I can't help but see Rise of Skywalker and Dark Empire as being very close to the same story (much as with A New Hope and The Force Awakens are in my eyes). Which version of "the Emperor is back (or never really been gone), he's been secretly running things from behind the scenes & built a massive military while in hiding, and he can personally use the Force on a scale that's almost unimaginable" do you prefer and why?

All things considered? RoS. I’ve always been lukewarm (no pun intended) towards Dark Empire . While I think the movie had to do a little too much to wrap things up in its runtime, factoring in Dark Empire , Dark Empire II , and Empire’s End , I felt that that take on the idea was stretched too much. Also, while have enjoyed their work on other comics, Vietch and Kennedy just didn’t click for me on DE all that well.

For me? Dark Empire.
It was never my favorite piece of EU work but RoS just used the same storylines as EU works but did a worse job of them.

Rise of Skywalker hands-down.

The first six issues of Dark Empire was mediocre at the best of times, and that they had Palps come back at full military strength in only a few years, and with even more powerful weapons (such as a cannon that shoots hyperspace rockets or gigantic droid ships that devour worlds and poop out Imperial combat vehicles) while Palps pulsl the sorts of magical shenanigans you'd expect to find in a high-level D&D game in very stark contrast to what had come before, and unfortunately set the tone for how the Force would be treated in future books up until the New Jedi Order. The follow-up series were utter trash, and makes me glad that the entire story got booted to Legends, as even in-universe a number of people found the whole story to ludicrous. Then you've got the hindquarters pull of the Emperor has a secret planet hidden within the mysterious Deep Core, which conveniently had never been explored for all the thousands of years the Republic had existed.

And the folks that were whining about Luke's so-called "character assassination" in TLJ obviously never read Dark Empire, which has Luke completely forget the warnings or even the lesson he'd learned at the climax of his second duel with Vader, and plunges head-first into being Palpatine's new apprentice, and only getting "redeemed" at the last second by Leia and her unborn super-Force wizard baby with another Force effect pulled out of the author's rear exhaust.

Rise of Skywalker isn't a perfect movie (frankly, none of the Star Wars films are perfect), but it at least handles the whole "Palps is back and with a massive fleet!" a lot better than Dark Empire did. At least TRoS's Sith fleet was built using previously established tech (Star Destroyers, superlasers devised from refined Death Star tech that was seen in TLJ). And the main Skywalker in the story made his own decision to turn from the dark side after getting a few nudges from the few positive figures in his life, even if one of them was just a memory. And Palps and his fleet hiding out in the Unknown Regions makes a lot more sense that him hiding in the New Republic's backyard in the oh-so-conveniently never-explored "Deep Core" that nobody knows about yet had regular space traffic, or at least regular enough that a couple of Nar Shaddaa smugglers can get approved Imperial access to ferry goods to that region.

9 hours ago, Nytwyng said:

All things considered? RoS. I’ve always been lukewarm (no pun intended) towards Dark Empire . While I think the movie had to do a little too much to wrap things up in its runtime, factoring in Dark Empire , Dark Empire II , and Empire’s End , I felt that that take on the idea was stretched too much. Also, while have enjoyed their work on other comics, Vietch and Kennedy just didn’t click for me on DE all that well.

To be honest, I never read Dark Empire II nor Empire's End. I just looked up the summaries on Wookieepedia, and they do sound pretty bad. However, I was just looking at comparing the original Dark Empire, which really feels similar to what Rise of Skywalker would have been if it had happened much sooner after the Battle of Endor and featured the original heroes instead of the "next generation" group.

9 hours ago, BipolarJuice said:

For me? Dark Empire.
It was never my favorite piece of EU work but RoS just used the same storylines as EU works but did a worse job of them.

I wonder if that's the case. If Rise of Skywalker had used the Dark Empire story only set a few decades later and with the "next generation" of young heroes, how would that story have compared with what we saw? Similarly, if Dark Empire would have used the Rise of Skywalker story only set a few decades sooner and focused upon the original heroes, how would that story have compared with what we saw?

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

To be honest, I never read Dark Empire II nor Empire's End. I just looked up the summaries on Wookieepedia, and they do sound pretty bad. However, I was just looking at comparing the original Dark Empire, which really feels similar to what Rise of Skywalker would have been if it had happened much sooner after the Battle of Endor and featured the original heroes instead of the "next generation" group.

Still the same answer for the same reasons (or most of them, anyway...an argument could be made for six issues being equivalent to a feature film, since that's generally the length of movie adaptations). Dark Empire just didn't click for me while RoS worked far more than it didn't (possibly precisely because of the "next generation" being the focus rather than the original characters).

2 hours ago, Nytwyng said:

Still the same answer for the same reasons (or most of them, anyway...an argument could be made for six issues being equivalent to a feature film, since that's generally the length of movie adaptations). Dark Empire just didn't click for me while RoS worked far more than it didn't (possibly precisely because of the "next generation" being the focus rather than the original characters).

How would you have felt with the Dark Empire story told with the next generation heroes? I'm trying to separate whether it's the heroes or the story of Rise of Skywalker that makes it more attractive to you. As for me, I prefer the Dark Empire story over Rise of Skywalker and probably would have even if it had been focused on next generation heroes.

15 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

How would you have felt with the Dark Empire story told with the next generation heroes? I'm trying to separate whether it's the heroes or the story of Rise of Skywalker that makes it more attractive to you. As for me, I prefer the Dark Empire story over Rise of Skywalker and probably would have even if it had been focused on next generation heroes.

Tough to say. As I said, part of my reaction to Dark Empire is that I don't think Vietch and Kennedy really "clicked" on Star Wars for me. It's been long enough since I read it that, as I recall, enough of the beats as presented were dependent upon being those characters (because, of course, they're the ones we had at the time).

20 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

Tough to say. As I said, part of my reaction to Dark Empire is that I don't think Vietch and Kennedy really "clicked" on Star Wars for me. It's been long enough since I read it that, as I recall, enough of the beats as presented were dependent upon being those characters (because, of course, they're the ones we had at the time).

I could easily have seen Dark Empire with reborn Palps trying to seduce Ben Solo instead of uncle Luke. As the second part of that, perhaps his actual offspring (Rey) would hold the key to stabilizing his failing clones.