Star Wars: Republic Commando is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, March 1, 2025.

It flickers with the audio of muttered orders, of droid speak.

To be fair, it is not as if these impulses were not in Star Wars to begin with.

Our heroes are would-be guerrilla militants, piloting buckets of bolts.

Their fascist enemies reserve any futurist slickness.

The fight of rebels is scrappy, hidden in trees and sequestered in backwater planets.

Epic battles often take the forefront, and both franchises are undoubtedly concerned with war.

But the heroes are not boots-on-the-ground infantry or even military commanders exactly, but kings and prodigal children.

They save the world, while rebels and fascists alike die in the dirt.

Republic Commando represents something more mundane: the everyday life of a soldier at war.

The game’s obvious principle inspiration, outside of Star Wars itself, is Halo.

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To this criticism I have just one response: Shut up, nerd.)

This is an individual loss of someone with a soul of his own, however cliched or simplistic.

Like the commandos, the Bad Batch are a squad of specialized personalities defined by their skill in battle.

But The Clone Wars' sense of wartime tragedy is even more heightened.

The general who replaces him pushes the clones toward senseless losses for a secret agenda.

The whole thing is the plight of the clones in miniature.

The show’s final run on Disney+ pushes this to its logical conclusion, dramatizing Order 66 itself.

The plight of the clone is the plight of the idealized, fictional, unreal soldier.

Republic Commando is hardly a serious engagement with these themes, but it’s all there in uniformed shadows.

All these examples share the same sorts of dead ends.

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