While the main Star Wars Skywalker Saga trilogies focus on stories with stakes that affect the entire galaxy, The Mandalorian's popularity shows that smaller stories set within the Star Wars universe can still have a large impact on their audience. On the publishing side, Star Wars has long embraced smaller scale stories in both the Legends canon and the new canon, and some examples include past anthologies such as Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina and current comics such as the Star Wars Adventures series. Still, the majority of Star Wars video games focus on battles and high-stakes stories. With a growing market for cozy video games, Lucasfilm should look to the past and reboot Star Wars: Yoda Stories.
First published in 1997 by LucasArts for the PC and in 1999 for the Game Boy Color, Star Wars: Yoda Stories featured simple adventures starring Luke Skywalker. While the adventures involved some combat, they also focused on point and click style gameplay that involved gathering resources and solving puzzles to complete the mission's objectives. Star Wars: Yoda Stories shone with its randomly generated maps, which added replay value to its limited mission types. Star Wars: Yoda Stories also was explicitly marketed towards children, with cute graphics and additional media for the player's PC.
The game does have its detractors. For example, Syfy ranked it 49th in a list of "50 Star Wars Video Games Ranked From Worst to Best." The missions could be long and repetitive, and the gameplay could be clunky. Despite these flaws, Star Wars: Yoda Stories retains its charms and could easily be adapted to the mobile video game market. The format of Star Wars: Yoda Stories would provide an opportunity to expand the galaxy far, far away and build more lore, and it could be used to tie in with several other Star Wars properties.
One obvious choice for a Star Wars: Yoda Stories reboot could be Star Wars: Baby Yoda Stories. Set within the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, the game could feature adventures and missions that the Mandalorian undertakes as he evades the fragments of the Empire and searches for a home for Grogu. While this reboot might be set over a shorter time period, the missions could provide more insight into the galaxy as the New Republic and the fragments of the Empire vie for power.
There's also IDW Publishing's Star Wars Adventures, which might be one of the easiest to adapt into a Star Wars: Yoda Stories reboot. Marketed for all ages, Star Wars Adventures is an ongoing comics anthology of short stories set within the Star Wars universe. A Star Wars: Yoda Stories reboot based on this series might be rebranded simply as Star Wars Adventures. Like the comics, the game could feature rotating protagonists for stories set throughout the Skywalker Saga. New missions could be released periodically to align with the release of new issues or collected volumes.
The Star Wars: The High Republic subseries might also be a good fit for a new Star Wars: Yoda Stories because the game would fit within the series's multigenerational marketing strategy. Set 200 years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the subseries focuses on the Jedi at their prime as they face new dangers in the expanding Republic. While Yoda is a Jedi Master in the series, the game could rotate which Jedi Master assigns the missions. Players could choose one of the new Jedi Padawans to play or create their own character. The world of The High Republic is still new, and a Star Wars: Yoda Stories reboot could be an avenue to more fully explore the galaxy at this time period.
Throughout all of these possibilities, simpler missions could provide opportunities to create lore about the everyday lives of citizens of the Star Wars galaxy. While some missions could focus on retrieving important data for the Resistance, other missions might involve protecting a small village from invaders or gathering materials to help a city prepare for a festival. While these types of adventures might not have an enormous effect on the galaxy at large, they would provide game developers ample opportunity to flesh out the worlds and cultures of the Star Wars galaxy.
While Star Wars: Yoda Stories might not be most gamers’ choice for a Star Wars game reboot, this style of game would be an excellent fit for the current mobile game market. The franchise has been expanding its gaming oeuvre with the recent announcement of Star Wars: Hunters. With the increase in cozy games, a new Star Wars: Yoda Stories, reworked to overcome the original game's flaws, could fill this niche. By focusing on smaller-scale stories, the game developers could give more depth and insight towards what actually is at stake in the rest of the Star Wars canon.