Obsidian’s follow-up to Bioware’s respectably subtitled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), SW:KOTOR2:TSL is more of the same, although this is not in itself a bad thing. I hadn’t bought a copy of KOTOR myself, so I was unphased when I read reviews of KOTOR2 which said it was no different from the first one. This way I could play the second one and (basically) own the first, at the same time. Diabolical!
And you know, at first my theory worked and I didn’t mind. Then, as time – and the game – wore on, I began to get bored with the RPG-ness of it all. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the whole: “do this for me”, “hack!/slash!”, “thanks, now do that for her” way of life, and wish my real job simply consisted of doing a whole bunch of stupid little things for other people I barely know (… hey, wait a minute!). But the Art of RPG’s is to fool people into NOT getting bored with their banal tasks. And it is here that KOTOR2 fails miserably. By the end you don’t care that you had seen the ‘twist’ coming since the beginning of the game (because it was pointed out to you); or that the villain on the cover looks quite menacing despite seeming to have quite a large bust (it’s supposed to be a man) and his vocoder voice makes him sound like a reject from a Daft Punk song; or that the main villain’s name belongs in Chronicles of Riddick (but at least Crematoria had those evil-looking tendrils of sunlight going for it).
There are some good things going for it. The dialogue seems to read better, or at least more sophisticated. Kreia’s grey-area philosophy is interesting (I’m yet to try and play it that way) and, unlike KOTOR which I also played immediately after Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (SWJKJA: Raven, 2003), I wasn’t particularly perturbed by the fact that it had no y-axis (you can’t look up or down). But Obsidian really needed to make the thing play, feel, hell – even look different to Bioware’s one to make this franchise worth continuing. And with the latter developer’s release of Jade Empire this year which, from what I’ve heard, is more or less the same as KOTOR anyway, there’s some stiff competition for KOTOR2.