Though intended as a casual experience like its Indiana Jones-based predecessor, reviews were harsh and Yoda Stories was the last of LucasArts's "Desktop Adventures" series.
Yoda Stories contains examples of:
- 1-Up: After completing 15 games, Yoda will give you a "Spirit Heart," which functions as an extra life. You only get one and can't replace it, although it will return each time you begin a new mission.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Among your foes will be huge flying insects, crab-like things, leeches, and other nasty critters.
- Chain of Deals: Any given mission will likely turn into one of these.
- Denial of Diagonal Attack: Averted as to your lightsaber, but not as to any blaster you pick up.
- Empty Room Psych: Most locations contain nothing whatsoever of interest (sometimes they have a hidden health pickup under a random rock, but it's rare.) Thankfully, your Locator, once found, tells you which locations contain something and which are empty.
- End-Game Results Screen: The game shows you a score at the end, affected by the difficulty level you chose and how fast you completed the game.
- Fetch Quest: Every mission will feature people who need one specific item and are offering you one other specific item in exchange, which happens to be the one specific item someone else needs, leading you into a Chain of Deals.
- He Knows About Timed Hits: R2-D2 is the first thing you can pick up in any mission, and if you use him on any object in the game or tile on the map, he will give you hints and instruction on how to play.
- Irrelevant Importance: Sometimes you will amass an impressive collection of keys that each only work on one specific door that you only need to open once.
- It May Help You on Your Quest: Every game begins with Master Yoda giving you a briefing and one object that you will need to solve one of the puzzles in the mission. How all this junk wound up in his hut on Dagobah is never quite explained...
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Nobody bats an eye when Luke pushes furniture and boxes around looking for stuff.
- Life Meter: A circle-shaped life meter, initially completely green. As you receive damage, the circle goes from green to yellow, then from yellow to red, then from red to black, and then, well, you die.
- MacGuffin: Sometimes your mission is to find a specific object, like a "Sith Amulet" or an "Imperial Battle Code."
- Playable Epilogue: Once you fulfill your quest, you can walk around the entire gameworld and talk to people, though only two or three people have new lines. If your quest was to retrieve an object or rescue a person, you can also return to Yoda to hand it over and receive some words of praise.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Pretty much the point of the game.
- Shout-Out: When confronted with a bunch of snakes, Luke will comment that he isn't afraid of them—unlike some other guy we know...
- Starter Equipment: You start off with your lightsaber, R2-D2, and whatever random thing Yoda gives you to get you going.
- Teleporters and Transporters: Transporters are scattered across each gameworld, and so long as you have a Locator (i.e. a map), you can use them to teleport instantly between one Transporter and another. Unfortunately, they are randomly located throughout each gameworld, which means they are not always located usefully.
- The Enemy Weapons Are Better: You can pick up blasters by defeating enemies or finding them in the gameworld, and although they have limited ammo which cannot be replenished and can't shoot diagonally, they are more powerful and have farther range than your lightsaber.
