Why Fallen Order Didn't Feature A Major Star Wars Cameo

01.12.2023 - 20:45 / screenrant.com / Cal Kestis

missed the opportunity for a major character to make an appearance, but a new book reveals that might've been intentional. and its sequel, , visit 13 different planets from across the franchise. Each helps to tie in species, ships, heroes, and villains from the wider series, giving Cal Kestis a firm place in the canon.

But at the same time, the games are oddly insular. There are a few run-ins with Darth Vader, a handful of tie-ins with , and a smattering of nods towards the main series protagonists. However, they rarely, if ever, actually appear ingame. The plot is focused strictly on Cal Kestis' journey, at once wholly separate from the main movie trilogies and inextricably connected with them. Still, had the perfect chance for one cameo, but it declined to take it — and now there's a perfectly good reason why.

A new tie-in book,, has revealed that Chewbacca wasn’t present on Kashyyyk during the events of Fallen Order, but later heard tell of Cal’s presence there. The book explores some mysteries and misconceptions about Wookies, whose unique language and rich culture has always made them somewhat of an enigma in the canon. One of the unanswered questions it accounts for is Chewbacca's absence during the Kashyyyk chapters of. As it turns out, he was off-world, but what he was doing is a different question.

Cal visits Kashyyyk during the early mid-game, where he gets embroiled in an effort to shut down an Imperial refinery that has forced many Wookies into slavery. The resistance is already well underway by the time the Jedi shows up, but Cal swoops in, hijacks an AT-AT, and shuts down the plant. He returns later in search of information left behind by the Jedi Eno Cordova: clues pointing toward a holocron containing a list of Force-sensitive children, which he intends to use to rebuild the Jedi Order. With the help of a grateful Wookie leader, he finds a further message from Cordova to help him along his way.

Oddly enough, Chewbacca isn't present during any of this. It's a bit surprising, since other media, including, portrays him as a leading Wookie resistance fighter, one who wouldn't be liable to miss a fight for his species' home planet. Obviously, whatever he was doing was indispensable to the resistance effort, otherwise he would've returned to assist on Kashyyyk, and appeared in. So what was Chewie up to, and who on Kashyyyk filled in for him?

has a pretty concrete timeline, so it's usually possible to point to a specific year and determine exactly what a major character was doing at the time. With Chewie, that gets a little more complicated. takes place in 14 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), in essence, 14 years before the ending of. That puts it four years before Chewbacca met Han Solo in