It would be lovely to say that Jedi Outcast’s combat forever changed the way that developers approached melee battles in action games, but that sadly isn’t the truth. Star Wars games or no, developers everywhere are still chasing the perfect melee combat system. Titles like Blade Symphony – one of many games inspired by the revolutionary combat in Jedi Outcast – have even gone so far as to base the entire game around the mechanics of its melee fights.

With Jedi Outcast, however, you have a game which doesn’t even introduce its melee system until around the quarter mark but manages to perfectly capture the thrill of a combat style that has achieved mythical status in the realm of pop culture. My fascination with Jedi Outcast’s lightsaber combat has long inspired me to consider just how it is that a game that doesn’t even come alive until almost halfway through can best the efforts of games that focus on nothing else.

At some point, I began to accept the possibility that Jedi Outcast’s worst moments are more than just a tool developer Raven Software used to pad the length of the game and deceive those Star Wars fans who took a chance on their adventure.

Although I realized that Jedi Outcast was part of the Dark Forces franchise long ago, I never appreciated what the game’s first-person shooter sections mean to the series’ on-going narrative. At the beginning of Jedi Outcast, protagonist Kyle Katarn wants to be as far away from a lightsaber and all other Jedi-related things as possible. He has the ability to be one of the galaxy’s great Jedi warriors, but no longer possesses the desire.

That’s not a standpoint many Star Wars fans can sympathize with, but rather one that stems from Katarn’s history as a mercenary turned Jedi who watched his world descend into chaos as he furthered his training in pursuit of a form of justice bordering on vengeance. In Katarn’s mind, he has done what the Jedi in him was required to do, and it is time to return to his life as a mercenary.