TFU was the project that ultimately killed the franchise.
You won't hear me advocating for
Force Unleashed anytime soon. While there's a sprinkle of interesting concepts here and there, the wider narrative repercussions are disastrous on the wider continuity, particularly where the founding of the Rebellion is concerned.
The lone consolation is that authors throughout the company shied away from incorporating Starkiller or the events surrounding him in any further material. You'll notice that any and all narrative elements related to
The Force Unleashed are remarkably absent in all published comics and novels from 2008 onwards--not a namedrop, or even reference to the events of that game, almost like they never happened. This conscious effort by the authors to be hands-off with Starkiller and his storylines in either TFU 1 or 2, largely to avoid any continuity conflicts with the planned third game...which as we all know, never materialized.
As a result, everything related to
Force Unleashed feels orphaned, and effectively memory-holed by the official continuity itself, as further story arcs of the 2010's like
Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, and even OT-centric storylines like
Choices of One or the later comic book issues for
Dark Times made zero references or callbacks to Starkiller's adventures.
It's a similar situation to how the bulk of EU material started to have less and less references to TCW as that show went on.
You can't really bring Starkiller into canon successfully. His appeal is the power fantasy and that power fantasy doesn't work outside of leniency granted by a video game setting that's playing loose with it's interpretation of the force for the sake of spectacle.
...too late.
First 2 seasons of Mando are coming to blu-ray. As is some Marvel junk.
If anyone is getting the idea that maybe Disney is reversing their stance on physical media, I wouldn't get too excited.
They're still winding down on worldwide distribution of physical media to strong-arm people into subscribing to their failing streaming service,
as their outright ceasing of physical releases in Australia this month proves. They're just hoping that they can dangle enough keys in front of their core Western market so that not enough people notice them fucking an entire chunk of the world over.
Too bad he didn't let authors like Zahn in inherit and left it to Filoni. Now, granted, Zahn cucked out himself, but novel writers probably would have done a better job adapting their books than Filoni's slap dash kiddy stuff.
Zahn is sitting where he is because of outright complicity to both Disney and Filoni's handling of his work. He not only consulted with Filoni on Thrawn's depiction of
Rebels, declaring from the rooftops to media outlets everywhere that the
Rebels version of his character was "true and authentic" to his vision (in spite of the show outright bastardizing Thrawn as a character), but he even altered Thrawn's characterization and backstory in his most recent novels to better accommodate
Rebels' changes. He also altered SW lore to better accommodate
The Rise of Skywalker, by retconning the name Skywalker to mean "Wayfinder" in the Chiss language to tie-in with that dumbass movie, and even used an entire chapter of
Thrawn Alliances to shill for Disney's retarded park expansion...by having Padme take a detour to the Galaxy's Edge planet, Batuu, so she can literally try out and compliment food items from the theme park menu, in the most blatant, shameless marketing and whoring out of SW lore I've ever seen.
Yes, all of this happened, yes it is current in the Mouse continuity, and yes, Zahn is 100% complicit in it. Which all be far more tolerable if his most recent books were at all readable in spite of all that....which they aren't. The Chiss Politics in the recent
Ascendancy Trilogy were so laborious and agonizingly shit, you even had dedicated shill sites commenting on how bad it was. Zahn has a presence at conventions and the like, but that's largely him coasting off his success in the EU, not anything he's written recently.
That's why you'll notice there's almost no hype, discourse or discussion about Zahn's books anywhere online, if people even remember they exist in the first place.
If you want to get even bigger feels listen and compare the end credits for Revenge of the Sith with Rise of Skywalker. The former you can feel the emotion of Williams conducting what should have been the final movie of the Saga, and then you have latter which is some half assed paint by numbers feel.
I mean, that's not saying a whole lot. Most, if not all of Williams' orchestral contributions to the Disney Era has been "paint by the numbers". And that has less to do with him as a composer, and more of him going through the motions without a whole lot of creative oversight from the people he's collaborating with.
Part of the reason why the music in the OT was so good, and even
better in the PT, was because George Lucas is himself extremely knowledgeable about classical music. When temping the score for the OT films, he would use classical orchestrations, and would constantly consult with Williams about what he wanted with musical motifs for the likes of Leia or Vader, referencing specific cues from Holst, Verdi, Brahms and the like. Much like the concept and design work done on the PT, it was a lot of Lucas' own meticulous, bordering-on-autistic obsession with small details like this that brought out the best work of people like Williams.
But when you have people with the cultural and musical literacy of a gnat like Abrams or Johnson (the former of which literally denied Williams footage to compose around in fear of his mystery box bullshit getting leaked), what you get is the wallpaper sound of the ST, that doesn't measure up to even the weakest of Williams' previous collaborations with Lucas.
Hell, even
the march that Williams composed for the Soviets in Crystal Skull is more melodious than the snoozefest of a march he wrote for the First Order in the new films.
For better and worse, it's just not star wars without him at the helm giving vague directions and slapping shit together as he goes; then basically telling anyone who doesn't like it to fuck off while he makes up some other brand new shit on the spot to fuck with you more 
