Star Wars. That’s a franchise that needs no introduction. In fact, if you’re never heard of it and you are still playing games, you seriously need to donate all your games and systems to the more fortunate (since they’re seen some of the best movies ever) and go back to the cave you must’ve been living in for over twenty-five years. Then there’s Bioware. You might have played their games but not known that they made them, but nonetheless, they are the brilliant developers behind Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and a few other great, lesser-known games. For a few years, they worked on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Combining Star Wars, one of the best franchises of all time, with the rules of Dungeons & Dragons: 3rd Edition, the amazing folks over at Bioware made not only one of the best RPG’s of all time, but what is quite simply one of the best games of all time, in any genre. If you play KOTOR and have any reaction besides awe, you should call an asylum, because chances are, you're insane. I’ll start with the gameplay. Don’t ask me how, but Bioware managed to make KOTOR play in a completely unique way from every other RPG, and yet make it incredibly familiar to those who play third-person games or especially RPG’s. The combat, which is probably the main part of the game, can be turn-based or real-time, depending on options you set. You have, of course, your fair share of lightsabers, armor, swords, blaster pistols, blaster rifles, grenades, mines, upgrades for all these things, and of course, your defensive and offensive Force Powers. You can focus on using weapons, and from there melee or ranged weapons, or on sneak-attacking, or using force powers, or on just avoiding most of your enemies using stealth. You have different armor slots for different body parts in your inventory, so you can try to have all your items’ special modifications do one thing (like improve a skill) or do a bunch of different things (like improve a few different skills, make you immune to a few different things, and protect you from a few specific types of attacks). The combat, though, is fast-paced, fun, and beautiful (especially with several Jedi using lightsabers), regardless of whether you use weapons, grenades/mines, or Force Powers. The combat would be nothing, however, without the plot and dialogue. The plot is basically that 4,000 years before the movies, the Sith and the Republic are at war, after Malak and Revan, heroes of the Mandalorian War, suddenly turned to the Dark Side and created an enormous Sith army that challenged the Republic in such a short amount of time that it almost seems impossible. You wake up on board the Endar Spire above Taris, which is being destroyed by Sith fighters. Crash-landing on Taris, you, as well as Carth Onasi and eventually a handful of other memorable NPC’s, have to rescue Bastila. Once you escape to Dantooine on board the Millenium Falcon-esque Ebon Hawk, you find a Star Map and an ancient droid that tells you about the Star Forge, which is apparently what Malak used to create the Sith army so suddenly. You are sent by the Jedi Council on a quest throughout four other planets to find four other Star Maps, which will give you the location of the Star Forge. You’ll spend from 30-40 hours going throughout all the planets, finding the Star Maps and completing all the side quests, and then not only finding the Star Forge, but stopping Lord Malak once and for all. There are several different endings, depending on many factors, like, obviously, your alignment. The dialogue is the truly unique part of KOTOR, though, in that while you usually have a fair amount of choice in dialogue in other RPG’s, only in KOTOR does it truly matter. Just about every single choice you make has an influence to your alignment to the Force (either Light Side or Dark Side, as shown by a scale on your character sheet) in a small or large way, and in turn, most choices you make will help advance the plot or give you new quests or information about old quests. You can [Persuade] or [Lie] to characters to get them to do things they wouldn’t normally do or reveal information that they wouldn’t normally reveal. You can threaten characters into giving you information or items or discounts, or just kill them for no reason, if you are going for a Dark Side shift, while you can be kind and generous and helpful to people for a Light Side shift. You can kill a person for the items they’re carrying, or help them with a quest to get it as a reward. You have so many choices that it’s a very rare thing to only have one dialogue option unless you’ve used all your other ones already. Not that the choices stop there- you have tons of different options regarding the actual gameplay, like whether you should poison the water to kill a gigantic fish or blow up a machine that was causing it to go insane and leave it alive. The dialogue and quests both have enough different options and outcomes to make it worthwhile to play through the game at LEAST two times. The NPC’s are all memorable, as I said before. For instance, depending on your gender, Carth or Bastila may become attracted to you, and depending on your alignment, HK-47 may be loyal to you or reluctantly follow you only on the basis that you purchased him. There are backstories to each character, both short and long, and sometimes containing an actual quest. Carth, for example, lost his wife and lost the whereabouts of his son because his old mentor, Saul Karath, the current admiral of the Sith fleet, betrayed the Republic to prove himself worthy to Malak, and so Carth wants revenge on Saul. The revenge is solved inevitably when you confront Saul, but you can eventually find Carth’s son and reunite the two. Meanwhile, NPC’s like Jolee and HK-47 have interesting background stories, but no actual quest to go along with them. That about sums up the gameplay and plot, but the gameplay is nowhere near the only good part of KOTOR. First off, you have the graphics. The PC version of KOTOR, even today with all the brand new high-tech ultra-detailed super-beautiful game engines like the Source engine and the Doom 3 engine, still looks absolutely amazing. The characters, items, textures, and special effects all look incredibly great. While some of the character’s animations are just plain bad and overused, other animations, especially lip-synching, are done pretty well. The lightsaber effects, mine/grenade explosions, and some “misty” effects (like in the tombs in Korriban) can sometimes slow down the framerate, but it kicks right up to “Smoooooooth” a few moments after the dust settles. The in-engine cut-scenes are only as good as the settings you set the graphics on, but the pre-rendered ones, from simply arriving on a planet to a planet or ship being obliterated, look absolutely amazing and on-par even with the high-tech games on high-tech engines coming out in late 2005. If those aren’t great graphics, I don’t know what are. The audio is both high quality and innovative. It’s high quality because of all the new and classic Star Wars-type music, and because of the new and classic Star Wars-type sound effects. Every area, from the murky Lower Shadowlands of Kashyyyk to the somewhat tropical planet that leads you to the Star Forge, has an appropriate musical score, and every event, from a mine exploding to a lightsaber turning on to a blaster firing, has an appropriate sound effect that seems as real as a sound representing a fake event can be. The part that’s innovative (in that it’s never been done so well) is the dialogue. Every word of dialogue, from humans and aliens, in every single language in the game, is spoken and (if enabled in the options) subtitled. Your dialogue isn’t spoken, to help enhance immersion, and the NPC’s that speak real-life English never actually say your character’s name (it makes sense, though- how could they record every one of the trillions of possible names you could have, because it would sound tacky to use a system that tries to sound out your name, and would require the voice actor to still voice millions of syllables). This DOES help immersion. A lot. You always feel like you’re really a Jedi who has the dialogue options presented, who can go to the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force, who is the last hope of the Republic or the greatest thread to the Republic, who can end anyone’s life in a moment without thinking twice. These countless hours of recorded dialogue aren’t actually innovative, and are, like I said earlier, only so groundbreaking because no game has ever had such professionally done and plentiful voice acting. The audio may only help immersion, but it’s just as valuable to the experience you get when playing Knights of the Old Republic as the gameplay and plot. Those are the reasons why the game is so great. What I haven’t explained is why exactly all this matters, and the exact reason for that is one simple thing: the value of the game. Your first play-through, on either side of the force, will last you at least 30 hours if you do just a handful of side quests, probably up to 40 if you do all or most of the side quests. You will almost be forced to play through the game again on the opposite alignment and/or gender because you can’t do everything on your first play-through. Your gender alone has an impact with Carth and Bastila and how some characters react to you, not to mention the alignment with the Force that gives you not only a completely different gameplay experience, especially with your dialogue, but a completely different ending. The game can easily last you 75 hours before you have seen most of what is available throughout its vast galaxy. That is excluding the mini-games, like bounty-hunting, pazaak (cards), and swoop racing, which can give you at least 10 more hours in each play-through. If you can honestly say that a 75-100 hour game available for $20 everywhere doesn’t have incredible value, you need to play games other than Morrowind, GTA, and MMORPG’s, because you have some sincerely screwed up values about value. One thing I should add in is that the bugs that everyone else constantly complains about, as well as control issues, are something that I never encountered. I can see why you could complain about them, but reviews are simply opinions, so why should I tell you what you could think when I can tell you what you probably will think? The only crash I encountered was one that my computer does in a lot of games, due to something wrong hardware-wise. The controls may be annoying at first, but they are changeable and give you plenty of different ways to control your character, so it’s hard to complain about them even if you don’t actually like them, unless you’re lazy and never bother trying to change the controls because you desperately want to find a reason to not call KOTOR a perfect game. Yes, the game is as good as I’ve described. Hype did not factor into this game, nor did bias. In fact, if GameSpot hadn’t reviewed KOTOR or given it such a good review, I never would’ve gotten it and the handful of people that I’ve managed to convince to buy it or, if they have it and have stopped playing, finish it would never have known how truly great it is. The gameplay, plot, dialogue, choices, graphics, audio, and value are some of the most top-notch stuff in any game, in any genre, on any system, ever. You simply can’t go wrong with KOTOR. Bioware did something when they made the game, something they’d tried and failed to do with Neverwinter Nights and had done to a slightly lesser extent with the Baldur’s Gate games. They made a game that people will be talking about and comparing other games to even in decades. You can’t talk about moral choices in games without thinking of KOTOR. You can’t talk about Star Wars games without thinking about KOTOR. You can’t talk about good RPG’s without talking about KOTOR. You would have a really tough time trying to find one thing that isn’t at least “good” in the game, and an even tougher time finding a thing that is “bad”, if one even exists. Bioware made what is, above all else, an extremely fun, highly-polished RPG that gives you a level of choice that even the Grand Theft Auto games, even San Andreas, have a tough time matching. For every even somewhat linear part of the game geographically, you have a new dialogue choice to balance out any slight feeling of linearity. Yes, it’s one step before impossible to find a problem with this game unless you are truly nit picking. Knights of the Old Republic is a game that everybody with a brain, and even some people without brains, can enjoy immensely, and that’s that. What are you waiting for? Go buy the game go play through it twice! I’m surprised you made it this far without doing that. Doing that would probably be harder than resisting the Dark Side of the Force. Meatbag.
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