I Think Enough Time Has Passed To Finally Talk About Star Wars Zero Company’s [Spoiler] Moment

If you’re like me and neither got into Clone Wars lore nor paid attention to Star Wars Zero Company‘s in-universe news broadcasts, then like me you would have reached a point about halfway through this game where a key cutscene happens and you lose your damn mind.

See, from the Battle Droids to the Anakin Skywalker cameo to the presence of a Republic officer (Berric) on your bridge and a Clone Trooper (Trick) among your ranks, I had been led to believe this was a Clone Wars-era video game. Which, fine, it’s not my favourite Star Wars period, but for the opening hours of Zero Company it had been grimy and “real” enough to feel sufficiently Star Wars in a way I could recognise, so I was enjoying it well enough.It is, after all, a very good tactics game. I was going to spend this campaign as the leader of a ragtag group of mercenaries fighting a cult on behalf of the Republic, and that was going to be fun.

Then, as you’re preparing to head off on a fairly routine mission, this happens:

Uh, holy shit.

I get that a certain percentage of the playerbase would have been expecting this, especially those who grew up on Clone Wars cartoons, but I think it hit so much harder if, like me, you had no idea this was coming. One minute I’m making my peace working for the Republic and hanging out with my Republic officer buddy and my absolute favourite soldier Trick, a former Republic Clone Trooper, and the next my–and their–whole universe has been turned upside down.

With one order my buddy Berric is now trying to arrest me, my new Clone Trooper friends are manhandling me and, worst of all, my pal Trick has turned on me. And the game has the smarts to make this play out as a mission! By keeping Trick a member of your party for one more mission, but locking the player into only selecting the rest of your party as targets, we get to see the change and turmoil that came in Order 66’s wake from an entirely new story-telling perspective: gameplay.

The entire game pivots after this point. It’s no longer a story set in the waning days of the Clone Wars, it’s now a story about Empire and rebellion, and starts looking to Andorfor inspiration instead of a cartoon series. Zero Company’s backend is loaded with some of the most explicit anti-fascist commentary you’ll find in a Star Wars video game,right down to a Porco Rosso cameo, as Hawks and his crew find themselves making the transition from indifferent mercenaries to freedom fighters.

What’s especially deft (and poignant) is the way the birth of the Empire plays out among people you already knew before it existed. Where a Clone Trooper can turn at the push of a button, a person–in this case your friend Bennic–doesn’t instantly become a fascist. They get there slowly: a followed order here, a justification there.

None of this is revolutionary storytelling in of itself, but as this is a Star Wars video game, and a turn-based tactics one at that, my bar was so low that I’d have made do with “good guys win in the end” so long as they didn’t fuck it up. Having it end by telling a defecting Imperial officer that there was no ultimate redemption for him, he was going to have to live with the terrible things he had done, safely cleared that bar.

Before I’d started playing I’d seen reviews saying stuff like this was the “best Star Wars game in decades”; even taking the developer’s pedigree into account, that felt like a very big call,since we’ve had some pretty good Star Wars games lately! After this point in Zero Company, though, I can see exactly what they were talking about. Zero Companyis a great squad tactics game, sure, I’d have loved it even were it just that, but the way it brings such shock and gravity to a moment that not even the film it originated in could muster was a masterstroke.