Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
John without Williams
I was really looking forward to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order when it was announced. How disappointed I was when I saw the first gameplay and how surprised I was when I had a lot of fun playing it. And after this ups and downs, I can almost be glad to have arrived at a stage of indifference, into which the soundtrack by Stephen Barton (Titanfall, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) and Gordy Haab (Star Wars: The Old Republic) has transported me.
In my game review of Fallen Order , I praised the great Star Wars-atmosphere and emphasized how well the style of John Williams' film music was emulated. It turns out that this probably works best in combination with the game's story and visuals. Unfortunately, the feeling is only transferred to a limited extent if the OST is decoupled from the overall work of art. Sure, what comes out of the speakers sounds like Star Wars, but more like the ambient tracks, the placeholders, the stretchers between the big, well-known pieces by John Williams. Highlights are nowhere to be found in the 44-track OST, everything sounds like a good copy of the original, but without its inventiveness. Like a pizza without cheese, the hunger for music from a galaxy far, far away is satisfied, but the result doesn't really make me happy either.
The score
It doesn't help that two versions of the soundtrack have been released. And while the original soundtrack actually contains the music from Fallen Order Fallen Order, the other album, 34 songs long, is a strange best-of of the well-known tracks from the Star Wars-universe combined with a worst-of remix of the same. It didn't really make sense to me and so I'm left with an extremely critical opinion, which may sound unfair in this form due to the high quality of the compositions on the OST. But if, like me, after the forgettable film scores of the last three screen incarnations, you were hoping to at least get something noteworthy for your ears in the games, you should head for the nearest spaceport with your outrigger freighter. Here there is only more of the same.
And while John Williams can still be credited with being forced to write ambivalent and therefore interchangeable motifs due to the unplanned nature of the trilogy, this can only be explained by a lack of courage or creativity in the games. And that's a shame, because Gordy Haab in particular has proven through his work on the other Star Wars-games that he has grasped the essence, the magic of Williams' compositions. But perhaps I've simply heard it too often in too many variations for it to still inspire me. Perhaps the magic of these past masterpieces can simply no longer be reproduced. Alone, if we had always judged human history by these standards, we would probably never have gotten beyond grunting around the campfire.
