May the Fourth be with you! We’re republishing this list in celebration of Star Wars day and after giving it a good ol’ sweep, so after your Andor binge, make sure you leave some time to check out the best video games Star Wars has to offer.
The Skywalker Saga may have ended in 2019, but Star Wars is never really over, is it? Especially in the world of video games. Spanning systems all the way back to the NES and arcades, Star Wars has been on practically every video game console ever.
So below, we’re taking a look at nigh-on every Star Wars game on Nintendo systems in the West, ranked from worst to best by you, dear readers. To keep things tidier, in instances where the same game was released on multiple platforms, we’ve opted to mention the lesser of the two — invariably the portable version — in the other’s entry. Remember, this list is not set in stone but is governed by each game’s User Rating in our database.
So, come with us on a journey to a galaxy fa—oh you know the rest. We begin at the bottom, so beware that the Force is not strong with many of these…
42. Star Wars: The New Droid Army (GBA)
An isometric platformer that takes place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, you control the petulant young Skywalker in this stodgy action game. Considering the platform it’s on, the game looks and sounds okay. Beyond that, though, it’s dull, repetitive and so s-l-o-w. Anakin, you’re breaking our heart.
41. Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles (GBA)
With passable animation and audio (especially considering the system) and boring, finicky platforming, Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles falls into a regretfully familiar pattern of portable Star Wars games. It’s not as hateful as some, and it’s a little faster-paced than New Droid Army, but it’s a similar story.
Perhaps developer HotGen was trying to faithfully capture the excitement of The Phantom Menace‘s trade disputes, in which case job done. Some might call the non-canon blue lightsaber wielded by Mace Windu on the cover unforgivable, but we were too bored to care.
40. Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon (GBA)
Anyone who’s only ever played Star Wars games on a Game Boy deserves your pity. Retro Nintendo portables had a lot of things going for them, but a high midi-chlorian count wasn’t one of them.
Flight of the Falcon is one of the very worst Star Wars games ever because it’s got Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon on the cover — the two coolest things in the Star Wars universe — and it sullies their good names. As with all terrible Star Wars games, the iconography fools you into thinking ‘ah, it can’t be that bad!’, but our review conclusion sums this up perfectly: “Flight of the Falcon is a very bad game. As such, you should not play it. However cool the screenshots look, however promising the premise sounds, just remember that the Force is not with this one in any way, shape or form.”
Han, mah boogie, you deserved better.
39. Star Wars: Yoda Stories (GBC)
You have to remember that while Yoda is a beloved character, this game came before we’d ever seen him wield a lightsaber in what is easily the best scene in Attack of the Clones. Despite the name, in Yoda Stories you control Luke Skywalker in a top-down adventure as he chops snakes in two with his laser sword. How bad can that be?…
Really quite bad, it turns out. ‘Sedate’ is too generous a word, and the whole game is a technical embarrassment. It’s tempting to blame the hardware, but then you look at Link’s Awakening and see what might have been. Link’s Awakening this ain’t. Poodoo, plain and simple.
38. Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones (GBA)
Fittingly, perhaps, the weakest movie in the saga got one of the weakest Star Wars games ever. Normally we’d caveat a statement like that with ‘arguably’, but Episode II is inescapably pants in parts (except for Mace Windu’s general badassery and that Yoda bit at the end — we remember quite liking that).
The tie-in GBA game is a turgid side-scrolling beat ’em up that lacks the artistic polish even the dullest Star Wars games bring to the table. Coarse, rough, and irritating, indeed.
37. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (NES)
A relatively ho-hum 8-bit platformer where you play as young Skywalker battling through variations of the locations from the movie, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back could not be more average. For kids desperate to play as hero Luke, it was passable filler but no more.
A Game Boy version also exists, but if you’re gagging to play through the best film of the saga in video game form, you’re much better off going with the 16-bit ‘Super’ iteration. Indeed, LucasArts didn’t even bother with an 8-bit Return of the Jedi — the developer simply jumped generations and started afresh with Super Star Wars on the SNES.
36. Star Wars (NES)
Another platformer. To be fair, it did a decent job of providing some variety and touching on the main characters and locations of the movie, but it’s pretty unmemorable (and unforgiving).
The token Game Boy version upped the difficulty as it reduced screen real estate, but possibly the most interesting of the 8-bit versions is the entirely different and earlier Famicom game developed by Namco in 1987. ‘Interesting’ because it’s not afraid of deviating significantly from the source material and having Darth Vader turn into a scorpion. Not ‘interesting’ because it’s any good, sadly.
