Star Wars: Knights of the Eighteen-Year-Old Republic

"Focused, driven, certain (the way it's got to be)
Crooked (no trust)
Liars (conman)
Drunk with (power)
Mentor
Taught me everything that I know
So wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong"

 

Mudvayne - Determined

 

 

Back in high school, another boy asked my opinion of David Lynch's Dune adaptation. My answer? "I'm just glad I got to see sandworms." This seems the appropriate tack in reviewing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic too, as it addressed an action flick audience incapable of rational analysis, presumed to respond only to Pavlovian stimuli in the form of gimmicks from Star Wars movies. This is a product intended to make drooling yokels feel included.

 

Not to say it didn't have its good points (quite a few in fact) but quality had to be snuck in under the radar or floated above generic Star Wars set pieces. I'll admit I really got into the game haflway through Manaan - only place featuring moral ambiguity - but I get the feeling the writers pretty much had to invent their own planet and alien culture to stretch their creativity a bit instead of toeing Lucas' crap line by line. Other planets mostly crammed as many movie gimmicks as possible in every single zone: Twi'lek dancing girls, beeping droids, protocol droids, blasters with 0.5% precision, banthas, the famous cantina scene cut and pasted a dozen times over... and of course since LucasArts wanted to bank on those execrable prequels, it needed to include pod racing and dual lightsabers (two of the one-half things I could stomach about Phantom Menace.) I'm also annoyed by the third-person-shooter interface for a target-lock RPG which would've functioned much better in strategy view, another concession to the flicks' mindless "action" feels.

However, for anyone who's played BioWare's other games, I can't but note this is likely the hardest they ever tried to knot all their cliches together. They even worked in a zombie plague at the start, copied and pasted Aribeth (thankfully with slightly less hammy dialogue) and recycled music from Neverwinter Nights right in the tutorial, plus the prison break via a companion, later rehashed for DA:O. Feels. Lotsa feels. All of the feels, feel by feel.

*Sigh*

So why am I not completely bashing what should by light of its concepts qualify as sheer adaptational shovelware?

Execution.

Where not deliberately dumbing everything down to the tastes of Star Wars fans, the design team showed unquestionable expertise. The over-riding problem concerns a lack of choice, but let's take it aspect by aspect.

 

 

1) Character progression

Humans are degenerate vermin and I should never have to play one - galaxy full of little green men in 31 flavors but you make me play a retarded plains-ape. Also, I don't know how fleshed out the D20 Star Wars tabletop mechanics are, but KotOR manages to give an overall vibe of NWN in spaaaaaAAAce! - but with fewer skills, fewer feats, fewer spells, fewer everythings. I deliberately "gimped" myself by avoiding the obvious swashbuckling space-knight routine, and was pleasantly surprised to find my robotics and hacking prowess coming in handy throughout the campaign. Good thing I avoided lockpicking (a.k.a. "security") as in another NWN throwback, you can just bash open almost every container and door. Boss fights were marginally difficult (took me two attempts) as they often force you to solo and presume you'll want to play a simpleminded brawler. I mean, why else would you be in a nominally Science Fiction game but to hit shit with sticks?

 

Nevertheless, I found the EnergyRes. / ForceImmunity/Breach / Plague / Kill spell combo took care of pretty much everything, with grenades sufficing for the remainder of brute force (pun intended) occasionally defaulting to laser-sabers for passive bonuses merely because my trusty rifle was canonically useless against jedi.

So: zero race choice, class choice limited to a couple feats' difference, plus you're locked into your jedi prestige class before level ten. So much for strategic "role" playing. At least the game's balanced enough that none of your few choices are rendered useless.

2) Gear

Medieval cutlery gets phlebotinized by Dune-like personal shields, all the more redundant in being told from the start everyone has armor and weapons which lightsabers can't cut, sapping their mystique (for obvious balance reasons) down to the level of ten foot laser poles. Though technically you get a choice of ranged weaponry, all blaster flavors... blast things. You'll merely level up different skills among your characters to avoid overlap for the best weapons from each category. In keeping with the movies' theme, glowstick swashbucklers are just flat-out <better> than everyone else... but I will admit balance-wise my blaster rifle remained useful up to the end, jedi duels aside.

As usual in Bioware / Obsidian games, resource management is trivialized into irrelevance. You get free healing in town, infinite force healing, can afk to regenerate and are handed so many freebie consumables you can't even burn through them all. A very simple game all-told, again presuming a degenerate audience.

3) Campaign progression

Decent amount of freedom. Each planet's combat zones are linear but theres a healthy dose of side quests and you can complete the four planets in your preferred order. Also, each planet's given a slight (thematic) spin, with Manaan rewarding noncombat finesse the most, the Sith academy offering a predictable bounty or minefield of Dark Side choices depending which side you're on, Tatoooine some extra robotics opportunities and Kashyyyyyyyyk the jungle planet lots of fights against biological enemies.

 

Of course it might've been nice to hint more at what themes await you in various zones beforehand so you can make a half-informed choice - BioWare later improved on this in the DA:O campaign.

4) Quest progression

Yes!

Pleasantly surprised to find most missions have 2+ solutions, whether between light / dark sides or combat / noncombat. By the standards of 2003, KotOR was staggeringly... bushy, in its branching.

 

Skillful level design, well paced, with usually just enough filler combat to make you feel like you're working toward the more involved encounters. Honestly, though it may not register on customers' consciousness, level design above other factors likely made the game a success. Aside from the infuriating minigames (get to that later) the core content is beautifully dosed for cinematic appeal, minimal grind, a few puzzles to break up the combat sequences and just enough divergence and recursion to give the impression of nonlinearity.

On the downside, many noncombat solutions require you to expend consumables and appear to yield fewer experience points than blasting your way across the galaxy. Not a huge problem since you'll have ample opportunities to level up and by halfway through the game I was swimming in parts and spikes... but still, you're basically being asked to spend money to lose EXP.

 

5) Companions

A must for games treading in Black Isle's wake, though in this case KotOR's pared-down D20 system and faux-third-person-shooter idiocy limits you to a party of three, and even that feels cumbersome at times. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like putting in the effort to explore all of their dialogues and personal quests. Some are pathetically cheesy (the plucky little girl plus lovable big lug pair) while others felt surprisingly ambiguous and multifaceted (Jolee and Juhani) but I dropped both of them as soon as I ran across the amusingly murderous HK47. (Helped that I could instantly upgrade it to maximum efficacy due to my INT / robotics focus.) Canderous' attitude lent a welcome bit of integrity and dignity to the otherwise cartoonish Light/Dark blather.

Here I also have to criticize the various times you find your party selection forced on you, but I think that'll grow into its own post.

6) Alignment

Last and most involved. While moral alignment was central to Planescape: Torment and impacted some major decisions in Baldur's Gate, it fell by the wayside in Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights, meaning KotOR could've gone either way based on customer expectations. They opted for heavy and pervasive implementation of Light vs. Dark roleplaying into most quests and integrated your overall tally into the efficiency of Jedi spellcasting, making you feel the consequences of your actions. It certainly makes the game stand out among its contemporaries like Morrowind which hand-waved morality in favor of exploration/completionism, and especially among the rise of "action" RPG Diablo clones and the amoral powermongering of early graphical MMOs.

Sadly, alignment gains scale so heavily with your depth in either branch as to deny choice. (Contradicting your current alignment shifts you massively in the other direction; conversely, continued gains appear diminished.) A primary spellcaster like me at least needed to maintain mana efficiency, which means you take one alignment decision early on and can never again stray from that path, even momentarily. Here's a rather egregious example:

I ranked full Dark Side before a late-game dialogue in which I gave a single answer contrary to my villainy, instantly rubberbanding me back to almost perfectly neutral. Worse yet? The line in question was voicing apprehension that my apprentice as a Sith Lord would betray me... which seems a perfectly valid concern given several examples along the campaign's length, including the main chapter of the main plot itself! How is declaring my intent to preemptively murder [REDACTED] worth half a campaign's worth of light side alignment shifts? Especially since it explicitly contradicts the Jedi stance against killing, painstakingly and repeatedly exposited earlier on! Mind-blowingly stupid mission writing at the very climax of the story.

 

It doesn't help that "light" and "dark" in the context of a simpleminded action movie adaptation translate into either cartoonish sweetness worthy of a Disney princess or equally cartoonish moustache-twirling, puppy-kicking evil. This pretty much determined my decision to go Darkseid.

If you limit my choice between schmaltz and bombast, I choose bombast.

 

 

Aside from all that, production values were predictably impressive given the LucasArts tie-in.

The unmistakeable blocky 3D, low-polygon early-2000s graphics look dated now, but for their time leapt far beyond the game engine's previous showing, NWN. Just the look of my character's face once I dove deep into the Sith end of the alignment pool was impressive in itself. Nice enough music, exceptionally good voice acting, fully fleshed out dialogues even for minor characters. On the flipside, many overextended, unskippable cutscenes. Thankfully you can save between... some of them and combat, though KotOR's also guilty of some standard cheap fake longevity tricks like cutscenes dropping you straight into an exposed position to force more reloads. I'm ambivalent about the "dubbed" alien voices. Appropriate but too restricted not to seem repetitive: dung-o' bungo cheata puta shoota poot-poot-poot gets old fast, listening to jawas makes me pine for the golden age of dial-up modems and an entire dialogue in Shyriiwook groan-speech starts sounding like the galaxy's most awkward porn dubbing.

Aaaaaaand then there's the minigames. The goddamn idiotic minigames.

The space invaders minigame between planets.

The pod racing minigame.

The "vingt et none" minigame, which as a bonus is obviously rigged.

You rarely see such infuriating, blatant timesinks in RPGs, moreso because they're the only reliable way to get all the money you'll need for the best gear. Racing is bad enough due to being unable to save and the overextended dialogue and cutscenes (the after-race cutscene on Manaan drags longer than crashing the game and reloading) but Pazaak really takes the proverbial cake. Leaving aside that starting a match always requires an extra line of dialogue, the computer blatantly cheats... even though reloading between matches means it's not your character being punished by losing money and gear but you yourself by wasting your time.

Pazaak makes one of the greatest object lessons in terrible timesink implementation in video game history.

In closing, I have to mention a plot element which may be spoiler-ish, but I'll try to keep things vague. At one point you're presented with your grand moral quandary... which was completely invalidated for me by the involvement of telepathy. I *LOATHE* mind control - even when I dabbled in blood magic in DA:O I refused to ever utilize Blood Control and only embraced dementation in Bloodlines because it's basically the exact opposite of "controling" anything. Watching my enemies writhe in agony as I boil their blood? Legit. Frying them with magic lightning? Cool. Freezing them into loser-pops? Delicious. Riddling them with plasma musketballs? All in a day's work. But it must be their own minds, intact, which shatter before mah awesomah powah! So, once again, the choice was no choice at all.

Also, though some reading this may find it hard to believe, I had never looked up KotOR's big plot twist in the nearly two decades it's been out, so it came as a surprise to me... that it came as a surprise at all. Thanks to two famous movies such a twist was already clichéd by 2003, but somehow they played the hints lightly enough to allow you to predict but also discount its probability, and justified it well enough as force powers taken to their logical extreme.

Kudos. (Though Ursula K. LeGuin did it better.)

 

Overall a decent game even after all this time, and very interesting for anyone curious about design choices in general. It seems to have cemented Bioware's RPG stylings.