Galaxy Guide 2: Yavin and Bespin (1989) is my least favorite of the series. Basically, it is an in depth look at the titular planets accompanied by some short adventures.

Couple problems with this. For starters, Yavin and Bespin are probably the two least interesting locales in the original trilogy – Bespin in particular always struck me as more of a surreal dreamspace than a functioning mining city where people live. The Yavin material, which establishes some history of the vanished Massasi people, fares a bit better and wound up being an on-again-off-again preoccupation of later expanded universe stories. Still, both these places are pivotal to the movies and served their purpose. I wouldn’t want to set my Star Wars games there A. for fear of mucking about in the events of the movie and B. because there doesn’t seem much to do there. Compare to Mos Eisley, which is just crammed with potential stories (and didn’t get its own Galaxy Guide until volume 7, and even with all that potential, it still feels flat to me).

Still, there is a direct line of DNA between this book and the more refined Planets of the Galaxy series that established many more worlds of the expanded universe.