The BIG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Retrospective

originally this video was going to be about Knights of the Old Republic 2 the Sith Lords similar to New Vegas Kotor 2 is a sequel by obsidian working off the framework of another company what New Vegas was to Fallout 3 so too is the Sith Lords to Kotor one however unlike New Vegas the Sith Lords is more narratively tied to the events of the game preceding it an incredibly large amount of references are made to the events of the first game meaning it would be difficult to navigate around the storyline of the sequel with no context of what happened before for that reason I've opted to start with Knights of the Old Republic 1 by BioWare as an entry point that can be watched before checking out the planned future video focusing on the sequel personally Kotor was one of the first games to introduce Mead into tabletop style role-playing games both in general and within a video game format I've taken part in a limited amount of tabletops throughout my life sure but Kotor was the first for me and was what kind of drew me into tabletops as a whole it's simply a Star Wars role-playing game at a glance but a more in-depth look shows you a D20 system that's actually built off of the role-playing game developed by Wizards of the Coast best known for Dungeons and Dragons as well as magic the Gathering I was not someone accustomed to crpgs or games similar to said genre around kotor's release back in 2003 it was a new experience in a multitude of ways making it very alluring to someone that was both a fan of Star Wars and RPGs in general a game where you leveled up your classes gained skills attributes and Feats as well as being able to pause on the Fly for a better means of planning your next course of action while in battle I had never seen anything like this before the closest thing to it at the time was turn-based strategy games at least to my adolescent eyes I was a big fan of Final Fantasy and this was in a way the closest thing to a Star Wars game that would give me a similar experience Kotor has justifiably a bit of Legacy behind it it not only spawned a sequel game one I think is much better than its predecessor but it also spawned an MMO far into kotor's narrative future now I have my own feelings on said MMO but that's not really within the scope of this video what I'm trying to say is that I believe Kotor to be a fairly flawed experience overall looking back years later but one that was so revolutionary nonetheless that it managed to cement itself as one of the best Star Wars video game experiences of its time and hopefully I'll be able to Showcase that to you Knights of the Old Republic is a game created by BioWare best known for the series we are discussing today as well as Dragon Age and Mass Effect games that can be considered within a similar vein of Kotor all three of these series seem to share a large aspect of their design between one another especially when it comes to narrative progression and exploration and also especially when it comes to very mediocre karmic dials and dialogue BioWare is a company that at one point loved reality systems they were obsessed with them to the point that one of mass effect's biggest selling points was said morality system the ability to be a paragon or a renegade and how that would affect the overall storyline as well as your character's appearance and personality all of these systems would fit just as well within a Star Wars environment thanks to the already established concept of the light side and the dark side sure enough five years prior to Mass Effect the foundation for the exact same morality system was already created and implemented within a Star Wars setting morality plays a large part in Kotor due to it playing a large part within Star Wars but whether or not it was done well or ever has been done well by BioWare is something we'll explore a bit later that isn't to say that the role-playing mechanics are totally bad far from it there's so much to this game that I would consider revolutionary at the time the ability to kill your party members or have them turn against you and the ability to make various choices that will overall have a Rippling effect throughout your your journey leads to a truly Dynamic even if somewhat limited experience Kotor released between the film's attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith it even was potentially going to be a game that took place during the Clone Wars but BioWare opted for a game set 4 000 years in the past in order to have more creative freedom a choice I personally think was for the best especially since it led to some of my favorite Aesthetics within Star Wars while the game looks incredibly aged by today's standards at the time it was one of the most graphically impressive releases on the Xbox and PC which was one of the game's stronger selling points the Cinematic feel of the game that you experience while playing is intentional as Kotor was always meant to feel like one of the films and it was with this design Direction and the Incredible use of hardware at the time alongside very little pushback from LucasArts that led to one of the best Star Wars games ever made and you'll see some of that through the mechanics and storyline as we discuss them to be clear I am a fan of Star Wars sure but not a die-hard one I enjoyed the original films as a kid the prequels and several games they came out with in its lifetime but I am not the type to sit down on Wikipedia and read up on all the lore to buy the books to the comics and any other form of media as soon as it releases it's more accurate to even say that at this point I am a fan of coke tour more than I am a fan of Star Wars coltor is what wowed me showed me what I considered some of the best parts of Star Wars as a whole the best parts of role-playing games and allowed me to live within the world so going into this retrospective please keep that in mind this is about Kotor with respect to Star Wars how Kotor May relate to Star Wars is not necessarily the point rather I want to talk about the role-playing aspect the mechanics the design where things worked and where they failed I don't really care if it wasn't particularly good or bad as a Star Wars experience and care more about it as a video game Star Wars or not if you enjoy this content please consider liking commenting and subscribing as it helps me continue to make it with that out of the way I'm Super Rad and this is the Knights of the Old Republic retrospective before we begin I have to preface this video with a similar section I had in the New Vegas one like New Vegas Kotor and its sequel can be considered filled to the brim with the bugs and issues that can make the gameplay experience on Modern Hardware less than desirable for New Vegas it was very easy to install a few mods that added to the game's stability with Kotor and Kotor 2 it's not that simple as the Old Republic has a few Community patches you can install fairly easily this makes the game much more stable and you're less likely to see bugs in other various issues though they're still incredibly constant getting it to run on a 1440p monitor is a little more difficult and requires some finessing the game isn't designed for this resolution but it's arguably the better way to play it considering the type of monitor I am using and for the recording process UI elements have been adjusted for this resolution but cinematic fmvs have not meaning they will appear as they did originally albeit stretched potentially even more controversial may be the changes necessary to play through Kotor 2. one of the more comprehensive bug fixes for said entry is the Sith Lord restoration mod that not only fixes various issues but also restores a large amount of cut content generally speaking I like these retrospectives to focus on the game within a vanilla environment as much as possible or vanilla plus as I put it in the New Vegas video that's a bit more difficult with the Sith Lords as the history of the game's development led to a bit of a rushed release with content planned to be fully featured and added But ultimately removed for time so when we do reach the sequel we may be analyzing it from the lens of the restoration mod while also pointing out how it would have been on release generally speaking I do my best to talk about the game in a way where these mods don't have a large or significant impact on my opinion regarding the product however we know that some of these games have aged to a point where they have become a buggy mess there's no reason to painfully work through them in that state upon starting a new game you have the ability to create a new character now the character creation process isn't the most advanced out there even for 2003 after choosing to be a male or female you have a set of portraits and each portrait corresponds to a model that will represent your character there's no in-depth customization in terms of Cosmetics however there is a fair bit of customization when it comes to selecting your class followed by setting up your skills attributes and Feats in terms of classes there are three options to start with those being Scout scoundrel and Soldier each of these classes dictates some of your starting abilities and which abilities you will gain for free when leveling up this in turn changes how you'll play with the character scoundrel for example gets a large amount of stealth bonuses overall stealth attacks can be used for extra damage and activating a stealth attack can be done in a variety of ways for example I could stock up on concussion grenades in order to stun my enemies stun enemies take stealth attacks and therefore extra damage this is a valuable playstyle for scoundrels that can make playing them incredibly easy now in terms of overall play style it'd be disingenuous to say that your experience is going to be dramatically different based on which class you pick this isn't like Dragon's Dogma where choosing to play as a mage is a completely different experience to that of a fighter rather the classes are all very similar in overall design and differ based on which skills you are given for free on level up and thus dictate the play style in ways that may not even be relevant to a first-time player if you want the best experience or easiest experience Scout and scoundrel are probably your best options with Soldier being arguably the weaker option out of the three due to some of the abilities it gets that can kind of become obsolete later soldiers have the most health overall but Vitality in this game can become less important as you progress especially with the right force abilities and item Management on top of that there are class skills of which are cheaper to rank up are skills generally better off for party members as you can then focus on more important skills like persuade since your character is the only one who can perform persuasion checks within dialogue now that doesn't mean Soldier is a wrong choice at all you can make it work it arguably won't matter unless you have an actual class plan where you want to optimize as much as possible so on your first playthrough it really doesn't matter pick what sounds cool to you and try something new on subsequent playthroughs that's how games like this should work not every class is necessarily equal but that also doesn't matter this gets even more muddy as Jedi classes are introduced later on but we'll talk about that as it becomes introduced to us all you really need to know right now is that at one point early in the storyline your class swaps from your first selection to one of three Jedi classes and there's a maximum level total of 20 within Knights of the Old Republic that means if you hit Level 6 as a scoundrel you'll only have 14 levels left for your Jedi class this leads to some players opting to not level up at all they gain the experience but don't actually allocate anything upon meeting the level threshold this is a fine option if you want to take it as it allows you to optimize your Jedi class and get more abilities out of it but it is hardly necessary and potentially detrimental especially for new players not leveling up naturally makes the game harder and the intro sequence on Terrace is particularly combat heavy meaning you tend to need to learn a few tricks and optimizations to make it out of there with a large chunk of exp while not actually leveling up starting classes can also complement your Jedi class upgrade so it's not like you are truly losing out by leveling up your starting class take the game easy and invest in what you enjoy and through that you'll be rewarded after choosing your starting class you then have to choose your attributes these are your base character stats values that take your overall effectiveness in combat and outside of it you start with each of these attributes at their minimum level of eight and you are given 30 points to allocate into them each attribute costs one point to level up until you hit Level 15 which costs 2 points from then on and then three points at a level 17 onward it would cost me one point to level up to 14 2 points to 15 two points again n to 16 and then three points to 17. when playing the character will gain a new attribute point every fourth level leading to an additional Five Points overall however these Five Points won't be subject to the increased cost during character generation meaning that it'd be possible to take an attribute that you got to 18 at creation and boosted all the way to 23. although I imagine that is a bad idea this is due to the concept of modifiers the attribute doesn't matter too much it's used in a calculation to determine a modifier you take your attribute subtract 10 from it and divide it by 2 while rounding down this means an attribute of 8 gives you a modifier of negative one and an attribute of 9 does the same thing every two points extra into the attribute boosts the modifier by one these modifiers are then used in various roles or calculations to determine success failure or bonuses I won't go into great detail about every attribute strength is best known for melee weapon Effectiveness while Dex does the same thing for ranged weapons interestingly lightsabers will use the higher value of the two Constitution affects your health and fortitude and intelligence affects multiple things including skill points on level up and character generation meanwhile wisdom and Charisma are force-related attributes with Charisma being particularly important for the main character as it directly affects the persuasion skill speaking of skills these are further stats to allocate points into that are used within the game most of this skills are used for various non-combative checks computer use will allow you to hack into terminals while using less of the game's hacking currency computer spikes the higher the skill the less spikes you need meanwhile something like security has to roll a difficulty check for success and having a higher Security will add a modifier to said check for the main character I would generally say that the three most important skills are persuasion maybe treating injury and potentially awareness although the wisdom attribute gives a large awareness bonus anyway this is due to the player character being the only one who can persuade people and the party members being able to complete the other actions for you instead you don't have to hack that terminal T3 M4 could Hack That terminal Mission Viejo could disable that mine there's objectively better places to put your skill points overall since your party members can cover your weaknesses and you have unique abilities that they do not in this specific playthrough I opted to play as the scoundrel class and boosted my strength dexterity Constitution wisdom and Charisma evenly while leaving intelligence at the minimum since I know I'm not going to need that many skill points invested in my character allowing me to be stronger in other areas Feats are the final choice in character creation and are perks you can purchase periodically on level up depending on your class soldiers for example get a new feat almost every level up while a class like scoundrel gets them every two or so the maximum amount of Feats you can have by level 20 is dependent both on your starting class and what level you become a Jedi most of these perks are for helping you in combat or allowing you to wear new equipment and implants but not everything is like that big empathy which gives a skill bonus to persuasion or awareness and treat injury this is potentially a good feat for you if you still need to invest in Persuasion so you can pass certain dialogue checks not all of these Feats are passive either within the combat system of Kotor you can use default attacks automatically per turn but melee and ranged Fighters can invest in certain Feats that offer bonuses to crit rate amount of attacks or damage usually with some sort of detriment in return looking at critical streaks for melee users you can boost your critical threat at the cost of a negative 5 defense penalty meaning that there is a greater chance of you rolling a value that will perform critical damage flurry meanwhile grants you additional attacks in a single combat round making this attack best for stealth kills as all attacks within a combat round will gain a stealth damage bonus on eligible targets it should be pointed out that you don't have to go through all of this you can choose preset stats per class but I highly recommend choosing your own abilities and reading up a little bit on the system if you want to be truly effective you can get through the normal difficulty of Kotor fairly easily even with a nonsense build but if you want to learn to fight effectively and steamroll some enemies through strategy you need to do a little bit of research and reading additionally every level up allows you to auto level if you choose to which will allocate stats and points based off of your class this is also not recommended you're better off entering the level screen choosing the recommended button to see what they would place the stats in and deciding if that is right for you Kotor is one of those RPGs with a lot of depth under the hood that many players probably won't end up perceiving it's one of the things that I love about it it's a way of Designing a battle system that can be played from a high level where you know barely anything about it and still have a fun and fulfilling time then every time you go back to the game and try again you know more about the system and can gradually become more and more versed within its mechanics you learn to be more effective overall but you don't have to be meaning this game is more accessible to all audiences upon exiting the Character Creator you're met with your first FMV cut scene which includes the traditional Star Wars text crawl to establish this setting the game is working with that being the world of Star Wars set 4 000 years before the events of the films the biggest takeaway from the text crawl is that the Sith Armada is run by a Seth Lord known as Darth Malik who is the last surviving Apprentice of Darth Revan both Revan and Malik are incredibly important figures within the storyline of Knights of the Old Republic's first game with Revan having a Rippling effect into the game's sequel while Malik acts as the first game's main antagonist it should be pointed out that this retrospective will go in depth into the storyline as it is presented to us so take this as your one and only spoiler warning I think I might have put one more in I'm not sure Kotor takes place during a time of Sith domination the Republican Jedi exists as opposition to them but have been left mostly weakened and Scattered which has in turn allowed the Sith to impose their will on various planets found within the Galaxy including Terrace where we'll be spending the majority of our early game time and I really do mean a majority above Terrace a Jedi Fleet aboard the endar Spire is currently in combat with dark Malek's forces after being ambushed your character awakens from a dream during the beginning of this attack as Sith forces begin to board the Spire trass olgo a member of the Republic feat enters your room to gain your assistance Trask acts as a bit of a tutorial character designed as a temporary party member who will help you learn the basics of equipment and kotor's battle system you can ask him various questions about what's going on but ultimately it boils down to fighting off the Sith reaching a set of Escape pods and ultimately saving bastila a powerful Jedi who is important to the Republic due to her unique ability known as battle meditation it's around this time that Trask will discuss your history with the Republic the storyline given is based on your starting class as we are a scoundrel Trask mentions how we used to smuggle spice and blasters along the corellian run and the Republic apparently hired us for our talents rather than locking us up for committing illegal activities each of the classes has a different reason for being on the spire and working for the Republic and none of them are particularly well explained but this is on purpose for greater reveals later down the line your character's storyline must be left ambiguous for both storyline purposes and as a means of making role-playing said character easier as I touched on in the New Vegas video and I am unfortunately going to be mentioning the New Vegas video a lot it is a generally easier for an individual to insert themselves into the player character when there is less known history to work with that being said Kotor like New Vegas fills up that history later on down the line which leads to a similar hiccup of potentially retconning your established headcanon for the sake of a big narrative payoff on bioware's end obviously I'm against this I was against this in New Vegas and this is no different now that being said the payoff I am talking about is almost historical in how impactful it was Dakota as a whole though it leads to issues I just mentioned it manages to pay off due the point that the overall reveal and history of your character is a net positive in terms of a role-playing experience so look forward to that if you've never played the game before you should you should probably play this game at least once before watching this video but I'm not judging you before you can go anywhere tasks you with finding your clothes which in turn allows you to access the equipment menu within the equipment screen there are nine slots the most important are both your armor slots as well as your main hand and offhand for equipment within the watsi Star Wars system it is possible for characters to use one-handed or two-handed weapons using one-handed weapons allows the player to dual wield at a penalty that can be mitigated by investing into weapon fighting Feats of which there are three and we will be investing in this either to do wield later on down the line or to use double-bladed lightsabers in fact no matter which playstyle you choose whether it be ranged melee two-handed two weapon and so on you will need to make certain investments into specific Feats in order to get the most out of your character you could dual wield at any time but if you don't invest into the right Feats for it you'll be left at a disadvantage when fighting enemies of a similar level to yourself the freedom of leveling and Feats is there for you but you are encouraged to take a few necessary paths along the way for dual wielding specifically you have a main hand where your weapon will be the most effective generally meaning you want to equip your best melee weapons to set hand and then complement it with a weapon in your off hand especially weapons that have offhand bonuses in their stats or are made to be offhand like shorter lightsabers most other pieces of equipment are specifically for stat raising things like headpieces gloves implants and belts implants specifically need Feats in order to be worn and they come in three levels the higher the level the higher the necessary you feat to wear it belts also can contain additional functionality that being a stealth generator which is a necessary piece of equipment in order to use the game's stealth mechanic stealth is a little finicky in this game by activating your stealth field you enter solo mode meaning you move without your Hardy members who are usually right beside or behind you this allows you to bypass enemies or get close enough to enter a combat phase that will lead to a stealth attack if they haven't spotted you in that sense it is possible for scoundrels to Ambush enemies before calling the rest of your party back to your side to commence battle it's not the most intuitive system in terms of activating it or mechanics but it at the very least makes sense if your party members aren't skilled at stealth or especially if they don't have a field it doesn't make sense to have them follow alongside you while you are trying to sneak by someone take the last of us which opted to have party members simply not be observed by the enemy AI while you're skulking around I don't have any strong opinions on said design choice either this way or that but it helps to show the contrast between Naughty Dogs decisions for stealth and biowares with bioware's decision fitting better overall in a role-playing environment finally there are also Shields that can be equipped to either armed slawed on every character that isn't a Droid droids get their own Shield mechanic but it's functions virtually the same Shields are explained better on Terrace but they essentially allow you to deflect most energy damage and sometimes melee damage temporarily and with limited usage different more advanced Shields can deflect various other forms of energy damage as well but most cannot block simple melee attacks from weapons such as viral blades once you're equipped Trask will join your party proper and offer a small tutorial in character swapping you can always have a party of a maximum of three people and while on the field you can swap between controlling any of them at any given time this comes with several uses for one it allows you to better control the flow of battle and make sure every member is doing exactly what you want them to this is bolstered by the fact that you can pause the game mid-combat to get a better perception of the battle at hand while still giving out orders additionally characters other than your main can be used to perform various actions that your custom character may not be Adept at Trask here has override codes for the door you cannot open the door so you need to switch to controlling Trask and have him interact with said door in order to input the codes then you can simply swap back to your main character and continue pressing forward what next transpires is a set of battles that are designed to teach you various aspects of the combat system these are both somewhat explained by Trask while also having the option of the game shooting you some tutorial messages as new mechanics make themselves known it's not the most eloquent tutorial out there but it gets the job done without an overly large amount of text preventing you from getting into the action and for a game centered around the rules of a tabletop RPG you know that's a blessing if anything Kotor has a large amount of mechanics many of which you may not even realize on your first run through and as you gain experience with the game and learn more and more ways to prepare and optimize battles you'll slowly begin to appreciate all the tabletop has to offer without being forced to make use of it you should at the very least read through the tutorial messages once though you not only learn the ins and outs of basic combat but how to better make use of items within battle as well grenades are a particularly useful resource within the early game and there are various types of grenades that are better for different situations concussion grenades can stun enemies leaving them open to stealth attacks and there's also types that are better overall against droids versus Humans you have a lot of options the biggest trap overall is potentially the lack of explanation that comes with special attacks generally ranged in melee characters will have three specific special attacks in the form of Feats and while these may seem like they are more useful than your default attack overall you can look a bit further into them to see that these abilities are a bit more beneficial within specific circumstances I've mentioned it already but the Critical Strike ability is great for helping with criticals but at the same time it bestows a large defense penalty onto your character leaving you particularly vulnerable to attacks after the fact in that sense critical streak is best used when you want to get like a killing blow on an enemy rather than when you're fighting like five different dudes this isn't a law that you need to follow realistically on normal difficulty you could spam your active Feats whenever you want and probably get through the game just fine but you will notice a distinct boost in damage and Effectiveness if you read up on your feets and learn when to properly use them it's nice for a game to have normal mode as a means of allowing players to get introduced to the mechanics overall then players can switch to the harder difficulty later once they understand the game better and feel rewarded for optimizing properly as you continue through this fire you'll have communications with cartho Nasi a republic pilot and one of the only surviving members on the ship with you Kurth is your first true party member meaning that Trask is going to meet his untimely demise shortly as he sacrifices himself to hold off a dark Jedi allowing you to continue towards karth and the Escape pods other than acting as a tutorial there isn't much else to the Spire as reach Kurth there's only one pod left with bastilla having already escaped onto the planet of Terrace below you have the option of following cards onto the last pod but you won't be able to come back to the Spy ear and this brings up a good point about exploration and Kotor for the most part areas within Kotor go from linear to linear but slightly more open there's a fog of War around the map and this helps you know which areas you walked through already and which you haven't generally speaking you will most likely want to do sweeps of every area you visit until you've made the entire map visible by doing so you will manage to find every interactable object and storage chest within an area which helps you keep stocked up on gear and items some of which can be considered highly useful even early on computer spikes and their repair equivalent are also items you'll want to keep stocked up on as it helps progressing through new areas especially enemy locations much easier all of this to say that if you haven't explored every nook and cranny you should back away from the pods and consider doing so the game is designed to facilitate you looking around everywhere as your pod escapes the Spire with karth the two of you manage to crash land on Terrace which knocks you unconscious Terrace is a planet that is completely covered in one giant City above ground this leads to a capitalist hierarchy where the rich human Nobles live on the upper levels while aliens and Criminal animals live in the lower City there's also an under city which is basically hell on Earth for the people of Terrace and where most convicted criminals get sent to spend the rest of their days but we'll see more of that location when we get to it you may have heard me say human Nobles specifically and yes many of the people on Terrace are speciesist or basically just racist many humans see themselves as above other alien species and since there is such an abundance of humans many of whom are in powerful roles this allows for the oppression of said aliens it's a classic parallel of real world racism and power structures not only does terrorists act as a demonstration of capitalist problems in greed it also is facilitated by the Seth who now rule over it and seem to care a little about the injustices people face or any criminal activity as long as it doesn't affect their forces specifically the Sith are oppressors and they have taken over an already oppressive Planet allowing it to be pushed even further into this lifestyle and and ideology due to this many alien species on terrorists and humans who are not as well off often suffer at the hands of those in power whether they be the rich or the Sith Landing in the upper city of Terrace karth manages to drag you from the Escape pods to a nearby abandoned Apartment where you are given the opportunity to rest during this you have a vision of Bastille in combat with a dark Jedi these Visions are important both for your connection with bastila and also helping establish your past as a character but there isn't much to say on them now until you meet up with bastila again and that won't be for some time in fact teres is probably the planet you spend the absolute most time on in comparison to any other location within Kotor to the point it's kind of a meme to those that have played the game multiple times Terrace is in a way an extension of the tutorial on the endar Spire a way of getting you accustomed to various mechanics you'll be presented with on your journey but these mechanics are presented to you within a four to seven hour gameplay segment depending on whether or not you are reading and listening to all of the dialogue along the way Terrace is very very long there's a lot to do there and there's plenty of experience to gain in order to level up before leaving we'll be exploring a lot of these features as we go but I want to make it clear that I think Terrace is one of the game's biggest detriments in terms of replayability though not necessarily for first time players from a first-time player's perspective Terrace is huge and fairly open within its exploration there's so much to do in order to both introduce you to mechanics but also to the world and culture of Star Wars in general it's a good first time experience but due to it being so long and dragging on you may not feel up to playing the game again due to how much of Terrace there is before you get the ability to actually explore the Galaxy in my opinion the exploration aspect of kodor is one of its greatest features and once you experience it it's hard to go back to the filter that is Terrace there's a reason Terrace is like this and it's not just because of how much needs to be introduced to a lot of what Terry shows off could have been shown on separate planets the reason Terrace is so long and there's so much to do here is because the developers wanted to help you build a relationship with the location and the building of said relationship the comfort of a home area you were used to will have a bigger payoff later on as you escape the sethar Mata that has the planet on lockdown that's a big aspect of the current climate within Terrace nobody can currently leave due to the Sith Armada in the skies above shooting anybody down that doesn't have authorization this is due to them still hunting down bastila who has crash landed on the planet much like you and karth once you awaken within the apartment karth explains that he dragged you there and you can discuss the current situation with him to learn a little backstory about the Sith Armada Darth Revan and Malik used to be Jedi who went off to take part in an event known as the Mandalorian Wars it was after the events of this war that Revan and Malik were turned to the dark side and in turn established their own Empire this led to a conflict between their empire and the Republic known as the Jedi civil war and ultimately led to the known death of Revan at the hands of Bastille Sean Malik meanwhile continues to live and continues his attempts to exert his will on the people of the Republic what makes basilis so important to be found is not only the fact that she is a Jedi considered to be capable of defeating a Sith Lord but the fact that she has a unique ability known as battle meditation battle meditation has the ability to influence entire armies both through inspiring allies and causing the opposition to lose the will to fight it's an incredibly powerful ability but one that takes time and preparation to use effectively meaning that an ambush like the one on the endar Spire is enough to prevent basila from properly using her ability to turn the tides against the Sith while on Terrace the apartment acts as your main Hub where you can find and Converse with all of your party members and manage your inventory and upgrades this is a BioWare staple sure plenty of games have Hub areas but a consistent theme and design began to form with BioWare games where you would periodically return to a Hub location during your travels in order to have long stretches of dialogue with your various teammates in Kotor it's the apartment and later the Eben hawk in Dragon Age It's the Campsite in Mass Effect it's the Normandy BioWare loves making various areas like this that are generally used both as a means of conversing and as a central point to move on within your travels what better place to talk to your party members than the ship that will be transporting you from planet to planet there's plenty of interactions within Terrace and many of the other planets as you explore and I don't plan on addressing them all an example appears immediately after exiting the apartment while two aliens are being interrogated by Sith Troopers who ultimately kill one of them for no other reason than that they could they said they're clearly painted as evil throughout the entirety of the storyline but comically so while it's fine to have a clear distinction between a good faction and an evil one there is little to no room left for nuance on either side the Sith are mustache trolling in their evil it feels like they tie you to a set of train tracks if they could and this in turn leads to a group of rather boring antagonists every single Sith soldier kills when talked back to bullies anyone in their way and never questions if what they are doing is right or wrong no one feels like they are part of the Sith through the direct result of Sith oppression through fear of pain death or retaliation from Malik rather every Sith trooper seems to just Revel in the acts that they take part in with no thought otherwise the Jedi aren't much better in this entry either since the dark side is so obviously evil in Kotor the light side in turn is incredibly righteous there is some commentary on the acts of the Jedi and how their code May differ from you know human moral value and ethics but not to the level of say Kotor 2 or even a game like New Vegas it's not necessarily A Bad Thing Star Wars has consistently been a series for children it looks to discuss the concepts of good actions versus bad ones what made you a righteous individual and what makes you an evil one but the look is so surface level that it mostly just comes off as comedic without actual really saying anything other than killing people is bad while briefly touching on the greater issues of human greed and Prejudice this is accentuated in just how incredibly awful a large portion of the dialogue tends to be lore dumps and conversations of the history of the world generally come off as fairly well written there is actual effort put into making the character sound like real people talking about their experiences and values this is especially true in the conversations between your party members and yourself although not on your end instead your character has two options in terms of conversing you can be either incredibly naively righteous in your dialogue or you can be one of the most dastardly evil individuals you'll probably ever meet again it's comical and pulls you out of the character so strongly that people have actively made mods to change how the dialogue reads so that you come off as a real human being and not simply a cartoon character at the very least some of the dialogue choices can come off as inquisitive or somewhat grounded but other than that you get scenes where you're either acting like a superhero or randomly warning an alien to stay out of your way before you kill them too like I said though I'm not going to bother going into details of every interaction you have on Terrace or any other planet there are some interesting ones however such as the ability to talk to a local doctor and break into his back room to find that he has been helping injured Republic soldiers zelka can't do anything for these men due to their injuries being so severe other than helping them die comfortably you can threaten to rat him out or allow him the knowledge that you are of the Republic as well a lot of conversation options will bestow light side or dark side points onto your character whether you are further on the light side or dark side will also affect your overall appearance most noticeably in your character portrait that's not all your alignment will lock you out of certain equipment such as dark side equipment like tulac horns mask additionally certain force abilities are inherently light or dark and will cost more to use based on how far our Ur along the opposing alignment zelka here has another matter to discuss with us that being the procurement of rock ghoul serum a medication that halts the mutation of an individual into a rack ghoul due to the pollution found within the undercity racquels are demonic freakish-looking creatures whose bite can infect other individuals and rapidly begin to mutate them as well the serum is generally in the hands of Sith Troopers traversing the undercity and you can suggest to zelka that you'll grab a vial for him but he quickly shoots down this idea out of fear that the Sith will think he is asking you to kill them for it regardless we can return to him with the sample later on to finish this Quest and use the serum to help a few other individuals nearby on the upper levels of Terrace is a Cantina and within you can take part in a few side activities One exclusive to Terrace is the arena where you can sign up to take part in various fights to move up the rankings and eventually take on the champion and then further a death match against a retired Mandalorian by the name of bendak's Starkiller the first thing I want to say is this every RPG should have an arena always have an arena there's something immensely gratifying about having a system designed around testing your abilities of your character while also rewarding them with items until they ultimately reach Champion status Oblivion and Kotor both do well in making sure people notice these advancements generally people you beat will comment on the fight and maybe even gain extra respect for you as you beat tougher and tougher opponents fans will notice you and comment on how they love watching you fight the only other game I can think of that did Arenas as well as those two is probably the boxing side quest in Fallout 2 where completing it makes you a well-known individual through the entirety of new Reno yes I finally played Fallout 2. I did it I played Fallout 1 and 2 finally all of the Arena fights in Kotor are done with suppressor Fields meaning no one dies in the process it used to be death matches but they were outlawed leading to bendak's retirement since he found the game's less interesting with the change the Cantina is also where you get your first introduction into kotor's card game again every RPG should have one of these card games and Arena side quests 10 out of 10 content pasik could be considered a more competitive and fair version of blackjack maybe I I don't know if I would say more fair it's more competitive though it's a two-player game you versus another player which is what two-player means why did I write it like that and you each get to make a side deck of exactly 10 cards these cards can be an arrangement of various values from one to six and either positive negative or a card that can be either or based on player choice there's a main deck during the game that doesn't have a limit to the amount of cards in it but generally there would be four of each number and said numbers would range from 1 to 10. so what's the point of the game exactly each player must construct their side deck with cards of various values that they believe will help them in the match cards that can be considered positive or negative at the same time are of course the most powerful because of their ability to cover multiple bases then at the start of the game each player is randomly assigned four of their 10 side deck cards and these are hidden from the opponent then a round starts and a card from the main deck is drawn and placed in the first player's playing area thus starting their overall value if Player 1 draws a 5 they now have a total value of 5 with the goal of a game being to have a higher value than your opponent without going over 20. the side deck comes into play by allowing you to get as close to 20 as possible on your turn after the draw phase let's say you get a score of 25 you could play a negative 5 value card from your side deck to bring that value to 20 and prevent the bust similarly if you had an 18 total and a plus two side Deck card you could boost your way to 20 as well the idea is that throughout the rounds you need to conserve your cards as much as possible leading to an element of luck as you try to hit 20 while using little to no side deck cards to do it your opponent then Works within the same rule set if they run out of side deck cards they are stuck hoping that they win through the will of the main deck a player needs to win three times total draws do not count as wins and you get nothing back for a draw the game keeps going pasig is fun side content it gives you multiple NPCs to interact with and play against while making some money on the side it also gives you the goal of collecting various cards from crates and Merchants along your journey incentivizing exploration the unfortunate part about it is how easy it is double-sided cards are simply too powerful to not use from my understanding and experience why would you want plus cards or minus cards in your deck when you could simply play something that covers both scenarios essentially doubling your chances to win I doubt it's actually doubling your chances though statistical probability is a little more complicated than that but it does give you a statistical Advantage overall along your exploration of Terrace you can run into multiple individuals who have bounties on their head by Zacks the Hut who runs the Bounty office generally these have light side and dark side options where you either collect the reward by killing the individual or you let them go but some will actually allow you to fake the death of the individual or get the Bounty dropped entirely however there's two bounties where the individuals must be killed those being Selvin and bendak Selvin is another assassin and will basically attack you after a long enough conversation bendak is more involved as I mentioned he's the true champion of the Arena death matches before they were outlawed in order to fight and kill him you need to become Champion yourself and then schedule an illegal Arena match so that the two of you can face off this actually leads to Dark Side points no matter what you do and I'd say understandably so there's no actual reason for you to have to participate and kill bendak outside of Fame glory and money things that generally air on the specific side of the force there's no righteousness or Justice here exploring the upper levels of Terrace is fine but basila's Escape pod isn't here that means you and karth need access into the lower levels of terrorists but these are locked off by The Sith luckily there's a group of Sith you can take out in order to get a temporary set of their armor and wearing it will allow you to slip by The Sith Troopers who are guarding the door to the lower City alternatively you can get invited to a party where all of the individuals there get so drunk they pass out allowing you to take a set for yourself a lot of options of progression in this game have multiple Avenues you could take to get to your goal it's one of the aspects of an RPG that can make it stronger than its competitors while Kotor doesn't necessarily go out of its way to do this all of the time there's still various Avenues you can take on your journey that may make your adventure different from someone else there's plenty of hidden encounters and dialogue to be had with people as well we won't see it on this playthrough but there is a Sith Twilight you can convince to return to the light side and if you do this early on within koroban you can return to adapt to wean in order to converse with her considering the most popular planetary Canon playroot of the game this is most likely a conversation many Miss and may have never heard of at a glance Kotor may not seem like it has much in terms of Divergence but under the hood and with some experimenting you can find pieces of dialogue and interactions throughout the game that many have yet to experience that I have yet to experience I've played this game for over a decade now and I'm still learning more about it especially now that I'm making this retrospective in my eyes that is the make of a fantastic RPG something New Vegas was also particularly strong at the Sith armor can be used for various unique dialogues around terrorists shopkeepers will feel intimidated while talking to you for example once in the lower City a cutscene will play out between the black valkers and the hidden backs two gangs that are competing for territory within the undercity the Volker are the only real hostile ones however as their leader has been replaced by a member of the becks who betrayed his previous gang to take over the volkers after his scene of watching the volkers absolutely decimate The Backs you'll be forced into a confrontation with them before gaining the ability to explore the undercity is similar to the upper City in a lot of ways it has apartment complexes to explore as well as its own Cantina off to the right of the lower City entrance is the volcker base but you can't enter it at this time instead the Cantina is most likely to be your next stop as a cutscene plays out which introduces the player to candorus Ordo who is used as muscle to intimidate a few gang members into paying their dues to davik Kang you'll hear David's name a lot during terrorists he's the local crime Lord on Terrace and a member of The Exchange a large crime organization that focuses on the development of spices and the smuggling of illegal Contraband candorus here is one of our party members but we won't have him joining us for some time he's one of the few Dark Side alignment party members as well throughout your journey with your various party members they will often take the time to comment on your actions in the given situation Darkseid characters will applaud Dark Side activities while late Side characters will expect you to be more righteous sometimes even intervening with your actions on top of these one-off lines and interactions your party members will often have a lot to converse with you about but not all at once Kurth as our first party member will often show signs of wanting to have a conversation with you these aren't always brought to your attention but generally are and allow you to discuss a bit of the character's backstory while learning more about them and their views on you specifically Kurth is suspicious of you you're a talented fighter with the ability to speak countless alien languages but you're also not a member of the Republic forces so why exactly were you on the end our Aspire Trask gave us a reason but it didn't make a terrible amount of sense nor did he go into great detail about it there's questions surrounding you and kartha's right to ask him but even then he is still overly suspicious of you and you get to explore why that is during your journey around Terrace if you choose to Kurt isn't someone that trusts easily this is in part due to what he sees as Revan and Malik's betrayal not only to the Jedi Order but even more so to The Republic what really great on him however is the Republic soldiers that joined up with them specifically one individual people karth may have considered friends there is more to it than this and we'll discuss it more as he expresses himself within this specific playthrough entering into the Cantina is your first introduction to the Bounty Hunter Kalo Nord Kayla is an established Bounty Hunter who works for David Kang he's so sure of himself that he refuses to talk to anyone that approaches him instead counting to three until they leave if they don't leave on three he proceeds to kill them in short work you can attempt to talk to him after this and he gives you the same treatment if you try to converse with him too much he'll ultimately smoke you leading to a game over this is also where you can meet Mission Viejo and zalbar for the first time Mission and zalbar are two additional party members you will recruit before leaving Terrace but like candorus this is more so their introduction rather than the point where they actually join you mission is being harassed by a few patrons and zalbar is tasked by mission to intimidate them which he reluctantly does after his meal is delivered to him Mission and zalbar are friends they have been friends for quite some time and they look after each other with Mission being the brains and zalbar being the brawn Mission at the current age of 14 also has a complex surrounding her age and being perceived as a child and this will be brought up constantly as she looks to prove herself to her fellow party members and be perceived with the the respect she believes she deserves she also has her own set of problems as well while we don't get much out of her during our time on Terrace you can have her explain a bit of her past including her brother Griff who seems to have left Mission behind on Terrace to leave with his girlfriend another Twilight by the name of Lena who Mission holds a great resentment for the Cantina is also where you pick up the Bounty quests I mentioned earlier and while not particularly important there is a side quest where you have to help a Twilight dancer get hired by dancing with her and it's some of the roughest choreography you've probably ever seen it's learned on your journey that the volkers were the first to find Bastille's Escape pod and scavenge it meaning they are most likely the ones with her in their possession in fact the valkers are planning on giving her away as a prize slash slave in this year's swoop Race Championship what's swoop racing it's like F1 straights the goal is to see who can go from point A to B on a straight line as fast as possible with the inclusion of booster ads and debris to add to the challenge it's its own Mini-Game and something you'll need to take part in in order to free her but the question is how can you make that happen the answer is the hidden backs not just anyone can enter the races but the becks can have a representative of theirs enter and that representative could be you you just have to meet with the backs to make it happen cat in Tech is the leader of the Bex it takes a bit of convincing to be let into their base due to the conflict with volkers but it's not particularly difficult to reason your way inside gaten's a blind man and one of reputable values he runs a swoop gang sure but the gang is designed around helping those in need within the lower City Garden is willing to hear you out and through negotiation you come to the arrangement that they will help you with getting to the swoop races in return for you helping them with the situation involving the valkers the hidden backs have designed a prototype swoop engine that is guaranteed to be faster than anything else in the championship but that engine has been stolen and taken to the volcker base if you return it to the backs they'll agree to help you but you can't just go through the front entrance as it is locked instead guidance suggests checking out the undercity where Mission and zalbar like to hang out and scavenge getting into the undercity is similar to the lower City you need specific security papers to do so and gadden is willing to trade you the papers for the Sith uniforms you acquired earlier the papers will also retroactively give you authorization to enter the lower City meaning the uniforms are now obsolete anyway so it's pretty much a good deal as you take the elevator down into the undercity you are met with a landscape of what I would consider a personal hell world all of Terrace is covered in a lifted cityscape similar to something like midgard in Final Fantasy VII within this area there is no sunlight and all of the individuals down here live in filth and fear at the hands of the Rat ghouls it's impossible for the people to push into the lower City due to the government before the Sith showed up and now the Sith keeping it locked off meaning there has never been anywhere for the individuals down there to go effectively leaving them stuck to live in the desolate land their Community is gated off to prevent rackles from getting in and they even have a prison set up for those that get infected so that when they do change they won't be able to infect anyone else it's a horrible way to live and with the imposing forces of the Sith and of the systems of power in place there's nothing for these people to do but suffer there is one man by the name of rukil who believes in the promised land a similar situation to that of Jason Bright's quest in Fallout New Vegas I told you I was going to be mentioning New Vegas a lot you should watch you should watch that video however it turns out that the promised land here does exist and rukil would like you to find several journal entries that will allow him to convince the others into making a pilgrimage to the location Beware by doing so the community will pack up and leave removing the ability to complete certain side quests and use the merchants if you haven't already what's more important currently is finding Mission and zalbar who have trekked outside of the gated community and into the more dangerous areas surrounded by raccools as you approach the gate the gatekeeper will refuse to open the door as a man by the name of pandari is being chased by a group of raccoons you can go out and help and in turn save hendar while also allowing you the ability to Traverse freely you can probably also leave him to die and gain Dark Side points but I'm not going to spend all the time in this retrospective explaining every light side in Dark Side action as you exit into the undercity proper Mission will run up to you begging for help due to zalbar being captured by a gang of gamorians that I believe are looking to sell him off into slavery the way to the volcker base is somewhere within the sewers of the undercity coincidentally the sewers are where zelbar is as well and Mission happens to know the codes that will get you into the base everything lines up into having Mission join your party on the agreement that you'll help her save zalabar before going to the base before the sewers however it's good to explore the current location a bit in order to find a few key interactions one of which is you running into candorus again candorus was sent to check out the Republic pod that fell down here with a set of rookie soldiers most of whom have died to the raccools while conversing with him you'll be attacked and kandaris will lose more men before heading back to the surface near the Escape pod you can find a wounded public soldier who was on the verge of mutating into a rat ghoul you can technically save him if you have the serum on hand I I didn't display through but he'll end up dying anyway to the hands of other raccoons in the area the serum itself is found on the corpse of an attacked Sith trooper by bringing the serum to zelka he can generate a supply of it that will help the people of the undercity there's even a group of prisoners in the undercity you can use the serum on in order to save them while gaining some light side points once in the sewers proper it's your typical dungeon crawling Affair you'll find plenty of gamorians and racquels to fight along the way to zalbar who's locked up further in the sewer system once save zabar will commit a life debt to you a ritual in which a Wookie will swear their life to the one who saved them even if it means sacrificing themselves at some point in the future zalabar swearing a life debt to you means he will always be by your side and essentially do anything you ask of him since salbar has sworn this debt to you he will join your party and since Mission goes where zalbar goes she'll stick around for the rest of the adventure as well all that's left now is heading into the volcker base via the back rooms of the sewers but to get there you have to get past a giant Rancor a kind of iconic creature within the series by this point I believe you can fight it head-on but the easier and expected way of taking care of it is via a pile of corpses nearby where you can stick a grenade alongside some concoction that smells like food for the rancor causing it to explode internally within you'll come into confrontation with a man named Camden who stole the engine for the volcker leader brezzik Canon will point out that you aren't wearing hidden back colors and ask if you would work for them instead which would in turn have you race for them as well the Big Choice here is who you will work for the Light Side option is that you side with the backs while the dark side option would be siding with the valkers regardless of who you side with the conclusion is relatively the same so we'll stick with the backs here as it is canonically a light side run by killing Cannon and returning with the engine you'll be entering in the swoop Race For The Backs although an amateur gadden sees potential in you and believes you can win the entire thing the mini game itself is pretty straight straightforward you accelerate constantly in a straight line while shifting gears as is required you can increase your speed drastically by hitting boosters and dodging debris by doing this optimally it is incredibly easy to get the best time overall within the race swoop racing becomes a recurring minigame in your travels but here it is mandatory to win thus making the times necessary to beat incredibly trivial the tournament is a set of Heats meaning everyone gets 5 attempts to lock in their best times by having an incredible time you can easily beat everyone alternatively you can simply get an alright time only for it to be beaten later meaning you'll have to perform at least one other attempt once you win the swoop race you'll be awarded Bastille as your prize but brejcik will show up and accuse you of cheating by using a prototype engine which one isn't cheating and two is exactly what he tried to do by stealing it from the hidden backs he's even called out on this by the organizers until brezzek has a tantrum and attacks you giving Bastille the opportunity to escape and assist in defeating the aggressors what follows is another example of poor dial log within Kotor after managing to make it to bastila you are given a set of some pretty abysmal dialogue choices two of the choices reference saving Masala while another is a cartoonishly nefarious example of dark side dialogue I mentioned previously in which your character can claim that they own her now if you don't want to claim to be the one who saved bastila as she had basically just saved herself you can choose the it's the long story options but lo and behold you then get thrust into two dialogue choices both of which force you to state that you were the one who saved her which in turn forces you into an argument with her about who really saved who and who needed saving to begin with there's no way of dodging this confrontation or a means of having your character act with a bit of humbleness or Grace you're forced to sort of buffoon your way through a large portion of the game's dialogue and this will in turn come up time and time again the game even continually offers options of you mentioning how you saved bastila though there do become outs that do not require you to say as such once you leave with vasila you'll have another Vision within your apartment this time it's basila fighting Darth Revan who ends up being killed by a blast from outside the space vessel they're in Kurth is happy to see basil alive but she's upset that they don't already have a plan to get off the planet these are some of the inter-party conflicts that begin to show themselves throughout the journey karth and Bastille have a hard time getting along due to basila's perceived strict nature and how she's quick to question or judge the actions of her peers karth meanwhile holds respect Above All Else and feels insulted when basila doesn't give what he believes he deserves Mission has issues with being perceived as a child and gets into fights with karth and basila on the subject even to a point where Bastille shows she can be somewhat childish herself when goaded into it all of this to say that things are fairly tense between everyone and they'll continue to be for some time you're all working together but no one is truly immediately friendly with one another at least not yet unless you count Mission and zelbar basila's brashness comes from responsibility the gift of battle meditation patient puts her in a position of power which brings a responsibility to keep her fellow Jedi safe this gives her a sense of worth and in turn makes her wish to prove herself to her peers including the Jedi Council but this also leads to issues in terms of how she presents herself to the party often keeping her distance in terms of building relationships you're a bit of an exception to this at the start Bastille can sense the force in you and a fairly powerful amount at that you can mention your Visions to her and she'll point out that they are a byproduct of force sensitivity and she'd like you to gain the guidance of the council once off Terrace the question is then how will you get off Terrace that's where candorus comes in an individual will inform you that candorus wishes to speak to you in the upper City Cantina while visiting him he will mention how working for David isn't all that it's cracked up to be in he wants to get off the planet before the Sith do anything drastic in order to do so you need to get by the blockade and to get by the blockade you need authorization codes which are within the city's Sith base candorus has a way into the base in the form of T3 M4 a utility Droid and your next party member T3 is displayed in a local Droid shop but not for sale as it is on hold for davik candaris is tasked with getting the Droid and using it to obtain the codes which he now tasks for you so that the entire group including candorus can escape you can grab the Droid from the shop by saying you are working for davik and kandaris and then begin infiltrating the Sith base which acts as another Dungeon Crawl it concludes with a battle against your first dark Jedi a lesser member of the Sith that has not yet received their lightsaber however that doesn't mean they are pushovers if not leveled properly or prepared this can be a bit of a wall even on normal difficulty and may lead to a few hair pulling scenarios until you understand the game's battle and preparation mechanics a bit better you may notice at this point that I'm not offering as much insight into the overall progression of Terrace and that's because there's simply so much of it I already mentioned how long Terrace is how it acts as an introduction to countless mechanics and also as an introduction to a large portion of your party members on Terrace you learn to hack and repair to disable or retrieve mines to persuade to race to play pizzac and how to fight at a higher level there's so much to Terrace and that's in turn a reason it's so long and as I mentioned I believe that Terrace could have been broken up into multiple other planets in terms of what is introduced to you this is in contrast to what the developers wanted to design for Better or For Worse and leaves you with a sequence of events that takes hours upon hours to get through in comparison to the rest of the games in my opinion more fulfilling content it's important to discuss the steps we take to get from the beginning of Terrace to the end but how much more is there to actually say or analyze outside of the characters in our party and their personalities once you have the codes candorus agrees to get you into David's headquarters under the guys that you're a new potential recruit you get to bring candorus and one other party member alongside you for this sequence and I opted for bastila though she may not be the best choice overall there are several security terminals that could make your life exploring the space easier so having a party member with a high computer skill could be more beneficial to you you meet with David and Kayla Nord who chastise candorous slightly for going soft which is perceived due to him working with you currently regardless davik takes you to the guest quarters and explains that venturing around will lead to hostilities the goal of this section is to get the codes that can be used to lower the shields on davik's spaceship the ebenhawk which is known to be one of the fastest ships in the area to do this you need to explore the area and find davik's old pilot who is currently being tortured in another nearby room around this point is a scene focused on the Sith Armada in the space above Terrace Malik orders his Fleet to begin bombarding terrorists to the point of leveling the entire city and intern the entire planet where billions of people currently live this is what the developers discussed as a concept when deciding to make Terrace such a long slog because they wanted you to spend enough time and experience enough of terrorists to build a sort of bond with it so that when it did ultimately come crashing down there'd be an emotional payoff for the player while also demonstrating the Lang thanks Malik was willing to go to in order to get his way once you have the codes and enter the hangar where the ebenhawk is stored you'll be met with davik and Kayla who are running away from debris and fire as the Sith begin bombing the planet this leads to a confrontation between the two of them and your party resulting in davik's death and the apparent death of Calo as a large amount of scaffolding seems to fall onto him upon entering the ebenhawk proper you pick up the rest of your party members and fly off into space while being chased by Sith forces which you are forced to shoot down in one of the worst mini games within this entry it's not particularly bad when all is said and done it's just the least engaging and mechanically gratifying out of everything you've experienced thus far still Star Wars and Space Battles seem to go hand in hand and I can't necessarily fault BioWare for not wanting to create an elaborate space combat system in a game and engine that already feels incredibly limited as it is once the ships are dealt with karth Will Engage The hyperdrive and you'll find yourself and your party shot to dantuine or Terrace 2 as you may soon realize is dantooine rather than feeling like the game finally opening up to you can end up feeling like the extensive introduction that Terrace offered us we're not in the free exploration Zone just yet but we're getting there and there's plenty of dantooine that is at the very least interesting to explore still it's no surprise people may have a difficult time beating this game for a second or third time due to just how much content there is early on and how long it takes to actually access all of it on your own Galactic Adventure if you thought Terrace was boring and rather drawn out overall I have good news for you dantooine is both a shorter experience overall and more open in terms of its areas if anything dantooine is the first example of What kotor's exploration system is truly like rather than only exploring large cities with enemies scattered about somewhat you'll be able to explore more wide-reaching Landscapes that are filled with encounters and in a way this can be a little overwhelming at first the amount of enemies that get thrown at you while exploring DanTDM wean are much larger than what you were used to on Terrace to the point that you may find your supply of healing items and various buff items beginning to dwindle luckily there's multiple shops situated on the planet that allow you to restock as is needed and it most likely will be you should be taking part in every battle you see whenever possible while not completely finite many of the enemies around the various explorable planets are one-off encounters other mobs seem to spawn sporadically and rarely but the big battles with the most exp don't seem to show back up meaning you can effectively clear an area out for a guaranteed amount of exp this means it's beneficial to clear every area on every planet when the situation allows as this will help better prepare you via leveling up so you're stronger when it comes to the later areas since the battles are pseudo-finite and within the game World proper you don't have to worry about endlessly grinding Random Encounters as well that's to the taste of some including myself it can often get grading and sometimes without the end in sight kotor's explorable areas are large but not overly so allowing you to spend an acceptable amount of time checking every interactable location and taking out all of the mobs on the way for a good optimization and party management before we get to take part in any Adventure however we still have to deal with the unearthing of our apparent Force sensitivity as you land on Dan to wean bastila will inform you that the Jedi Council would like to speak with you now before we go any further I want to make something very clear about my personal outlook on the Sith and the Jedi something we need to consider is how the Jedi are seen as an inherent good in the Sith as an inherent evil I want to be very very clear here from my experience with this series and how the Sith are portrayed within it I believe it is incredibly fair to say that the Sith are evil I think blowing up planets and killing billions of people is enough to say that the power of the dark side of Pride greed and wrath are what led to these atrocities and in that sense the dark side and by association the Sith are truly evil there aren't actually sides within the force at least not as we know them rather the dark is just a Corruption of the force causing the light to exist as its unblemished counterpart it's like taking an energy source and watching it slowly degrade and become unstable to bring balance to the force then is to Simply eradicate the dark side not an actual balance between the two where they equate one another what I don't believe is that the Jedi are an inherent good I believe they are good for the most part and that they perform good when they see it possible but the Jedi much like the Sith are still human or alien they're sentient anti-sapient creatures they have flaws they are prone to manipulation tactics and causing harm to others despite being Arbiters of the light side and while you may or may not agree with that the fact remains that Kotor likes to explore this concept somewhat especially on dantooine and even more so within the plotline of the second game the Sith Lords there's a new party member here that we will meet shortly one who goes through intense manipulation and in my opinion mental suffering only to come out of it because of your intervention the point I'm making is that the light side is good inherently the light side is the virtuousness and righteousness of humanity to do good and to be good the Jedi are the human aspect of this system and unfortunately are easily fallible this leads to those who disrespect the concept of the light side when their real problem is with the council or the Jedi Order specifically so the council wants to meet but only with you and Bastille meaning the rest of your party is unfortunately left in the dark something that understandably bothers karth on the topic of karth his issues with you become more prevalent as you explore dantooine karth likes to be in the know and in control to be out of the loop leaves him susceptible to being betrayed just as you find out his commanding officer saw kareth had done to him previously when joining Malik and the Sith Saul gave security codes to the Sith that allowed them to bypass the sensors of a Republic Fleet and essentially destroy them from the inside karth could never forgive himself for not stopping Saul as Saul came to karth with an offer to join the Seth alongside him which karth ended up refusing unfortunately the secretiveness of the council is also going to cause karth grief here and we'll see him kind of blow up about this later on the council itself is made up of Masters vandar Czar rook and dorak who also happens to be their current historian while this is is a Jedi cancel it is not the Jedi Council which is actually situated in Coruscant however since the Jedi Civil War is currently taking place many have had to disperse and flee to other planets for safety thus leading to the civilization developed within day until wean a location currently unknown to the Seth Armada now these guys suck it's not particularly obvious right now why that is but we will get some examples on dantooine and then more later on in the games as well as in the sequel they just do so much bad in my eyes that I always have such a begrudging time talking nice with them in order to stay on the light side path while interacting with the people of dantooine the council senses a large amount of the force flowing through you potentially more than any pupil before you but the Jedi don't train adults unless there are very special circumstances of which there are for one the Sith Fleet is leading to the extinction of the Jedi and you and Bastille seem to be sharing Visions specifically a vision of Malik and Revan entering into the ruins that are found on dantooine currently this is known as a force Bond a connection within the force that ties you to bastila apparently by Fate they use the terms fate and destiny offhand to justify why this is taking place without giving actual substantial explanations and there are explanations to be given the Jedi Council and in turn basila have just chosen not to share them with you they've chosen to do a lot to you in fact but that isn't clear immediately the council is wary of giving you training as a Jedi I guess it's easier to manipulate kids than full adults so there's a better chance of you potentially falling to the dark side despite this okay that was a little disingenuous despite this they agree it's the best course of action due to the current climate between Jedi and Sith and opt to take you in as an apprentice of the Jedi Order what follows is a montage of your training something that apparently lasts weeks thing gets you to levels of skill with the force that would normally take individuals years to achieve once said training is complete there are three final tests to take part in in order to be bestowed the title of Padawan the first of which is simply reciting the Jedi code for Czar second is the creation of your lightsaber and this is mechanically where you actually unlock the ability to become a Jedi by talking to dorak he will run a personality test on you to see which of the three class archetypes he believes you are best suited for those being Guardian Sentinel and Consular three classes that come with their own benefits Jedi guardian is a more lightsaber-focused class this is most obvious due to them receiving the force jump ability automatically which allows them to close distances immediately in battle they have high fortitude and reflex saves in one of their class skills is treat injury making them very resilient they also gain the most Feats through leveling out of all of the classes Jedi Consular is the opposite end of the spectrum focusing almost completely on on force abilities and gaining more Force Powers overall in the process additionally they are immediately given the force Focus feat which makes it harder for enemies to resist their abilities this is the class I've chosen for the playthrough as it seems to complement the scoundrel class and will help us make use of our stealth bonuses for some Hefty damage finally Jedi Sentinel is the midpoint between the two extremes it looks to balance the two classes into a singular one but ultimately I found it fell a bit flat in terms of Effectiveness when compared to the two take the Consular for example who has an abundance of class skills and plenty of extra Force Powers Sentinel just seems to miss out on the bonuses of being a consular while also being a weaker Guardian maybe there's something I'm missing here but I never found the class particularly handy so Jedi counselor it is and with that if you've been saving any level UPS now is the time to use them generally for stealth based characters it's good to unlock abilities that will allow you to stun your enemies such such as for stun and upgrading it to Forest Whirlwind which you'll see me use fairly regularly during this playthrough there's still one final trial however and that's the cleansing of an area known as the tainted Grove a location on dantooine that is being overwhelmed by the dark side and in turn causing the local cath hounds to become overall more aggressive and vicious in comparison to how they normally are you're tasked with heading to the Grove and dealing with this issue but you can't take Bastille along with you just your typical party members heading out of the conclave presents you with the openness that is dantuwine it's broken up into three to four major plane style areas as well as a Crystal Cave that is worth exploring Crystal Caves are a means of allowing you to explore a small mini dungeon in order to gain the reward of various lightsaber crystals crystals can have various effects some can change the color of your saber while Others May boast passive upgrades just outside of The Enclave are several individuals looking for help there is a woman looking for her last Droid that was given to her by her deceased husband and a man that is looking for revenge against the Mandalorian Raiders for killing his daughter I'm not going to go into many of the side quests on dantowin there is two in particular I would like to talk about momentarily but first we have to deal with the Grove I will quickly point out that going on a Revenge quest in order to wipe out the mandalorians on dantooine in order to avenge the death of this man's daughter is oddly reminiscent to what Anakin did to the Tuscan Raiders just without the murdering of women and children they're not completely Equitable in a moral sense especially since you find the mandalorians actively committing harm and threatening families but I found it surprising there were no Dark Side points gained at all for wiping them out to take revenge even under the guise of keeping the citizens of dantooine safe seems to be leaning slightly on the dark side more so than the light in my eyes especially since you are doing this on the request of a random individual without asking the council about it I'm not going to shed a tear for the Mandalorian Raiders being killed in Fair combat or anything I just thought there would have been some sort of dark side alignment reward for this similarly to when we fought and killed bendak Starkiller in Fair combat within the arena just trying to be consistent so what's going on in the tainted Grove turns out that the source of the dark side infection within the area is a Jedi by the name of juhani juhani is seen meditating in the area around the bodies of several mandalorians that she either killed in aggression or in defense upon approaching juhani she immediately attacks your party and the battle will end and enter a conversation after dealing enough damage to her jahani is surprised with how much stronger than her you are despite her descent into the dark side a descent that is notoriously advertised to offer power and control jahani explains that she was training with her master and through agitation during combat ended up striking said Master down and killing her jahani realizing what she had done and felt that she had fallen out of the light side and attempted to fully embrace the dark side in her grief and guilt that's really what the dark side is it's a weakness the effects of someone giving up their will and values in order to descend into a pit of despair anger and perceived power it's a virus that eats off of your weakness and it's generally through strong mental fortitude that the Jedi are able to Stave it off jahani is one of your potential party members I say potential because you can opt to kill her here and now as she is a dark Jedi and a threat to the people of dantooine her influence via the dark side is causing individuals in the surrounding settlements to be attacked more and more often by cath hounds but that's obviously not what we're going to do in this playthrough we're a light side character and strolling through the canonical events of the game with slight deviance this means we can use our persuasion skill to pass series of checks that allow us to convince jahani to not only return to the late side but also the Jedi Order we even with no real guarantees on our part can say for sure that we believe the order will welcome her back with open arms despite knowing that she apparently murdered her master in Anger here's the kicker though it was all a lie jahani never killed her master when you return to The Enclave jahani explains that she has been re-established as a member of the order on top of that her master actually set all of this up as a test she had jahani succumb to her anger attack her assume she was dead and then go off to the Grove to develop a blight via the dark side that ultimately led to the harm of several innocent civilians on dantooine are you kidding me in what world do we see this sequence of events and think to ourselves ah yes the Jedi are definitely so very wise and definitely not some weird group of manipulators who follow some sort of ends justify the means mindset no they are an infallible good to many people in the Galaxy clearly this isn't actually the case while the Light Side may be infallible in its goodness the Jedi clearly aren't they are people and can actively lead to the suffering of others despite being part of the light I don't know maybe they feel bad about it it's not like the game doesn't comment on this either if karth is in your party he'll mention how it's pretty messed up how the Jedi are willing to manipulate you to the dark side and then welcome you back after sending someone off to fix the situation so the game is self-aware they are commenting on how the actions of the Jedi can be questioned how the Jedi themselves are questionable at least from the perception of a non-jedi like karth with jahani saved or murdered if you're out here murdering party members you can return to the council to inform them of the good or bad news they'll officially bestow upon you the title of Padawan before moving discussions onto the ruins from your vision of which revin and Malik stepped foot within now that you're in official Jedi it's time to go out and do some jediing around the Galaxy the ruins themselves are fairly easy to find they're close to The Enclave making it surprising that the Jedi had never thought to explore them before Revan and Malik they have some form of reasoning for this believing them to just being some old architecture or something from before they arrived and therefore of little value but guess what it actually has the most value and now you get to discover why or you would if a man by the name of Allen matale didn't burst into the chambers demanding the council do something about his neighbor see Alan here believes that the sand rules and other wealthy family in dantuine have kidnapped his son and he'd be right about that you can head to the metalli estate which leads to an explanation of Bad Blood between the two families specifically between the two fathers of of each he offers you 1 000 credits to find his son and I want you to remember that number heading to the Sandra estate allows you to investigate a bit further the father nurik or nerik I don't remember how they pronounced it won't talk to you but his daughter rahaja informs you that the missing son is locked within one of the estate's rooms with the entire interior guarded by security robots she gives you a key to a side door that you can use to enter the interior of the estate in order to break the boy Shen out of his imprisonment raheja also explains that the reason nurik kidnaps Shen is due to his own son going missing which he believes to be the fault of the matales now here's the interesting bit it wasn't the matalis that killed nurik's son Cassis turns out it was just some cath hounds out in the plains thanks johani you'll be able to figure this out by going to explore the planes and finding a newly spawned set of cath hounds surrounding a corpse but you probably won't see this course before finishing the quest anyway since rahesh gave you the key you may think the next natural step of the questline would be to rescue Shen and you'd be right that is a valid path to take but if you do not grab the journal ahead of time and deliver it to nurik before finishing the quest I believe you lose out on around 500 exp which isn't too much it's just you you can miss it delivering the journal doesn't actually change any of the outcomes from my understanding it's just a means of completing an optional part of the quest line really what you're here to do is to save Shen but here's the thing Shen won't leave without rahesha turns out they're the Romeo and Juliet of dantooine and if you want to get Shen to leave peacefully you need to take rahega with you which she does agree to this leads to a climax outside of the Sandra estate where Alan appears with some security droids to confront nurik this encounter can go a few waves neither father wants their child to be with the other so you can do a bit of convincing to let bygones be bygones alternatively if you can't convince against the parents you can send Shen and rahaja to the Jedi Enclave you can also have the two separated or you can provoke the two fathers into a bloodbath that will leave everyone dead the choice is yours with the most Light Side option being convincing everyone to get along remember that 1 000 credit reward for finding Shen you only get it if the two are successfully separated even if you convince everyone to get along you actually get the lowest possible amount of credits that being 500. as your reward despite the fact that Alan gets to continue seeing his son while having them kill each other leads to no credits so that's technically the worst reward out of all the options but hey you get some cool Dark Side points for it I'm not trying to say that good actions are befitting over reward but what I found kind of lackluster in design was that the best possible solution in which everyone seemed to be at the very least happy leads to you being penalized from a credit sense realistically both the persuasion and support duration routes should have paid the same amount with the dark side route potentially allowing you to loot Allen's corpse for at least some reward while not as in-depth one of my favorite quests in the game is on dantuween in the form of a detective investigation Bo Luke a Jedi Twilight asks for your help in a murder mystery as a means of testing your abilities as a Jedi when it comes to using your brain I guess the reasoning doesn't matter as much here this is a problem-solving Quest a man has been murdered and there are two suspects the entirety of this Quest is confined to this one area that you met bluekin rather than looking around for Clues you simply need to talk to the two suspects and a datapad Droid baluk brought along in order for you to find contradictions in the suspect's testimony it's basically a mini Phoenix Wright trial I won't spoil who did it for you as I think you should play it in order to find out for yourself and have the best experience with it but it's one of the more entertaining quests in the game for the dialogue alone that's the one spoiler you get saved from though there's another big one later on down the line that's gonna hit you like a truck so if I haven't said so already make sure you play the game before watching this if that's something you care about when you enter the ruins proper you're met with an enigmatic Droid and the corpse of a Jedi known as Nemo you can actually converse with him early on as soon as you leave The Enclave he was a nice dude and very friendly to you in conversation meaning that his death here feels pretty bad if you took the time to interact with him the Droid doesn't appear hostile in fact it has the ability to ascertain your language and respond to you using one of its own various alien dialects it has installed this is due to it needing to be able to communicate with in its own words the slave species that were used in the construction of these ruins and an object known as the starforge slavery is a key component in both Star Wars and Kotor it is both rampant and often has a blind eye turned towards it basila was to be sold to slavery zalbar would have become a Wookie slave these robot thoughts and their creators controlled entire species of slaves in order to build some sort of creation slavery is normalized in the universe of Star Wars almost similarly to how it is normalized within our real life the difference being that it is vilified slightly less within the world of Star Wars but still vilified regardless at least within the perception of those that are light side aligned in Star Wars even lawful stretches of the Galaxy may allow slavery for one reason or another even considering it to the point that damaging a slave is damaging someone's property in a way the law is not Light Side inherent the law is not necessarily always good it's a construct of humanity based on the values of those who specifically created the rules and those who look to exploit them similar to how not all Jedi do good all of the time it is also true that Humanity's Creations like law do not always perform good either people's perception of Justice changes from person to person from culture to culture Star Wars in many ways is meant to parallel a lot of our socio-political history they have the Light Side vilify slavery because it's something that makes sense to be vilified rather on the nose to say that slavery is bad and evil but it's also not the first time I've said it I said the same thing about Kaiser's Legion and that always seems to rile a few people up either because they think it's excused in some way or because simply calling slavery evil doesn't sound book smart enough for them they wanted in a more adult or mature way but is it not mature to Simply say that slavery is wrong is that not something we as a society believe and perpetuate through our media as Kotor attempts to do here sure slavery is accepted within a portion of the Galaxy but never do the Light Side aligned characters agree with the practice so what we have here is an ancient Droid selfie admittedly 20 000 years old and therefore 5 000 years older than the Republic itself meaning that whoever created this star Forge and these ruins are an ancient race that may or may not be extinct the Droid doesn't go into detail about its creators or potentially doesn't have the ability to in order to progress through the ruins you need to solve a series of tests it's two very basic tests that if you fail you will be attacked by the defense system that's what happened to my man Nemo here rest in peace kind of on Nemo for this one since the questions in the test basically boil down to which types of planetary types would be conducive to life and death which is pretty easy to just figure out or infer Oceanic grassland and arboreal for life and Volcanic desert and baron for death so for as nice as Nema was I guess he was also a little stupid once the two tests have been completed you'll be presented with one of several star Maps these are devices that plot points with within the Galaxy and are used as a means of guidance in terms of finding other star Maps while building a path to the starforge this is what Revan and Malik found Within the Ruins the first time they appeared here and ended up being what they used to reach the starforge proper while it isn't clear what the starforge actually is at this time it's a device that allowed for the creation of the sithar MATA in record time allowing the Sith to multiply in power incredibly quickly with this knowledge you can return to the council to explain what you found unfortunately the council has no knowledge on the star Forge and even the Jedi Wreckers don't seem to ever mention it it's truly a device older than the Republic itself regardless the council asks of you a Padawan to begin traveling to the various other star maps in order to try and plot a course to the star Forge this means traveling to kashyyk Tatooine Manon and koroban respectively again they are asking you a Padawan to do this despite your skill in the force and your success at training it's still only been weeks since you even arrived at the enclave and now they want you to go across the Galaxy exploring planets and potentially putting yourself in great danger every time that sounds foolish and rash it doesn't sound sensical at all that might sound like I'm bashing the storytelling of this game but that's not it rather it makes sense that their reasoning is nonsensical and this is due to the council not telling you everything that they know they're hiding things from you Bastille is hiding things from you and the decision to send you on this suicide mission is basically boiled down to you having a connection with bastila and the fact that they can't send a bunch of skilled Jedi out without gaining the attention of the Sith something karth will also point out as being suspicious so it's basically up to you and a bunch of amateurs aside from maybe karth and bastila oh and juhani is coming along too the best part about juhani coming is this line from Rook who who says that her fall to the dark side may serve as a reminder of the pitfalls of the path you are on as if they were not a direct cause of her pain and suffering before heading out you can have a few more conversations and cut scenes with the characters in your party in this playthrough I had a scene where Mission ran into her brother's now ex-girlfriend Lena while Mission Harbor is a great resentment towards Lena believing her to be the reason for her brother to leave without her a simple conversation implies that things are not as Mission perceives as them rather ulina seems like a good person and not the individual Mission described unfortunately it sounds like the manipulator within the relationship was instead mission's brother Griff further it was Griff who opted to leave mission on Terrace when he and Lena left even when Lena offered to pay for Missions ticket apparently Griff is off mining on Tatooine at the moment but Mission doesn't seem to buy into what Lena is selling even though it comes off as reasonable and you can't necessarily blame her since it's her brother who she holds a high amount of regard for it's a bit of crushing new is coming off the tails of her home being completely bombarded by The Sith with dantooine out of the way the options with the game are beginning to open up for us and the central Hub location we will be using to travel from place to place is the Eben Hawk the Evan Hawk is a bit of an iconic location for Kotor fans mostly due to it being used in both this entry and the sequel as the main Hub location it also follows bioware's signature style of allowing you to converse with everyone in between Mission States in order to learn more about them you can spend a large portion of time in between planets on the ship simply stopping by each on PC and learning more and more about them as they gradually open up to you it's a formula that has become rather samey over the years since BioWare uses it with little to no innovation from Kotor to dragon age to Mass Effect and more but that's due to its strength of allowing you to feel like you are building relationships with the party members during the downtime of your quest the cockpit is where we can find our Galactic map which will be used to fast travel from planet to Planet while there is no necessary order in which to complete the planets there is a suggested route both through dialogue and through the level of difficulty each planet offers you as a player my personal order and the one that also seems to be popularized is Tatooine takashik followed by Manan and korriban and that's the order we will be seeing on this playthrough let it be clear however the game has more depth than you may initially realize taking planets in certain orders or revisiting some planets can lead to Quest lions and dialogue you may miss out on otherwise but it isn't necessary to see any of it more just flavor to the overall product on the original Xbox release of Kotor Yavin station was a purchasable DLC that would unlock a new location specifically to offer an assortment of powerful but expensive items as well as a means of making money easier I'm not going to discuss all of the progression and mechanics about the station specifically what we really need to focus on is suvam tan a merchant who runs this space station and also happens to offer some of the highest Wagers in terms of pazek at 750 credits per wager as I mentioned savam sells an assortment of powerful items that generally come at a great cost there's ways to circumvent this however Force persuading savom will earn you a five percent discount in the shop which is great and all sure but what we are really interested in is the opportunity to earn a 20 discount which will end up saving you tens of thousands of credits if you're looking to buy everything he has to offer in order to acquire this discount you simply need to beat savam at pazik 10 times it's not the most difficult thing to do in the world but savam does have a strong deck using exclusively double-sided cards meaning even when playing smart a lot of these games can end up boiling down to Pure chance once you've beaten savam 10 times and potentially made around 7 500 credits in the process he will begin selling to you at a 20 discount additionally Savannah will buy items from you at a higher rate than any other Merchant in the game this is especially abusable shortly when we take part in swoop racing on Tatooine personally I never utilized Yavin station properly until this playthrough as I had never played the original Xbox version nor does the game tell you that there's ways to really make the most out of the DLC it was always just kind of there for me a merchant orbiting a moon that sold a bunch of items I couldn't afford nor did I feel like I wanted but when playing on higher difficulties and looking to be as proficient as possible a large portion of the items being sold aren't necessarily overpowered but still highly useful I don't necessarily fault the game for not making this clear either it's up to the player to search around for merchants and find the best deals plus since savom offers such a high potential wager for pizzac it makes sense that many players would try to win against him fairly often only to eventually unlock the discount as a bonus reward I've been holding off on talking about them but Circa Corporation is another prevalent group within the storyline of Kotor they're a corporation that has ties with this Sith allowing them to be particularly ruthless in all forms of business from exploiting people for their labor to Simply letting them die if they get into any form of trouble the only thing Circa cares about is PR for some reason and producing a profit as efficiently as possible regardless of who gets hurt along the way as you land in the Starship Hangar on Tatooine it's a Circa rep who is there to meet you demanding a one-time fee of 100 credits in order for you to be able to indefinitely use said hanger in terms of services being offered it's actually a very good deal but you don't get rich in games like these by paying when you don't have to and you can generally negotiate your way with Circa or any Merchant via persuasion or forced persuasion in this specific example we can claim that the money we would have used for the hangar will be going towards circus shops anyway so either way the company is going to make a profit and again that's all Circa cares about they're a commentary on capitalism and corporate greed how the power of money and property can be taken too far in many situations while leading to the suffering of others some of the most amusing comments I received on the New Vegas video were people that complained about me discussing the negative aspects of capitalism within New Vegas despite the fact that we're discussing how New Vegas is specifically framing them to seem negative for the majority if not the entirety of the game the people making the most out of capitalism are generally villainous individuals usually comically so Kotor is no different here they aren't outright saying anything like capitalism is evil but they are commenting on it by having the most powerful corporations out there manage to be the most powerful by aligning them with the Sith of all people and having them take advantage of planetary Airy species and workers so the Sith are the ultimate bad guys and Circa Corporation is making the most out of this situation meaning we are going to be seeing a lot of them throughout our journey we've been having various conversations with our party members during this time as well jahani is still battling with gaining control over their emotions candorus is telling us War Stories during his time as an active Mandalorian Soldier and karth is sulking in a corner because no one is telling him why you essentially have the equivalent to force superpowers something you should also be questioning as we continue moving forward on top of our normal crew we also have a new stowaway that is a human girl by the name of Sasha Sasha has been living in the Ebon Hawk for some time but when you catch her she can't converse with you she seems to have some sort of language but it's a bit of a jumbled mess and doesn't even seem to make immediate sense you can talk to her periodically to learn her language and it doesn't take long to be able to converse with her fully you end up realizing that she is a missing girl that a Twilight back on dantooine was was looking for and you can eventually have her return to her parents for a reward just like any planet we will be visiting it starts with a vision of a star map giving both you and Bastille an idea of where the map is in relation to the planet you're on the star map on Tatooine seems to be in a cave meaning you're going to need some direction around Tatooine in order to find the right one considering the planet is almost nothing except an Endless Sea of desert said cave can be found in the Eastern Dune sea but it's not that simple in order to get to the Eastern section of the Dune sea you'll need a map and in order to obtain a map we'll need to take part in the main conflict of this planet that being the Circa Corporation versus the sand people in order to leave anchor head currently you need a hunting license hunting is a popular sport on Tatooine it's considered an honorable profession by some and people can turn in animal parts for a small reward from the local hunting club unfortunately Circa regulates who gets a license and they currently don't seem to be handing any out lucky for us Circa Corporation has an office is within the city of anchor head in which we landed heading over allows one of the Reps to inform us on what's going on Tatooine is essentially a hell world for zerka there is not much to mine here and they basically got stuck with it looking to turn a profit through trade and various other exponentiors like swoop racing to make matters worse the Saiyan people are attacking the sand crawlers that Circa owns taking jawa's prisoner and even killing circus staff which is worrisome for Mission as it may mean that her brother is dead that's another thing to keep in mind here while you can bring any two party members alongside you it's always best to work through everyone's dialogue and get an idea of who would be best where for example mission is looking for her brother and we found out said brother is somewhere on Terrace therefore it makes sense that one of the slots goes to her basila on the other hand had a conversation with us about her past as a child before joining the Jedi how she loved her father and hated her mother a woman who would often pressure basila's father into treasure hunting what better place to look for Treasure than on tattoo wean with all of its prized animals and caves to explore to solidify this a woman will approach Bastille in the hangar if you bring her along informing you that her mother is looking for her and happens to be ill we can find the woman in a nearby Cantina but it's best to get a few other things done first so zerka has a problem with Saiyan people and we are potentially a solution to that issue we can thus enter into an agreement for a hunting license we can agree to kill the sand people and return their gaffy sticks to the rep for a monetary reward now obviously wiping out an entire tribe of sand people sounds a little a little messed up just a bit it's some attack of the Clones Anakin Skywalker levels of Darkseid and not something you have to do in fact you are informed by a local alien that there may be an opportunity for peace if you can find some means of conversing with the tribe leader issue is while you can understand many languages you cannot understand the language of the Saiyan people but were in luck there is a nearby Droid shop housing in hk-47 unit who just so happens to be able to translate their language HK 47 is an iconic party member within Kotor and Kotor II he is potentially the most beloved character due to multiple factors one of those being his unique manner of speech where he prefixes all of his sentences with a descriptor of what the sentence will entail he's also completely willing to act within the Light Side alignment for you but not before mentioning how eager he is to potentially kill anyone that gets in your way often HK sounds weary and frustrated with your decisions and actions when it comes to Light Side activities disappointed he doesn't get to kill the various meat bags you run into he's an interesting party member for several reasons as well after purchasing him from the Droid shop you can discuss his memory module and how it seems various aspects of his memory remained locked within his system if you have a high repair skill you can pass a sequence of checks with each check upgrading HK stats in some way but it's hardly necessary unless you plan on making him a fairly active member in your party if you do plan on doing this make sure you've been boosting repair fairly early into the playthrough as there will come a time soon that the upgrades are locked away completely HK can replace Bastille once we're ready to visit the same people but before that we need her to have a conversation with her mother who is found within a local Cantina what transpires is a bit of character development for basila while basila is a proud Jedi she has a hard time controlling certain emotions within her just like any other human may have difficulty doing despite years of training to prevent it Jedi still have the opportunity to fall back onto their more natural and human emotions Bastille holds a strong love for her father and a large disdain for her mother that she can't let go even when they meet in the Cantina it basically starts and ends in an argument between the two with Bastille's mother informing her that she's dying in that Bastille's father is already dead after hunting in the Dune sea now she's asking for his holocron as an object to remember him by Bastille is suspicious of her mother and doesn't believe that this is the full story it is the full story but basila doesn't necessarily believe it yet before heading out there's a chance you'll be ambushed by some dark Jedi it seems Malik has put a bounty on your head but this isn't the time to care about that no now is the time for swoop racing which marks its return after our first ever run back in Terrace this time it's all about beating certain times and rising up in the tears in order to earn racing bonds there's three tiers all locked behind certain best times and by reaching those tiers you can earn racing bonds which can be sold to Merchants for a profit do not sell these bonds to any Merchant except the dude back on Yavin station while most individuals will buy the bonds for around 60 credits each he will buy them for 154 and you earn about 120 of them total on Tatooine making the trip back to the station incredibly worthwhile once you've explored all there is an anchor head it's time to explore the Dune sea and visit the sand people on your way way out you can talk to a Jawa who asks you to rescue his friends who are being held prisoner within the sand people's home this acts as an alternative solution in terms of getting the map to the Eastern Dune sea see both the same people in the Jawas can give you information on how to reach there but depending on how you're interacting with this and people go you may not get anything out of them the dunesey is very very large if you have the ability you should be using Force speed whenever possible it's good to point out that you can't actually use Force speed unless you are wearing any form of Jedi robes certain force abilities won't be available unless robes are worn as they count as their own specific armor type however if you feel inclined since light armor is so useful you can throw on a pair of robes cast for Speed and then quickly switch back to your normal armor while still getting the benefits of the ability for a decent length of time what makes the Dune sea particularly annoying however is not its size but the weird inclusion of what seems to be randomized battles I have no idea why they didn't just cover the exceptionally large area video with various groups of sand people but instead chose to have them randomly show up out of nowhere to attack you at least it's on brand for them as a species you have two options for reaching the sand people you can either defeat the sand people that show up via randomized Encounters in order to get their costumes thus allowing you to bypass combat as you enter into their home or you can simply kill everyone on your way in neither is considered light side or dark side here just yet mostly due to the fact that the sand people are openly hostile and aggressive just being within their vicinity will provoke combat and thus force you to defend yourself since this is a light side playthrough though it's best to have the costumes on hand so you can converse with the chieftain once you have taken out three groups of Raiders you should be able to properly disguise your entire team but realistically you only need two costumes as you should swap one of your party members potentially basila at this point for hk47 HK is our translator and the only way we can come to a peaceful solution with this sand people it's a comical situation since HK is incredibly eager to Simply kill everyone inside once inside the headquarters proper the sand people will realize you are not one of them and be simply baffled that you even managed to make it this far you can have HK translate for you and tell them that you wish to talk to the chieftain you manage this but it's on pretty Shaky Ground the sand people despise Outsiders due to their past before Tatooine was a desert Wasteland you only have their patience for so long because they're curious over the fact that you managed to get inside the main thing you need to bring up to the sand people is the attacks on the sand crawlers you don't actually need to care about that right now necessarily if you wanted to you could simply Wipe Out the sand people here and now saving the Jawas in the process and getting the map you need from the Jawa back in Anchor head since we are being more diplomatic about it the chieftain informs you that the attacks will never stop but they can lessen them slightly since they are moving camps anyway the only thing they need for the journey are a pair of water vapor Raiders which you can coincidentally by back at the Circa offices once you purchase and deliver the vaporators the chieftain is still dumbfounded that you not only managed to acquire them but also hand them over he rewards you with a map to the Eastern Dune sea as he informs you that there is a local crate Dragon cave that houses the star map you seek you'll also be given The Chieftains gaffy stick which you can return to the Circa Corporation in order to pass it off like you got rid of the sand people for them while we're here we can ask about the various prisoners those being the Jawas and Griff apparently the sand people have no use for them and basically say you can take them off their hands which is particularly handy the Jawas head back to Anchor head and we finally get to meet mission's brother who really is just a sleazeball and ended up abandoning mission on Terrace he's an idiot and not incredibly considerate but his conversations with Mission do seem to suggest there's some familial love that he's capable of despite Mission now seeming to hate his guts he also heads back to Anchor head but not before informing us that he has a job lined out there and he'd like to talk to us again before we leave with the map obtained we can head to the Eastern dudency to find a crate Dragon cave and a hunter by the name of komad fortuna you can actually meet comad earlier in the hunting club and he'll remember you and your conversation upon this meeting that's one of kotori's main role-playing strengths by taking the time to converse with any individuals there is a chance that it will pay off later on when you may run into them again people seem to remember you even from passing interactions and it helps the world feel a bit more realistic and Alive overall before you actually talk to comad there's another Hunter who seems to get impatient opting to run into the crate Dragon cave with no particular plan which leads to the following scene I'm tired of waiting ComEd how big can this Dragon of yours be I'm going in [Music] sometimes Kotor is incredibly strong in terms of cinematics and other times not so much comad remembers you from the hunk Club if you converse with him earlier and asks you to help him with his plan to take down the dragon normally comad would want to do this in a more honorable way but this particular dragon is incredibly large in this particular Hunt is to help with the ecosystem involving crate dragons and Wildlife essentially you need to call the dragon to keep everything in Balance the plan then is to lure some nearby Banta to the cave which will lure the dragon out and turn into a set of Minds The issue is that sand people apparently Revere Banta and by doing so you will get attacked by a different tribe of sand people than you have dealt with previously a group that is more hardened by the desert and therefore more difficult to combat but really it's just the same guys you've been fighting since the beginning I don't know why they tried to make it seem like they'd be more difficult from my understanding this pseudorandom encounters have at least one group that are within the same tier of difficulty as these individuals so there's a good chance you've already dispatched enemies at this level regardless they're easy prey and so is the crate Dragon who died in all of the mines around his cave entrance with the dragon taken care of comad offers you one of two crate Dragon pearls as a reward for helping him he takes the other but as all situations lead to you can opt to earn some dark side points by taking the second dragon pearl from him but honestly it isn't necessary one is enough for a few reasons that we'll see shortly before that you need to head into the nearby cave to grab some loot including Bastille's father's holocron she is happy to have found it but seems unable to let it go or she needs to at least think about it before deciding if she will hand it over to her mother the star map is also located here and marks another point on the Galaxy map that makes you one step closer to finding the star Forge waiting outside for you is none other than Kayla Nord who apparently not only didn't die when all the scaffolding fell on him but he also managed to escape from the planet with no no ship within the vicinity Kayla's Escape is one of those suspension of disbelief moments in the game you're expected to just accept that he escaped but if you take even a little time to think about it all signs point to this being virtually impossible Especially since one we had the fastest ship in the galaxy and two we were the only ones who had the Sith codes arguably candorus may have given the codes to davik who may have handed them to Calo it's not impossible necessarily but it's very very close this is the final confrontation with Kayla but it doesn't have to happen on Tatooine the fight will happen on the first planet you visit after dantooine assuming you managed to progress far enough for it Kotor has story beats it wants you to make at Key parts of your journey and these checkpoints are generally dictated by the amount of star Maps you find it's nice to see the effort put in to take into consideration that the player has the freedom to go to any Planet they choose in any order someone like Kayla is going to track you down so it makes both narrative and mechanical sense that he'd find you based on on a specific time frame and game rather than on a specific Planet only he's hunting you and he's going to follow you wherever you go and this feature plays a role throughout the entirety of your journey you'll have to fight Halo here and kill him this time for real afterward there's not much else for you to do on Tatooine in terms of the game's main storyline but there's of course side quests and cleanup for what we've already taken on if you take the crate Dragon Pearl to the sand people the chieftain will be so blown away by the idea that you killed one he agrees to have their Storyteller explain their history to you how they used to live on Tatooine when it was green and without the wrappings that cover their body how an alien species showed up and ruined everything for them and why they hate Outsiders so much it's very interesting lore but you have to give up the Pearl to hear it now like I mentioned this is a light side playthrough I wouldn't expect you to completely Wipe Out the entire tribe since it would lead to Dark Side points right well as a bit of an oversight you can steal from one of the containers littered around the home which will provoke all of the sand people into attacking you with no further repercussions you won't be scolded for it you won't receive Dark Side points for it it's simply a net positive as you gain items experience and the ability to get your Pearl back if you're wondering why you might want the Pearl back to begin with it probably has monetary value but more importantly it can be used as a crystal upgrade for lightsabers in order to give them an attack and energy damage boost I haven't discussed the system much yet but certain weapons and armor come with modification slots for specific upgrades if you get your hands on these upgrades you can equip them for offensive and defensive bonuses lightsabers are slightly more convoluted in that regard you can equip up to two bonus crystals which will affect the stats of your weapon and you have a slot for changing the color of the saber entirely meaning you can find various colors on your journey and change them as you see fit back in Anchor head it's good to visit Griff so you can learn that he now has made a deal with the exchange in order to produce teresi and Ale a staple beverage of terrorists that no longer has the ability to be produced since the plan it you know got decimated by The Sith however one of the key ingredients can actually be found on kashyyk and Griff would love it if we went there to retrieve it for him before someone from The Exchange tries to break his legs for Bastille's mother we can return to her with the holocron and this ends up leading to a bit of a heart to heart between the two basila's mother treated her like garbage and Bastille resents her for it but as the woman is dying with no hope of recovery she looks to fix some things within their relationship and suggests Bastille hold on to the holocron as a Memento of her father Bastille gives her mother 500 credits and tells her to go to Coruscant to find a doctor and hope she can speak to her again after her journey is complete that's Tatooine not all of it of course but everything I think matters enough to discuss you get to see a lot of development out of mission and basilisk specifically you gain HK 47 as a permanent party member but that doesn't mean the rest of your party doesn't have anything to say johani has a lot of backstory that she is willing to divulge to on your journey you can learn that a lot of her anger and inability to control her emotion comes from the Prejudice she experienced on her Homeworld for not being human before she joined up with the Jedi there's even a point where she reveals that this was Terrace and that she seems to blame and resent both you and Bastille seeing you as the Catalyst that led to the Seth attack there's more to her story than that but we'll get back to it as it develops in this playthrough it's around this point in the adventure that discussions with certain party members get a little bit more substantial karth really begins to open up about what the Betrayal of tilos at the hands of his former Commander Saul meant to him and the weight involved it wasn't just the Republic that was hit by this betrayal but karth's family as well his wife dying in his arms during the attack and his son going missing Bastille meanwhile is beginning to depend on you more your virtuousness and indemitable will that allows you to not stray from the light side is something she not only respects but is somewhat jealous of basila has a hard time controlling herself to the level she believes a Jedi must we saw anger and contempt for her mother that was only let go through your actions we've seen Pride through her discussions with carth and Mission and we've seen the beginning of love between her and your character it's not just that bastilla has respect for you but she also has more romantic feelings for you ones that go against the teachings of the Jedi Order and that are said to lead one astray and to the dark side the truth is that bastila is just young and human she's had a harder time being indoctrinated by the ways of the Jedi due to how powerful she is and how people perceive her her tough upbringing has left her with something to prove to herself and those around her and through that Bastille has learned to wall herself off from people so she can continue to improve but this wall is coming down slowly through her journey with your character basila is a romance option in this game in true BioWare form there are a few romanceable companions such as karth should you be playing a female character it makes sense why these two would be chosen for one they are the main companions within your journey the two you've met that hold the most relevant to the overall story they're also the only characters of age on the I've been Hawk with you that is except for jahangi who is also romanceable and zalbar I guess but he isn't an option for I'm guessing Wookie related reasons with jahani the option never fully sat right with me due to the power imbalance that is present here juhani fell to the dark side and is traveling with you for guidance you are in a way a mentor to her someone that is supposed to be helping her regain her confidence in herself and the light side to take this companionship and attempt to turn it into something more is a bit of a muddied situation one that puts into question the ethical implications of attempting to seduce what is effectively your student even if you are of similar rank within the order specifically additionally this is also what's happening with you and bastila but flipped in the other direction Bastille shares a bond with you but she is above you in both Rank and experience if your goal is to truly be a Jedi and to move further up the ranks of the order while attempting to save the world these personal romantic conversations with basila could feel as though they are a necessity for you to take part in if you don't want to suffer the social consequences otherwise realistically though within the confines of this game specifically it it isn't that deep for either of the characters you weren't meant to think about those social implications you should you should think about the social implications but you're not expected to in this situation what may be affected within your career let's say as a Jedi it's just something we consider after the fact as these issues within our real world have become more apparent and visible however considering there is much bastila in the order is hiding from you it is a good idea to question the moral ground Bastille stands on once everything is revealed on the topic of romance it is considered Canon that Bastille and your character end up together so that is what we will be pursuing for the narrative's sake in the meantime let's check out the next planet on our journey in terms of planets I want to say that kashyyk is much more straightforward than the previous open expanses of Tatooine and that's not a bad thing more linearity in map design is a welcome addition in an RPG it adds variety and Direction outside of the more open experiences that are available both Dan to wean and Tatooine were fairly huge in their design at the time of release especially for a game that has you running around incredibly slowly until you unlock the force abilities or stimulants that speed you up that doesn't mean the maps of kashik are small though while more linear they are still incredibly large as you land and exit Your Vessel you'll be met with another Circa rep who is demanding a 100 credit docking fee this is a bit of a theme within the game you land on a planet they request funds from you for doing so whether it be Circa or not and you try to weasel your way out of them if you so choose the only planet I haven't managed to convince of this so far was Manon but we'll get there after kashyyk it should be no surprise that it is good to bring zalbar and Mission along for some time on the upper levels of kashyyk this is albar's home and you get some interesting backstory out of him considering he doesn't normally open up to you on the Hawk zalbar was exiled from his home by his father due to a confrontation between zalbar and his brother chandar zalbar found out chandar was making deals with the zerka corporation in order to enslave Wookies for profit and weaponry chandar wanted to rise in power through this but upon witnessing it zalbar attacked him in a fit of rage but not with Conventional Weapons instead zalbar used his claws to attack chandar something that is considered forbidden by The Wookie people due to them perceiving their claws as tools and not as weapons in fact to use your claws in such a way Brands you as a mad claw and you are essentially considered to be deranged by the community Zabar's father the chieftain didn't believe him when he explained the situation and thus he was exiled which led to him eventually running into Mission it's painful for zalbar to be back here but he's also curious about what is going on now that Circa seems to have a stronger foothold in the region since kashyyk isn't part of the Republic at this point they have no protection from slavers or anyone else outside of their own fire power your vision of kashyyk had shown the star map being down below the incredibly large trees in an area known as the shadowlands due to light being unable to penetrate the foliage but to get down there you first need to get past a Wookie guard and to get past him you have to talk to chandar thus taking you to a nearby Wookiee Village here chandar states that he will be holding on to zalbar until you complete a task for him surrounded As You Are by a village of Wookies and Circa employees there's no real fight with him on it you have to complete this job in order to save zalbar and gain access to the shadowlands for both chandar's needs as well as your own trendar specifically wants you to deal with another mad claw in the shadowlands who has been attacking zerka employees down there so we're already heading down to the shadowlands at this point while grabbing a few side quests here and there along the way that aren't of any real note but this is also where the planet opens up a bit more the shadowlands are a series of winding paths as you take an elevator down one of the first things you'll witness is what appears to be a Jedi fighting off some of the local Wildlife this is Jolie bindo your final party member and a self-proclaimed gray Jedi I want to say this is the first time the concept has been brought up and began its popularization but I'm not completely sure if it was mentioned previously I believe Qui-Gon Jen from The Phantom Menace is also considered one regardless Jolie is potentially the most prominent and well-known gray Jedi within the fandom gray Jedi is a bit of an odd concept one that seems to be revered by a lot of the fandoms since their Inception in a world of absolutes those being light and dark some people see Nuance in the concept of a gray option they specifically rely on the idea that the force is some alignment you can walk a fine line on you are neither Light Side nor Dark Side you are simply gray you allow emotions to drive you but you do not succumb to The Thirst for power that the dark side presents this isn't an accurate descriptor from my understanding the gray Jedi are better described as Light Side Jedi that simply do not take into heed everything the council tries to enforce Rev in for example was not always a Sith Lord he was a Jedi who didn't agree with how the council was doing nothing against the mandalorians and opted to help the people of the Republic fight them back even when he became a Sith it wasn't because of his issues with the council specifically Qui-Gon is a similar example who took on Anakin despite the council's warnings because he felt it was right within the world of Star Wars the gray Jedi simply do not exist they are not individuals who pull from both the light and the dark side of the force at the same time they are just individuals usually aligned with the light who simply disagree with the practices of the council and the Jedi Order even Joe Lee as we will see is someone who has his own issues and resentment But ultimately aligns himself with the light despite claiming to see only in Gray the reason I bring this up is because this concept has been both popularized and reviled within the fandom for some time some individuals love the concept of the gray Jedi While others believe it doesn't really make sense in the lore I am of that mindset that the gray Jedi simply do not exist Jolie is one of the only ones who even seems to bring up the concept and that's more about his own personal moral compass not this actual training and lifestyle as a Jedi specifically I think what's particularly interesting about the concept though is how these individuals that one may consider gray Jedi manage to question the council utilize their emotions and ultimately be free of the monk-like training of the Jedi while not succumbing to the corruption to the force that is the dark side what makes the concept of gray Jedi so interesting is their refusal to follow the established Norms presented to them that often limit their lies in overly Extreme Ways while not turning comically evil in the process these Jedi that go against the council show that said council's wisdom is not absolute there is a conceptual space for what people commonly refer to as gray Jedi but the term itself is lacking when you meet Jolie he's a bit grumpy he doesn't want to be coddled or treated with the respect of a Jedi but rather the respect of an elder he sees you as a child indoctrinated by the ways of the council and in turn seems to both resent you slightly but also look to utilize and observe you for his own benefit Jolie lives in the shadow lands and he knows where the star map you're looking for is located but it happens to be behind a force field set up by zerka that he witnessed being built allowing him to learn how to disable it you can agree to help Jolie by removing the zerka presence in the shadowlands but he talks as if he wants it done without Bloodshed due to the trouble it would cause for the wookies Jolie cares about the wookies of kashyyk but he doesn't care enough to attempt rescuing them from enslavement or at the very least he doesn't believe he would be able to nor is it his place to however while he may not feel like taking action he at the very least doesn't want to make things worse for them in order to benefit himself the zerka poachers can be found near Jolie's house this Quest is also related specifically to Griff as the poachers are willing to pay you to kill various monkey-like creatures known as tack around the area if you choose to help them you can get the glands but they would essentially go extinct in the process thus leading to an obvious Dark Side path alternatively the poachers already have some glands in a nearby crate so you simply need to deal with them and then grab the Clans before returning to Griff to finish the quest line with mission to deal with the Circa poachers peacefully you have to convince a few of them to let you turn off various Sonic emitters around the area by doing so you can cause the wildlife to show up on the poaching site and run the Circa employees out of the shadowlands when you return to Jolie he kind of chastises you for handling the situation peacefully it's as if he was trying to observe you and understand your reasoning for doing so despite him specifically mentioning it would be the best course of action for him in the wookies I found it odd as you can mention there was no point in killing the men and he agrees with you but says the environment would say otherwise sure to Jolie the zerka corporation is doing irreparable harm to the environment of kashyyk and many other planets if he cares so much about that why hasn't he simply killed them himself right because he didn't want to make trouble for the wookies so you handle this peacefully but then he mentions that there would be justification in killing them yes but he specifically mentioned we shouldn't it's an annoying and illogical thing to be chastised about and seems to come off as the ramblings of some grumpy old man who is living in the bottom of a giant forest part of the agreement to help Jolie was to have him join you on your journey meaning he'll be with us for the rest of the trip in the meantime he agrees to escort you to a nearby force field which he is able to disable thus gaining you access to the nearby star map but it isn't that easy to activate this time beside the star map is a computer that is displaying the Hologram of an unknown alien creature when you approach it it initiates neural recognition and Julie is quick to point out that it never did anything for him when he would stop by this is important foreshadowing within the storyline one of many events that should have you questioning your past and potentially the motivations the council had in sending you here if Jolie was never able to activate the computer why did it activate for you immediately questioning the computer will make it realize that something is off it recognizes you but you don't seem to be the person it remembers which is off-putting to it from a security sense so in order to make sure you are who you are in the eyes of the computer you have to answer a series of Personality questions now the first question is a bit of a freebie it's a what-if scenario where you answer with something either Light Side aligned or dark side aligned since we are light sided aligned in this playthrough we would obviously choose the Light Side option but the computer is quick to point out that this is not what it expected of us as it is not how it remembers us so what ends up being inferred here is that not only does the computer want you to answer questions based on its perception of what is most efficient for a given situation regardless of how dark side it sounds it also wants you to prove your Tactical decision making based on Dark Side alignment as this is how it remembers you this is where there's a bit of oversight on the developers part if we step back and look at the current situation this robot will not give us access to the star map if we do not answer its hypothetical questions correctly by not answering them correctly you enter a series of battles before gaining access to the map so let's say we are role playing an astute individual you have reached the star map and you have answered the first hypothetical based on your outlinement but you have learned that this is not what the computer wants to hear you infer that the computer is expecting Darkseid aligned answers from you and therefore you play along something that should be obvious to your party since you are clearly Light Side aligned and it should be fairly obvious that this is a necessary action that doesn't actually hurt anyone or anything while also gaining you access to the star map that's how it should go down right well it doesn't even after the initial description of what the computer expects from you by continuing with dark side aligned answers ones where you would essentially say that you would sacrifice City's worth of people in order to gain a tactical advantage in a war characters like Mission will be blown away that you would let all of these people just die to your part 30 you're answering truthfully mechanically you are answering truthfully as well as by doing this task you end up gaining Dark Side points what's the deal here Kotor is a game that allows you to both persuade and lie this is a task necessary for story progression but they only give you the option of acting truly evil in concept or entering a series of battles due to your virtuousness there is no third option of you simply lying to the machine and answering dishonestly and I am left wondering why there are so many situations where you get to lie and through lying there seems to be an understanding with your party that you are not being truly evil but rather capitalizing on a situation and manipulating someone that's not the case here you have to eat the dark side points regardless of how nonsensical they are or you have to fight your way out of there while gaining the info on the star map it's a missed opportunity to add a bit more of satisfying dialogue trees to the scenario now Mission thinks I would abandon millions of people for the sake of a strategic victory in in battle Off Script here but I was thinking about it and it's possible that the computer was scanning your brain and might have realized that you were lying but I still believe it to be somewhat of a missed opportunity because you should have at least been able to attempt to lie and then the computer could have caught you on it while the star map has been dealt with we still have the issue with chandar and zaobar meaning there's a mad claw Wookie down here in the shadowlands that we need to find and take down before going back to the surface nothing is ever that simple however the Mad claw we are looking for is a wookie by the name of freyr who just so happens to be the father of chandarin zalbar after finding out that his son truly did betray them freyr was betrayed Again by chandar and exiled to the shadowlands where he has been slowly losing his sanity while fighting for his life when you run into freyr he's on the verge of becoming fully hostile to anyone who approaches him especially Outsiders whom he has little trust for due to the Circa Corporation this brings up another of the game's running themes generally speaking many alien species have a disdain for what they call Outsiders and while not exclusively so this generally boils down to humanity specifically when something goes wrong or when alien species are being treated unjustly it's generally at the hands of humans framing Humanity as a force not inherently good for the Galaxy acts as a parallel for our real world how humans often hurt other humans for various reasons and the ones generally being hurt are the marginalized sometimes it's for greed like with the Circa Corporation here looking to enslave the wookies other times it's prejudiced in a world of Star Wars with a universe full of countless alien species generally speaking humanity is seen as the oppressors and the aliens the marginalized Humanity has the power and privilege and we watch how they use said power and privilege to either help people or more often than not hurt people it's interesting to point out since time and time again humans are considered the end all be all good guy saviors of the Galaxy within a large portion of Science Fiction to see them often the perpetrators of harmful actions rather than the heroes is a breath of fresh air even if Mass Effect didn't follow suit of course the same power and privilege of humankind still gives us our main protagonists not only in this game but in the greater Star Wars universe as a whole a major criticism of the films are their focus on human Heroes and Kotor is no exception you are not given the option to choose a species other than human albeit for a very particular reason and your most plot relevant companions are bastila and to some degree karth while this does give Credence to the idea that mankind is capable of being a force for either good or evil light or dark within the Galaxy it also serves as a grim reminder that humans are simply expected to be the default agents of change in the universe and this doubles back into our real life Jolie can try to reason with freyr but it's to no avail leading to a confrontation where you have to defend yourself against him until he surrenders you can choose to kill freyr or try and talk him down by successful conversing with him he'll explain how he is the father of the two brothers and feels immense guilt for both exiling zalbar and allowing this to happen to his people he wants to make things right but the only way for him to even have a chance is by retrieving a ceremonial blade one of importance to his people that has been lost to time and chandar is in possession of the hilt you can actually find the blade ahead of time it's stuck in the height of a Terran tatec after a previous Chieftain rothwar got into a confrontation with one it's a funny name in order to make it appear you have to complete a ritual where you place the corpse of a kinrath on some nearby Vines thus luring it out to feed once you deliver the blade defrayer he will run off thus starting a small-scale civil war between the wookies who are loyal to chandar and the ones who see him for what he really is a traitorous slaver you'll get ambushed back at the elevator by a few chandar Loyalists and soon after one of the upper level guards will sneak you into the city to deal with chandara and save zalbar it seems chandar and zalbar have been talking a fair bit in your absence to the point that zolbar informs you he isn't sure of anything anymore due to his brother slowly convincing him that what was going on may be right you can help push zalbar one way or the other and when it comes to choosing an alliance between his father or his brother you can even take a more peaceful approach by having zalbar suggest that the fighting simply ceased before anyone else has to die unfortunately peace was never an option as chandar will simply begin attacking you anyway leading to his death in the process by helping freyr the wookies will begin to expel Circa from the planet while freyr offers a place for zalbar beside him as ruler zauber wants to honor his life debt to you and try to save the galaxy in the process hopefully learning more about himself along the way his father gives him baka's sword the ceremonial blade I mentioned earlier which can now be equipped and used in battle on your way back to the ship you can witness the wookies drive out the Circa employees around the base and The Landing Pad until the place is empty I actually had a quest to turn in here and now that I'm writing this I'm wondering if I locked myself out of completing it I looked into it after the fact and I did did lock myself out of it I believe while Terrace delved into the oppressive rule via Prejudice racism and capitalism kashyyk looks to take an even deeper exploration on these Concepts the amount of suffering you watch the wookies experience throughout your journey on kashyyk is unprecedented in the game yes Tara's got leveled but you don't really witness it as much as you see the suffering of The Wookie first hand they aren't saying much about the slavery as much as they are showing you the consequences of succumbing to your vices to Greed or pride in a way this is an example of humanity and Wookies turning to the dark side without the abilities of the force to back them up these vices are blights that create wounds within the goodness of a community and if you don't clean said wounds you watch them fester and slowly consume what once was it's the broken window concept this is how the Light Side gets broken down in the dark side how zerka can show up and slowly build a more and more oppressive establishment within the planetary structure it's the easier thing to do for some it's easier to succumb to what may benefit you personally rather than what is the right thing in a sense this is the entire greater theme of Star Wars concept of Jedi and of the light side it's hard to do the right thing and have people help one another rather than hurt one another and it is through the efforts of individuals that want to do good and perform righteous actions that allows the Light Side to not be fully consumed and eventually push back the blight that is ever present banan is potentially one of the most interesting planets to explore overall rather than focusing on large open or linear areas of wilderness to explore Manon takes a different approach in its storytelling where most planets would give you a simple starting location or town to interact with and start side quests Manon puts all of its focus into the soul Commerce Hub Auto City which was constructed specifically so the sea people known as the cell cath would have an above water location they could interact with Outsiders including both the Republic and the Sith that might sound a bit surprising interactions with zerka have been apparent so far and their ties to the Sith have been obvious but other than Terrace which was under Sith occupation we've never actually seen a planet in which the Sith are overly prevalent even more unusual the Republic and Sith are both present within the city and other than some large political tension are interacting within a fairly peaceful manner well as peaceful as you can get when talking about this Sith and the Republic see Monon is the source of an organic substance known as culto that has incredibly potent Curative properties Koto cannot be synthesized currently meaning Manon is the sole source for the product and it's completely controlled by the cell cath people this means that the cell cath have opted to use the kolto as a tool for establishing a form of neutrality between themselves and the Republic and Sith make no mistake this Sith are evil and do harm just for the sake of it it but it seems that within some reaches of the Galaxy that view isn't necessarily the popular one in fact on Monon specifically there are many who simply do not believe the news they hear about the Sith many don't even believe that it was the Sith who bombarded terrorists believing it to be propaganda what we end up with is a lot of political action and subterfu John Manon rather than going out and exploring the ocean depths of the planet we will be spending more time in Auto City helping the Republic prove to the cell cat that the Sith are not only evil but actively looking to instill harm on the cell cath people while taking over their government so what we have is tension between two warring factions many in the Milan government look to capitalize on this tension through the sale of culto believing that it will help keep them safe between the two factions this of course isn't true considering the plans the Sith have in store for them which will be revealed as we explore each faction's embassies as you land on Manon you'll experience a vision of this star map which appears to be underwater understandable considering Manon is nothing but endless oceans as you exit the Eben Hawk you'll start in a private Hangar of which there are several in the area all used for various side quests or if we're progressing the main quest it's best to bring carth in potentially Jolie with you for the majority of your stay here at least for me karth finally ran into an old friend of his that informed him that his son dustel is Alive and Well Saul's betrayal and attack on Telos killed karth's wife and caused his son to go missing but now it seems that dustul has been found unfortunately for karth dustil seems to be getting trained at the Sith Academy in corriban which is luckily the next planet we will be heading to after the events of Manon I imagine you can have this cutscene trigger anywhere as long as you have been working through cards dialogue and managed to learn about his past you should eventually have someone approach him the same can be said for Joe Lee who after mentioning a man by the name of sunry will eventually be approached to learn that his old friend is being held prisoner by Manon authorities these authorities are going to be a recurring aspect in the narrative on this planet and we'll be seeing a lot of them as we tend to require breaking planetary laws in order to get anything done here luckily laws don't inherently mean good or light side so breaking them generally is the right thing to do rather than not I personally suggest exploring around and picking up all of the various side quests especially since some of them can be completed alongside the main quest to find the star map on Manon this will bring you to one of the more involved side quests on the planet and probably the only one actually worth mentioning aside from Jolie's character Quest here there is a rhodian named hulis in the city talking to him is rather off-putting due to his speech and mannerisms he talks in a way that feels existential questioning your reason for conversing with him the concept of factions in the war and all around presenting himself as rather obtuse this is on purpose a form of tactic to keep you away from him unless you are the right person he should be talking to if you've killed Kalo Nord there's a chance a Twilight by the name of senni vac has approached you with a data pad the information on the pad suggested that you visit this roding alone meaning he won't have a proper conversation with you until you do so once alone hulis will introduce himself as a member of the Gino heriden an Intergalactic Guild of Assassins or high-level bounty hunters apparently by killing Kayla you've put yourself on the map and now the group appears to have some interest in you normally I wouldn't follow this quest line on a light side playthrough as it is specifically designed for Dark Side players but it also happens to be one of the more involved side quests with several rewards helis wants to invite you into the guild But first you need to prove yourself with a test helis will present you with two Targets and Intergalactic slaver named zulon and an anti-republic radical terrorist named lorgal for most of these assassinations you need to travel around some of the planets you already explored zooland for example is on dantooine and his feeder can be found near one of the Estates on the planet just a quick note about this the reason you are given two Targets to choose from is because they both offer you separate rewards and both can be completed so you get the full set of items however the individual on dantuine can be locked off to you after your fourth star map for narrative reasons so you will always have a means of completing the quest assuming you don't also get banned off of Manon which is actually possible that's one of the more interesting aspects of Manon not only is progression here different than you may be used to there are severe consequences in regards to the actions you take here that we'll discuss near the planet's narrative Climax and if you aren't careful you can find yourself locked out of content you haven't completed yet due to these you as a character need to choose your actions wisely and consider dialogue options that will allow you to navigate politically around the Council of cell cath who run the local government for the Assassin Nations you simply need to take out a subset of criminals zulon on Dan deween and lurgal who happens to be locked up in the Republic Embassy on Manon while zulon must be killed in combat you can simply overload lurgal's prison cell and kill him on the spot these two actions and further assassinations will always apply Dark Side points to your character and while you can't talk to hulis with a party you can still bring your party along for the actual assassinations after your initiation whether you killed one or two of the targets you will be given three extra ones all of whom have to be dealt with in order to complete your acceptance into the guild there's vorn on Tatooine rulon on kashyyk and etherak on Manon now all of these have their own very specific way of going about them vorn is in the Dune sea and you can reprogram his assault Droid to take you to him etherac or a thorac on the other hand is on Manon and you can get to him by pretending to be a business partner and gaining access to his private Hangar back where you started on Manon the one that is a potential issue is rule on the shapeshifter not directly and not always after you complete your third star map Malek's Apprentice Darth abandon is set loose on you and he can show up at three specific locations based on your progression if you already completed Tatooine and kashyyk you'll most likely run into him on korriban if you completed korriban earlier and then kashyyk Bandon would instead appear as you exit the crate Dragon cave back in the Eastern Dune sea here's the thing these locations aren't fixed based on planet progression the game only checks to see how many Star Maps you've completed this means you could travel back to tantooine say to go searching for vorn you could enter the crate Dragon cave turn around and see Darth Bandon waiting for you this is actually what happened to me and caused me to almost jump out of my seat since I hadn't expected to see him until korriban and I happen to be by myself I decided to kill him here for footage but ended up reverting the save since I figured I would wait to bring him up for when we actually reached koroban however another issue presented itself here while you don't find vorn in the crate Dragon cave thus bypassing Bandon you can only find rulin in the shadowlands and by taking the elevator you will always be forced into a confrontation with the Seth Apprentice here meaning if you want to complete the quest ASAP you have to fight Bandon in what I would consider an early progression point and by this point in my playthrough I was so tired of running into this guy that I just decided to get rid of him here and now while explaining this process to you so Darth Vanden is dead and you need to assassinate three more criminals for the Gino horatin but things are not as they seem once everyone is dead you can return to hulis for your various rewards but he will inform you that you've actually been deceived rather than killing criminals you've actually been assassinating high-ranking Gino haraden members leaving the only active leader alive being hueless allowing him to take control of the entire guild to make matters worse he will not allow you to join the Guild as he believes you to be too powerful and dangerous due to this he also won't try to have you assassinated meaning you can leave things here if you wish alternatively you can oppose his schemes and he'll suggest you have a 1v1 in the Dune sea you'd be pretty gullible to go along with this plan after having him already betray you so it's best to bring a party along with you as Euless will have around nine dudes waiting for you as you exit anchor head leading to a final battle that has essentially led to you accidentally wiping out the entirety of a criminal organization of elite assassins so that's pretty cool a lot of this is alluded to in the various data pads you find on the bodies of the individuals you kill the dark side points aren't incredibly Hefty and I haven't seen this cause any conversations or issues with your party members meaning depending on how you value role-playing as a light side character you may choose to do this Quest anyway for the rewards while eating the dark side points that you can offset later with further Light Side Shenanigans once you've picked up relevant man side Quest you have to head to the Republic Embassy in order to enlist their aid in finding the star map one of the side quests specifically wants you to find out why the Republic is hiring mercenaries another wants you to find the missing cell cath I mentioned earlier all of these are related in one way or another and in order to get anywhere we need to first talk to Roland Wan of the Republic Roland has an idea of where the star map may be but he wants our help in dealing with the Sith first as it turns out the Republic had a Droid underwater that ended up getting damaged and lost the Salvage of the Droid was then picked up by The Sith and is now in their own Embassy where they are looking to datamine it for Republic Secrets the Republic would like you to break into the Sith base to recover the data on the Droid and they're generous enough to give you a few ways of doing so two of the ways can be completed in the embassy itself one is to break the encryption on some Sith pass cards and the other is to interrogate a Sith prisoner for his passcode both are mini games of sorts the encryption challenge is really just you figuring out the next number in several mathematical sequences until the game tells you that you successfully decrypted the cards once done you can move on but I'll briefly talk about the other options as if you didn't have Google and weren't good at figuring out sequences these other two options would be necessary for you the interrogation is a little more simple you have to use persuasion in order to convince a trooper to divulge information to you it's simple and I'm not even sure if your persuasion stat actually comes into effect here more likely you were supposed to select your interrogation dialogue in a specific order for several categories I had a fairly High persuasion stat that failed constantly unless I chose a proper order I found online New Vegas did it better the game takes into account that neither of these options may be necessarily doable for every player and so a third option is offered there is a Sith hanger near your own one that doesn't have security cameras for privacy's sake meaning you could break into there kill the Sith inside and use their transport to get inside the base this is my my preferred route today only due to the fact that the game seems to drop the ball on a potentially unique opportunity to have us work a bit of Espionage the transport you take as you arrive in a back entrance of the Sith Embassy and thus would have you infiltrating the base by force you'd think alternatively we could use the passcode or cards to go through the front which happens to be the case but regardless of dialogue choices persuasion or even Force persuasion the secretary will always not recognize you and thus cause Security on you leading to combat no matter what means you take to actually get into the Sith Embassy the result will always be the same and for a game with a habit of offering various routes and options that will change The Narrative of specific quest lines it was a bit frustrating to experience this I'd say this is an aspect they could fix in the remake but who knows if we're even getting that anymore the Sith Embassy is a rather lengthy Endeavor one of the longer dungeon type segments in the game that is full of troops although the numbers are high they can be dispatched fairly easily so long as you've been optimizing your build at least somewhat these fights shouldn't cause you any trouble at all within one of the training Halls is a group of hostile self-cath apprentices it seems the dark Jedi within the Sith are looking to train them in the forest and then use them to take over to create a South cath puppet government where the Sith are truly in charge you can find out about this on a data pad when you find a room full of dead cell cath trainees who were tortured by The Sith for some reason it's the Sith there's another room of living non-hostile cell cath but when you try to rescue them they explain that they believe this Sith are good and willing to train them in the force for no other reason than because they are deserving of it or some other weird excuse in fact they believe that everything the Republic says about the Sith is merely propaganda and it's actually the Sith who are somehow the good guys propaganda works that's a recurring aspect of Manon and a big part of this area's narrative theme the concept of how those less involved within a large-scale conflict can be more easily swayed to believe one side over another regardless of who is actually in the right or not the Sith are clearly evil but they use propaganda and political tactics slash Power Moves In order to try and convince citizens of the various planets that it's actually the Republic who are somehow the bad guys in this situation and it works just like in real life propaganda works and many people can be stuck in their ignorant beliefs until you have the evidence to prove it otherwise and even then the evidence sometimes isn't enough for them luckily we can find a token on the dead cell Cath and convince the other trainees to go back home and this information can be used as evidence against the Sith later further into the embassy is the Droid being guarded by various enemies by taking them out and grabbing the data module within you've done everything that is necessary to progress the main questline on Manon and can leave however leaving leads to the first of two situations where you are presented as a criminal in front of the cell cath Court made up of five council members who vote on whether or not you are guilty or innocent see Manon has to enforce their neutrality due to the culto they sell and how they feel said kolto makes them Untouchable between the two factions this hellcath believed that by being the only Distributors of kolto they cannot be attacked but as we now know and have always suspected this Sith have plans to take everything for themselves anyway the reason you get arrested is because the cell cath received reports of blaster fire and explosions from inside the base since there is a rule of neutrality and peace in Otto City you've essentially broken the law and need to explain yourself to the court the first scenario leads to a sentencing of death and a game over if you aren't careful you can be presented by a self-cath arbiter which is essentially a lawyer but it's actually not in your best interest as he will not be able to get an innocent verdict you're better off interrupting him mid-hearing or choosing to represent yourself from the get-go considering you have plenty of evidence against the Sith by this point if you fully explored the embassy just mentioning the public government scheme is enough to get the court to investigate your allegations and find you innocent thanking you for bringing this information to light it should be pointed out that some of the council members are more on the side of the Sith While others are on the side of the Republic even in Otto where the Manon forced the coexistence between Republican Sith true neutrality doesn't seem to exist here we are going to be forced to deal with the court again a little later but we'll need to optionally deal with them if we want to help Jolie's friend who has been arrested Under Suspicion of killing a female Sith officer summary is a longtime friend of Jolie and his wife will beg us to help him get out of jail as his life depends on it by killing one individual sunry 2 can be put to death similar to our time on day and to win this Quest will involve a bit of investigating although it is much more involved than simply questioning a couple individuals in a singular area instead we first need to talk to sunry and learn that he claims to be innocent sunry is a self-proclaimed in fact a lot of individuals refer to him them as that even if it is no longer considered appropriate I guess it's a product of its time since sunry doesn't have an Arbiter you can talk to the court about him and automatically be assigned as his sunry maintains his innocence that he had nothing to do with the death of the Sith officer and that he was only meeting with her in a hotel room in order to try and turn her into a double agent for the Republic the issue is that there are several witnesses that saw him leaving the scene of the crime after a gunshot went off on top of that his Medal of Honor was found clutched in the woman's hands essentially it doesn't look good for him so you need to go to the hotel room in order to question some of the residents there as well as the proprietor ignis he's simple enough and has a straightforward story where he knows what he saw that being sunry leaving immediately after The Gunshot you can however persuade or bribe the man to say that he saw sunry leaving beforehand it's up to you and doesn't affect your alignment like I said the law and the light side are not equivalent here but will delve deeper into that ideology in a second there are two patrons at the hotel that witnessed something during the events of that night the first is foreth me who is a professional pasig player you can convince him to inform you that the Sith officer was actually a dark Jedi unbeknownst to anyone it seems and that foreth didn't actually witness the murder more importantly he will inform you that it seemed as if alasa the Sith dark Jedi was having an affair with sunry of the Republic something you can question sunry and Alora about later gloopor is a rhodian in a room at the end of the hall you can get him to admit to being paid to plant the Medal of Honor on the dead body suggesting that the Sith had been trying to frame summary things don't make a lot of sense here it seems accurate to say everyone saw sunry leave the hotel after the shot but for some reason the Sith were planting a medal It all becomes a little more clear as a mysterious individual meets you outside the hotel and suggests you investigate the Republic Embassy for more information as it turns out the same computer you used for the Sith pass card encryption also has the ability to be spliced allowing you to find Surveillance footage of sunry killing alasa things are getting a bit messy here you can talk to Elora about the affair and she'll confirm it was true you can then corroborate this with sunry but also point out that you know he is guilty sunry will confess to you but claim that he did it only because alasa was betraying him to the Seth all along in essence what sunry did was for Revenge he essentially killed alasa while defenseless they even mentioned it was in her sleep but the security footage clearly states that she was shot in the back as she entered the room with sunry seems to be some sort of writing and consistency during development as sunry does admit to it you're left with a bit of a moral dilemma here not one that is light or dark but one that specifically tackles the concept of Justice within the confines of the law sunry did kill an individual In Cold Blood but said individual was a Sith spy that seemed to be feeding information to the Sith what's worse is that he either shot her in the back or while she was sleeping sunry tries to equate this to your killing of Seth while in battle but this is a bit different I think we can all agree that killing an unarmed individual in their sleep May generally gain you some dark side alignment it's something that we as players and the developers may consider mechanically a dark side action because to us it comes off as wrong while Kotor generally has every Sith official you talk to come off as comically evil it'd be difficult to say everyone within the Sith is Evil Within the universe or deserving of murder criminal punishment yes but death in your sleep it's not something I would personally feel comfortable with and neither would the Jedi or even Jolie who is usually more open to these kinds of things it seems to most that an obstruction of justice has taken place that there were better alternatives to the situation perhaps sunry could have informed the Republic of the knowledge he gained and had her captured and arrested it isn't impossible considering the embassy already had one Sith prisoner so if we frame this as Justice not being served that what sunry has done was morally wrong we then have to consider the repercussions of turning him in and explaining his actions while it might not actually be true sunry explains that confessing of his actions and the cover-up by the Republic by keeping their surveillance footage private could lead the cell cath to removing the Republic from Manon entirely and also revoking their access to kolto which could mean the end of the war sunry attempts here to create a new moral dilemma if we have arrived at the idea that it is wrong to kill In Cold Blood and that sunry is guilty in this regard do we turn him in would it be betraying the Republic to do so and even if it was does it matter that's up for you to decide it's one of the most nuanced decisions you have to make in the game in my opinion and worth really thinking about when you are taking part in it personally I would see sunry confess the issue with that however is that I also don't personally believe in the death penalty which seems to be the sole form of punishment the cell Cath and force except for one situation with your character later I don't believe the well-being of the Republic should excuse the actions of a man willing to cheat on his wife and kill his former lover while she's sleeping I believe some form of action needs to be taken here with that said it is a much more interesting case if you prove sunry innocent it offers more experience points overall and also mechanically forces you to sway the opinions of several judges based on your actions during the investigation and at the hearing so for the sake of the retrospective I'd like to to at least discuss it briefly since each judge has a certain disposition towards the Republic and the Sith they all start with a certain invisible point value that must be raised to at least plus three across the board in order to find suddenly innocent some of these points start in the negatives each witness you convinced to explain what happened generally earns you points across the board additionally certain dialogue choices and questions will lead to answers that raise points in favor as well but not always for every judge by interviewing everyone properly and having done your due diligence and your initial interviews for the witnesses you can earn an innocent verdict for sunry that also leads to the Sith being punished further due to their actions in planting evidence sunry will leave with his wife who forgave his adultery for some reason and you can talk to Jolie about the case it's a Bittersweet situation Jolie asks you if you believe justice has been done here today and if you answer no he agrees with you but mentions how our opinions have nothing to do with the law in the eyes of the law justice has been done a man has been found innocent regardless of if you believe he was truly guilty in Jolie's own words it's a sad State of Affairs and a very honest representation of what the law is like in the real world pitfalls and all with the major side quests out of the way in the Sith Embassy dealt with you can head back with the data to The Republic Embassy in order to get their help with the star map turns out that the reason the Republic even created the Droid was because they were investigating a hidden base they had created but had seemingly gone dark on them to interfere with culto means death but the Republic made a secret deal with some self-cath moderates in the government who believe that the Sith are truly a detriment to Manon if the Republic could Harvest their kolto from the source and eventually synthesize it the Sith could be forced out of Manon and the Republic could gain a tactical Advantage unfortunately there seems to be an issue in the base and that is why the Republic has been hiring so many mercenaries on Manon now it's your turn to go on another suicide mission to find out what's happening while getting to the star map in the process the Republic give you a submersible that takes you to the underwater base when you arrive you find the scene of a Slaughter most of the mercenaries and employees scientists Below have been murdered by crazed self cath who suddenly turned violent after a scream was emanated by a giant faraxan shark now selcath are attacking and eating people while the smaller farax and sharks pick off anyone who heads outside of the base it's honestly one of the darker and creepier areas to explore in the game I think what makes it so impactful is its powerful contrast in comparison to the beauty of Otto city as you progress you'll find a scuba suit that will allow you to head from one area of the base to another you can use a Sonic emitter to instantly kill any sharks in the vicinity so that you can travel safely once you make it a few scientists will be found behind a force field and I you not try to murder you by depressurizing the chamber and killing you in the process you you can destroy the force field to stop the countdown and they'll eventually come to their senses and apologize for their actions these scientists tell you the same story everyone else has but mention that the giant shark can potentially be dealt with in one of two ways you can use an experimental toxin known to kill the Sharks but unknown are the further repercussions that it would have on the surrounding ecology alternatively you can blow up the culto harvesting machine and resetting the Republic back after years of setup since where Light Side will complete a small Mini-Game that allows the Machinery to explode this in turn calms the giant racks and shark and it will allow you to pass over towards the star map that is nearby thus finishing your main task on Manon but we aren't out of the woods just yet when you return to the Embassy you can inform the Republic ambassador of what happened he'll worry about all the work that was lost in fear this will cause them to lose the war but it should be obvious to us that this isn't the case since we're going to win the war for them by being an insanely powerful Jedi worse though is what happens as we leave the embassy cell cath authorities arrest us for a second time this time asking what happened in the depths of their Homeworld if you blew up the Machinery you can explain you saved everyone from the shark by destroying what was down there turns out the shark is known as the progenitor and is a part of cell cath myth and considered to be the potential source and guardian of culto this news is enough to have the cell cath not only forgive your transgressions but also thank you for your service allowing you to leave if you end up poisoning the surrounding area to kill the shark or if you can't talk your way out of the hearing you'll actually be banned from a non-permanently meaning you legitimately can't return there ever I believe if you try you can land in the Docking Bay but they won't let you go any further this is why I mentioned it's important to make sure all of your side quests are done otherwise you may get locked out of some Manon is one of my favorite planets in the entirety of the Kotori series every Quest and scene that takes place there is interesting in its own right the politics and subterfuge that take place the ability to take part in the entirety of a court case and the adventures into the depths of manon's oceans only to be subjected to the horrors of the crazed selkath there's so much happening there and none of it feels forced by any means but the best part about the planet is the city you spend the most amount of time in Otto is even now incredibly beautiful it's a floating city where you see nothing but Ocean on the horizon and the music there is some of the most calming in the entry it reminded me of the Oblivion OST which I am heavily nostalgic for with Manon taken care of there is only one star map left to find that being on korriban which also happens to be home of the Sith Academy however that's not where we'll be going right away after receiving four star Maps total there is a forced storyline event that takes place as you attempt to travel from one planet to the next in which you are forced to board a large Sith ship known as the Leviathan which just so happens to be commanded by Saul kareth as I mentioned the Leviathan is a forced encounter it acts as the climax of Saul's storyline as well as the falling morale for your party due to the events that take place before that it's good to note that if you're following along with all of your companion storylines you can have Jolie tell you about his wife it takes a lot of prodding but it mostly boils down to the concept of love and how Jolie doesn't believe it to be the cause of a Jedi's fall to the dark side aspects of passion sure but love as Jolie points out is different it's something that more often than not will hurt you but it's also something that strengthens you as a person if you let it this is another example of Jolie not seeing eye to eye with the council something he will mention he believes due to seeing the Jedi as blind to their actions the mind of a Jedi within the council seems to be unaware of the steps ahead of them and how their actions May lead them down the path of Ruin due to Blind virtuousness and righteousness on the topic of love bastila has been fighting her feelings for you for some time she talks to you about them in private how she respects you and sees you as a powerful Jedi one even more powerful than her but that is the reason she believes you both must cut your ties as soon as possible and not pursue this potential relationship any further if you discuss this with her it will lead to a moment of perceived weakness and a kiss of which Bastille feels guilty about Bastille is proud of her abilities as a Jedi but scared about the weakness of her will what we learned from Jolie is that the things the Jedi perceived as weakness are not always so and in a way you can begin showing this to bastila and offering the perspective that the will of the council is not all-knowing now your ship has been hit by a tractor beam and brought onto the Leviathan before you are boarded you discuss with the group how you are going to get out of this situation and the consensus is to have someone break out in order to free the others karth bastila and yourself are too important to be left alone right away so it's up to the karth bastila and yourself are too important to be left alone right away so it's up to one of your secondary party members and you get to choose who to send in I personally chose mission for this one who managed to swipe a key card off of one of the Sith after provoking him with insults before the breakout basil the car then you are locked in torture cells and interrogated by Saul Saul wants information on your mission and the location of the Jedi enclave and he tortures bastilla periodically to get you to talk basila doesn't want you to say anything and you can uphold that which she will later respect even if it is difficult to watch one of the big reveals here is that the question about the Jedi Enclave was a test turns out the Sith had already found and destroyed it meaning you cannot return to dantooine for the rest of your journey and it is unknown if anyone managed to escape at the time an interest part of the scene is when Saul mentions something to you about Malik which you have no idea about this informs Saul that you are unaware of something that you should be and he finds it humorous regardless of who you have chosen to break out the main goal is to get a pass card and free everyone from captivity it's a rather involved process of sneaking around or being more forceful depending on who you choose everyone's a little bit different depending once Mission manages to break the group out everyone except the main three head to the hangar to get the Ebon Hawk ready while the rest of you head to the bridge to confront Saul there's a battle that ensues and Saul is left dying karth Wants Revenge for his family but you can talk him down for Light Side points with his dying words Saul tells karth a secret that causes him to enter a Justified fit of rage demanding answers from bastilla while you witness the argument with no idea of what is happening there's no time to conclude the issues as Malik is on his way and you have to rush to the hangar with your party unfortunate generally just as you are about to make it Malik appears from one of the hangar entrances to stop the three of you it's at this point that Things become revealed Malik wants bastila but he also wants to kill or overpower you specifically he recognizes you even if you don't remember who you are and he finds this incredibly hilarious this is where things start rushing back to you you hear the words of basila as she discusses using the enemy against themselves and words from the council about not normally accepting adults into the order how the force can wipe your memory and destroy your identity how the Allure of the dark side May set you down a familiar path everything you've done all of the planets you visited are a path that you have already tread once before it should be obvious by now but the big reveal the ultimate spoiler of Kotor is that you are in fact Revan the dark lord of the Sith and the hero of the Mandalorian Wars all along the council and bastila have lied to you about your past and have used you in their efforts to find the starforge they have always known who you were and didn't want to tell you in the chance that you would join the Dark Side once more bastila and Malik inform you that during your battle against the Jedi Knights you were betrayed by Malik and deeply wounded since the Jedi don't kill their prisoners bastila attempted to save your life but the force and the attack had damaged your mind to the point that it essentially had to be rebuilt the order used this as an opportunity to implant false memories in your mind of working for the Republic all of this was a fabrication the truth is that you were Revenant all along you went off to fight in the Mandalorian Wars against the council's wishes at some point down the line after becoming a hero in the war you ended up turning to the dark side and seeking out the starforge after creating an Empire you were attacked by bastila and betrayed by Malik leaving you injured as Bastille healed you after your mind was rebuilt a force Bond thus connected you which bound your Destinies together this is what Saul ended up telling karth and he's still coming to terms with it you can discuss the information for a moment as Bastille explains everything to you you can choose to understand her actions or not it seems at least somewhat justified in my opinion to feel a sense of betrayal at this knowledge that the Jedi would so actively manipulate an individual who was mentally broken and rebuilt goes to show how far they are willing to go and what they are willing to justify was doing this to revin a light side aligned action or the actions of individuals of humanity was it the right thing to do to essentially create a new person entirely from the remnants of a Sith Lord I wouldn't particularly consider those tactics virtuous even if they are necessary this isn't something I'm chastising them for either but I believe it shows how a manipulative the council can be it goes back to how we discussed the council earlier on dantuine to be Light Side aligned doesn't mean you are truly moral or virtuous sometimes the light sidelined individuals do some questionable things some really questionable things this is what Jolie tries to teach you in your discussions and it's now something you witness first hand due to the actions of the bastila and the council the light side is an all-around good in the universe but the Jedi are not always the same they are Sapient and Mortal beings and as such are fallible as well Malik puts basila and carth in stasis leading to a one-on-one battle so that he can prove himself and surpass you it's a little funny considering I absolutely destroyed him by this point but he still found a means to overpower and get away from me via a cut scene the battle ends with Bastille Breaking Free and keeping Malik preoccupied long enough for you and karth to escape while she stays behind sacrificing herself although Jolie doesn't believe that Malik would kill her due to her abilities with battle meditation as you all make it back to your ship and Escape karth demands you come clean to everyone about who you are that you are revin despite losing your memories of that time in your life almost everyone is accepting of you although karth questions it depending on your light and dark side affiliations candorus specifically has gained a huge amount of respect for you since you were the only one to truly be able to defeat the mandalorians HK 47 as it turns out is actually the Droid of Revan meaning you have always been his master and this in turn unlocks his memory banks if you talk to him later he will reveal that the reason he calls everyone meat bag is because he once called Malik that and you found it so humorous you programmed him to use it consistently Mission believes that you are a different person due to your reconstructed memories and it's something I agree with I personally believe that an individual is what their memories make them to be if you remove the memories and replace them with something else you are now a different person probably with a different personality zalbar agrees with Mission and jahani can point out how everything has come back around since you are the Jedi that apparently saved her on Terrace meaning her respect for you has effectively skyrocketed as well as for Jolie he always knew you were Revan but didn't believe it was his place to tell you all this to say that your party will mostly believe in you even if Kurth is suspicious depending on your actions with bastila captured and taken to the starforge it's now up to you all to find the final star map and to head there in order to save bastila and defeat Malik once and for all this means that korriban is the next destination and luckily enough this will also tie into karth's quest line involving his son Corbin is possibly one of the most straightforward planets to explore next to kashyyk the real Freedom comes from choosing which tombs you'll explore in the valley first but before we can even reach the valley we'll find ourselves stuck in the hangar Bay and surrounding shops and cantina for a short period of time Corbin is an interesting location it's home to the Sith Academy and also home to ancient Sith ruins naturally there are a lot of Sith here but that somehow hasn't stopped individuals from opening Cantinas and shops in order to try and make some money no matter the cost for the most part these are going to be more lecherous individuals Smugglers and the like who don't want to open up shop on Republic world since what they are doing may be considered illegal for that reason it should come as no surprise that almost everyone here recognizes the Ebon Hawk due to its use in smuggling operations for various criminals over its lifetime including davik and the exchange before we stole it from them something that earns a bit of respect from the people you talk to or they simply don't care everyone is out for themselves here and so they will generally steer clear of trouble with you despite the transgressions of the Sith as we have learned on Manon many individuals don't believe in the evil that the Sith perpetuate or simply don't care and are looking out for themselves first there's countless end of individuals stopping in coraban in order to potentially join with the Sith and this in turn leads to countless individuals getting attacked tortured or simply messed with by Seth students who have learned to embrace the comical levels of evil that this game is known for everyone Sith here is hilariously evil incredibly so they'll threaten to kill you mug you force you to stand for days on end without food or water Etc I can honestly say that while korriban is meant to show a world under pure Sith Rule and all the aspects of evil and suffering this conveys it ends up being more like an amusement park of comedic villainy and you're going to go through the whole thing incomprehensibly laughing at the absolute absurdity of it all there's even a group of school bullies who threaten to kill you the star map appears to you in a vision within some sort of Tomb and all the known tombs of ancient Sith Lords are in a valley were the only accesses through the Sith Academy in order to gain access to the Sith Academy you need a recommendation from a high-ranking member as well as a medallion that has been given to you by a student who has nominated you that's kind of the gist of it how you go about getting it is a little more complicated you need to be accepted in by a Twilight named euthura but she won't let you in unless you get a medallion from another Sith student and the only way to get one is by killing a member who seems to be going on a rampage around one of the shops and force electrocuting anyone that is within his immediate field of view if you bring The Medallion to you Thora she will allow you access to the academy and once inside you will officially be a student you aren't finished yet though while there are tombs that are free to access and explore the one tomb you actually need to gain access to is locked and is only accessible by uthar a Sith master who runs the academy in order for him to give you access you have to compete with all of the other students in order to gain enough Prestige to be fully accepted into the Sith the trick is that only one student is accepted a year and assuming they don't die everyone else will have to try again next time on the topic of details based on progression you can tell almost everyone here that you're actually the dark lord Revan to which nobody will really believe you except for one Merchant who knows it to be true due to hacking into Sith reconnaissance in fact depending on what order you were doing the planets in you can actually bring this fact up in various situations for various effects just traveling around space telling people that you're the dark lord who died at the hands of Malik's betrayal you throw the Twilight that got you admitted into the academy did so because she could sense the storing powers of the force within you due to this she asks you early on if you would consider helping her betray uthar so the two of you could rise in power within the academy you can agree to this and you can even prod her for information on her past to get to know her better if you do this and use the right dialogue options later you can actually turn her to the Light Side although I didn't end up doing that this playthrough if you do turn her to the light side she will travel to The Enclave on dantuine which we know now gets destroyed you can even have a rare dialogue with her there depending on how you progress through the planets if your first couple of planets included korriban and you traveled to dantooine before The Enclave is destroyed you can find her there and discuss her progress within the academy itself you can find dustel who is karth's son Dustin won't be happy to see his father however as he believes that his work with the Republic forced him to abandon his family the truth is that karth was simply late returning to Telos in order to save his family leaving him to hold his dying wife in his arms with no sign of dustil in the surrounding ruin feeling abandoned dustil turned to the Sith who he believed to be good rather than evil and he won't really be convinced otherwise unless you provide him ample evidence said evidence can be found in uthar's bed Chambers there's a data pad that details how one of dustil's friends at the gay Academy was killed this will convince him that he was wrong about the Seth while also showing some remorse towards his father however rather than leave dustil Ops to stay in the academy so he can convince others to leave alongside him and save them from the Sith to which karth is both appreciative and proud of kurth's entire life seems to be centered around his time with the Republic it isn't surprising that while he had the best intentions his time away from his family ultimately led to some resentment from his son now that they are reunited and dustil sees the Sith for what they truly are it's left up in the air whether or not they will be able to fully reconcile although kartha is hopeful and is willing to try on the topic of companions jahani is a great one to bring along here as you will run into a slaver a few times who turns out to be one of the individuals who murdered the kathar on Terrace he even remembers jahani and tries to capture her again this acts as a narrative climax for jahani storyline this man who she reviles constantly attempts to goad her into giving in to her dark thoughts and anger and it's through your conversations with her and your ability to help her stay calm and within the light that she manages to hold on and control herself while she'll never forgive the man who killed her family she can at least find peace in soulless in the fact that she is not like him and hopefully never will be now in order to earn Prestige there is multiple tasks you need to complete around the academy in the valley although you don't need to complete all of them one of the easiest ways to get some is to repeat the Sith code to uthar and explain its meaning to him you can also interrogate a Mandalorian prisoner to find his weapons cache if you'd like some of the more obvious ways to gain Prestige include visiting the various tombs around the valley there's three main tombs for you to explore currently and each is meant to act as its own challenge in order for you to earn some form of artifact or other item that can be returned for Prestige before that though there is a cave where you can find a group of students who have escaped the academy and are being hunted down you can kill them all for Prestige or help them escape and lie about it while still gaining favor from uthar first there is the tomb of ajanta Paul you have to place a grenade within a stone pillar in order to cause it to blow up but this in turn activates a set of security droids you can't immediately kill instead you need to run across a nearby bridge and activate a lever which will cause all of the droids to blow up the real trial is in the burial chamber itself where the force ghosts of ajanta Paul will present itself to the party currently in agony due to what is presumably a forced Eternity for him due to the inability to move on ajunta's artifact is his powerful blade but within his tomb there are three blades total he explains that you need to present one of the blades to the nearby statue if he choose the right blade you may take it and leave otherwise he will try to kill you in order to know which blade to take he provides a riddle but really you can just save scum until you get the right one Additionally you can even convince him to turn back to the light side as a force ghost which will allow him to pass on into the Afterlife while providing you a boost in Light Side alignment next is the tomb of tulak horde which just so happens to be also housing uthar's old Sith master who was kicked out into the valley by uthar after he overtook him in power now jorak uln is a crazy old man who uses a nerve agent trap to paralyze victims that come into the tomb so he can essentially torture them in fact he already has one Sith student in his clutches and will manage to capture you as well this leads to a bit of a mini game where he will ask you moral questions if you answer as a Sith he will electrocute the student if you answer any other way he will electrocute you the goal is to cause the student to die before you but you can actually answer in a way that leads to both of you getting electrocuted equally and preventing either of you from dying this in turn allows the student to break free and free you so that you and your party can kill jorak once and for all I believe you take his band off of his corpse which can be returned to uthar for Prestige the final tomb that of Mark aragnos is incredibly straightforward it's a linear path through a large army of battle droids until you reach one specific assassination Droid that has turned incredibly aggressive due to its inability to tune its audio receptors you can actually wear a sound dampening device found on a corpse near the entrance in order to converse with the Droid and you can then disable its assassination protocols and allow it to escape I unfortunately did not remember this and ended up killing everything in the Tomb before leaving there are a few other means of gaining Prestige but none really worth mentioning by this point you should have enough to earn uthar's favor and he will agree to escort you to the tomb of Naga Shadow for the final trial you will enter the tomb with uthara and youthura but you must progress through it alone which is slightly daunting as you have to work your way through to tarantatek in order to gain access to a set of pillars which contains specialized grenades one for hot and one for cold you must bring these grenades to a nearby acid pool that is preventing you from Crossing and use the right grenade to create passage since the acid is liquid you need to use the cold grenade to freeze it as using the hot grenade will cause a noxious gas that will lead to a game over once over the the acid pool you'll find the star map thus concluding our reasons for being on korriban but all is not done yet as you return to uthar he states that for your trial to be fully complete you must kill euthura as he believes she has become too ambitious to be left alive since we agreed to help you through it earlier and since you can potentially have her join the light side I usually suggest siding with her on this but you can side with uthar if you want or alternatively fight the both of them regardless after killing uthar euthura will turn on you anyway and you will have to fight her until she concedes and surrenders her life to you you can kill her hear or let her go and your dialogue choices may allow her to return to the light side if you do kill her the academy enters a state of war and you basically have to kill everyone within if you leave her to run the academy it is relatively peaceful when you leave as I mentioned korban acts as an amusement park for Dart side characters everything within is designed to allow a player focusing on the dark side to Revel in a acts of villainy in contrast Light Side characters are going to have a bit more of a frustrating time to get to your end goal of the star map while still performing and doing good you generally need to take the more difficult options presented to you or ones that require High skill checks the Mandalorian you interrogate can be saved from captivity but you need a high computer skill check to do so if you choose to go through with the interrogation for the prestige you'll have an easier time but you also gain Dark Side points in the process in a way Corban shows us that to be evil and to get what you want you may generally see an easier time in doing so it's the righteous decisions that are difficult and more rewarding that's why you can be challenging for many to stay on the path of the Jedi the dark side represents the corrupting forces of human will that well can be easily broken down and it requires hard work to keep intact while all of the Star maps have now been retrieved there is no current cut scene or moment with your party that informs you of this instead a new location appears on your Galaxy map but you should definitely head back to Yavin station before proceeding this will lead to a battle within the station while also unlocking the full inventory of the shop found here with inside inventory are two very expensive lightsaber color crystals while the color of the saber generally doesn't change its attributes these specific crystals actually bolster the effects of the optional upgrade crystals you have equipped to the saber making them highly useful for bolstering the strength of your character and potentially your party with all of the Star maps in hand it's time to see what lies ahead and what the starforge actually is it's time to find bastila and deal with Malik once and for all while putting an end to the Jedi Civil War and this retrospective in the process while you might think the starforge is the next destination in the journey there's actually one final planet to go over known as lahan as you approach the starforge a disrupter field disables several key parts of the Eben Hawk forcing karth to perform an emergency landing on an unknown planet that is not found within Republic records this is lahan one of the more beautiful planets in the game and also home to the ancient Rakata race the craters of the star Forge and the infinite Empire as you land on lahan you end up on a beach full of other ships that met a similar fate to you in fact it seems there is something on lahan that prevents any ship from getting close to the star Forge unless you already knew about it ahead of time this is why this Sith are able to move freely from the starforge and lahan to the rest of the outer rim but you ended up crash landing traitors and adventurers from across the Galaxy have also reached this area themselves and subsequently crashed to either their deaths or their Doom as leaving the beach has anyone attacked by rakatan Warriors the priority of your party is rescuing bastila in dealing with the starforge but before that is possible you'll have to find a way to repair the Eben Hawk and disable the disrupter as you fight your way through waves of rakatan warriors with Rancor pets of all things you'll eventually reach a side of the beach with a village and less hostile ricotta this is due to them recognizing you when they heard an individual had been effectively using magic to slaughter them they knew Revan had returned this is because both Revan and Malik had landed here previously in their original search for the forge and now the rakatan leader known as the one looks to converse with you things are about to get a bit lore heavy so bear with me as we discuss the two tribes on the planet the ricotta you are meeting currently are known as the black ricotta due to their choice of clothing I assume the only one who doesn't wear black is the one they are a violent Warrior Race who look to control the entirety of the surrounding land including an ancient Temple that is locked behind a ritual that only the other tribe known as Elder Rakata know how to perform these Rakata met with you back when you were Revan and asked you to slay this elder tribe and bring the secrets of the temple to them in which you apparently agreed to after disappearing into the star Forge following set events the Rakata assumed you had simply betrayed them and went on with their lives capturing elders and torturing them for info of which they rarely divulged anything you can explain to the one that you are a changed man due to the loss of your memory and he believes you as he can sense there is something different about you he asks if you will again help them with the task you previously agreed to and you can either really agree or rely to him in order to get out peacefully on the other side of the island is a secondary community of Rakata known as the elders as it turns out they also recognize you as revin had been playing both sides of the warring tribes on one side he agreed to kill the elders and on the other he agreed help destroy the starforge but why would the elders want the starforge destroyed and additionally what makes the elders different from the other rakatan tribe there's a historian nearby and a computer that gives a large chunk of their backstory to the player essentially the star Forge was created by the rakatans over 20 000 years ago as an automated Shipyard that fed off the energy of a nearby star while also feeding off force-sensitive individuals and corrupting them via the dark side the starforge itself then is an incredibly powerful relic of the dark side and allows those within to be Amplified by it should they wish meaning someone like Malik is almost infinitely more powerful within if given the opportunity to make the most of the station it wasn't always this way however originally the starforge simply fed off the energy from the Star the rakatan people were able to create such a device by both being an incredibly Advanced species and by enslaving being countless races to help build the infinite Empire thus named for the automated starforge's ability to consistently and constantly churn out Advanced space weapons for their use essentially infinitely this was the golden age for the Rakata but as the sarforge began to feed off the negative energy from the conquest and slavery that the ricotta perpetuated in it became a tool of the dark side and this caused several disruptions for them namely a series of uprisings began to take place throughout the slave races who were slowly standing up against the Rakata additionally a plague began to spread and kill off their species while also mutating to a point that it cut them off from the force entirely the Rakata were a force Adept people and their technology was controlled via the force hence why the starforge was able to be converted into a dark side Beacon now cut off from the entirety of their technological innovations their race essentially fell stagnant and led to a long Civil War on the surface of lahon destroying the surrounding areas and leaving it as a land of islands and beaches One rakatan Tribe the black Rakata moved underground after the hostilities and devolved culturally into what we have witnessed here today the elders however seem to have kept all the knowledge of their past transgressions and now looked to repent by destroying the forge entirely a task they gave to Revan which he accepted and inevitably betrayed them on now Revan has returned and while the Rakata can tell you are different in some capacity they don't fully trust you to earn their trust they ask that you go back to the previous tribe and free one of their Elders who has been held for interrogation as you head back the black Rakata assumed that you have betrayed them and you end up fighting through the entirety of them to save the Elder and prove yourself to the rest while the elders are still wary of your intentions they trust you enough by this point and agreed to give you access to the temple through their ritual that will lower the force field however they warn you that you will have to go in alone as is tradition and that the temple is full of dark Jedi in fact there's a scene upon Landing in lahan that we see basila being tortured by Malik within one subsection of the temple but they have unfortunately absconded by this point while you are meant to go in alone both juhani and Jolie had premonitions of the dangers within the temple and they refused to let you do so forcing you to convince the elders to allow them to accompany you despite Traditions the temple itself is just another dungeon to work through there's nothing particularly special about it until you manage to reach the very top where the disruptor device is located who is there to greet you none other than bastila who has shocker fall into the dark side and now attacks you she's a fairly simple fight like most by this point in the game but for the narrative's sake she pushes you all away from her and explains how her descent into the dark side has made her open her eyes to the flaws of the Jedi Council basila talks about how the Jedi sought to exploit the bond between you and her and she's actually kind of spitting at this point point the Jedi Council did use you for their own benefit in a way that was heavily manipulative but at the same time there is a difference between what they have done and what the Sith and the dark side are doing right now sure the Jedi are a flawed order of loser monks but they're not evil and looking to take control of the entire galaxy this is potentially one of the most interesting points in the game as it is the most Divergent in terms of storyline obviously we disagree with bastila here and try to convince her back to the light but you don't have to do that Bastille recognizes your strength and believes you can defeat Malik she would even join with you if you were willing to return to the dark side and become a Sith Lord once more that is an option you can take you can choose to work with bastila here and betray your friends something Jolie and jahani aren't willing to let you do at this point and will lead to a confrontation that ends in their deaths when you return to your party bastila will inform everyone that you are revin once more Earth will feel betrayed similar to when Saul took his home and family from him he'll run off but everyone else will follow you for one reason or another the droids are programmed too and candorus is a Mandalorian who only cares about following you out of respect zalbar has also sworn a life debt to you the only outlier here is Mission who neither runs away or joins you forcing her to be killed and there's a pretty messed up way of going about that where you force zalbar mission's best friend to do it for you but I won't subject you to all of that no we refuse bastila and she runs off in her ship nearby you can then disable the disrupter and the shields around the temple allowing you to escape when you return to your party you can inform them about Bastille turning to the dark side and everyone is in agreement that it's time to head to the starforge proper and defeat Malik before this can go on any further and maybe save basila from the Dark Side in the process the starforge acts as the set piece for Knights of the Old Republic's finale with the adventure complete it's now time to Face Off against Malik and His Infinite Fleet of Sith as you approach the star Forge it seems the Republic has received a distress signal from karthin are now on their way to help out in the upcoming battle only there's one major issue bastila is using her battle meditation to bolster the abilities of the Sith Fleet and preventing the Republic from being able to make any leeway towards the forge as it turns out many of the Jedi on dantooine were saved along with the various Masters including vandar who suggests sending in a small task force of Jedi to break through the Sith lines and begin assaulting the Ford from the inside in hopes of interrupting bastila and giving the Republic an advantage you and the rest of your party agree to be part of this task force and take the Eben Hawk alongside various Jedi ships into the forage proper now the last section or so has mostly been lore dumps and exploring the concepts the game has been setting up along your journey lahan in a way was really just there to provide context to the existence of the star of Forge it's a rather short planet and there's not much to say on it other than and what it presents to you narratively in a way lahan is kind of exhausting you've gone through several long sections of the game throughout the various planets when you have collected every Star map and are finally on your way to the forge there's now one additional section of the game you need to complete before the finale while the context of the narrative is appreciated and I enjoy learning about the Rakata and their history it really feels like the game is stretching itself out within this section an opportunity could have been taken to teach us of the Rakata their people and their technology within the starforge itself but instead we have one last stretch of gameplay before the finale where nothing of real importance happens except for your confrontation with bastila which could have just happened on the starforge proper in fact it does happen on the starforge later on anyway the reason I bring this up is because as I mentioned lahan left me feeling exhausted with the game and when you go into the starforge you are unfortunately met with several areas that begin to show the overall weaknesses within the game's party management and battle system leading to an even more exhausting time as you work your way towards the end it's not just the battle system and party that gets stressed here there's also several boss encounters that simply do not benefit the gameplay in any way and we will see that as we progress through let's first discuss the journey from The Landing Pad to basila as you land you'll be met with several Jedi who in turn are met with several dark Jedi the Jedi hold off this Sith in order for you to progress throughout the star Forge and as you progress you'll see various cut scenes of Malik ordering his troops to go after you he starts with droids created via the starforge then all of his Sith Troopers and dark Jedis and then eventually bastilla these are infinite enemies like truly infinite from what I understand as you progress if you were to stand still you would be met with a Non-Stop wave of enemies over and over until you eventually ran out of resources now more likely than not that isn't going to happen if you have built your party appropriately and brought a decent supply of items you can progress from point A to point B with minimal interruptions the issue lies in party management here as you are running ahead you generally lose line of sight on your party meanwhile several enemy units May spawn behind you and catch the attention of your party members forcing them to backtrack without your knowledge Until you realize too late because you just ran into 10 Sith Troopers with no backup meanwhile because you aren't with them your party is now getting slaughtered by an endless stream of enemies which in turn forces you to backtrack as well to clear them out and then essentially escort your party to the exit through each area it's the most frustrating area in the game it seems clear that the party AI wasn't designed to take these kind of situations into account or follow the player character as you disengage from these battles into another the only way to get them to properly prioritize is through manual control and while manual control has its uses in specific battles for more efficient fighting this is a situation where the overall mechanics feel incredibly messy realistically the star Forge absolutely should be full of enemies and large-scale battles but these battles should have been limited and strategically placed throughout the area as you explore as opposed to just constantly bum rushing you I understand what they were going for here the pressure of having an army breathing down your neck from all sides but in a game like Kotor where every other set of enemies are either roaming or replaced with purpose it would have simply been better to just have a ton of enemies in various areas leading to enjoyable battles with a definitive end before you progress further once you're close to the command center Malik leaves bastila there to confront you on his own he mentions that she's merely there to slow Revan down and he doesn't really care if she succeeds or not as you reach basilis you will throw your party members into stasis and lock them in the room behind you leading into what I would consider your first boss encounter the encounter itself plays out over repetitive battles where you need to get basila down to a certain percentage of Health before his set of dialogue takes place this process repeats as she draws power from the starforge to heal herself and continue fighting while conversing with you the conversations consist of you convincing bass to let it come back to the light side and her refusing you believing that the dark side is both freedom from the Jedi and also full of power the Light Side could never offer her you prove her wrong on some of this by defeating her multiple times over the course of this encounter to the point where she doesn't seem to understand what is happening and begins to realize that she was wrong about the power of the dark side there's a point during the battle where she essentially is forced to admit defeat and asks that when you kill her that you don't make her suffer since you both shared something in the past the Light Side path of this game is the only way you can actually kill basil I believe I don't think it's an option in the dark side route you have a choice here you can strike Bastille down and finish the job where you can continue your attempts to bring her back to the light through the bond you share and through love it isn't as much logic that brings Bastille back as it is your love for one another in a way this is a call back to our conversations with Jolie who seemed to be attempting to teach you this very lesson Jolie will tell you about love and how it can hurt and how that hurt can be a gateway to the dark side but it isn't love or passion itself that is necessarily evil these feelings can provide happiness and do good to love someone is an amazing feeling and something Jolie misses immensely it too can unfortunately make you somewhat blind Jolie for example trained his wife in the ways of the Jedi as an adult against the wishes of the council and she eventually turned to the dark side when given the opportunity to kill her in battle Jolie couldn't do it and he let his wife go and she went on to slaughter many Jedi during the war of exarcoon Joe Lee even went on trial for this and he was found innocent by the Jedi as they wanted to show him compassion this in turn is what caused Jolie to finally turned his back on the council and the order fully and he believed that he should have been punished for his actions in a way we are mirroring Jolie's past in this confrontation with bastila we have someone we love who has turned to the dark side and we have met them in battle and triumphed now given the opportunity we can either kill them or let them go while letting them go isn't a mechanical option here instead we can try to do what Jolie unfortunately failed at although it wasn't necessarily his fault or responsibility we can try to bring Bastille back to us through the power of love and friendship it may sound cliche in a way but the social and emotional bonds we create with our friends and lovers hold weight over us Bastille's love for Revan and revin's love for her is enough for the two to reconcile and for bastilla to see the error of her ways and luckily come back to the light does she have the possibility of falling to the dark side again potentially would it have been safer to strike her down here and now again potentially but would it have been the right thing to do when there was a good opportunity to bring her back to her friends would it have been better to consider bastila a lost cause that's something for the player to decide based on their own morals in my opinion it seemed like the force bond between Revan and bastila on top of their love for one another was enough to save her from the clutches of the dark side especially after hearing Jolie's story of love and the strength and pain it can provide Bastille will stay behind as you go to confront Malik and while the dialogue and events with basila are one of the high points of the starforge don't worry we are about to go into what is one of the worst boss fight designs I have ever experienced in any RPG as you reached Malik in the room ahead you will see six consoles scattered around the area Malik will appear and kill a couple of Jedi in front of you before escaping and activating the area's defense systems which is another Infinite Source of droids to fight not only are you by yourself at this point but you will be fighting a up to six droids at a time at all times until you figure out how to disable the technology that creates them well those several computer stations end up being the key by going up to the station you can use computer spikes to disable one of the generators there's one generator per station and considering I had minimal computer skill this meant I needed seven spikes per station or 42 total hopefully I did my multiplication right there now I don't know about you but I did not have 42 spikes going into this fight I had maybe enough for one station and then afterwards none for the rest so what happens now are you soft locked fighting an ever-ending army of droids not exactly no there is a solution although not the greatest every time a new Droid gets generated a chest beside the Droid station will generate a spike meaning every seven droids you kill will lead to another station being disabled this could thus lead to a solo battle versus you and a total of 42 draw voids in fact it may be smarter for you to not disable the generators until you've generated all the spikes you need as the process gets slower the less droids there are appearing once you've disabled all six generators the door will unlock and you can head in to fight Malik proper now this fight is absolutely insane if you are not prepared for it even with preparation it can still be fairly difficult due to the sheer attack power Malik has in comparison to you to make matters worse it seems Malik has learned how to make the most of the star Forge by capturing Jedi killing them and then harnessing their corpses for energy before they can become one with the force this keeps them in some weird Perpetual state of purgatory or limbo until he decides to utilize their power in the battle against you which is exactly what he will do if you manage to deal enough damage to Malik or if he uses a certain amount of his Force pool he'll sap energy from one of the corpses turning it into a husk of its former self and gain all of his power back there are several of these bodies around the viewing platform you fight in meaning that there are several rounds of this fight you need to work through and it is some of the most exhausting coin flip combat I have ever experienced if you aren't properly prepared for it there is an easier way if you have one of the few force abilities like force breach you can run around the area and blow up the various generators allowing the corpses of the Jedi to rest if you do this before killing Malik you will have no means of healing himself and the battle will end after just one additional round if you don't have that Force ability I am not sure what you're supposed to do other than fight him several consecutive times again though the battle can be incredibly painful Malik was able to resist and save my stasis ability which is one of the most effective crowd control abilities I had on this character if it wasn't for having Force Whirlwind he would have constantly defeated me in multiple attacks due to one of his abilities having the opportunity to Stun Me overall all the Malik fight is incredibly daunting for new players not just because he is strong but also because you are Solo during it Malek's death is a little sad it was Revan who started Malik down the path of the dark side and while Revan threw sheer luck and the will of the force was essentially reborn into the light Malik was stuck in the dark for the rest of his existence as he lays dying he wonders what it would have been like if their roles were reversed if Malik had been the one to return to the light instead of Revan despite all he tried to do for ultimate power Malik now is brutally aware of the fact that it was all for naught and that within his death there is nothing waiting for him other than Darkness you can apologize to Malik as he dies for setting him down this path but at the same time you were forced to remind him that he could have left the path at any time and I don't think that's a very fair response nor a good apology the dark side time and time again within the Star Wars universe and within Kotor itself has been shown to be intoxicating and addictive in a way it is a drug and the addicts have said drug may have an exceptionally hard time getting off it by themselves there is still a huge responsibility on Revan for leading him down it and to claim that Malik could have simply stepped off the path is incredibly disingenuous at best but also par for the course in terms of how the Jedi view the Sith even bastila a Jedi just recently turned Sith via torture needed to be fought several times and deeply convinced to break out of the destructive cycle she then found herself in and even before that she was someone that was so strongly susceptible to falling over to the dark side that anything could have potentially tipped the scales for her it's not right to say that the Sith can simply break out of the dark side because the dark side is essentially a Godly malicious force that has to be actively combated by individuals every day of their lives through rigorous train in order to prevent them from slipping Revan is the cause of Malik and Malik is the cause of all of this destruction and death of Terrace and Revan holds as much blame for this as Malik does if not more so that is until what I believe is a retcon in later stories that give alternative reasoning for Revan and Malik's descent into the dark side but that's not within the scope of this video the way Revan responds to Malik's death then is Bittersweet Revan has triumphed against the Sith but seems to hold little blame for his actions you've been manipulated by the Jedi and formed into their hero and now your past transgressions are forgotten and you don't even believe the actions of Malik are any fault of your own there's a lack of personal responsibility that can be expressed by the player there and it just ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth as I returned to analyze this game with Malik defeated you and Bastille meet up with karth and the others on the Eben Hawk and make your Escape as the Republic public begins destroying the star Forge for good afterward the soldiers and your party meet with the Jedi on lahon for a ceremony where you each receive a Cross of Glory the highest honored the Republic can bestow the Jedi see you as a Jedi redeemed and now the savior of the Galaxy you and your party are heroes to the people of the Republic and will go down in history as such ending Knights of the Old Republic I was already a fan of Star Wars before Knights of the Old Republic was released but this game was what made me truly love this series if Kotor existed on its own without any form of Star Wars media ever existing I would still be content with the game and settings they explore Kotor is an entry that is riddled with bugs it's sometimes a chore to get through them all and in modern times can require a bit of modding just to get it running properly even recording footage of the game on my computer was more annoying than any other games I've recorded previously but despite all of this it was still a joy to return to it's been a long time since I played through the first entry in this series specifically as I almost always default to its Sequel and I'm glad I finally did whenever I make these videos about a game I enjoy it gives me an opportunity to really pay attention to them to read all of the dialogue to consider what it means to look at the themes presented and the criticisms the writers bring up about the game's universe and its people while the Gen are still revered for example I never realized how much they were critiqued and even when those critiques come from a Sith Lord or another member of the dark side they sometimes still hold a lot of weight to them while the diverging paths via character Choice aren't always enormous Kotor was one of the first games I had played that really allowed you to make these kinds of moral decisions it was new territory for me in both Star Wars and games in general and for that it'll always hold a nostalgic place in my heart it's definitely aged in many ways a game that was once a graphical and mechanical Marvel is now kind of seen as a mess but the charm is still there the game is buggy the alignments are cartoonishly on the nose and comedic and your own character's dialogue is something you will sometimes physically cringe at but those are all the downsides of an overall positive experience a great experience where you get to role play your journey as a simple human in the setting of Star Wars and your Ascent into a force-wielding superhuman who saves the the Galaxy with a band of very unique party members while unique personalities anyway a lot of them end up feeling incredibly similar mechanically unless you take the time to really diversify their playstyles via level UPS Kotor may feel like a large game but in terms of other RPGs out there it's actually fairly limited and small that might sound like a negative but in reality this allowed BioWare to do something that I personally appreciate in my games make the content matter story lines and side quests in Kotor can generally hold a lot of weight you can take the time to learn about your characters and the habitants of the various planets you explore if you are given a side quest it is generally unique from every other side quest in the game there's Mysteries to be solved court cases to take part in Espionage that can unfold it's not just radiant quests and collect-a-thons from the other games out there I'll use Xenoblade and Skyrim as basic surface level examples here but don't bite my head off for it consider the absolute nonsense that was the side quest system in Xenoblade Chronicles 1. how many quests there were that simply didn't matter and how many there were where you couldn't tell if they did matter or not take Skyrim's system for radiant quests which look to alleviate the work necessary for filling the game with actual good well thought out content and instead focused on creating the same content over and over again with little variants now I'm sure Xenoblade has fixed these issues in subsequent releases and we can only hope that the Elder Scrolls will do the same with its release of Elder Scrolls 6 in the year of 2085 but those are both very large games looking to have very large Scopes and with the market being what it has been for some time developers may look to fill in the gaps of content with something generic it's understandable that's what allows games like Kotor to be stronger in that regard it's a smaller more limited scope but everything matters everything feels unique and with purpose and when you take part in it it rarely feels like a chore it feels will simply fun to play and that's why I can always go back to it well I can't always go back to Kotor 1 that Terrace section is a real run killer if you haven't played Knights of the Old Republic in the past I highly recommend you take the time to get the game playable and give it a chance it's one of the best Star Wars experiences out there if that's what you're looking for and as a tabletop style RPG well I don't feel it particularly excels at emulating that aspect it does you said aspect well in providing a generally entertaining gameplay experience overall it's one of those experiences that simply gets better the more you explore and learn if you do try it I hope you enjoy it and please feel free to let me know about your experiences in the comments thanks for watching everyone hey thanks so much for watching to the end of the video if you if you made it to the end of the video I don't know why you would be here otherwise but it's great to have you hi Gabe thanks so much this is the patreon section of the video where I shout out all the patrons High tier engineering to your patrons show up here here usually and g-rank patrons get shouted out individually vocally by me so shout out to woolly rallcar Triton 8 Prime XD ashtray disparity beyond the time Nolan Brookman Mo all Kissimmee Captain Zeba cyberworm Kathleen magic crunchy cowuru Jonathan strangely Rosalio and a big shout out to Mr janky uh not a patron currently but as always Mr janky helps out with the script writing process a lot of the editing and stuff like that uh couldn't have been done without him so big shout out to Mr janky if you guys want to join the Discord feel free we have a Discord Community it's pretty chill and if you ever want to see me streaming Monster Hunter and maybe some other games I'm on twitch.tv super radlemon you can find all the information down in the description thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: SuperRAD

Views: 1,458,875

Keywords: star wars, knights of the old republic, kotor, swkotor, tor, swtor, tsl, the sith lords, lucasarts, xbox, dnd, wotc

Id: XxeSXZD8GMY

Length: 220min 43sec (13243 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 02 2022