While the Star Destroyer fight was not supposed to be particularly difficult, Aspyr Media's signature (lack of) quality control ensured that in the PC port, when playing with a keyboard and mouse, you may find yourself seriously struggling with this silly scene. I've tested various pieces of advice posted by people through the years and practiced the fight myself to see what works and what doesn't, and here is my short strategy guide on how to beat this nightmare.

The fight is split into two phases it alternates between:
- The TIE swarm phase, in which a group of TIE Fighters spawns from the Star Destroyer and reaches you after several seconds, forcing you to destroy them all to progress to the other phase;
- The Star Destroyer tug of war, where you have to complete a QTE to pull the ship down towards you gradually.

You cannot activate the QTE until every single TIE is gone. As soon as the TIEs are all dealt with, you have a limited amount of time to start pulling the Star Destroyer down.

You can't (as far as I know) pull the Star Destroyer all the way down in a single attempt. There are several stages of the fight - it seems there are 3 or 4 (including the starting position). Once you've pulled the ship down far enough, when you let go, it will return to one of these predetermined positions, but no further. During the first couple of stages, the ISD takes long enough to return to its original orientation that if you destroy the TIE Fighters really quickly, you can start your next attempt at the QTE with an advantage. Once you reach the final stage (where the ISD turns its nose to the bottom right corner of your screen - see image), the ship will return to its starting position so quickly that you have to do the final QTE in one try; there's no point in hurrying with the TIEs, as you will never destroy them all in time at that point.


The Star Destroyer's final position.

The QTE will not end automatically once the TIEs reach you, so it's up to you to decide when to let go. Even though they miss practically all the time when you're fighting them, the TIEs will hit you fairly consistently when you're engaged in the QTE, and they can slice through your health very quickly on higher difficulties. Every second counts, so you will want to keep pulling the Star Destroyer down while being shot at until your health goes down to about 50%. You will be able to heal easily by taking down the TIEs, so just make sure you don't die. And yes, this means that lowering the difficulty can buy you extra time, so if you're really struggling, that would be one of the first things to try.

It's also worth pointing out that your upgradeable stats matter in this fight - especially Force capacity and regeneration and max health/damage resistance. In theory, you could go back to previous missions to level up, though I doubt the change would be noticeable enough to be worth it.

The TIEs don't put up much of a fight, but the targeting system does. The fastest way to destroy the fighters is using Force lightning, which kills them almost instantly, though it takes a few seconds for them to explode afterwards. It is possible to grab them and try to shove them into one another, but I've found this to be very ineffective in comparison.

The issue is actually hitting the ships with your lightning. To do so, you need to be locked onto them, and that usually lasts only for a moment. In order to even get a lock, the best strategy I've found is this:
- Wait for a TIE to approach the platform. Pick a single one to go after - it's extremely difficult to take more than one out at a time.
- Don't attack until the TIE turns left or right. As soon as it does, double jump in its direction, but remember to hold the forwards (W) key as well, as you can only lock onto an enemy if Starkiller is facing them directly.
- For a guaranteed hit, wait until the blue lock-on icon appears; however, it often appears for an extremely short time, so if you feel you haven't synced everything up perfectly, you can try shooting your lightning before the icon appears. There is still a good chance that you will lock onto the TIE a moment later and the lightning will catch it.
- If you want to be quick, make sure to conserve your Force energy. Once a TIE has been clipped by the lightning, let go of the key. If one of the other TIEs is still within range, go after it - you should be able to take down at least two during one flyby wave fairly easily. But if they're all almost off-screen, save your energy and wait for the next wave. Even with maxed out Force regeneration, it still takes a while, so you're better off making each use of it count.

The real pain comes from the QTE itself, and this is where things get properly weird and ugly. The goal - which you aren't really told - is to rotate the Star Destroyer into a very specific position, because for some reason it can only go down like that. Once you've rotated it into this arbitrary position, the prompt will change and you can start pulling it down. This is where the real problems start.

First of all, the button prompts are a complete lie. They're supposed to tell you how to rotate the ISD, with a patch of colour in the background letting you know how close to proper alignment you are. I cannot stress this enough: ignore these prompts entirely. They don't match what's actually going on and will sometimes straight up point you in the opposite direction.

What you actually want to do is align the ISD yourself. It needs to be facing directly towards you, but with its nose pointing up. The easiest way to find that sweet spot is by trying to align the top edge of the ship's bow with the ridge on top of the first "tier" of its superstructure - as depicted in the picture below. To rotate the ship left and right, use the movement keys (A and D). To rotate it up and down, use the mouse. That makes a lot more sense with two analogue sticks, of course.


Rotate the ISD until the edges marked by the green and red lines are in roughly the same place on your screen.

Once optimal Force-pulling orientation has been achieved, the button prompt will do the only helpful thing and change to let you know that you can start pulling the ship down.

While you should be able to get through the alignment part decently quickly, the pulling part may prove to be nearly impossible; in order to stand a chance at getting through it, you need to understand how the game treats mouse inputs:

TFU doesn't care how quickly you move the mouse - all it cares about is whether you're moving the mouse. While other games might expect you to keep sliding the mouse in a direction as fast as you can, that won't help you here - in fact, it will make your life harder, because when you stop moving the mouse by picking it up, the movement of the ship stops entirely for a moment. So what you want to do is move your mouse continuously for as long as you can. Make long, very slow motions; even the slightest movement will still register. Think of the mouse as an analogue stick that needs to be tilted without letting go.

To make this part easier, you may want to lower your DPI as far as it will go. This will be easier if your mouse supports quick-switching between different DPI settings. With lower sensitivity, you'll be able to get more "mileage" out of your mouse moves. Although, be warned that even when I lowered my mouse to 100 DPI - its minimum limit - I still needed to make really big motions, so sensitivity changes alone won't make the problem go away.

Aside from the mouse movement, you also need to keep holding down the backwards (S) key. There's no trick here, just remember that the game needs to be reading both inputs simultaneously for the ISD to move at all.

Even using all this knowledge, the fight still takes some practice. If you're still having trouble with it, make sure to lower your difficulty to "Apprentice", as the few seconds of extra QTE time awarded by higher resistance to the TIE Fighter shots may prove crucial. There is also an element of luck, as the TIEs have random accuracy - I've seen several in a row fail to hit me, but I've also seen two land shots at the exact same time. Regardless, I hope this guide will help some people out there make it through this outrageous mess of a port.