I’ve been considering to write a series of reviews for the Star Wars movies for quite a while, and with everyone (but me) being excited for the new movies and someone convinving me that Revenge of the Sith is actually a terrible movie with barely any redeeming qualities, this seems a good time to actually get around and do it.

But not today. What I’ll be doing here is making my own personal list of Star Wars works that for me define what Star Wars is and which stories and characters I like to remember. And which in reverse implies which part of the Expanded Universe I’d rather ignore and pretend not to exist as part of the universe.

• The Classic Movies: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, obviously. I heard Disney has announced theatrical cut version on DVD or Blue Ray. I’d really like to have those.
• X-Wing: This was my very first videogame back in 5th grade. We just had gotten our first computer and one of my friends had this game, which we’ve played many days after school at his home for many months. Story is almost nonexisting, but it was my first game and the first Star Wars thing that wasn’t the movies. So it simply has to be on this list.
• Tie Fighter: The second game in the series. And still to many people one of the greatest space combat and Star Wars game of all time. (Mostly people in their 30s, I would assume.) This one had a pretty good story, but almost nothing from it did ever get used in any other works. The exception being the Tie Defender, which I think was possibly the worst new idea introduced by it. But to my knowledge, it’s still the only Star Wars game with a story in which you play as the Empire, and had a huge effect on getting a look inside its military.
• Shadows of the Empire: This one was created simultaneously as a book and a videogame and takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The book follows Luke and Leia as they are trying to rescue Han Solo and get involved with the organized crime of Corruscant while the game is about the mercenary Dash Rendar, who is helping the rebels by following other clues that might help with the search, and the two cross paths every so often. The book has a lot of problems and the game is just very, very weird. But damn it, I was 13 and I devoured it and loved it. It’s not great, but it did a lot to shape my own image of what Star Wars is.
• The Thrawn Series: By the end of the 80s, Star Wars consisted of the three movies, a comic series by Marvel (which got almost entirely ignored by any other works later), and the roleplaying game. There also was a Han Solo and a Lando Calrissian book with various stories that are kind of their origin stories, I believe. But that was it. Then the Thrawn novels came out and Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command changed everything. These three books changed everything. They single handedly started what became the entire Expanded Universe. Quite probably because they are really pretty good. And when you were 12 or 15 in the 90s, they were mind blowing! I read them again last winter with a group of other people, and I’m definitly going to review them as well. There are so many things that are now taken for granted that really didn’t exist before it. Not just Grand Admiral Thrawn, who is just the most magnificent villain, as well as Mara Jade and Captain Palaeon, who became very major characters in their own right. It also established the New Republic with the capital on Coruscant and Han and Leia being married and having kids, who also became pretty important characters in later books. The entire New Republic era goes back to just this one story. It’s probably the most important Star Wars work ever, right after the classic movies. Without it, there probably wouldn’t ever have been any more movies and the huge number of novels and videogames we have now might not exist either.
• The X-Wing series: I mean the books, not the games. The X-Wing series takes place in a quite rarely seen part of the Star Wars history, being set between Return of the Jedi and the Thrawn series. The central hero of the series is Wedge Antilles, a minor character from the movies and the one guy who survived both battles against the Death Stars. After Luke stops being a fighter pilot to pursue his Jedi career, Wedge becomes the most famous and skilled pilot in the Rebellion and leader of the ultra elite Rogue Squadron. Killing the Emperor and Vader and destroying a major part of the imperial fleet was a major victory, but it didn’t remove the imperial government from power. The first storyline that covers the first four books is just about that: Destroying the Empire and establishing a New Republic. For that purpose wedge assembles a team of elite pilots and commandos, whose task is to take various secret missions to prepare the conquest of the capital on Corruscant. I really loved those books and got them again in English, but have not yet gotten around to read them. The books that follow also have Wedge as the lead character, but this time he’s creating a new special unit made up of various unique individuals specifically selected for the most unusual of missions that go beyond the capabilities of regular commando and infiltration troops. Who also travel around in starfighters and are damn good pilots, because this is the X-Wing series after all. I read the first three or four of these and while I did quite enjoy them, I eventually lost interest. But the first four books rank very high on my list, right after the Thrawn series.
• Jedi Knight: I actually only played Jedi Knight 2 and Jedi Knight 3 (Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy). I always considered giving Dark Forces and Dark Forces 2 a try, but they are really old now and just don’t look that great. These games are the adventures of Kyle Katarn, a mercenary with Jedi training, who has a quite difficult relationship with Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi Order. He clearly is a good guy and often on the same side as the Jedi and the New Republic, but also very independent and difficult. In many ways like the early Han Solo, but clearly a diffent and well distinguished character. And the early games in particular were pretty dark for Star Wars. And the best thing about them: Lightsaber combat. In the games that I played, the lightsaber is awesome. It works like you expect it to work, easily cutting through enemies and slicing them to pieces instead of heavy impacts that take a couple of hits to deal enough health damage to kill. And there’s a lot of dark Jedi disciples to have lightsaber fights with as well. The stories of the games I played are not great, and as far as I am aware the characters or events were never mentioned anywhere else. But I like them and they feel very much like Star Wars. They are still pretty fun today.
• Tales of the Jedi: I never really got into the many Star Wars comics. My brother had some, but I never gave them any real attention for a very long time. The Tales of the Jedi series was particularly unusual, as it was the only Star Wars work not set in the classic but instead 4,000 years in the past, at the time of the great wars between the Jedi and the Sith. Some of the characters and places were used as mythology references in the Jedi Academy novels, but that was mostly it. I think the quality is not too great, though the original storylines by Tom Veitch were quite interesting stuff. The later ones by Kevin Anderson really not so much. Their real impact came much later when the period got picked up as the setting for a videogame.
• Knights of the Old Republic: This is one of the famous BioWare RPGs, which one might count as one of the biggest videogame series ever, going back to Baldur’s Gate in the late 90s and up to the most recent game Dragon Age 3. Counting the various spin-offs and sequels by Black Isle/Obsidian Entertainment, there have been 16 games in total by now. KotOR is probably among the most praised and once it was decided to no longer make licensed games, it led to the creation of the Mass Effect series. The first Mass Effect is very much a direct successor to KotOR with a different, but in many ways very similar setting. It is set a few decades after the Tales of the Jedi comic series and takes the name from one of its storylines. While I think the story and characters are not actually that amazing, the way the setting is represented really is. The galaxy is very much recognizable as Star Wars, but it’s also a quite different place from the later periods. Both the Jedi and the Sith are much more prominent, but at the same time everything is also much more decentralized  with various medium factions instead of just two massive ones. The game is a lot of fun, and I actually like the KotOR era even more than the classic movie era.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Please people! Stop reusing the same titles for various different works! This comic is the third Star Wars story called Knights of the old Republic, after the first comic and the videogame. This one takes place shortly before the game and you see several familiar places and brief appearances of characters, but other than that really is a clearly separate story. Actually two stories, following the same group of characters. The central character is Zyne Carrick, who is possibly the worst Jedi ever. In the first story he gets caught up in a big conspiracy within the Jedi order and has to go on the run while he is framed for having fallen to the dark side and having murdered several Jedi. During the adventure he also gets involved in the Mandalorian War and crosses paths with Revan and Malak when they were still renegade Jedi fighting for the Old Republic against the wishes of the Jedi Council. The second story revolves more around Jarael, one of Zaynes companions, while he becomes a supporting character to her story. Both are really damn good, and this is by far my favorite American comic, standing shoulder to shoulder with Hellboy. I plan to read it again sometime, and then probably do a review of it.

Something quite interesting I’ve noticed a while back, is that most of the Star Wars works I really like and regard very highly don’t actually involve the movie characters to any considerable degree. The Thrawn series being the notable exception. I like the movies, but the heroes are the heroes of that story. Their story. Seeing them turned into statesmen somehow isn’t really doing it for me.

As you also might notice, no stories from either the Clone Wars or the New Jedi Order eras (and I don’t even know what this Legacy era thing is). I think the main reason is that they don’t really match with what I consider the true form of Star Wars. They feel more like spin offs with quite different styles and aesthetics. I actually wasn’t really happy with most stories set in the late New Republic era. The Correlian Trilogy was probably the last thing chronologically that I’ve ever read. And yeah, I wasn’t a fan. These stories also focus a lot on politics and seem to me to have lost the swashbuckling adventure style of the first two movies.