Super Star Wars (1992) [SNES]

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

-George Lucas

Speaking of things that didn’t age well… Super Star Wars for the Super Nintendo took one of the most beloved, celebrated, and indeed worshiped franchises of all time and made a gratingly difficult video game adaptation out of it, almost antithetical toward its subject matter. Whereas Star Wars, here specifically A New Hope, is this enjoyable science fantasy adventure that can engage just about anyone regardless of their interest in film or demographic, the developers of Super Star Wars seemingly designed it with only the hardcore gamer crowd in mind.

Now that’s quite a bit of buzzwording, beg your pardon, so let me explain.

Who is this for?

At this point in time, just about every SNES enthusiast probably knows the reputation of the Super Star Wars trilogy. They’ve been called janky, poorly designed, brutal, the list goes on. They see the occasional mentions in people’s favorites due to playing them as kids, which also goes to explain why some people may find the games easy since they played them many, many times as kids, but general consensus is that the games are simply too hard.

Now I didn’t play these as a kid for more than a few minutes so I don’t have any personal fondness for them, but in attempting to knock the three of them off my backlog, I found that yeah, they have earned their reputation as cruel games that eat players for breakfast. I asked the question: “Who is this really for?”

I supposed that most of the people who enjoyed the movies couldn’t get into these games, but there are those who said they played them as children, and that must be who the games are for. They were apparently designed for kids who had enough time on their hands to practice playing until they could excel. That’s not a knock against the games (necessarily) or certainly against kids themselves, and in fact, it demonstrates the beauty of the axiom: “Practice makes better”. Really, that is the true hardcore gamer, one raised on the real meaty stuff and practiced the heck of those games. Everything else is just flexing to impress strangers on the internet!

Anyway, for those of us playing these games later in life, like myself, with less time and perhaps patience, these are truly grueling experiences.

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age

My next fundamental question, and the one most relevant to this critique, is this: why are these games so hard?

It’s easy to simply shift the blame on the developers, isn’t it? That’s tempting. We could simply say they didn’t know what they were doing, or in other words, they were too stupid to design a good game and so this is what we ended up with. However, both Sculpted Software and LucasArts made other, better games, so that doesn’t seem like the entire picture.

We could lay the blame on the era, right? To my mind, that’s an even bigger mistake. The 16-bit era and the SNES, in particular, saw a wealth of well-designed games with tight controls, high accessibility, great replay value, excellent visual and aural presentation, and timeless gameplay that still resonates with old and new players today.

Something went wrong with these three games though, and I think the primary avenue of investigation open to us lies within the games themselves. Why are these games so hard? Well, let’s take a look at what’s in these games.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

I remember attempting to play this game and giving up during the first few levels many times. There’s a platforming stage in the desert on Tatooine followed by a Mode 7 land speeder stage that has you shooting down Jawas, and that’s followed by another platforming stage with some pretty iffy jumps. An overview of these 3 levels reveals a lot of traits and design decisions that dominate the Super Star Wars trilogy as a whole.

Some of these traits are integral to generating the kind of difficulty that Super Star Wars boasts, and many of them seem to lean toward being downright unfair. The sequels to Super Star Wars made some changes to mitigate and alleviate the savagery of a few of these traits, such as by introducing Force powers that can heal your character, but I’ll address those changes when I review Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi

First up, to put it bluntly, there are too many enemies to reasonably manage or avoid. Aerial creatures are constantly dive-bombing you and scorpions require you to duck or shoot downward, bombarding you and quickly overwhelming you in that first stage. Because there are so many and they’re so fast-moving, it’s difficult to avoid them. There are even enemies–I think they’re Womp Rats–that jump out from behind rocks right on top of you and I’m not sure how to dodge them at all. Best to just kill them and keep moving, grabbing any health drops, considering they just keep coming.

Later in the game, enemies can even suddenly spawn over a pit and interrupt your jump, killing you instantly. If there’s no way to predict the danger or see it coming, the player can’t compensate for it, regardless of skill level, and that might just be the textbook definition of unfair.

Sorry for the mess

Because of enemy placement, you’re almost constantly bleeding damage. There are no invincibility frames after being hit, so you can chew through a full health bar remarkably quickly. Couple that with the array of projectiles in the third stage on the Sand Crawler and you’re out of luck. Oh and there’s also shrapnel chip damage. This is one of the more surprising damaging elements in the game, considering how many different robots and machines there are in the Star Wars universe, but destroying a mechanical foe or sometimes even a harmless object can create a spray of deadly metal shards that blast up into the air.

It’s been noted that the devs deliberately made the game hard and that’s why nearly every enemy drops health recovery items. Well, particular to this first game, hearts disappear rather quickly. Your character has a fairly slow run and a jump that doesn’t cover much distance, although you can maneuver with a crouching slide, and you’ll likely find that you will be unable to grab all those precious hearts that enemies drop simply because they evaporate so soon.

Your powers are weak, old man

Character movement is stifling. You cannot run and fire a weapon (something they changed for the sequel games). High somersaults require pressing up plus jump instead of using a double jump (again included in the future games). On top of the slow movement, the controls themselves are unreliable. I tested this on both original hardware and emulation. There were so many tight platformers on the Super Nintendo and this just isn’t one of them, which is a shame considering how tricky some of the jumps can be.

Platforming in Super Star Wars, with its tiny, fast-moving elevators and walkways, can be a real nightmare. Missing a single jump can occasionally mean having to restart an entire stage since levels are built with some verticality, like the Sand Crawler. This cutthroat design is especially meanspirited thanks to the timer present in platforming stages. The developers would remove timers from the later games. Maybe they felt bad about it.

I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they’re not much bigger than 2 meters

The Super Star Wars trilogy built its reputation on taking the action and adventure of the movies and translating them into video games. Super Star Wars follows the plot of A New Hope (or just Star Wars, for you older purists) and as such, it features levels that change up the gameplay from platforming, such as the trench run on the Death Star or cruising over Tatooine on a land speeder. These levels can be a great breath of fresh air and fun in that sense, although they present the player with entirely new problems to solve.

Without a manual–which, let’s face it, is the way a majority of players are going to be experiencing retro games like this–you might find yourself suddenly thrown into the driver’s or pilot’s seat of some fanciful craft without the slightest clue about how to operate it. And the ships function fairly differently from each other, as well. The Landspeeder on Tatooine requires you to replenish its fuel or you will lose the ability to turn while the X-wing has both third-person and first-person perspective sections, the last of which has you shooting down TIE Fighter bullets of all things. If you’re flying in blind, you’re absolutely going to lose some progress just trying to figure out what it is you’re supposed to be doing.

You could look up the controls online, of course, but I doubt you will.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this

So if you somehow manage to make it through the gamut of enemies and platforming to reach the end of a level, thanks in no small part to secret, invisible power-ups and/or health items that are remarkably tough to find in this game compared to its sequels, you’ll typically face a boss. Better hope you can figure out the boss’s pattern of attack (if there is one!) because dying means losing your blaster power-ups, making you weaker on the next attempt. If you think a lightsaber makes everything better, you may want to think again; while the Jedi weapon doesn’t rely on upgrades, it also has a hideously short range. Attacking with it is like trying to swat a house fly out of thin air with a plastic fly swatter.

Bosses also restart you further back in the level, often requiring you to run the gamut all over again.

Reminder: fair criticism takes time. Also, this is an advertisement.

The 8-bit Review

Visuals: 7/10

One of the best things about the Super Star Wars trilogy is the graphics, which simply got better and better over the course of the trio of games. That means they’re at their blandest, brownest, and most rudimentary here, but there are still some excellent moments that showcase this series’ visual powers, boosted by the iconic, recognizable figures lifted right out of the movies. The Mode 7 sequences aren’t always the prettiest, but the jump from side-scrolling to diving across the Death Star is exhilarating for the eyes.

Audio: 7/10

John Williams’ beloved score is lovingly recreated here on the SNES S-SMP sound system with all of the fullness and capable instrumentation that other games on the console enjoyed. Obviously, Super Star Wars benefits from the simple presence of Williams’ compositions, although with so many stages, it doesn’t seem like there’s quite enough music to go around, resulting in sameness. Still, the soundtrack is sure to please Star Wars fans.

Gameplay: 3/10

Something I haven’t addressed yet is the game’s choice between playable characters in certain levels. A lot of the levels feature Luke Skywalker but you can also play as Han Solo or Chewbacca. There’s not a whole lot of difference between the playable characters in this game, so you may not find too much strategy but it at least changes things up. What mostly holds the gameplay back are the movement, controls, and unfairer elements of the game’s difficulty.

Challenge: 3/10

Only a Sith deals in absolutes but the fact is that without practice you will find the game unreasonably hard. You could spend time farming upgrades and health each stage on each life but there is still that timer. You won’t look twice at Dark Souls again. Super Star Wars is ugly hard. Compared to something like Cuphead that separated its bosses in isolated stages, rather than at the end of platforming levels, for the most part, I’m not sure how anyone beat this game’s iffy designs other than by brute-forcing their way through in a time in their lives when they had the hours to repeatedly get their butt whooped for months on end. A higher score is not for more difficulty but for better-designed difficulty.

Accessibility: 5/10

Super Star Wars has an advantage over difficult games in the modern era by having fairly simple controls with not too many input demands or attacks to juggle. Compared to something like Sekiro, you only need to worry about jumping and shooting, or swinging a laser sword, and not taking damage, at least where the platforming stages are concerned. This means it’s a decently accessible game, at least, although not taking damage is no small hurdle in itself. However, overreliance on level memorization, secret items to succeed, and not instructing players on new controls when a ship level occurs knocks it down some pegs.

The blaster has a middling upgrade that homes in on enemies but the last upgrade doesn’t. Why?

Themes: 6/10

Besides the weird boss fights like the gigantic Womp Rat or the Cantina boss fight against that holographic chess piece monster, Super Star Wars follows the movie pretty closely. I imagine that’s typically why somebody would play this game in the first place! Seeing moments on the film “brought to life” in 16-bit glory definitely has a special appeal to it.

Uniqueness: 6/10

Star Wars video games weren’t anything new when Super Star Wars came out. An unlicensed game published as early as 1978 featured TIE Fighters. However, I suspect that this might have been the first Star Wars game to attempt to retell the entire plot of A New Hope from start to finish, complete with cinematic intermediary sequences. It seems like most Star Wars games before 1992 focused on aerial fights and the assault on the Death Star. Beyond that, it’s one of the most difficult SNES games, without a doubt.

Personal: 2/10

This game and its two sequels are just a few of the SNES games I own that I’ve never beaten… until now. This year I decided to knock them off my backlog. Well, they almost knocked me out, instead! Super Star Wars is super difficult, super irritating, super janky, and super not very super at all. Graphics and sound design can only get you so far, including the flourishes of fun in the better platforming stages and the Mode 7 levels. When damage is practically unavoidable, you start to resent the experience. Still… after completing Return of the Jedi, I went back and played the first few stages of Super Star Wars and I could actually beat the first two levels without dying.

When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master!

Aggregated Score: 4.9

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.