Item - Jedi's Honor

Like the last book, this is a largely linear but fun adventure. There's not a whole lot of replay motivation, but victory doesn't require too much effort. As before, the characters are fairly well-developed and the art is interesting even if Luke Skywalker doesn't look much like Mark Hamill. There's a little bit of bookkeeping to do (keeping track of time passed and the location of Luke's ship), but it's even less intrusive than the fairly minimal note-taking in the last volume. From what I've encountered of the Star Wars universe, it seems that the gore and gratuitous nudity quotient is higher than normal here, though I suppose these things aren't quite the same in a gamebook as they would be in a movie. Still, I was at least mildly surprised. More troubling is the book's rather negative portrayal of passive resistance -- in the Star Wars universe, where everything is pretty much black and white, I guess passive resistance doesn't make a whole lot of sense... but some parts of the book still managed to leave a somewhat bad taste in my mouth. As in the last book, bad endings don't explicity kill off Luke, making it easier to fit the story into Star Wars continuity even if you fail, though the failure text isn't formatted as amusingly as it was before -- it replaces the campy cliffhanger questions with a less interesting statement that Luke will survive. Ultimately, I'd say this is about on a par with its predecessor; I found it slightly more enjoyable, but that's really a matter of personal taste -- both are worth a look as long as you don't play with the expectation of being able to heavily influence the plot.

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