Star Wars Hunters: Battle For the Arena - Spoiler-Free Review

TWO Star Wars books came out last week, and while Battle Scars is amazing and so is Sam Maggs (go listen to my interview with her if you haven’t already!), all Star Wars books are valid, and this second one deserves just as much praise.

Star Wars Hunters: Battle for the Arena by Mark Oshiro is a middle-grade novel set in the years following the fall of the Galactic Empire. It features characters from the upcoming mobile and Nintendo Switch game Star Wars: Hunters, and lays the foundation for the game’s setting and context.

This is – you guessed it – my spoiler-free review! I’m hoping to get Mark on the show to talk more about the book, but either way there will be a full discussion on it down the road. I just like doing these reviews first because I want to give you time to grab the book and read it before we discuss further. And yes, I know we haven’t done a Quest for the Hidden City deep dive yet, there are a lot of books coming out!!! We’ll get there. I promise.

Anyway! Battle for the Arena.

On the planet Vespaara lies the Arena—a series of battlefields where fighters known as Hunters face off in teams to compete in front of roaring crowds. Newest to their ranks is Rieve, a Force-sensitive orphan from Corellia with abilities she can barely control, and a past she desperately wants to leave behind. But Rieve gets off to a rocky start, strugging [sic] with her lack of confidence both inside the Arena and with her fellow Hunters. And when a mysterious stranger begins stalking the Arena, Rieve fears her troubled past has finally caught up with her....

Let me start by saying this is actually my first exposure to Mark Oshiro aside from their short story “Hunger” in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, and it certainly won’t be my last!

Full disclosure: I’ve never written a Star Wars story and I probably never will – but I have written stories, and original worldbuilding is by far one of the most challenging, even if the most fun, part of sci-fi and fantasy. It has to be such a challenge to craft an original society and set of characters in someone else/s universe, and make it feel familiar yet new all at the same time. But Mark? You nailed it. Absolutely crushed it. That’s a compliment I promise.

Reeve instantly became a new favorite Star Wars character for me, and Rieeve is just one of a handful of genuinely delightful, memorable characters debuting in this story. I can imagine it’s also not easy to build out and develop a character to beautifully in such a short amount of time – the book, as with other middle-grades, are by definition shorter, but that just means their greatness is packed into a smaller but just as worthwhile package.

The time between ROTJ and the sequel trilogy has been explored a lot more in middle-grade than in any other medium in Star Wars at this point, and Battle for the Arena is a great addition to this lineup. You really get a sense of what the galaxy is like at this time – we may be on some far-off planet but there are mentions of The New Republic, and Imperials, and the desperate lengths people will go to survive and make a living and leave their questionable pasts behind.

I love the concept of the Arena, where someone can enter a battle being anything they want to be, and escape into that world during a tournament. It adds so much more depth to what will be the Hunters game, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can play as any character, but you know the entity behind that character might have their own completely different backstory.

At first admittedly I was a little skeptical about Rieeve being Force-sensitive – sometimes it’s refreshing to get Star Wars stories without these characters for the sake of variety BUT. Reeve’s struggles to control her abilities are so relatable from a real-world perspective. So many of us wrestle with our strengths and how to use them to better ourselves and the people around us, and those strengths so often also bring out our weaknesses – and it’s an internal, highly personal journey to learn where we fit in the universe when we have a strength the people around us don’t fully relate to or understand.

I finished Battle for the Arena feeling so PUMPED to dive into the game, and if I’m being honest, I would not mind seeing Rieeve and teammates in more future stories. Do you know how fun a Hunters comic series would be? I might actually keep up with reading that one …

While the game will be released on Switch, iOS and Android later this year, Oshiro’s book is available now - and if you like your free to play player vs player games to have some context in the larger star wars timeline, this book should really help build your hype for the experience. Plus, it’s Mark Oshiro. You’re in for a real treat.

Star Wars Hunters: Battle for the Arena is available now wherever you get your Star Wars books.