I liked each one for different reasons. The first KOTOR had a good story, pretty environments(I love Manaan and Taris), and Carth while the second KOTOR had an easier menu and controls and I Disciple.
I DIDN'T like KOTOR II better, however, than the first one because the first one had options and side-quests that had to do with getting to know your partners. I also hated the last boss of the second one.
Each game is good in their own right, even though I liked the first one a bit more. :3
Well first, i'm not really sure starwars should have a gritty make over, its a fairytale story of uber good vs uber evil, if you take that away from it there isn't an awful lot left.
That said I guess my main problem with kotor 2 was that it didn't really work for me... for example I'm trying to roleplay a sithlord and i'm all like: POWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH... UNLIMITED POWAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpAcanUJX7s] and Kreia is there sitting on my shoulder rolling her eyes and heaping me with scorn... how does that picture make any sense?
They're two very different games. KOTOR1 was all about fulfilling your fantasies of being a Jedi Master/Sith Lord. KOTOR2 was more about challenging your beliefs and deconstructing the Star Wars setting. It's like comparing Raiders of the Lost Ark with Blade Runner.
The thing with KOTOR2 is that it actually asks you to justify your actions. You're constantly challenged on your decisions. They bring up what the Exile did during the Mandalorian War all the time. You actually have to deal with the reasons and consequences for your actions. In contrast, Revan never really has to answer for anything he did when he was a Sith Lord. If you go light side, you basically just act like you're a completely different person than Revan. If you go dark side, you just go back to being Revan without knowing or even caring about what Revan's original motivation was. I guess you're just supposed to assume that Revan was a stereotypical power hungry Sith. With KOTOR2, you can't just go, "I'm a Jedi Knight so I'm going to do this simply because it's what Jedi Knights do" or "I'm Sith Lord so I'm going to do this because that's what Sith Lords do."
So here's the thing: I've spent the past few days reading through the KOTOR 2 LP (many thanks to Avatar Roku for the link) and I've got to admit, I've been hooked. There was definitely stuff I missed, despite playing the game through both in its original format and with the restoration mod...
...the implication that Kreia is Handmaiden's mother (my second playthrough was female, so instead of having Handmaiden in my party I was stuck with Disciple constantly shouting "you have left me an opening" but still, I doubt I would have caught the subtlety)
...and I agree with a lot of the other posters in this thread, when you get to read the complete thing it's a subtle and well-crafted story with some incredibly deep content. It's very cool stuff and my hat goes off to the writers.
BUT:
The various bugs, cuts and very nature of the game ensure that for the vast majority of players, the story will be broken at best and in many cases it can become a largely unintelligible mess. As the LP demonstrates, a lot of the cool content is only available if you know in advance to have companion X with you on world A (or worse, companion X and Y), or if you micro-manage the influence system in the correct way to give you access to all the different dialog trees (again, as the LP notes, for Mandalore it was actually impossible to do so without modding, and I managed to screw Bao-Dur's up all by myself through poor planning once).
Plus with an ending handled that badly, you've really got to cut people some slack - it's only natural for your final experience with a story to colour your perception of everything that came before it.
Anywho, my point is that I'll agree, KOTOR 2's complete story was fantastic, but with all the problems the developers had I think it would have made better novel than it did a video game.
It ruined it with SO MUCH additional content and crap and difficult mass-enemy fights that it just got tiresome. I'm not even sure the HK Factory was worth it.
Ha! Apart from the plot-twist, the original KOTOR's story is your standard Good vs Evil Star Wars space opera.
KOTOR II's story wasn't that unfinished. More importantly, it was an incredible deconstruction of both the Star Wars mythos and RPG tropes, and had some of the deepest, most morally ambiguous characters in any Star Wars story.
You may like KOTOR's campy story over KOTOR II's brooding tale, and that's fine. But one is significantly less hackneyed and cliched than the other, and it's not the original.
You hit the nail on the head. Through Kreia, the writers forced you to question everything you knew about Jedi, Sith, the Force, good and evil. Kotor 2 has the most mature (I would say the overall best) story of any of the Bioware/Obsidian games. OT: I prefer kotor 2 just because of the depth of the story. Very, very good addition to star wars canon... and yes... it is fucking canon regardless of what lucasarts may try to retcon in the future.
I actually think(Please don't fling anyting in my way) that KoToR 2 is the superior game. I found the story more compelling, the characters more likeable and the level-up system way better than KoTOR 1. If anything, I would play it again than KoTOR 1.
It ruined it with SO MUCH additional content and crap and difficult mass-enemy fights that it just got tiresome. I'm not even sure the HK Factory was worth it.
I dunno if a definitive answer was ever found for why the HK factory was cut, but after playing the game with it reinserted I figured it was cut for pacing reasons as much as anything else. It looks like the level was largely completed (as opposed to something like the droid planet, which obviously wasn't even close) but it slowed the third act of the game down way too much - you're finally building pace heading towards the climactic final battles and then BANG, the story skips sideways for two hours of frustrating blaster combat and meatbag jokes.
To use another franchise, consider the Batman comics. For years and years, the comics presented him as a darkly dressed but otherwise cheery force for justice and the general good,
Well sure, except for the fact that when he was first introduced he regularly shot criminals.
With a gun.
As for KOTOR; I rather enjoyed Bioware's well done, if a bit cliched/classic storyline. When I want heavy "shades of gray" choices and morally ambiguous plots, I generally don't go to Star Wars to get them. I've always felt that Star Wars worked best in the tone it was conceived in. In other words, the movie serials and mythic stories that inspired it.
Overthinking Star Wars too much leads to midichlorians.
And that's nothing against KOTOR 2. I played it all the way through at least twice and actually never had much of a problem with bugs. And I did like how you had a little more wiggle room in convincing your companions to see things your way.
But when approaching Star Wars, I prefer the mythic/high adventure type stories. Just my personal preference.
Also, I might be forgetting some things, but I don't think KOTOR 2 had as many consequences for playing an evil character as KOTOR did. I suppose that's inevitable with it's grayer moral scale and that you've pretty much molded your companions in your own image by the end of the game.
But in KOTOR, if you go the evil route, you MURDER almost half of your companions. Heck, you can mind control the wookie to kill his little girl best friend.
I mean..... DAMN!!
During my obligatory evil run through, I actually had to stop playing for a few minutes after that.
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Well, that, and being able to train half your companions as Jedi.
