After what feels like a month and might have actually been a month (it took about 45 hours of gameplay, not counting time lost to reloading old saves to get around glitches and save file corruptions), I’ve finally finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The end of the game was mostly as I remembered it, except that it was so much easier this time around because I’d built a combat-functional character instead of one that relied on skills to be useful to the three-character team and a combination of mines, flight, and the one-medpac-per-turn-via-the-inventory-screen feature to win the final boss fight. Which was almost frustratingly easy this time around, as was pretty much every fight. I just loaded up on buffs and unloaded on ever enemy I came across. I rarely bothered to control my allies, even, since what actions they took largely didn’t matter since all I had to do was move from foe to foe, mowing them down with my dual-wielding powerhouse that slapped the final boss down in two rounds of attacks (since I didn’t bother using Critical Strike to potentially get that down to one turn). At least it wasn’t the nightmarish fight I remember from my youth, though I’ll say that there’s actually a lot of fun to be found in that kind of fear and suspense.

There was a significant part of me that wanted to start a new save file immediately and do a more canonical run-through of the game (I played Dark Sided and the canon ending for the game, according to the old Star Wars Legends stuff anyway, is that your protagonist turns to the Light Side ultimately), but I managed to put it off for a day and no longer feel so heedlessly inclined. Not because it’s not a good game, mind you. I just don’t want to spend another month of gaming time tucked away in my office. Plus, I’ve got Unicorn Overlord and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door to play, not to mention Final Fantasy 7 to finish, Dragon’s Dogma 1 and 2 to finish and play respectively, and Armored Core to keep chipping away at as I slowly grind through the replay options and different plot threads. I have plenty of other games to play through that either have new stories, better graphics, or a more urgent relevance in my mind. Plus, maybe that much-discussed and never seen KotOR remake will actually happen and I’ll have a newer version of the game to play at some point in the future. Better to leave some general interest unexplored so I’ve got a reason to buy and play this incredibly hypothetical remake.

I enjoyed my time with KotOR pretty much all the way through, but it’s difficult not to compare it to its modern descendants. Which isn’t always a negative thing, since there’s plenty of modern games that fall short of the bar this game set way back when, but KotOR feels like such a product of its time that I’m not sure it could grab much of a new modern audience. I mean, it would get some attention of course (it is actually decent Star Wars media and we’re still in a bit of lull between good Star Wars things while we wait for Andor and to see how all the other newer Star Wars projects pan out), but I just don’t know that they could really modernize it without significant rewrites. Some of which might be good! A lot of the characters in that game are interesting, but they also tend to really fall flat because they’re too one-dimensional most of the time. Carth has a lot of potentially strong beats, but none of them really land. Juhani’s stories feel pretty disconnected from her current life beyond the whole “how she got there” and while I love putting an asshole in his place, there really isn’t a lot after you deal with the guy who wants to buy her from you other than the potential romance, which is also still pretty short-lived and mild like the other two in the game. I do think a bit of punching up could be good, but I think it also might run the risk of losing some of the spirit that makes the game so iconic and individual. If you mess with any of it, it gets easier to mess with the rest.

Plus, one of the major events in the game, that caught me by surprise as a kid, was the central twist, which absolutely couldn’t be changed without basically making it a brand new game. I won’t spoil it here since I want there to be at least one place on the internet that doesn’t spoil the shit out of the game, but you literally can’t google any proper nouns from the game without finding a spoiler immediately. Sure, it’ a twenty-one year old game, but everything online seems like it is deliberately trying to spoil the game’s twist as quickly as possible. This was a major issue that the A More Civilized Age podcast ran into, but a lot of it turned out to be a bit of a moot point since one of them, Rob, figured out what was going on pretty much immediately. Sure, he didn’t know the full extent of the twist, but he figured out the thrust of it the instant the game started directly foreshadowing it. I’m not sure I’d get it that quickly if I played the game for the first time at my current age, but I feel like the game pretty obviously hints at some of what is going on. It really stood out every time the game tried to subtly hint at the nature of the twist during my playthrough. Partly, of course, because I’m clued in and was deliberately looking for this stuff, but also because what counts as “subtle” in this game still seems pretty obvious, even within the conceits of a video game. I wish I had better stuff to say about the twist, but the amazement and surprise of my childhood has been replaced by an idle frustration with how weird some of the character models looked if they were viewed from any angle other than the one shown during dialogue selection. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to react quite as strongly, but I still wish I’d been able to get more into the drama of it all.

At this point, I’m still (idly) thinking about playing the game again. Part of me wants to get the canonical end and part of me wants to just experience the other half (the Light Sided bits) of this relatively short game (especially compared to its contemporary relatives that can, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3, take more than three times as long to fully play through). All of me, though, is not sure I’m up for even a speedy click-through of the game, given how much mindless running around there is in a few major segments of the game. And how warm my office is during the summer. Plus, like I said above, maybe the remake will happen soon. I’ve gotta save SOMETHING for that possibility. I’ll need a reason to convince myself to buy what will probably be a disappointing game because it will be competing against the version of it that I remember from my childhood and won’t get the pass that replaying the old game gets because it won’t actually look like the game I remember it being. What could hope to win against that? I’m honestly not even sure if my favorite Paper Mario game will be able to hold up against itself, much less this slightly more ancient game being potentially given new life and all the problems of “realistic” modern graphics (that they’re going to look dated and bad in a few years no matter what). It might be better to just keep replaying the old game rather than starting and never finishing the new iteration of it…