YMMV / Rogue Squadron

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The World Devastators in the "Battle of Calamari" are this. Let's just say that taking them down is a LOT easier than how they were depicted as being taken down in the original source material of Dark Empire.
  • Moff Seerdon, the Big Bad of the original game, faces off against you in the tough Thyferra level in a shuttle. While he's got more armaments than most Imperial ships (being one of the only flying enemies with seeker missiles), he's still a shuttle: a huge target that can easily be shot down with a few of your own seeker missiles or torpedoes. His laser cannons are a joke and even his seeker missiles have little chance of hitting you.
  • In Rebel Strike Sarkli is the final opponent to fight as you escape from the exploding shield generator bunker in "Triumph of the Rebellion". You can just spam him with blaster bolts, as his shots do next to no damage, and the explosions from the bunker aren't particularly damaging either.
• Awesome Music:
  • The games all used music from the movies (the first game using Musy X remixes of songs from them, the sequels using the real audio tracks), with all that entails. Factor 5 also improvised plenty of their own music for the games, and while the Musy X synthesizer was no match for John Williams' fully orchestrated scores, it turned out some respectable pieces, such as the moody theme of "The Jade Moon".
  • The heroic main theme, which got increasingly bombastic with each game. It's one of the most recognizable pieces of non-Williams Star Wars music for a reason.
  • The inclusion of the 70's Disco remix of the Star Wars theme for the opening of Rebel Strike. It's also used as the theme for the arcade room, so you can make Darth Vader shake to the music in the Death Star hanger.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The Jade Moon in the first game is a short but very fun level, having great atmosphere and just the right amount of challenge.
  • Imperial Construction Yards, also in the first game. While it is a Speeder level (which are typically That One Level), the AT-ATs are not mission-critical at all this time, so if you move quickly you can ignore them or even destroy them while they're docked and vulnerable to blasters. Once you get past the tricky Radar section, it's a pure hit 'n' run level where you fly around to blow up as many Imperial enemies and structures as you can to your heart's content.
  • Death Star Attack in the second game. Its a perfect recreation of the rebels iconic assault on the first Death Star, getting the game off to an incredibly strong start.
  • Battle of Endor does a brilliant job of replicating the most involved and chaotic fight in the Original Trilogy, culminating in taking down two Star Destroyers.
• Breather Level:
  • After the tough "Assault On Kile II" level, you're treated to "Rescue on Kessel", which can be completed in seconds if you aren't aiming for medals, and even if you're going for the gold, its still a very short and relieving change of pace before you're thrown into the brutal "Prisons of Kessel".
  • All three of the unlockable bonus levels are a relieving change of pace from the games challenging final levels, but "Beggar's Canyon" stands out in particular because its a leisurely paced racing level with no combat involved, and even getting a Gold Medal is ridiculously easy in it.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Medal chasers in the two GameCube games will simply tell their squadmates to flee, since their kills don't count towards the kill requirements for the medals. They will also use the X-Wing nearly every chance they get, due to its balance and versatility.
• Contested Sequel: Rebel Strike, while not considered necessarily a bad game, is the most polarizing entry in the franchise. The game's detractors criticize the game for being a step down from its predecessor for questionable gameplay mechanics in the single-player and relying too much on recreating events from the movies. On the other hand, defenders praise the game for having more polished level design, including playable walkers and adding multiplayer.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Missile Turrets, particularly in the first game. One alone can put a nasty dent in your shields. Two or three will drop an X-wing in a little over a second. You will learn to fear the lock-on sound. Worse yet is that the Final Boss has access to them; not so bad if you've learned how to avoid them by that point, but completely awful if you haven't.
  • The guard towers in "Prisoners of the Maw" in Rogue Leader take so much damage that the Y-wing's bombs are the only reliable way of destroying them, and even with the Y-wing's shields they'll rip you apart in seconds.
  • Tank Droids: numerous, tough, hard-hitting and ACCURATE. Plus a couple TIEs & TIE Interceptors actually have AI rather than flying pre-programmed paths (Kile II, Chandrila & Thyferra).
  • AT-ATs in every game, but especially Rogue Leader.
    • Their sole weakness is the Snowspeeder's tow cable. The first game straight up prevented you from using anything but the Speeder in missions featuring them, even with cheat codes or when the walkers weren't mission-critical at all (ex: Imperial Construction Yards). Rogue Leader let you use other ships for some AT-AT missions, but nothing besides the tow cable could destroy them, not even the Y-Wing's bombs, forcing you to switch to the Speeder mid-mission until they're dealt with.
    • They only face one direction so staying out of their line of fire is so easy the most likely way to die against them is to run into them, but since they can only be destroyed by lassoing their legs with a tow cable, destroying them takes a painstakingly long time, and you ALWAYS have to destroy them because whenever they appear they have to destroyed before they destroy a mission-critical objective.
    • Rebel Strike makes AT-ATs slightly easier to deal with by giving you an alternate way to destroy them by picking up a bomb and flying it into the side, but with the Snowspeeder's low flight ceiling, it's just as easy to plow headlong into the side of the AT-AT yourself, without even scratching the paint job.
• Disappointing Last Level: Battle of Hoth in the first game is a decidedly underwhelming bonus level that not only barely represents the iconic scene its based on, but is also a very short, basic and relatively easy level (unless you're aiming to get a Gold Medal on it) compared to the downright brutal levels you had to get a Gold on to unlock it in the first place. Thankfully the Rogue Leader version of this mission picks up the slack by being a full-bodied mission.
• Even Better Sequel: Rogue Squadron was an amazing game (for its time), but Rogue Leader improved upon it in almost every way and is, to this day, probably the best Star Wars-themed flight game ever made.
• Fan Nickname: Darth Bob, an affectionate name for the occasional TIE Fighter in Rogue Leader who decides to kamikaze into the player's ship, often costing a life in the process. Best invoked with a Skyward Scream, Khan-style.
• Friendly Fandoms: The series has quite a bit of appreciation from Star Fox fans, as both series contain some of the most well-received flight shooters of all time.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Once you pick up the Homing Cluster Missile upgrade, any ship with those missiles (V-Wing in the first game, Slave-1 in the second, Naboo Starfighter in the third, and TIE Advanced in the second and third) can immediately kill up to 6 enemies without needing to aim at them. Ditto for the cluster torpedo upgrade in Battle For Naboo.
  • The Naboo Starfighter is an absurdly powerful Master of All, with high speed, great shields, and powerful weapons in all of the main games. It makes earning Gold Medals nearly trivial, even in bombing levels designed for the Y-Wing. Battle for Naboo brings it down to a "mere" Jack of All Stats because it replaces the X-Wing in that game, but even then it's still the best "normal" ship in the game. Adding homing cluster missiles in Rebel Strike is just icing on the cake.
  • Rebel Strike added sonic mines (first seen in Attack of the Clones) to the game-breaker arsenal. Just shoot a few in random directions, and boom—big blue waves of doom that cut through shields. Putting them on the Slave 1 makes a little sense due to the ship's flaws (slow, worthless lasers, and made of paper) but it really goes into broken territory when they're equipped on the fast-and-small Jedi Starfighter.
    • The sonic mines also slowly regenerate, so you'll always be able to create blue shockwave chaos.
  • The A-wing's concussion missiles got a major upgrade in Rebel Strike. With the ability to lock on to multiple targets and fire several missiles at once, they've essentially become a poor man's cluster missiles. And like the Y-wing's bombs, they regenerate, so you can keep using them throughout the level whenever you're having trouble lining up a shot.
  • The AT-STs in Rebel Strike rapidly regenerate both health and concussion missiles; any level where you drive one is an extended Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • Which is nothing compared to the carnage you can unleash when the game gives you an AT-AT in one level. Though quite slow, the walker is almost as Nigh-Invulnerable as it is when the Empire is using it against you, and they don't have Snowspeeders or any easy way to take you down. The rest of the level is pretty much a shooting gallery at that point.
  • If any player selects the TIE Advanced in the multiplayer mode of Rebel Strike, that player has pretty much automatically won, since its homing cluster missiles one-shot-kill anything without even having to aim. Especially bad since—unlike in the single player mode—the TIE Advanced and homing cluster missiles are both unlocked at the start of the game.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Tie-D Fighters in Battle for Calimari. They're small, fast, very hard to hit with the V-Wings cannons, and they are smart and will literally fly circles around you if you don't shoot them down ASAP.
  • The TIE's in the Battle for Endor, if for nothing else their tendency to run into you by accident.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In Rogue Squadron, it's possible for certain cutscenes to continue on if the player is to crash their vehicle just before they even begin. For example, the "Liberation of Gerrard V" cutscene that shows Wedge being chased by a pair of TIE Interceptors would continue on longer than usual, only for the two TIEs to suddenly crash into the sea below, as if they were both shot down.
  • Rogue Leader doesn't count a life as lost if you get destroyed exactly when a cutscene begins. This is best demonstrated on Razor Rendezvous: Destroying the Star Destroyer's bridge immediately triggers a cutscene, meaning that the vast majority of players who get gold (which requires no lives lost) do so by crashing into the bridge.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: All three of the games (and Battle for Naboo). It helps that the games add plenty of original missions in between canon events like the Battles of Yavin and Hoth, so it never feels like you're just rehashing the movies. In fact, the first game's main storyline consists entirely of original missions, with the Death Star and Battle of Hoth saved for bonus missions. Even the Contested Sequel Rebel Strike's flaws have little to do with the license.
• Retroactive Recognition: An oddly in-universe case. Dak Rakler's voice actor (Raphael Sbarge) is better known to Star Wars Legends fans as Scorch or Carth Onasi
• Scrappy Mechanic: Rebel Strike's on-foot levels in the main campaign are generally reviled by fans largely due to the floaty controls and finicky auto-aim system.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Battle for Naboo is significantly easier than the preceding Rogue Squadron (mostly due to fewer difficult escort missions), though it trades off the lower difficulty by including some excruciatingly hard (but thankfully optional) goals to earn Gold and Platinum Medals. Rebel Strike is also significantly easier than the preceding Rogue Leader (mostly due to regenerating secondary weapons and several on-foot missions that are easier than flying levels), though Gold and Platinum Medal runs are still no slouch.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Rogue Leader is significantly more difficult than the original game and Battle for Naboo, especially if you're aiming for Gold Medals and/or are playing it on Ace Mode.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus of Rebel Strike. The game is fun but suffered from questionable gameplay mechanics, most notably the on-foot sequences in the main game. Of course, Rebel Strike also includes a co-op version of the entirety of Rogue Leader, which alone made the game worth getting for some people.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In Rogue Leader, if you fail at any point in "Death Star Attack", you'll see Yavin IV explode. While lifting the explosion wholesale from the Alderaan explosion is understandable, the screen seems to awkwardly fade from the view of the planet to the explosion footage. Furthermore, the iconic green beam is nowhere to be found; it could be that the laser was fired from behind the planet, but why wouldn't the developers show it?
  • Another one from Rogue Leader: Running out of time on "Triumph of the Empire" shows the Death Star going kaboom, just like in canon, but it also shows Vader's TIE being blown away by the wreckage. Problem is, it's painfully obvious that Vader's TIE moves in the game's native 60 FPS while the explosion is taken straight out of the 24 FPS source material.
  • In the same game, failing "Revenge on Yavin" by letting too many Rebel Transports escape shows Vader plugging a blaster shot into one of his wingmen. Not only is the bolt a Painfully Slow Projectile, but it freezes in place once the entire trail is shown and Vader's ship flies through it after the poor henchmen is killed.
  • In Rebel Strike "Battlefield Hoth", a few AT-ATs fall over as you run back to base. The problem is that there are very clearly no Snowspeeders tripping them with cables. They just randomly stop walking and fall over.
  • If you fail near the end of "Defiance on Dantooine", you get a brief cutscene where the Rebel starfighters are destroyed by Imperial gunfire. Sarkli falls over and dies as if he's been hit. But if you pauses just a frame before Sarkli dies, you'll see that the laser clearly hit his X-Wing, not himself.
  • From the same game, the end of the level "Attack on the Executor" shows the Executor "fall" out of control and hit the Death Star, there's an explosion...and then Executor is still there, like the tip got lodged in the Death Star and now the whole ship is stuck in it. Why the developers didn't just use footage from the movie is a mystery, particularly since they do use footage from the movie at other points.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The "Mystery" theme from Rogue Leader and Rebel Strike is a very blatant ersatz of the first few minutes of Gustav Holst's "Saturn" suite.
• Take That, Scrappy!: The title sequence of Battle for Naboo features the N64 logo ^note alternatively, the Lucasfilm logo in the PC port falling on Jar Jar Binks.
• That One Level: Each game has a few of them.
  • ... but none come close to the sheer frustration from "Escape from Fest". The AT-PTs are so fragile, you can go from a gold run to mission failure in seconds. Take too long getting to the AT-PTs at the beginning? Mission over. Don't blow up enough of the roughly 85 tank droids that jump you? Mission over. Let one TIE Bomber get to the AT-PTs? Mission over. The medal requirements are also unusually tight compared to the rest of the game, giving you only seven minutes to qualify for even a Bronze medal, let alone Gold, and most of that will be spent tying up a whopping three AT-ATs and waiting for the AT-PTs to take their sweet time crawling across the finish line.
  • The Battle of Hoth bonus level in the first game is a breeze on its own, but getting a gold medal on it is a pain due to the very tight criteria. You're given just barely enough time to finish the level, so if you flub up even once with taking down the AT-ATs, you may as well just start over. On top of that, the accuracy requirements are unusually high, which can be an extra pain in the neck despite the presence of three huge targets to shoot at due to the aforementioned time requirements.
  • When it comes to brutal levels that don't involve the Snowspeeder, nothing matches the sheer insanity that is Raid on Sullust. There are missile turrets everywhere and they will begin firing on you as soon as you start the level. Even the heavily armored Y-Wing will barely last a few seconds if you don't stay on your toes. And aiming for a gold medal turns it into the hardest level in the entire game. Moff Seerdon's Revenge is barely any more forgiving due to its extremely open ended structure and low margin for error, especially in regards to medal requirements.
  • "Razor Rendezvous": You in a B-wing vs a Star Destroyer and its entire complement of fighters. On the other hand, this kind of mission is exactly what the B-wing was designed for, and if you know what you're doing, you can finish with a gold in under a minute.
  • "Prisons of Kessel": You're escorting a fragile shuttle through incredibly hostile territory filled to the brim with missile turrets that will waste your X-wing when they're not wasting your escort.
  • The "Death Star Attack" level may be a great opening level for Rogue Leader on a casual playthrough, but a Gold Medal run instantly escalates it into one of the hardest levels in the entire game. Besides having an insanely tight time requirement where you have mere seconds of error, you have to kill a very high number of targets at the same time (90 enemies total). There's no way to cheese this mission with another ship either; you're stuck with either the X-Wing or the Y-Wing (which has its Proton Bombs swapped out for proton torpedoes for the occasion).
  • "Battle of Endor": How bad is it?
    • Waves upon waves of TIE Interceptors, complete with the infamous Darth Bob AI, an Escort Mission where you have to chase after TIE Bombers (who will happily go Macross on you if you try to take them out before they split up, and are nearly impossible to find afterwards even with your targeting computer).
    • And in case that wasn't enough, the game dumps two Star Destroyers on you at the end, and unlike Razor Rendezvous above, you're probably not using a ship equipped to handle them like the B-wing. Oh, and you can only die three times (unlocking the Naboo starfighter and getting all the Tech Upgrades prior makes it slightly more bearable, but still by no means a cakewalk). Have fun.
  • Rogue Leader's "Strike At The Core". Seriously! You can fail seconds after starting the level as a flurry of TIE Fighters and laser turrets rip you and the Millennium Falcon to shreds. After that you have to chase the Falcon and protect it from fighters while flying through a tight winding tunnel. Missing any TIEs for a few seconds results in an instant fail. You have to do all of this while flying at breakneck speeds because the Falcon slams on the gas the entire damn level! It all culminates with having to race all the way through the tight, turning, winding tunnel again with an instant death fireball chasing you on the way out. For an added wrinkle: the Falcon can- and will- bump you into a wall and kill you instantly as you flee. For an extra kick in the soul you can replay this mission with the Millennium Falcon, which barely fits in the tunnel you have to race through to begin with.
  • "Imperial Academy Heist": "They picked me up on their sensors!" (Game Over)
    • Or if you're playing at night, with the Speeder: "The Empire knows we're here!" (Game Over)
  • Or in Rebel Strike with the long Destrillion tunnel followed by TIE Hunters & the superlaser.
  • "Defection at Corellia" from the first game can be pretty annoying. Firstly, it's at night, and Coronet City is partly built into a hilly seaside whose contours aren't very visible. Secondly, you're in a snowspeeder, tasked with zooming across opposite ends of the city, protecting both the Capitol and the bunker where Crix Madine is holed up in, and you have to take out two AT-ATs along the way, one of whom is nestled right next to a hill. And finally, you, in that piddly snowspeeder, have to take out an entire wing of TIE Bombers.
  • The Queen's Gambit in Battle for Naboo starts off easy, but the second half, where you're saddled with the Naboo Bomber, is aggravating, especially on medal runs. The bomber is near useless—it moves slow as molasses, only has six bombs (two of which are needed to take out the MT Ts before they reach their destination) and its slow firing laser cannons are pathetic. Did we mention there are lots of turrets and mines scattered around to distract you as well? Being able to replay the level with the N-1 Fighter doesn't make it much better either, since its whole load of missiles won't take down a single MTT, and your lasers take even longer to chew through them.
  • Panaka's Diversion from Battle for Naboo. Not that hard of a level on its own, but getting a gold or platinum medal turns it into an endurance test. The nastiest criteria to meet is that you can't die at all—this level is packed with enemies in a cramped city environment, so getting through in one piece, on top of having to kill enough enemies and meet a strict time limit, will really push your skills to their limits.
  • "Prisons of the Maw" from Rogue Leader:
    • First off, it's a Y-Wing mission, which obviously requires the player to fly the Rebels' slow, lumbering bomber that will most likely get shot down at least once through an asteroid field for added "fun". The first half of the mission requires the player to use the ship's ion cannons on three generators powering a forcefield, which gets pretty tedious.
    • But that is nothing compared to the second half! Wedge and crew have to bomb the prison's gun towers and walkers while a group of Rebels make their escape on a train. If you don't complete the objectives lightning fast, the train will be destroyed and you'll be forced to retreat. Needless to say, it's a Death Star-sized pain in the ass.
    • Oh, and you have to do this while constantly hearing the Rebels scream at you.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The first game had a button dedicated to changing the firing mode of your ship's blasters, letting you choose to fire one at a time, two at a time if you were in a ship with four blasters like the X-Wing, or all at once. Few players used this (unless they were in the V-Wing thanks to its rapid-fire mode being tied to the feature) since it didn't improve damage-per-second that much and the slower firing rate punished missed shots. The later games made laser linking automatic, rewarding the player for pausing between shots instead of just holding down A.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Battle for Naboo's final level has the Droid Control Ship, which the developers commentary states is one of the largest models ever rendered on the Nintendo 64 and was actually thought by many to be impossible to accomplish on the console!
  • For a game that was released in 2001 and as a Nintendo GameCube launch title, Rogue Leader's visuals hold up very well to this day.

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