Why Star Wars Outlaws is the most authentic Star Wars sequel since Rogue One

2024-09-11

GamesAdventureStar Wars OutlawsWhy Star Wars Outlaws is the most authentic Star Wars sequel since Rogue OneWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Star Wars Outlaws protagonist Kay Vess shooting a Stormtrooper and droid with her blaster

As a lifelong Star Wars fan, and someone old enough to (just!) remember seeing the original movie at the Studio Cinema, Bletchley, in 1978, there have been moments inStar Wars Outlawsthat have filled me with overwhelming nostalgia. Strolling through Mos Eisley, passing Stormtroopers carrying their heavy stock assault rifles and Jawas selling gently used Astromech droids, has been a hell of an experience – but it’s only part of what makesUbisoft’s game such a faithful Star Wars experience. Like the acclaimed sequel movieRogue One, it captures so much of the style and meaning of the first three films.

There’s a lot of John Ford in both Star Wars and Outlaws. Kay Vess is the reluctant hero drawn against her will into a wider conflict, a regular Ford theme, which Lucas adapted into Luke Skywalker. Ford, too, was interested in life at the edges of the American Frontier: small remote towns, dodgy cantinas, corrupt lawmakers, the thriving underworld – this is reflected in the setting of Outlaws with its outer rim planets and criminal gangs. The whole Gunslinger quest, where Kay sets out to help a Tatooine sheriff defend her town from outlaws, is a classic Western narrative. Meanwhile, the samurai-inspired Ashiga clan with its complex codes of honor and duty are a nod toward Kurosawa. The game’s whole narrative, of a rootless warrior attempting to navigate their own route through a vast and devastating war, is the essence of Hidden Fortress – the Kurosawa picture to which Star Wars is most indebted.

(Don’t) let the past die

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The Trailblazer space ship being shot at by a TIE Fighter in Star Wars Outlaws

Return to Tatooine

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Star Wars Outlaws screenshot

But Outlaws also relates closely to the original Star Wars trilogy – in a very obvious sense, as with its setting between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, it takes us right back to the themes, worlds and visual language of those films. Star Wars began in a post-Clone War era of battered technology and corrupt star systems surviving on the outskirts of Imperial rule. Outlaws is there too. It returns to Tatooine, the heartland of the Star Wars myth, weaving in iconic characters such as Jabba and Lando, and like Rogue One, it makes brief yet scintillating use of Darth Vader and the Death Star. Just as important is how Outlaws uses the aesthetics, iconography and milieu of the original movies: the cantinas with their shadowy corners filled with diverse aliens, imperial bases with their monochrome interiors and walls of blinking computer panels; spaceship cockpits with their analogue switches and levers. A New Hope, Rogue One and Outlaws are all about physical technology – hard drives and memory banks, computer hacking tools and stolen plans. And while Kay is breaking into vaults for loot and data, there are Rebel Alliance operatives doing the same thing, drawing us back to the spies alluded to in the original film.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Kay Vess and Nix fighting to escape an Imperial base in Star Wars Outlaws

And while the Outlaws universe feels practical and weathered – a stark contrast to the digital precision and opulence of the prequel trilogy – the narrative also feels grounded. It’s about thugs and gangsters, and set in dodgy bars and the streets of crowded towns. There’s none of the meandering Jedi, Sith and Mandalorian mythologies that weighed down theDisneyTV spin-offs or the closing film trilogy of the Skywalker saga. This leads to a world that feels immediately understandable. “We have a fantastic world building team that really would dissect these planets, from demographics, to fauna, flora and aesthetics,” says narrative director Navid Khavari. “We followed the three second rule, which was very crucial to Star Wars: ‘do I understand what I’m seeing within three seconds? Do I get the story?’ Whether that’s an environment, or a character, it was important.”

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Indeed the very building blocks of the Outlaws narrative – its structure and underlying themes – take us back to the opening trilogy and its reliance on Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey, which was a huge inspiration for Lucas. Just like a New Hope, Outlaws is a story about building a crew and setting off on a quest: in the former, Luke gathers C3PO, R2D2 and Ben Kenobi, then Han and Leia; in the latter, Kay has Nix, but she bring in other experts, starting with battle droid ND-5. It was the same with Rogue One – a classic crew-building story with Jyn gathering a team of disparate warriors. But on a deeper level, both Rogue One and Outlaws return to the absolutely fundamental theme of Star Wars – parental abandonment and rediscovery. Just as Luke must contend with Vader, Kay’s relationship with her errant mother underpins the story and drives her forward. As Whitta says of Rogue One, “One of the things that’s very clear from the original trilogy is that it’s about a fallen man being redeemed through the love of, and for, his son. So that’s where the idea of Jyn’s father being one of the architects of the Death Star came from, a similar theme of the daughter redeeming the sins of the father.”

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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”

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Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”

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3Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action”

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4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”

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(Don’t) let the past die

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