Ahkan Stormforge

It was okay I suppose, but I don't know why everyone is going so bat****-crazy about it.

Black & White.

Definitely Kreia - the xp bonus and Force Chain abilities were extremely useful. Handmaiden or Atton would come next. Handmaiden was a very strong tank and Atton, of course, had the more diverse skill repertoire.

Because spawns of Bhaal who have a very high concentration of Bhaal's essence have their corporeal form disintegrate upon death. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> My statement was referring to a whole host of games, other than BG2, where death of the main PC causes instant game over. I should have made that more clear. But that said, it was never mentioned in the story of either BG games, wasn't even shown in BG2, and basically existed solely in a short sequence in BG1 with no explanation. It was a bad gameplay mechanic.

Well, that was just a story element they invented to explain why it was instant game over, it didn't really add anything to the story and they could have easily gone without it. IMO it would have been a better game if there wasn't instant game over upon the protagonist's death. That's all I'm saying. But it's silly that no matter what, under no circumstances are your companions ever able to have you resurrected. There were plenty of times that I could have had the main PC resurrected on the next round after dying, why is this completely robbed from me?

I'm not that big of a fan of the KotOR-style dying system. I understand that they had to do it for the KotOR series since resurrection isn't really a part of the Star Wars universe (aside from some extremely rare circumstances, i.e. massive Sith rituals, etc.) and having permanent, un-recoverable death would just be too penalizing. D&D, on the other hand, has all sorts of resurrection spells readily available to the PCs (and also relatively commonly at temples) so I really don't see the need for the "death only upon TPWO" mechanic. If you fell unconscious at 0 HP and *then* the enemy could perform some type of coup de grace to initiate death, I would understand, but it was always a head scratcher to me why the enemy would leave all these prone bodies of their enemy laying around untouched. I also had a problem in BG where death of the main character intiated an immediate game over since then my next question was always, "Why can't the rest of my party take me to a temple and have Raise Dead cast on me again? " I think the D&D bleed rules got it the most right.

I just did it a couple days ago and she stuck around until I had defended her three times.

I sort of like this interpretation. It reminds me of Planescape: Torment where The Nameless One and The Transcendent One were two halves of a whole - TNO is the humanity minus the immortality and TTO is the immortality minus the humanity. But here, Exile is the life minus the Force and Darth Nihilus is the Force minus the life. Exile fills his void by retouching with the Force through Kreia and the Force Bond, Nihilus fills his void by sucking the life from everything. Does Visas even have to see anything when she removes the mask though? Perhaps there's just darkness there and Nihilus was just holding a form through strength of will (would sort of explain why he dissipated away there at the end - there wasn't even a body beneath the robes).

You also have to take into account that just because you are reducing someone to 0 HP in this game, does not necessarily mean that you are killing them - for example, the twin Twi'lek assassins that Atton faces first that you then must face again, as long as one person in your party is standing the other are just "knocked out" at 0 HP, etc. So just because you are protecting Kreia by fighting against your allies, that does not necessarily mean that you are killing them. Jedi protect life, and in this case that goal is probably best served by protecting Kreia and wounding or knocking out the others rather than allowing them to flat-out kill her. My interpretation of the entire Korriban tomb test was that the Exile realized that these were figments or apparitions and that it was mostly a mental and spiritual exercise. Therefore, the test of defending Kreia is not so much that you are willing to murder your companions, but that you are willing to defend the defenseless no matter what.

Just finished KotOR 2 and I really enjoyed it, but was hoping to get a couple things clarified that were odd to me. 1) Are we supposed to know what Mira does after defeating Hanharr on Malachor? The last we see of her, she is walking away towards Trayus Academy and then you never see her again. Kreia states that she lives on and doesn't die until later, so I presume she makes it off with you on the Ebon Hawk, but I still thought it was kind of odd. And what was the point of Kreia resurrecting Hanharr? I can buy the whole "master plan that was years in devlopment" for most of the tricks Kreia pulled, but knowing that Mira would be the only other non-droid with the Exile on Malachor's surface and that she would need to be distracted is pushing it a bit. 2) Why were Mira and the Remote (and G0-T0 I suppose too...) the only ones to accompany you to Malachor? Or does everyone else stay on the ship? Once again, the lack of an explanation was confusing to me. 3) After beating the game, the 'Movies' tab says that I only unlocked 53/65 movies. Are there really 12 DS-specific movies (I played through as LS)? 4) Why can't Bao-Dur wear robes or any of the Jedi armors? Did I miss something? He gets no defence for his Tech Specialist levels and then has to wear plain old clothing if he wants to use all of the Force Powers? Lame. If I did it again I probably would have just kept him at level 6 until making him a Jedi, given him the heavy armor feat so he could at least have gotten some defence, had him fight unarmed, and then only purchased powers that have no armor restriction. Bao-Dur would be kind of a goofy Jedi like that, but he was just horrible in my playthrough with lots of Tech Specialist levels, a lightsaber, and a bunch of armor restricted powers (so I had to use just clothing). 5) What exactly does the Mass Shadow Generator do? There were references that ships were "crushed" and I suppose Malachor did look a little crumpled (or something) - but I never saw it explicitly stated in-game what it did and thus why it was such a horrible weapon to unleash. I was pretty pleased with the game overall and I feel like TSL has inspired me to read more of the Star Wars source material since Obsidian took such an original and dark interpretation of it - it was quite a bit better plot-wise than KotOR (although I think the one conversation where you ask Kreia about the three Sith Lords and she said the third is a "betrayer" who "had not revealed herself yet" I kinda rolled my eyes because you can't make it much more obvious than that) and delved much deeper into the philosophies of the Sith, Jedi, and Force than what I have experienced before from the movies and the couple books I have read. Why couldn't Lucas have gotten such quality writing for Epsiodes 1-3? It's too bad the game got rushed out the door, it really could have been incredible with a couple extra months of polish I think - by the end you could really tell that a large amount of stuff got cut and I ran into quite a few random glitches.