"It's not a good game that's wrongly considered great, it's a bad game that's wrongly considered good."
In the case of Super Star Wars, I can safely say that this game is overrated for one very important reason: It isn't any good. I've seen this game on multiple game site's lists for "Best Super Nintendo Games" all across the Internet, in people's personal lists, and I can't help but wonder who they think they're kidding. Themselves, apparently. It's kind of weird, really, that there exists a game that is literally overrated for simply being called "good."
Super Star Wars had two things going for it back in 1992: Graphics and Sound. The game looks very good, with large, detailed sprites being used for playable characters and enemies alike. The environments are also well designed artistically. The sounds and music tracks are all ripped from the actual film. This game does have the authentic Star Wars vibe, but it also sucks in the most important category of all: Gameplay.
The game's most crippling problem is the horrendous job the developers did when designing the controls. Being a run-and-gun style game, the ability to competently manage swarms of enemies is critical. However, shooting diagonally can only be achieved by pushing diagonally on the D-Pad, which would not be a problem if the game could consistently tell the difference between "stand still and shoot diagonally" or "shoot diagonally while moving".
Most enemies attack from an angle, and you will be shooting diagonally a great deal. By the third level you will also need to jump between narrow moving platforms while dealing with multiple swarms of enemies that attack from diagonal angles. This leads to endless aggravation as you fall off the edge of one platform after another for simply trying to prevent
your life bar from being hacked to pieces. It's almost as if the developers went out of their way to design levels that would exploit the worst points of their game.
There is no excuse for the developers to not allow snap-aiming with the shoulder buttons, a feat that Super Metroid and many more games to come would perform to great success two years after Super Star Wars. In Super Metroid, the L and R buttons allowed for automatic 45 degree aiming up or down, eliminating the risk of frustration while shooting diagonally and platforming. You don't need to worry about moving while aiming if there are buttons assigned for aiming while standing still! This concept completely escaped the imbecile developers of Super Star Wars who decided to have the L and R buttons, get ready for this, shift the screen up and down.
Even Super Mario World, which came out a year before Super Star Wars, was designed with enough competence that if you held up on the D-Pad, you looked up, and if you held down, you looked down. Very simple, fundamental choices were made when Super Star Wars' developers designed the control scheme that largely ruin the game. It seems simple to assign snap aiming to the shoulder buttons, but an incredibly obtuse idea to assign camera controls to two more buttons than necessary. What were they thinking?
More problems arise because from the first level, Luke is getting his arse bitten off by ravenous legions of scorpions and monsters
that spawn so frequently that between the sluggishness of your character, the poor aiming controls, and the incredibly short invulnerability period between taking hits, there is only frustration.
Enemies almost never stop spawning en mass. As soon as you kill the first 4-5 that hopped onto the screen from behind you (at a 45 degree angle of course) another group of 4-5 spawn from the exact same spot within at most a single second. You can obtain upgrades for your gun, which you will need because even with an upgrade, many enemies take more than one shot to kill, and all of them are faster than you. Most simply collide with you to deal damage and aiming down is largely useless because the range is so small that unless a single enemy is inches from your feet, another 2-3 will have smashed into you by the time you kill off the first. There are also flying enemies quite often that will also attack in groups while other monsters attack your feet, and they will dive bomb you if you attempt to escape the ground beasts by jumping around.
Your invulnerability period between hits is obnoxiously short, almost as short as the time it takes for new enemy groups to spawn from old ones. It is very easy to lose a quarter to half of your health from a single mob of enemies because your character is slow and the controls are bad and the enemies never stop spawning and you rack up multiple hits from just trying to fight back. Every enemy tends to drop health for you when it dies, luckily, which cuts your losses shorter, but still makes each level a war of attrition as you are slowly ground into dust. You also suffer some knockback when you are hit, which makes later levels with narrow moving platforms a nightmare as in between the terrible aiming that can cause accidental falls, you can (perhaps more practically) be simply shot or rammed off of the platforms.
There is also one final point that really must be made: The driving levels, MY GOD, the driving levels are some of the worst sequences I have ever played in a game. The easiest example is the second level, in which you must navigate a landspeeder across the desert, dodging potholes and killing a set number of Jawas on speeders of their own before driving towards the Jawa base. The landspeeder truly has some of the worst controls of all time: It is unbelievably slow at turning unless you utilize your boost, which is limited and if it runs out and you cannot see any rocks to destroy which may yield more fuel, you are screwed, and guess what else? Pushing up on the D-Pad is not only how you move forward, it's how you aim straight down at the ground! How stupid do you have to be to cripple two sets of controls at once? One of the worst things you could do is sit still during this driving sequence, and yet sitting still is also the most effective way to aim at the approaching enemies. God help you if one of them gets past your sights.
Once again, enemies are faster and much more maneuverable than you are, and your invulnerability period between hits is even shorter! It may seem like a simple task to kill 12-14 Jawas, and with some strategy it can be easier to manage, but there is no excuse for how truly putrescent and bull it is to have over half of the game's difficulty come from disgustingly bad controls.
Super Star Wars is not a good game, it is not even a decent game, but a truly awful game that is wrapped up in pretty presentation. We still get games like this today, stock FPS titles that feature zero innovation, bad controls, and bad level design but have good graphics and sound. Super Star Wars is a classic example of undeserved praise being lavished on a title that gets by on presentation and use of a popular franchise.