Auberon said:
Peragus mining station, also known as two-hour tutorial.
kman123 said:
I hate everything about the Peragus Mining Station in KOTOR 2. That 200 hour long segment of boring bullshit actually stops me from replaying it, knowing I have to slog through all that.
Peragus is a brilliant section. I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate it for what it is the very first time I played it. Mostly because it isn't really Star Wars, and it isn't really even an RPG at that point; it's survival horror. Everything from waking up in an abandoned facility with no memory of how you got there, to running around in incredibly basic gear (it takes a while before you even find
clothes), to the logs left in the final hours of the worker is straight up survival horror. Instead of slogging through plot as per RPG tradition, you're working backwards to figure out what happened. It's the perfect introduction to Atton and Kreia, at each others throats for the whole game, neither of whom you should trust. They're not RPG companions, not for Peragus anyway, they're shifty individuals you need to use to escape.
Plus, it's the only time in the game when a villain (apart from the third titular Sith Lord) actually feels genuinely threatening. I mean, just look at what that lone HK-50 pulled off. It's a masterpiece of controlled chaos, and the only time you actually see a shade of HK-47 at work, rather than the slightly tougher, but still fairly generic mooks the rest of the HK-50s become later. Finally, I love Peragus because it sets the tone, and the theme, for the rest of the game. That is to say, even the Force won't help you on Peragus. You need to use your wits, your skills and those around you. The whole theme of the game is how dependence on the Force is a bad thing, and Peragus is the distillation of that philosophy. Not to mention the idea that the mere presence of a Jedi causes chaos in the galaxy around them, that's something referred back to often.
If you want to talk about dull sections of KotOR, I would gladly offer up the Citadel immediately after instead of Peragus. Running around that station doing menial chores for hours, being a puppet to various powers that ultimately have little relevance to the story is far more boring. I challenge you to name me a single interesting character from the Citadel. The only one I can think of is B4-D4. A friggin' droid!
The underwater section of Manaan in the first game is a total slog as well, and given that everything about the Selkath seems engineered to make me loathe them, I'm not so hot on the hub section either. Were it not for some brilliant side quests and very beautiful music, I'd be writing off the whole of Manaan here.
