The tactical shooter’s pivot to wartime tragedy and military fiction predates Andor, The Clone Wars, and The Bad Batch.
Star Wars: Republic Commando is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, March 1, 2025. Below, we look at how its focus on military fiction was a sign of things to come to the Star Wars galaxy .
When you boot up Star Wars: Republic Commando, the first thing you see is the LucasArts logo, fuzzy like a jammed radio signal. It flickers with the audio of muttered orders, of droid speak. This is an idea taken from the original Clone Wars cartoons (starting in 2003), which also opens with a distorted broadcast, in that case of blaster fire and blaring lightsabers. In tandem, these aesthetic flourishes represent a turn away from the science fantasy mythicism of Star Wars proper and a turn toward a grittier, though still exaggerated, military fiction.
To be fair, it is not as if these impulses were not in Star Wars to begin with. Though A New Hope draws on the science fiction golden age idealism of Flash Gordan serials, it is a worn down future. 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.
Still, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are not ordinary soldiers, but heroes (nomenclature used by a Star Wars video game contemporary to Republic Commando: Battlefront 2). The original trilogy, and to a large extent the prequels, take a similar position to war as The Lord of the Rings. 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. Like that FPS, Republic Commando goes to great pains to make its titular characters special boys, a cut above the ordinary clones who make up the rest of the Galactic Republic’s army. But also, the commandos can’t get up to anything too earth-shattering or else interfere with the films their game ties in with. In practical terms, the plot of Star Wars itself would not change if every one of the commandos died in a ditch. The effect is like a bit of propaganda: You are the heroes that preserve the republic, although in actuality, you are just more bodies to line the future Emperor’s checkbook.
The game is aware of this dynamic. Even though it was released before Episode III revealed the looming threat of Order 66, the clone troopers were still destined to become the Empire’s stormtroopers. (Yes, I’m aware the Empire swaps to a more standard military recruitment strategy in its early days. To this criticism I have just one response: Shut up, nerd.) At game’s end, the commandos suffer a senseless loss of their sniper, Sev, only for their Jedi commanders to order them to a new position, forcing the squad to leave their teammate behind. This is not the loss of some pawn with the same visage and personality as every one of his brothers. This is an individual loss of someone with a soul of his own, however cliched or simplistic.
All of this neatly anticipates Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars show, which grants whole platoons and battalions the same attention this game provided an elite squad. The game’s commandos even appear in one episode, but they also are predecessors to many of The Clone Wars’ original characters, especially The Bad Batch, who were first conceptualized before the series’ cancelation on Cartoon Network but re-appeared as part of the series’ revitalization on Disney+ and then on their own spin-off show. Like the commandos, the Bad Batch are a squad of specialized personalities defined by their skill in battle. The Bad Batch are not the first of such characters to appear in The Clone Wars, but are a small unit, defined by their relationships to each other, in a way that echoes Republic Commando.
But The Clone Wars’ sense of wartime tragedy is even more heightened. The Battle of Umbara arc follows Anakin Skywalker’s 501st clone battalion after he is called away on a special mission. 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. They are all dying for a cause they are incapable of actually choosing, that demands they turn against their friends and comrades with the flick of a switch.
The show’s final run on Disney+ pushes this to its logical conclusion, dramatizing Order 66 itself. Anakin’s apprentice, Ahsoka, watches her friends turn on her and she saves her mentor, Captain Rex, but the rest of the clones accompanying her die in the encounter. This could be the substance of a Metal Gear Solid backstory, as it explores the same issues: duty to your loyalties vs. the substance of your conscience, love on the battlefield or a bullet in the gut. 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. Its influence is felt across the next 20 years of Star Wars, from the sometimes strict military fiction of Clone Wars to the guerrilla warfare drama of Andor to Dave Filoni’s partial stewardship of the franchise (though I’ll believe that Mandalorian movie is happening when I am in the theater watching it). All these examples share the same sorts of dead ends. No matter how Republic Commandos dressed itself up in blaster fire and Halo-style heroics, all that awaits its heroes is death. That’s as true for them as it is for Captain Rex as it is for Andor or Anakin Skywalker.
