Rogue One - It's all about the Death Star, baby!

Rogue One – A Star Wars Story is, after Fantastic Beasts, the other inevitable major movie-franchise event this winter. Although this iteration of Star Wars disguises itself as a spinoff, it follows pretty much the well-established routine of Rebels vs. Empire with quirky robot sidekicks, dogfights and vast battlefields thrown into the mix.

The Empire seeks to destroy all opposition. Source.

One year after the release of The Force Awakens, which felt like a minute reenactment of Episode IV but set after the events of the first six movies and with a predominantly female cast, the story focuses this time on a period shortly before the events of Episode IV. The protagonist, a Leia-like young woman named Jin Erso (Felicity Jones), happens to be the daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), the architect of – you guessed it – the Death Star. Oh, Star Wars. You will never get over this thing, will you? I do hope that the next Star Wars movie comes up with a different plot, but probably in vain.

Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) wants his Death Star finished. Source.

Put on the sepia filter, darling, things are getting serious

 

The movie starts on a vast, green field, but the grey sky, heavy wind and the arrival of Shadowtroopers lead by sinister Empire-Commander Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) sets the uniquely sinister tone for this movie. They abduct Jin's father to make him finish the Death Star, but his main function is to look sad and humble - a terrible waste on such a terrific actor as Mikkelsen. His daughter manages to escape. We meet her again during a fight between the Empire and the rebels. Soon afterwards, we witness an ambush against Empire forces in a pretty Arabian-looking place on some desert moon, reminiscent of the news coverage on conflicts in the Middle East. 

Jin Erso (Felicity Jones) and her rebel friends. Source.

Rogue One puts a great emphasis on the depiction of bombastic battles and cuts down on the humour. A striking example for this change of tone is K2-SO who used to be an imperial droid but was programmed to be rebel-friendly. Robots are typically comic relief characters in Star Wars, but K2-SO’s comedy predominantly relies on the ridiculous robotic precision and sarcastic tone of C-3PO and combines it with a rather dark and uncanny design far from the quaint ball named BB-8 and, in addition to that, is a lot more violent than harmless R2-D2. K2-SO is, nevertheless, a rather sympathetic character. 

 

K2-SO doesn't trust Jin. Source.

This leads me to another typical Star Wars dilemma: I cannot empathize with most characters. Jin Erso is not particularly charismatic and half of the cast seem to be surrogate fathers to her, but there is no such thing as (fatherly) love to be felt anywhere. I can live with that, but I did not know whom to side with in particular (apart from the obvious mantra: Rebels = good, Empire = bad!). Even some of the more interesting characters such as the blind, mysterious Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) seem underdeveloped. Among all these empty shells, we get a little glimpse on Darth Vader, and it feels like a friend coming to rescue you from a lame party where nobody bothers to acknowledge your existence - but he won't stay for long, and you are on your own again in less-than friendly territory. To put it politely: I think that the runtime of the movie (133 min) could have been used more efficiently.

  

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story offers action and spectacle, but not a whole lot more, and hardcore Star Wars fans will be perfectly fine. Everyone else may skip this one, it's alright, but it's not a must-see.

TES V: Skyrim - A Dragonbore?

No. This is not a review of the 2016 Special Edition. I didn’t even play the add-ons. It is just a cute, harmless review of Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as it was released in 2011 for PC. Skyrim was then a great and acclaimed game, and it still is. 

Skyrim provides some great improvements compared to its predecessor, Oblivion. Most notably of them being that you can now level almost infinitely, something that the predecessor didn’t allow because you had to pick a very limited number of major skills. If those skills had reached level 100, you were unable to level your character as a whole, meaning no more increasing for the size of your inventory, magical power, or hit points. The reason why this was such a major issue is that The Elder Scrolls games, being role-playing games, heavily rely on leveling.

 

Game Mechanics

 

Skyrim expands on this core mechanic by allowing the player to unlock new abilities as they increase their skills, be it lockpicking (don’t; it’s easy enough already!), axe-wielding, stealing and sneaking, and all kinds of sorcery from belching flames and turning invisible to enchanting armor. The latter adds some crafting mechanics, which again is very fun and very rewarding.

 

A Centurion - finest Dwemer craftsmanship.

During my best moments of playing I found myself eagerly planning to get the perfect armor, and just a random aspect as this can be made as complex as you wish: First, become a perfect blacksmith. Second, perfect your skills of enchanting the armor: You can implement permanent spells to protect yourself from destructive magic, increase your health and/or skills in ridiculous amounts. But that's not all: Third, you can use these skills to create a set of armor that enhances your ability to mix potions. Consume these potions to become an even more efficient blacksmith or enchanter. Rinse and repeat, but be careful not to create a friction in the space-time continuum while you’re at it.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the game mechanics are Skyrim’s absolute forte. You can turn almost any idea on top of your mind into a strategy to win the many, many battles you will have to fight. Sneak upon them? Shoot them in the head? Poison them and crush them with a telekinetically moved crate? – It’s possible. After all, Skyrim is a game about fighting, and it excels at this aspect.

More precisely, it is a game about fighting some sick bastards in abandoned ruins. It doesn’t matter much if those bastards call themselves Bandits or Trolls or Necromancers or Vampires. If you join the Dark Brotherhood, you can be a sick bastard yourself. The same goes for the Daedric princes, whose shrines can be found all over Skyrim and offer great rewards for scaring people, betraying your friends, and creating chaos in general. 

Casting lightning bolts at your enemies is fun.

Speaking of sick bastards: Yes, there are lots of moral choices to be made. You can freely choose whether you want to side with the racist northerners around Ulfric Stormcloak or whether you want to join the oppressive imperial forces, although the racist Northerners seem to be the obvious choice as at least they were not planning to execute you at the beginning of the game. While the outcome of this conflict doesn’t affect the game a lot, there are many quests that have at least some influence on the game. Some of them require you to be evil, mostly to acquire special loot. Other quests are fairly innocent: You can buy a house so that you will have a place to store your many, many treasures or you can help the locals and become a thane; you can even marry. There is a lot to do. 

First, the game will ask you to choose a race (another choice that does not matter all too much): 3 kinds of human, 3 or 4 kinds of elves (depending whether you regard orks as a kind of elf) or one of the weird options, being the cat guy or the lizard guy (or girl, respectively). I chose the high elf, because I wanted to be an excellent mage, but I did use heavy armor (it doesn’t really slow you down) and a mace from time to time, proving once again that you can be anything you want in the wonderful land of Skyrim. 

Talking to gods is daily business for the Dragonborn, but rarely do they appear physically.

Tall tales, small tales

 

And you should put that to good use and goof around a bit. Because being just the Dragonborn is a bit redundant sometimes, meaning that the story is not particularly interesting. I would even call it boring. It could really have been a great epic inspired by the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the oldest remaining heroes’ tale in English language with a brave hero fighting monsters, claiming a throne and dying heroically. But it isn’t. 

 

After one less exciting quest or two you will soon pick up the habit of skipping dialogues, because sometimes it is just more interesting to try out new skills than listening to some grumpy guard who got an arrow to the knee. In fact, if you listened to every dialogue and read every book that crosses your way, the game would lose a lot of momentum. 

You can marry at the temple of Mara.

In some instances, the game will force you to sit and wait and listen to dialogue sequences while the voice actors are taking their sweet time (this goes especially for Daedric Princes). For my taste, the writing simply lacks something. I couldn't care less about the Blades, and neither are the Greybeards on top of the mountains particularly secretive, stylish, threatening or interesting. And dragons. I’ve never been a fan of dragons, and they can become annoying once they start attacking you in random locations. 

 

Also, there is not really any way to tell the epic artifacts of the story apart from those that you may find during the quests for, say, the College of Winterhold (equivalent to the mage guild of Oblivion). If everything is super precious, nothing actually is. Skyrim aptly shows that this economic rule applies to storytelling as well, as I find myself enjoying the Dwemer the most - an ancient civilization whose people completely vanished from the face of the earth and who therefore can and will not pester me with drawn-out dialogues. Their mastery of magic and technology turned out to be their undoing. What is left from them are ruins of their civilization inhabited by their tireless steampunk robots which are among the most impressive monsters in the whole game. 

The Greybeards are not very talkative, but that alone does not make them particularly interesting.

Skyrim is addictive enough to have kept me playing for a total of roughly 240 hours. It offers a lot of freedom, many skills to master and places to discover. I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys exploring the vast worlds of Action-RPGs and can forgive a game for having a bit of a "meh" plot. I certainly can.