It took me years to finally finish FO. I stopped at some point just before a boss fight, and lost all the muscle memory required to beat it. It took hours upon hours just to beat that one boss and be able to make any forward progress, and then…

I thought it was a great game. Wonderful Star Wars-y-ness. To the degree that I bought the Cal Kentis lightsaber @ Galaxy’s Edge the last time I was there, and I have a Lego BB-8. I love Respawn’s output, and Titanfall 2 is one of my favorite FPS games ever.

I say all that, because the last battle in Fallen Order is break-your-controller in half when you shatter your TV by throwing your controller and then your console through the wall frustrating.

I don’t know whether it’s that I am also “not good”, but to me the problem is that Fallen Order is trying to be a precision, high-readability, “deterministic” action game like how people describe Dark Souls, but its core foundation can’t support that level of precision.

Animation windups are too long. Or enemy windups are too short. Both. I felt like the last boss was like the last boss in a Street Fighter game, where the AI difficulty ramps up slowly through the course of the regular characters, and then the last boss has AI coded by a sadist. Between what felt like cheap boss AI, really fast-deploying moves by the boss, and slow-deploying animation-trapping moves by you, there were a lot of times where that last battle just felt totally arbitrary and unfair. And wildly harder than all but one other battle in the game. Which you’ll probably know when you get stuck there.

Friends told me to lower the difficulty for those battles, and I wouldn’t do it. But let me recommend to you - if you want to end this game with the fondness for it you’ll have through the majority of your playthrough, just turn the difficulty down for any battles where you’re genuinely stuck. Because plowing through via brute force/repetition, I got so pissed off at the game that my memory of it is… damaged.

If I’d felt like the difficulty was fair, I’d have already bought Jedi Survivor. I have not. And that bugs me, because based on Titanfall 2, I was pretty sure I’d buy everything Respawn ever released on day 1 for the rest of time. I’ll get it eventually, though.