Star Wars products love a theme moment—Force Friday, Triple Force Friday, whatever the Force Friday equivalent for Rogue One was called. Maybe they just love Fridays, but now Lucasfilm and its merch partners are capitalizing on a whole month to sell you things, with a specific villainous twist.
This March is now Imperial March, because, well, duh, and Lucasfilm is planning a bunch of new merchandise announcements with a suitably evil theme. Hasbro is leading the charge with a wave of new figures from Jedi: Fallen Order, Ahsoka, and classic Star Wars across its 6″ and 3.75″ toy lines, and although “Imperial March” will be long done by the time any of them come out, it’s still nice to see what’s in store for the baddies on your shelves this year.
The Jedi: Fallen Order three-pack (featuring the vision of an Inquistor Cal Kestis, the Second Sister, and a Purge Trooper) will release this spring exclusively through Amazon for $75, while the Vintage Collection Captain Enoch and Night Trooper pack ($55), as well as the individual Darth Vader and Stormtrooper releases ($17 each), will be available from Hasbro Pulse and other retailers this summer. Click through to see pictures!
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the Bad Batch find themselves up against, and running away from, some kind of giant creature. “Why,” grunts Wrecker, the team’s beefy strongman as he huffs along, “why is there always a huge monster?” It’s a fun gag, because really, with The Bad Batch, there almost always is a huge monster. But it’s also an awkward truth of the show at large.
Bad Batch has struggled to find a balance between telling a variety of one-off stories of the week (like, say, the perpetual huge monster the ragtag clones always seem to find regardless of what their mission was) and a larger narrative with its titular heroes.
Image: Lucasfilm
It’s why, for the most part, the series and its characters have largely felt stuck in place, even as the relentless Rise of the Empire encroaches further and further on the world and surviving characters of the Clone Wars—save for Omega (Michelle Ang) and conflicted team turncoat Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker, perpetual voice of every Star Wars clone), the team hasn’t really grown in character beyond their initial introductions. It’s also why arguably the most interesting plotlines the series has developed so far—like seeing the young Hera Syndulla and the burgeoning re-emergence of Ryloth’s resistance groups in season one, or season two’s plotline about the lack of social welfare for Clones as the Empire turns towards its Stormtrooper program—have, by and large, not involved the Batch at all. The series has mostly kept its momentum restrained, content to only barely advance its world and characters as it distracts itself with another monster of the week.
All that changes in its third and final season—which returns today on Disney+ with a three-episode premiere, the first batch of 15 episodes—even though the huge monsters are definitely still there (in the first eight episodes, provided for review, there are at least five, depending on your hugeness threshold). Coalescing around the fallout of that three-part premiere, which itself focuses on the captured Omega and Crosshair as they reconnect and endure their separate lives in the underbelly of the Empire’s mysterious cloning research facility at Mount Tantiss, The Bad Batch’s final outing takes a more serialized approach than its predecessors, deftly drawing together plot elements that have built in fits and starts over the show so far. It’s been a long time coming, and occasionally to the show’s own frustration in the past, but even as season three moves on from one story to the next, everything feels like it’s coming together to focus on one particular endgame—one with potentially huge ramifications for both the characters we’ve come to know over the course of the show and the wider connective world of Star Wars in this tumultuous time period.
Image: Lucasfilm
Everything matters here, and not simply in a quantifiable, wikiable “canon” way—it’s just that instead with this tight focus on its endgame drawing together myriad characters and stories at the nexus of Mount Tantiss and what the sinister Doctor Hemlock (Jimmi Simpson) has in store beneath its peaks, Bad Batch finally feels like it’s making effective use of the time it’s got. From the big monster action sequences, to character threads coming home to roost as the Batch reckons with the loss of Tech in season two’s climax while also dealing with the return of the lost members to its fold, season three spends its first half in service of starting to dig back into its characters in ways it rarely has so far, using the pressure cooker of its overarching scenario to really put the screws on its characters, and explore in what ways they really have changed in the long days since Order 66. Once again, this is in large part done most well through the lens of Omega and Crosshair, but this unlikely duo doesn’t just bring out the best in themselves but also draws that out in the rest of the crew, leading to some really satisfying moments of character work that feel like earned payoffs given how scattershot the series’ episodic nature has been in service of those characters in the past.
And while yes, there are some fun one-offs in these first eight episodes—a particular highlight sees Hunter and Wrecker begrudgingly team up with Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) in a desperate bid for information—none of it feels necessarily “wasted,” in either distracting from the central plot or away from digging into its characters more, all weaving itself into this singular path towards Tantiss and Hemlock, again and again. It works, not just because it means we actually get to sit with our heroes and watch them develop and bounce off each other more, but because it effectively sets the stakes for the season at large as something that really matters—grand in the scheme of Star Wars itself, and The Bad Batch’s place in its timeline, but more crucially grand in terms of what matters to our heroes as people, especially.
Image: Lucasfilm
Where the show has previously struggled to make its most interesting worldbuilding personally matter to the Batch, season three marries the personal and galactic stakes together perfectly, keeping everything compelling as it ticks over from week to week. It’s a reflection of a much stronger, more confident show, one that feels like it’s finally ready to nail down the story it wants to tell with its characters and is laser focused on doing so. Time will tell if the back half of the season will effectively pick up on the strengths of its front—but The Bad Batch has set a stage brimming with potential for an incredibly satisfying end to this chapter of Star Wars animation if it sticks the landing.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch’s third and final season begins streaming on Disney+ today, February 21, with a three-episode premiere.
When it comes to incredible cosplay, San Diego Comic-Con always delivers, and this year was no exception. The event, which ran from July 20 to July 23 and took place at the famed San Diego Convention Center, brought fun panels, cool interactive experiences, and almost provided us with an unofficial GTA: San Andreas restaurant before Rockstar’s lawyers shut it down. But what about the cosplay?
The video and photos brought to you today were all provided, as usual, by Minerablu (you can check out way more of his stuff on his Instagram page or on his YouTube channel). Click through to see The Fifth Element cosplays, The Last of Us looks, and much, much more.
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was first released in 2002. It was, and remains to this day, one of the best Star Wars games ever made, a near-perfect blend of the original Dark Forces’ FPS combat with third-person lightsaber combat that even modern games could take notes from.
Suddenly, Everyone Wants To Remake Dead Space
If you went and played the game as nature intended in 2023, it would be great! But this standalone port/version, provided you’ve got the hardware, looks like a huge—and decidedly more modern—improvement. It takes the original Jedi Outcast and gives the player full VR support, along with the ability to wield your lightsaber via motion controls and use force powers via hand gestures.
I need to be clear when saying the original was a very good video game in every respect. But people’s lingering memories of it, especially in the wake of Fallen Order’s all-ages combat, was the way you could absolutely go to town on Stormtroopers with your lightsaber, something this trailer is very aware of:
JK-XR: Outcast – Jedi Knight II VR – Release Trailer
It’s called JK-XR, and was created by fans as a “standalone VR port” of the original, which means this is a complete reworking of Jedi Outcast’s engine with an all-new download (though you’ll still need a copy of the original for everything else). That explains why the team have been able to cater this so specifically to VR, down to the new weapon and force power menus.
New gameplay from the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Survivor seems to reveal that, unlike in the first game, the sequel will finally let Jedi Cal Kestis slice up stormtroopers and other human enemies. And that’s a good thing, as this much-wanted change makes lightsabers feel powerful and deadly again.
The lightsaber is one of the coolest pieces of Star Wars tech and genuinely one of the best fictional weapons ever created. Instantly iconic, the weapon and its sounds are so ingrained in our minds that when grown adult actors in Star Wars movies or shows are handed a prop lightsaber they make all the hums and whoosh noises like they were eight years old again. And I don’t blame anyone for loving the lightsaber. It’s a powerful laser sword that can cut off limbs, slice through metal doors, and it comes in rad colors. What more could you want? But for a long time, most Star Wars games—including 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order—haven’t let you really slice and dice with these iconic laser blades, treating them more like glowing bats.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Combat Stances Explained
However, in new gameplay released by IGN yesterday, we see that this doesn’t appear to be the case in Survivor. In a neat video going over how the game’s combat stances work, the devs showcase Cal fighting different enemies while explaining how his various moves will work and how stances factor into combat.
That’s all fine and dandy. But more interesting to me is what happens during the fight against some Imperial scout troopers at around 4:14:
Gif: IGN / EA / Lucasfilm / Kotaku
Look at that! Cal just cut a dude’s leg off. And if you look around the floor at that point in the video you can see at least two more cut-off limbs, likely from earlier in the fight. This is exciting!
Kotaku reached out to EA and Respawn about this dismemberment and was told “The footage is what it is” and that the publisher wouldn’t provide any additional comment.
For many years now, Star Wars games have made lightsabers feel pretty weak as it can often take dozens of hits to kill a random enemy and you never get to cut off limbs or do real damage to your target unless they are a droid or random animal. In an interview in 2019, Respawn senior designer Justin Perez seemed to imply Lucasfilm and Disney weren’t okay with lightsabers cutting off arms or legs. This was further backed up by people who worked on season 7 of The Clone Wars, which is also mentioned in that IGN interview from 2019.
So, I had assumed that was just how things would work. Cal could kill all the innocent animals and aliens he wanted, but he couldn’t chop any limbs off of stormtroopers. But it appears that Disney and Lucasfilm have either relaxed this rule or given Respawn a pass.
Either way, I’m excited to play Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and cut off some legs when it launches on April 28, 2023 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
