A long time ago (about 4000 years before the films) in a galaxy far far away...
A warrior race known as the Mandalorians decided to wage war on the Republic. The Republic was losing badly, so they asked the Jedi Order for aid. Now you'd think they'd answer the call, since they're actually sworn to protect the Republic but instead the "wise" masters said they needed time to "evaluate" the Mandalorian threat, even while millions of innocent lives were being wasted in the Outer Rim. Surely THAT should be enough for a good evaluation: They must be stopped! Luckily, there were many Jedi who were more down to earth who couldn't bear to stand by and watch all those innocents die and so they ran to the rescue, led by 2 Jedi Knights, Revan and Malak and thanks to the Jedi's combat skills and Revans cunning tactics, the Mandalorians were beaten at a planet called Malachor V. But then all the Jedi who fought in the war either died or turned to the dark side and Revan and Malak, once heroes became Sith Lords and turned their armada against the Republic.
Fast forward 5 years to the events of KoTOR, where the Sith, led by Darth Revan, are winning - what KoTOR 2 refers to as the Jedi Civil War - because recruitment is through the roof as the dark side offers far better incentives than the light, all the Jedi who heeded the council's decision to sit back, relax, "evaluate" and watch the slaughter of the Outer Rim during the Mandalorian Wars (it is just 1 long conflict, despite how they always use the plural) are the all-knowing, all-wise, infallible , noble heroes who are never wrong, despite the fact that so many of them are turning their lightsabres red as fast as they switch them on and the few people who speak out against them are generally ignored because what do they know? But anyway...Revan is betrayed and supposedly killed by his apprentice Malak (shock horror!) who then takes over and the game basically involves you ultimately snuffing out Malak, either to take his place or save the Republic. In KoTOR 2, you take the role of the Exile, so called because he (gender optional) was 1 of those Jedi who fought in the Mandalorian Wars but also suffered some horrific atrocity at the end that somehow resulted in him being completely cut off from the Force and was the only 1 to come back and face the council's judgement after the war's end but instead of finding out why the Exile fought in the war, they sent him away, in blatant defiance of the 2nd tenet of the Jedi Code: There is no ignorance, there is knowledge!
Fast forward another 5 years and we arrive at KoTOR 2, which starts with the Exile lying in the medical bay of his ship, the Ebon Hawk, damaged and drifting in a dense asteroid field with only 1 utility droid, T3-M4 (you weren't expecting R2-D2 were you?) to repair the ship and dock with a nearby mining station for repairs.
I mentioned KoTOR because I find the relationship between the 2 unique among games I've played; KoTOR 2 is to its predecessor what Kreia is to the Exile: a harsh, disapproving matron whose job it is to break down misconceptions and show you the contrast and indeed, the contrast couldn't be any sharper; KoTOR's story used a very narrow-minded 'cops and robbers' approach (which at least I can't fault for lack of narrative focus), ze Jedi are good and ze Sith are bad, no qvestions asked! If KoTOR were a news reporter, it would give about 98% of its interview time to the Jedi, so we'd only hear ever hear their perspective on the conflict and how "just" it is, their propaganda. Whereas in KoTOR 2, there's almost bugger all Jedi left so the story is told mainly through the perspective of war veterans, refugees and all other non-Jedi. Now, the reason the events of the 1st game are called the Jedi Civil War by KoTOR 2 is because that's how the common folk in the galaxy see it. To quote from an NPC ally: "Jedi, Sith, you don't get it do you? To the galaxy they're all the same; just men and women with too much power, squabbling over religion while the rest of us burn!" So KoTOR 2 basically does everything from taking a step back and subtly questioning the last game's events to outright smashing a verbal hammer over their heads. You might think it's being overly harsh but I prefer to see this games story as a 'rubber band' effect; the Jedi were placed on a mile-high bullshit pedestal and KoTOR 2 took it upon itself to break it down. Another major plus for the game is that there is more moral flexibility this time round. Ok, character development is just as black and white as ever; your alignment starts off bang smack in the middle of the grey area, you decide whether you're going to be good or evil and go from there, gradually moving the alignment marker all the way to the top or bottom, respectively, because those are the only 2 places where the gameplay bonuses are to be found. No, what I mean is you are still free to choose the good or bad outcomes of some situations. For example: On the planet Dantooine, there's 1 big house that used be owned by a rich snob family in KoTOR and it simply comes down to who's going to live there when you're finished: the settlers, who're actually already there (good) or the mercenaries (bad)? Well, take your pick because this one at least, isn't alignment restricted.
Don't take this to mean that I'm completely anti-Jedi; out of the Jedi Masters you meet throughout the game, 2 of them are typical narrow-minded, self-righteous dickheads who defend the 'rightness' of the councils apathy during the Mandalorian Wars until their dying breaths, slag off the Exile for fighting in the war and are practically begging to have their lightsabres shoved down their throats - if you so choose - but the other 2 turn out to be more open-minded about everything, as well as sympathetic and understanding towards the Exile and his choices and I genuinely came to respect them because they showed their humanity.
Since the game is sub-titled The Sith Lords, it'd be silly not to mention them. There are 3 main Sith Lords in the game, not counting the occasional nameless sub-bosses, whom I think are far better characterised than any of those born from The Pen of George Lucas. In no particular order:
Darth Sion: The Lord of Pain. This bloke is definitely the most grotesque Sith Lord I've ever seen. He looks like he was blown up with a grenade and tried using Prince of Persia style rewind to recover but cocked up somehow, so now he's a walking cracked, broken, fractured, fleshy mess who looks like he could fall apart at any time. Or to quote again from an NPC ally: he looks like he "sleeps with vibroblades". This means that he's in constant pain and who honestly wouldn't go insane as a result? So he's a pure, unbridled, sabre-happy psychopath who wants nothing more than to KIIIIILLLLL!!!
Darth Nihilus: The Lord of Hunger. This one, ironically, has no character at all. He's basically described throughout the game as being a walking black hole, sucking in life all around him; a breach in the Force that must be sealed; so overwhelmed by this hunger that he's "forgotten his own flesh".
Darth Traya: The Lord of Betrayal. This one spends the majority of the game in the shadows; the only reference to her is when Kreia says "and the last is a creature of betrayals, for without such things, there is no hope" and that she'll be revealed "when the time is right". And suffice to say that when you do meet her and discover her true motivations, they're something you just wouldn't expect any Jedi or Sith would ever want.
In terms of combat, it's the same system from KoTOR (don't fix what isn't broken); a pseudo turn-based system whereby it appears to happen in real-time but in fact you and the opponent take it in turns and you pause the game with the space bar, issue commands to your characters, resume, watch as the opposition is wiped out then loot the corpses, which can be quite generous. This hands off approach I have to admit, even for me, can get a bit lacklustre occasionally, just sitting back and watching it happen as opposed to making it happen by, say, abusing the left mouse to death but it ultimately works and ensures that the player is never overwhelmed. Although the lightsabre is nowhere near as neglected as in The Force Unleashed, this game does seem similarly more in favour of Force powers; do I cut down a dozen thugs 1 by 1 or get them all together, raise my hand and electrocute the whole lot of them with Force Storm? Another thing that helps game flow is the fact that there is no bullshit limit on your inventory, which is only good for forcing you to either abandon a few less valuable items on the spot and move on or backtrack all the way to the nearest merchant and sell to make room before running all the bloody way back to where you left off, making this a really good scavenger's game.
KoTOR 2 does have some big problems though, like the boss fight with Darth Nihilus. This is where gameplay and story contradict each other, like 2 kids both trying to convince daddy that it's the other's fault; since Nihilus is touted throughout as being the walking black hole that threatens to drain all life from the galaxy and how the Jedi Masters tell you that he can only be fought through the Force, you'd think that would require a serious change of strategy but in practice, not only can he be fought through the Force but you can kill him with a lightsabre, or any melee weapon for that matter, even shoot or grenade him!
In KoTOR, your Jedi teacher tells you that every Jedi's lightsabre is unique, that it's made of components that identify it as your own, which, in KoTOR 2, is echoed by your mild-mannered mechanical wizard Bao-Dur when you set about looking for the parts. That's all very well but there's just one problem: THEY ALL LOOK THE BLOODY SAME (and I do know about the USM by the way)! Take any thin, white plastic tube, cut it down to size and you're holding the entire collection the game has to offer! If the lightsabre is the symbol of the Jedi then they're (In KoTOR) all a bunch of bland, generic blobs with no personality, obliviously conforming to tired old cliches. At least Jedi Academy gave you SOME variety of hilt models and that came out before KoTOR did! This may sound petty but since there are more lightsabre-wielding NPC's than in the last game, I found myself having to change all the lightsabres to different colours, purely so I could tell everyone's apart on the workbench upgrade menu.
The most irritating of them all is the final meeting of the Jedi Masters. Without giving too much away, all they do is basically accuse the levelling system of being something of the dark side, mistake the Exile for both Sion and Nihilus and decide to repay him for reuniting them by threatening to reset him to level 1, even the aforementioned sympathetic and understanding Masters, presumably having been mind-tricked by the dickhead!
But the most tragic flaw of the game is that it's...incomplete. Yes, there are a few bugs that Obsidian stopped giving a shit about after the 1st couple of patches but worst of all is the amount of content that was cut from the game. For one thing, where the hell do all your party members disappear to after you've crash-landed on the final planet? You get to control one for a boss fight (who then walks in the direction the Exile went but is neither seen nor heard from again) and Bao-Dur's floating sidekick, as it powers up various machines scattered about the canyon on instructions from a holographic recording of Bao-Dur but that's it. Plus the ending provides no closure whatsoever. This became all the more apparent to me when I 1st discovered the existence of various "content restoration" mods on the web. All I can say to that is: 3 cheers to the modding community!
So, do I still recommend KoTOR 2? Well, if you're not into RPG's then I've understandably been typing out of my arse and the hands-off combat, combined with dialog-heavy gameplay will probably be a resounding "meh!" but if you do like your RPG's, then how could I clock in almost a year of gameplay and not recommend it?
Who said older isn't better?
Side Notes
If my Force Unleashed review taught me one thing, then it's the importance of keeping irrelevant rambling to a minimum, so I've decided to make a separate section of things I'd still like to mention but which I think aren't necessarily relevant to the review:
(1) Why is it that the Jedi Code is so often mentioned out of context? There's that bit in the Phantom Menace when Qui-Gon Jinn asks the council if he can train Anakin but then Mace Windu says "he's too old" and "the code forbids it". Um, no it doesn't Master Windbag! Or when Obi-Wan tells Qui-Gon "if you followed the code, you would be on the council". So you're saying that your Master is NOT calm, centred, serene and knowledgeable? Or, in Revenge of The Sith, when Anakin, after killing Dooku, says to Palpatine, "he was an unarmed prisoner, I shouldn't have done that, it's not the Jedi way". Well maybe if you'd chopped his head off 1st, you wouldn't be feeling so pointlessly guilty! Ok, everyone gather round and let's recite the code shall we?
There is no emotion; there is peace (or Equilibrium if you like)
There is no ignorance; there is knowledge (smartarse!)
There is no passion; there is serenity (BOOOORRRRIIING!!!)
There is no chaos; there is harmony (resistance is futile!)
There is no death; there is the Force (I AM INVINCI...)
Hhmmmm...nope, it doesn't say anything about how soon in life you have to start training, council membership requirements or the appropriate time to kill someone! DUMBARSES!
A warrior race known as the Mandalorians decided to wage war on the Republic. The Republic was losing badly, so they asked the Jedi Order for aid. Now you'd think they'd answer the call, since they're actually sworn to protect the Republic but instead the "wise" masters said they needed time to "evaluate" the Mandalorian threat, even while millions of innocent lives were being wasted in the Outer Rim. Surely THAT should be enough for a good evaluation: They must be stopped! Luckily, there were many Jedi who were more down to earth who couldn't bear to stand by and watch all those innocents die and so they ran to the rescue, led by 2 Jedi Knights, Revan and Malak and thanks to the Jedi's combat skills and Revans cunning tactics, the Mandalorians were beaten at a planet called Malachor V. But then all the Jedi who fought in the war either died or turned to the dark side and Revan and Malak, once heroes became Sith Lords and turned their armada against the Republic.
Fast forward 5 years to the events of KoTOR, where the Sith, led by Darth Revan, are winning - what KoTOR 2 refers to as the Jedi Civil War - because recruitment is through the roof as the dark side offers far better incentives than the light, all the Jedi who heeded the council's decision to sit back, relax, "evaluate" and watch the slaughter of the Outer Rim during the Mandalorian Wars (it is just 1 long conflict, despite how they always use the plural) are the all-knowing, all-wise, infallible , noble heroes who are never wrong, despite the fact that so many of them are turning their lightsabres red as fast as they switch them on and the few people who speak out against them are generally ignored because what do they know? But anyway...Revan is betrayed and supposedly killed by his apprentice Malak (shock horror!) who then takes over and the game basically involves you ultimately snuffing out Malak, either to take his place or save the Republic. In KoTOR 2, you take the role of the Exile, so called because he (gender optional) was 1 of those Jedi who fought in the Mandalorian Wars but also suffered some horrific atrocity at the end that somehow resulted in him being completely cut off from the Force and was the only 1 to come back and face the council's judgement after the war's end but instead of finding out why the Exile fought in the war, they sent him away, in blatant defiance of the 2nd tenet of the Jedi Code: There is no ignorance, there is knowledge!
Fast forward another 5 years and we arrive at KoTOR 2, which starts with the Exile lying in the medical bay of his ship, the Ebon Hawk, damaged and drifting in a dense asteroid field with only 1 utility droid, T3-M4 (you weren't expecting R2-D2 were you?) to repair the ship and dock with a nearby mining station for repairs.
I mentioned KoTOR because I find the relationship between the 2 unique among games I've played; KoTOR 2 is to its predecessor what Kreia is to the Exile: a harsh, disapproving matron whose job it is to break down misconceptions and show you the contrast and indeed, the contrast couldn't be any sharper; KoTOR's story used a very narrow-minded 'cops and robbers' approach (which at least I can't fault for lack of narrative focus), ze Jedi are good and ze Sith are bad, no qvestions asked! If KoTOR were a news reporter, it would give about 98% of its interview time to the Jedi, so we'd only hear ever hear their perspective on the conflict and how "just" it is, their propaganda. Whereas in KoTOR 2, there's almost bugger all Jedi left so the story is told mainly through the perspective of war veterans, refugees and all other non-Jedi. Now, the reason the events of the 1st game are called the Jedi Civil War by KoTOR 2 is because that's how the common folk in the galaxy see it. To quote from an NPC ally: "Jedi, Sith, you don't get it do you? To the galaxy they're all the same; just men and women with too much power, squabbling over religion while the rest of us burn!" So KoTOR 2 basically does everything from taking a step back and subtly questioning the last game's events to outright smashing a verbal hammer over their heads. You might think it's being overly harsh but I prefer to see this games story as a 'rubber band' effect; the Jedi were placed on a mile-high bullshit pedestal and KoTOR 2 took it upon itself to break it down. Another major plus for the game is that there is more moral flexibility this time round. Ok, character development is just as black and white as ever; your alignment starts off bang smack in the middle of the grey area, you decide whether you're going to be good or evil and go from there, gradually moving the alignment marker all the way to the top or bottom, respectively, because those are the only 2 places where the gameplay bonuses are to be found. No, what I mean is you are still free to choose the good or bad outcomes of some situations. For example: On the planet Dantooine, there's 1 big house that used be owned by a rich snob family in KoTOR and it simply comes down to who's going to live there when you're finished: the settlers, who're actually already there (good) or the mercenaries (bad)? Well, take your pick because this one at least, isn't alignment restricted.
Don't take this to mean that I'm completely anti-Jedi; out of the Jedi Masters you meet throughout the game, 2 of them are typical narrow-minded, self-righteous dickheads who defend the 'rightness' of the councils apathy during the Mandalorian Wars until their dying breaths, slag off the Exile for fighting in the war and are practically begging to have their lightsabres shoved down their throats - if you so choose - but the other 2 turn out to be more open-minded about everything, as well as sympathetic and understanding towards the Exile and his choices and I genuinely came to respect them because they showed their humanity.
Since the game is sub-titled The Sith Lords, it'd be silly not to mention them. There are 3 main Sith Lords in the game, not counting the occasional nameless sub-bosses, whom I think are far better characterised than any of those born from The Pen of George Lucas. In no particular order:
Darth Sion: The Lord of Pain. This bloke is definitely the most grotesque Sith Lord I've ever seen. He looks like he was blown up with a grenade and tried using Prince of Persia style rewind to recover but cocked up somehow, so now he's a walking cracked, broken, fractured, fleshy mess who looks like he could fall apart at any time. Or to quote again from an NPC ally: he looks like he "sleeps with vibroblades". This means that he's in constant pain and who honestly wouldn't go insane as a result? So he's a pure, unbridled, sabre-happy psychopath who wants nothing more than to KIIIIILLLLL!!!
Darth Nihilus: The Lord of Hunger. This one, ironically, has no character at all. He's basically described throughout the game as being a walking black hole, sucking in life all around him; a breach in the Force that must be sealed; so overwhelmed by this hunger that he's "forgotten his own flesh".
Darth Traya: The Lord of Betrayal. This one spends the majority of the game in the shadows; the only reference to her is when Kreia says "and the last is a creature of betrayals, for without such things, there is no hope" and that she'll be revealed "when the time is right". And suffice to say that when you do meet her and discover her true motivations, they're something you just wouldn't expect any Jedi or Sith would ever want.
In terms of combat, it's the same system from KoTOR (don't fix what isn't broken); a pseudo turn-based system whereby it appears to happen in real-time but in fact you and the opponent take it in turns and you pause the game with the space bar, issue commands to your characters, resume, watch as the opposition is wiped out then loot the corpses, which can be quite generous. This hands off approach I have to admit, even for me, can get a bit lacklustre occasionally, just sitting back and watching it happen as opposed to making it happen by, say, abusing the left mouse to death but it ultimately works and ensures that the player is never overwhelmed. Although the lightsabre is nowhere near as neglected as in The Force Unleashed, this game does seem similarly more in favour of Force powers; do I cut down a dozen thugs 1 by 1 or get them all together, raise my hand and electrocute the whole lot of them with Force Storm? Another thing that helps game flow is the fact that there is no bullshit limit on your inventory, which is only good for forcing you to either abandon a few less valuable items on the spot and move on or backtrack all the way to the nearest merchant and sell to make room before running all the bloody way back to where you left off, making this a really good scavenger's game.
KoTOR 2 does have some big problems though, like the boss fight with Darth Nihilus. This is where gameplay and story contradict each other, like 2 kids both trying to convince daddy that it's the other's fault; since Nihilus is touted throughout as being the walking black hole that threatens to drain all life from the galaxy and how the Jedi Masters tell you that he can only be fought through the Force, you'd think that would require a serious change of strategy but in practice, not only can he be fought through the Force but you can kill him with a lightsabre, or any melee weapon for that matter, even shoot or grenade him!
In KoTOR, your Jedi teacher tells you that every Jedi's lightsabre is unique, that it's made of components that identify it as your own, which, in KoTOR 2, is echoed by your mild-mannered mechanical wizard Bao-Dur when you set about looking for the parts. That's all very well but there's just one problem: THEY ALL LOOK THE BLOODY SAME (and I do know about the USM by the way)! Take any thin, white plastic tube, cut it down to size and you're holding the entire collection the game has to offer! If the lightsabre is the symbol of the Jedi then they're (In KoTOR) all a bunch of bland, generic blobs with no personality, obliviously conforming to tired old cliches. At least Jedi Academy gave you SOME variety of hilt models and that came out before KoTOR did! This may sound petty but since there are more lightsabre-wielding NPC's than in the last game, I found myself having to change all the lightsabres to different colours, purely so I could tell everyone's apart on the workbench upgrade menu.
The most irritating of them all is the final meeting of the Jedi Masters. Without giving too much away, all they do is basically accuse the levelling system of being something of the dark side, mistake the Exile for both Sion and Nihilus and decide to repay him for reuniting them by threatening to reset him to level 1, even the aforementioned sympathetic and understanding Masters, presumably having been mind-tricked by the dickhead!
But the most tragic flaw of the game is that it's...incomplete. Yes, there are a few bugs that Obsidian stopped giving a shit about after the 1st couple of patches but worst of all is the amount of content that was cut from the game. For one thing, where the hell do all your party members disappear to after you've crash-landed on the final planet? You get to control one for a boss fight (who then walks in the direction the Exile went but is neither seen nor heard from again) and Bao-Dur's floating sidekick, as it powers up various machines scattered about the canyon on instructions from a holographic recording of Bao-Dur but that's it. Plus the ending provides no closure whatsoever. This became all the more apparent to me when I 1st discovered the existence of various "content restoration" mods on the web. All I can say to that is: 3 cheers to the modding community!
So, do I still recommend KoTOR 2? Well, if you're not into RPG's then I've understandably been typing out of my arse and the hands-off combat, combined with dialog-heavy gameplay will probably be a resounding "meh!" but if you do like your RPG's, then how could I clock in almost a year of gameplay and not recommend it?
Who said older isn't better?
Side Notes
If my Force Unleashed review taught me one thing, then it's the importance of keeping irrelevant rambling to a minimum, so I've decided to make a separate section of things I'd still like to mention but which I think aren't necessarily relevant to the review:
(1) Why is it that the Jedi Code is so often mentioned out of context? There's that bit in the Phantom Menace when Qui-Gon Jinn asks the council if he can train Anakin but then Mace Windu says "he's too old" and "the code forbids it". Um, no it doesn't Master Windbag! Or when Obi-Wan tells Qui-Gon "if you followed the code, you would be on the council". So you're saying that your Master is NOT calm, centred, serene and knowledgeable? Or, in Revenge of The Sith, when Anakin, after killing Dooku, says to Palpatine, "he was an unarmed prisoner, I shouldn't have done that, it's not the Jedi way". Well maybe if you'd chopped his head off 1st, you wouldn't be feeling so pointlessly guilty! Ok, everyone gather round and let's recite the code shall we?
There is no emotion; there is peace (or Equilibrium if you like)
There is no ignorance; there is knowledge (smartarse!)
There is no passion; there is serenity (BOOOORRRRIIING!!!)
There is no chaos; there is harmony (resistance is futile!)
There is no death; there is the Force (I AM INVINCI...)
Hhmmmm...nope, it doesn't say anything about how soon in life you have to start training, council membership requirements or the appropriate time to kill someone! DUMBARSES!
.
