YMMV / Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

• Anticlimax Boss: Marka Ragnos, one of the few Ancient Sith known by name, and who ruled prosperously over their entire race as Dark Lord of the Sith for centuries before dying of old age, is defeated by a teenage Jedi with only a couple of weeks of training.
• Best Boss Ever: Between the choice of the Big Bad possessed by an Ancient Sith Lord, or a one-on-one with Kyle, many players said they enjoyed the latter and found it more interesting.
• Best Level Ever: The mission to Zonju V has Jaden escaping from mercs on a swoop, leading to high-speed mounted combat. Slicing up an enemy's swoop with your lightsaber results in some awesome and amusing kill cams.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most base game multiplayer servers today restrict to only lightsabers as weapons and the sole Force power being Jump, due to some believing the rest are unbalanced. Also the default fighting style for lightsaber combat is single-blade, strong style. Even in the single player campaign, no lightsaber-wielding enemy can last long against repeated overhead chops from the Strong style.
  • Other than fighting hostile Jedi and a few other very specific situations, most of the game can be played perfectly fine as a standard FPS instead of using your lightsaber. But the lightsaber is so cool almost no one does.
  • While players have a free choice when it comes to the order of missions in the solo campaign, some are best picked earlier or later than others. The most notable ones would be doing Blenjeel's merchant rescue and Zonju V's contact missions as the very first of their batches each and every time, simply because of how fast and easy they are, while still offering a point towards your powers, and, of course, Dosuun's cult investigation as the last of the 2nd batch, as it's a No-Gear Level, so getting as many points towards your powers before it makes it far easier to handle.
  • Certain Force powers, like Heal, Lighting and Grab, are just so much better than other options, it becomes a Self-Imposed Challenge to not use them.
• Contested Sequel: The overall story is nothing amazing, and the option of choosing the order of your missions leaves a lot of the game feeling like Filler. But the customization and combat mechanics are considered the best of the series, and was the first Star Wars game to have a really extensive multiplayer scene.
• Demonic Spiders: The heavy-hitting Hazard Troopers that you start encountering on Vjun are tough to kill, their concussion rifles hit hard (as the boss fight with Rax Joris should attest to), and they often appear in groups. The only meaningful way to take them down quickly is to use their own concussion rifles against them or Force Pushing the blasts back to them (which can be hard as the bullets travel pretty fast).
• Fridge Brilliance: Rosh's jealousy of Jaden in the game's first act. He complains that Jaden gets all of the cool missions while he gets stuck doing odd jobs, and that Kyle favors Jaden. If you look closely, though, Jaden IS getting the same odd jobs as Rosh probably is, with one crucial difference: Jaden is Born Unlucky. Go talk to some mercenaries? Several dozen of them try to kill him. Go buy an R5 unit? About a hundred Tusken Raiders try to kill him. Go rescue a crashed merchant ship? An electrical storm disables his ship, and then half a dozen big-ass sand burrowers try to eat him. Jaden is getting more excitement than Rosh — festering the latter's resentment — but not by Kyle's conscious design.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Fully leveled Protection and Absorption give 75% damage resistance, and immunity to Force powers while restoring Jaden's own Force points. By stacking both Jaden can become an unstoppable juggernaut, shrugging off hits, and ignoring all harmful Force powers.
  • Fully leveled Force Grip is this too, as it goes from simply choking your enemies to full blown telekinesis as you can now toss your unfortunate victim around like a ragdoll while you're choking them. Due to the game's engine, if you slam them down to the ground, it will cause their model to flail rapidly as it clips into the ground, and since the game calculates fall-damage by speed as well as distance, this will usually instakill any unfortunate mook that gets in your grasp, because the rapid glitchy clipping will cause immediate fatal "fall damage". Reborn, however, are immune to this due to their model's incapability of being flailed. However, it will make your victims get stuck in a "choking" animation for a few seconds before continuing attacking you, meaning you can choke them, let go, and have them stunned for a few seconds, which is ample time to kill them with a lightsaber, which can be all it takes to gain victory over some of the tougher Reborn fights. Also, while Reborn will shrug off the choke mere seconds in, this is more than enough time to toss them. While this is good at keeping them away, this has more...balanced uses. Having some trouble with an Elite Reborn? Is there a pit nearby (probably)? Just choke 'em, then immediately flick 'em into the pit, because while their powerful force abilities make them immune to being choked for more than a few seconds, they're not immune to a fatal plummet. Even without a nearby pit, ledge, or other dangerous obstacle to hurl enemies into — and there often is! — with quick timing you can grab a Force user and throw them miles into the air, causing them to die from the resulting fall. Only a handful of enemies in the game are immune to Grip or fall damage, and the number of times you fight enemies in locations where they can't be dropped can probably counted by hand.
  • Fully leveled Force Lightning is absolutely brutal for crowd control. Normal gun-wielding enemies are no match against it - making some levels a breeze to go through, and it can soften force users during the fight, allowing you to kill them easier. And unlike Force Choke, Force Lightning cannot be countered by Force Push. What's more, one salvo of Level 3 Force Lightning can take down a freaking AT-ST.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Those flying jetpack stormtroopers don't do much damage and Jaden could easily deflect the blasts from the repeaters they carry, but they are hard to hit with conventional weapons and will more often than not successfully dodge your saber throws at them, making them surprisingly hard to kill, and in later missions they often attack in pairs. Force Lightning does considerable damage, but the knockback throws them out of range of the blast, so it takes multiple attempts to put them down. Even when you hit them, they seem to get a good deal of resistance to damage while they're flying, so you'll be stuck for several seconds fighting even individual ones as they dodge most of your attacks and shrug off the ones that do hit.
  • The unarmed cultists are Squishy Wizards whom Jaden could dispatch with ease with just a few saber slashes, but those nasty buggers dodge like crazy and will spam Force powers at you while you're fighting their armed companions. Worse yet, if you happen to fight them near long cliffs, they are very capable of Force Pushing you down into oblivion. That's right. They can use your own tricks against you. Unless you have Force Absorption on, those cultists could prove to be quite troublesome foes. Alternately you can blast them with Force Lightning instead... providing they haven't hurled you off a ledge before you can target them.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Go here.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The tomb on Chandrila you go to prevent the Disciples of Ragnos from sucking the force power from? Star Wars: The Old Republic reveals that's the tomb of the player character of the Jedi Consular class in that game, the Third Barsen'thor.
  Jaden Korr: Rest peacefully.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: There have been a number of jokes about Max Goof being a Jedi, since he and Rosh share voice actors. That said, this game came out quite a bit before Disney bought the franchise.
• Narm:
  • Jaden's descent to the Dark Side if you're playing as a male. His voice actor Philip Tanzini must've had a lot of fun doing the voice work as Jaden suddenly becomes more hammy.
    Jaden Korr: Oh nooo, this is just the beginning.
  • Jaden's turn to the Dark Side itself is pretty hard to take seriously because it seems to happen out of nowhere. The closest thing to foreshadowing is Kyle offering a brief warning if you emphasize Dark Side/offensive Force powers, but otherwise, Jaden almost instantly goes from "noble young Jedi padawan" to "scenery-chewing Sith megalomaniac" as if by the flick of a switch. Of course, at least it's the non-canon ending.
• The Scrappy: Rosh. Many players tend to find his voice and attitude during the first two acts to be extremely annoying, and often find great joy in finding various ways to kill him in the game.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Jedi Academy is noticeably easier than Jedi Outcast, to the point that the Hard difficulty in Academy is about on par with the Normal difficulty of Outcast. Jaden gets a wider selection of Force powers than Kyle did, and gets them much earlier, with many combinations having the potential to be a major Game-Breaker. The overall level design and game balance is much more forgiving, too. Also, since your health and inventory are reset at the end of each mission, you can play through more carefree without having to worry about Too Awesome to Use or Unstable Equilibrium.
• Take That, Scrappy!: The opportunity to kill Rosh off for good is very tempting compared to many other Star Wars media making "turn to the Dark Side" kills much more blatantly evil, that many players end up taking that chance and reveling in it. Perhaps the developers succeeded a bit too much at making him unlikeable…?
• That One Level: Vjun, the last planet you visited at the end of Act 2, has a considerable rise in difficulty compared to earlier levels. It starts with you having to traverse most of the level under acid rain that constantly drains your health while engaging with tough Hazard Troopers in heavy armor carrying accurate and hard-hitting concussion rifles. God help you if you didn't invest some points into your Force Protection to deal with the rain or max out Force Lightning to take out the Hazard Troopers. Worse yet, after you reach the inner sanctum of the fortress, you'll start fighting the elite cultists of the Disciples of Ragnos for the first time, and they are everywhere (and some of them even dual-wield lightsabers or using a double-bladed lightsaber as well, while you still only have one). This culminates in you fighting three powerful dark Jedi at once at the end of the level. It doesn't help that you're conveniently separated from Kyle during all this, forcing you to engage all those hard enemies by yourself when you could've used some much-needed help from Kyle. And if al of this wasn't enough, the level simply drags forever, with no end in sight.

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