This. Game.
This. Freaking. Game.
Okay, I can't hold it off anymore. I didn't ever actually play this while it was on the Super Nintendo, despite owning a Super Nintendo in my youth. No, I was saddled with the direct sequel to this game - Super Empire Strikes Back. And I will go ahead and admit that I am more than a little biased going into this one because of how much that game pissed me off.
But, when this game came out ported to Playstation 4, I...ignored it for the better part of a year. Then I picked it up around two weeks ago for something a little different after the bloom had fallen off of the rose that is Dishonored 2 and...this somehow pisses me off more than Empire did.
I mean it. I know that games back in the pre-DLC era were made to be especially hard in order to make them last longer to the consumer, and boy does the Super Star Wars franchise take the cake. This game in particular has one of the most amazingly unforgiving opening levels in video game history.
In a "faithful" recreation of the first film, A New Hope, Luke Skywalker heads out across the Dune Sea looking for...oh, wait. Yeah, no. The game just immediately throws us into controlling Luke Skywalker. Luke's play style this way is very Contra and Castlevania. Luke starts out with a blaster, though he does end up getting a lightsaber a bit later on. The blaster can shoot directly in every direction around Luke, but only one shot per holding of the "shoot" button (unless you have an upgrade for rapid fire) and unfortunately it locks him out of the use of certain angles that enemies will love to run up and screw you over with.
And yes, I do compare this to Castlevania as I mentioned before. Only with the Castlevania games, there's generally some challenge in learning the patterns of an enemy in order to fight it effectively. Medusa Heads you can learn the patterns of and work around. But infinity spawning womp rats from behind a boulder? Impossible even if I didn't have two other ones at any given time to contend with. And that's just the womp rats.
In the first level, the player has to contend with scorpions, some kind of snake thing that pops up out of the ground in a few places, and birds that attack you are angles that you can't necessarily shoot them at, and womp rats. ALL IN THE FIRST FEW MINUTES OF BOOTING UP THE GAME!. Even Castlevania had moments of forgiveness...they were few and far between...but they did give them. And, more to the point, Castlevania's enemies all had patterns that you could learn from and figure out how to beat.
...I mean, unless the game just hated you.
Super Star Wars is very much that through almost the entire game and rarely lets up. There are brief moments of (relative) calm such as the landspeeder part of the second level, but it eventually dives back into what can be a very irritating mess of enemy attacks combined with not all that great jump controls to be used in platforming sections. As I said before, you can play Luke, Han, and Chewbacca by the end of the game, but until you get to the Mos Eisley cantina, you're stuck with Luke and his rather irritating jump that takes way more button presses than it should take to initiate.
Say that I suck, call me a moron, whatever, but Luke's spinning high jump takes too long to get going and would be complete and utter bullshit even if you weren't dealing with everything trying to attack you at once. Maybe I was just too traumatized by the endless loops of falling from the platforms of the Sandcrawler that I'm honestly trying to figure out why they're there...
Oh, right. Platformer game. Logic is irrelevant.
Some high points I can give the game are in the sound direction. The music is astounding in its renditions of John Williams' score for the film in glorious 16-bit. When you fire a blaster, it sounds like a blaster and the ethereal hum of a lightsaber is as satisfying as ever. So, aesthetically, they hit every note they needed to in order to make this a feast for the eyes and the ears. But the game suffers from being one of the most unforgiving and balls-out insanely difficult games I've ever played.
So, it's good, yes, but it's highly unfair and a pain to get through. It is possible to get through it without saves (which the PS4 port so graciously gives), but so is performing a successful lobotomy with nothing but a spoon and an open mind, and, frankly, I could stand to be a little comfortably numb right now.
Super Star Wars is now available from the Playstation Network from Disney Interactive Studios and Code Mystics.
Original release for SNES was through Nintendo of America, Lucas Arts, and Sculpted Software.
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