STAR WARS™: Knights of the Old Republic

A solid RPG but with janky/dated mechanics based on 2003 standards. This is basically Mass Effect (ME) before ME. An good/evil-based RPG with a hybrid turn-based combat with real-time elements. (the following's based on a blind playthrough) Technical: -For whatever reason, I have to turn off frame buffer effects or else the game crashes every time. -I also have to turn off grass or else it makes my player partially invisible in grassy areas. Good parts: -Its nice for the game to have a lot of choice as to where to go and how you go about doing things -story is interesting (albeit similar to ME like something to do with an advanced lost ancient civlization) and has a twist to it -Some of the dialogue with major characters are interesting. Good/bad: -It is possible to make "wrong" choices that lead to instant death, or a poor outcome so frequently / multiple save files become necessarily. -Combat's a mix of turn and real-time based combat based on dice rolls, so there's a lot of times where it appears your character hits an enemy only for it to display as "miss"; sometimes requires pausing and optimizing the actions. -Wildly inconsistent difficulty curves where one moment, you easily defeat enemies, and the next moment you are barely surviving, if at all. Bad parts: -A lot of the worlds are just large spaces with just a few actual areas of interest. There are lots of long distances where you're just wasting time moving through. -A lot of the dialog with NPCs are unneccesarily long-winded.

KOTOR is the game that does the best job of distilling the "traditional" Star Wars experience into an RPG form factor, and ends up telling one of the best SW stories ever in the process. How could it do that, one might ask, if it goes back thousands of years in the fictional timeline? I would answer: it is exceptionally Star Wars-ish precisely BECAUSE it starts (relatively) fresh. Star Wars, for me at least, has always been intimately linked to a sense of infinite possibility, bottomless mystery and constant discovery - sprinkled with some goofy/acerbic humor. And KOTOR delivers. The galaxy is the same, and familiar enough to feel comfortable... but it's thousands of years before Episode I, so anything and everything could be different. You'll explore the depths of forests and Sith tombs bristling with secrets that, once uncovered, only leave you wanting more. As for discovery, well... it would be a crime to spoil the plot. But rest assured that, while it can't quite match the depth of Obsidian-developed KOTOR 2, it stands at least on equal footing with the original trilogy, helped along by a soundtrack that, much like the rest of the game, is distinctly Star Wars-ish in a refreshing and surprisingly good way. Last but not least, Star Wars is about heroics; about individuals who determine the fate of the entire galaxy (for better or for worse), a concept epitomized by the Jedi. And this game pulls no punches in this respect. All in all, the biggest risk you take in playing KOTOR is spending the rest of your life longing for another Star Wars story that can equal it.

I think this is one of the best games ever made, however, it is only best played as a Light Side character. A very good romance option (and perhaps the only one) is also plagued by a bug if you play as a Dark Side character (it's the Bastila bug, I've had it when I played this game on Steam but it's not game-breaking). I think the bug is easily corrected by messing with a text or html file; however, playing as a Dark Side character only makes you appear as a common bully, and not the skilled, subtle manipulator the second game makes you out to be; again, just as someone said, there might be a reason for it, but it is hard to believe after all the cool stuff that you hear about the character in the sequel. Generally, this is a common problem among the games of the period this was released in. Also, a heads up: on my laptop with Intel graphics, this version won't even start, while a CD version worked just fine, especially after getting "upgraded" to a no-CD version, which is something I wouldn't recommend. But the Steam version does work on my laptop, so something is wrong here. Any potential buyer should be aware that this version might or might not work on their system. I seriously hope this gets fixed and all the KOTOR games and versions thereof start working properly on all systems, not just some.

This game is one of the rare gems released the last 20 years. The only game that is remotely modern that would rival its story and characters, is Witcher 3. Anway I would like to address something, I would have to disagree that it's best played as light side or dark side. as some people claim. Dark side offers its own rewards in terms of fun and shocking revelations to your companions at some point, which I of course will not spoil. Including companions complaining about you and confronting you with their concerns. It adds more depth to companion dynamics. Darkside has better abilities as well. On the other hand you can form relationships you can't with darkside if you choose lightside. Therefor the game is best played twice, once as darkside and once as lighside. One is not better than the other, it's all in what you will enjoy more, not what I will. But both are fundamentally great, that's the point. Be sure to pick up HK47 he makes the journey even better.

It took me 5-6 years to finally install this game and play it. Didn't regret. Seeing as I played a whole lot of old Infinity Engine RPGs, this game felt mechanically familiar. This is a real-time-with-pause RPG where you don't directly attack opponents, but rather issue your party commands, including attacking, using items, and using Force powers (worked better in the isometric perspective, to be honest). Now, I'll reveal close to nothing about the story because it's nearly impossible to do so without spoiling anything, but I'll just give you a tip - if you want to run with two jedi at all times, consider Kashyyk as your first planet. As for the story - the starting point is that you're on board a space ship and you have amnesia, which is as early 2000s as it gets. Now, the game's plot itself isn't all that original, but to me, it was all about progressing through it, interacting with my companions, and listening to what had happened before. Nothing too spectacular, but it was a thoroughly satisfying experience. Relatively early on in the game, you become a jedi and you choose between three classes - a combat-focused one, a force-focused one, and one that's sort of inbetween. If you choose the jedi guardian class (combat), make sure you don't do what I did on my playthrough by choosing dueling (single-handed combat) - max out the dual-wielding feat and go for two lightsabers, seeing as you can imbue them with crystals which grant them various improvements, so you get double the bonuses. The sense of progression is just amazing, this isn't one of those games where enemies scale with you and you never feel like you're on top, you'll feel like a powerhouse by the end. The things I hated - the amount of walking (felt tedious even when using the speed power) and the speed at which you open containers, as well as only being able to see within a single horizontal plane, which was just weird, but not really gameplay-impacting (fixed in 2, by the way).