A long time ago in a press release far, far away, ILMxLAB revealed that they were working on a virtual reality adventure starring Darth Vader. Well, today we got our first look at Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series in the last few years, and it’s… something.
Based on what we see in this trailer, it appears that the plot of this series – or at least this episode – will take place between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope. It sees an unidentified individual being drawn to Vader’s liquid hot magma evil lair on Mustafar. It seems that Vader has brought this individual to Dr. Evil’s summer home for a specific purpose. Unfortunately, he does not reveal that purpose.
That’s about all we know in terms of concrete details, but there are other plot points implied by this trailer. The fact that Vader is accompanied by an interrogation droid tends to suggest that he believes this unidentified individual may know something specific/valuable. The fact that we see a lightsaber duel at the end of the trailer also implies that either the individual – or a mysterious outside party – may be one of the Jedi who survived Order 66.
All of that is fascinating, but the most fascinating aspects of this project remain the things we don’t know about it.
For instance, are we looking at the start of the plot of this entire series, or is this some kind of adventure limited to the first episode? Is the reason that we don’t see the “hero” of the trailer as simple as the fact that the developers want you to feel like the protagonist, or are they trying to conceal the identity of a previously established Star Wars character?
Most importantly, what, exactly, even is this project? It seems to be a narrative-driven VR adventure with interactive elements, but how interactive is Vader Immortal really going to be? Our best guess is that’s it’s going to be a mostly on-the-rails Star Wars story that we’ll only be able to watch by straping things to our face. And all this after Disney admitted that they were making too many Star Wars titles…
We’ll know more when Vader Immortal debuts in 2019.