled to it will feel like an exciting spectacle of nostalgia that only happens once in a while, rather than seeing every oversaturated planet that Star Wars has already milked enough iconography from. That is why having too many notable planets in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor could have an adverse effect, and from what has been shown from the sequel thus far it seems like Survivor will preserve what made Fallen Order special.
Koboh is a desert canyon planet with a rocky landscape serving as a wider map than fans will be accustomed to, debuting mounts for traversal convenience and in-planet fast travel as a quality-of-life improvement. It is true that familiar enemies will appear on Koboh, including B1, B2, and BX droids, but with the Rambler’s Ranch behaving like an NPC encampment and much more to explore that has not been shown, it will be exciting to see what original flora and fauna is introduced in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor releases on April 28, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
