Flashback Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox).
Posted by Steve McHugh on 08.16.2007
George should have gotten Bioware to make the last 3 films.
Well after a few weeks off to catch up on game playing and sorting out reviews it's finally time once again to do another column. As I said last time I was going to take a look at a couple of Xbox games that all you 360 owners might want to take a look at and figured that i'd start with KOTOR 1 this week and 2 in a fortnight.
The idea of Star Wars always appealed more to me then the actual beast itself. Don't get me wrong, I'm as big a fan of the original trilogy as the next sane person but they're no more the high point of cinematic storytelling then any other adventure film; be it Back to the Future or Lord of the Rings. They're all very good but people talk about them like they're the Second Coming or something. And whilst there is no doubt of the cultural (and indeed cinematic) influence they've given a generation of people they are not the be all and end all of stories.
For the most part Star Wars games used to be fantastic. The early 90's games managed to contain the interesting parts, the Jedi and Sith, the Force and the star ships without containing quite so much of the boring stuff that Lucas focused on more in the later films. If I'm being honest the games tended to jettison the crap and keep the good that made the films interesting. Mostly they got rid of the Ewoks which whilst they are the most powerful race in Star Wars history, they also sucked.
This greatness that Lucasarts bestowed on game players ended with a resounding splat upon the launch of that steaming pile of crap known as The Phantom Menace. Before PM you had the SNES games, the X-Wing games (including X-wing Alliance which is still awesome to this day) and several other excellent pieces of work based on or at least around those first 3 films. However, after PM all Star Wars games were shit. And not a bit shit either; they were horrible nasty little cash-in pieces of rubbish which should have never been published. But in 2002/3 there was hope.
Everyone in this picture without a Lightsaber is going to die.
You see in 2003, Bioware were about to publish Knights of the Old Republic. Set some 4000 years before Anakin Skywalker was even thought of, it would contain none of the baggage of the past few games and films and be a separate entity. The main hope people held on to though was that Bioware, who made Baldurs Gate (the good one on the PC) and Baldurs Gate 2 (one of the best RPG's of all time), would be making the game. These guys knew what they were doing and people waited with baited breath to see the finished game.
Turns out Bioware did a pretty good job. Actually, saying that Bioware did a pretty good job is like saying that the Great Wall of China is a bit big. Bioware did an amazing job on this game and blew people's expectations out of the water.
It starts simply enough with you picking the sex, name and type (soldier etc) that you want your character to be. Then you find out that your ship is under attack and for the next hour or so you go through a very well put together tutorial which doesn't hold your hand too much and lets you get on with it. After then you escape and land on Telos where you spend a few hours trying to figure out why the Sith want you dead and exactly who you are.
That's right KOTOR takes the old hero who doesn't remember his past' to be the starting point of the game. But you certainly don't have to be a hero for long as you're free to decide (for the most part) who you help and who you leave alone or even who you kill. Most of the sub-quests let you make your own decisions about whether you want to be a good Jedi, evil Sith or even a completely neutral party.
You don't just have to decide your path based on actions alone. You can talk to a multitude of characters where you get to choose your responses in a conversation, those responses in turn will decide how these characters behave towards you and in fact your behaviour will determine how your own band of followers act towards you.
Kevin's next holiday picture wasn't quite so nice.
For every act of good or evil you will earn good or dark side points. These go towards making your character lean one way or the other making them more proficient in either good or dark side powers.
But what's the point in being good or evil if you don't get to become more powerful? This is one area where KOTOR excels. You gain XP from pretty much every action but instead of giving you more XP for following one path, you average out getting the same whether you tackle a problem by killing everything yourself or hacking into the computer terminal and releasing a poison to knock them out. It means that whether you decide to be Sith or Jedi you'll never have to worry about being weaker then if you had gone the other path. It's not all clear cut either, some Jedi actions are unbelievably stupid whilst some Sith actions are very attractive because they're an easy route to take. This gives you not only an incredible freedom but it also makes you think that your actions do have consequences, something of a rarity in many RPG's.
You don't have to take this journey alone as up to 9 different characters will help you on your quest. You can only take 3 (including yourself) with you at any one point, causing you to be much more tactical about who you take where. However you'll soon find those you gravitate towards more then others (HK-47 is genius) and use them when you get the chance.
Please feel free to make your own gay robot joke.
This is partly down to how you want to play the game but also down to how wonderfully these characters are written. Each of them has an interesting and varied back story and you can talk to any of them about it whenever you're on your ship. Some of the stories that you learn as you play through the game are almost as interesting as the main story itself and that's high praise indeed because the main quest is an amazing piece of writing. Every character or NPC in the game seems to have a life of their own and as you learn more about your friends you will feel emotional attachments to them. Enough that when the game ends you want to know what happens to them next. This is helped by a wonderful cast who do some of the best in game voice work on the Xbox.
A major part of every RPG, apart from the story, is the fighting and KOTOR has one of the best fighting systems in an RPG in recent memory. You give orders in real time (you can pause the game though) and they're carried out in an orderly fashion. It works very well and gives the fighting a real dynamic and sense of urgency that very few RPG's even come close to comparing to.
This is still pretty good to look at too, with some nice lighting and textures (especially in the fights) and some of the back drops look amazing.
Frying people never gets old.
So it looks stunning, the writing is amazing as is the voice work and music. Even the fighting engine works smoothly and you will actually look forward to fights. So surely this is the perfect game. Well no there are problems. After a while a lot of the faces start to look the same and some of the places you'll visit have less interest in them than others (the space ships are a little on the dull side). It's not a difficult game and no one should have more then a few occasions where they might be tested. And the good/evil balance isn't as interesting as, say, fable or KOTOR 2 but these are tiny faults in an otherwise flawless game.
Should I buy it?
Yes. Now. Go. It's the best Star Wars game ever. One of the top 3 games for the xbox and one of my personal favourite RPG's of all time. This can't get enough praise.
9.7/10
Other stuff.
- Resi 5 has been called racist. Some people are idiots and anyone who thinks this is certainly not very high up on the old IQ tree.
- Bioshock out in 2 weeks (give or take). I implore everyone to go buy this as it's getting fantastic reviews. If you don't own a 360 go get one as this isn't going to be going to the PS3.
- Joe looses at TNA .. here a question to the writers. Do you even know what you're doing anymore? Joe should have had the title a while ago now and the fact that he hasn't makes me think that TNA are out to piss away every last piece of good will they have. Oh and get rid of VKM, they're dragging down everyone else with their sucky wrestling and quite frankly when they come on TV I switch off. Both of them haven't been useful since 1999. And also quit hiring old WWE has-beens you've got plenty of excellent talent so why don't you use it.
- One last thing before I go. I'd just like to give my condolences to the family of Mike Wieringo who passed away at 44 on Sunday night. He was one of my favourite artists and his work on Fantastic Four is some of the best art I've ever seen on that book. He will be very sadly missed.
That's it for this time but in the next column I'll be looking at KOTOR 2.
