Really difficult games I completed: Super Star Wars on SNES

These days I don't have a lot of patience for extremely difficult games. The entire genre of games that have grown in popularity that are commonly referred to as "Souls-like" well, I hate them. I do not have the time, patience, or muscle memory to git gud at something this difficult and I will give up really quickly. The most I ever sunk into any of them was Nioh 1 and in that I never even made it past the first boss.

There was a time though, a long long time ago, that I would put a lot more into games, difficult or not.

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Super Star Wars was and is considered by many people to be "too difficult" but we also have to keep in mind that this phrase meant something very different than it means now. Back then we didn't really have a lot of 3-D options so "too difficult" meant really difficult platforming and carefully timed jumps. This is something that to this day I excel at so maybe this is where I got my training.

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For example, fairly early on in the game you have to rescue C3PO and R2-D2 from the Jawa Sandcrawler rather than simply purchasing them like in the films. First you have to gain access to the interior of the crawler then once you do there is some pretty tricky platforming inside involving moving platforms, fixed lasers, and enemies coming at you all at once. A lot of people complained that the interior design of the sandcrawler was just odd and a bit unfair because enemies off screen could fire at you but you could not fire on them. Fall off of one of the moving platforms and there is a good chance you are going to be sent back a ways to do the platforming again and many of the enemies that you already killed respawn a rather fast rate.

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Another thing that at first was exciting was the kind of 3D landspeeder section which was a nice break from what we would normally expect in a platforming action game. It was a good idea to mix things up like this... kind of. The problem lies in the fact that there doesn't seem to be much of a point and no indication of any sort of objective. You seem to just aimlessly shoot at Jawas and their contraptions / vehicles and after a certain amount of time the game will tell you where you are supposed to go. If you already know where to go at the start this changes nothing, heading in that direction early does not mean you get to skip the rather tedious shooting section.

Later in the game there is an X-wing section that is done slightly better but for the most part the shooter sections of this game are quite sub-par although they are considerably easier than the platforming sections.

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If you manage to make it to the bosses you are in for a treat because compared to the rest of the game they are actually quite easy. You just need to memorize some rather simplistic patterns and fire away. Honestly, the bosses are much easier than the stages that precede them and after such grueling gameplay to get to them, this was a very welcome respite.

It was disappointing that none of the bosses are actual characters from the game and you never face off against ol' Darth in this volume either but I suppose you couldn't really since you never gain control of the character Obi-Wan anyway. We can't deviate from the actual movies too much I suppose.

In my mind, the SNES is right around the time when the video game industry was transitioning from a kids' toy to something for people of all ages. I say this because a lot of SNES players in the 90's weren't even alive when the original Star Wars film was released. They may have not even been familiar with it.

Our options were pretty limited given the home gaming technology that existed in the late 80's and early 90's and sometimes the only thing that manufacturers could do would be to make the games more difficult in order to differentiate from other games.

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_{Strangely, the final level is one of the easiest in the entire game}

If you look at almost anyone's review of this game online they are going to state that this game was extremely difficult. Some will even go on to say that it is critically flawed because the first stages are some of the most difficult in the entire game and well, they aren't wrong when they say that games should not be like this. The more difficult stages should come later, right?

All in all I look back on this game with a sense of not really realizing what I had accomplished back in the early 90's. These day a game this difficult would scare me away pretty quickly but I was a teenager back then and we didn't just have hundreds of games at our disposal any time we felt like it. Therefore, when you got a new game you stuck with it and figured it out and as far as hard games that I have completed are concerned, this one is near the top of my list of accomplishments.