KOTOR 2: Final Thoughts

I realized that I never really posted conclusion to my KOTOR 2 ramblings which can be found here, here and here. I actually finished the game some time ago but never got around to putting my final thoughts about it on the interwebs. I was just so frustrated and disgusted with the ending I really did not want to talk about it. The game is a fucking tease – it builds this great storyline, does all kinds of crazy foreshadowing and makes you all excited for some mind blowing climax . Then just as things are about to get interesting, it simply goes “THE END”, then punches you in your face, films you cry and then posts it on Youtube. Or at least that’s how it feels when you first finish the game.

So I didn’t post anything about the ending for a while. And then I was like – wait! Why am I passing an occasion to totally trash a game with a really sucky ending. This is a perfect excuse to write some crazy, barely coherent bullshit and pass it of as humor. And this is what I’m doing right now. I’m not posting any screen shots, because the game was punitively removed from my hard drive after I finished it.

Do you remember how the first KOTOR had different ending for light and dark side? That was pretty cool, but I guess not cool enough to make it into the sequel. KOTOR 2 ends the same whether you have been a light side goody two-shoes pussy, or a ruthless dark side asshole. I mean, sure there is *some* slight variation at the end – you know, in the final line of the dialog or so. You pretty much get a choice of saying:

“Ha, I will now go and become the most powerful sith lord FUCKING EVAR”

or

“I will now go back to my exile LIKE A FUCKING LUSAR THAT I AM”.

To make things worse you get both options regardless of your alignment or how you played the game. Yup, you can sort of switch sides at the very last minute. After all, Vader did it so it must be cool, no? I personally think that it totally doesn’t FUCKING cheapen all the moral choices the game forced you to make up to this point, and totally doesn’t make the whole light/dark side thing meaningless.

The lack of distinct light/dark ending is a total buzzkil but it gets worse. As I said before, the game ends at the precise moment it was actually getting good. As you progress through the different locations, you find out that all your companions have some dark secrets and private agendas. You have a love triangle going on between your character, the Hanmaiden and Visas (and maybe even Mira if you make some effort and take her on some missions). You get a chance to convert (if you are playing light side) Visas and the Handmaiden finally reveals her name to you. There is betrayal afoot, people turn out not to be what they appear to be. Some of it is predictable, some is not. The two shifty dark aligned droids are both plotting and scheming cooking up something big behind your back. It is all building up to something big – it seems that your crew is about to implode on itself. The writing is good – maybe little spotty at places but you’re totally into it.

Then the game pretty much ends like this:

FUCK YOU! NO ENDING!

Look at that kid’s facial expression. He is really putting a lot of effort into flipping you off. This is the amount of sheer force with which the game tells you to FUCK OFF. Nothing gets resolved. In fact you can never be sure if your friends survived the crash-landing on Malachor. You spent most of the game leveling these fuckers up, talking to them, taking them on missions even though they are totally useless just to get some brownie points with them. And then you crash land on the planet, mysteriously survive and never get to see them again.

The locations in the game have mixed quality. Paragus is dull and boring for the most part. Telos is very open ended. Nar Shada is awesome. It’s huge, contains many open ended quests, gives you a sense of choice. It is really what the whole game should be like. Duxan and Isis are ok, but seem small and tad linear. Korriban…

Ok, let me talk about Korriban. It is a joke. Korriban is like 4 rooms you have to clear out of monsters, and around 50 minutes of exposition dished out in drawn out boring cut scenes. It is stupid, pointless and boring. It really seems like it was tacked on to the game just for shits and giggles.

Dantoine is better – on the par with Duxan and Isis bit, but much shorter. It also suffers from an annoying insurmountable waist high fence syndrome. I totally loved how I was able to see the Jedi Academy from the spaceport but had to go around using the longest possible route to get to it because my Jedi could not hop over the 6″ high curb that separated me from it. A+ for level design!

Finally Malachor V – the end-game area. Oh boy. If you can believe it, it is actually even worse than Korriban. First, you crash on it your ship gets permanently wedged between rock thousands of feet above the surface. Miraculously you somehow teleport yourself out of the ship and start wandering the surface of the planet without explanation on how you got there or whether or not your companions survived.

At this point the game devolves into a dungeon crawl – you clear the area of enemies, head to the next one, rinse, repeat. There is literally nothing to do there other than kill everything that moves and loot every box and body you can find until you reach the boss fight.

That point the action switches to Mira (who also mysteriously finds herself on the surface without any explanation) and you get to do a final face-off with Hanharr. Which is really the same final face off you did on Nar Shadda just with different background setting. People tell me recycling is good, so I guess I can fault them for trying it.

Once you are done with Mira a cut scene shows her heading the same way as your main character and you become Bao-Dur’s little floating probe drone. Naturally you are not told what happened to Bao-Dur himself because that would actually make sense, and be good storytelling. Your mission is to activate reactors in ruined ships on the surface or something like that. The final bit of good writing that somehow got smuggled to this location is the fact hat GOTO shows up and fucks things up because of his personal agenda which is actually kinda cool. I guess this would be a spoiler but I really don’t care at this point. Besides, you never find out what was GOTO’s plan so it’s not like I’m spoiling something awesome.

When you kill the final boss the cut scene shows the planet exploding. Another minor difference between light/dark endings is that in the light side version you see Ebon Hawk flying away at the last second and in the dark ending you don’t. Naturally you have no clue who is actually on the ship and what has happened to Mira, Bao-Dur’s drone and Goto who clearly were still on the surface of the planet and away from the ship last time you have seen them.

KOTOR 2 really needed 3-4 additional hours of solid game play to wrap up all the loose ends and flesh out the locations you visit later in the game. Supposedly it was rushed into production and it shows. KOTOR2 is clearly unfinished. It actually could have been a really good game just like it’s predecessor. But because of the ending, it is merely mediocre. I really enjoyed most of it, but I felt totally cheated by the lack of any kind of valid conclusion.

[tags]kotor 2, knights of the old republic 2, games[/tags]

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5 Responses to KOTOR 2: Final Thoughts

  1. Alphast NETHERLANDS Mozilla Firefox Linux Terminalist says:

    Excellent post! Lol and an excellent choice of illustration. Feyenoord soccer fans are just a bunch of hooligans and losers. Mwahahaha… And their team can’t win a proper match.

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  2. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux Terminalist says:

    LOL! I picked the image mostly because of his determined expression. The fact that he is wearing the colors of an allegedly sucky soccer team is totally coincidental. But if it adds another layer of humor on top of it, all the better. :)

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  3. Alphast NETHERLANDS Mozilla Firefox Linux Terminalist says:

    Well, to be a bit more charitable, Rotterdam’s Feyenoord club has had better days. There are two clubs in town: Sparta and Feyenoord, the first being a bit more family like and “cool”. Feyenoord supporters are generally viewed as loud and annoying. Their habit of ransacking the streets of the city on a regular basis (mainly when they lose a match) hasn’t made them very popular with non-football fans like me. And they tend to lose a lot these days… Fortunately, the police has improved its crowd control techniques, and we don’t see the same level of damage as before…

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  4. Joe UNITED STATES Google Chrome Windows says:

    So… Yeah. I know I’m necro-posting, but to fulfill the irreplaceable role of irate fanboy after having his favorite game get the brutal thrashing it deserved:

    It’s not the fault of the game. The developers pressed it to release too soon. There is actually a fair amount of really good content (ESPECIALLY in the endgame) that wasn’t included. The developers just ran out of… something before it could be totally finished. There are actually a few mods-in-progress to restore the cut stuff and make the ending actually make some sense.

    But yeah, for what was in the box: I agree wholeheartedly with your (years) earlier sentiment.

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  5. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    @ Joe:

    Yeah, I know. And to be fair I really enjoyed most of the game. I’m anxiously waiting for that mod thing to come out so I could experience the cut content. :)

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