Does The Mighty Nein have a Star Wars problem?

The first three episodes of Critical Role’s newest animated fantasy adventure The Mighty Nein, are finally here, and with it comes a new spin on the 100+ hours of the multimedia corporation’s second actual play Dungeons & Dragons campaign. After watching the entire first season, it quickly became obvious to me that its creators weren’t kidding when they said that they would be making some serious changes from the original campaign. These changes, however, do raise some startling comparisons to another franchise dear to my heart: Star Wars.

[Ed note. Spoilers ahead for The Mighty Nein episodes 1-3 and Critical Role’s Campaign 2.]

For the most part, the changes to The Mighty Nein have been for the better. Critical Role is well-loved for its actual play campaigns, but each episode ranges from 3-to-5 hours long — hardly the sort of thing that’s easy to adapt into an animated TV show format. To give you the neatly packed sausage version of the story, Critical Role has made some changes to the characters’ backgrounds and relationships at the start.

Beauregard Lionett (Marisha Ray) no longer starts her journey alongside Fjord Stone (Travis Willingham) and Jester Lavorre (Laura Bailey), but by herself as a Cobalt Soul monk on a quest to help Daeron (Ming Na-Wen) root out corruption in the Dwendalian Empire. Caleb Widogast (Liam O’Brien) and Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel) also no longer meet in prison, but during a robbery gone wrong. Last but not least is Mollymauk Tealeaf (Taliesin Jaffe), who seems to no longer know Yasha Nyoorin (Ashley Johnson), as established in the first episode of Campaign 2.

The result is a far more cohesive and coherent experience. You get to see these characters’ backgrounds and further appreciate the relationships they build with one another as they overcome initial distrust and differences to form a true found family. However, it does raise the question of what, going forward, is canon for fans of The Mighty Nein characters. Is it the animated show, or does the actual play still reign supreme?

What throws a spanner in the works is that it’s not unusual for Critical Role to do spin-offs and one-shots with returning characters. Both Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein characters have appeared several times in Campaign 3 alone, and just recently, Jester and Fjord got married in a live one-shot at Radio City Music Hall. Sometimes, the cast members even play two characters at once, swapping halfway into an episode, or mix a combination of characters from different Campaigns into one party. Point is, it’s clear that these characters are far from being left behind, and will more than likely appear again in the future. It’s a tricky situation, and one that reminds me far too much of the ongoing argument between Star Wars Legends and Star Wars Canon fans.

Image: 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC

For the uninitiated, Star Wars Legends is a collection of stories from the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) published between 1976 and 2012. Besides the original and the prequel Star Wars movie trilogies, this included video games, novels, comics, and TV shows. In many ways, the years between 1976 and 2012 were very much like the Wild West, with a variety of authors spinning tales with characters across multiple eras. The quality, like modern Star Wars, varied over time, but that didn’t stop fans of the era from enjoying it. In 2012, however, Star Wars creator George Lucas sold the franchise to Disney, and by 2014, the acquisition led to the rebranding of Star Wars EU stories as Legends.

These stories — outside of the original and prequel films, as well as the animated Clone Wars show — would be separate from Star Wars Canon, which encompasses every comic, novel, TV show, video game, and film published under Disney. Despite the Star Wars reboot aiming to ensure everything was nice and consistent, several retcons have occurred throughout this era. When you have a whole slew of creatives coming together under a corporation, the difficulty of wrangling all of it together under one consistent canon is tough. You’re bound to get some inconsistencies.

In 2025, Critical Role fans are experiencing a similar issue, but on a much smaller scale. Now, events and stories from The Mighty Nein world have two different versions.

Image: Prime Video

Understandably, Yasha’s character seems to be the biggest change overall. Ashley Johnson couldn’t be around a lot of the time for Campaign 2 due to other commitments, which made it hard to fit Yasha in the overall narrative of the campaign. When Johnson did join full-time in episode 86, there was plenty more time to expand on her character. In The Mighty Nein, Yasha has her own story arc that initially runs in parallel with the other characters’ rather than connecting straight away. If you’re a big fan of Beau and Yasha’s romance in the campaign — we personally felt it was heartfelt, but clunky — and how it started, it’s clear that The Mighty Nein are taking a different approach to it. Let’s hope it pays off.

A change in character backgrounds and relationships isn’t exactly the same as rebooting a franchise, of course, and as a company that so clearly loves tabletop actual play, I doubt that Critical Role will look at their past one-shots and campaigns and consider them lesser in comparison to their animated shows. Most likely, the actual play and the TV shows will remain two separate versions of the same story, each with their own canon. That said, for fans who care deeply about the canonical lore, characters, and their relationship, things are about to get more confusing.