The first roleplaying game (RPG) I ever played was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The second one I played was the sequel. To say that they have had an impact on me would be underselling the truth. Recently, I’ve been trying to replay KotOR 2 alongside A More Civilized Age and haven’t been able to really stick with it, despite enjoying my recent playthrough of the original KotOR, and I was at a bit of a loss as to why this was the case. Why have I been struggling with KotOR 2 when I’ve got such fond memories of both games and, in my memory, clearly preferred KotOR 2 over the original game. Despite there being plenty of opportunities for me to play KotOR 2 without even interrupting my Final Fantasy 14 time, why have I been unable to even force myself to play the game? I went through all that trouble to mod it for the first time ever and while I’ve been keeping up with A More Civilized Age’s coverage of the game by following Austin Walker’s Let’s Play of it, I keep internally rebelling against how much stuff he’s got rattling around in his inventory that he will probably never use to the degree that I keep thinking about playing it myself just to scratch the “hyper efficient playthrough” itch that’s been growing. In theory, I should be spending all of the time I’m not paying attention to Final Fantasy 14 playing KotOR 2 and yet I’ve gone back to playing Wildermyth instead. Only last night, as I was staring at my computer screen without doing anything while Final Fantasy 14 sat untouched on my monitor following some encouraging personal news, did the answer occur to me.

In short, the answer is a mix of player choice, self-insertion into the game, and scratching niche itches. Currently, KotOR 2 does nothing for me that some other game couldn’t do better. I’d get just as much choice out of going back to my second Dragon Age: The Veilguard playthrough, but I’d enjoy the story and gameplay a bit more since it’s so much less janky and often-frustrating due to KotOR 2’s peaks-and-valleys difficulty (not to mention how much better, visually, it looks). I get a lot more enjoyment out of inserting myself into Final Fantasy 14 via the casual, decision-oriented roleplaying that happens any time I do story quests in any game that I’m playing a self-created avatar character, and there’s so much more to do that doesn’t involve another fighting circle, parade of enemies, or long dialogue trees that I need to exhaust in order to carry on. Wildermyth scratches my need for strategic gameplay, quick planning, and battle-commanding in a much more smooth and less… variable manner than KotOR 2 does (which barely scratches it at all since any amount of focused building to my characters makes most battles trivial or nigh-impossible, depending on the chosen focus amd whether or not I’m allowed to use the party I’ve built to work together rather than whatever single character has been isolated for whatever story beat that’s happening). Eveything I could get from KotOR 2, I can get from something else that will also give me more than KotOR 2 will. Hell, I can even get the story by watching the Let’s Play I linked above, and all without needing to do the monotonous work of bashing a bunch of wild beasts a couple times over and over again in order to clear the area so I can find whatever random junk I’ve been sent to fetch.

KotOR 2 will always take up a large space in my mind as a game that really informed what I’d come to expect from future video games. It had interpersonal drama, tons of excellent character work, interesting companions that could either oppose or support you, and a fairly interesting story about leadership and education and who gets to shape the world, but there’s so much out there these days that does it better. That does pretty much everything better. So, thanks to an amazing RPG experience last year with Veilguard, the sweeping power of FF14, and the simplicity of play in Wildermyth (which also probably won’t randomly crash on me the way KotOR 2 might), I just don’t think that KotOR 2 really meets my current standards. If I’d played it last summer, before Veilguard and Final Fantasy 14, I probably would have completed it. I’d have even had fun! But right now, as I’m still dealing with burnout, daily exhaustion from work, and my now-constant sleep issues, I just don’t think it’s worth my time to play. Hell, I’m not even sure I’d be watching the Let’s Play if I wasn’t doing it mostly at work, during my lunch breaks. Any other time, I’ve got stuff that I could be doing that would give me more than KotOR 2 can, based on my initial foray into the game and how I fell asleep during one of the “wander around killing bad guys” phases of the first part of the game (Peragus Mining Colony, for those who know). I’d rather do something that is keeping me engaged and not letting my attention drift so freely that I’ll fall asleep mid-fight (and not have anything bad happen because my companions doing their thing was enough to win the fight before anything could kill my character).

Maybe someday I’ll go back to KotOR 2 and enjoy myself. Maybe I’ll even do it in the upcoming weeks as I continue to rest and (hopefully) start feeling better most days. Maybe this post will go up and I’ll have already booted the game up again, just to check things out. I don’t know. Right now, though, the thought of doing that feels exactly like trying to make myself do something i’ll enjoy during a nasty depression spike: theoretically fun but probably unlikely to stir anything within me to the degree that it will feel pointless to continue playing should I manage to actually overcome the lack of desire to play it at all. Sure, I had one of those evenings pretty recently, so maybe there’s something to the idea that this might be the depression talking [it wasn’t just the depression talking, but I no longer feel “write a blog post” levels of not wanting to play it], but I actually did do other stuff that night and have done plenty since then, so who knows. I’m not sure I actually want to play KotOR 2 enough to figure it out, not when I can get so much more from all kinds of other options that are easily available to me.