Jedi Academy is Dark Forces' final evolution. TIE FIghter was succeeded by the Rogue Squadron and Battlefront games. And these successor games came out in the PT era of 1999-2005.
The Jedi Knight/Academy games were all right, I guess, but the tone was different. Rogue Sqaudron was
way different from TIE Fighter/X-Wing, though, and not really a game I thought was all that great. I don't think it had anything to do with it coming out during that era, though. They weren't
bad games, just not as interesting to me. I liked the most simulation feel of TIE Fighter.
The problem is, Star Wars isn't Warhammer. It was a setting that was constantly evolving and changing, even with the SWEU changing elements before the Prequels. Hell, there was a time in the SWEU where Palpatine returned.
Yeah, I get that. I also don't like Warhammer, haha. I didn't care for a lot of the books that came out in the Extended Universe in general, either.
That, and I thought the Prequels actually did right by non-Force users by showing that even normies can gut the Jedi. Like that Battlefront 2 clone trooper narrator said "We realized that the Jedi can be fooled. And if they can be fooled, they can be killed."
For me it doesn't have anything to do with some kind of "balance" issue, it's largely thematic and tonal. My vision of Star Wars (and this was shared by most people who were in their teens or older before the prequel films) was that it was a good bit grittier, and not focused on Jedi or the Force really much at all. Except for very rare situations, like 1 in 100 billion or more rare people (Skywalkers, Katarn, Obi-Wan, whoever else was in the Jedi order before it collapsed, maybe a dozen number of remaining knights in the whole galaxy) it wasn't really something that came up much, or people even knew about. In the original movies, the idea of Jedi were treated like an obscure,
mostly inconsequential group of fanatics or weirdos (at least as far as most people knew) whose existence and powers were not widely known. I think the setting was much better this way.
A lot of this comes down to preferring the West End Games version/vision of Star Wars in the 90s to the direction it went from the prequel movie on. To a significant extent, WEG played a major role in keeping Star Wars interesting and "alive" between the release of Return of the Jedi through the end of the 90s. Their stories focused on smuggling, interplanetary organized crime in a lawless, almost wild west kind of galaxy, subterfuge, rooting out or acting as spies, double crossing, bounty hunting. The good stuff. In my opinion, Jedi, and anything having to do with them, really only detracted from that. In the game I played with my friends, there were other very small, largely inconsequential groups sort of like our idea of the Jedi, who also could use the Force, but even that wasn't entirely understood or explained. They were more like the Bene Gesserit. The mystery of things like that helped keep it feeling bigger and more immersive.
This probably sounds like "you just don't like that something messed with you and your friends' autistic headcanon," and yeah, maybe that's true to some extent, but I don't think that's the whole picture. It really was a different setting. If you ever dive into the old WEG books (which are all easily accessible online, you might enjoy them) I think you'd get what I meant. It just wasn't the same.
