There’s just enough polished jank and weirdness in Jedi Power Battles to make it a worthwhile nostalgic trip
I fucking love Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. I don’t know, I’ll always defend it, but it’s just a kids movie. It’s a silly movie with a hard-to-buy story about government trade routes with a procedural coup-like plan by one of the most corrupt and evil human beings in the galaxy. But if you can get past that concept, there’s actually a lot of fun to be had with The Phantom Menace in general.
That’s the thing about Jedi Power Battles; when it was first released back in 2000 there was already a Phantom Menace video game that closely followed the plotin seriousness. Power Battles decided it was going to be sort of the goofier retelling of the story, and really lean into the video gamey side of things that would make it much more accessible to fans who just wanted a good time.
It’s easy to say something like “they don’t make games like this any more” but that’s definitely the truth when it comes to licensed IP as big as Star Wars. With this remaster, it’s a nice reminder of that era of games and what they brought as an alternative.
The original was a really fun game and I have a lot of good memories about it, and this version doesn’t sacrifice any of those aspects. It retains the weird things that are almost charming now, like grabbing a powerup that just makes our lightsaber longer. There are even big head modes, because why not? This is a video game. Have fun with it. We can even play as Darth Maul or Mace Windu (and now even Jar Jar Binks!) throughout the whole story, even when they’re not in those parts of the film. The development team added the all of the original’s unlockables from the beginning in this version, so we can have the broadest fun as possible.
It’s also a really good co-op game because it requires us to actually cooperate. It’s not so much like a lot of couch co-op where both players are doing their own thing towards the same goal. In this case we need to work together to tackle specific things. It’s not uncommon to ask a partner, “I need your help to take down this droideka.”
Because it relies so much on that original’s charm, this version is still a bit of a mess. The developers didn’t fix anything janky about the original game, which I appreciate, they just made it look a little better. The camera is bad pretty much all the time. The platforming is extremely difficult to do sometimes. But that doesn’t stop me from loving it nonetheless. It’s just a fun little action game where we get to be whoever we want from the movie and can do some typical action game cycles.
Star Wars Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles is silly and imperfect and I appreciate that. The original’s delightfulness hasn’t gone away, it’s only become a better looking nostalgia trip.
This review is based on a Nintendo Switch eShop code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Portions of the video originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for February 2, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher/developer.
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