This Is the Perfect 'Star Wars' Cameo

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 mild spoilers for the mission "Casualties of War" in Star Wars: Zero Company.

Star Wars has had a fraught history with cameos as of late. For every smart use of a legacy character in any given tale (Bail Organa in Andor, Darth Vader's shock appearance in the finale of Maul: Shadow Lord), there are a dozen that feel like they're there to put a name out and not really integrate all that well into the story being told (not to be mean to the Jon Favreau/Dave Filoni corner of the Star Wars universe, but let's just point in that direction and call it a day, shall we?).

So when you say, "Anakin Skywalker is in the new Star Wars video game," you might expect to start rolling your eyes. Zero Company certainly made a lot of use out of the one clip of Matt Lanter's spin on the legendary Jedi general describing something as "most impressive" in its marketing material to make you expect that his presence in the game was going to be that kind of cameo, a recognizable face flung into a scene or two to get the mainstream Star Wars fans intrigued in the way that the ragtag group of nobodies that otherwise make up Zero Company's cast wouldn't.

Instead, Zero Company joins that increasingly rarefied group of Star Wars stories that leverage a legacy character so well to not just add depth to the story of the new characters whose orbit they're thrust into but to add further depth to that legacy.