– Spoiler-Free Review –
After the crew of the Stinger Mantis escaped the clutches of Darth Vader, they are bringing the fight straight to the Empire. But when a stormtrooper defects and promises a powerful new weapon in the fight against tyranny, will the crew accept? Or will the threat of the Inquisitors turn them away? Read Chris’ review of Jedi: Battle Scars now!
I love Jedi: Fallen Order. There are really a few reasons I shouldn’t. I’m not much of a gamer, so a Dark Souls type game, both in exploration and difficulty isn’t really made for me. It also features some very un-Jedi-like fighting, like leveling up mostly through killing wild animals. But, despite all of this, I love the game and the crew. I was happy, then, to see the new novel with the Jedi banner, serving as a prequel to the upcoming Jedi: Survivor game. In a lot of ways, the novel didn’t disappoint me; which is great, considering it was the first novel I was excited for outside of anything The High Republic related. This review will largely break down into three parts: the two major aspects of the storyline (without spoilers) and odds and ends.
The overarching plot of the novel is about a stormtrooper who turns from the Empire, asking the crew for help retrieving an artifact that would turn the tide of the war against the Empire. This stormtrooper understandably causes friction within the crew, as they struggle to know whether or not they should trust her and help her retrieve the artifact. The fact this novel is based around a MacGuffin really makes it feel like an extension of the video game, which is a theme I will return to again and again in the book. Largely, this novel feels like one mission in a longer game: we see them meet up with the stormtrooper, run a mission with her, a twist is introduced in that mission, and then there’s a mini-boss stage, before a final mission with a big boss battle. This mostly keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace, pausing to check in with Merrin and Cal, and occasionally everyone else, but wants to keep moving forward to the end. I enjoyed the book for the most part, and felt myself reading it fairly quickly. I do want to point out that this novel has a fairly low page count, only 255, compared to some of the longer ones that have come out recently (Battle of Jedha and Shadow of the Sith, for example). Even though the pacing helped this be a quick read, it was a little quicker simply due to its brevity.
The first major aspect of the storyline is Merrin’s. Though Cal is front and center on this novel, this book is much more interested in Merrin. I think, largely, this was the right call: Merrin’s story, introduced in the first game, is very compelling and begged to be explored even further, and Cal is getting his own game, anyway. The novel allows a deeper insight into Merrin’s head, being someone who recently lost her entire homeworld and family, and was recently freed from ex-Jedi Taron Malicos. The novel explores her perspective from two angles: grappling with her past, her powers, and her connection with Dathomir, and with her relationship with the crew. Merrin is a complex character, and I think this novel does a really good job of exploring where she’s at now in the story. Again, since this novel feels so much like a video game, we don’t sit with her as she contemplates for pages at a time, but there are extended looks into her mindset and what she’s thinking about right now. The novel also explores her position in the crew as a new member really well, something that I don’t think we see a lot of in ensemble casts. Usually, a late addition to the crew is welcomed in without much thought, but here we see the way new members shift dynamics and how they fit in (or sometimes, worry that they don’t).
This novel also has a romantic thread running throughout. This romantic plot does read fairly differently than recent ones (like Convergence), being less about romantic tropes and more like “these two characters are in love, now what?” This reads as a bit more authentic to me, as it is fueled by passion and loneliness and what the characters are missing and hope to find in one another than feeling like it’s checking romantic boxes. Author Sam Maggs noted that this novel was a bit “spicy” and had to be toned down, and with all of the spice left in the novel, I’m curious how much spicier it was before it was edited. Thankfully, the romance informs the characters and their actions and decisions in a way that felt more believable to me, making this one of the most recent romances that didn’t fall completely flat for me.
The second major aspect of the storyline is, well, the rest of the crew of the Stinger Mantis. After the crew escaped from Nur, we start seeing their priorities and their focus have started to come into question. What is the best way to fight against the Empire? How does one crew really do that much damage against a galactic regime? I found this aspect of the story fairly refreshing, too, as you don’t see a lot of existential questions related to rebellions in novels like these. Even though we don’t know a ton about the upcoming game, this novel really starts to bridge the gap between the two, and you can already start to put some pieces together about the next game from reading this. In a lot of ways, I feel like this novel is one of the better tie-ins, ranking a little closer to Catalyst as a tie-in that has some direction of where the main project is going, compared to tie-ins that are only tangentially related like Brotherhood or Padawan.
A bummer, to me, is that we don’t really spend a ton of time with the rest of the crew, at least relative to Merrin. Of course, we do spend some time with Cal, but not nearly as much as we do with Merrin. In a lot of ways, Cal exists as the one who swings the lightsabers at the foes. He brings in another really video game-y aspect to the book, where he’s constantly taking in stim packs, performing Force-tricks that you can do in the games, and platforming his way through the missions. I do think this writing style, as a video game come to prose, is going to be a fairly big dividing line for some readers. It worked for me, for the most part, as I kind of accepted Maggs wanted to make sure she captured the feeling of the video game in prose. Some may not feel like this translated into the medium properly. For example, I always played the game with the thought Cal taking med-pacs during missions was a “video game thing” and not something he was “actually” doing. In the novel, it is something he’s actually doing. Maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t take some time in the novel to stop and kill some bunnies with his lightsaber, though.
We do spend some time with Cere Junda and Greez, but far less. Cere, at one point in the novel, is offered a chance to take her own side-quest, trying to 100% the game. This side quest introduces a wrinkle in her story, one that has her call her own future into question and makes us wonder where her story is moving in the future. She also has a very interesting interaction with the Fifth Brother, whom we’ll discuss below, that brings to mind the finale of Fallen Order. Greez is…also there, but the novel is the least interested in him, even though he appears in almost every single group conversation. As I noted above, the novel is really short. Most of the time, I feel like movies need to be shorter, but novels need to be longer. I felt like The Rise of Skywalker novel was way too short, also clocking in at approximately 250 pages, losing a lot of steam at the end and writing mostly the bare bones of the fight on Exegol, a time when we really needed to get into the heads of the characters. This book feels similar: 50 more pages would have gone a long way into getting into the heads of the characters. I do understand that may have thrown the pacing off, so I can see why it may have been shorter, but even a few more pages could’ve done quite a bit, inserted at key scenes. (Of course, key scenes I won’t talk about now since it’s a mostly non-spoiler review.)
And this kind of brings me to odds and ends, especially my first thought: the Fifth Brother is a wall of an enemy, and has essentially little characterization. In a lot of ways, this could’ve been any living Inquisitor and the story would’ve operated more or less in the same fashion. I’m betting there were some constraints that almost forced Maggs’ hand (his recent appearance in Obi-Wan Kenobi and possibly timeline issues with other Inquisitors), but this was a bit of a bummer to me. He was more of a speed bump on the way to the end of the novel than he was a compelling villain that stood against the heroes. I would’ve liked to have spent more time in his head, but that’s fine. Another odds and ends thing, for me, was the the prose read a bit too…modern for me. Lots of slang, lots of puns in the narration, and a LOT of memes. Don’t get me wrong, most of the memes made me laugh, but it did ruin the immersion at times, as well. If the prose of Wendig and DJ Older was a little too much for you at times, I could see that being the case here, as well.
Overall, I had fun reading Battle Scars. It’s a fun adventure, bringing the spirit of the video game into the prose novel. It has fun really investigating the mindset of Merrin and, to a lesser extent, the Stinger Mantis crew, introducing the new video game with a nice foundation. I probably won’t revisit the novel, since it feels like it was designed for only the first-read, but I will think of it fondly as time goes on.
You can follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisWerms, and of course, you can follow the Manor on Twitter @MynockManor and Instagram @mynockmanor!
DISCLOSURE: I received a copy of this book from the publisher at no charge in order to provide an early review. However, this did not affect the overall review content. All opinions are my own.