Lit Which Clone Wars multimedia project did you personally prefer?

Which Clone Wars era did you prefer personally (not so much which one was necessarily better, but which one you enjoyed more?).



There aren't as many games included on the right because the unincluded games of the CGI show seemed to get poor/mediocre reviews.

 

I sometimes wonder why the Clone Wars project didn't have the cohesion of Shadows of the Empire.

 

There's good and bad with both, hard to decide.

 

The first one, definitely. Especially because of Republic Commando, Labyrinth of Evil, and Revenge of the Sith novelization.

 

I'm just so tired of all these clone wars

Edit: also, zeta is now an unperson for not mentioning Shatterpoint

 

They're both largely decent but should never have co-existed.

I didn't like TCW as part of the EU at all. As part of the NU, it's pretty much fine.

Definitely enjoyed (what I read of) the first run more.

 

Well it's a good thing Disney dumped away the Clone Wars era and now focuses on the OT and ST era mostly.

 

Yeah, never understood why TCW is considered part of Legends and Canon, when really it should just be canon. It doesn't mesh with the multimedia project at all; Anakin gets knighted at a different point in the war, characters die in different places/times, personalities are different, etc. Some people have come up with complex explanations but they're too messy to work IMO.

 

After the Great Disneyfication, I moved all my TCW books and comics to a separate section and reestablished the original chronology on my shelves. Original flavor Clone Wars, for all its flaws, is much preferable to the new mess as far as I'm concerned.

 

The older 2002 project, definitely. I still miss the older Tartakovsky series (I think its been out of print for years?). Also it was just more fun seeing so much going on (comics, novels, video games, cartoons) and while it didn't always mesh, particularly with older canon, they tried, and some of the retcons were pretty interesting.

Then TCW came along. It wasn't awful overall, but a lot of the stories were... odd. Not just at how it ran over old canon, but at how unnecessary some of it was. Not to mention keeping track of things was more trouble than it was worth (this season three episode is set before that season one episode, despite seeming like it happened later, because they say so, followed by a sequel to the season one episode). Hondo was fun, but hate that they brought back Maul, and his later plots were silly (yeah, taking over pirate gangs and syndicates, how impressive). The animation and action were pretty good, as was the characterization some clones got. Funny how out there some of the ideas were though (Mortis, Yoda's season six adventure).

 

I think TCW did a better job with Anakin for sure. The Mortis and Yoda arc are also highlights.

The original multimedia project had Shatterpoint and Dark Rendezvous. And my boy Alpha-17.

I can't decide!

I think Disney needs to do a third version.

 

TCW was pretty much the Disney era of canon plopped down into the last few years of the old EU. Not even with the obvious aspect of it being the only thing of the old EU the Disney reboot kept, but in terms of tone and approach to characterization, storytelling, plots that connect (or don't) to movies, it's pretty much how the new canon approaches it.

 

Despite its flaws I greatly enjoyed the original multimedia project more as it some of my favorite works from the old EU. The Clone Wars micro series, Republic, Shatterpoint, Republic Commando, Yoda: Dark Rendezvous and more I've come to greatly treasure as some of the best stuff from the old EU.

 

I specifically mentioned stuff I had read or played, though Shatterpoint and Yoda: Dark Rendezvous are almost certainly good reasons to prefer the original multimedia project.

 

In retrospect, a c. 2008 canon reboot would have been nice. The original Clone Wars stories had to do a lot of gymnastics to fit in with the new ones, and a lot of their integrity and cohesion ended up being compromised as a result. But of course if Lucasfilm had rebooted canon at the time for nothing more than a TV show, we would have rioted.

Added bonus: No Fate of the Jedi. The only real con would have been a premature end to KOTOR and Legacy.

20/20 hindsight and all, though.

 

I feel like the original is the only one that fully capitalized upon being a multimedia project. TCW did not really tie into its tie ins every much while the 2002 stuff had crossover. Sure there where errors in both but felt things mattered between each story in the '02 stuff.

 

I prefer the Clone Wars verse of 2002- 2007
Those stories are more realistic and canonical for me than the CGI Clone Wars

 

The first, no question.

In terms of the second, Uli's post nails it. Considered as the new version for Disney, it works well enough and does have some high points. It also had the advantage of knowing where the Clone Wars went from the start and so amped it up more, with more battles, Greivous active from the start and so on.

 

Just a funny example of why TCW should never have tried to fit in with legends

From the episode Witches Of The Mist

Obi Wan: Dathomir? The planet of the witches, forgive me for asking masters but I was always under the impression, Darth Mauls' homeworld was Iridonia?

Windu: Dathomir was the planet were Maul was raised, Iridonia is where the rest of his species dwell.

Whatever way you look at it, this exchange is either a half-assed retcon for legend fans or completely pointless exposition now we're aware of what's canon and what isn't

 

I prefer the original. I read/watched the 2002 - 2005 multimedia project as it came out, back when we didn't know a lot about what would happen in ROTS and how the war would end. It was almost as if we experienced the 3-year Clone Wars in real time as it unfolded between 2002 and 2005. It was not perfect, it had its stinkers(Jedi Trial, heh), but overall it was an exciting, enjoyable experience.

That doesn't mean I hate TCW, though. It was really good at times, but overall my reaction is meh. And I definitely agree with the people who think it should not be a part of the Legends timeline.

 

Original Clone Wars, there is no competition as far as I'm concerned. It connected nicely with both AOTC and ROTS, much better than TCW did. It felt like a war period and it told stories that mattered and made sense. TCW didn't know what it wanted to be for the most part.

 

Headcanon:
- Maul's parents were spacers. They had him on Iridonia but we often travelled with his parents and rarely spent time there.
- Around Age 3 - 5, ship crashed on Dathomir and he was found Talzin, who adopted him.
- Age 6 - 8, spent time among the yellow Zabraks on Dathomir (he is a red subspecies much like Koth was a light skinned haired Zabrak and Kolar was a dark skinned haired Zabrak - Zabraks have subspecies).
- Age 8 - 12, taken by Darth Sidious in exchange for whatever Talzin wanted (though she hated Sidious because she had a vision he would destroy her order and she gave him Maul to prevent it, little realising she was setting the seed for her own destruction).
Extra:
- Maul did die on Naboo but as his body was being transported to Coruscant on a different shuttle to the Neimoidians, it was intercepted by pirates who brought it to Talzin. She tried to restore him to life but the consequences resulted in Maul being insane for close to twelve odd years, rushing off on the pirate ship and somehow crashlanding on Lotho Minor, giving time for Talzin to find out how to get rid of the insanity (this makes Maul an unreliable narrator to his fate post-Naboo and how he ended up on Lotho Minor because even automated transports bound for junk worlds would've been halted by the Trade Federation)

 

This too. It made for a unique experience that TCW could never match.

 

The original Clone Wars push suffered significantly from coming out in real-time between the movies, with extremely limited knowledge of where the Clone Wars were actually headed. So everything from ROTS pops up in the last six months of the war and Anakin's knighting is delayed well past when it should have actually happened. There was never really an attempt to build a larger arc to the narrative, either in the form of character arcs or a general sense of the war's direction. The result was a lot of one-off stories in the same old format where the Separatists are attacking one planet, the Jedi go to that planet and stop the Separatists, rinse and repeat, no sense of greater context whatsoever. The whole war is just a series of one-off random planetary actions. The whole thing would have been so much better off if they'd held off on showing the Clone Wars until they knew where things were going, spent those first two years on filling in the gap between Episodes I and II, and then been able to do a truly epic multimedia campaign, something that could even have surpassed the scale of the NJO in terms of coordination. So I do lament the many weaknesses of the original campaign.

But the thing is, The Clone Wars had the chance to do all that . . . and it didn't. It did the same thing. Pretty much everything was still just a series of random one-offs. And instead of making a more coherent narrative, we got random crap like all the Separatist companies actually being neutral and the clones being programmed -- all stuff that just made the war stupider. The closest thing it had to an overarching narrative was the story of how the Clone Wars also happened to the time period in which a resurrected Darth Maul showed up and created some kind of crime syndicate third faction and that's the real story of the Clone Wars, how Darth Maul came back. It squandered all its opportunities on that kind of imbecility.

So its lows were so much lower, it didn't seize the ground the original push had neglected, and it never hit the highs of the original material, either, at least not for me. The Republic comics were just brilliant, giving the war the shape it otherwise lacked. The Tartakovsky microseries was a blast. Books like Shatterpoint, Labyrinth of Evil, Dark Rendezvous, Hard Contact, and MedStar had tremendous depth and told great stories. Even some one-offs like The Cestus Deception were generally solid. The video games were damn good. You had a cast of great heroes and villains like Quinlan, Tholme, Aayla, Alpha, K'Kruhk, Bly, Whie and Scout, A'Sharad Hett, Sagoro Autem, Fordo, the MedStar bunch, Ventress, Durge, Sora Bulq, Alto Stratus. It wasn't perfect. But it was exciting and interesting and it tied together into a messy but fascinating whole. There was just so much more to it than one cartoon and a handful of irrelevant spinoffs. That's the long version of my answer.

 

PARTICULARLY the latter two examples...