Highlights
- LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is an ambitious and impressive game with over 20 open-world hub planets and over 300 playable characters.
- The game features innovative RPG elements with 10 separate skill trees for different classes, allowing players to customize their characters.
- A potential LEGO Lord of the Rings remake could benefit from a similar skill tree system, with characters categorized into typical fantasy classes or species.
By far the most ambitious LEGO game to date, and maybe even one of the most ambitious Star Wars games ever made, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a great game, and an excellent leap forward for the usual LEGO formula. Not content with just bringing together all nine mainline Star Wars movies, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga also delivered over 20 fully explorable open-world hub planets, over 300 playable characters, and a whole swathe of side content and collectibles to complete. It definitely wasn’t perfect, but LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was a true step up from its predecessors, and its paved the way for more LEGO games like it in the near-future.
While it hasn’t been officially announced just yet, it’s been heavily rumored that TT Games’ next title will be a fully-fledged remake of the LEGO Harry Potter series, bringing that series up to the same scale as The Skywalker Saga. But while a LEGO Harry Potter remake is probably a smart move right now following the extreme success of Hogwarts Legacy, there’s another fantasy franchise that could use the LEGO remake treatment, and Skywalker Saga‘s skill trees would already be perfectly suited to it.
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A LEGO Lord of the Rings Remake Could Use Skywalker Saga’s Skill Trees
Leaving its linear past behind it, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga attempted to put an even greater emphasis on RPG elements than any previous LEGO game had, and one of the biggest RPG features in the final product was its many different skill trees. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga had an impressive total of 10 separate skill trees, each one belonging to a specific class in the game, aside from the overarching Core Upgrade path that allowed players to receive upgrades for every character across the board.
These nine specialized skill trees were divided into typical Star Wars factions and classes, ranging from Jedi and Sith to Scoundrel and Scavenger, and a good few in between. Each and every one of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga‘s 380 playable characters belonged to one of these classes, and could make use of the upgrades found within. These included simple stat boosts and class-specific attacks like Force Throw, as well as whole new abilities such as the Scoundrel’s charged shot.
This general approach to skill trees worked fairly well in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, but it would really shine in a LEGO Lord of the Rings remake. Belonging to the fantasy genre and fitting into much of its overarching tropes, Lord of the Rings‘ characters tend to fit into the usual stereotypical fantasy classes, with Legolas being a rogue, Gimli being a barbarian, and Aragorn being a warrior. This naturally lends itself well to a skill tree system like The Skywalker Saga‘s, with much of Lord of the Rings‘ characters being easily categorized into these common classes.
Alternatively, a LEGO Lord of the Rings remake could separate its character skill trees by species. For instance, the humans would have a specific skill tree, as would the elves, the dwarves, and the orcs. This approach might make it a bit more difficult to categorize certain characters like Saruman and Gandalf, but they could receive specialized skill trees all their own in this case.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is the sixth installment in the Lego Star Wars series (from developer Traveller’s Tales). This release features a wide array of playable characters, as well as some truly detailed settings that will bring a smile to any Star Wars fantatic’s face.
- Released
- April 5, 2022
- ESRB
- E10+ for Everyone 10+: Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief
- How Long To Beat
- 19 Hours
- X|S Enhanced
- Yes
- File Size Xbox Series
- 45 GB (November 2023)
- Metascore
- 82
- Split Screen Orientation
- Vertical Only
- Number of Players
- 1-2
- Local Co-Op Support
- 1-2 Players
