Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords

KotOR II, eh? I'm sure most fans of the series were a tad surprised when they heard a sequel would be coming out so soon after the first. We've all heard the horror stories about the "expensive expansion pack" kinds of sequels. KotOR II does NOT fit into that category.

KotOR II's storyline is set 5 years after the event of the original KotOR. While you do not play the same character as the first game, you play a new one that is just as (or maybe even more) interesting. The plot itself can be viewed many ways. While the dialogue is rich and very well written, the plot itself doesn't have much structure (though that's more or less intentional).

Your party characters interact much more, and this time they don't just stand there and do nothing. However, their stories can't be fleshed out as much as the first game, and you may find yourself loosing interest in some of them later on in the game.

Overall this is a fantastic game. Its smartly written, and carries a really groovy "fantasy-esque" feel the changes the star wars experience (for the better). The game starts out magnificent, but towards the end you will start really seeing the holes (the game's development schedule was far too ambitious). Really, the only way to form a fair opinion of this game is to play it yourself.

This game is a must-play primarily for the dialogue and voicework of Kreia, played by Sara Kestelman. This powerful, matronly role is extremely memorable and worth going through several times just to hear every bit of it. The game itself is very entertaining as well, allowing many routes to many paths, and all are not so obvious, which is a good thing. Majority of the voicework other than Kestelman's is excellent as well, in that it is very immersive. Very rarely will bad voice acting put you out of the game, save for the lackluster performance of Bao-Dur. It may have been a design decision to give him such a boring voice, but if this is the case, it was a poor decision indeed. On the whole though, this is definitely worth your while.

This is only my first playthrough with the game. There's still a little more I want to learn about the story with a few more replays. With what I've experienced so far. This is quite possibly the smartest Star Wars story I've ever came across and nothing else even comes close.

Over the past few years, I've been growing burned out of Star Wars. And the new content and fan discussions around it have driven me further than I thought I would ever have in my teenage years. I also had this guilty feeling that maybe Star Wars isn't really that interesting anymore, especially because of how minimized it has been recently as a basic fairy tale story for children by both the makers of the new content and the consumers who defend it constantly.

KOTOR not only brought me back to what I used to feel about Star Wars, it opened it into a completely new direction. It's way better than what I wished before of how I wanted Star Wars to be more complex and self aware about its themes of good and evil. I don't play any RPG, and admittedly am not a fan of it. I admittedly came to this game because I was once a Star Wars fan and I heard this is some of the best storytelling we've not only gotten from Star Wars but of all time. I went through KOTOR the first game and thought it was pretty good. The story, while the main plot was pretty much a retelling of A New Hope with aspects from other movies, did a really good job bringing me in to the Star Wars universe I cannot see any other RPG pull off, and the character work/side quests/ planets are very interesting and you can tell have a lot of idea put into them.

KOTOR 2 takes what the first game was good at and tripled a fraction of it. The story is better, the characters are better, the decision making is much more intriguing in this game than the first because the themes of good vs evil is taken SO MUCH more seriously, and you are more afraid of choosing a good decision that maybe would lead to worse consequences or a friend would lose trust in you. The game has so many aspects about its events and backstories that I couldn't come to a full conclusion on how to really about any of it morally. The movies usually make it clear that the blowup of Alderaan is bad and the blowup of the Death Star is good. I have no idea on what to feel about the wars that happened before the events of this game. The Mandialorian Wars, the Battle of Malachor V. The game gave such a strong theme that no action anyone ever took is great. Even when a character acted on the best intentions, it always ends up horribly in the price of war. It also added so much more depth to the Force than anything I've ever seen. It put more emphasis on what kind of choices you can make with it, such as can you use the Dark Side for the greater good? Or can a Jedi who hasn't fallen do something worse than a Jedi that has fallen. While still keeping the Light vs Dark concept consistent and making sense. Yes, the dark side still consumes you and you will still create/face consequences, but I love the idea that this game came across, that some of the Jedi, including Revan, just HAD to turn to the Dark Side in order to understand how the Sith can be defeated while sacrificing their own goodwill in order to do it. It's even much more complex than that.

All the character monologues, even when they go for a long time, are almost always intriguing and never usually boring, especially when they're backed up by amazing voice acting and storytelling within their dialogue. It especially helped make for some great characters that we barely get to see. Like Darth Sion and Darth Nihilus only showed up for one or two scenes before the climax, but are given so much depth from some of Kreia's monologues that it barely matters and their payoff is worth it.

Kreia is hands down, the most intriguing, and one of the best written characters I have ever seen in Star Wars. She carries the entire game, she's much more intelligent and manipulative than even characters like Palpatine can ever dream to be. Her words of advice are genuinely smart and believable, and her ideas and philosophy of the Force can be applied to much of real life as well, the same reason Empire Strikes Back's themes are so great. Except her philosophy is much more brutal and grey than any of what other movies or EU content taught. Her philosophy is more about which action you take, good or bad, works best for your purpose or others', and depending on which side of the galaxy you're in. Giving a stranger you don't know some money, is that a helpful case or is giving someone what they not have earned 'cheapening' their problem? Her philosophy works like this, it's more about doing the right thing but being fully committed to it without being cheap. If you want to know how to defeat the Sith, act like or become a Sith and then you'll know. You want to understand how powerful or special you are? Look at yourself without your Jedi powers and see how you hold on your own. You hate the Force and it's prophetic will that destroys billions of people for every generation? Work your way towards the rarest, darkest knowledge possible to DESTROY THE FORCE. Kreia thrived on these ideas and always talked about people she knew that thrived on them as well. But you still had your own choice as a player to deny these teachings and reject Kreia as a teacher. Because this game gives perspective, not preach. But her teachings were still the most intriguing part of the game. And I could listen to hours of her all day. She makes for some of the greatest villains ever made, period.

Not even a week before I played this game, I watched a Bad Batch episode and groaned because of the way the episode just turns out that a senator a clone was told to arrest just comes out and simply states her intentions aren't bad without explaining why and suddenly that was enough for a clone to put down his weapon and realize his mistake. That was not what Star Wars is, never was even going back to the first 3 films. Star Wars is not about denial or the quickest road to redemption in a small world. Growth takes time, and redemption is hard for those who struggle too much with good and evil. We all struggle in a harsh world we ourselves can't control. And what we can control, is up for us to decide, we triumph based on whether that decision we make was hard, not just that it was right. It's easy to make a right choice when nothing holds you back. We triumph when Han went back to help Luke in the Battle of Yavin when he thought he didn't want to. Not with Rey defeating Palpatine in the third film, because it was always eventual. Star Wars needs to go back when things really meant something again. It's a story about war. People die and there's never coming back from it. Even in a simplistic adventure, we can't brush it off like nothing serious came out of it. Accept the reality and show it, not dedicate a whole minute of sadness to one rebel who died in battle we never even met or heard nothing special about. KOTOR 2 is something I don't want to be pretentious and say every Star Wars project should be like it, because it's much better than it needed to be and it's too much to compare with any other Star Wars project, but Star Wars should take inspiration from it and follow its teachings. It's the core idea of how you can keep Star Wars interesting and it really took an advantage on what was simplistic about Star Wars. And it knew how to do it without being pretentious or going against anything of what made SW what it was. I hate the "Jedi and Sith are both bad and need to end" concept that's talked about by so many fans, but I'm glad my hate for it is over the way the fans discuss it than how it was originally brought to the table. This game doesn't go by one idea that opposes another, it explores everything and supports/attacks all sides. Every hero and villain has both redeemable and bad qualities, and every one of them has reasonable but flawed motives, And I feel any author or writer should understand this. For what you would complain about Star Wars being a kiddy-ish unchallenging story, this game turns it away from that in every aspect it can, and it deserves the praise for the way it achieved it way more than TLJ does. It's going as the best written Star Wars story I've came across, not even "one of" to be honest, because it set that high of a bar. Empire Strikes Back is a great movie and it gets its point across very well with way less. But the writing with KOTOR 2 generally is smarter and more compelling. Yoda is a great character but now he doesn't even compare to Kreia. Even Revan through only exposition and dialogue is quite possibly more complex than over half the Star Wars characters in the movies. With some flaws, I already consider it a masterpiece. And I'm glad I came across stuff like this later on in my life than sooner. I'm gonna replay the game a few more times to learn some more about the story. The experience from so far is worth it. One of my favorite Star Wars pieces and I can't think of any other SW stuff to reach this level.

This is an amazing game, full of side-quests and chances to choose your outcome in many ways, just like the last game. Unfortunately, the new developer, Obsidian, seems to have forgotten to ruthlessly weed out bugs in the game. For instance, in my experience I found that the game would freeze during the load repeatedly, an...unfavorable aspect of the game. Also, the game has an unkind tendency to do a random choose of what items are dropped by enemies, and what items are given to shops. This has a good side and a very very bad side. On the plus side, the game can randomly give you high-damage items, like weapons or armor, that are over-powerful until nearly the end. On the negative side, you are likely to go through the game and miss at least one thing. While these items are not related to any quest, they are still items that can be very useful. Another problem I had with it is that the new upgrade system is much more, and possibly too complex compared to the previous game, with up to 6 factors in upgrading certain objects. This does not mean that the game is bad. The game is a very fun RPG, and the characters are very funny, while at the same time very helpful. Some new twists actually encourage you to interact with your non-playable characters. There is also a nifty change in the level system which raises the bar of leveling from 20 to level 50, at least. I did find the plot rather confusing at times, but all-in-all it was worth the wait, and worth the money.

By far the best and most complex Star Wars story. You really should play it at least once, even though it has dated graphics and mechanics. Oh, and play it with the fan made restored content mode, since kotor 2 haven't been finished because Lucasarts' greed (that's why I gave it "only" 9 star). Compared to other Star Wars stories it is like books to comics. EA really should remake it with the original content, since sadly not everything could been restored.