Why I Love - Knights of the Old Republic 2

Keeping the War in Star Wars

One of my earliest gaming memories was finding a bundled set on a trip to Target called Star Wars: The Best of PC. Within it was Star Wars Battlefront, Empire At War, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, Republic Commando and a little RPG called Knights of the Old Republic (as well as a 14 day trial to Star Wars Galaxies). Quite the package, huh? All of these games are classics, ones I still play to this day and are close to my heart, but Knights of the Old Republic is in another league. I have countless memories of that game, playing it at an age when I did not remotely understand the mechanics, and making it off the starting world of Taris was a crowning achievement. Maybe down the line I will talk more about that one, but today I want to focus on the sequel, Knights of the Old Republic 2.

Star Wars: The Best of PC. Definitely one of the coolest gaming bundles ever

Knights of the Old Republic 2, or Kotor 2, as I will refer to it going forward, was Obsidian Entertainment's first ever game, released in 2004. I'd be hard pressed to assign it labels like "underrated", "hidden gem", or "overlooked", as it is generally regarded as one of the best pieces of Star Wars media and one of the all time great RPGs. Even looking at old reviews from the time, IGN opened with the tagline "Bow down before your new RPG master" and GameSpot with "No other game since Knights of the Old Republic has managed to deliver this excellent style of role-playing". It, along with the original, have been praised to death, and I'm going to toss my own praise onto the heap. Full spoilers ahead for both games, and if you're looking for a quick answer, yes, please go play them both.... For those who want the ramblings of why, read ahead.

The game picks up a few short years after the first one ends, and the thing that stands out to me right away is how different the tone is. Where the first game starts with you waking up on a ship under siege, throwing you headfirst into the action and telling you to hold your questions for later, the player wakes up this time alone in a quiet room. Instead of an active battle taking place, whatever happened is now done. Instead of a fellow soldier being present to pose the questions "where am I and who is attacking us?" to, you are left to piece it together with video logs left behind. Even the soundtrack is right away more contemplative and serene than it is the bombast found in the first. This is something I absolutely love. It dared to take things in a different direction than you'd expect, and it isn't afraid to wear it on its sleeve.

The boring, quiet chambers you wake up in on the Peragus mining facility

The story is about the jedi exile, a former jedi who is cast out of the order for his/her role in the Mandalorian War, considered a betrayer for following Revan and Malak into the conflict. The jedi of the galaxy have been almost entirely wiped out, leaving the remaining handful to go into hiding. There is a new sith threat, but even these guys strike out through the force and hide their whereabouts compared to Malak and his straightforward army from Kotor 1. Whereas that game has the tone of a typical Star Wars story with jedi fighting a sith army and a big super weapon, this one feels borderline post-apocalyptic. For most of the game you don't even know how to find this threat. It truly does not feel like anything you've seen from Star Wars before yet still is perfectly Star Wars, and if you follow any discourse today you'll know that's a hard balance to strike and still have fans be happy.

Most of the conversations you have in Kotor 2 end up being deeper and more philosophical than the original, and a lot of other RPGs in general. Kreia, the old woman and mentor figure, is a gray jedi who constantly advocates for the force's destruction. This leads to great back and forths about how the force should be used, who should control it, whether it should even exist at all, and making you question what the difference between jedi and sith really is. Even when dealing with regular humans you get the sense that the average person in the galaxy doesn't know how a jedi is different from the sith, and most of those squabbles don't even matter to the world at large. There are too many companions to go through, but they don't have straightforward backstories that lean a certain way either.

Darth Nihilus, Traya, and Sion. Some of the coolest looking Sith ever

Atton starts as your happy go lucky, Han Solo type, but you can eventually learn of the jedi torture he inflicted during the war and the internal termoil it caused. Bao-Dur starts as an old war buddy of yours who is happy to see you again, but delving into his backstory reveals the PTSD he suffered and how he felt lost after the war ended. Even Handmaiden joins your party as a spy of the jedi Atris, but as you talk with her you learn she is the daughter of a famous Echani leader and a jedi, giving her a struggle with identity and who she wants to be.

As you make decisions, your character slides around on an alignment chart between light side and dark side, which feels a bit strange when the game focuses so heavily on the morally ambiguous. This isn't really a fault of the developers, as they picked up on BioWare's engine that still used this system. Its inclusion makes sense, however this means the game has to arbitrarily assign certain actions as good and some as bad. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of standard decisions to make, but sometimes these feel weird when next to the deep conversations you have elsewhere. For example, you land on the Hutt moon of Nar Shaddaa and Kreia pulls you aside to explain how people have ulterior motives and what you deem as a good decision may not truly be so. This is awesome, but then later on you explore the refugee sector that's overrun with Exchange slavers, and the side quest is basically a choice between working with the Exchange to make money off the slaves or kill the boss and set them free. It is still a well written area with lots of cool dialogue, but it kind of abandons the ambiguity that was set up literally earlier on the same planet. There are plenty of instances where this isn't the case but it makes some of those choices stand out.

The Ebon Hawk docked at Nar Shaddaa, one of many planets you visit on your journey

Most of the locations you visit are a lot of fun, and the way in which Obsidian reuses planets from Kotor 1 shows how great they are at being economical with their resources. In the first game you visit Dantooine as a shining jedi enclave with tall grass flowing in the wind, where the only real threat is the local wildlife. You can feel the sense of peace as you train with the council and help out the local farmers. This is also in large part helped by the score, as the soundtrack there in the first game has one of the most nostalgic tracks ever for me. In Kotor 2, we see a post Jedi Civil War Dantooine, which is in a totally opposite state. The planet has been ravaged, with politics in disarray, the jedi Enclave is destroyed and subject to looting, and the farmers can no longer operate without being attacked by mercenaries. The music is somber, the grass is browned, and it feels off. They reuse all the assets meaning Obisidian was probably able to create this world fairly easy, but they use it to demonstrate how war affects the galaxy, and it really drives the point home when you are physically revisiting a place that the player got to explore back when it was flourishing.

Everywhere that you visit has something interesting of consequence going on. The world of Telos, which is the first post tutorial area, depicts a struggle between the locals who are running a restoration project with the Republic to rebuild, and the organizations who want it shut down for profit. There is also Onderon, which is engulfed in its own political civil war between the queen and a militant leader who thinks being part of the Republic is bad for their future. In typical Kotor 2 fashion, he is portrayed as a dictator with some fair reasoning that complicates it a bit from being strictly good vs evil. Every place you visit feels like the conflicts you get wrapped up in will have some effect on the future of the galaxy.

Dantooine has seen some better days

This all plays into something that Kotor 2 added which I didn't even get to mention yet, being the companion influence system. You can find this sort of thing in most traditional RPGs nowadays, but it was absent from the first game. Your actions and decisions contribute to whether certain companions like you or hate you more, and doing this can unlock all sorts of benefits. Some will tell you more of their backstory, some might give you new perks, but the most interesting is that a lot of them can be trained into jedi/sith with enough influence. This really adds a new level of weight to what you do in the world, as well as just who you decide to bring with you where. From a story perspective it is such a cool thing to see, as the level of influence that the jedi exile has through the force is part of what makes them so special, and you see this happen through your gameplay choices rather than it just being a thing explained to you.

Gameplay in this series is a bit of a rough subject. Personally, I'm an RPG and DnD nerd, and so I love the old school, real time with pause mechanics. Managing your parties level ups and equipment, deciding what feats they need for your build or what skills would be helpful is part of that core experience. At the same time, I also totally get those that think it feels outdated, because it objectively is. Even a game like Baldur's Gate 3, which had mainstream success while being a stats based DnD RPG was using the newest and most user firendly tabletop ruleset. If the game's remake ever gets made, it will absolutely become an action RPG of the likes of Mass Effect, which works, but I'll definitely be a little bit salty about it. I admit it is at least half nostalgia, but the stat system and pausing to queue up abilities feels integral to the DNA of Kotor in my eyes.

The typical outcome of attempting a conversation with your companions

I've played these games a million times but for the first time ever I went with a blasters only build, and I'm shocked at how well it held up. Almost too well. The sequel, more so than the original, feels like you have more options that are actually viable, but I think the game is just simply easy. The only way I can see someone struggling is by just having problems with the logistics of building a character and putting points in the wrong place, which it honestly does a very bad job at explaining. You either need tabletop RPG knowledge beforehand or are great at Googling as you go along. There are a few points where you are forced to take control of your companions to go through some zones, and so you can't ignore gearing them up properly. This was a huge mistake the first few times I played, and you don't get any warnings until it happens. Ultimately it feels like a power fantasy which is totally fun in its own right, but it never feels like you need to use all your consumables or tap into every resource in order to survive.

I will fully admit that the ending of the game sucks. It is brief, you don't get to see the results of your actions, and it is very clear there was some kind of further story that will never see the light of day. The famous Sith Lords Restored Content Mod helps with this and is basically essential to a play through now. It does what the name implies and brings back tons of extra stuff that Obsidian had to leave on the cutting room floor to hit their rushed release date, which is sad that they didn't get the time they needed to fully finish development. It is one of those games that changes the way you look at Star Wars things like the force and the jedi, but it also asks questions about what war does to people and places that have implications way beyond this fictional universe.

Just badass art of the duel between Nihilus and Atris

Admittedly, this is Kotor 2's greatest strength, but it is also what makes it so much harder for me to come back to than it is for Kotor 1. Sometimes the conversations can get exhausting and it is difficult to power through when every quest you embark on involves philosophizing and waxing poetic about the state of the world. I love it for that, I really really do, but whenever I get the itch to replay a Kotor game, I still gravitate towards the first. I might be in the minority on that, but it is such a close race that I really could never make a definitive call on which one I think is better. The stories are set thousands and thousands of years before anything in the films we know, but they stand alongside the original trilogy for me as some of the most memorable Star Wars. Being twenty years old at this point, there is a lot outdated about them in terms of gameplay design and the game's port, but Aspyr gave it an overhaul on Steam to make it run out of the box with added workshop support and achievements. (Please please please do this for Kotor 1 as well Aspyr, I'm begging you!) I love these games to death, and they will always have my wholehearted recommendation.