YMMV / From a Certain Point of View

• Broken Base:
  • The book is seen by fans as either a great anniversary stunt with some nice new stories and characters, or a poor imitation of the Legends omnibus Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina with weaker writing and far worse continuity between stories. To wit, in three consecutive stories, Greedo goes from a self-pitying nice guy with a grudge, to a genuinely dangerous bounty hunter people are afraid of, to a known idiot nobody takes seriously. However, it should be noted that this compilation makes heavy use of Unreliable Narrator (with the first Greedo characterization coming from his own POV as an example), hence the title of the compilation, but whether that just makes it more interesting or comes off as a flimsy excuse for lack of continuity comes down to a matter of taste.
  • Is the characterization of Tarkin in of MSE-6 and Men a hidden soft side of the villain that we never got to see before, major character derailment of the mastermind Tarkin being lovestruck by a handsome young trooper, or actively hateful by having the only gay character not only be a villain, but massively abusing his authority in textbook quid-pro-quo sexual harassment?
• Ending Fatigue: The problem of having all the stories in chronological order becomes apparent when we're treated to four consecutive tales of Rebel pilots during the Battle of Yavin, all of which are incredibly similar and repetitive.
• Funny Moments: There's more than a few moments:
  • "An Incident Report" shows us what Motti thinks of Vader Force-choking him. He may have a point, but the entire tone of the report, or his expectations that reporting Darth Vader will do anything, is hilarious.
  • We finally find out about the Noodle Incident that Vader alluded to when telling Boba Fett about "No Disintegrations": two guys Boba was chasing fired at him with a disruptor only to get disintegrated themselves due to Boba being prepared for it, and when he tried to cash the bounty with Darth Vader in person, who was the one who had placed it, it was refused because Vader couldn't identify the quarries from their ashes.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Aunt Beru's final regret is that she'll never see Luke have a family of his own. This is even more tragic in light of The Last Jedi where her nephew dies alone on Ahch-To, never having had any children of his own, partly the cause of his own nephew's fall to the Dark Side and with only his sister and a single remaining student to mourn him. It's gotten even harsher with The Rise of Skywalker, with Ben Solo's death, meaning the entire family is now gone. It's mitigated by Rey taking up the Skywalker name, but still.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: R5-D4 surviving the sandcrawler massacre and his story ending with him having hope of getting a new master becomes this when The Mandalorian revealed that he did indeed find a new owner in Peli Motto.
• Jerkass Woobie: Garindan in "The Secrets of Long Snoot". He's willing to perform criminal activity and do spy work against the Rebellion for credits, and has a very low opinion of humans (partially as a result of discrimination from them towards him), but it's revealed in this story that the Empire tried to brainwash him and his people as spies, and he's only playing along so he can free his people later. However, he's been stuck on Tatooine for years, separated from his family and struggling to balance the credits he's made between saving for his trip home and curing his homesickness with calls to his family. During one of these calls, he learns from his daughter that his wife died. It's also revealed that selling out the Rebel droids to the stormtroopers was supposed to be his last job to get him off Tatooine, only for the bounty to be forfeited with their failure to capture the droids and Garindan no closer to getting home. While Garindan's failure ultimately saved the galaxy in the long run, it's really difficult to not feel bad about his situation.
• Narm:
  • In her story, Aunt Beru goes on for quite a bit about blue milk, and how she could've built a career serving blue cheese.
  • "That's right boys, Fett's here."
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The end of "Eclipse" gives us the destruction of Alderaan from the Organas' perspective. It's what happened on Jedha taken up to eleven. Even worse, Bail knew exactly what was coming as soon as the sun was blocked out.
  • It's brief but being as "Raymus" takes place immediately after Leia's ship barely escapes from Vader's grasp at Scarif we get a brief perspective on the absolute horror he is to the average soldier on the battlefield. Toshma Jefkins escaped from the Profundity to the Tantive IV only to watch his men get cut down by Vader in the hallway. The usually steeled veteran was so traumatized by the incident that he didn't even realize at the time that it was Vader himself, only able to describe the thing slaughtering his men as a "Death Angel".
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The book as a whole may be considered the canon counterpart of Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, a compilation of stories by different writers about the cantina patrons in Star Wars Legends. In addition to the Mos Eisley characters, From a Certain Point of View includes side characters throughout A New Hope (as well as characters that weren't seen in the film, exploring what they were up to at the time).
  • "The Red One" is in many ways a more dramatic, serious take on the much-maligned Infinities story "Skippy the Jedi Droid" from Star Wars Tales. Both focus on the backstory of R5-D4, his bonding with R2-D2 on the sandcrawler, and end with him deliberately overloading his motivator to ensure R2 can complete his mission — the main difference, obviously, being that "The Red One" doesn't have him as an inexplicably force-sensitive droid and former Jedi Master.
• The Woobie: R5-D4 in "The Red One". He's an old and poorly-maintained astromech droid that desperately wants to be bought so he can have a purpose and not get scrapped. Suffice to say, he feels threatened when the much more functional R2-D2 is added to the Jawas' inventory.

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