A number of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor previews and videos have dropped this week, and now hardcore franchise fans are digging into the footage and pulling out some fantastic details with big lore implications, including white lightsaber blades.
A brief clip from an Azzatru video shared on the Star Wars Jedi subreddit highlights the new lightsaber customization options in Survivor. Many of the options are quite similar to those of the original game, but there's a slick new interface tying it all together. The clip ends by showcasing all the available blade colors: blue, green, purple, yellow, cyan, magenta, indigo, orange, and white.
Lightsaber Customization In Star Wars Jedi: Survivor from r/FallenOrder
Lightsaber colors have historically been fairly locked down in Star Wars canon. Colors are determined by the type of crystal a lightsaber-wielder inserts into the weapon's hilt. Most blades are either blue or green, because those are the most common crystals, though as colors like purple and yellow got introduced into the canon, they were typically justified simply as rarer crystal types.
Sith get their red lightsabers through a process called bleeding, where they take a standard Jedi crystal and effectively torture the Force inside it until it turns red. White lightsaber crystals are created by healing a red crystal, purging its corruption. White crystals have notably been depicted in the hands of several Jedi in the High Republic era, but they first appeared in canon wielded by Ahsoka Tano, who's a notable figure in the Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian TV series, and will soon star in her own live-action series.
The question with the white crystal's appearance in Jedi: Survivor is whether it's purely cosmetic or represents a larger story event. In Fallen Order, you started with access to the standard blue and green lightsabers, and unlocked the rarer colors after a story event that saw Cal Kestis wind up in a cave deep inside Ilum, the planet where most Jedi get their lightsaber crystals.
If the more exotic crystals in Survivor are similarly gained through story events, does that mean that this white lightsaber crystal could mean something similar? There's already an explicit connection there. One brief shot in a previous trailer - explicitly called out on StarWars.com at the time - shows a Jedi wearing the golden robes of the High Republic era, back when more members of the order were wielding those white lightsabers. My money's on Cal getting ahold of this individual's lightsaber somehow or another, and the potential timeline crossover (the High Republic hails from some 1,000 years before the time of Jedi: Survivor) has me very excited.
In a meta sense, white lightsabers have also tended to represent a kind of purity in a Force user, set apart from the dogma of the Jedi and Sith. We see white lightsabers in the hands of High Republic Jedi, well before the order fell into the decline we see in the prequel movies, or in the hands of Ahsoka, who rejected the order's failures in order to forge her own path.
Star Wars has been teasing a Jedi breakthrough for some time, but the series has never completely reckoned with the moral failings of its theoretical heroes. There's nothing I want more out of Jedi: Survivor than to see that theme better explored, and bringing in a High Republic Jedi to see the outcome of the order's failures during the height of the Empire's power sounds like a fantastic way to do it.
Check out our latest Star Wars Jedi: Survivor preview - so far it seems the sequel is improving on the original game in just about every way.
