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Disney's Star Wars has mutated into some ever-(d)evolving, Lovecraftian sludge monster of endless content which extremely varies in quality. But I'm not here to hate on Disney Star Wars, Lord knows there's enough of that in the world - I'm here to tell you this game is from a time when Star Wars games were made with love and care by people who actually wanted to make them. While its predecessor, Jedi Outcast, was the better single-player campaign, Jedi Academy lifted fast-paced lightsaber combat into new heights, which have not, to this day, been beaten by any other game, not by a long shot.
Visually, Jedi Academy shows its age. Taking the Quake III engine and milking it was the name of the game back then. It doesn't look bad, but it does look dated and there is no native widescreen or high framerate support (though the game is locked at 90, which was a lot at the time), and editing .ini files results in an ugly, stretched HUD. There are mods to fix this, and there are numerous texture packs, overhauls and whatnot, so if modding is your jam, this game has plenty. The environments themselves look great and the mission setpieces are varied and interesting, from Imperial ships to a Vader castle, Tatooine, Jedi tombs, forests, you name it. On the sound front, I always praise the sound design of any Star Wars game because the source material is just so good that all a studio has to do is use the official sound banks consistently, which Raven Software does, and it just works every time.
This game's multiplayer is objectively its strongest showing, but admittedly, I spent more time in SP than in MP in my youth before Steam was a thing. It was just one of those games I obsessively replayed as a child. Credit where it's due, it was fairly unique in execution at the time, and it's still pretty neat. It starts off with a tutorial level and then throws you into a mission selection screen with 5 missions to choose from, 4 of which are mandatory. When you complete them, there's a "main story mission" and the process repeats with the missions getting harder and harder, and you selecting a Light or Dark Force power to upgrade before every mission to become stronger ("base" force powers upgrade automatically after every missions "set"). Based on your choices, Kyle Katarn or Luke Skywalker will comment on your alignment, but there is a single moment which determines what ending you get, so the choice of force power doesn't really matter. Still, the selectable force powers and two endings are a nice touch to inject some much needed replayability into an otherwise fairly short campaign.
That said, it's a long ways away from Jedi Outcast's slick and streamlined campaign, and the story is very ho-hum and nothing special (despite its two endings), but the missions are fun, the maps are interesting and look good, the enemy encounters are well executed. It's a bit shallow from a narrative and plot perspective, but they did the best they could to showcase Jedi Academy's exquisite combat and gameplay elements, namely, the interplay between the lightsaber combat and force powers. There are guns too, but outside of a few niche levels, they just don't hold a candle to the more elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
And lighsaber combat is what makes Jedi Academy a cut above the rest and the reason why there's a fiercely devoted and active MP community to this very day. The beauty of JA's combat lies in its lightning-fast responsiveness and robust simplicity. There are three lighsaber stances (fast/medium/strong), each with its own moveset, plus dual sabers and saber staff a la Darth Maul. There are some special "kata" moves, jump moves and force-pull moves and so on, but since most lock you into an uncancellable animation, they are not very effective in PvP.
Either way, you execute different slashes and swings in the movesets by pressing directional keys and clicking or sometimes holding the left mouse button at different times. A very bare-bones system at first glance, but it can take YEARS to master the timing of moves, when in the animation the saber's damage hitbox is active, how to block moves, and so on. The Force powers from SP translate well into MP with some obvious tweaks (for example, Force Speed doesn't rip a hole into space-time and magically slow everyone else down, it just makes you faster), and it's this interplay of simple mechanics with complex interactions that make Jedi Academy so addictive, so elegant and so unique. And that's vanilla. Don't even get me started on the completely insane skill ceiling of something like the Movie Battles II mod, which takes the vanilla system and expands it tenfold.
I can't really find much fault in Jedi Academy other than relatively easily remedied technical aspects like native widescreen and high FPS support and the slightly "not great not terrible" singleplayer campaign. No other game out there makes you feel like a lightsaber-wielding badass Jedi the way Jedi Academy does. The new Respawn games are a different, more deliberate, slower-paced beast, and the Force Unleashed leans a bit into the over-the-top cartoony hack-and-slash, but Jedi Academy is the absolute peak of fwong fwong kkkssssshhhh fwong fwong fun. You really feel like you're doing all the heavy lifting, all the crazy-fast moves, the exploiting of openings, it's highly interactive wihtout being weightless and airy.
A few things in life never get old: swinging a lightsaber and decimating a whole room of Stormtroopers with UNLIMITED POWER Force Lightning, winning a 3v1 against AI dark Jedi or 1v1 saber battle vs a real human in MP - those are definitely on that list.