Star Wars: The Lost Jedi

______________________________________________________________

1. Jedi Dawn  - Score = 6.4   Tier = OK

Sections: 418
Attempts to Beat: 6

I could already hear the famous John Williams Star Wars score in my head when I began this series, and with this being my first Star Wars themed gamebook, I was looking forward to see what it could do. This short two-book series is also, as far as I can tell, the only feature gamebooks written by author Paul Cockburn, so I was interested to see what he could do as well. We play here as Havet Storm (great name), a young teenage boy who, since the death of his mother several years ago, has spent his life alone and on the run from the Empire due to his grandfather having once been a Jedi Knight. The Jedi, in addition to being outlawed, have had all traces of their bloodlines systematically destroyed by the Empire to ensure they never rise again. Therefore, Havet has spent many years living "off-the-grid", hopping from planet to planet and eking out a meagre existence wherever he can find it. When his mother passed, Havet found among her possessions a dog-like droid called Arf, and inside this droid he discovered a voice message from his deceased grandfather detailing how the Empire had hunted him down. Also inside Arf though, we found our grandfather's lightsaber, having been hidden there all this time. Deciding that it is time to move on yet again, Havet now boards a transport ship to leave the planet Korphir and head for the nearby planet of Toprawa, hopefully to remain one step ahead of the Empire and somehow find a way to make a living. The adventure then begins with us arriving at the Spaceport on the militarized Toprawa, with the logic being that the Empire would least expect to find us right under their noses.    

The game system gives you 6 stats to keep track of. The first 5 of these are: Strength, Speed, Blaster, Lightsaber, and Tech Skills. The stat generation for these is not random (yay!), and you get 20 total points to allocate among these stats as you see fit, requiring to put at least 1 point in each up to a maximum of 6. However, you won't want to use all 20 points on these 5 stats, as this is where the 6th stat comes in, that being your Jedi Power Points. Any of your starting 20 points that you don't allocate to your 5 starting stats go into these Power Points, and as this is far and away the most crucial stat in the game, you will want to make sure you have a decent supply of these. Any of these stats can then be tested at various times during the adventure as you might expect, however the means by which they are tested I found a bit unusual, as they do not involve you rolling dice. When a stat is tested, you are told to add your score in that attribute to a given number, then turn to the indicated section. So if you are hacking a computer, you might be asked to add your Tech Skills score to 200, then turn to that section (eg. if your Tech Skills score was 3, you would turn to section 203). Weird. I guess this allows for varying degrees of success for the skill checks as opposed to just "pass or fail", as there theoretically could be 6 different outcomes. However, because there are a fair number of these checks, they use up a lot of sections of the book, making a 418 section adventure shorter than you would expect. 

Combat in the book does not beat around the bush. I suppose to reflect just how deadly the weapons involved are (be they either blaster or lightsaber), it only takes one successful hit from either you or your opponent to win the fight. When a fight begins you will be told whether it starts either At Range (where you need to use your Blaster) or Up Close (Lightsaber). Depending on which it is, you then roll one die, and add it to either your Blaster or Lightsaber stat, and unless the book states otherwise, you need the result to at least be a 7 to score a hit and win the fight. Should you miss, your opponent then gets to take their turn with their combat stat provided, and you keep going until one of you hits the other. You also have the option of walking around with your weapons hidden inside Arf, or hanging from your belt. You will probably want to wear them openly, because even though this is supposed to risk drawing attention to yourself in the adventure, should you have them hidden you will need to spend the first round taking them out. You usually get to go first, unless you are ambushed, so the importance of hitting your opponent on your first roll is evident. And this is why those Jedi Power Points are so important, because they allow you to spend them at any time to influence either a combat die roll or one of the skill checks. Did you roll a 2 when you needed to roll a 4 to hit your enemy? Then you can spend 2 points to turn that miss into a hit. This also works the other way, and you can spend Jedi Points to turn an enemy's hit into a miss. Thank goodness these Jedi Points exist, otherwise this could have become extremely frustrating along the lines of one-strike-combat from the Fighting Fantasy book Chasms of Malice. I'm not really sure how much strategy this adds though, as it seems to me you really have no choice but to spend your Jedi Points to avoid losing a combat, at least in most cases. To be fair, the book does hint that you should avoid combat at all costs when possible (you are just a kid after all), but then it goes and apparently throws in a couple of unavoidable confrontations with very dangerous enemies. Fortunately, there are a couple of different places where you can have your Jedi Power Points restored to maximum (anytime you go to sleep, they get restored), so you don't have to worry too much about conserving them.  

The other mechanic included here is called the Data Bank, and it works very much like a codeword system. At the back of the book there are an additional 119 extra sections (numbered 501-619) labelled as this Data Bank. When you perform certain actions, meet certain characters, or acquire certain items during the adventure you are almost always told to check off one of these sections. You then get to read that section at the back of the book, which usually provides some greater detail as to what just happened. As you then make your way through the quest, you will be asked if you have certain numbers checked off, which determines what happens next. This all sounded good at first, but became very tedious, very fast, and was probably my biggest gripe with the adventure. The problem is you are CONSTANTLY being given Data Bank numbers to flip to the back of the book to read, and it seems to me many of these could have just been included in the section of the adventure itself in which they were given. For example, why do I have to turn to the back of the book to get the stats of my enemy for a combat? Couldn't that have just been given in the section where I came across it? The other problem is that by the time you get into the back half of the adventure, which Data Bank numbers you have marked off determines so much of what happens that I felt like I was no longer making many decisions and was just along for the ride. While I suppose I can appreciate the author trying to include something new and interesting here, the whole Data Bank system felt to me rather bloated and unnecessary. 

So playing as Havet Storm, you land on the planet of Toprawa without any real goal other than avoiding detection by the Empire and hopefully finding some meaningful employment. I rather like this approach that doesn't seem to get implemented all that much in gamebooks, where you have no goal when the adventure begins, nothing given to you in a prologue or anything, and you just initially go about your business until you get caught up in an adventure that unfolds as you play. As you walk the streets of Toprawa City, you can soon find yourself in the middle of many different situations, including: being a witness to a murder, striking up a friendship with a pretty blonde girl who works at the local Empire military base, pursued by a woman called Diamond who is the leader of the Empire security forces (and I presume pictured on the cover of the book), and even falling foul of notorious bounty hunter Boba Fett who you inadvertently insult inside a seedy cantina. I thought the characterization of Boba Fett here was fantastic, as he is made out to be the most dangerous person in the galaxy short of Darth Vader and the Emperor himself. He is given such a great icy-cold demeanor too, calmly informing you that he will kill you the next time he sees you (and his combat stats back up just how deadly he is). You will eventually get noticed by the local Rebel group on Toprawa who see you as someone who can help them in their goal of overthrowing the Empire. This was another issue I had with the adventure, as in order to join the Rebels and be able to move on to the end game, I first needed to get the right Data Bank entries checked off on my list, so that I often found myself just circling around between the Spaceport and the Commercial District on Toprawa until I stumbled across the correct entries that would finally allow me to proceed. Several times I found myself going in circles so much that I was reading the same sections over and over again on the same playthrough (isn't an adventure with a "codeword" system supposed to prevent this?). 

Anyway, once you finally hook up with the Rebels, they reveal their plan to you and how you can help them achieve it. By this point, you should have befriended that pretty blonde girl I mentioned earlier, who works at the military base and also happens to be the daughter of the head scientist currently working on a laser that the Rebels have learned is to be installed in a super weapon the Empire has under construction called the "Death Star". (This all sounds strangely familiar). The Rebel plan is to have you use your friendship with her to infiltrate the base, steal the plans for this laser, then use the communications system inside the base to transmit these plans to the nearby ship Tantive IV, which is the ship of Princess Leia Organa, secretly a member of the Rebels. Ok, so stealing the plans to the Death Star to send to Princess Leia, who we see gets them in the beginning of "A New Hope", and which also involves the daughter of one of the Death Star's main scientists? This gamebook was certainly before its time, because this is all strangely reminiscent of the movie "Rogue One". Granted, the daughter here is a complete airhead who is a full-on member of the Empire so it's not exactly an equal comparison, but it was in the ballpark enough that I started to wonder if one of the writers of that movie ever played this book. 

The best sequence of the adventure is this infiltration of the base, because as soon as you get inside, the Rebels begin an assault on the base to provide a distraction and hopefully clear out many of the areas that you will need to pass through in order to complete your mission. At this point, the book introduces a Time Track, where you are provided 9 boxes and are periodically told to mark off one or more of the boxes as time goes by. If you waste too much time fiddling around or don't go the correct way inside the base, you can find yourself getting to the end of the Time Track, where you have now run out of time and die in the explosion when the Rebels succeed in blowing up the whole base. The adventure is almost a tale of two difficulty levels, as the first 75% or so of the book which involves circling around Toprawa until you join up with the Rebels I found rather easy, and I made it to this base sequence on my first attempt. When the assault on the base begins though, it seemed like I needed to do everything right from this point on with no room for error. This did make completing the book a bit tedious, as I would go through that first 75% each time, get one step further in the end sequence before dying, then go at it again until I finally figured out what I needed to do inside the base. The base assault isn't all that long so it didn't take too many tries, but it was having to circle around Toprawa so many times gathering all the Data Bank numbers that I would need that ultimately led to me tiring out (and the very small font of the book didn't help in that regard either).          

Is this the lamest death in movie history for a badass villain or what? 

The writing style here felt very stilted to me, with odd turns of phrase. The material would take itself quite seriously for the most part, but then out of the blue a section would end with a sentence that had me thinking..."wait a second, was that a joke?" Speaking of jokes, there is also apparently a running one throughout the book on how Havet is craving his favorite drink ,Star Racer, that he can never quite seem to get his hands on. I'm assuming due to Havet's young age this is some kind of cola and not a beer? Although who knows, this is the Star Wars universe after all.  The adventure does do a nice job with the 'Star Wars" atmosphere in a couple of places, namely the cantina where the initial confrontation with Boba Fett takes place (and you can run into him at several different points in the book), and the interior of the Empire military base. I only wish the streets of Toprawa had this same atmosphere infused into them, as when traveling along them I felt like I could have been in any generic sci-fi or even post-apocalyptic setting, with many poorer areas and burned out buildings. Every so often though there will be a Star Wars reference thrown in just in case you might have found your attention wandering (Grand Moff Tarkin even gets a name drop). The author is clearly trying to draw parallels between Havet and Luke Skywalker, what with you being a teenager and having your Jedi ancestor giving you his lightsaber, and there is even a line in here that comes out of nowhere talking about your "desert home". This got me wondering how Cockburn got permission to use the Star Wars license for these books, but I guess that license was much easier to come by in 1993 when this book was published, which I guess was the "Dark Times" for Star Wars, a few years before the Special Edition re-releases of the original movies to theatres again that re-ignited the craze. I can only imagine how much Disney would charge for this license now.    

Ranking: Not bad, but rather disappointing after what I initially thought was a strong rules system along with this being my first adventure set in the iconic Star Wars universe. Getting to mess around inside that universe is probably the big draw here, and props to Cockburn for integrating this adventure into what would become the opening to the first Star Wars movie (the victory section even includes the full "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope" speech as we see Leia enter the plans into R2-D2). The Skill Check system I thought was odd, but workable, and the Combat System was suitably tense with how brief and deadly it was, although it did lead to the Jedi Power Points being made completely overpowered. The overall plot too was decent, but there was just far too much circling around looking for the Data Bank numbers that would allow you to proceed. That Data Bank system degenerated into a mess after a while, and I think the book would have been better without it. The final sequence inside the base started to win me over again, but by that point it was too little too late to push this into the Good tier. This is a solidly OK entry though, and not a bad opening book by any means which any Star Wars fan should probably check out.