Star Wars Eclipse Trailer: Fire Up The Drums For An Epic Lucasfilm Video Game

The Game Awards 2021 has some trailers coming out of it for movie and TV tie-in games with geek appeal. One of those is "Star Wars Eclipse," a new game set in the High Republic era of "Star Wars," a couple hundred years before the mainline movie series.

The official "Star Wars" YouTube channel bills the trailer for "Eclipse" as a "cinematic reveal," and boy howdy, they aren't kidding. There's some real drum-tastic pageantry to this thing, enough to excite even a non-gamer. Honestly, the effects here are so good that you wouldn't even know you're watching a video game trailer. You'd think you're seeing something for the next "Star Wars" movie.

In the absence of any of those on the immediate horizon, "Star Wars" fans will have to settle for Disney+ shows like "The Mandalorian" and "The Book of Boba Fett," along with games like "Star Wars Eclipse." In this trailer, there's also some familiar imagery on display from the "Star Wars" prequels, but don't let that deter you from feasting your eyes on it.

I'll level with you, folks: I never even had a Nintendo growing up, and I haven't kept up with the Expanded Universe (now retconned as Legends) of "Star Wars" outside the movies and TV shows. So I'm not the best person to analyze this trailer and tell you what you're seeing here. However, even as a non-gamer with poor hand-eye coordination, I can appreciate the epic quality of this trailer.

It's got fiery suns and close-ups of the human eye and the "Star Wars" equivalent of Japanese taiko drumming. Yoda stares out the window, and there's a half-built protocol droid (too early for C-3PO?), and I can tell you there's one alien in there with an eyepatch who looks like a "Star Wars" action figure I used to have (I forget his name). We also see a Neimoidian, one of those aliens like Nute Gunray from "The Phantom Menace" (you know, the Viceroy of the Trade Federation, whose voice makes him sound like an ethnic stereotype).

At the end of the trailer, someone or something Sith-like comes rising out of the sludge like Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) in Denis Villeneuve's "Dune," further proving how indebted "Star Wars" is to Frank Herbert's novel and showing how the two franchises have, whether intentionally or not, kept up an ongoing cross-pollination.

Here's the synopsis for "Star Wars Eclipse":

Star Wars Eclipse™ is the newest adventure in the High Republic era, now early in development by Quantic Dream. Learn more on www.StarWarsEclipse.com.

Set during the High Republic era, Star Wars Eclipse™ is an intricately branching action-adventure game that can be experienced in many ways, and puts the destinies of multiple playable characters in your hands, created in collaboration between Quantic Dream and Lucasfilm Games.