r/FallenOrder • u/FormerCat4883 • 3d ago
Discussion The metanarrative of difficulty
So recently I went back to playing Jedi: Fallen Order, booted up NG+, and decided "Fudge it, I'm gonna try Grandmaster!"
I beat the game with a lot of tribulations... but not as many as I expected. Nonetheless, from the very start, fighting Oggdo Boggdo over and over, I realised that the difficulty settings of the game are very much tied to a metanarrative.
Grandmaster is called that because you have to be patient, show restraint, and use a defensive posture, all whilst displaying consistency and relying very much on appropriate use of the force. You have to play the game like a true Jedi...
And that kinda blew me away because I honestly had a tremendous amount of fun mastering the mechanics of the game in that way, and it made Cal feel genuinely like a real Jedi to me because outside of the cutscenes, he was fighting like one.
Respawn cooked so hard.
10
u/AwesomeX121189 3d ago
Meh not really. You can definitely play aggressively if you know what you’re doing
3
u/9durth 3d ago
The only problem with that game is the layout of the planets, coupled with the lack of fast travel, that makes the game difficult in a annoying way.
Otherwise great game. I 100% it two weeks ago, went back to it after Survivor.
Pleasantly susprised to be able to use Slow as a regulat force power. I had forgotten about that.
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u/Megotaku 3d ago
The difficulty of Grandmaster isn't tied to the meta-narrative, in fact it's the opposite. It's ludonarrative dissonance and, in a meta sense, anti-narrative. Part of being a Jedi is being an insanely powerful swordsman with mystical powers that the entire galaxy fears. On GM, you have creatures and elite soldiers eating dozens and dozens of attacks by lightsabers, weapons that can cut through reinforced starship bulkheads, while Cal drops dead from a stiff breeze.
GM makes Jedi astonishingly weak in a meta-narrative sense, which is the polar opposite of what they are supposed to represent in the explicit narrative. They're an enemy force so dangerous that the Empire will deploy battalions of soldiers from across the galaxy on the mere credible rumor that one is present.
What's worse about GM mode is that is makes the game significantly more grindy. The punishing difficulty both incentivizes putting the narrative off as long as possible to gain player power and the repetition of death and respawn massively extends out the length of the runtime, particularly the side-quest sections that have nothing to do with the story and plot of the game. I was making it through every section of the game on GM, but I realized after 7 hours that I didn't even remotely care about the story anymore. All the narrative focus had shifted to getting past whatever boss encounter was 1-2 shotting me with infinite unblockable spam next.
You can like Grand Master difficulty, but in my opinion it's the worst way to experience the game, especially the first time. Grand Master in my view is for people who have experienced everything the game has to offer at least once and are looking to inject some challenge back into a system they feel they've already mastered.