If you removed all the Star Wars from Data East's Star Wars, it would be a bad, boring, repetitive pinball table.
It should be clear that I don't rate tables just based on their gameplay. This is a table that needed a code update to convert it from a broken one-shot game (shoot the middle ramp forever) to a mostly one-shot game (shoot the death star a lot and play multiball). @solar-espeon has the strategies over at Pinball Primer.
Am I saying that a Star Wars theme is what brings a table from bad to good? Not at all! There have been at least 8 distinct Star Wars pinball tables, and almost all of them are garbage. One of them was so bad that it destroyed the greatest pinball company.
What this table offers is that it uses its theme well, as a vehicle for the joy of '90s pinball. VPin Workshop has brought it to VPX (download link) in a way that really makes the artwork shine and the mechanisms feel satisfying.
What I'm thinking when I'm playing this table is not "how do I optimize my flips to consistently hit the Death Star to get the most points", it's "which character modes have I played? Could I be close to the 50 million for joining the Dark Side? I hope I can start the frenzy mode that plays the cantina music. I wonder if the Sarlacc Pit is worth a lot of points right now."
I want to play the table suboptimally, because I want to see all the things happen. And of course I do want to get to multiball at some point, so I can hear the voice saying "Stay on target", shoot a ball into the trench, and watch the explosion on the DMD. That's the power of a good theme used well.
Okay, I don't want to see all the things happen. I could do without the Speeder Race video mode, which is not even a video mode. It just plays an animation and gives you 10 million points. You can hit the flippers to feel like you're influencing it but you're not.
Jabba the Hutt saying "Pinball, hoo hoo hoo" is a great voice clip and it's one of the frequent redeems on my Twitch stream.
What a silly machine. What a wonderful machine.