Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
“The Sith always betray one another. . . . I’m sure you’ll learn that soon enough.”
The overthrow of the Republic is complete. The Separatist forces have been smashed, the Jedi Council nearly decimated, and the rest of the Order all but destroyed. Now absolute power rests in the iron fist of Darth Sidious–the cunning Sith lord better known as the former Senator, now Emperor, Palpatine. But more remains to be done. Pockets of resistance in the galaxy must still be defeated and missing Jedi accounted for . . . and dealt with. These crucial tasks fall to the Emperor’s ruthless enforcer, Darth Vader. In turn, the Dark Lord has groomed a lethal apprentice entrusted with a top-secret mission: to comb the galaxy and dispatch the last of his masters’ enemies, thereby punctuating the dark side’s victory with the Jedi’s doom.
Since childhood, Vader’s nameless agent has known only the cold, mercenary creed of the Sith. His past is a void; his present, the carrying out of his deadly orders. But his future beckons like a glistening black jewel with the ultimate promise: to stand beside the only father he has ever known, with the galaxy at their feet. It is a destiny he can realize only by rising to the greatest challenge of his discipleship: destroying Emperor Palpatine.
The apprentice’s journeys will take him across the far reaches of the galaxy, from the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk to the junkyard planet of Raxus Prime. On these missions, the young Sith acolyte will forge an unlikely alliance with a ruined Jedi Master seeking redemption and wrestle with forbidden feelings for his beautiful comrade, Juno Eclipse. And he will be tested as never before–by shattering revelations that strike at the very heart of all he believes and stir within him long-forgotten hopes of reclaiming his name . . . and changing his destiny.
Author: Sean Williams
Cover artist: Amir Zand
Publisher: Del Rey
Release date: November 5, 2024
Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
Narrator: Marc Thompson
ISBN: 9780593726136
It’s heading towards twenty years since Australian author Sean Williams took on the challenge of bringing to the page the story of Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, Galen Marek, better known to the world as ‘Starkiller’. The Rule of Two is still in effect, but the tale of training Starkiller and keeping him from hidden from his own master Darth Sidious is a thrilling story that has plenty to offer modern readers, and in this case listeners who are familiar with Vader having his own ‘secret army’ of acolyte’s and lackeys, to say nothing of an Inquisitorious at his command.
Viewed through the lens of the dark side, The Force Unleashed sees Marek handed a series of tasks to complete that largely involve taking on Jedi who evaded the Jedi purge, and does so in a way that avoids any moustache-twirling or maniacally-laughing distractions. It was a unique perspective to give back then, and while other books and comics had flipped the lens to show it from the ‘bad guys’ point of view (the previous years Darth Bane: Path of Destruction being an immediate example) The Force Unleashed did it in a way – in book form and of course in the pixel world of the computer game – no one had seen before.
While travelling the galaxy on his missions for Vader he takes on such obstacles as the former Jedi General Rahm Kota, a dark version of himself known as the Dark Apprentice and the Aleena Jedi Kazdan Paratus, driven to insanity by his isolation on Raxus Prime, building a Jedi Temple out of junk and populating it metallic effegies of the council. He is joined by two key figures. Juno Eclipse (voiced in the game by Natalie Cox) is the pilot of his vessel the Rogue Shadow while his training droid is PROXY (voiced by David Collins) a prototype holodroid who while being friendlty to Marek would constantly try to kill him in training as per his orders from Lord Vader. They give the novel some extra thrust and depth rather than simply following the action-orientated drive of the game. There’s ‘something’ between Starkiller and Juno which adds and extra spark, while PROXY is an interesting character in the book, his naievity in never quite realising the dichotomy of his diametrically opposed primary functions (kill Marek / serve Marek) giving us some memorable moments.
There are some issues that make connection to the characters diffucult. Marek isn’t a charismatic lead character, instead he’s somewhat of a blank slate who is difficult to root for even when making his heroic turn at the end of the book. We know his true name and some of his past, but we see little progression; he is powerful from the off, and as such there’s no journey to the Force awakening here. Famously those powers are more akin to what we saw in the then still recent Tartakovsky Clone Wars, with Starkiller pulling a Star Destroyer from the skies. He has his internal struggle, the legacy of his father pulling him to the light while the influence of Vader keeps him in the dark, but from a gameplay perspective we know where this is heading.
Back in 2008 there was far more literature in the chronology, and while it’s common to see it dismissed as never having been canon today, back then it was all that we had and so there was a concerted effort to slot new stories into this timeline (albeit within the varying levels of G, T, C and S canon). However, the placing of The Force Unleashed and its then fresh perspectives were a breath of fresh air, and while novelising the somewhat non-linear flow of a video game is a challenge it makes a good fist of it, adapting the prolific usage of the Force in the game (a key element of any video adventure) to ‘make sense’ and pulling you into a storyline that as all good games do, takes you on a journey and points you to a final destination.
It’s absolutely no surprise that the freshly read audiobook narrated by Marc Thompson is bristling with energy and performance, with Thompson the ‘voice’ of Star Wars for those who consume their GFFA adventures on headphones in trains or within the confines of their cars travelling to and from work (although the American pronunciation of Executor is still wrong after 44 years). It’s good to see The Force Unleashed return to the spotlight in this Essential Legends Collection release, and long may they continue, as these were literally the lifeblood of Star Wars for most of the 90’s and beyond.
