Sarkli

The game *Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron 2* featured third-person X-Wing flying action, offered a storyline that paralleled the plots of all three original trilogy films, and also contained on-foot missions for the first time in the series. It was very popular with many of the Dudes.

Of those three cool-sounding features, though, two presented problems when the proverbial rubber hit the road.

* Movie-based games are difficult because the movies weren't meant to be interactive action set pieces. Many stay faithful to their films, forcing the player to play through these set pieces, and end up being bad. *Rogue Squadron 2* decided to address this by adding a key element to the plot of the game: an ally-turned-antagonist named Sarkli
* The on-foot missions weren't awful, but they weren't well done. You'd most often play as someone who sprinted through a level autoaiming at all the stormtroopers and mowing them down with a hilarious firehose of blaster fire. There wasn't a cap on how fast you could pull the trigger, and there wasn't any real aiming, so most enemies just took like fifteen shots to kill as you ran around the room.

Sarkli was a founding member of Rogue Squadron, as the game's story explains. He heroically saves you near the beginning of the game, as Luke and friends are about to be killed by at AT-ST. That was the first sign of weirdness; our eventual Jedi Master was saved by this random guy who everybody seemed to know really well, but we as the viewer had never seen before.

As the game's plot progresses through the movies, it's explained that there is a traitor in the Alliance, eventually revealed to be Sarkli himself. Sarkli defects to the Empire and causes all sorts of trouble for the heroes, which only gets more and more confusing as these characters we know and love act as if this guy is some beloved character and not a faceless generic idiot.

Finally, there is a showdown. As the scene following the Ewoks defeating the Imperial forces on Endor begins, Han is planting the detonators on the shield generator's core. Sarkli appears from behind a pole or something, pointing a blaster at him. The famous exchange, with Sarkli uttering in his dumb faux-British accent, "*Hello Solo*" and Han replying, "Sarkli!" has been quoted many, many times throughout the years by the Dudes. Again, who gives a shit about this clown?

What follows is arguably the most bizarre boss fight in video game history. Instead of Sarkli successfully preventing Han from planting the detonators, the detonators have already been planted and they start to go off. Both men are forced to flee the generator station. Almost the entirety of the "fight" is Sarkli running for his life, his back to Han, while Han just unloads the firehose blaster into Sarkli's back. Eventually Han kills him or whatever, Han gallops out of the station, and it explodes just like in the movie.

Sarkli was a beloved figure because of how ridiculous and random he was as a villain. Many laughs have always been had by picturing the very end of Return of the Jedi, when all the heroes reunite safely on Endor, having defeated the Empire. At some point in the night Han would say to Luke, *"Oh! Hey, kid! You'll never guess who I ran into! That Sarkli guy, he showed up in the generator station!*

*"And I shot him! I shot him in the back, like a thousand times. He tried to get away, but he went down eventually."*

It would have been a nice little footnote to the Rebel victory. Sarkli!