Replaying the game on hard mode, I noticed a curious thing about The Force Unleashed II - for a five hour game, it's awfully inconsistent. At the end of the second level, you fight this massive, multi-stage setpiece boss, a gigantic creature that makes a rancor look like a womprat . . . and it's the only thing remotely like it in the bulk of the game. Even the final fight against Darth Vader is tame by comparison. Most of the other levels don't even try. Like, there's a second major boss battle, but it's just a single mech, not much different than the elite enemies of later levels, but with a shield disarming gimmick, that still nonetheless has only one health bar.
It gets especially bad when you throw Dagobah into the mix - a brief platforming level with no enemies, no chance of death, and little to no plot significance. It makes me wonder if they ran out of money and/or time while making the game. Because while one could certainly make an argument in favor of tighter, more streamlined games that you don't need double-digit playtimes to get through, presumably, the advantage of such games is that they would have absolutely no fat on them. The wild inconsistency of The Force Unleashed II leads me to believe that its short length was unintentional.
Though it does have a few things that could pad out its running time to 20 hours. I spent a couple hours trying my hand at the "challenges," a series of mini-levels that you unlock over the course of the main story. Each one has a central conceit - survive for X minutes, get passed some moving platforms in X amount of time, etc - that requires a great deal of skill and precision. The better you do at the challenges, the more valuable the medal you win, and the cooler the stuff you unlock. I've got at least Bronze on all of them now, but I'm guessing that if I went for Platinums, that could easily take me my remaining 10 hours.
The only problem is, I'm not sure I want to. There's something uniquely frustrating about trying to shave seconds off a task you've already completed. Sure, there's the ladder of mastery, and learning to enjoy the sensory pleasure of perfection for its own sake, but there comes a time in every second-tier workhorse of an action game where you just want to coast.
I don't have to make an all or nothing decision, though. I'm about a third of the way through hard mode, and will probably finish it in another couple hours. Perhaps the greater demands of the higher difficulty will acclimate me to the game enough that I can grind out a few more medals.
Or maybe I'll just switch to easy mode and tear up the Empire like I'm a living god. . . I could go either way.
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