YMMV / Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

• Alternative Character Interpretation: At the end of the story, Kata seems pretty quick to forgive Cal and Merrin for killing her father Bode, even when you take into account that she clearly knew that he did terrible things to ensure her safety. Is she just repressing her sadness, grief and anger and bottling it up inside of herself? Or does she understand that Cal and Merrin didn’t have much of a choice and that they were fighting for their lives, especially since by that point, her father was too far gone and denied every chance he had to turn back from the path he was on?
• Anti-Climax Boss: Played for Laughs with "Rick the Door Technician". He sports a name and a boss healthbar, and yet he goes down just as easily as other Stormtroopers. He doesn't even have a stamina bar.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Denvik being left alive as a form of Cruel Mercy, with Cal knowing he's leaving him for Vader to finish later. Denvik doesn't get the Mercy Kill he was just begging for, and soon ends up choked to death by the Sith Lord offscreen as punishment for his many crimes.
  • Greez has a great moment when after the deaths of Cere and Cordova, Cal and Merrin begin blaming themselves for not foreseeing Bode's betrayal. Greez angrily snaps at them to knock it off, defiantly snarling that this is all on Bode and his friends are in no way to blame for the tragedy. It's a great way of shaking off the survivor's guilt that has plagued Cal the entire game and refusing to let Bode get away with what he's done, sympathetic motivations or not.
• Disappointing Last Level: For all the build up it has during the entire game, Tanalorr ends up being nothing more than a few areas you walk through so that you can get to the final boss. There aren't even any other enemies, and only one or two things to scan, making return trips possible but ultimately pointless in contrast to the prior game's non-revisited Nur.
• Ending Fatigue: Thought the fight with Dagan Gera was going to be the final showdown, especially with all the buildup to it and how much platforming you have to do to get to the observatory? Nope! After that boss fight, there's still a few hours left.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Turgle, the bizarre and comically annoying frog-alien voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, is beloved by players for his ridiculous but memorable design and providing some much-needed comic relief to an otherwise fairly grim story.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • B2 Droids. They're incredibly tanky and very resistant to staggering, and will constantly pelt you with blaster bolts while you're in the middle of a fight, interrupting you all the time. They are never a huge threat on their own, but when backed up by much more dangerous enemies, the chip damage inflicted by their shots adds up. At least, on the bright side, you can use this to your advantage in the Holotactics minigame with them as units.
  • Bramilks (AKA the spiky tumbleweed monsters) die in (usually) one hit. The problem? If you get close to them at all, their spikes suddenly protrude, dealing a fair bit of damage to you and interrupting anything you were doing, meaning you either have to use a ranged attack on them or try to bait an attack to leave them open. This can also lead to frustrating situations where you're trying to kill a group of them but they keep on rolling into you, stopping your attacks. In a group of enemies, this can often result in you getting knocked out of attacks, making everything take that much longer and making you need to heal a lot more.
  • Hardshells, by themselves, are incredibly easy to deal with, as they die in one swing from most saber attacks and their attacks aren't very dangerous. It's their tendency to absolutely swarm you, however, that makes them an annoyance. Furthermore, several wear explosive rocks as armor, not only making them tankier, but making them explode when they die, meaning that you have to pick them off from a distance or use the force to throw them at something, which can be difficult when there are so many of them, making targeting a specific one a nightmare.
• Good Bad Bugs: As an Anti-Frustration Feature, Force Tears restore all your stims, health, and Force energy. But they also restore them when you exit, rather than resetting you to your previous state. If you come across a Tear in your travels, you can use it to fill up without causing enemies to respawn.
• He's Just Hiding: Even though Ninth Sister gets decapitated by Cal, the character's previous return from near-certain death on multiple occasions and Made of Iron tendencies cause some fans to hold out a little skepticism about whether they are truly Deader than Dead and won't come back, especially given how the character essentially gets a Death by Cameo despite their earlier prominence.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Survivor plays very much like Fallen Order. While there are some new things added to the game, there's nothing that really transforms it, and combat and traversal feel very much unchanged from the first game. From a narrative perspective, Darth Vader also comes up again, almost feeling like he is there to fulfill a quota of famous characters instead of allowing anyone else to hunt down a group of runaway Jedi, in contrast to his far more emotionally impactful and shocking arrival in the prior game. Some people are okay with this, and some people are not.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Dagan Gera, to an extent. While he's an egomaniacal murderer and a madman with ambitions of becoming functionally a new emperor, once you piece together his full backstory and how his mental state degraded over years with nobody doing anything about it, being consumed by a well-meaning goal that he devoted his life to and then having it snatched away when the Jedi Council abandoned Tanalorr to the Nihil simply because they didn't see it as worth the trouble — after they had already all-but left him to fight the Nihil alone in a horrific battle — it's kind of hard to not feel like the Council and Santari did in some ways betray him and fail in their duty of care. None of it excuses his behavior, but he's definitely a monster created more by the failings of the system than anything else.
  • Bode. He's a monstrous and selfish person who commits appalling acts to ensure his own safety, but ultimately he's just a dad pushed past the breaking point by the death of his wife and his desperation to protect his daughter.
• Les Yay: Though romance is never brought up by her, Mosey has some sparks with the pansexual Merrin as they quickly grow to appreciate each other.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Caij's survival at the end of her questline is hardly a surprise. She was made much too likable and marketable to die in a boss fight after betraying Cal. Boba Fett scooping her up and going to collect the bounty is a good way to keep her fate ambiguous.
• Memetic Badass: Rick the Door Technician is the "Ironic Badass" subtype. He's just an average Stormtrooper, and the game sets him up as an intentional Anti-Climax Boss. Despite this, multiple video guides came out after the game released either hyping him up as the hardest boss in the game, giving ways to make his fight easier, or just straight up providing Cheese Strategy. Many even consider him as an even harder boss than Dagan Gera or Darth Vader.
• Memetic Mutation: GREEZY MONEY, BABY!^ExplanationA highly quotable line from Cal when Greez rejoins the Mantis crew, used in all sorts of situations to indicate financial success.
• Moral Event Horizon: Bode Akuna crosses it the moment he not only sells the Hidden Path out to the Empire, but also murders Eno Cordova in cold blood. He claims he was just trying to protect his daughter, Kata, and hide on Tanalorr alone, but regardless, he puts her in more danger than his enemies ever had. When Cal gives him a chance to surrender and redeem himself, Bode refuses to change his ways, forcing Cal to kill him.
• Obvious Beta: While the PC version likely fares the worst (see Porting Disaster below), all versions of the game had issues at launch, with unexpectedly low framerates and resolutions across all consoles. Alongside the performance problems are a number of strange progress-related bugs, including an error screen that prompts players to roll back their save file in case something unexpected happens.
• Obvious Judas: Some players pegged Bode as an Imperial spy from the moment of his introduction, given how he is introduced as the "new guy", quickly thereafter brings up his daughter as an explanation for his eventual betrayal, and ends up being the sole survivor of Cal's previous team after the intro.
• Porting Disaster: Shortly after launch, the game received mostly negative reviews on Steam, with most users going after the game for being a poor PC port. Most of the complaints centered around poor performance and even more bugs than the console versions, including cutscene audio skipping and going out of sync and a lack of optimization for multi-core CPUs. It got so bad that the developers issued a notice about the matter, stating they're working on fixes for the game.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Compared to the first game, where he was generally met with ambivalence at best, annoyance at worst, Greez is much more well-liked this time around nearly to Ensemble Dark Horse levels. Mostly because this game does a much better job selling him and the rest of the Stinger-Mantis crew as friends (whereas in the original his declaration that he saw the crew like family came off as an Informed Attribute) by dialing his "Grumpy Old Man snapping at the youngsters" tendencies back to a mutual Vitriolic Best Buds kind of dynamic, as well as giving him more bonding moments with Cal and more chances to show his usefulness to the team.
• Salvaged Story: The addition of fast-travel was widely praised given the lack of it was one of the biggest complaints about the previous game. Many have noted that given how this game is even bigger than the last, a lack of fast-travel may have made it unplayable for most players.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game has an extremely overzealous fall damage and out-of-bound system. Trying to jump down relatively small distances from higher ground to lower ground will often trigger it, damaging you and putting you back up on the higher ledge. The game even takes pains to defy the usual exploits around this, like double-jumping right before you hit the ground; you'll be reset anyway. It makes exploring the game's more open environments more of a chore than it should be.
  • While the Stance System adds some welcome variety to the gameplay, the fact that you can only equip two at a time, and that some types of enemies are difficult if not impossible to deal with without certain stances, places it in this category for some players. If you encounter such an enemy and don't have the proper stance equipped, it forces you to either take a death or backtrack to a meditation point to switch stances.
• That One Attack: The One-Hit Kill attacks from legendary bosses like the Rancor and the Spawn of Oggdo are sure to frustrate any Jedi, inexperienced or experienced. Unless you're prepared for them well in advance and know the best way of dodging them, you're going on a one-way trip back to your last meditation point. And sometimes not even that will save you.
• That One Boss:
  • Spawn of Oggdo is among one of the toughest bosses in the game, having a very high health pool and dealing massive damage with each attack, with their moves having large hitboxes and a lot of tracking, making dodging very difficult. To make matters worse, one of said hard-to-avoid attacks is a grab attack that is an instant kill at most health pools, with endgame levels of health needed to survive. The one saving grace for the player is that their attacks usually have plenty of warning time for you to dodge, and the one attack that doesn't can easily be avoided with a simple dodge to the side. However, that isn't the end of it: Later, you have to fight both them and the original Oggdo at the same time, meaning dodging becomes much, much harder.
  • One particularly harrowing Force Tear has the boss versions of a Mogu, Gorocco, and Bilemaw, and you have to fight them simultaneously. Their attacks are fast and often unblockable, they're not interested in Mook Chivalry, and on Jedi Master difficulty you'll go down in two of their hits even with a maxed out health bar. It can be something of a Luck-Based Mission, because their large size means it's very easy to get surrounded or cornered against the arena's edge and stunlocked before you have a chance to react.
  • The Rancor is also very difficult for fairly similar reasons, and just like the above example, you fight two of them at the same time in what is easily a contender for the hardest optional boss fight in the game.
  • While not surprising given who they are, Darth Vader can be a very difficult boss due to a variety of factors. They hit very hard and can combo you to death easily, so any mistakes are harshly punished. Furthermore, they have access to the Force, so they can pull you back in if you're trying to keep your distance to heal and push you away if you're trying to do some damage. One of the biggest however, is that the player is not playing as Cal, but as Cere. She only uses the single blade lightsaber style and does not have most of the upgrades that Cal does. If the player focused on another set of styles with Cal, they might have a difficult time adjusting. Furthermore, she also does not have the same amount of healing charges Cal might have if he went exploring for upgrades. Finally, Cere does not have Cal's slow time super, but the force shield. The shield is effective for handling lots of normal enemies, but against Vader, it's near useless.
• Unexpected Character:
  • First and foremost, Eno Cordova, the Big Good of Fallen Order, is revealed to have been alive the whole time, and was merely in hiding. During the time gap between Fallen Order and Survivor, he meets with Cere and begins working with her, and finally meets Cal in person with BD-1 in tow.
  • Second, Boba Fett makes a cameo by taking in Caij at the end of a questline.
  • Third, Vader's surprise appearance is one thing, but becoming a full-fledged boss battle as compared to his encounter in the previous game (this time fought by the much more seasoned Cere) is another.
  • Fourth, if you are inquisitive enough to search for Force Echoes in Tanalorr, you'll suddenly hear the voice of one familiar prequel-era Jedi Master: Oppo Rancisis. That means he was apparently old enough to live in the High Republic era!
• The Un-Twist:
  • As noted in Obvious Judas, Bode's betrayal is fairly easy to pick up on from the get-go. His reveal as a fallen Jedi, less so.
  • Cere's death is telegraphed pretty transparently in her ultimately final conversation with Cal in which she tells him how proud she (and Jaro Tapal) are of him, which is basically walking "kill me" bait for writers. This conversation makes it clear for players that when Vader arrives in the next sequence, she’s a goner and will not be lucky enough to escape him this time.

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