Last night, a few episodes ahead of where I’m at in the podcast A More Civilized Age, I finished Season 2 of Star Wars: Rebels. At this point, I’ve finally caught up to the latest episode of AMCA and will now need to slow down my watching speed to match the podcast’s pace. Which is incredibly tough given where Season 2 ends and how badly I want to immediately stop writing this blog post so I can watch another few episodes at least. Maybe a whole season. Wouldn’t be the first time I sat down to dip my toe into something and wound up watching the whole season instead. I can’t really afford to do that, in terms of my need for sleep and mental, emotional, and physical rest, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something preventing me from diving into season 3. Even though I really want to just turn the show on and keep watching until I’m out of seasons to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay strong and pace myself alongside AMCA like I originally planned to. I haven’t been this invested in a show in ages, not with the same level of emotional investment and burning curiosity, anyway. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of anime over the last couple years by sitting down each week to watch the newest episodes as each of them was released, but I was mostly just enjoying the ride. This time, with Star Wars: Rebels, I’m dying to know what happens next. Waiting is a genuine struggle and that’s saying something because I rarely struggle with impatience.
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Closing The Door On KotOR (For Now)
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.
Continue readingRevisiting Knights of the Old Republic Two Decades Later
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.
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