YMMV / Star Wars: Battlefront II

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the campaign truly the recollections of a clone trooper from the 501st, or is it Imperial propaganda? The clones would have been biologically around 70 years old by the time of the original trilogy. Setting aside their apparent longevity, many of the Clone Wars battles the campaign has them partake in occurred near simultaneously in distant parts of the galaxy. And while the clones were in one sense Do Anything Soldiers, being key parts of every facet of the Republic's war machine, a single trooper would not be trained as both a starfighter pilot and infantryman. And it seems notable that the game ends with a major victory for the Empire. So what does the campaign represent? The memories of a single clone? The collective war diary of the 501st? Or a propaganda piece commissioned by the Empire?
• Best Level Ever:
  • HOTH. It's the Empire's finest moment in the original trilogy, and only fitting that it serves as the climax of the campaign: from the very beginning you're raining death down on the hapless rebel scum in a lumbering AT-AT, tearing through their defenses like paper as they can do little but flee from you. When you're finally forced out of the war machine to fight on foot, you claim the hanger and the game poses a simple yes-or-no question: 'Play as Darth Vader?' Cue things getting that much worse for the already-crumbling rebels. Finally, you're tasked with doing an end-zone run with a targeting beacon across a massive field serving as the rebels' last stand, dodging blaster fire before hunkering down and protecting the beacon with your life until a Star Destroyer can call down an airstrike and blow up the rebel transport, stranding them at the mercy of the 501st and a Dark Lord of the Sith.
  • Kashyyyk. The good guys (Republic and Rebels) have a massive fortress built into the hillside, while the bad guys (CIS and Empire) come charging through the ocean waters and up the beach, with access to plenty of vehicles right off the bat. The fighting gets especially intense on the good guys' side of the beach, and their multiple defenses won't stand up against the sheer might of the bad guys' forces. There are turrets allowing you to rain heavy fire on the enemy, plenty of high ground to snipe from, fallback positions, allies... it's even more epic than it sounds.
  • Mos Eisley Assault. You can play as every hero or villain in the game, all the heroes and villains face off against each other, some of the sillier tracks from across the first two trilogies play in the background, and it all comes together in a giant cartoony free-for-all.
  • Naboo Hunt. You can choose to play as the Gungans, who have (surprisingly ineffective) EMP Grenades (the "boomers" from the first movie), or you can choose to play as Super Battle Droids, with rocket launchers and fast-firing blasters. It's quite clear which one was meant to win. It also helps that all the gungans intentionally are made to sound like Jar Jar.
  • Amusingly flipped in Endor Hunt. On the one side, you have Scout Troopers who have sniper rifles and pistols. On the other, you have Ewoks, who have... spears and rocks. The Ewoks will nearly always win. Ewoks are small and camouflaged in the undergrowth, and the rocks will knock over a trooper, allowing Ewoks to stick two or three spears in them. It really sells just why they were able to win in Return Of The Jedi.
• Complete Monster: Emperor Palpatine's evil casts a shadow over all of the game's events:
  • "Rise of the Empire": After creating the 501st Legion to serve his personal interests, Palpatine begins preparing for his Empire by having them steal the power core for the Death Star. After General Grievous's death, Palpatine executes Order 66, having Vader and the 501st kill every Knight, Master, guard, and child aligned with the Jedi. With full power secured, Palpatine crushes any attempt at rebellion, including massacring the Queen of his home planet of Naboo and her security force and forcing the 501st to kill an army of rival Clones alongside the Kamino leadership. After having the 501st put down a Death Star prison riot by killing every prisoner involved, Palpatine works to crush the Rebellion through the Death Star; when the Death Star is destroyed, Palpatine responds by having the Rebel forces on Yavin IV massacred, then tracks the Rebellion to Hoth to crush them once and for all.
  • "Galactic Conquest"'s "The Confederate Uprising" & "Dark Reign of the Empire": If the Confederacy wins the game, Darth Sidious leads his forces in killing everyone associated with the Republic, including his loyal Clone army, the Jedi, and Anakin Skywalker, to take power with his Empire. If the Empire wins the game, Palpatine's Empire crushes the Rebellion, with his army destroying Endor and its population while Palpatine forces Luke Skywalker to kneel before him.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Wampas on Hoth. They are fast and can kill you in one swipe, and they can take a lot of punishment in turn. Thankfully they only show up when playing Hunt mode on Hoth, where you'll have to fight an entire colony of them.
  • Gamorrean Guards in Jabba's Palace, as they can take an absurd amount of punishment, have a habit of spawning in the middle of already-heavy combat zones, and can kill most non-hero units in a single hit. Even hero units have to beware, as they are prone to being knocked over with one hit before being killed by the second. They are also able to capture command posts for themselves, resulting in much bleeding out of reinforcements for both sides.
  • Y-Wings in space battles. Unlike other starfighters, which only have Fixed Forward Facing Weapons, the Y-Wing has a swivel-mounted chaingun turret, meaning that they can shoot back at you even while you're tailing them. This means they can force the player to break off pursuit, at which point the Y-Wing can then turn around and nail you with its main gun to finish you off.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Gizor Delso became quite popular in mods. The fact he provides an excuse for the Empire to fight the Separatists also helps.
• Even Better Sequel: This game took its place as one of the most popular and best-selling Star Wars games of all time thanks to improved gameplay, the addition of space battles, playable heroes, medals, more units and vehicles, and the incorporation of every movie in the series up to that point. The improved AI for the game is an added bonus.
• Funny Moments:
  • When you take damage during a space battle, your fighter's astromech droid (assuming you have one) often squeals in panic just like R2-D2.
  • Clone troopers fighting Jango Fett will occasionally quip, "Can I get your autograph?" They might also refer to General Grievous as "Major Malevolent".
  • In Mos Eisley Assault, some of franchise's stranger songs ("Yub Nub", "Jedi Rocks", etc) play in place of the standard battle music. It works surprisingly well.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Engineers. They all have shotguns (which aren't the standard Short-Range Shotgun), the ability to slice the drivers out of vehicles, and the ability to heal and restock their own ammo. They are a common choice for going One-Man Army on the enemy team.
  • The Wookiees. They have above-average health, access to drones, and a grenade launcher. The Wookiee crossbow is a combination of a sniper rifle and a shotgun! Using various levels of charge on the gun can enable it to either spread out and hit more targets, or fire a single, concentrated shot. Add the scope for the sniper rifle part. Access to grenade launcher allows a Wookiee to go against vehicles, adding to the insane versatility of the berserker. The only class barring hero that counters a Wookiee is the Dark Trooper, whose ARC Caster can do more damage, but lower health, reload and charge times means you have to have a really good escape.
  • The award weapons are this trope in spades, most notably the award rifle, shotgun, and pistol. The award rifle turns enemy soldiers into hamburger meat faster than you can say "I am your father," the award shotgun one-hit kills even the toughest enemy soldiers, and the award pistol is a mini-Sniper Rifle that fires as fast as the commando pistol.
  • The Droideka can be one in skilled hands. Not only are they ungodly fast while rolling, but once they reach a destination and deploy, often a long cramped hallway/alley or good over-watch position, they essentially completely cut off that area. Their shield lets them tank huge amounts of damage, and their own rapid-fire blasters shred anything short of a tank; this is on top of being immune to headshots and having infinite ammo. It tends to take a combined team effort to unglue one Droideka, and even then it will kill most of its attackers or simply curl up to retreat/reposition. They were thankfully hard to unlock in online play, making them rather rare.
  • Any Jedi hero. They can pretty much fight at any range and keep themselves alive by killing enemies, which is fairly easy since their lightsabers cut through infantry like a knife through warm butter and can deflect enemy fire. Darth Maul, having a double-bladed lightsaber and a secret combo, is the worst offender, as he can push the Republic back to a single command post (Polis Massa is a good example) and hold down a single corridor by spamming Saber Throw. The heroes' closest equivalent would probably be Aayla Secura, whose dual lightsabers make her hit like a chainsaw on legs and give her access to a sprinting attack that can shred other heroes with impunity, but even then she's only found on a handful of maps (one of which is Jabba's Palace, where she can get offed just as easily as regular units by Gamorrean Guards if caught unawares) whereas Darth Maul shows up virtually everywhere.
  • CIS Tri-Fighters are small, fast, and the most maneuverable of all Scout-class fighters, with nigh-undodgeable homing missiles and a rapid-fire blaster chaingun.
  • The Empire's Theta Shuttle is surprisingly powerful. Although it's slow and has trouble dodging enemy ships, it's immensely sturdy compared to most ships, capable of taking on all Rebel ships single-handedly with barely a scratch, mainly due to packing the same concussion missiles as the TIE Interceptor with a wide lock-on arc.
  • Really, the Transport ships in general. They have the toughest armor of all the starfighter classes and their weaponry can take out enemy starfighters and frigates. Not only that, but they can be used as a spawn point if landed in an enemy capital ship. Their only real drawback is their lack of speed and poor maneuverability.
  • Emperor Palpatine becomes nearly unstoppable with his force lightning. If you charge right up to the enemy's main spawn control point and try to take it, you can bring yourself back up to full health just by using force lightning to kill dozens of enemies in the vicinity in mere seconds.
  • Han Solo is about as good as a non-Jedi hero can get, mainly for his incredibly powerful gun. It deals the same damage as the award pistol and fires two shots at a time to instantly kill anything that's not in a vehicle, doesn't need to reload, rarely overheats, and has a good fire rate with perfect accuracy, letting him single-handedly gun down crowds of enemies in short order. He's playable even in Hero Assault as he can kite lightsaber-users with his fast movement speed while poking them to bits and blowing them up with detpacks. "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a blaster at your side," indeed.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Geonosians if you're playing as the Republic. They fight for the CIS and, unlike in the first game, they now have unlimited reinforcements, meaning that while they're fairly weak, there's no way to get them completely off your back while hunting down straggling enemies or trying to hold down command posts. Oh, and they can pilot vehicles and use turrets. These traits also apply to the Wookiees on Kashyyyk, who side with the heroic faction and basically gives them a big numbers advantage over the Empire and CIS, though they're less aggravating due to the map design making them less able to drag out the game and because they can't fly.
  • V-Wings in space battles if you play as the CIS. While they pose little threat in a dogfight, taking them down can be a genuine challenge. Not only do they have high health due to their status as a bomber, but their speed, agility, and small size compared to the other bombers make them frustratingly hard targets. So it takes a lot of firepower to put them down, and even landing enough hits to do so is a chore.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Go here.
• Memetic Mutation: Most of the dialogue has become this, particularly the clone lines.
  • "Watch those wrist rockets!"
  • "They've sent in the supers!"
  • "NOW HEAR THIS!"
  • "Just like the simulations."
• Narm:
  • The female Rebel sniper sometimes shouts "Yee-haw!" in an atrocious attempt at an American southern accent.
  • The announcer prompts can sometimes lead to rather ridiculous sounding messages when spliced together.
    CIS Announcer: Reinforcements are being depleted! Victory is inevitable!
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The Bothan Spies. They have incinerator weapons, regenerate health, transmit the ability to regenerate health to others, are equipped with time bombs, and attack in numbers. And they can do all this without you seeing them once, because they can turn invisible! It's almost guaranteed that once you see one, you will not stop until you've sprayed the area with gunfire, emptied a magazine in the alien's general direction, thrown several grenades, and generally made sure that it is superlatively dead. Of course, they have such awful range and such low health that you can hand them their asses if you ever get in a fight where you can actually see one of them.
  • A glitch in the Tantive IV map allows the player to leave the map and walk around it from the outside. If you're fighting another player and both of you know the glitch, this can get really paranoia-inducing, as they can literally come from anywhere.
• Polished Port: The Xbox One backwards compatibility version both runs a lot better and looks a lot better, due to the visuals getting a bump with the better hardware.
• Porting Disaster: In contrast, the PC port of the game suffers from an immensely downgraded pre-game UI that runs on a fixed resolution and lacks all of the graphical and thematic work done for the console UI. It's also notoriously unstable and prone to crashing, with the game being known to work poorly on DirectX 12 and giving black screens when the Discord in-game overlay is active.
• Rooting for the Empire: Literally in the campaign, since the player only plays as the clone troopers (who not only get to execute Order 66, but are presented rather sympathetically doing so and in their envy of the Jedi's fame) and Empire, and the final mission presents an alternate reality where the rebels are defeated for good. This even got streamlined into the old Expanded Universe, as people felt the ending was perfect for them, but then it was all de-canonized when Disney bought the rights and did away with the entire now-Legends canon.
  • From some missions, you might end up doing this when you play against the New Clone Army or the Separatist Remnants, in part because the leader of the latter is an Ensemble Dark Horse.
• Scrappy Weapon: While award weapons always have some kind of drawback compared to their base counterpart (award rifle and shotgun get a delay between shots/bursts, award pistol trades off Bottomless Magazines, etc.), their upsides generally make them worth using. Unfortunately, this can't be said of the Beam Rifle. Compared to the regular sniper rifle, the Beam Rifle suffers from a severely reduced fire rate, reload speed, magazine size, and ammo capacity, making it worse in nearly every way. And just to add insult to injury, it does no damage on headshots and has issues with hit registration giving it a lower effective range, making it a straight downgrade over the default sniper rifles in what is supposed to be its entire purpose. Its only upsides are instantly killing on bodyshots and the ability to penetrate multiple enemies when the hit registration works correctly, which don't make up for the weapon's mountain of downsides; the War Hero bonus gives you a damage increase that lets the regular sniper rifle One-Hit Kill on bodyshots anyway, and enemies will rarely line up nicely for you to land a One-Hit Polykill.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Some of the harder aspects of the original game are toned down here. In particular, vehicles and turrets inflict less damage and are considerably easier to destroy.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Naboo Hunt puts Super Battle Droids up against Gungans. You have a tri-shotgun that can 2-hit kill anything, a rocket launcher built into your arm, and a machine gun. They have grenades, horrible aim, and a fusion cutter. Plus, there's already the motivation of killing Jar-Jar, whom all the Gungans sound exactly like. Do the math.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The campaign narration on Felucia. He states the entire time they were on the planet was a nightmare, and the 501st only made it through thanks to the leadership of Aayla Secura. When they were rotated out she told them they were the finest she had ever served with, and the narrator states that knowing about the inevitability of Order 66, none of the clones could bear to look her in the eye.
    Narrator: It was a good thing we were wearing helmets. When her death came, I hope it was quick. She deserved that much.
  • The opening narration to "Operation: Knightfall." The clones all knew what was coming and refused to say a word. Even with some of their misgivings about the Jedi Order, it is made clear that the Clone Troopers have no desire to kill the order down to the last child, but they feel that they have to. And keep in mind, this was before the biochip retcon rendered this entire narration moot and turned the clones into mindless drones upon the activation of Order 66.
  • Yavin IV: Orbit gives a perspective flip to the destruction of the Death Star, noting how half the 501st were getting to the ships in their hangers, and of the ones who made it out another third were killed in the explosion of the Death Star. The narrator notes some of them were friends he fought alongside for over 20 years.
• That One Achievement: The Demolition medal requires you to land four critical hits on vehicles with a rocket launcher in one life. This is much harder than it sounds; most weak spots on vehicles are located in spots that are hard to hit when they're trying to gun you down (which they most definitely will), and the ones that aren't make you put yourself in the vehicle's line of fire. And you have to dead-fire the rockets, because the lock-on function will not automatically target vehicle weak spots. If you want to play with remote missiles, have fun trying to grind this one.
• That One Attack: There's a reason why Clone Troopers tell you all the time to "Watch those wrist rockets!" when fighting Super Battle Droids. They fire in a straight line with indefinite range and explode on impact, often one-shotting infantry on a direct hit; even with damage reduction from the Guardian medal, you'll lose half your health if one hits you. Not only are Super Battle Droids the basic trooper for the Separatists (meaning the AI spawns far more often as them than any other class, and they are the only class available to the CIS in early Galactic Conquest battles), but in this game they're a lot more rocket-happy than in the original game, meaning you'll have to dodge a lot of rockets or else instantly die. To add insult to injury, they're considerably worse than grenades when you're the one using them against the AI since they deal almost no splash damage, making them weak against groups of enemies.
• That One Level:
  • Kashyyyk is a meat grinder, requiring players to hold the front line against the enemy before falling back to defend a small refinery station. The enemy has access to explosives and vehicles, making the latter part hell.
    • It's not much better outside the campaign. If playing on the heroic side (Republic/Rebels), your forward command post has very little cover and is nigh-impossible to hold against enemies storming it from both the beach and the water; this inevitably leads to your reinforcements running out very quickly, and the infinite Wookiee reinforcements only do so much. And just to add insult to injury, losing the forward CP also means you lose access to tanks. Meanwhile, if you're playing on the "Villain" side (CIS or Empire), the mission requires you to slog your way across the map, with very little cover, while AI-spawned Wookiees aid the "Heroes" in manning heavy weapons on top of a huge wall. Oh, and said Wookiees don't count towards the enemy number count. It's a bit like the D-Day invasion in "Saving Private Ryan" and initially the only way to get past the wall is two narrow doorways, which are easy to turn into choke points. You can open up a much larger door between the two, but to do that you have to get past these narrow choke points to blow up a computer panel while under fire from pretty much every single enemy on the heroic side.
  • When on the Hoth Hunt level, that is "Rebels vs. Wampas," it can be this if you pick the Wampas. The problem is that the Rebels all start out standing in an open field... that is covered in turrets, autoblasters, and trenches. The Wampas have to emerge from narrow caves and advance across an empty hangar, in full view of the entire Rebel army, who is at this point well entrenched and no doubt manning the numerous gun emplacements, waiting for you to emerge from your narrow choke point into their killing field. Of course, it doesn't get much better if you play as the Rebels, since the Wampas move fast, can take several hits without dying, and can deal a near-guaranteed One-Hit Kill when they hit back.
  • Operation Knightfall should be one of the most memorable levels, if not for the ridiculous mission objective where you have to protect bookcases that are being destroyed by the Jedi, which fails the mission entirely if they're all destroyed. Jedi immediately spawn right on top of the bookcases when the objective goes live. It's perfectly possible to fail this objective within thirty seconds of getting it, and extremely rare to complete it with more than one bookcase still standing.
  • The Raid on Polis Massa is an extremely challenging Marathon Level, requiring you to complete multiple objectives across a massive map, while being swarmed by Rebel forces. And once you're done, you have to fight your way back to the start of the map.
    • The regular Polis Massa map is very tough for the Empire and Republic due to the way the spawn points are set up; namely, the Rebels and CIS spawn closer to the Empire/Republic's forward command post than the Empire/Republic do. This makes the command post depressingly hard to hold, and just to add insult to injury, the Rebel/CIS command posts are ridiculously easy to defend.
  • The Tantive IV mission. Let's just say that the Rebels in the opening of A New Hope would have fared much better if they had access to thermal detonators. The one mercy you get is the ability to play as Darth Vader if you survive the opening bloodbath... and that's a pretty big "if".
  • Endor for the Empire. The Ewoks actively side with the Rebels against you, and their small size and usage of rocks that send you flying and temporarily stun you makes for an annoying enemy. To make matters worse, their deaths don't diminish the enemy unit counts, so killing them is of no hindrance to the Rebels. In addition, the level's forestry can make locating Rebels particularly difficult, which makes it easy for snipers to hide and snipe you when you aren't looking.
  • Jabba's Palace - for both teams, mind you. The layout is labyrinthine and full of traps, most notably a Rancor, and all over the map there are Gammorean Guards, who take an absurd amount of punishment, and can end your life with a clean swing of their axe.
  • Naboo, for several reasons:
    • The map has a pathfinding bug that causes bots on the heroic side to get stuck on a wall north of the upper left command post, with as many as 7 bots being able to get stuck there, putting the heroic side at a clear disadvantage. No one has managed to fix this.
    • The vehicles on the map are unbalanced. The Empire and Separatists get their tanks as they did in the Battlefront 1 version of the map, while for some reason the Republic is downgraded to AT-RTs, which aren't exactly on the same level as the Seps' AAT but can at least do some damage, while the Rebels get absolutely nothing whatsoever to deal with the Empire's IFTs.
    • In Galactic Conquest, Naboo is one of the few planets that directly borders another (Dagobah), and is located in a chokepoint in the middle of the map, so it's going to get invaded a lot. Dagobah also gets this for the same reason, but it's far easier to defend; that being said, you'll get sick of the map very, very quickly if you play Galactic Conquest a lot.
  • The Death Star in Battlefront 2 is hated for its Cells command post that gives the Empire/CIS side a well defended position, so well defended that the Rebel/Republic side will always lose the battle if not captured quickly.
  • Dagobah is hated for its imbalanced command post placement that gives the advantage to the Empire/CIS side, especially when playing with bots.
  • Geonosis is this for the Republic. The Separatists are aided by the Geonosians, giving them a virtually unlimited amount of reinforcements (especially as Geonosian kills don't detract from the Separatist unit numbers) and the Republic's vehicles are reduced from the first game, giving them only one AT-TE to go up against the Separatists' multiple tanks.
• Underused Game Mechanic: During the campaign, there are three missions where you (as the Empire) get to fight both Clones and Separatists respectively, complete with a decent story justification for it (Kamino building up another clone army to resist the Empire and a Separatist in hiding uncovering a hidden droid factory on Mustafar). Sadly, everywhere else matchups are strictly limited by the era you're in.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • This game adds space battles for the first time, yet it didn't include the famous Battle of Yavin IV and Battle of Endor. Recreated by fans, though.
  • The capital ships in space battles... don't really do anything. They just sit in one place, occasionally launching fighters, firing heavy lasers that don't do anything to one another, until one cruiser is too badly damaged by enemy bombers and the battle ends without even a satisfying fireball to mark its defeat. It would have been far more interesting and dramatic to have them moving around the battlefield, actually engaging each other with their heavy weapons, while the starfighters dogfight and drop bombs to soften them up.

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