In 'Zero Company,' the Revenge of the Sith Comes for Everyone

Welcome to Zero Company week at the Observation Deck. The new Star Wars game is occupying the vast majority of my brain at the moment, so all three blogs this week will be dedicated to my thoughts on the latest gaming escapades in the galaxy far, far away.

This post contains major spoilers for Star Wars: Zero Company.

Any story that places itself within proximity to Revenge of the Sith takes on the air of inevitable tragedy that defines the last act of the prequel trilogy. You cannot tell a story about the revenge of the Sith without acknowledging that it is a story everyone already knows. Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader. The Republic falls, and the Empire rises. The Jedi are all but wiped out. Darkness prevails, and light retreats. These are parts of Star Wars that have been known for almost half a century now; there is no surprise.

So it is both a surprise and not that Zero Company weaves its tale in the final days of the Clone War, and treats that inevitability as a given. This game was never going to be a story just about the Clone War and the role groups on its fringes, like Hawks' outfit and the Infinite Coil, play in the wider machinations of the conflict. Sooner or later, Revenge of the Sith would happen. It was just a matter of when. Just after the tutorial? A mid-game twist? The very end?

That last suggestion seemed like the assumption to take, the more and more people started realizing that Zero Company would interweave with the curtain call of the prequel trilogy, because it's really what we've gotten the most out of Star Wars in its latest era. For a period of Star Wars storytelling that is fascinated by both the Clone Wars, thanks to the legacy of the animated series, and the "Rise of the Empire" period that comes after it, few of those stories really want to delve into the actuality of what happens in that moment of failure—the issuance of Order 66—and the moments immediately after (we've had some good ones, of course, like the opening act of The Bad Batch). Everyone wants the moment, or the inevitable arrival of it, but what comes after is often left to the imagination. We already know the scope of Palpatine's Imperial ambition, so why get caught up with the little details?

But Zero Company is a game about the people who make up those little details—not about the Republic or the Jedi as systems and institutions, but the people caught in their shadow. It's fitting, then, that the game tasks you with dealing with this inevitability in small, personal ways... and then doesn't let you escape its aftermath.