I’ve once again reached a branch in the saga that is listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age. This time, I’ve begun playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on my PC, for the first time in years. KotOR, as I’ve mentioned years ago, was the game that made me fall in love with RPGs. It is also one of the few games I didn’t replay post-high school since it went “missing” at one point after my brother came home from college for a vacation and then, when I got it on Steam as part of a Star Wars bundle, I just couldn’t get into it again. I played it so much in high school that I’d basically memorized the entire game and I was pretty much the only person I knew who was really into Star Wars stuff so I had no one to talk to about it. There was nothing to keep me there. Which has all changed this year. Now, one of my closest friends is more into Star Wars than I am and my current podcast listening focus is a podcast all about Star Wars media that played through the game themselves! How could I not replay it? I mean, I could have tried to wait for whatever remake is going to happen (which, as of an interview in April of 2024, is still being worked on), but it has been several years since it was supposed to be done the first time and it spent most of the time since then looking like a dead project, so I’m not expecting that to ever bear fruit. Instead, I’m playing the old, kinda janky version of the game (with no mods so I can get the unadulterated experience) and having a blast most of the time.

The one concession I’ve made for my replay of the game is that I’m following a character build guide. I’m not particularly interested in spending half my game time trying to figure out the right mechanics, powers, items, and team combinations to get through the game (which was very loosely built on the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition ruleset), so I’m fine outsourcing it to a build guide that will give me the experience I want. Since I played the game before I was even in high school and had no idea what I was doing, why any of the feats mattered, or what the basic attributes even meant, my goal for this play through was to play a competent combatant. In previous games, I’d always lucked into being a very skills-focused character (since it was demonstrably clear that a higher intelligence gave you more skill points and nothing but constitution had any kind of visible impact on the character build screen and I never noticed my HP changing even once prior to my attempts to replay it as a post-D&D-playing adult) and relied on the somewhat more directed builds of my companions to carry me through combat, so I decided that I’d make a super beefcake this time and be the ultimate warrior. Which is actually working out pretty well for me with my Scout/Jedi Guardian build. My character is all about those big damage numbers and, so far, it has been a blast to just chew through the copious combat in this game with my dual-wielding (currently spending some time with a double-bladed lightsaber) super-tank. I mean, his AC isn’t always the highest in the party, but he’s got enough buffs and the ability to stun most enemies that it doesn’t really matter.

While I haven’t made it through many of the major plot points in the game (I’ve been jumping around a lot, from one area to another, rather than completing any of them all the way through), I’ve gotten a lot of powerful gear and gotten to a pretty high level considering the level-cap of twenty. This also means that I’ve spent a lot of time focused on the “side” content in the game, doing parts of major quests but also most of the side quests, and it is startlingly clear how much more writing effort was put into some characters than others. I mean, Carth is a one-note sad sack and while this has always been true, it feels way more obviously true now than it did when I was younger (both when I was a teen and when I tried replaying this game almost a decade ago). Mission is much more obviously a child, Juhani is impossible to get a read on other than “angry cat lady who won’t let herself experience her own emotions,” Bastilla is clearly a child who has been traumatized by her early life and separation from said life and then told she’s the most importantest, specialest girl in the universe because of her unique power, and then everyone else is either almost entirely ignored by the writers so far or has major “burned out middle-aged guy who used to be the town hero quarterback when he was in high school” energy. They’re all pitiful little babies or sad adults and, despite that, I think I appreciate them more now then ever.

Canderous seems to have made peace with the fact that he used to be hot shit and while he’s still pretty hot shit now, has mostly accepted that he can’t recapture that glory. Mission seems like she’s growing up fast and while I don’t think she’s going to have a great future, she seems like a naive child who is slowly but surely figuring things out, which is a pretty big deal since games like this are often terrible at writing children. Bastilla still seems the same, but I see the cracks in her façade that are foreshadowing what is to come for her. Carth still seems like a pitiful sad-sack, but I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to see that this is what he is and the game just fell short of doing justice to a character that lost everything but his job and can actually blame other people for it. I still don’t know anything about Juhani because she won’t talk to me about anything, but I feel like there’s more there and that maybe I just never spent time with her. HK-47 is and has always been a delight and our little T3-M4 friend is too new to be anything but present most of the time. It’s an interesting collection of deeply flawed characters that are absolutely products of the time since KotOR was a massive shift in what people expected RPGs to be and a huge game for its time beside that. It’s twenty-one years old and represents an important step in the way RPGs are made and played and also a game very much stuck in a period of time. It’s all so late-90s and early-00s that can’t help but laugh sometimes.

I’ve finally hit the point in the game where I’m going to start completing worlds, so I will hopefully be wrapping it up in the next week or so. I expect that I’ll have more to say on KotOR once I’ve gotten through the rest of it, though it remains to be seen if I’ll have enough for another blog post. I’m sure I’ll have something, at least, since I didn’t touch on Zaalbar or Jolee Bindo at all and still have SO much plot to cover in my Dark Side run of the game, so look forward that! After all, who doesn’t love some writing about a Star Wars game from two decades ago?