OremLittleKing

A story should never end with a cliffhanger. Ever. You can leave plenty of plot threads open for future sequels, but you must conclude the story you started, or you didn't finish your story, and you put out an unfinished product. At the beginning of any story, it raises conflict, a question, or some source of tension. The end of the story comes when (or right after) that tension is resolved (or released). If you end your story before you release that tension, you have failed as a storyteller. That said, I believe KotOR II tried to answer the question the story started with. It just failed to do so satisfactorily, and that's why everyone is calling it a cliffhanger. And no, in case this comes up, I don't believe ESB had a cliffhanger ending. I believe it was a tragedy. There was still another story to be told (RotJ) after ESB, but ESB itself was a self-contained story with a satisfactory conclusion. Edit: By the way, some things--such as the Lord of the Rings movies--can be considered to be a single story, even though they come in multiple installments. Using that example, the tension Fellowship of the Ring starts with is not concluded at the end of that film, it's concluded at the end of Return of the King. That said, KotOR 1 and KotOR 2 are completely different, self-contained stories, and the plot threads raised at the end of KotOR 2 (regarding Revan) didn't really have anything to do with the story that was being told in that game.

As a writer, let me tell you now, the two are inseparable. I knew from my first hour of playing KotOR II that the ending would suck. How did I know it? The writer showed me. He showed me with the way he was presenting his story. I could smell manipulation right at the beginning, and I wasn't surprised when all of the teasing mysteries lead to dead ends and a swiss cheese-like ending. The writer should know what ending he is shooting for before he ever starts putting the story into the game. He should have a clear plan on what it's going to be and should structure his journey around reaching that ending. He should never have to rely on manipulation--hiding all of the information that could lead to understanding the story--to keep you playing. That's the mark of bad writing. So, I'm not going to vote. I think if the writer knows what he's doing, he'll just see the ending as the natural conclusion to his journey. It's not a puzzle piece to be crafted and inserted at the last minute, it's the last stitch in a tightly woven, flowing weave. Connected with and part of all of the other parts of the story.

You do know that KotOR 2 has been uh, released, right? Or were you referring to KotOR 3?

It's all about Combat. Before Quake II, before Unreal Tournament, there were 8 pixel tanks shooting 2 pixel shells at each other.

Nice work :D One question though... when did Bastila decide to go blonde? Is it just a phase? 'Cause I'm not sure it's totally "her".

You know, I kind of like a told ending. Preferably there should be a short cinematic ending as well, but there's a certain fable-like appeal to having a nice, long, told ending. Cinematic endings are by necessity less detailed and therefore less fulfilling/more trite, but having a triumphant cinematic clip (like the ones that ended KotOR) after a told ending would work very well.

Back to the Future... love those movies, haha.

I complain about both of them, because I think both of them are garbage... And it's not the actors' faults, either. How would you do with that awful dialogue if you were forced to try to say it convincingly? I mean, come on, there were some good actors in both films, actors whose work I have admired in many other movies... but combine George Lucas' crappy dialogue with his crappy direction, and what do you get... "bad acting". Doesn't help that the stories of both films ranged from vaguely to completely ridiculous, either. And yet, I will waste another $8 on episode 3, in the vain hope that Lucas actually pulls a rabbit out of his hat and gives us a decent movie.

Dual wielding a double-bladed lightsaber with your best crystals/upgrades is the best damage output in the game, as long as you get all of the Two-Weapon Fighting feats.

Wow, that's a lot of repeat posts. But yeah, to answer your question, this bothered me a little bit, too. Because, you know, Revan was the driving force of the Jedi Civil War in KotOR 1, and it really didn't seem to me like the Jedi got "wiped out". There were thousands upon thousands of them, all engaged in the daily affairs of the Republic. I didn't understand how, at the beginning of KotOR II, they had been exterminated so thoroughly. There were some explanations about this within the story, but I didn't really buy them on such a wide scale.

To each his own, I suppose--personally, I didn't have the problems with the original game's characters that you did. The KotOR II characters didn't catch my interest because, frankly, they were too introspective. Too, dare I say it, bland. The reason I liked Mira best was because she was the most "outward" of the bunch, and even though she had a little depth in her own right, she had immediate flair and magnetism that the others mostly lacked. But that's Star Wars. Arrogant smugglers, naiieve kids, and snotty princesses. Star Wars characters are supposed to be cartoonish. It's not that I have a problem with subtle characters. But with subtle characters, I still need to be quickly shown something that tells me who they are. They can't stay cloaked the entire game, because when the "truly moving, personal moments" come, I won't care about them. Which I suppose was basically my entire problem with KotOR II's story. The whole time I had a sense of "why should I care?". I didn't care about the characters because I never liked the characters, and I was never given enough information to understand what was happening with the plot and therefore care about it. But, everyone gets something different out of a story. I mean, I'm always right, but you're still entitled to your opinion.

Frankly, with the possible exception of Mira, not one of the characters in KotOR II caught my interest the way the ones in KotOR did. Sure, if you qualify them as "better" based on how detailed/conflicted/morally ambiguous they are, then I guess you're right, but I don't qualify characters that way. The first step for me is to like them as people. I rarely liked the KotOR II characters--I was intrigued by them at times, but I didn't like them. Most of the KotOR characters had a very Star Wars-like magnetism that just made them likeable and often humorous from the moment they showed up until the end of the game. By the way, Orson Scott Card fan? Then you know that good storytelling has clarity and purpose.

The person who said the ending sucks because the story sucked had it right on the money. The whole point of a story is to build up to its ending--good endings don't just materialize out of thin air, and can't just be made up after the fact and inserted into the puzzle to resolve all of the questions and tension from before. The fact is, the story set up too many mysteries that went nowhere, and there wasn't an ending that could have resolved them all satisfactorily. The story was a dead end. When you're at the last part of the game and the loading screen blurbs are giving you crucial plot information you didn't know about before, you know something is wrong. It's a shame the writer didn't take the time to hammer out his plot properly before trying to stick it into the game. It's an incoherent mess, but because the writer is so talented, it's a very entertaining incoherent mess, until the entire story inevitably collapses under its own weight at the end. Good thing the journey was enjoyable, because its conclusion certainly didn't leave me satisfied.

Awkward interface? What do you mean by this? Can I have some examples. Ohh and for gameplay. Is the PC as good? My wants are 1 Gameplay 2 Fast Load times 3 Non-buggy 4 Graphics (not as important as the others) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The gameplay is exactly the same... the content is pretty much a direct port from the Xbox. But as I said before, the interface is much easier to handle, in my opinion. With a decent PC the load times are 2-3x as fast. Didn't notice any bugs on any of my playthroughs on the PC version. The graphics are nicer just because the resolution can be increased and you can turn on nice features like FSAA and Ansitropic filtering.

The interface for the PC version is far superior. I started my third playthrough of KotOR after beating KotOR II, and I'm playing it on the PC (even though I have the Xbox version as well). It's such a relief. Everything is so much faster and less awkward to deal with--selecting targets, feats/force powers/items, even browsing the menu system. Heck, even moving around feels more responsive and easier to control for me. Then there's the graphics. If you have a nice system, you can crank up the resolution, antialiasing, ansitropic filtering, etc etc... won't make the models anymore detailed or the textures any fancier, but it does make everything look clearer, cleaner, and smoother. Which is a nice bonus. But the number one reason for playing the PC version instead of the Xbox version is the technical aspect of the game. With a decent system, loading is almost instantaneous on the PC, whereas it was painfully long on the Xbox. Frame rates are better throughout the game. It makes the whole game more seamless and immersive, not to have jarring 30 second load times every time you go to a different area. All of that rambling was basically a long way of saying: go for the PC version, it's better. (edited out the references to the forthcoming K2 PC version because I'm tired and didn't read the original post carefully enough)

By the way, I called BioWare the master of single-player RPGs because I loved BG/BG2, I kinda halfway liked NWN, which they redeemed with the excellent HotU, and I loved KotOR. That's just my personal opinion, though... I can't think of another company out there making better single-player RPGs.

Yeah, but ESB was easily comprehensible, with a clear plot... and regardless of its darker nature, the good guys were still undeniably good, and the bad guys bad. KotOR II is far too muddy and unclear--not just the morality of its characters, but the entire story. My complaints were not about the "feel" of the game, anyway. They were about the substance of the game, which is something different entirely.

A Look at KotOR II as a sequel and as an RPG I was a massive fan of the original Knights of the Old Republic. It did for me something that George Lucas utterly failed to do with his new films: captured and resurrected the spirit of Star Wars. It was epic, with lovable yet archetypal characters, acted by people who weren't the best or the most believable at their trade, but who had personality, style, and charisma to make up for it. I didn't come into KotOR II with very high expectations. BioWare went off to do Jade Empire and Dragon Age, leaving the continuation of their story in the hands of a company I had no doubt would fail to top the masters of the single-player RPG genre. Yet I knew Obsidian had some talent in it, developers who knew how to handle RPGs, so I expected at least a decent offering. That's what I got. A decent offering. Maybe due to how quickly it was pushed out the door, or maybe because the writers just weren't quite as in control of their story as BioWare's were, but regardless of the cause, KotOR II does not live up to its predecessor. And here's why. The packaging - Graphics, Sound, and Interface See: KotOR. Not much has changed. All of the old glitches present in the modified Aurora engine used in the original game still remain in KotOR II. The poor pathfinding, irritating collision detection, and competent yet slightly awkward interface. It's all here. The game was easy enough to control, just like the first one. But like the first, cycling through menus and selection bars with my D-pad or L/R buttons got old after awhile, especially in the heat of battle. It wasn't too hard to control the game, but I can't help but think Obsidian could have retooled the interface a little, made it a bit more intuitive and easy to handle. No such luck. The graphics look about like they did in KotOR. In fact, a large portion of the models used in the first game return for its sequel. Interestingly enough, many of the models created by Obsidian are nicer than BioWare's original work--art was never BioWare's strongest point, I suppose. And then there's the sound. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single sound effect I didn't hear in the first game, and the music sounded about the same. Except, of course, the voiceovers. There were many of them, and most of the voice acting was quite good, at least as good as that in the original game. The dialogue, on the other hand... well, that's for a later section of this review. There was one major problem with the "packaging", though. The game had serious technical issues, obviously seriously straining my Xbox to handle it. As a PC gamer who bought an Xbox for KotOR II and Jade Empire, I don't rightly know whether this was a major problem with the original KotOR, because I didn't play through it on my Xbox. Regardless, traversing the menu was an exercise in frustration--not only did I have to cycle through it with my L/R buttons, I had to cycle through it slowly and painfully as the game struggled to load each screen. It was a frustration throughout the game, and I had frame rate issues as well, most noticeably when entering an area. These problems didn't cripple the game, but they were an irritation, especially since there are games on the Xbox that look much better and have far less in the way of technical issues. Gameplay Much like the original game, KotOR II has you run through planets in a nonlinear order, performing minor tasks to reach the more important ones. It's a formula that works, and Obsidian handled it just as well as BioWare did, in terms of gameplay. There's a lot of fetching, running around, and discovering things, but it's mostly engaging and fun to deal with. I was rarely bored after I got into the swing of things, and I took my time just exploring the side quests and talking to NPCs. But where that structure works just as well as it did in KotOR, the combat does not. The changes Obsidian made to the rules, the equipment they eventually start handing out like candy, and the whirlwind of Force Powers, Feats, and items eventually results in your character becoming almost godlike in power. The combat was frustratingly easy, to the point of me often putting down my controller when it started and watching the pretty lights until it ended. By the end of the game, I was killing enemies solo in one round per target, with normal, unfeated attacks. And I didn't even pick Jedi Weapon Master as my Prestige class. The Meat - Story and Dialogue I play single-player RPGs for one primary reason: to experience a story, not just as a passive bystander, but as an active force in determining its outcome. The quality of the story and how much I feel I can influence it are the two factors that determine my ultimate enjoyment of an RPG. Unfortunately, this is the area in which KotOR II most obviously fails. It's not my influence on the story that it fails in--in that it matches and even surpasses the original game. No, it's in the quality of the story itself that KotOR II falls so far short of its predecessor. I started noticing it right away. Mysteries, mysteries everywhere. Even things my character knew, I wasn't allowed to know, which only served to detach me from him. I felt as if Obsidian was trying to manipulate me into playing their game on the false tension that derives from lacking knowledge and having none given to you. I might have forgiven that, however, if the resolutions to those many mysteries had proven powerful and satisfying. Unfortunately, the resolutions, including the ultimate ending, were as confusing and filled with blank spaces as was the rest of the story. The writer had talent, though. There's a difference, you see, between talent and skill. The writer proved he had talent with things like his intriguing villains (moreso than Malak) and the powerful, clear moments scattered throughout the story. He also proved he lacked skill because his plot was an overcomplicated, confusing mess. He also forgot that this is a Star Wars game. Star Wars is not about moral ambiguity. It's not about complicated, tangled webs of relationships, events, and philosophies. Star Wars is about what's right and what's wrong, and the clear separation between the two. It's about heroes and villains and epic struggles. It is and always has been a modern day myth, built on the same things that made stories like The Iliad & The Odyssey persevere. Star Wars does have its subtleties, but it's not about the subtleties. Its subtleties are not its heart. KotOR II loses sight of this, and it was only when hints of a true Star Wars story started to emerge that I got shivers up my spine (roots, perhaps, for KotOR III). So the story ultimately failed for me, but I enjoyed it anyway, because it had enough good moments to leave me with some sense of satisfaction. As for the dialogue, well, it's good. But there's a lot of it. Too much of it, in fact. NPCs often reiterate the same thing they just said a line or two ago, except in different wording. You start to wonder why the writer didn't cut some of this stuff out, when it would so obviously cost them more money in the studio recording voiceovers. And because the voiceovers were so good, I felt obligated to listen to every line, even when it was just wasted disc space. KotOR handled this much better, rarely rambling on in this manner. It was cleaner, more concise, and it's a shame KotOR II didn't follow its example. Conclusion If I make it sound like I hated KotOR II, I didn't. I liked it. As an RPG, it was a good game, and it was 35 hours well spent. But it could have been so much more--it could have been a sequel that lived up to the simple power of the original KotOR. With all of its complexities, all of its detail, and its massive amounts of dialogue, KotOR II still doesn't match up to its predecessor because it neglects the things that make a story great and forsakes what made KotOR so undeniably Star Wars. I got what I expected. KotOR II was worth my $50 and 35 hours. But it didn't live up to the magnificent work BioWare did with the original game.