Scheduled to premiere on the Disney+ streaming service on September 22, Star Wars: Visions is a series of nine animated short films produced by six Japanese animation studios. The anime-inspired anthology series Star Wars: Visions is the latest experiment in filtering the sci-fi franchise through a new lens, and it offers up a vision of Star Wars that feels fresh, innovative, and original while remaining faithful to the tone and themes of Lucasfilm’s beloved saga.
But that’s part of the magic of Star Wars, which has frequently reinvented itself in one way or another over four decades. Not every franchise can find ways to feel fresh after more than 40 years. Also, for how funny bighead Luke Skywalker looks. It tapped into the imagination of kids wanting to bash together action figures and take Luke on more adventures around the galaxy, and for that alone I’m glad it existed. Played today, it’s redolent of that era before there were prequels and midichlorians. Waving a lightsaber at giant desert bugs to save C3PO’s head from jawas isn’t exactly captivating in 2015, but there was a charming clunkiness to the affair that kept me stuck on it far longer than I expected.īefore “procedurally generated” was back-of-the-box selling point for videogames, Yoda Stories plunked unsuspecting kids into an X-wing and told them to go run around in literally hundreds of randomly generated maps.
STAR WARS YODA STORIES FREE
How did these characters get from A to B? We had an overabundance of action figures, free time and imagination to act out these adventures, and a videogame playground aimed at kids made perfect sense to keep stoking those daydreams.Īnd so Yoda Stories dumps the player in the midst of the “what if” that’s essential to loving these films, sending the player out on a few less-than-vital missions. Leia ended Empire standing beside Luke as a supportive friend, and the next time we see her, she’s the closest the series ever comes to an empowered female character, impersonating a notoriously fearsome bounty hunter. Luke transforms from a broken and battered Jedi-in-training to a cloaked, sinister-looking master. Lando and Chewie blast off to find a frozen Han Solo and wind up embedded spies in Jabba’s palace. Of the three original films, it’s that gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi that provides the most room for the imagination to run wild. We were well in the midst of a Star Wars media blitz. The Expanded Universe, previously conversation fodder for sci-fi conventioneers and comic-shop junkies, had gone semi-mainstream with Shadows of the Empire, a novelization about the space between Empire and Jedi that received the same kind of promotion reserved for a new film. An updated wave of action figures were hogging allowances. When Yoda Stories hit the shelves of local Babbage’s in March 1997, moviegoers had two months prior been treated to A New Hope: Special Edition, the first installment in a decades-long feud with George Lucas as he futzed with minute (and major) alterations to the original films. Its clearest descendent is the type of game you get Facebook invites to play with from former high school classmates.īut as a kid, this little timewaster stirred my fascination with just how expansive that galaxy could be. The seemingly never-ending permutations of adventures apparently were just variations on 15 levels. It’s a clunky, poorly written cash-in on the series, with bloopy, cartoonish sound effects. Playing it now, in my thirties, I’m questioning whether it was worth the hours I sunk into it on our screaming-fast 133mhz computer.
STAR WARS YODA STORIES PC
It’s in the same vein of early-90s lightweight PC action titles like Chip’s Challenge, but it has the bonus of giving the player the excuse to run around and bash on Stormtroopers. (Desert planet? Frozen planet? Forest planet? Check, check, check). It spit out randomly created maps of various Star Wars-esque locales. The game was an installment in LucasArts’ stalled “Desktop Adventure” series-low-key, cutesy titles that require about as much investment as your average game of Minesweeper or Solitaire. With an overhead view, players guided a cartoonishly large-headed Luke Skywalker, ordered by Yoda to visit various planets to save his friends, collect piles of robot junk, and swing a lightsaber around. Yoda Stories wasn’t much more than a lightweight diversion for preteens with a propensity to hog time on the family desktop.