Star Wars KOTOR: Bioware's Clunky Masterpiece

hey i got shirts now and i was advised to say all this at the beginning of the video so here it is bye many people who were interested in gaming back in the late 90s through 2010 or so knew about bioware in some form or another after receiving a fantastic amount of success with baldur's gate baldur's gate 2 and neverwinter knights bioware dipped its toe into the realm of star wars releasing the universally acclaimed knights of the old republic in 2003 the game was lauded for its writing specifically with rewards being heaped onto it over time for how well its story was told i recall picking up the game for xbox when i was about 12 years old or so and having fun with it but i also remember a lot of the plot going over my head i wasn't super familiar with the star wars universe until i was about 13 when episode 3 came out so a lot of the different background lore was overwhelming i do remember being excited about the actual mechanics of the game but a lot of the story is lost on me even today as much as i would like to try to figure out if this game was as good as i remember i don't remember much so instead i'd like to go into this evaluation with semi-fresh eyes and see if it holds up to the praise that it got even today oh also spoilers lots of spoilers spoilers for the game itself and chunks of the star wars franchise if you care about those go play all of the star wars games and watch all of the movies right now i'll wait i'm not going to wait ooh as always i don't tend to critique the graphical quality of the game that's nearly old enough to vote but uh i'm gonna mod this game to not look like this i obviously won't be adding anything that changes the original story of the game at all if you want to know which mods i installed they'll be in my description at any rate jumping into the game has you creating your character in an extremely d-esque fashion this means that having eight or nine points in an attribute gives you a negative 1 modifier 10 or 11 gets you a flat 0 and so on in addition to this you start with a base class which reflects more on a combat oriented character a stealthier one or a jack of all trades who focuses more on skills as an avid fan of d i already loved this system and i decided to roll with a relatively balanced but charismatic knight who has some bulkiness and dodge chance my first instinct was to toss a large chunk of my stats into strength but one of the things that i do recall is a lot of equipment having a bonus to strength in addition to this i get to sink some points into skills with my int being set to 12 and my class being set tonight i really only get to choose a handful of skills with the amount of points that i have i decided to focus as much as i could on persuasion which is a max of two and then dump the rest into awareness and treat injury and then finally you get to pick out a feat which mostly affects combat i decided to go with two weapon fighting because who wouldn't the character creation is fantastic and i imagine it lends a ton of replayability to the game in and of itself as it seems to allow you to focus on letting you figure out a build that you want to roleplay or that just suits your playstyle in general starting the game up brings you to a very familiar opening which i personally have never really enjoyed i get that the scrolling text is very iconic but for some reason i always have trouble reading it when it starts to really scroll further though it's not so much reading as it is like comprehending it for some reason either way the story takes place about 4 000 years before the formation of the first galactic empire the main antagonist force featured in the original trilogy of movies in knights of the old republic the main antagonist appears to be darth malak who has unleashed a seemingly unstoppable wave of sith combatants upon the jedi order this is back the order into a corner with many of their knights falling or converting to the sith armada our character story begins in the midst of this dire situation above a planet known as terrace all right nerd [ __ ] aside we got this guy who comes in and talks loudly at me he's like ah [ __ ] we gotta hurry dude the officer in charge really needs help being protected i repeat we really need to hurry i work the night shift probably why you haven't seen me we have to hurry they said you were the top in your class probably the best that they've ever seen we really probably should hurry though to move towards the foot locker hold down the right mouse button and face the camera towards it then hold down the left mouse button as well to cause the character to run forward i'm sorry [ __ ] what yeah this was definitely made at a time where developers went uh what's the most natural hand position you can think of wscz dude i actually wind up dragging the camera around with my mouse like an mmo which is definitely better than just using wasd to move around while keeping the camera stationary it's not a deal breaker or anything it's just different but yeah this whole beginning bit is definitely less of an immersive experience and more of a small voice in my mind going you're playing a video game it's not a huge deal really i just honestly found some of the more tutorial bits kind of funny in a way once the foot locker is selected left click on it again to perform the default action all right here's how this game works you're usually going to be involved in a party of sorts and you can swap around to the other members of your party to use the various skill sets to progress throughout the game in addition to this the combat looks incredibly similar to something like an older mmo where you target your enemy approach and start using whatever skills or abilities you have at your disposal to take them down this is an incredibly dated system that has almost no place in more modern video games i imagine that the combat would throw off many newcomers to the game just with how archaic it looks and feels personally i thought i would mind it a lot more than i do it's probably the hundreds of hours that i've sunk into world of warcraft and dragon age beyond this the menus and general way that you use things tend to be taken care of through clicking on whatever it is that you want to use this encompasses looting healing and generally accessing any of your menus i do feel like this game would be a lot worse off without the pause function so it's fortunate that it does exist so that i can think over what i want to do when i get fed up with watching my character with power attacks as for the actual story on this ship it's not super great yet obviously since it's all tutorial you fight through these shiny boys and then you get to a bit where a jedi is fighting a dark jedi and they both biff it trask here is like whoa don't get near those guys you'll just get in the way they're way too powerful then later on another dark jedi comes rolling in like he's about to drop the hottest album of 3956 bby and old trask is like alright stand back son i'm about to have the most anti-climactic death since ben kenobi so we're nearing the end of our tutorial i've got a flurry attack now this guy named karth keeps popping up to let me know what my battle royale status is things are pretty normal then you get to mess around with hacking and repairing which is pretty straightforward basically you need to have some computer spikes and or repair kits to slice computers or fix broken things if your skills are high enough in the computer use or repair category it takes less of these tools to get done what you're trying to get done hey dave yeah did you try the coffee this morning yeah it was pretty weak right i've been telling everyone i came about this and they just won't do anything at any rate bastille made it off the ship karth and i follow suit and i wake up to him filling me in on what's going on we're now on the planet of terrace which is under complete sith control our mission is to locate bastila and do our best to break through the sith blockade and hightail it out of this place apparently she's so important because of her rare force ability to inspire her allies to fight to their fullest and her enemies to feel a sense of powerlessness during key battles this ability is known as battle meditation and it requires a tremendous amount of focus and energy to pull off which explains why she was unable to use it during the sudden ambush qarth also says that our best bet is to look for her in the undercity as word of a few escape pods landing there has made its way to his ears terrace itself used to be a sprawling wonderful metropolis of a planet but has now fallen into disarray with it getting worse and worse with dangerous and criminal elements the further down you go and the very bottom is filled with monsters cool what i will say about how the dialogue is handled is that it's very jumbled i'm unsure if it's just karth's voice actor or the direction that he was given but a lot of his sentences feel like he's completely unsure of what he's saying or had a weirder intonation than you would expect given the sentence it's obvious that malik's a ruthless tyrant who'll crush anyone who stands in his way just like reverend was experience knowing that this voice actor is the same as caden and mass effect i'm guessing that it was probably on bioware's end anyways i finally get to just start roaming around and exploring [ __ ] i talk to different humans and aliens terrorize people by busting into their apartments and stealing whatever the hell's in their rooms and learn a little more about terrace this merchant lady tells me about how the quarantine is really [ __ ] with business which has so much more relevance in today's world the big thing that i noticed about the dialogue is that it's very cyclical basically you ask her about the crashed escape pods and then she tells you about them and then mentions that they might have gotten hit by swoop gangs then you ask her what those are and she tells you that they're gangs that swoop they just like swoop in and grab [ __ ] and a gang though using swoop bikes brilliant then at the end she mentions that some dude named davic is having issues with everything you ask her about davic and she explains that he's a big old crime lord you ask if he works with the sith and she's like nah he stays out of the way unlike those god damn swoop gangs and then you get the option to ask what that is again then you ask for general information about terrace and she tells you stuff that you mostly know already and ends with but stay out of the lower city because those [ __ ] swoop gangs are there even devic is having trouble and the whole conversation kind of repeats itself if you let it i guess it's an all right way to get all the info while going in pretty much any order that you want but the issue is that when you do get all of the info the game repeats its points quite a few times but honestly this wouldn't even be as big of an issue if it weren't for those accursed swoop gang exploring terrace a little more leads me to the cantina which has a jazzy tune playing to it this was not what i signed up for when i read the word cantina the main draw here at first is the game of pizaak which is basically head-to-head blackjack with a small twist the game itself is just luck and the twist of allowing you to play cards which add to or subtract from your score can be [ __ ] and i say that as someone who repeatedly swept the supposed pizaak champion of terrace it's a fun mini game though honestly and i think that's what counts here i mean come on who doesn't like blackjack in addition to blackjack 2 there's this off-duty sith officer who acts all surprised that you would even take the time to talk to her i try to woo her with my persuasion and she goes from oh you're a nice guy too alright [ __ ] off well alright then didn't think that messing up a persuasion check that's literally just me empathizing with her would turn into me being a complete dick what's even funnier is the fact that all i have to do to succeed is try again when i talk to her through her speech cycle this nets me with the knowledge that there's going to be some kind of sith after party when they're done i don't know oppressing people for the day i'm apparently now invited to this party which actually sounds pretty amusing this was a pretty interesting interaction which makes some of the sith officers seem more human now don't get me wrong she also goes on about being on a shitty backwater planet and how the people should be grateful for them being here so it's not like i'm sitting here thinking huh maybe they're actually good guys but it's nice to see them in a more approachable light the last notable part of the cantina is the fighting arena first you watch as two dudes duke it out and then you get your own shot every time you win you get 10 of the bets unless you're able to persuade jabba junior to part with more the first two rounds are no issue the third is tougher and then [ __ ] joffrey grand master of the blades comes strolling in and just destroys me [Applause] so yeah i'm gonna hold off on that let's go crash a sith party [Music] careful sauna that one's got quite the kick a couple more bottles and we'll all be passed out on the floor who cares we're not on duty tomorrow let's live a little [Music] this game is honest to god unintentional comedy i mean maybe them suddenly showing up on the ground was intentional but i like to think that they just didn't want to animate a scene where they pass out on the ground while partying still hilarious anyways i get a set of sith armor out of this which comes in handy with fooling the local population i like this a lot as most people react to you completely differently now including this guy who cowers before me as a sith soldier and then cowers before me as a regular dude because he thinks i'm there to kill him for a bounty that davik placed on his head i give him 200 walmart money to help him out which nets me some good boy points and experience the main importance to picking up the sith armor is bypassing the guard who stands at the entrance to the lower city now i can slip in and hopefully get to where bastille is it's at the start of the lower city where you get to witness two swoop gangs fight each other before you mop up the victors from here you make it to another cantina with the exact same layout right down to another hut lying about in a room first you encounter this absolute badass of a bounty hunter kalo nord who annihilates a group of thugs trying to start [ __ ] with him instead of talking he just counts when he hits three they all die well as it turns out kelo does the same thing to me too even though i approach him as a friend the guy is no joke beyond this you learn that davik supposedly has a ship quick enough to bust through the sith blockade but the auto targeting lasers that their armada is equipped with would still take out the ship this tells me that i probably need to steal or earn that ship from davic while also shutting down the laser defenses the more important bit here is meeting mission and her wookie friend zalbar mission's got a weird name but she's a fun character she seems to be younger but knows the lower city in and out as she seems to be a rogueish type who gets into a lot of trouble zalbar is her muscle who follows her around and seems primarily interested in eating food she gives you some background knowledge about how the two gangs got to being at each other's throats before bouncing off to another cantina ran by another gang then you get to witness the inspiration behind the dance off and connect star wars by helping out this lady who's trying to get a job [Music] but if i've learned anything about this game it's that when someone is proclaimed as dangerous they usually very much are i like that a lot because my initial instinct as someone who's playing a game is to go yeah i can take them on no problem in this game if i start some [ __ ] with a badass you can bet your ass i'm gonna get destroyed if i'm not properly leveled up it's a very old school style of playing and i enjoy it a lot so far i'm definitely enjoying the game but the gameplay has aged horribly very horribly while i want to get to the next bit to progress the storyline i find myself a little aggravated with slowly walking to the next area occasionally getting into a fight and then slowly continuing on and it sucks because whenever i do get to the next part of the story or a random encounter i'm pretty enthralled with whoever i wind up meeting and talking to i could definitely see myself emphatically loving the game if it were remastered with a fresh combat and movement system and a less clunky ui alright so now i'm hit with an absolute barrage of information in the form of the next stage of this quest first we meet this really trusting dude who's the head of a faction down here who's had a lot of troubles with the gang who's been terrorizing the lower and under city he tells me that the pods that crashed here were picked cleaned by the gang and that bastila has been taken hostage as a slave since she's no ordinary slave she's being posted as the prize for whoever wins the next big swoop bike race so now i have to enter this race and win on behalf of this guy's faction so that the volkart gang loses enough reputation to hopefully ward them off from raiding these guys for a while longer but their accelerator prototype was stolen by the volkars and without it we're probably going to lose the race so i have to find mission again and get her to guide me to the back entrance of the base steal the prototype and win the race but to even get to the undercity i have to get past the sith guard who apparently doesn't care about uniforms and does care about archaic paper which has been stamped with a general you may pass into this part of the city fortunately this guy happens to have gotten some of the papers and is willing to trade them for my uniform this is like an old point-and-click king's quest game old-school quest structure aside i'm scratching my head trying to figure out why the security system isn't completely reversed like why would the sith care about me trying to get into the worst part of the city why wouldn't they be guarding the upper part more instead i don't know maybe i'm missing something in addition to this karth over here loves injecting little quips of information into the conversations you're having but the quest giver never really acknowledges anything he says it's like yeah they took this republic officer hostage and karth goes oh good they don't know that she's more than just an officer i guess he's supposed to be whispering i don't know shit's weird well the under city is about as shitty as the game made it out to be it looks like an unfinished beta map the monsters mentioned prior are known as rack ghouls these are basically zombie type creatures which infect others by biting them eventually turning them into other rack ghouls they also hit like a truck anyways i find mission who's in a bit of trouble her wookie friend from before got captured by slave traders who took the sewers and mission promises to help me infiltrate the volkar base in exchange for busting him out she also joins my party which is definitely needed at this stage her usefulness extends past just being a pretty good shot as she can get through doors and disarm mines pretty handily almost completely outdoing karth fortunately we drudge our way through the sewers pretty easily and pick up zalbar as another party member who swears a life debt to me making him loyal to me forever so i toss karth out and we have ourselves a real party now from here it's a bit more of the same with the added bonus of a rancor in its natural habitat a pit getting by him is easy if you know how to read otherwise it might take a bit to learn how to read the data pad that tells you to stuff the corpse pile with a grenade and some yum yum sauce after this is the volkar base followed by the garage thank god i have allies who are much more powerful than i am because i've severely underestimated the dnd chance to hit while dual wielding rules fortunately i started to sink some feats into bettering it but yeah my character is not the most powerful here and probably won't be until mid game the gameplay is pretty harrowing at this point as everything needs to be clicked a few times to get working and the environment is some of the ugliest i've seen in a very long time also alt tabbing has turned a couple of us here into pseudo-silver surfers so i was wondering when i would encounter the dark side choice of this mission or if there was one at all turns out that there's a higher up dude for the vulcars here who offers me 500 credits and the girl if i turn on the leader of the hidden backs and kill him instead i'm sitting here thinking geez that sounds a lot easier than winning a race but then he's like yeah but you also gotta win the race we'll basically just give you the good bike to win with i decided to turn this guy's armor shiny also and then give him the old slash and dash all right blah blah blah run through the base slowly blah blah now we're racing the racing isn't um it's not very impressive i mean not compared to how this whole race thing was built up in my mind but you know something i actually kind of had fun the mechanics are very simple but i liked it anyways the leader of the volkars comes out and throws a [ __ ] fit about me cheating and then says that he's taking basila back as a prize then basila breaks out of the cage because i don't know she remembered she's a jedi maybe she was a little sleepy before i don't i don't understand that it's just very convenient is all whatever we kill the guy and then i get the pleasure of talking to my absolute least favorite character in the game so far bastila is an outright pompous prick of a jedi i know she's written to be insufferable and i'm sure she'll go through some character arc that makes her more tolerable but christ she's an ass oh nice try rescuing me but i'm afraid i've rescued myself for the little known thing called the force maybe you've heard of it at least karth doesn't put up with her [ __ ] at all shooting his power ranking up to a more respectable place [Music] all right we gotta get off terrace before i go nuts man and right as i leave the apartment someone approaches me with an offer to meet up with davic's right-hand man to figure out how to do just that kandras here hasn't been getting paid what he's owed so he's a little miffed with davic he wants me to steal the codes to shut down the sith lasers and then he'll provide the ride out to bust into the sith base i need to purchase a specialized droid to help me out fortunately one of the big upsides to having bastila is her speed increase ability which makes all this running back and forth go twice as fast [Music] before we take on the sith base i do a little more arena stuff which winds up with me being the champion you can seek out one of the old champions from back when the arena allowed death matches and fight him too with the added bonus of him being a bounty target but i suck so let's go do the sith [ __ ] instead yes yeah running through the base is basically more the same stuff as before so i'll cut right to the good stuff awaiting at the end of this base is a sith governor he seems like he's going to be a cakewalk at first but then he starts using the force to stun my party and heal himself the guy's pretty tough and this is really the fight that made me realize how much i need to switch to other members in my party to make sure that they're using the correct skills to take him down even this far in which i know isn't terribly far i'm still learning by experimentation i think it's a great way to approach the otherwise simple on-the-surface gameplay and it's probably the most fun i've had in one of these battles after this i make it over to kandarus and we move onward to davik's base with me pretending to be a potential recruit well that plan lasts all five minutes as i immediately figure out where the codes for the ship are and we bust out of this place on our way out the dark lord malik has decided to destroy the planet of terrace in an effort to kill bastila this means that davic is also trying to escape with the badass from before kalonord well kalo isn't as much of a badass at this ascended level and we have no issue taking him out this results in an escape sequence where i shoot ships down with a turret it's stale i'm sure this was an amazingly cool feature back in 2003 but it's extremely lackluster now and feels even more out of place than the swoop bike race but we made it finally off the tutorial planet and onward to dantooine alright how many pages of script do we got here six cool and how many more planets ah [ __ ] all right this video might be a little long but you knew that so my guy's been seeing all of these visions memories of bastilla fighting the dark lord revan and supposedly defeating him he also witnesses revan and malik approaching something known as the star forge in the ancient ruins of this planet which is a vision that he shares with bastila in addition to this i apparently have a strong presence of the force dwelling within me this is very unusual and my fate is to be left with the jedi council on dantooine may the force be with you and also with you so i start my training i spar learn how to use the force seek knowledge from old scriptures you know jedi [ __ ] it's explained how revan and malik were very eager jedi students whose insatiable lust for knowledge and power led them to the dark side something happened when they left to eradicate a mandalorian threat to the jedi order and it corrupted them to a point where they gave themselves to the dark side now with my training nearing completion my task is to join bastille in figuring out what revan and malik found at the runes here on dantooine but first i gotta pass a pop quiz i fail it five times before i force my way through it but then we get to the good stuff lightsaber flavors you got your cool mint flavor which begets the way of the guardian they do melee stuff then you got your cheeto flavor which represents the sentinel they're all about cool skills and finally you got the shamrock shake flavor no one wants that i want purple oh well you already know we're going blue so i grabbed my saber and now the last part of my test is to go to a nearby grove type thing and expel the dark force energy residing within it before i head out i learn a little more about what happened with revan and malik revan was supposedly a genius military tactician who led the republic fleet to victory after victory when the mandalorians moved in on the weakened order following a war with a rogue sith lord eventually revan more or less won the war for the jedi and was hailed as a hero then he disappeared with the entire fleet and rumors followed about sightings of him on various planets alongside malik when he did return he commanded an even greater armada before as a sith lord many of the ships were completely alien to the jedi order and sunni began conquering everything in sight quelled only by basil's strike team when he fell the less strategy inclined malik took over rolling over the republic with sheer numbers instead of tactical brilliance my main takeaway here is that sith lords always have super evil sounding names before they become sith lords for as much training as i've endured and wisdom that i've absorbed it took me 20 minutes to figure out that i needed to talk to a droid to leave this place i'm not sure what that says about me but it can't be good so dantooine is a grassy kind of farmland type planet with several family mansion type things surrounding the area i could rush straight to the objective and take care of it but there are a few side quests that show up before it stuff like helping a woman find her droid which seems to have opened the front door and walked away despite her claims that it was kidnapped then there's a few mandalorian survivors who have been terrorizing random families and demanding money from them and finally there's a murder mystery involving two men who claim that the other killed the victim i hash out that one first determining that both men plotted to kill the victim separately the first one because his wife was cheating on him with the victim and the second one because he suspected the victim was [ __ ] him over in a business deal it's interesting because i really thought that i'd have no interest in side quests in this game especially when a lot of them are presented as something like ah these guys are killing us help but a lot of them have a lot more complexity to them than they initially present on the surface and many of them have a light or dark side choice they're pretty well done and they make me actually enjoy the delay from the main quest the last trial that i face involves taking down this jedi who turned to the dark side recently she's just sitting over near these trees looking menacingly onward towards uh i don't know plants and animals after getting her low enough she goes on about how she was such a fool to trust in the dark side's power and how i should kill her i eventually convinced her that she should go talk to the council and ask for forgiveness the council's like yeah sure whatever and i become a padawan the thing that irks me about the council is how little that they seem to do yeah i'm sure that they all have their own jobs but they preach about how a jedi truly discovers themselves and their role in the universe by going out into the world and solving issues for others basically like oh a jedi isn't a true jedi unless they go do things and then they just sit here and kind of hang out around the premises i mean i'm sure at least one or two of them are necessary to hang out and answer questions and guide trainees but all of them i don't know this passive behavior even affects the next main quest where they're like yeah so uh we sent a jedi to go figure out what's up with those runes that revan and malik entered in your dream and he never came back maybe we shouldn't have sent him anyways you want to go to those ruins like dude why don't you go to those runes that a sith lord investigated what then a guy comes in from one of the two family mansions and goes the other family kidnapped my son and the council goes so you want to go do that too my guy what the hell is everyone else doing in this place yeah yeah i know it's a video game and i know it's just a way of presenting the quest but man the game does a pretty okay job at explaining some of the blatant contradictions like how this prodigy of a jedi got ambushed and wasn't able to use her battle meditation because of it then all of the problems on dantooine seem to be heaped onto the player i guess a lot of it is just my feelings on how slow the jedi order moves in general these idiots watched as all of these planets around their planets were taken over by the mandalorians and went yeah but those aren't our planets we ain't gotta do [ __ ] and then they were surprised when the mandalorians amassed all of their forces and started smoking them i know they were just coming off of a war but i almost agree with revan's methodology of taking the fight back to them i mean yeah the guy turned to the dark side but before that he got the job done i just find it ludicrous that even when the mandalorians started their assault the council was still like uh maybe we should just play this defensively you [ __ ] ding dongs the jedi order are basically bronze level starcraft players the whole situation with the two families is pretty straightforward first one kidnapped the other one son because they thought the other one kidnapped their son kidnap's son doesn't want to leave without the kidnapper's daughter because he loves her comedy ensues there you are shen father mr mitali rohesha father mr sandro holland but the real interesting part is the main quest apparently this star forge which revan and malik found is some kind of ancient device capable of tremendous power it speculated that this forge was what created the alien ships which revan flew in on the robot guardian here tells us that the forge was crafted on dantooine by slaves which were commanded by a race known as the builders after the forge was finished all of the slaves were executed and this robot guardian silently watched over the creation grounds fueled by the star forge's power this thing and the race which built all of this is apparently well over 20 000 years old even older than the republic to get to the area where the forge supposedly is i have to figure out some puzzles and answer some questions correctly they're pretty easy but all of this is definitely intriguing when i get to the center of this tootsie pop it's not the starforge which awaits me but a map to its possible location the map highlights several planets which revan and malek were spotted on at one point which means that we've got a treasure trail to follow at this stage bastila shows a little more interest in you which is exactly the direction i imagined her character would take she's a little less cold a little more straightforward and wants to know exactly what it means to have her fate bound to yours her score goes up a few points anyways now i get to determine which order i want to hit these planets in and shape my game all i really know is that i want to hit the sith world of korriban last to start i'm at an impasse with tatooine and kashic but ultimately i think that tatooine would be the best bet because i recognize it from other star wars media so i take off and witness a cutscene showing malik talking to his top guy and kallonord who apparently somehow made it off of terrace after being buried in rubble during a sith attack yeah okay he's evidently going to be hunting us for a bit longer when i arrive on tatooine i communicate with my whole crew and learn a bit more about them bastilla talks about dark side stuff catgirl talks about that too big z talks about someone eating our food supply qarth talks about not trusting me at all which severely hurts his rankings candris talks about living for the thrill of battle as all mandalorians do and this robot goes beep boop i couldn't find big blue but i could find this stowaway who's been eating our food her language is completely [ __ ] and it takes a bit to understand exactly what she's saying but it appears that she's a stowaway who feels safe on the ship and is escaped from mandalorian custody potentially on dantooine we'll take care of that later let's get out to this desert i'm greeted by a worker from space walmart who tries to shake me down for 100 credits i persuade my way out of that after a few botched attempts and then ask about what all is around here apparently tatooine is regarded as a [ __ ] zerka corporation set up shop here after they were tricked by a rival company into thinking that it was going to be a profitable business endeavor and have been struggling ever since the most profitable things to do here now are hunt exotic creatures and turn in their trophies participate in pod race uh swoop bike racing and general bounty hunting zerka corporation has completely locked down the entire place swamping it with layers of bureaucracy and corporate greed you need to have a hunting license to leave the city which they control and sell they're in the middle of mining ore that deteriorates rapidly and is all but useless and yet they still try to sell it they make all of their workers sign waivers which ensures that they have no liability for loss of life on the job they're just complete [ __ ] in every sense of the word right now so many people have hunter licenses that they're not giving them out anymore except almost in the same breath this corporate drone tells me that she'll give me one if i sign a contract to eliminate a particular tribe of sand people outside of the city wall that is racist i could zip relatively quickly to the main objective at this stage but as always the side quests are enticing these include trying to infiltrate and negotiate peace with the sand people which i imagine might lead me to the main quest as well then i can help out this hunter whose wife trapped him with his own droids and left him to die and then finally i get to ward off waves of sand people who are attacking zerka miners a lot of these are short and sweet but negotiating piece seems like the big one first off no one can really communicate with the sand people it's rumored however that there's a droid that's being sold at a shop here which can meet hk47 easily the most evil character which is able to join my party so far he's a quick-witted combat droid who doesn't quite remember everything about himself the shop owner wants 5000 credits for him but can be talked down to 3 000 if you negotiate he'll knock off another 500 if you threaten him but that would be mean and dark oh god well i don't have that kind of money so i make it by swoop racing and come back hk might be one of my favorite party members solely because he's basically bender but with less drinking he lies when he needs to he calls me master sarcastically at times the first thing he offers to do for me after i buy him is to kill someone for me and he gets pissed off when i dig around at his circuitry to try to repair him and fail at it he's a good guy well i mean not literally but you know he's cool then there's mission so i've covered all the basics with her background but throughout my adventures i've asked her about her family her main support system was her older brother griff who helped to keep them as safe as he could when their parents died the more that she talks about him though the more it sounds like he's a total scumbag hefting her into a crate to smuggle her away ripping people off and get rich quick schemes stealing from whoever he could and eventually abandoning her on terrace mission puts no blame on her brother and instead claims that some busty skank lured him away and told him to keep her away from them well we eventually met said skank on dantooine and she appears to be very nice almost motherly towards mission of course it could just be a ruse but she's a very good actress if this is the case she claims that griff was the one that told her did not buy mission a ticket off the planet explaining that he felt that mission was holding them back eventually lena here left him on tatooine while he tried to get rich quick some other way explaining how badly she fell for mission while the zerka drone from before informs me that griff was signed up with their mining outfit before being carted off by the sand people as their prisoner the most peculiar thing that happens with mission is that she doesn't stay naive to how her brother may be given the overwhelming evidence and opinions from other people that we've talked to about him she's went from he would never do all of that to calling him a slime ball also of course she still wants to help him so i figured that we should get to that along with the whole san people infiltration thing we also know that the star map is around one of these caves out here from a dream that bastille and i shared and it's also possibly been looted by the sand people as much as it seemed like there was a lot of haphazardly placed quests on tatooine i have to admit that i like how most of it is tied together in a way so us sneaking into the sand people area of the map isn't really too hard we throw on some disguises and get recognized as outsiders when we make it in but some hasty translations from hk47 help out in a pinch shall i blast him now master the chieftain thinks that we're messing with them and asks for us to bring them some water vaporizers to prove ourselves to which i obliged by hoofing it all the way back to the start of the map realized that i could have went straight back to the ship and then running all the way back he's astonished that we came back and promises to reduce the attacks then he gives me his tribal stick thing that zerka wanted as proof that i killed him points me in the direction of the star map and then tells me that i can take griff with me since he's completely useless as a hostage like i said i love when everything ties together it just feels like all of that effort is that much more rewarding well griff is hands down easily the biggest piece of [ __ ] in the game now instantly and completely blowing past bastila at the beginning of the game he's like oh i'm sure glad my sister's alive say you got any credits you [ __ ] remind me to play through this game again on the dark side at least mission realizes how shitty your brother has been after all this time alright so now we've got to get this star map and heck on out of this desert wasteland this requires me to take down a gigantic dragon which in turn requires me to lead it out into some mines which in turn requires me to lure some banta over which in turn requires me to use some fodder to do so i already bought the fodder at the beginning of the area because it was one credit and there was only one in stock kind of seemed important well as much as you might expect a fight with a weaker dragon the mines actually do the entire job i get a pearl which is fantastic for upgrading my lightsaber a few other nice equipment pickups and of course the star map at the end of the cave as i'm on my way out here comes kallonord again who proves once more that he isn't the badass he seemed to be at first hopefully he's really dead this time it's worth noting that there was a part earlier where i questioned bastila about her background as a jedi she admits that she didn't actually kill revan but that interestingly enough malik turned his starship's guns on revan's ship nearly killing her and killing revan instead i find this interesting mostly because of how much revan has been talked up at this point everything about him was said to be brilliant and it makes me wonder if he's truly dead or not alright let's get off this rock yeah you remember that turret section it happens more than once in fact i head over to the trading outpost on yevon to grab some gear and have to shoot down more ships and then i have to do the exact same thing on the way back to dantooine it really sucks and it just feels like one of those things that got ramrodded into the game because it's a star wars thing it's a very poor decision that's h worse than the combat what's also gotten pretty annoying is bastila harping on about the dark side and how easy it is to fall prey to it i swear we've had three separate conversations about what the dark side is and how anyone could be swayed by its siren call and about how we need to be better than that and blah blah blah but all of this is made up for with the glorious purple lightsaber crystal that i found on tatooine my game is complete also i drop off that stowaway and i don't get attacked on my way to kashuk which is nice kashuk is a wookiee homeworld as i'm gently reminded by mish when she tells me that large z has some unfinished business here so i grab him and he relays to me that his brother was the one who let slaver set up camp here he was so angry that he used his claws to strike his brother which is taboo among the wookies as claws are considered tools not weapons so he was exiled his father believing his brother over himself the zurka corporation drones are generally awful as always and have no issues with the enslavement of the wookiees here meanwhile mission has forgotten what zalbar looks like as she lets me know that he would love to see the trees here weird i think the worst thing about this place might be the um the ambient sounds like there's this very light xylophone type music and then there's just this crazy loud droning of like insects and animal chirping and whatnot and it's just very annoying and it gets worse later with these little monkey things that run around [Applause] then there's also the dialogue when i reach the wookie base of operations i mean yeah they're wookies they're not going to speak universal basic but it also makes the cutscene exchanges with my voiceless character kind of um then again if my character was fully voiced he'd be doing the exact same thing back and that would be absolutely hilarious at any rate this is zalbar's brother he is unapologetically one of the biggest [ __ ] in the game he just outright tells you yeah so i sold some of our people into slavery for weapons got my brother kicked out of the village by spreading my story of him attacking me with his claws then watched as the village chief our dad went and tried to fight the slavers that guy probably got killed anyways i'm the chieftain now and i'm still trading our people away to zerko while pretending like we're putting up a good fight against them he's just one of those obnoxiously evil characters though not to a point where he just wants everyone to die or anything like that it's all just personal gain for him anyways he wants to keep zelbar here for a while and sends me off to kill a wookie who's supposedly gone insane and is hiding in the shadow lands i doubt that the guy is actually insane and i'm hoping that i can recruit him to come back and destroy these guys as easy as it is to actually write a selfish character who makes everyone else miserable it's a super effective way to make the player want to bring them down this brings us to our next companion jolie bindo easily the most fun name to say in the game jolie is a crotchy old man of a jedi living out here on kashuk for the past decade or two he's also voiced by kevin michael richardson who's done lots and lots of voice acting for a multitude of games and other media he's a good character who doesn't seem to want to talk much about himself but he seems pretty disgruntled with zerka's existence on the planet he also notably doesn't care too much about discussing the whole light side dark side nuance to the force i like that i'm kind of tired of hearing about it myself honestly and have started giving bastille a [ __ ] for it when she brings it up which has actually made her a little more endearing towards me anyways my task is to remove a camp of zurka employees who have entrenched themselves near jolie's house their commander doesn't care about moving at all and only wants to poach the creatures around the camp the soldiers under his control on the other hand are pretty miserable fortunately they can be persuaded to give me the codes to these little devices which keep all the larger beasts at bay of course they all have the exact same dialogue trees to get the codes from them but you only need to shut down two of the devices before this big load comes storming through effectively vacating them from the area and allowing you to proceed further down into the shadow lands kashuk is interesting in that it seems a lot more linear in terms of its quest progression where tatooine and dantooine had you stumbling upon a side quest every here or there kasich seemed to be all picked up in the shadowlands area of the map for the most part these involve a droid with records of azerka boy up top killing off people who owed him money a beast summoned by a ritual who killed a jedi at one point and a pack of mandalorians who have apparently been attacking wookies who put their weapons away that last one actually conflicts pretty harshly with candarus's version of mandalorian culture he seemed to be pretty adamant about how mandalorians are an honor-bound fight-seeking people who live for battle well apparently they have no idea why they're doing it either the data pad on one of the corpses shows that they were commanded to do this in order to learn how to use jedi weaponry by someone and they seem to be pretty bored with it at this point the beast which killed the jedi also strikes me as particularly interesting as i was warned about these type of beasts on dantooine supposedly they're created when the dark side of the force is in full effect and are known to be very dangerous to jedis in particular the council sent three jedis off to exterminate these beasts after the last war with the sith lord exarcoon and apparently the one that got eaten here had gotten into a heated argument with the other two over the fact that they openly loved each other he stormed off to this planet instead and got himself 8 but not before seemingly giving in to that prideful emotion that the dark side so often exudes but more to the main bulk of this planet's questing so the star map here is protected by some kind of ai which has been directed to give the coordinates only to an individual who it deems to match the parameters set by its creator after quizzing it a little more it's a fairly good guess that this creator was likely revving himself he identifies me as someone who can access his functions but only if i pass a test in order to test me a series of questions is asked with only one correct answer each time these questions involve a prison scenario where i can send zalbar to prison for five years and go free if he doesn't accuse me also another scenario where i can let my city be attacked in 5 days to exploit an enemy's weakness in 10 days and a scenario where my nation is stagnating and what i would do to keep my civilians from questioning my leadership after failing the first question it becomes very obvious that i should be answering these in a way that a sith would i pass the rest of the questions and get granted access to the star map now i know that this is probably going to be the big twist of the game but i've been thinking this since i saw the cutscene where bastila unmasks revan i'm guessing that i'm revan if that's correct it's probably easy enough to say that i just looked it up but there's a lot of evidence pointing towards this theory so far there's my character's very existence as this ultra savvy soldier who suddenly sprung up and now has a very potent access to the force there's this big o face that bastila makes during the cutscene where revan is unmasked and now there's this ai who's been clearly programmed by revan to identify one particular person with as cunning and ruthless as revan has been made out to be i imagine the chances of him letting some random person access the star map is probably a solid zero percent it's all speculation at this point but it's what i'm thinking right now alright let's finish up this planet first off i found huge z's father roaming around here and we beat each other's asses after this we give him the blade that was found in the beast which slew the jedi earlier as it was some kind of legendary blade that their greatest warrior used forever ago he goes back to confront his son and i follow suit when we arrive zalbar is basically like yeah so i know that my brother kind of enslaved my people and betrayed the [ __ ] out of both me and my father but he's been making some crazy compelling arguments while you were gone what no he hasn't i don't need to be here to know how simple his arguments are i think this was a really lazy way to shoehorn in a dark side response and it really echoes my sentiment about this entire planet honestly i like the revenge story with zalbar and his family i like the portrayal of zurka being the scum of the galaxy what i don't like is how simple zalbar's brother's reasoning has been i don't like the hazy forest at the bottom of this planet especially when you consider that terrace had something like a rancor at the bottom of it and nothing even remotely rivaled that here despite the shadowlands being made out to be this really dangerous area and like i mentioned before i hated these stupid monkeys that constantly make the exact same sound over and over again during every little part of the shadowlands exploration [Applause] sure [Applause] i mean holy [ __ ] did no one mention this while play testing at any rate i take freyr's side obviously and then ask them to talk out their differences zelbar's brother puffs out his chest like a gorilla and goes no we fight now alright man well whatever the end result works out for me as the wookies begin killing off the remaining zurka forces here in between planet changes is another malic cutscene in which he's disappointed in callow nord's failure it's like um you know in dk64 where k-rool gets pissed every time he watches one of his bosses die to the kongs no alright sorry anyways he then brings in the next boss darth brandon without the r you can tell that he means business because he destroys one of the ship's consoles along with one of the troopers here i guess both of those were totally expendable because malik does not give a [ __ ] i head back to tatooine to see if another crate dragon spawned i kinda doubt it but i want another pearl for my other lightsaber well after meeting up with bastila's [ __ ] of a mother and learning about her father's death we head out to find his holocron and return it to her well here comes big bad bandon ready to die in the same location that calendar died at i gotta admit seeing another set of space bikes parked here forever is kind of funny if malik sends another goon after me i'm coming back to the skavon principle so yeah we sort of work out the issues between basler and her mother and now i kinda care about her [ __ ] god damn it bioware [Music] i think i think we should have some privacy for this come with me so manon is a big old water planet it's like entirely ocean besides some man-made structures which litter parts of it we arrive on big shell and i'm not harassed for docking fees by zurka for once which is nice when i arrive inside i get to watch a republic officer and a sith officer tell each other that their dad could beat up the other one's dad i think that's one of the most interesting parts about this universe because there are obviously republic dictated planets and sith ones but manon in particular is a neutral planet which forbid the two from fighting each other so the two forces kind of both go about their respective businesses while having to be around each other the reason that either side hasn't dominated the planet yet is because of this super potent healing agent called kolto the fish people of manon built this big above water hub so that they could sell to both sides and threaten to destroy the only known source of it in the galaxy if either side attacks them it's pretty smart though this republic officer guesses that the sith are probably going to try to do something to take the planet anyways it definitely makes for an interesting setting to say the least especially with the whole planet being a water one i just hope that this doesn't evolve into some kind of water exploration combat nobody likes water levels they just like the idea of them oh if you don't know where that is go north from here then south pass the port official in the first courtyard east into the second courtyard then north then east again you got that have a pleasant stay master jedi so manan is definitely the prettiest planet so far maybe period given that koriban is a sith world filled with volcanic activity it's got this giant glass front part facing out towards an endless ocean and it looks really cool even today the issue is that this place has kind of been filled with vast amounts of nothing so far i mean a desert on tatooine sure makes sense for it to not have much but even then there was quite a bit to interact with here on manon i've ran into a pazak player a bazaar card seller and a dude who basically rehashes the whole idea of this planet hosting both sith and republic forces oh and more groups of sith and republic officers basically saying that their side is gonna win nice there's a point where a sith officer tries to shake you down for 20 credits saying that this area was for sith only when you say nah i'm not going to do that she's like typical republic scum not giving us money and [ __ ] then that's all that happens cell cath traveler cell cath sith officer republic officer cell cath cleaning droid ooh sith negotiator i have no desire to speak to you [ __ ] oh dude swoop races holy [ __ ] now there's an exciting new mechanic eventually i do manage to make it to the republic embassy which has a mission for me in exchange for data on the star map one of their scanner module droid things that were in the ocean came floating all the way up and it was all disabled and [ __ ] the sith got the cell cath to delay the republic's retrieval of this thing long enough for the sith to recover it instead and now the republic wants me to retrieve it so i have a few ways to proceed but interrogating a sith prisoner is the easiest one this more or less has me mashing through options until i succeed which is a little silly because they set up the situation with a very serious tone like oh you can use the truth serum but if he resists enough his mind will blank then you'll have to use the neutralizer before using the serum again but if you use it too much he might forget everything that he knows i think i failed this task like 12 to 15 times and he never forgot anything oh well i got my info and i make it to the sith base fight some dudes and miraculously managed to find the correct area to go to the very first time then i grab the data and zip out back to the republic at least that was the plan since the cell cath have a very strict policy against violence and they heard of a fight breaking out they place me under arrest as i walk out i'm assigned a lawyer who tries to defend me by saying that i was there by coincidence that goes poorly so i dismiss him and defend myself stating that the sith lured me to their base to try to coerce me to the dark side and then attacked me when i refused they don't have enough evidence to convict me and basically side with me and put the sith on a lockdown of sorts barring them from the protection of their laws for the time being while that does seem like a huge victory i can't help but think that this is all the reason the sith will need to try to initiate some sort of hostile takeover still this whole planet was relatively mundane in terms of questing until this chrono-trigger-esque arrest so i'm pretty happy about its conclusion not only that but this quest seems to kick off this planet's string of quests finally when i walk out a woman approaches jolie in my party and lets him know that her husband and old friend of jolies is locked up and being framed by the sith for murder i go back to the judges and submit my request to be this guy's lawyer now i have to quiz different witnesses the judges themselves and the defendant the judges seem split on how they feel about the republican the sith and they're also split about how they feel about the capability of this old man who supposedly killed a sith officer in her prime the defendant sunree tells me that he was meeting the woman at the hotel because he's pretending to be a sith spy feeding the sith false information at the same time the woman seemed to be pretty close to turning into a double agent and working for the republic as well sunri thinks that the woman was murdered by the sith when they found out and then they planted a medal which belonged to him in her hand so i'm off to the hotel to canvas the witnesses here i start with the hotel owner who thinks that the gunshot went off and then sunri ran off afterwards well i decided to ask him if he would testify the opposite way no no no no no that's a lot of money gathering testimonies from the other two witnesses shows that a sith personnel paid off one of them to plant the medal on the victim's body but also that the victim and the defendant were definitely having an affair and that the victim may have been a dark jedi not just an ordinary sith this makes the likelihood of her being shot and killed by an old man way less likely soon after leaving the hotel i'm told by a stranger that both the republic and the sith have played a role in this case and that each side is trying to win against the other in addition to this court case i run into someone who wants me to figure out why the republic is suddenly hiring so many mercenaries and someone who suspects the sith of kidnapping many young cell cath children including his own daughter a mercenary from a bloodthirsty race of people tells me that the sith hired him to collect as many children as he could from the cell cath and bring them to their embassy as far as the republic mass hiring their mercenaries goes i'm pointed towards their embassy for answers also so basically all these side quests involve snooping around both sides embassies so here are all of these side quests back to back the republic is hiring mercenaries because basically they struck a deal with some of the more republic-minded cell cath to build a harvesting base directly on top of the source of the culto healing agent when they were nearing completion they found the star map and soon after communications went completely dark they sent down some republic officers and got no communication back then they started sending down mercenaries over and over to try to get to the bottom of what happened as far as the sith kidnapping cell cath children goes yes they have been kidnapping them though it's more of a coercion than a kidnapping basically they've been training potential future leaders of the cell cath in the ways of the sith brainwashing them so that they could eventually take over the planet and control the kolto mining i find the evidence of this and convinced the children to report the crimes of the sith to the cell cath leadership and then finally the trial so sunri did kill the sith woman it was caught on videotape by sith recording devices then seized by the republic when sunray called in a favor after this the sith tried to plant the evidence to help them win the upcoming court case by paying off this goofy bastard the reason sunri did it was because yes he was having an affair but he wasn't converting the dark jedi to come over to the republic's side he was being used by her for his information pretending like she was going to be joining his side at some point when he found out that she was using him he went mad with rage and waited for her to fall asleep before shooting her i actually have no idea how to proceed with this case i already paid the guy at the front desk to turn a blind eye to the fact that sunri ran away after the gunshot but realistically the guy killed someone because he was angry with him but then again she was a dark jedi this is really a morally ambiguous case holy [ __ ] and there's no right answer you're making a decision on what to do with this man's life and no matter how you slice it the decision doesn't feel 100 right i think the tipping point for me was the fact that sunrise started to fall back on the whole this will ruin the republic because the cell cath will ban them from harvesting culto after this i just hate how this guy's now taking the high road and using it as a shield for his actions stating that he killed a sith and there's nothing wrong with that so i send him down the river with the video evidence though i couldn't help but reload a save and see how the whole trial plays out because it really tickles my phoenix right itch it is an honor to see justice served and i will see sunri is executed for the crime he has committed sunray left before i heard the blaster shot impossible she carried a lightsaber under that cloak of hers objection that doesn't prove she was a jedi in the republic it is awarded only to the bravest most valorous most honorable men lies slander i object were you in alaska's room on the night of the murder i was working on her trying to turn her over to the republican side obviously full story i did not kill her your honors no god damn that was a fun quest so now it's down to the bottom of the ocean or something like that both to figure out what went awry and for the star map well i guess the cell cath went insane when some kind of voice went off and affected the minds of everyone in the facility everyone else was fine after a moment but the cell cath entered some kind of frenzy state and started attacking everyone in sight the thing about this section is that it could have been so much scarier like the way that the few survivors talk to you makes it sound like these fish men went completely bloodthirsty attacking and eating every single person that they could but the reality is that fighting them feels about the same as fighting any other creature in this game i don't know i feel like a remaster of this area could be incredible anyways i pop on an environment suit and go to the bottom of the ocean no attacks no force powers and about 20 percent of my normal movement speed water levels man come on hurry up don't just stand there we have to keep moving the water is filled [Music] are you [ __ ] kidding me so here's something i found out after several times of dying to these idiots you need a sonic emitter to carry onward and kill these things i did not grab that so i reload a save and grab two of them and then get back to it fortunately my force speed glitched out and let me move at 40 percent of my normal speed so that was cool after killing off for axis games and finally ending the tropico series once and for all i make it to probably the worst voice acting in the game i mean to be honest a lot of voice acting was a lot better than i thought it would be for 2003 but holy [ __ ] man no no the faraxia will get us no a cell catheter coming no no no ah ah you sammy sammy calm down i don't think they're here to kill us uh kono kono are they yes i think they're here to help us eventually they stopped panicking enough to tell me that a big fat [ __ ] shark rose up and gave them all the mind melt they theorize that it's been around for a long ass time and has been eating kolto to sustain itself thus making it big so my options here are to use this machine constructed down here to vent a very potent poison into the area and kill off the sharks or to do a math puzzle to overload the machine and cause it to self-destruct saving the shark i go with the latter because it seems good to save this thing that's only doing what it does best being a big god damn shark with psychic powers awesome i haven't talked a lot about the logic puzzles in this game but there are quite a few of them that involve me thinking my way through various math problems drawing me to the conclusion that someone at bioware was a big nerd i hated math when i was growing up but i actually like these simple logic puzzles a lot they make me feel smart until i fail them so the facility explodes and the shark gives me a nod to go ahead and map my star i suck down the info and tiptoe back to the surface then i get arrested again yep one last case to go out on except this time they're like why'd you explode stuff and i'm like big goddamn shark man and they go holy [ __ ] dude alright you're free to go apparently it was like the creator of their people or something according to their legends and they're stoked to know that god's still alive down there swimming the good swim let's get off this planet this time the sith don't send another mercenary or sith master after us instead the man who's been interacting with malik comes for us himself it turns out that this guy was karth's old commander the person who taught him everything he knows about being a soldier it's the reason that qarth is extremely slow to trust you while this gigantic ship has no issue plucking us away from our destination and pulling us into it here's the prison sequence that a lot of games around this time seem to have the issue with this particular prison sequence is the fact that well we're all kind of badasses it isn't one jedi and a bunch of crewmates it's four jedi a wookiee two incredibly well-trained soldiers who have seen many battles two droids and a roguish twilight girl ironically i rely on the last one to free us here from prison but the fact remains that as long as malik himself isn't waiting for us when we dock we really should have no issues fighting our way out but it's just your standard capture sequence you get stripped down thrown into capture cells and tortured for information i will leave you here in your cell with a small taste of the horrors you will suffer when lord malik arrives i don't know it just kind of negates the entire idea that you're an ultra powerful group when an old man in a hat captures your crew with no issue what we do learn from this situation is that dantooine was destroyed by the sith along with the jedi enclave there malik is on his way and ready to interrogate you himself and oh yeah oh this can't be true can it you really don't know what's going on here do you hmm what could i possibly not know about that seems plot twisty anyways i pilot mission here to get us all freed and then bounce on out of here [Music] so i have to go to the bridge to open the hangar bay doors so that we can leave when we get there a big old battle between us and kart's old commander ensues and qarth moves in to finish the job after i know that jedi are like this really good force in the universe i mean i get that i'll just never get the whole no don't do it you'll become like them i mean we just kind of mortally wounded him why not let qarth finish the job to avenge his wife i don't know i guess i just don't buy into that jedi tenant the commander's final words to karth make him wig out and confront bastila about some big secret realistically it would make a lot more sense if both she and the jedi council knew that i was revan i mean how wouldn't they so here's a fun little sequence i forget to open the hangar doors because this was a time before big glowing objective markers and a bunch of sith came charging in to block our escape so i [ __ ] on off out of there half to moonbase alpha through the same sequence as before which unequips all of our weapons for whatever reason i get all the way to the elevator and it's like oh you forgot to do the bridge thing brilliant i reload an old save fight old man river again remember to open the hangar doors and leave again the fortunate part is that they don't make me spacewalk again since i opened the hangar doors which is nice of them uh oh here comes malik and boy is he good at laughing so yeah i'm revvin they spared me and wiped my memories because only i can stop me the reality of the situation is that malik turned on me because he wanted my power the jedi council sent a task force of knights against me and malik took action at that very moment instead of letting me die they took me away to reprogram my mind and help them find the starforge bastille of flip-flops between the truth and the whole idea that i could be saved and that even as an evil sith lord i deserved to be saved the jedi council was desperate and they saw an opportunity i don't blame them but this lip service of all life deserves to be spared is blatant [ __ ] i don't know jedis man they annoy me actually let me ask one of you nerds out there this why did the council send a strike team of knights to go kill the dark lord revan they do still have masters even in this dire time what is it that holds them back from fighting or infiltrating or doing a lot of this really dangerous stuff themselves is it just their presence would be detected because they're stronger in the way of the force or i don't i don't know i mean when i asked this before i didn't realize i was revan yet it made a little more sense for them to send bastille and i to the first star map location on dantooine given that knowledge but still it always feels like achieving the role of master is basically just retirement maybe that is what it is i feel like i've seen masters fight all right enough about that so you're now to fight malik alone which is a huge huge mistake not because he's super powerful or anything like that but because he's extraordinarily weak the battle goes like this i hit him twice he hides behind a blast door i chase him around and fight him again down to like i don't know an eighth of his health i am doing the opposite of struggling here then you know what happens he does this stupid god mode freeze attack thing and then bastila whips her lightsaber at malik and tells me to run what no i can i can just kill him then the door locks on them and i have no other choice but to run this is so stupid the player should not have been made to fight malik at this stage i would have been happier if he had just simply kidnapped her and escaped okay say you wrote the game to go down this way here's what you do you make malik nearly invincible and you buff the hell out of him you make the fight scripted to lose and when you get low enough he freezes you and goes in to finish you off before bastila makes her big sacrifice the way that this happened was the worst way it could have happened and it makes the whole escape sequence the stupidest [ __ ] ever even more so when you have to blast more ships out of the sky what a poor decision anyways qarth tries to do the whole how can i trust you thing again for like the 9 000th time and literally everyone else is like well we trust him so i do like that hk47 regains his memories and remembers that he happens to be revan's droid what's even funnier is the fact that the game points out to you how convenient it is that you happen to find him in some random shop on tatooine and then candarus goes yeah but have you heard about the plot hole filling device known as the force which literally explains away any sort of convenience and story writing as space magic okay enough of the logistics let's talk about korriban when i pictured the planet i expected landing in some volcanic regions surrounded by enemies instead i land in the middle of more zerka people they're like welcome to planet evil good to see that you brought the evil ship back and intend to become an evil jedi oh all right yeah that's that's what i'm here for there isn't a lot to this place at first glance a cantina with no music azerka place and then outside is the sith academy for training sith that's my target so i have to pretend that i want to defect from the jedi order and am here to join them i try to persuade them to let me in in a few different ways but apparently the 14 or so persuasion i have just isn't enough i know there's a force persuaded but i'm really wondering if sinking so many of my points into persuade as a soldier guardian who doesn't gain many points per level was worth it because i really failed checks more often than i succeeded them either way i beat the [ __ ] out of some sith and take their medallion to gain admittance into the sith academy it's here that they're like we're all evil but only the most evil will become a sith i don't even know if i need to become corbon's next top sith to gain access to the star map honestly but i'm guessing i probably do well all of my questions are answered as the lady who originally went nah i don't trust you because something's weird with you now goes i trust you implicitly please help me kill my master alright then she tells me that i have to become the next big sith boy to get into the tomb where the star map is and then tells me exactly how to do so so i clear out three tombs kill two of the other students and turn one back towards the light side potentially the artifacts gained here are actually pretty damn powerful but also very much have a dark side requirement the puzzles and trials are easy as hell but they are enjoyable to a degree which is what matters more so i head back with all this stuff and the sith master is like i'm very impressed i'm not impressed enough yet though he does that over and over again until finally he is impressed enough i then head to the final trial which involves me fighting a few regular beasts two super tough ones and doing this logic puzzle that's easy but tedious technically i didn't need to do that last bit but i didn't realize that until later after this i freezed this acid river that i likely could have forced jumped over and grabbed the final star map my final action in this whole academy is supposed to be me striking down the master's pupil since he realized that she was trying to strike him down i choose to side with the lady who turns on me afterwards because she's a sith and all sith fights sith when they're threatened i get a chance to spare her and i do because i'm space jesus the thing about korriban is that well it's a neat concept to a degree but from a storytelling perspective it almost feels like it's better suited to do earlier in the game i know you can do it earlier but there's a point where it's like i've been on all these other planets and i've interacted with sith across the galaxy to a point where i was on one of their main ships and yet no one recognizes me as this jedi troublemaker who's definitely wanted by the sith oh well after wrapping up a few side quests and gaining access to my official 7-eleven pre-order slurpee lightsabers it's time to press onwards to my final endeavor in this game as we warp into the part of the system where the starforge is karth sends out a signal alerting the rest of the republic fleet to head over and help out this leads into yet another ship shooting sequence but this time with a different background then our stabilizers go out and it causes us to plummet to the only planet nearby it's determined that the sith have some kind of jammer which forces ships to crash into this planet via disabling their engines this raises a question about a huge oversight with the sith's plan why wouldn't they just lure the republic's ships over here to the starforge and let their jammer crash their entire fleet into this planet because the way that karth tells it we have to disable whatever's causing this phenomenon before the republic fleet gets there or the whole thing's just gonna crash and burn it just seems like such a wasted advantage to me in the meantime malik is converting bastila to the dark side the only way that he knows how by electrocuting her until she has mild to severe alzheimer's can't wait to see how darth basila looks so our objective is to disable the field get our ship working and try again this has me running into these natives which are technologically very primitive they have no idea what a computer is and refer to the force as magic they also claim that revan came here and made a deal with them to slay their enemies if they gave up knowledge on how to bypass the barrier into the main temple here evidently revan had no intention of fulfilling his end of the agreement and seems to have gotten the information he needed from their enemies instead these enemies are fewer in number more technologically advanced and a lot smarter than these guys here at least going off the information they've given me also i have a small starship on my face now well turns out that their enemies are simply more ricotta who have barred themselves off from the rest of their barbaric race the way that they tell it they were the so-called builders of the starforge and had a tremendous wealth of technological wisdom and control over the force they enslaved other races conquering most of the galaxy under the banner of the infinite empire before eventually becoming numb to the force when they found that their race had evolved to not being able to use the force anymore they had to revert back to more primitive technology before eventually cannibalizing and destroying themselves with weapons of mass destruction the priests who survived the assault in their temple came together and formed a new enclave to try and rebuild while straying from destructive technology they're utterly ashamed of the starforge and its capabilities and wanted revan to destroy it when they realized he used it for his own nefarious purposes they assumed that they would never see revan again well surprise here i am and i tell them that i basically want to destroy the star forge and need access to it which is literally the exact same thing that i told them that i wanted to do when i was all evil and [ __ ] they don't believe me of course and want me to prove that i've changed by rescuing one of their scouts from the barbaric tribe on the other side of the island what i don't understand is that i can't like activate the starforge again right it's already activated what harm is there in letting me go there again maybe i can crank this [ __ ] to 11 if i got back in alright so i can't like manipulate or talk my way into getting the prisoner out like i thought i could because these guys immediately go ah we saw that you went into that place that we can't possibly get into and then come back out we have no way of knowing if you killed the elders in there or not but we think that you haven't the video game logic is getting worse and worse man so yeah i find my way through all this [ __ ] free the prisoner and then hoof it back they tell me that i can enter the temple now with their help but that there are leftover sith forces from before in it so jumanji and jolie tag along to help me out and we bust on through this temple well here comes a large scale surprise it's bastila and she's evil dang here's some cliff notes hey guys it's me your good pal bastila i've been fried worse than a weekend at burning man so now i'm evil and i must end your life i am much more powerful than you for sure okay alright so i'm not that powerful but you man you sure are powerful why don't you come be powerful with me we can kill malik and i could be your apprentice [ __ ] will be so good the jedi order is really manipulative you know so let's just go be bad guys instead yeah i don't know i'm not feeling the whole join me on the dark side thing like i get a little more into it if my dialogue choices weren't no you have betrayed us please come back to the light or haha [ __ ] yeah dude let's go kill malik and rule the galaxy i just want like a solid logical in-between set of dialogue i want a neutral set because really i get the whole idea of the jedi order being super manipulative with how they present their tenants they really get on people for being anything other than emotionless drones and i'm not a huge fan but at the same time the relentless destructiveness of the dark side has historically repeated itself a few times in this game alone with the downfall of the sith under xr [ __ ] and then even further back with the entire plight of the rakata race cannibalizing itself but i'm left with these extreme dialogue options which tilt one way or the other and the whole thing winds up with bastilla becoming another generic sith apprentice who has about as much personality as any other one i guess i just don't care about her as much after speaking to a much more interestingly written character like jolie in my down time i throw the switches and disable the fields and all that jazz oh yeah and bastila just ran away and rejoined malik i assumed to add a solid three seconds to his boss encounter later so we make our way to the gigantic battle between the sith and the republic of course bastila's battle meditation is making it impossible for the republic to break through so only a very small force could infiltrate the starforge at this point that would be us and a few other random jedi fleets malik's hull plan is to basically stall us for time with wave after wave of droids sith troopers and dark jedi when we eventually push through all of that he offers up basila as the final stall for time here's how the battle goes this time you will not defeat me [Music] i see now when malik followed you it is you who are your doomed falters the light side is failing you while the power of the star this is not possible you have rejected the dark side you are a weak and pathetic servant of the light i could join you in your battle against the dark lord but how would you be able to trust me are you certain you wish to take this risk i could end your life and gain my luck's favor with a single stroke of my lightsaber the dark side has wholly consumed me and you will suffer for failing to see that i just i don't know bastille's cockiness really irritated me at first and then i started to grow fond of her but as time went on the relationship your character forms with her is very shallow it seems so deep because you have this bond that was formed through her saving you and she wants to keep you from the dark side and blah blah blah but it all seems very guided and purposefully tragic it irritates me even more when we had all of these dark side talks to keep me from going back to it at the beginning of the game they make more sense now but the existence of these talks only further exacerbates her arrogant hypocrisy when she falls to the dark side after all of that lecture i just got sick of her to me basila has an overpowered plot bending talent and an underpowered personality though for as let down as i was i do have to admit that the cutscene that follows when her battle meditation fails is actually pretty damn cool even if the graphics are obviously dated i just wish baslow would have followed me to fight malik and then maybe betrayed me afterwards or something though i do have to wonder what a dark side playthrough would look like at this stage in the next room i encounter malek who has two republic soldiers with him who he is currently choking the life out of i don't know how they made it this far either but apparently their sole purpose is to die in front of you malik then cackles his evil laugh and goes hey check out how cool the star forge is and then he seals me in this room this is by far the worst designed boss fight i have ever played in my entire life i've relied on mission to use all of the computers in the game except for in the temple on the rakatan planet when i used jon bon jovi so needless to say my computer use is zilch well i don't have any party members anymore they got frozen into another dimension by count bastila so my goal here is to use eight spikes on all six computers to get the machines to stop spawning except i have almost no spikes so i have to kill about 45 or so droids to gain these spikes i walked away from my pc to use the bathroom at one point during this fight unfortunately i don't keep attacking things that aren't right next to me so that didn't help this fight is just the worst when it's too easy it's a giant waste of time if it were much harder i would imagine this would be more of an unsatisfying nightmare slog of healing and injecting and saving new files it's just a horribly designed fight from head to toe well the room after this is well it's not a lot better i can almost hear the devs going well if you like that then you're gonna love this basically malik is a lot more powerful than before which is good but without a gimmick to keep him alive for more than 10 seconds the fight would be over in well 10 seconds so he unveils or rather points out that there are chambers of jedi which are in some kind of stasis tubes malik then claims that each of these jedi are basically dead but the starforge has kept their souls from passing on to the force i don't know how many there are i stopped counting after a while but sweet [ __ ] there's a lot you basically fight malik from full health over and over and over again for every single jedi tube that there is in this realm it's rough but honestly it's a little more enjoyable than the droid room since i actually did struggle a bit when all is said and done malik laments ever joining the dark side and wonders if his future would have been different if our roles had been reversed i looked down on him with my tiny spaceship face before leaving out to where karthus who tells me that we need to get the hell out of dodge before the republic fleet gives this place the old alderaan treatment you make your grand escape and get escorted back uh to the rakatan planet i guess they didn't want to design a new backdrop for this celebration it's all very star wars-y and you can guess how it goes just by looking at what's on screen knights of the old republic is it's hard to judge exactly because while i did have a lot of fun it's got so many flaws which could have been stamped out where the game redone in some way the game is good but it's in desperate need of some upkeep a remaster a patch something that might never happen because even with all of the fixes i applied the game has an 80 chance of not launching in 1920 by 1080 which isn't even a resolution in the game by default the other option is playing in some variant of 800x600 and i'd rather play with my monitor turned off instead my saves corrupted a few times causing me to have to redo entire areas my ui walks out sometimes causing the 800x600 version to display in addition to stripping the models of their texture layers the ai pathing can be absolutely atrocious as evidenced by members of my party getting stuck on objects and outside of the map sometimes oftentimes you receive a set of dialogue options and it doesn't feel like you picking a specific one gives you a specific answer back many times the options are i'm a good guy the force is good here's the neutral response and i'm a huge [ __ ] sith man watch out much of the dialogue in general tends to repeat itself quite a lot by the end of the game especially the whole light side versus dark side argument the combat is old and stale and clunky beyond belief and it feels ridiculous when you're trying to buff yourself mid-battle only for said buffs to last a solid 20 seconds and you taking a third of your health and damage while you apply them gimmicks like swoop races and starship battles are repetitive beyond belief and desperately need some kind of advancement to keep them interesting for as often as they're presented but the game isn't bad either not at all it's chock full of content and interesting lore there are tons and tons and tons of things that i didn't even mention specific nifty puzzles dialogue with all different party members and the stories they have to tell side quests that give you fun ideas to digest some of my favorite dialogue in the game stems from quizzing jolie on his pass and asking what he thinks about the jedi order and him going on about everyone thinking that the order is infallible and can do no wrong if i mentioned every little interesting conversation this video would easily have been twice as long i did it all for the wookies the wookies it's really what makes this game shine at all because without the intrigue garnered from the various random characters races and environments this would easily be one of those games that fell by the wayside and completely forgotten about there's a reason why knights of the old republic is so highly regarded in people's hearts and memories and even after i was happy to be done with the game part of me started to wonder how a dark side playthrough would turn out while i do think that a fair amount of nostalgia is necessary to fully appreciate the game and overlook some of its glaring issues it's still a fine game for someone new to pick up if they know what they're getting into i would absolutely love to see a remaster of both the first and second games i know it's somewhat unlikely but we've been in an age of remakes for quite a bit now and anything is possible thanks for watching i should have realized that this was a bioware game going in but holy [ __ ] that took a while i know that a few of you are going to want to see a knights of the old republic 2 at some point and i have no qualms about firing it up sometime but not for a bit i'm kind of uh star wars out at the moment so until then i have well i've got shirts now if you want to support me and wear a shirt with a thing on it i've got shirts with things on them from crowdmade you want a shirt one with a thing on it i got it so check that out if um you want a shirt with a thing on it anyways i have a twitch where i stream once in a blue moon i have a twitter where i tweet out my newest videos i have a discord where people chill out and shoot the [ __ ] in the meantime and i have a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,240,548

Keywords: Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic, KOTOR, Evaluation, Review, Bioware, Analysis, Jedi, Revan, Malak, Sith, Bastilla, Carth, Mission, Zaalbar, Jolee Bindo, Canderous, HK-47, Beep boop robot, Juhani, Dantooine, Tatooine, Kashyyyk, Clunky, Manaan, Korriban, Star Forge, Republic, Jedi Council, Order, Light side, Dark side, Mocha caramel side, The Force, Lightsaber, Yavin, Wookiee, What race is yoda btw, Idk much about Star Wars, SWOOP GANGS, SWOOP RACES, Ebon Hawk, Battle Meditation, Hakuna Rakata

Id: mDUEeGrgU4s

Length: 86min 58sec (5218 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Gerakion]

Hi all. Been here for a while (although on another account primarily), thought you might all enjoy this overview of KOTOR from this awesome youtube channel.

Salt's thing is covering large games in a comprehensive fashion rather than just summarizing, in particular western RPGs. This vid is from the perspective of a first time player and will probably be on the basic side for most people here. Still, it's interesting to see some old clunky systems pointed out that I just gloss over all the time, and Salt adds a lot of humor to the game. I think I'll always refer to Czerka as "Space Walmart" from here on out haha.