The Force Unleashed II makes the curious choice of depicting the dark side of the Force as more powerful than the light. It's something that has been an issue for the entire series, but it's especially pronounced here. The Starkiller clone is impulsive, overly attached, and driven by anger. He kills constantly and without remorse, and as near as I can tell, gives into his hate almost all the time. He also defeats Darth Vader handily.
I think maybe the game is unclear on the difference between a Jedi and a Sith. It seems like when it says "Jedi," it means "force user who is on the side of the rebels" and when it says "Sith" it means "force user who is on the side of the Empire." Other than that, they have no visible difference in methods, ideology, or goals - except at the very end of the game, where General Kota goes out of his way to persuade you to not kill the main villain.
I really don't get this guy. He did it in the first game, and that was a disaster, and then at the end of the second game, he's put in a near-identical position, and he does it again. I know that, on a narrative level, it's just that thing that stories sometimes do, where I can cut through hundreds of storm troopers and dozens of my brother-clones, and that doesn't mean anything, but put me up against a named character, and suddenly I'm supposed to care about the sanctity of life.
This game puts a strange spin on it, though. If you go with the light side ending, General Kota talks you into taking Darth Vader prisoner and putting him on trial, which is . . . how is that even supposed to work? Vader is canonically one of the most powerful Force users in history. Keeping him prisoner is likely impossible, and very dangerous, even if you could. And what exactly would a trial of Darth Vader look like? Does the Rebel Alliance maintain a court system? Who is going to be Darth Vader's defense lawyer? I mean, they captured him in the middle of a cloning laboratory where he was creating an army of dark Jedi, and, of course, he's the Emperor's right hand man, so it's kind of an open and shut case. And then you're going to execute him anyway? How does that have any sort of legitimacy?
Yes, it's important to get the Empire's crimes out in the open, so that the galaxy can begin to heal, but that's not going to mean a damned thing if the Rebels can't win the war, and winning the war seems pretty unlikely if they're going to keep interrupting their military missions to spare the lives of the enemy's most powerful space wizards.
But that's just the plot of the game, and seeing as how I finished it in five hours, that's probably going to be the least important aspect of the game. What's more important is how it plays, and that's been perfectly serviceable. You walk through corridors and brawl with Star Wars-style enemies and shoot lightning and such. If the levels were all different, I could easily do this indefinitely. So having them all be the same and play them four or five times each doesn't seem like that much of a burden.
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