I really don't like this Starkiller guy. He's like if someone wanted to design Luke Skywalker, but hated his innocence, enthusiasm, and earnestness. I guess the Starkiller in this game is a clone of the original, but because both of them are so strong in the Force, the new Starkiller is picking up the old one's memories and personality, which kind of makes sense in that goofy, sci-fi way where the space magic has never done anything like this before, but the sort of things it has done before are similar enough that it doesn't feel entirely like a cheat. If young Anakin Skywalker can come back as a ghost (or, for that matter, old Anakin Skywalker can appear as a ghost in a purely hypothetical, non-cybernetic form) then a clone being possessed by the memories of the dead original is not so much a stretch.
It does raise all sorts of ethical questions that I'm not sure the game is going to go into, though. Like, what sort of culpability does new-Starkiller have for old-Starkiller's many crimes. The original Starkiller was an unrepentant murderer. It's one of the things that frustrated me about the first game.
He was kidnapped and brainwashed by Darth Vader at a very young age, so him becoming a Sith assassin doesn't necessarily make him irredeemable. He too, was a victim of the Dark Side. And yet, at every point in the story where it would have made sense for him to come to terms with his past, it's completely elided, as if the game itself didn't realize that there were some unresolved issues that needed to be addressed.
He just sort of conscripts ex-General Kota and insinuates himself into his life, and never once do we see anything remotely resembling a "hey, sorry about blinding you and throwing you out of a space station." Which is important, because it leaves me completely at sea when it comes to interpreting the cutscene at the end of level 2, where they have a tense argument in which Kota dresses Starkiller down for wanting to meditate and recover his memories instead of immediately joining the rebellion. Which, you know, is a pretty intense conversation to have with the clone of the guy who maimed you. What if new-Starkiller randomly gets back the part of old-Starkiller that was a heartless killing machine, hunting down Jedi with a single-minded obsession?
I should probably give it some time, though. The Force Unleashed II does seem more interested in exploring new-Starkiller's inner state, and thus is more likely to deliver a nuanced interpretation of the character. I'm not hopeful, however, because even in this incarnation, the game doesn't seem to realize that there is something problematic about him, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I'm expecting a half-baked romance plot with Juno Eclipse to take up most of the game's running time.
On the gameplay front, The Force Unleashed II is a worthy successor to the first game. The levels are prettier, but with less scope for exploration (not that the first game was great about this), and there are fewer Force powers, but the missing ones were mostly cruft and the controls are all-around smoother. I have no real complaints on that score.
I do, however, expect to finish the game in less than 10 hours, which makes me wonder if this is another case where I should have bundled a game with its sequel.
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