Recent reviews by JigglyGenitalia

*Ignore the low play time: I've beaten the game on the original across various platforms countless times.

I had never played an RPG until Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I always owned Nintendo consoles and usually played platformers. One Christmas, I opened a present that included this game and an Xbox. I was a massive fan of Star Wars as a child because of the prequel films. I was also a dumb kid. What I lacked in movie taste at the time, I think I eventually made up for it in my taste in games: this game in particular changed my opinion about video games, it changed what I wanted from games, what I thought they could do, and was my first realization that games could tell a story beyond an Italian plumber cleaning out a mushroom princess' pipes. What KotOR did for me was allow me to break free from being a brand baby: I started to play things outside of platformers because of this (though I shouldn't deny that another Xbox exclusive helped do this: Halo). I believe it even has influenced me as an adult in returning to classic games that I didn't have the luxury to play when the first came out.

The actual story is this: an evil augmented space wizard, Darth Malak, utilizes a massive cosmic-powered forge to create an unstoppable army. Malak is waging war on the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order which govern the galaxy and maintain the peace. Your amnesiac hero must band together with a complex group of would-be heroes, villains, and those in-between to fight Malak from conquering the entire galaxy. You travel to various places to find pieces to assemble the star map leading to Malak's forge. Every world has its own story and struggle, often signaling the failings of the Republic and Jedi. The pieces of the map you find, the often dismal lives of the galaxy's citizens, and the history between Malak and the Jedi order he once was a knight in complicate the central conflict of the story, and all of this is used to build to an eventual twist that quite literally left eight year old me thoroughly mind-blown (I mean, it was obvious, BUT I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD).

Sound familiar? This is quite similar to the story of the original films only if the villain had already won. I was too young and not properly culturally savvy enough to understand the exact hullabaloo over Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. I already knew the twist before I saw those films, and the general feel of the Star Wars films was already something ingrained in modern movies to the point that the novelty of the original films just could not be replicated for me. Thankfully, I think this game's story recreated that experience viewers of the original trilogy had after they saw the opening text crawl and heard John William's iconic score. And much like the original films, few other things about this game remain dated; it's technical prowess still shows.

While graphically nowhere as photo-realistic as modern games are, Knights of the Old Republic, or KotOR (as it's been lovingly abbreviated by fans), is still a visually strong experience. The art-style of the games is familiar and different from the general Star Wars universe. The game takes place thousands of years before the formation of the Galactic Empire, and while the technology of the universe is eons ahead of our world, there is still the feeling that this is a past we are witnessing. Robots are noticeably bulkier than the eventual Separatist droids in the prequels. You can even fight with swords in this game, technically a gameplay contrivance but also a useful stylistic tool to suggest this is a far different era than Anakin Skywalker's. The architecture, space ship design, and clothing styles depart from the films, signaling again different cultures and technology. Now the people, well the character models, have admittedly aged beyond what most people would find acceptable for models and animations at this point. Characters make the same puppet-like head turn movements again and again in dialogue, couple that with robotic eye blinking and a vacant stare,and every human character or humanoid character are all proto-Five Nights at Freddie's animatronics. Good voice acting and writing luckily solve most of this issue, and still, this game was graphically ahead of the competition at the time so it's not entirely fair to complain.

Beyond the graphics comes another apparent relic, the DnD-lite gameplay. There are pretty much two types of RPGs anymore. The more complex, systems oriented games requiring significant player investment for leveling your character and combat. These types of games because of technical constraints are usually on the PC, but some RPGs popular on consoles (Dark Souls for one) have similar complexity. The now overwhelmingly popular standard of RPG is the accessible hybrid game: usually an FPS or other genre with some light character customization and leveling. KotOR was something in between these two genres. Not as demanding as the more pure RPG but not as economically designed as the hybrids. KotOR is a great introduction to the more technical RPGs if you find Baldur's Gate mechanically overwhelming or even the more recent Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pillars of Eternity. In this game, you really just manage a party of semi-independent characters. KotOR lacks clear class distinctions as you will probably just fill your limited party of three in combat with three ultra-strong Jedi. The game does have a abilities that favor either light, dark, or neutral force. Because of this, you might have one Jedi decked out with the more combat-based darkside abilities while the others are equipped with stat-influencing powers. Usually, it makes more sense to just pick the powerful abilities of each side. It sounds like I might be pointing out a flaw of the game, noting the pointlessness of classes, but since KotOR only clocks in at about thirty hours and you don't initially get access to the full force powers, you really just switch between the various character classes until the end game. At the end, you can successfully dominate with force users, though this is interestingly played with depending upon the path you take in the game. Complimenting the combat comes the dialogue and story trees. You direct your relationships with characters and the story, allowing you to have your very own personalized Star Wars fantasy. The potential paths for the story are binary, good vs. evil, but the subplots all have satisfying choices, surprisingly more meaningful than many of the longer and more complex games in the genre. Most might find the combat and character choices dated considering the fast-paced and simplified gameplay we see now with games like Mass Effect. Personally, I don't see how anyone can prefer the dreaded dialogue wheel to the more comprehensive dialogue choices in this game. While I know some might like the faster-paced RPGs we see now, to me this is really a tactical game in many ways (that's why it has a pause option), so if you don't like that style of game this likely isn't for you, but I also don't find it to be dated at all or inferior to contemporary RPGs. Now, the dice roll system for combat is probably the biggest source of disagreement among fans. Every attack has a roll for damage amount and even if it hits or not, a not particularly popular mechanic in games now. It's not too far off the hit-miss system old first-person RPGs like Ultima: Underworld or the early Elder Scrolls games, a big barrier for players to go back and play those games. The dice roll system usually isn't too bad, but I do think it's a best forgotten relic of the past.

But Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is not best forgotten. It's a must-play classic for fans of RPGs and Star Wars fans. For something that has aged so well, it's a relatively rare experience: a novel length game without superfluous content. Memorable characters, an excellent story, and - simply put- actually fun gameplay make this a classic.