(The Disneycember logo is shown, before showing clips from Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. Note: The clips that are all shown are from Doug's Twitch streams of himself playing the game)
Doug (vo): It's the first ever Lego Star Wars video game. I think. I'm pretty sure. Okay, so here's the thing, back when the prequels came out, we weren't into this nonsense where, "The prequels are good now!". Yeah, that's-that's a major pee-yosa there. There are only two things that everyone agreed was good around the prequels, the books based around the movies which were surprisingly well written and Lego Star Wars. At first, I couldn't believe it. Wait, Lego Star Wars the video game is actually really good? But the fact is even before the Lego movies came out, Lego was doing a really good job establishing its identity outside of just building blocks. There is a real personality about them, even when they're imitating something else, which they often have to do. Lego castles, Lego space, Lego all that stuff. So I really wanted to play the original to see what I was missing, but the closest thing I could find is The Complete Saga, which has the prequel games and then the original trilogy, and I think the original only had the prequels. In this one, the technology updated a little bit, but not much because we weirdly couldn't get it on PS5, so we had to get it on Steam, and then Steam weirdly wouldn't let us stream it, so we had to do this workaround where we were going in between like two or three different computers just so people could see what we were seeing. It was crazy, but I'm pretty sure for all intense and purposes, I played the original Lego Star Wars game, and for the most part, I have good news, it does hold up. There's definitely problems which I just associate with that's kind of how games were made at the time. I'll get more into that in a minute, but people are right that it does have a very charming, funny, laid back identity that doesn't want to give you an amazing adventure, but doesn't really want to give you a game for toddlers, either. It's a perfect light-hearted game to play after you got back from maybe doing something else outside and you kind of want to do something else, but nothing that involves your brain too much, and ironically enough, developers usually do have to use their brain quite a bit to get a perfect version of that type of game, and this may not be perfect, but it's pretty enjoyable.
Story and review[]
Doug (vo): The setup is you're pretty much playing through the original prequel trilogy. In fact, you start off in this bar and you pick what door you want to go through to lead to the movie you want to play. The game has no dialogue, it's mainly just grunts and screams and I think that weirdly works. I think they're aware if you're playing Lego Star Wars the video game, you've probably already seen the movies, so story and character isn't that important, they're going to know you know what's going on. Heck, sometimes, I feel like I can follow the movies easier through this than I can through the actual movies. You start playing as Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, but as time goes on, they introduce other characters you can play as. But what's so clever about is that you might start off playing as two and then in the next level, you might start off playing as two completely different ones, but then in the following level, they combine them all and all of them have different pros and cons, so a lot of the puzzles and problems solving is just trying to figure out which characters do you use for what scenario. It's kind of like that story of the farmer that has like the fox, the chicken feed and the chicken, he has to cross the river. Like, sometimes, it can be a touch annoying, but you also feel really good when you figure it out.
(Footage focusing on the gameplay is shown)
Doug (vo): It's also nice to play a game where it doesn't have to spell out how to use the controls. I know why they do this now in games, there's a lot more buttons than there used to be in the old days, but I really do miss the kind that let you just figure it out on your own. In fact, that's one of the reasons I like it starts off in that bar because you could just knock over stuff with your lightsabers or even attack somebody else and then they attack back and you're teaching yourself what to do when you get in the gameplay. I even found out later there's a whole ton of moves I wasn't using that I never discovered and I like that, I like there is a lot that can still be discovered by it. I feel like it'd be a fun game to play with friends like somebody else grabs the controller and says, "Oh hey, did you know you could do this?" and you're like, "Whoa, no I didn't! How do you do that?" Like. it's fun. you can see a few different strategies with people, not a ton, but just enough to be entertaining.
(Various footage is shown, mostly focusing on switching between characters and collecting items)
Doug (vo): Switching between characters that are going to pop up later also allows you to go back and experience levels in a different way. There's some areas that might need a grappling hook, but you don't have the character with a grappling hook yet, so when you finish that level, if you want to go back and play as that character later, you can and discover all sorts of new passages and stuff. The game also has its priorities in the right place. You cannot die in this game. That is to say, you can fall off a cliff, but you just pop back right where you were, you just got to go around and collect all these bits and parts that I guess are like the Sonic rings, they're kind of all over the place, and if you lose them, you just got to collect more. But again, if you die, you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning, you just pick up where you left off. I think they know nobody's going to enter this game thinking, "Man, I want some high stakes with Lego Star Wars the video game!". No, it's just here to have fun and be laidback. With that said, I will be honest, I have kind of a prejudice with early 2000s games, they're not my favorite.
(Footage from Super Mario 64 is shown before cutting back to Lego Star Wars)
Doug (vo): You see, when Mario 64 popped up, everyone was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing it's going to change gaming forever!". And yes, it did, but it also made games really awkward for a long period of time. It opened up a whole bunch of possibilities and new worlds, but I think not being able to control the camera most of the time led to a lot of frustrating gameplay. I can still play a lot of these classic sidescrollers fine, they're still great games. But with the exception of a handful, a lot of games from the late '90s and early 2000s really get under my skin, I don't enjoy them. It's not until we had control of that camera and you can move it around wherever you want it that I feel like games became fun again.
(Footage focusing on the side quests is shown)
Doug (vo): Lego Star Wars is somewhere in between. It is legitimately fun and the inability to move the camera doesn't hold it back too much. A lot of the platforming, jumping from one thing to another can get aggravating, but again, because you can't really die and you just pop up where you were before, it isn't super aggravating. Honestly, the biggest issue with me is something that I know is not supposed to take a huge amount of time suddenly taking a huge amount of time. A lot of people hate in Episode II when you're driving this little ship around, you got to push these...I don't know, battery balls, whatever the hell they are into the right spots. And yes, you want your game to be a little difficult, but trying to figure out how the controls for navigating the ship works and also pushing these things around, it can be pretty taxing. Also, I discovered a problem I never thought I would discover before, this game surprisingly really encourages you to just destroy everything. Just about anything in the game you can blow up or lightsaber or just absolutely destroy. Now you know me, I like smashy smashy, boom boom, slice slice, all that good stuff, but in a game where the majority of the answers is which character do you choose to go into which compartment and use what tool and stuff like that, there's a fair amount of time where the answer was simply blow it up. There are so many rooms where I'm just looking around trying different combinations of characters and different tools that they have and shouting, "Where do I go? What do I do?", and the answer? Oh yeah, just shoot that thing you didn't even know you could shoot. On the one hand, there's a sick part of me that kind of respects a game is like, "Hey, if you can't figure it out, punch it, there's always violence". That's just so dumb, animalistic and barbaric that I kind of got to salute it. But in a lot of these rooms, things glow to show that you can use the force to move it around and everything, and I feel like a few more hints like that could have helped in one or two scenarios. Again, it's not a huge problem. Honestly, whenever I did ask chat, "Hey, what do I do>" and they're just like, "Oh, blow up the statue", it was just so simple and dumb, I did laugh at it. But yes, if I didn't have chat there, it would probably irk me a little more.
Final thought[]
Doug (vo): Still, though, these games are pretty fun. Yes, they do have some of the disadvantages of when they came out, but I think they work past it with its creativity, good humor and really chill atmosphere. I think we all had a lot of fun making fun of the prequels, I mean, usually in a really, really mean way, and it is kind of funny that here's a Star Wars property that's making fun of it, but in a really innocent, cute way. I can't act like these are groundbreaking games, but then again, I didn't really play the ones that came after it. Maybe those are better or worse or I don't know, but I can see why it got a following. It did so much more than what was asked for it. I mean, I feel like this is a game series that should have been easily forgotten just based on what it is, but it turned out a GoldenEye, something that was just supposed to be a movie tie-in game and the same way I see that game as one of the greats in a lineup of, again, in my opinion, not always the best time for video games, the same way this one stands out and gives you still pretty decent time all these years later.
(A scene where Darth Vader is using the Force to destroy an object is shown)