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| Box Art |
On 6th
May 2013, EA and Disney announced a multi-year deal that EA would be producing
core Star Wars games and being a raging queen for a juicy bit of gossip it
inspired me to do my second review, this time on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: Sith Lords
(hereby known as KOTOR 2 because life is too short) and what most people
consider to be one of the last good Star Wars games.
I was
hesitant about reviewing this game because it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, who I haven’t
seen eye-to-eye in a couple of years. It all started with the unplayable Fallout: New Vegas, and I don’t just
mean it was bad. It was literally unplayable due the game’s number of bugs and
instability, which was a massive disappointment to me as Fallout 3 still remains one of my all-time favourite games. I’m
also a huge South Park fan, so knowing that Obsidian
is working on South Park: The Stick of
Truth has me worried; seriously if they fuck up that game, I’m going to
kill all the developers’ parents and turn them into chilli.
Anyway,
let’s get on with it…
KOTOR 2 is a
roleplaying game released in 2004 by American developers Obsidian Entertainment and was the company’s first major release.
It was also the sequel to Star Wars: Knights
of the Old Republic, which garnered praise from both critics and the
public.
It’s a
sequel, so a lot of comparisons can (and probably will) be drawn between the two
games, such as the opening of the games. The very first thing you do is create
a character, choose a class…yadda yadda yadda RPG stuff. You’re then thrown
into the tutorial. Now, in the original KOTOR the tutorial takes place on a
spaceship that is being attacked by the Sith, so you’re given a blaster or a
sword and are told to massacre everyone wearing a suit of armour. A simple, fun
and effective tutorial.
KOTOR 2 does
not do this.
The tutorial
starts on your ship, The Ebon Hawk, that is broken down and idling floating
through space; you have to fix it. Now, here is my first issue with the game,
even though you just spent hours (okay, more like minutes. This is 2004
character customisation options, not Skyrim)
you don’t play as you’re character during the tutorial. You play as T3-M4, some
R2-D2 wannabe droid. Admittedly, this isn’t a problem at this point because you’re
allowed to skip the tutorial but there are points later on in the game where
you are forced into the role of your crewmates. I’m playing an RPG! Let me use
my own character so I can pretend it’s me! More importantly, I’m playing a Star
Wars game, let me play as a fucking Jedi! Who wants to play as a goddamn droid?
The film is called Return of the Jedi,
not Return of the R2 Unit.
This hatred
for my crewmates when playing as them, is not helped by the combat system. It
is the typical RPG/MMORPG system where you click on an enemy and watch the
numbers go down as they auto-attack each other, occasionally pressing a button
to do a special attack and make the numbers go down faster. Honestly, I’ve had
more excitement during a wank than in this combat system. There was a segment
of the game that especially got on my generously portioned man-tits when I was
playing as a droid named HK-47, who can best be described as “what if C3-PO had
post-traumatic stress disorder and just fucking lost it one day?”, and I was
fighting other HK units. Both myself and my adversaries were using blaster
rifles, standing at either end of the room firing at each other. Yet none of us
were able to hit each other. I even moved up, to mere inches from opponents,
and their shots were still able to miss my metallic frame by miles. I don’t
think I can ever look at a Sci-Fi film that mentions machines taking over the
world without snorting at it dismissively, like that one hot girl I asked to
dance at my formal….bitch. Well, whose winning now? Huh? You’re off having the
time of your life and Im writing a blog on Star Wars.
Aw, I just
made myself sad.
No matter
how frustrating my crewmates were to play as, talking to them on the ship was
always something I looked forward to after every mission because you learnt
more about them and their backstory, all of which were fascinating. Well, most
of them were. One or two of them were so dull and boring that I gave up on them
after a view conversations, which came back to bite me in surprisingly taught
ass. In the penultimate mission there was a huge twist with one of these
“boring” characters that made him instantly interesting but it was too late to
go back and converse with him because I had enter endgame. Oh, if only I’d
listened to my mother and not judged a book by its cover.
There is
more than just your crewmates’ backstories to get out of talking to them as Obsidian do a good job of giving purpose
to these conversation as you can learn abilities off them or, and this is the
real selling point, turn a majority of them into Jedi. If you max out your
friendship with a character you can convert them into a Jedi. Unfortunately, it’s
not all of your team that can be converted, just the humans, which came as a
huge disappointment to me as I would have loved to have my waist high T3-M4
droid out on the battlefield dishing out lightsaber assisted vasectomies to my
enemies. Not only this but your crewmates also start to reflect your force
alignment, whether you’re lightside or darkside but all this adds up to is them
looking normal (lightside) or them reliving their gothic phase from their youth
(darkside).
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| Handmaiden (light) |
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| Handmaiden (dark) |
So,
narrative is definitely one of Obsidian’s
stronger qualities and it’s not just your band of merry men that are the better
for it but the overarching game narrative will leave the front of your pants
sticky too. Obsidian don’t allow the
story to fall into the usual problem that comes with Star Wars, which is
everything is so distinct. Jedi are good. Sith are bad. Everyone else can piss
off. Instead, KOTOR 2’s story deals with the middle/neutral ground which is
normally the boring and least prosperous route, especially in games with a
morality system. But KOTOR 2 doesn’t do that; instead it looks at the positive aspects
of being morally ambiguous, the big one being is complete freedom. Instead of
forgiving this man who has made very chauvinistic remarks to my female
companion, as a Jedi is taught to do, I can cut off his dick with my lightsaber
and make him perform fellatio on himself. Problem solved! What helps reinforce this neutral story is
the representation of everyone else in the galaxy; they’re dicks. The Jedi are
dicks. The Sith are dicks. Bounty hunters are dicks. Even the everyday
pedestrians are dicks. While travellingon Nar Shadda, I gave a beggar a couple
of credits because he was down on his luck, I took two steps away and some
asshole came up, killed him and took his money. Dicks!
It’s this
amazing way that Obsidian has handled
neutrality and what is usually a very difficult element of a game’s narrative
and really nailed it, which makes me think this is one of the aspects that
KOTOR 2 surpasses KOTOR.
Which is a
good thing because I’m not sure I can sit through another game where Bioware, developers of the original
KOTOR, rehash the same story but in a different game. Honestly, look at KOTOR, Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins.
They are the same story. “User created character has to join an elite group
(Jedi/Spectres/Grey Wardens) and defeat an ancient evil (Sith/Reapers/Dark
Spawn). I once criticised Capcom for
having a poor writers but at least they actually tried!
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| Try and unsee this! |
KOTOR 2 had
some big shoes to fill being the sequel to KOTOR but honestly, Obsidian did a great job (that was one
of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to type.) It makes me wonder what
changed that they went from making games like KOTOR 2 to a buggy mess like Fallout: New Vegas. If I haven’t
convinced you yet, know that unlike my review for Dragon’s Dogma I actually completed KOTOR 2 which clocks in at over
thirty hours of gameplay, so that should tell you something.
It’s
unfortunate that we may never see a KOTOR 3, especially with EA taking over all
Star Wars games for the foreseeable future. I guess my Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
fan fictions will have to tide me over until EA make a move.
“Oh! I never
thought a lightsaber could be used in that
way.”
Hans Davis
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