Star Wars: Jar Jar's Journey Adventure Book is a PC game developed and released by Lucas Learning and released in the year 1999, as the final game the studio developed for PC. The game is one of many games developed to tie in to the release of The Phantom Menace the same year. It is an educational game designed for children of ages 4 and up.
Jar Jar's Journey provides an abridged version of part of The Phantom Menace's story through a series of interactive storybook pages in a similar fashion to games like the Living Books or Disney's Animated Storybook series. Each page is narrated by one of the movie's characters, after which the player will be allowed to click on various objects on the screen to find different animations. Some of the words in the story are also interactive, either allowing the player to switch them out to words with similar meanings, or to play short songs about what the words mean. Certain pages also contain simple mini games.
As yet another piece from the deluge of Episode I kids' merchandise from back in the day, Jar Jar's Journey started getting wider attention when Vinny of Vinesauce played the game on one of his Sunday streams; the sheer absurdity of a Star Wars storybook game for very young children starring one of the franchise's most unpopular characters quickly garnered it morbid fascination from the Vinesauce community.
Jar Jar's Journey contains examples of:
- Adapted Out: The scene where Darth Maul attacks Qui-Gon and Anakin while they're returning to the Queen's starship is skipped, and Maul doesn't appear in the game at all as a result.
- And the Adventure Continues: The story ends after the gang leave Tatooine, with the final lines being a vague indication that the team will eventually defeat the Battle Droids.
- Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: The first page has a battle droid that, when clicked, makes to attack the heroes, only for the Jedi to take a combat stance, prompting the droid to back off.
- Bowdlerise: Some of the more mature or action-heavy themes in The Phantom Menace are omitted in this retelling.
- The issue of Anakin and his mother being Watto's slaves is never directly addressed.
- None of the podracers are shown getting into the deadly crashes they do in the movie, and while the text indicates that Sebulba is as aggressive a racer he is in the movie, it's said in the text rather than shown.
- The scene where Qui-Gon and Anakin are ambushed by Darth Maul while they're returning to the royal starship is completely omitted, and the gang simply return to the ship without any further incident following the pod race.
- Butt-Monkey: Many pages contain click points that result in Jar Jar being subjected to various slapstick.
- Decoy Protagonist: While the game's title indicates that this telling of The Phantom Menace will have Jar Jar as the central character, he's only the narrator for the first three pages, after which he has little bearing on the story and more or less becomes a background character. The only way the game gives him any more prominence than in the movie is the fact that the story begins in his introduction scene.
- Demoted to Extra: Much of the game takes place during a portion of the story where Obi-Wan doesn't appear. While he is in the first few pages, the text never mentions him by name, and he's largely a background character.
- Denser and Wackier: This game uses a very wacky and cartoonish artstyle to present the typically grounded story of the Star Wars universe. The more mature themes are downplayed or outright removed, and the juvenile humor and slapstick are more prominent.
- Maze Game: Page three features a maze minigame in which the player must navigate the Bongo through the walls of a maze to help Jar Jar and the Jedi reach Theed. On harder levels, the Bongo must pop all the bubbles in the maze before the way to Theed will be opened.
- Memory Match Mini-Game: C-3PO's Picture Match challenges the player to help Anakin program C-3PO's memory banks by clicking on panels to reveal the pictures underneath, and trying to find the pairs of like images to remove them. Each panel that is removed uncovers part of an image from The Phantom Menace underneath, which is fully revealed once all the panels have been cleared. Higher difficulties have more panels to uncover.
- Rhymes on a Dime: The customers in the Gragra's Food Finder minigame make their orders in the form of poems, with two sentences that both end in rhyming words.
- "Simon Says" Mini-Game: The R2-D2's Flashing Lights minigame requires the player to help R2 power the royal starship's shields by clicking the four colored light panels in the same order that they light up beforehand. Each time the player does this successfully, one more light will be added to the sequence.
- Sound Off: Some of the word songs use the stereotypical military cadence call as their basis, such as the songs for the words "Battle Droids", "joined", "brave", and "gorg".
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The "Tatooine" song on page 7 is a happy little piece about how the planet is full of fun, sunshine, and strange creatures, that disregards the fact that many of the planet's inhabitants hate it there, and it's also home to slavery and Mos Eisley, a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- Tastes Like Chicken:
- The game's intro has Jar Jar eat the exclamation mark in the logo, before commenting that it tastes like chicken. This begs the question of how he knows what chicken tastes like, coming from a galaxy far, far away and all.
- The "gorg" song on page 9 ends with the line "Some say gorgs will make you sicken, I say gorgs taste just like chicken".
