I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while because I finished both of these games in March, and it initially was a trio review along with Spider-Man 2, but I had more important things to talk about (like the magnificent production of Alistair McDowall’s X directed by Rosie Glen-Lambert.) Looking at a gaming landscape full of sequels to games that came out towards the end of the PS4/Xbox One generation, it’s gotten harder to tell what makes a good sequel or not. So I thought I would talk about it! This post originated as a 20 minute yap-session where my girlfriend made the mistake of asking me what I think about Ghostrunner II, and it eventually turned into something a little more legible. So enjoy! I played both on PS5, but they’re available on the full next-gen lineup.
Jedi: Survivor
After several years on the run from the Empire, Cal Kestis and his ragtag bunch have learned of a planet that could finally be their safe haven, but have a daunting journey ahead of them if they want to make it there alive.
As someone who had little-to-no technical issues— one crash in an entire 41 hour playthrough— I thought this was one of the most fun games I’ve played in a long time. I got lost on the main planet so often, and the surprises never stopped thanks to a rich variety of environments laid out across this sprawling landscape. Swamps, cliff-sides, riverbanks, grasslands, deep caverns, and more are scattered throughout a singular planet. One of my only problems with its predecessor, Fallen Order, was that I wanted another planet to make the story feel a little bigger. Survivor somehow manages to have fewer planets, yet it doesn’t feel like it because of the seamless flow between diverse regions on the main planet. It always felt like there was something new out there to discover, whether it was related to the story or not. More planets didn’t end up being the important part. I was pleased with how Survivor created more concentrated and deliberate environments with such a degree of cohesion.
Something that bothers me about some sequels, and even my favorite game is guilty of, is resetting the the protagonist by stripping away all of the abilities obtained in the first game. Survivor instead opts to let Cal get stronger and stronger with new abilities that complement the base that the developers laid in the first game. In the sequel, they put great attention into making the platforming/traversal segments a more engaging portion of the gameplay, and I think they absolutely succeeded. Fallen Order was never able to make these sequences all that fun, but its contemporary makes leaps and bounds to improve them. Equipping Cal with an air dash and a grapple hook, as well as introducing a Yoshi-esque mount to ride around on are all great ways to make movement more than just holding forward on the stick.
The breadth of tools within the combat are also innovated on in Survivor. The player is offered five lightsaber fighting styles and can equip two at a time, which grants flexibility in terms of how the player prioritizes speed, strength, range, and defense. Combined with various new Force-related abilities, there’s a much stronger sense of progression throughout this game than the one that came before it. I played the whole game on hard mode, which I could not do for the first game due to a couple of insane difficulty spikes, but in Survivor I never felt like I needed to turn it down. Improvements to the pacing and gradual difficulty growth were super evident.
I was struck early on by Gordy Haab and Stephen Barton’s incredible score, who carve out Cal’s theme within the pantheon of motifs in Star Wars music and weave it into this great, decades-spanning tapestry. The atmosphere is completed so effectively by the music and sound design in every corner of this galaxy. I often would play less aggressively in combat so that I could hit as many parries in a row as I could, since that parry sound effect was just that satisfying. This is not something that they “fixed” from the previous game, but I thought that the audio experience was knocked out of the park and wanted to mention it briefly.
I have so few complaints about this game, but one of them is the cutscene presentation. Many times in my playthrough, I remarked that it’s strange how in 2023 they still need to go from fullscreen to widescreen and halve the frame rate to 30 fps, similar to a frequent culprit on this blog: Ghost of Tsushima. Other games of a similar scale, such as Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, are able to seamlessly transition between cutscene and gameplay with no changes to the presentation, so I thought this was weird for Survivor to incorporate. But this is not remotely a deal-breaker in the grand scheme of things.
Ghostrunner II
After sacrificing himself to overthrow a tyrannical dictator, a cyborg ninja warrior is retconned back to life to deal with a new threat.
This game gets on my nerves. It really does, and it’s because of how much I like the first one. And that game gets on my nerves too! I think I really like the idea of Ghostrunner, but these games won’t stop getting in their own way.
For starters, they try so hard to make the story of this game work, but it just won’t. It was one of the most unmemorable stories I’ve ever digested, and even though I only finished it about a month ago, I had to look up the synopsis to write this. Ordinarily a first-person action game with a superficial story is no big deal (a la Doom Eternal) but they keep trying to force the player to engage with it. Every level or two, you get booted out to a hub world where you have to talk to NPCs in order to reach the next level, and the dialogue/character animations are simply not good. Coupled with them bringing back the cyber-void puzzles from the first game— its worst aspect— the developers keep finding new ways to obstruct the player from playing Ghostrunner. I had often praised the first game for its story delivery since cutscenes were replaced with earpiece dialogue that ran concurrently with gameplay, removing any direct interruptions from the action. I feel like that’s the optimal way for Ghostrunner to flow, and definitely needed no changing. Yet they felt the need to fix what wasn’t broken.
A sequel should always aim to elevate the experience of the first game while also carving out its own identity. When Ghostrunner II is playing at its best, it is playing exactly how Ghostrunner did. And believe me, I really do love the gameplay. It’s high-octane, high-intensity, and requires a lot of thought from the player on how to triumph over a tough level. But Ghostrunner II suffers from a heap of technical problems— yes, far worse than Jedi: Survivor, a game made by EA— that incur common frustration and disappointment that the game is forcing you to repeat a level over and over because of things like the grappling hook not pulling you forward and causing you to fall straight off a ledge, or clipping you through a wall, or collision detection in general. It’s hard to enjoy this game when I spent so much time wishing it’d let me.
Two things that were super prominent in the marketing were driving a motorcycle and going outside of the tower and cyberpunk/Asian neo-futuristic city that the first game was confined within. And they both underperform as selling points as well as within the context of the game itself. All the aforementioned bugs pale in comparison to the disaster of the motorcycle, with frame rate drops and collision detection errors galore. Going into the open dystopian expanse seemed like a great way for this game to expand its scope, but this portion of the story is proportionally much smaller than the time spent still inside the tower/city. Along with the unimpressive story and characters, the good set pieces are essentially retreads of the settings from the first game, and the new ones are boring.
One of the highlights of the first Ghostrunner was its first boss fight, an enormous energy column with hundreds of spinning lasers that outline an intricately ascending maze. I feel like this level represents a perfect benchmark for the potential of what this game has to offer, giving the player the best of both worlds that the gameplay is built upon (fast-paced platforming and intense combat.) The rest of the game featured more standard-issue bosses, where you evade attacks and wait to strike. I hoped that the former would be more present in the sequel, however all of them bear more similarity to the latter. None of the bosses in Ghostrunner II are noteworthy in any way, nor do they push the boundaries of what their game is capable of. Even the giant sandworm got repetitive.
All of this is to say that I am frustrated with Ghostrunner II as a sequel. It’s a fine game, and I’m sure a lot of people would enjoy it. In my opinion, first-person platforming games are the genre I want to see grow the most. But in the case of this game in particular, it’s the stagnation and sameness that disappoint me as a fan. The developers have shown that despite me and many other players begging them in the Ghostrunner discord server for a performance update, they are more interested in rolling out new cosmetics for the sword and motorcycle.
What I’ve learned about sequels from 2023 (the year of sequels) is what I find valuable in a continuation game. Bigger, more detailed environments; expansions to what made the first game good; and a clear reason of why a continuation was warranted. I can say without a doubt that Jedi: Survivor checks off all three of these boxes, while Ghostrunner II’s half-baked offerings can only be labeled as the contrary.
Thank you for reading! I’m currently playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and am absolutely engrossed. I may write something for that game if there’s interest for it. Tell me in the comments, what game are you looking forward to the most this year?
I'm looking forward to Dragon Age Dreadwolf, but it's probably not for this year 😅
Also, another great example of a proper sequel is Hades 2. It builds up on the original game and so much more. Highly recommend!