r/RewritingThePrequels

I'm in the middle of rewriting The Phantom Menace, my goal for this Prequel trilogy rewrite is to use common critiques and rewrite ideas to show they are possible but also easier said than done. A great example of this is changing Naboo to Alderaan.

It's a great idea but I had to change and add a lot. Full disclosure, I'm fairly young and the EU is a blind spot for me. I don't if Alderaan was ever touched on between Thrawn Trilogy and the 1999 release date. However, George Lucas has made it vary clear that he was indifferent to the EU, He didn't hate, didn't love it. It was over there, it was it's own thing.

The first thing I had to change was Alderaan's location in the galaxy. Alderaan is no longer a Core world now it's in the Mid Rim, where Naboo is. This is done because Alderaan needs to be far enough from Tatooine to warrant Hyper-space but still close enough for Hyper-space to not be needed, just like Naboo was. This also works because on the current Star Wars Galaxy-Map there is a route from Scarif to Naboo and in-between those planets is Tatooine, So it lines up with Episode 4.

Padme is not the Queen, she is one of now just two handmaidens. The other Handmaiden, Keira Knightley's character, is now Breha Antilles. Padme is still royalty but I'll explain that later. The Queen is now an adult and as of now her name is Zara (or Zarah) Organa, that name is taken form an early draft of A New Hope, if you have a better name suggestion fill free to share.

In this rewrite I combine Captain Panaka and Ric Olié (and Typho for later in the trilogy) into one character so the pilot of the starship is Owen Lars. I don't love the belated media rewrites but I do like the idea that Owen isn't related to Anakin at all but just friends. He works with Padme through out the trilogy so he has enough of a connection to the couple for raising Luke to makes sense.

Maybe Beru is also there as a co-pilot. Any scene that would make since for Owen could be given to her, like when Panaka introduces the droids to the Queen, that could Beru since she never got to meet the droids in ANH so she wouldn't know their the same.

Bail Organa is in this rewrite, he is a Prince and the son of the Queen. He is a couple of years older than the Handmaidens, if they're 14 he's like 16 or 17. He's not on Alderaan and isn't present for much in the plot because he's visiting his father on Coruscant because in my rewrite-

The Supreme Chancellor, Valorum's character, is Zara's husband and the formal King of Alderaan. I thinking of changing his name to Kayos Organa which was the name of Leia's dad in the rough draft of ANH. This is because Count Dooku is also in this rewrite but I want to rename him Count Valorum because that name also comes from that same rough draft, the character was a Prince and a member of the Knights of Sith.

Since this idea was reused for Dooku anyway, I think if George came up with Dooku for TPM he probably would have named him Valorum. But again if you have a better name suggestion fill free to share.

Okay one last thing....

After Palpatine convinces Zara to call for a Vote of No Confidence in Kayos leadership, Padme the handmaiden grows frustrated with the corruption in the Senate and decides to return to Alderaan. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan accompany her to investigate the return of the Sith. but this scene feels more like Rogue One when Jyn, Cassian, K-2SO, and a number of Rebels volunteer to take matters into their own hands.

On Alderaan, the team rescues security forces imprisoned in the Trade Federation's prison camps, although they were only able to successfully extract a handful. With them feeling betrayed by the Queen's absence, Padmé reveals herself as the Princess and persuades them to join in an alliance against the Trade Federation.

The scene where Jar Jar is promoted to general is replaced with a scene where Padme explains to Anakin why she was hidden from the public. One idea i have is for both her and Bail's safety, while yes her brother is next in line for the throne, if there are two potential heirs than enemies like the trade federation can use that to their sinister advantage. Another Idea I had was that Kayos isn't her biological father, but I'm not totally in love with that idea.

If you have better ideas, suggestions, and/or criticisms, fill free to share.

It is befuddling to see how the fans now demand The Force Unleashed games to be reintegrated into Canon (not knowing that it would erase Andor, but ok) when back in 2008-2010 people demanded it to be exorcised from the canon. The Star Wars Reddit and Youtube are trying so hard for years to sell everyone on these games that I was wondering if I was going insane. People still say they are somehow better than the Star Wars Jedi games. It's a very frequent sight. Even on r/StarWars, type "The Force Unleashed". It doesn't appear to be a minority, but a significant part of the fandom. It is placed on a pedestal it shouldn't be placed on. It makes me wonder if the Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi series will experience something similar in the future, too.

I remember watching the incredibly low-res videos of "Star Wars 2007" and being absolutely blown away by the technology shown there, alongside "Indiana Jones 2007", which later became Staff of Kings. Not only was it the first Star Wars game to be released on a next-generation console, but it also had the full support of George Lucas, with every piece of promotion revealing details oozing coolness. The groundbreaking premise of "Vader's secret apprentice" and the missing link between Episode 3 and 4 caused a great deal of speculation. The developers talking about ten different endings, promising a different story each time you play, excited everyone. There was no doubt that The Force Unleashed would be the greatest Star Wars game ever made.

Once the lid was opened, there were no "multiple endings" but two, which were determined by a single choice. It lacked the groundbreaking dynamicism shown in the pre-release footage. It was more or less a God of War with a Star Wars skin. Although the general audience liked it, it was quite contentious, with some fans considering it to be the bottom of the EU. Hayden Blackman (the project lead and writer, who was once a veteran writer who had written numerous well-regarded comics, was absolutely despised on par with how later Rian Johnson was treated. Around the time of the release, there was a series of incidents, like the LucasArts devs being laid off and some of the game studios like Free Radical going out of business, raising suspicions that production costs were embezzled. I remember some users calling it "Force Embezzled". Now, these games are looked upon fondly as the peak of Star Wars, so I guess time really does heal everything.

Despite TFU is beloved among the zoomers like "fuck Disney, this is real Star Wars", I find it funny how much TFU shares the same problems the Disney Star Wars later suffers from, like the fake-out deaths and the characters "somehow return" like TROS (there's even a precursor to flying Leia in space), the cringe kiss out of nowhere like Finn and Rose, the character just knowing where to go because of vision as a convenient plot device like TROS, a random turn to the light side like Reva, surfacial fan services, Bail Organa already being suspected like Kenobi, Mary Sue upending the existing and established continuity like Rey and Ahsoka, ruining Vader, and throwing in the OP Force superpowers like pulling starships from the air. Maybe the fans asking TFU to be part of Disney Canon have a point. It fits right in.

Playing today, TFU1's worst moments are when it tries to be serious. You can have a laughing track after each and every single one of its story beat. It's not even the garbage writing that makes this story such a parody of itself. It's that so many story choices are fundamentally so stupid you can't help but laugh. I have rarely seen a game that made this much of retcons and continuity errors, and every decision it makes is a bad one.

Galen Marek is the edgiest OP Gary Sue since Shadow the Hedgehog. This random guy suddenly appears out of nowhere into the existing canon and singlehandedly overturns the established narrative and lore (sounds familiar?). Despite being just Vader's apprentice, he overwhelms Vader himself and Palpatine to the point of feeling the fear of death. He grabs the TIE fighters like nothing, which makes the recent controversy about the Force users pulling back the starships with the Force seem quaint. He even singlehandedly crashes a Star Destroyer with the Force.

The Force Unleashed deals with the origins of the Rebel Alliance, and the way they go about it is by having Galen Marek doing some errands for the Organa family, which somehow inspires them to form the Rebel Alliance. The ending has Bail Organa say, "Are we ready to finish what he started? Then at last, the Rebel Alliance is born. Here, tonight". And the iconic symbol of Rebellion? Well, that's because Leia chose the symbol of the Marek family's crest as a symbol of hope, which made me laugh out loud replaying it.

Socioeconomic conditions and oppression giving birth to the Rebellion? Nah, it's because they were enamoured by Starkiller's hype and aura. Wow, why don't they recanonize The Force Unleashed? Are they stupid? Andor? That's just a fanfic. This is the real deal about the foundation of the Rebel Alliance! If The Force Unleashed came out today under Disney, the same fans who scream about recanonizing it would have stormed into the Lucasfilm building and demanded Kathleen Kennedy's head. Compared to Starkiller, Rey and Ahsoka are random extras.

If you pick the light side ending, it's vague exactly what turned Starkiller away from the dark side at the end. Well, did he even turn away from the dark side? When he was betrayed by Vader on the snow planet, he appeared to be fighting for vengeance, which is the dark side thing. When Starkiller defeats Vader and the Emperor, he hesitates for seconds to kill him because Kota says killing the Emperor makes him just as bad as him, which is one of the infamously shittest tropes that everyone hates. I don't even have to explain why this trope is terrible because I don't believe any player who thinks at this moment, "Oh, yeah, don't kill the Emperor".

If you were to buy the logic this game pushes upon the player, Starkiller doesn't really make a choice to not kill the Emperor; he only hesitates until the Emperor counterattacks, so Starkiller fights him again. It's not like Starkiller gets Jedi training and embraces the way of the Jedi, but Kota tells Juno corny musing about "he turned to light because of his love for you". So it was a spur-of-the-moment love and light for Juno? She wasn't even present there in person, WTF are you talking about, game??? Replaying the first game and seeing Leia make Galen Marek's crest into the iconic Rebel symbol made me lose it. When Rahm Kota said, "he did it for love", I laughed for a solid minute as the ending credits rolled up. That triggered my mindset to somewhere else.

By the time of The Force Unleashed 2, perhaps it was inevitable that the sequels would revive the dead characters and disregard the authenticity that they are in the universe. The light side ending is somehow shittier than the first game's. It might be the shittest ending in the entire franchise by a country mile. The Starkiller clone defeats Vader, roasts him with lightning, and shows mercy to let him live. Vader kneels and begs before Starkiller, the Rebels, who drag Vader away like a dog. Juno Eclipse is somehow alive and well, having just been thrown from a dozen stories high and crashed to the ground. Not a single bone is broken, as if she just took a nap and woke up completely fine. Does she have the Force power like Starkiller as well? Did someone clone her too and then replace her while she was falling? Did Palpatine cook up dozens of Juno Eclipses in her lab like Snoke? WTF is going on?

Despite A New Hope's premise clearly explaining that the Rebels won only one small victory against the Empire up to that point, and that they only obtained the Death Star plan from that victory, apparently, a handful of Rebel fighters already took over Kamino, one of the Empire's most strategically important bases, and captured DARTH VADER. Like, what am I supposed to even say to this shot?

However, the dark side endings of both games, if you judge them as a hype and aura standard that the game wants you to take, are awesome. In the first game's dark side ending, Juno dies and Galen is captured to be the Emperor's new apprentice. It continues to the DLCs where Galen is sent to Jabba's castle to obtain the Death Star plans, blowing away the guards, Tuskens, Boba Fett, and eventually Ben Kenobi. It then continues to Hoth, where Galen wreaks havoc in the Rebel base. Galen finds Luke Skywalker, roasts him with lightning, and turns him into the dark side out of anger. Both DLCs are vastly superior to the main game.

With The Force Unleashed 2, if the twist in the light side ending was that there was no twist, there's a real twist in the dark side one. Just as the Starkiller clone is about to strike Vader, Ezio appears, killing him. A new challenger shows up. In an instant, he annihilates the player and wipes out all the Rebels. Juno is dead. It turns out he is the perfected clone of Starkiller, whom Vader orders to annihilate all the Rebels in the galaxy.

It comes across as if the dark side ending was the true ending. For one, the choice is placed on the left side, not the right. The light side ending doesn't even conclude the story, leaving a forever cliffhanger that never ended, while the dark side ending is continued and completed with the DLC, massacre Ewoks, murdering both Han and Chewbacca, and having a final battle against Jedi Leia, annihilating the Rebellion as a whole on Endor.

So why are these dark side endings and DLCs good? Because they don't even pretend to have a shred of the depth and authenticity the main games tried to evoke and failed. The main games and light side endings try to posit themselves as authentic pieces of the Star Wars media, with the devs' insistence that these games are the "missing link" in the saga, which doesn't work because they already screw over the movie's continuity and integrity. DLCs don't and jump the shark so much that that alone is more entertaining. They acknowledge their non-canon status and take advantage of it to the fullest extent. It puts the player in the mindset as when you are reading cool edgy AU fanfictions. Take it as a power fantasy fan service fanfic written by 14-year-olds. Don't take it seriously. Don't think, but feel hype and aura.

No matter how you look at it, it seems The Force Unleashed main games should always have been exactly what these DLCs have promised: AU "What If" fanfics of Star Wars. A throwaway Star Wars fast food that should always be considered about as canon as Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Yakuza: Dead Souls, Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, Assassin's Creed III: The Tyranny of King Washington, and Hyrule Warriors.

Remove the terrible light side endings and leave the dark side endings in the games, and just go ham with the concept. It is simply fun to play as the bad guys, blowing away the Rebels and the OT heroes, and never be redeemed as an evil wish fulfillment.