Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Characters by Daniel Wallace, Mike Sutfin (Illustrator)

Question: What do Cliegg Lars, Shmi Skywalker, Jan Ors, Biggs Darklighter, Jek Porkins, Nen Yim, Jag Fel, and Nom Anor all have in common?

Answer: They're all missing from the New Essential Guide to Characters. [Ed. -- not true. See the UPDATE section below]

And that's what's wrong with the guide, right there. This Essential Guide... isn't. Kyle Katarn shows up, to my great pleasure (he's been so well threaded into the EU by now, he really is his own character and not just some guy from a video game), and so does Jerec, his foe from Jedi Knight... but if you're going to include Jerec, why doesn't Jan Ors, loyal pilot and love interest get an entry? If you're going to include Tsavong Lah (they do), how can you leave off Nom Anor and Nen Yim, the other two most interesting Yuuzhan Vong? Leaving off Cliegg is bad enough, but Shmi Skywalker getting no entry is practically criminal. She's only the matriarch of the entire Skywalker clan, and (highlight for spoiler) rage at her death put Anakin down the path to the Dark Side. SHEESH!

It should be noted that I don't count it if another character's entry mentions a character: Jan is mentioned in Kyle's entry, and Shmi in Anakin's, for example... but as a guide to the characters, you should be able to go in knowing nothing about Star Wars and say "Gee, I wonder who so-and-so is," and find out. If I know enough about Jan to know that Kyle's entry might have something on her, I didn't need to look up who she was in the first place.

Another complaint: some of the writing is laughable. Example: Apparently, Lando went on a "wife hunt" that ended when he found Tendra. Heh... I can see it now. "Roight, today we're hunting the wife! Now, she's a tricky devil, the wife is... ooh, look at this one! Crikey! She's a big one! DANGER!" Was an editor checking this work? If so, how did he let this get by?

For a fairly thick book (about a hundred pages or so), it only manages to include a couple dozen characters. Anakin Skywalker deserves every page he gets, but every single character gets at least a page, with the exception of The Podracers and The Jedi at highlight for spoiler) the Battle of Geonosis -- both entries incorporate a quick blurb about several characters. We needed more of this. Do Owen and Beru Lars need a page? Plenty more characters could have been included if they had only gotten the amount of lines they required. Also, the pictures need to go -- even for characters from the movies, they're all hand drawn, and fairly good ... but they take up space. The major characters should get a picture, but do I really care what the Podracers all looked like?

Hopefully, the next guide will do better. I cannot recommend this one. Unless you're enough of a Star Wars newbie that you still haven't figured out the difference between Anakin Skywalker and Anakin Solo, give this one a pass.

UPDATE

Since this review was posted on Echo Station, I received a number of emails pointing out some severe factual flaws I made in the review. For the record:

• Nom Anor IS in the book. I somehow didn't see the entry before, but he's there.
• There are about a hundred characters included, not dozens.

I apologize for making those errors in the review. A lot of people read what I write and it's my responsibility to give you the facts along with my opinion. Mea culpa, everyone. I'll be more careful in the future.

Also, Mr. Wallace, the author of this book, wrote me, and brought up a few good points I wanted to share with you all. Jag Fel, Cliegg Lars, Shmi Skywalker, and Nen Yim all appear in the book's appendix. I think that's a poor way to structure it, especially since many people regularly avoid the appendices in books, but in this case, go read it. It's very much like I wanted the entire book to be, with short blurbs for most characters and only a few illustrations.

I am therefore changing my recommendation. With most of the criminal omissions covered in the appendix, the New Essential Guide becomes much more useful. It's still not exactly the book I wanted to see; for one thing, if you wanted to find Jag Fel, you'd have to first look him up in the table of contents, and then flip through the appendix trying to find him, and that's an unnecessary hassle. Also, the characters who I thought were omitted and instead were placed in the appendix generally don't get enough coverage, as every character in the appendix only gets a short blurb. That's fine for Cliegg Lars, but I think Jag, Shmi, and Nen Yim deserved full entries rather than a few sentences.

My new bottom line is this: I still don't advocate rushing out to buy the guide, and I'm still disappointed by some characters not being included and others getting far less coverage than they deserve. However, if you do go out and buy this book (by the way, I HIGHLY recommend it to anyone who GMs Star Wars RPG games--it's practically a Who's Who in NPCs), you won't be wasting your money.

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(Cap'n Andy fanboy extraordinaire, is currently at home enjoying summer break. When he's not counting the days until Rebel Stand comes out, he's probably in the basement, playing his Gamecube and being scared half to death by Resident Evil.)