Bantam Skylark, $4.50, ISBN 0-553-48651-9
Sci-fi, 1998
Once upon a time, gamebooks are big, so it makes sense that certain IPs get the Choose Your Own Adventure treatment. It’s a matter of time before someone decides to do a Star Wars gamebook, so here it is: A New Hope, released right about Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace hitting the big screen.
Yes, you get to insert yourself into the movie of the same name, as Luke Skywalker’s BFF. Yes, that’s a new character made up for this campaign, which is both good and bad.
It’s good because you get to be in this campaign, and it’s bad because it makes both Luke and especially Leia look like hapless dolts at the mercy of your whims. To be fair, that’s mostly what gamebooks are all about, to make you feel like the boss of everyone—unless it’s a gamebook by a sadistic author like Jonathan Green and David Tant, for instance—so maybe that’s to be expected.
This leads to another double-edged sword: the most of this gamebook will see you just passively reading and turning to various pages, because it’s more of a story than anything else. This can be good, because the aforementioned moments of you getting to boss over Luke and Leia are not that numerous, and hence those characters get to keep some of their dignity intact. This also means, unfortunately, that this isn’t much of a gamebook.
On the bright side, it’s easy to read because Christopher Golden has a very engaging and balanced narrative style that never feels too kiddie and patronizing, yet at the same time never too grown-up to alienate the targeted kiddie audience.
It is easy to get to the happy ending, as you only have to do the right thing even if you hadn’t watched the movie that this one is based on.
What’s more awesome, though, is that you have the opportunity to betray the good guys because you think that is the only way to keep Luke safe. Of course, everything backfires, but you get to execute Luke, which is just metal. Oh, the campaign makes sure to tell you that you will be guilt-ridden for life, et cetera, but come on, you save Luke from showing up in the prequel trilogy and, like all those stupid shill rags would say, that’s a go-ooo-ooo-ood thing.
Anyway, this one doesn’t hold much surprises especially if you were familiar with the original trilogy, but it can be a pleasant trip to relive the Star Wars nostalgia. Heaven knows, it can’t be worse than the sequel trilogy, shudder. It also gives you a surprising amount of leeway to mess up Luke’s and Leia’s lives, which is a nice touch.
Hence, while it won’t be an earth shattering gamebook to play, it’s not a bad way at all to get some old school Star Wars fix.
