Ranger0087

That sums up how I feel about the game pretty well, except that I did enjoy playing them both over again. And personally, I prefer Malak to Kreia. Kreia's a little "heavier", so to speak, but her long ramblings just get a little tedious after the first play-through. Plus, she's just so insanely evil, it bugs me to have to be nice to her.

And you need to read things with a bit more gravitas. The FR novels are mass produced "trash" thats not to say you cant enjoy them. They dont challenge the reader and some people like that. You can say the same about KOTOR it dosnt challenge you to think like KOTORII does. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Given that you have absolutely no knowledge of my reading habits, I find your commentary to be misplaced. I think that if you're looking for fantastic, artful writing in a computer game, you're missing the point. It's a game, not a novel. As long as it has a reasonably coherent plot (and we'll pretend that KOTOR 2 does, since you seem so captivated by it), that's good enough for me. Why? Because I want to play a GAME. Ever hear of them? They're not quite the same thing as a novel, and they're not meant to be. Oh, and for someone who likes to put on intellectual airs, your command of spelling and punctuation is a bit questionable.

Comparing KOTOR 2 to the Silmiarilion is... amusing at best. Let's face it; KOTOR 2 had a lot of potential, but after the Jedi meet on Dantooine, it degenerates into utter incoherence. I don't think that KOTOR 2 is particularly more deep than the original; it's just more obscure. Oh, and if you really think Forgotten Realms novels are "deep as puddle", then I think you need to read them a little more critically.

That's funny; Manaan is my favorite planet out of both games. I love the music, the look of the city, and the combat-light, heavy role playing you get there. Korriban in KOTOR 2 was a disapointment. I wish they would have at least kept the Dreshdae colony open and given us something to actually do there, instead of wandering around and basically accomplishing nothing. After that, probably Malachor V. There's just nothing to do there except wander around and get into pointless fights. I kept wondering the whole time what had happened to my party members and why they weren't with me. Just tedious.

That could make sense, but it still strikes me that it's probably just an error in the script, or George Lucas changing his mind about the setting, and the EU was just scrambling to cover itself and reconcile the conflicting dates.

Yeah, that's a point. A Dark Jedi and a Sith aren't the same thing. Any idiot can go to the dark side, but that doesn't automatically make them a Sith, any more than Force sensitivity automatically makes them a Jedi. The Sith Lords in the movies, like Maul, Tyrranus (i.e. Count Dooku), Sidious, and Vader were "real" Sith because they were actually trained in Sith teachings. Tyrranus and Vader were both fallen Jedi, but they had a Sith master who trained them in that order. Who actually trained Revan and Malak to be Sith? Maybe that's what the game is getting it with the whole "True Sith" thing.

Revan is also similar to "revenge", which would go along with the Sith habit of deriving their names from words with violent and/or negative connotations.

........ right, a stupid copy of the original movie in a game, shallow caracter, shallow story, stupid twist, stupid villain. good story......where? kotor 2 story was way better, but incomplete. kotor 1 story was complete, but a complete junk. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's a copy of the original movie how, exactly? There's really not that much that's similar, in terms of plot. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> ship similar to the millenium falcon, capital ship similar to star destroyer, huge space station, to name a few edit: vilain with a mechanical part , clearly to ressemble darth vader (and even bioware said so) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Those are similarities of the basic setting, not the plot and its execution, or the characters. If you're saying those things make the first game a rip-off of the movies, then KOTOR 2 is exactly the same. It still has the Ebon Hawk, we have a Sith Lord with a full face mask, so he looks even more like Vader, and the Ravager looks even closer to a Star Destroyer than the Sith ships in the first one. That's just background stuff that's reminiscent of the films; it doesn't make for a complete copy.

........ right, a stupid copy of the original movie in a game, shallow caracter, shallow story, stupid twist, stupid villain. good story......where? kotor 2 story was way better, but incomplete. kotor 1 story was complete, but a complete junk. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's a copy of the original movie how, exactly? There's really not that much that's similar, in terms of plot. I would go with KOTOR 1, myself. I like pretty much everything about it better, especially the party members. The KOTOR 2 characters are interesting, but I never feel like I can get anywhere with them, like they just hit a certain point and nothing happens *coughBao-Durcough*. Characters like Jolee Bindo make the first KOTOR. There isn't one character in that game I don't like. I also really prefer the first game's music and the planets. KOTOR 2's music just kind of bums me out and it doesn't go with the levels very well, in my opinion, and the planets just don't stand out in my mind nearly as much. They also feel kind of incomplete next to the first game's (read: Korriban). Plus, the planets just look better in the first game. Manaan is easily my favorite planet in the first game, and it stands out to me more than anything in the second one. I will say, though, that I like certain elements of the gameplay in the second one better, like the extra feats and the prestige classes. I liked starting out in a regular class like in the first KOTOR, though. I thought it gave you a more rounded set of skills in the end.

I like the idea of the influence system, but it definately has some problems. First of all, I agree that it works better for light side characters than dark ones. When I played light side, I got pretty much everyone except GO-TO to like me. When I played dark side, only GO-TO, Visas, and Kreia really went anywhere, conversation-wise. There's also too much random chance involved. You have to get some characters to exactly the right place at the right time, which can be frustrating. I also think it gives a skewed perception of how well you really know the characters. I had times, especially in my first play through as a light side character, where I would get a bunch of influence with a party member who had only recently hooked up with me, and they'd start acting like we'd been together a long time and gone all over the galaxy (I think this was either Visas, the Handmaiden, or maybe Atton; I'm not sure), when it hadn't been that long. They just happened to like what I said, so they acted like we were best friends. It's really unrealistic. The old level-based conversation system gives a better sense for the amount of time you've spent with your party members, I think. It is possible to have both. You can have level based systems where you can also kill the line of conversation by responding negatively to what they're saying, something like that. I also like the idea someone else mentioned about being able to lie to influence your party members.

Sith were originally a species, then fallen Jedi showed up on their homeworld, intermingled with them, etc, as everyone's been saying. Eventually, the species itself died out, but the fallen Jedi, who had developed their own teachings and traditions over the years, just became known as "the Sith". That's pretty much established Star Wars canon. The "True Sith" referred to in the game could be almost anything, though. Are they talking about the original species of Sith, or one of the many later incarnations of the order of the Sith? Hard to say. Maybe it just means that Revan and his like styled themselves as Sith, when all they really were were fallen Jedi with delusions of grandeur, as they say. I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that there's a huge continuity issue in the timeline from the movies themselves. In the original trilogy, Obi-Wan says that the Jedi had protected the Old Republic for "a thousand generations", and much of the EU, including the history of the Sith species that some people have mentioned, was structured according to that timeframe. However, in Attack of the Clones, Palpatine says the Republic had stood for "a thousand years". That's a pretty significant difference, and I think it's causing some confusion about pre-movie Star Wars history even in canon sources. Based solely on the original trilogy, everything in KOTOR pretty much makes sense, timeline-wise. Based on the prequels, though, it doesn't. Oh, and Palpatine doesn't look like an alien because he's a member of the Sith order, not the Sith species, obviously.

Considering I never figured out how to make it work, pretty pointless.

I like Bao-Dur, personally. He was a very interesting concept, I thought, and I liked that he had an existing relationship with the PC. The fact that his dialogue goes nowhere and just becomes you saying "Never Mind" is really disapointing, but oh well. One thing, though: How do you make him a Jedi? I've played this game through twice (once as light side, once as dark side), and no go. I didn't even know it was possible until I came here. I got Atton, Mira, and the Handmaiden my first time through, but I never got any such dialogue with Bao-Dur. What do you have to do with him to get it to come up?