The LEGO franchise of licensed games currently hangs in limbo. Unfortunately for fans eager to get their hands on it, there's no release date for LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. It was once intended to release in 2020, but like many other studios in recent years, Traveller's Tales has delayed the game multiple times. The additional development time will certainly benefit LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga in the long run, but in the meantime fans are left hanging. The Skywalker Saga's new ideas are so enticing that it's hard to be patient for the game, beneficial as delays may be.
Thankfully, LEGO games have been around for a lot longer than The Skywalker Saga alone. For many years, Traveller's Tales has been producing delightful retellings of all kinds of IPs, from Indiana Jones to Harry Potter. That means even though The Skywalker Saga's release date is in doubt, there's plenty of LEGO games out there to entertain fans in the meantime. A couple games are particularly worth revisiting, considering the specific steps that The Skywalker Saga is taking to reimagine the way LEGO games play. As unique as the upcoming game sounds, it owes a lot to games that came before it.
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga is perhaps the most obvious game worth replaying before The Skywalker Saga releases. In a sense, they're the same game from different times: both compilations of LEGO levels based on every core movie in the Star Wars franchise to date. The Complete Saga proved it could be done more than a decade before The Skywalker Saga ever existed. What's more, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga executes sharply on retelling the story of Star Wars in a time before LEGO games used dialogue, instead focusing on funny imagery and minifigure body language.
Fans should revisit The Complete Saga because of its importance to LEGO as a whole. For one thing, The Complete Saga set the bar for LEGO games in its time; its consistent but diverse level design, huge character roster, and compelling hub all affected LEGO games that came afterwards. For another, it's the perfect game to compare to The Skywalker Saga to get a sense of how the series has grown. In its time, The Complete Saga was a big, ambitious game for compiling every Star Wars movie. Ten years later, fans can see just how much more ambitious LEGO games are.
LEGO Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars
If fans want a second LEGO Star Wars title to play, they should pick LEGO Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars. LEGO Star Wars 3 wasn't quite as beloved as The Complete Saga, but it deserves credit for a few things. For one, LEGO Star Wars 3 innovated the LEGO game structure in a couple of surprisingly ambitious ways that The Skywalker Saga should bear in mind. LEGO Star Wars 3 featured war levels unlike anything the LEGO franchise had seen before. Players fought out huge battles against hundreds of droids, all based on real episodes from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. These war levels showed that Traveller's Tales has known LEGO Star Wars has really flexible potential for years.
LEGO Star Wars 3 also deserves credit for its character customization. LEGO games famously tend to let players make custom characters with parts from characters that they've unlocked, but LEGO Star Wars 3 went above and beyond. It added details like lightsaber colors beyond the standard red, green, blue, and purple - orange and white lightsabers were available in LEGO Star Wars 3. The Skywalker Saga ought to have a character customizer even more ambitious than that, so hopefully Traveller's Tales is also looking back on LEGO Star Wars 3.
LEGO The Lord of the Rings
LEGO Star Wars shouldn't be the sole focus of a LEGO fan's nostalgia tour. LEGO The Lord of The Rings is very much worth revisiting, especially considering one of The Skywalker Saga's biggest selling points. The Skywalker Saga has a sprawling overworld composed of a couple dozen planets featured throughout the Star Wars movies. That overworld sounds fantastic, but The Skywalker Saga owes the idea to games like LEGO The Lord of the Rings.
LEGO The Lord of the Rings proved early on that LEGO games didn't have to limit themselves to hubs. Rather than players choosing levels from a beloved Lord of the Rings location like Bag End or Rivendell, LEGO The Lord of the Rings sent players on a journey through Middle Earth. Fans had to seek out the next level on foot, overcoming obstacles inspired by real Lord of the Rings facets. Beyond the plot, LEGO The Lord of the Rings made extensive use of its overworld by filling it with collectible characters and items, rewarding fans for exploring. With any luck, The Skywalker Saga's overworld will be even more fleshed out than that of LEGO The Lord of the Rings.
The LEGO Library Keeps Growing
There's a couple of other LEGO games that deserve mentions. For one, there's LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7, which gets a nod for its improvement on the first LEGO Harry Potter's spell wheel and combat. Dueling with dark wizards in Years 5-7 proved to be a rewarding representation of the Harry Potter wizarding world's actual combat, and showed that LEGO games don't have to stick to combat traditions. The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game gets credit for similar reasons, introducing RPG elements where players could upgrade the playable ninjas' skills. The Ninjago game suggested as far back as 2017 that Traveller's Tales was getting restless in sticking to the LEGO formula.
What all these games have in common is that they involved major changes to LEGO conventions. Whether it was the sheer scope of the game that bucked tradition or a total overhaul of a fundamental aspect of the LEGO game formula, they changed things for the better. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is trying to do the same thing. If this is how ambitious Traveller's Tales wants to be from here on out, then the possibilities are endless. The next LEGO game after The Skywalker Saga will hopefully carry on its innovations and find great new ways to build on them.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is in development for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.