Okay, I'm officially sick to death of Star Wars. I know how seriously real Star Wars fans take it, but I've always been pretty much merely a casual fan. When I was a kid I was more into stuff with elves and dragons, less the spaceships and robots, so I never grew up entrenched in that mythos. I'm in a position where I generally appreciated it, but never saw it as the second coming -- or first coming -- of entertainment, the way many people I know do. And over the last decade or so in particular, Star Wars came to symbolize for me the perils of Hollywood whoredom, in that I now see it mainly as a multimillion dollar property rather than anything of emotional value. When I think of Star Wars characters, I think of that time they were on all of the Pepsi cans.Please tell me what the hell Yoda is doing in my Soul Calibur. I mean, seriously.
Game director Katsutoshi Sasaki says that Yoda and Darth Vader are a natural fit for the SC universe. I wonder, do they really believe that? Maybe I'm just missing the entire message of what's probably my favorite fighting series (SF, KoF, I know, I'm only a casual genre fan, let me be!) -- though, I have my own ideas of the message of Soul Calibur.
Darth Vader is distinctly less menacing as a crossover IP than he is as a Sith lord; it takes even more menace out of him than those awful prequels, and that's saying something. Am I being cynical when I say this kind of thing is exactly what I'm opposing when I write things like this?
I always like to give the people who make games the benefit of the doubt. It's easy to sit here from our end of things and accuse them of ruining franchises, whoring IPs, half-assing development or all of the other myriad of accusations disgruntled fans and smug, cynical journalists (neither of whom need even the most rudimentary idea of the game design, development and publication process) tend to levy regularly. In my mind, the people behind the games we love are people just like you and me -- they really just want to do their best to make a good product that will make people happy. And like I said, I'm not really a Star Wars fan, so maybe this does make a lot of other people happy. But it sure doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, and it smells like money and old Pepsi cans.
Then again, Gabe at Penny Arcade seems to be one of the biggest Star Wars fans that comes to mind, and in their usual deft form, he doesn't get it either. So who knows?
[Via Kotaku]
