Marked for visibility purposes
Well, actually, my love for Star Wars ended up winning over my fear of spiders, so I decided to give it a shot and see if I can discover a way to make the playthrough experience as spider-free as possible. I actually found that you can avoid most of the fights with a bit of precision and attention to detail. I'll try to explore each planet to 100% and mark down potential encounters.
Kashyyyk:
- Forest Trench: At the first workbench, where you acquire the slicing upgrade, one will jump on you from the ceiling, when you go to collect the Force Echo. This is also triggers a cutscene, better left unseen. As many others have pointed out already, this fight can be avoided by navigating around the web on the floor.
- Imperial Refinery: Two spiders will ambush a squad of Imperials after you activate the cutter. Here you can rotate the camera away and wait out the fight. On lower difficulty, the Imperials on the ground win easily, but on higher difficulty the spiders actually defeat the Imperials they can reach. However, two stormtroopers are on elevated positions that the wyyyshokks can't reach, so with a little of bit of patience, you can just wait for them to shoot the remaining spider dead. This works every time I go back and I used to it explore the refinery.
- Imperial Refinery: After the abovementioned fight, if you go into the cave on the left, you will have an experience you will regret for life. The albino wyyyshokk (the Kashyyyk world boss) will attack you, when you try to collect the secret. I read that it is actually possible to collect the secret without triggering the fight, again by navigating around the webs, but honestly I did not have the nerve to try. Rather, you can very easily kill this boss without ever looking at it. Just jump into the middle of the web to trigger the encounter, close your eyes and once you hear it, press the target lock button. From this point, Cal will always face the boss and keep attacking until it dies. Since you can't really avoid its attacks, it will take a minute or so, but you have more than enough health on story mode to just brute force your way through this encounter.
- Kalyyystad Falls: After you defeat the three rocket troopers and the slug, you have to climb a rope to a bluff. Once you're up, look on the ground and notice the patch of web on the floor that you can easily step around. Just go around it and take the zipline down into the basin. You can avoid this encounter every time.
- Gloomroot Hollow: After you jump across the chasm where the wooden plank breaks beneath you and you fall into a pit, there will be one spider on top, where you climb out. Fortunately, it is fighting a slyyyg for dear life, which it ends up losing. Just wait at the bottom of the pit for a minute or so, climb out and finish off the slyyyg.
- Origin Lake: Now unfortunately, this is the first encounter you can't avoid in any way. There are two spiders on the shores of the lake, when you climb out. But again, lowering the difficulty to story mode, closing your eyes, target locking and hacking it blindly worked out for me.
- Origin Tree: After the long slide sequence and falling into the water, three spiders will be on an elevated plateau after climbing out of the water. Again, this encounter is not avoidable, but doable by target locking and blind fighting on story mode. Alternatively, I suppose they could also be pushed or pulled into the water - I assume this is why they are always so close to water -, where they would just drown.
Ordo Eris:
This is actually triggered on Zeffo, after exploring the tomb of Miktrull. On your way up, you are captured by a bounty hunter and taken to Ordo Eris, the asteriod stronghold of the criminal syndicate Haxion Brood. There, in an arena battle, you have to fight all kinds of monsters, but in the penultimate round, there will be one wyyyshokk. However, in this same round, there will also be a jotaz from Zeffo and you can just let the two creatures battle to the death. I only tried this once, but the jotaz won here.
Also on Ordo Eris, after escaping the dungeon and while navigating through the tunnels, you will see various creatures locked behind bars. They are the monsters that you will later fight in the arena. In one cell, you can find a live wyyyshokk, but it's locked behind bars and can't interact with you in any way. Just rotate the camera and move forward.
Also on Ordo Eris, near the end of the tunnels, you will come a cross a huge hole in the ground and three holes in the ceiling. While you are exploring the area, dead corpses will fall through the holes, presumable the victims of the arena fights above. Every so often, a dead whyyyyshokk will fall through. They are also non-interactive and can't hurt Cal in any way. However, to avoid a close-up of a dead spider passing you by on its way to the endless abyss, just wait until one corpse falls and then swing across. Every third or so corpse pile has a dead spider in it.
Dathomir:
Dathomir is full of bane back spiders, they are found it pretty much every area you explore. There is no way around them. However, they are much smaller than their Kashyyyk counterparts, less scary and they die from a single saber throw. They do not have any horroristic nightmares like the web strangling on the wyyyshokks. They spew acid and dissolve on death into acidic puddles, so it's better to keep distance anyways. Overall, they look more like bugs and feel like pests, for me they don't induce that shocking arachnophobic horror that the Kashyyyk spiders do. I don't like them, it's creepy how they sometimes jump, but overall they are tolerable and very easy to dispatch in a single hit or throw. I assume this is why they are so numerous.
Generally they lurk in dark and damp areas, like caves, swamps and foggy ruins. If you see vines overhead, there is a good chance that one or two will drop down, usally in front, sometimes on both sides to make a pincer (pun intended) move. I think that after exploring the starting area (Strangled Bluffs / Upper Strangled Bluffs I think they are called), you'll pretty quickly pick up on their attack patterns. A good strategy is to prepare yourself mentally when you are about to encounter such an area, go into parry mode just in case and just slowly walk forwards. When you see one, lock target and throw the saber. A single hit will kill them.
Well, there you have it, an arachnophobe's guide to a mostly spider-free experience. Because my phobia is pretty extreme, even amongst arachnophobes, I think most players will have an easier time getting through these two planets, Granted you have to make one concession, lowering difficulty to story mode for a grand total of 3 encounters, but at least the game is playable and enjoyable. If you're an achievement hunter, you might lose some hidden achievement for lowering the difficulty, but for now I'm just glad that I could actually progress in this game without turning it into a living nightmare.
