Ready for a Remake: Knights of the Old Republic 2
After seven years of delay, KotOR2 is finally out on mobile.
After seven years of delay, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords finally came out for mobile last December. I'd been waiting for this rerelease since finishing the first game on iPad in 2014; The Sith Lords is, after all, quite highly regarded. I played extensively as a child but only beat it once, in 2013, and my memories were not especially positive. Perhaps as an adult I'd find more worth appreciating?
It was only after I had finished the game that I learned you can, apparently, mod the iPad version with the Restored Content Mod. Some foolish part of me thought this would be included by default, and the notion that an iPad app might be moddable in the first place had not crossed my mind.
I regret not using RCM. The game is strictly worse without it. Bear that in mind as I continue forward with this review.
Is KotOR 2 Good? It's Complicated
Like with so many of Obsidian's games, it is blindingly obvious that KotOR2 was rushed out for release. The game's third act plays like the confusing cliffnotes version of an actual finale. Although most bugs are patched out for the iPad version, it's still a messy game, full of confusing decisions, bad level design, poorly constructed dialogue trees, and frustrating mechanics.
I do not think it was stylistically designed to be this way. RCM would have diminished the effects of the rushed design, but only in part. The truth is that KotOR2 just isn't very good. It is a fundamentally unfinished game.
The writing is what saves it.
Note that it's intentional I say writing and not narrative design. As a Chris Avellone game KotOR2 has a lot of very interesting narrative design, but it's also very messy. This exists at the core of what I want to discuss here.
Mona Lisa in a Rush
I can say with absolute certainty that, had Obsidian been given an extra two years of development time, KotOR2 would be a magnum opus of cRPGs. It would make Torment look like Fallout 4. The core of the story is excellent. The elements of narrative that function are brilliant.
...but almost none of it works.
Imagine the Mona Lisa, except Leonardo was in such a rush that he fucked up Madam Lisa's nose. And painted one eye brown and the other eye blue. And all of the paint ran.
The end result is that you can still see his talent as a painter. It isn't hard to imagine what the portrait could have been--but it's still not all that fun to look at. So it is with KotOR2.
What Works
The Writing
Kreia is rightfully regarded as one of gaming's most memorable antagonists. Everything Avellone channels through her dialogue--her lessons on the Force, her insight into the story--is intelligent, engaging, and compelling.
The relationship she develops with the player, too, is entrancing. Everything good about this game is related to Kreia. There are some writers who have leveled criticisms that her view of the Force is unfaithful to the setting, and I can't deny this--but I also don't give a flying fuck about Star Wars. As far as I'm concerned Star Wars is a versatile science fantasy setting with a lot of good ideas, nothing more. I don't really care about continuity, and so I find it easy to compartmentalize and take KotOR2 at face value.
Overall I prefer the first game's cast of companions, but the characters in 2 are fantastic. They're deep and well-realized, if also underdeveloped. With the exception of G0-T0 and T3, who are enormous wastes of space, it's always challenging deciding who to bring along on the adventure.
Replayability
The gender you choose in character creation will change quite a lot about the game overall. The narrative branches intuitively, at least up until the third act. For a game that's so woefully rushed it's impressive how big everything feels--you can easily justify two playthroughs, and the game already isn't short. It took me nearly 30 hours to beat.
No Stupid Twist
A lesser creative director would have tried to one-up the Revan twist in KotOR1 with something pointless and stupid. Avellone resisted the temptation. This restraint is worthy of applause.
The Ideas: Attempts at Mechanizing Narrative
As ever, Avellone tried to create harmony between systems and narrative. He justifies the existence of experience points in the mechanics, saying that each living being the Exile kills helps her re-attune her to the Force. He mechanizes relationships via a companion "Influence" system. Light and Dark points matter, at least in places, more than not-at-all. This is all great stuff.
In concept.
What Doesn't
Before His Time
The entirety of the first Knights of the Old Republic revolves around the game's third act twist. In many ways it's a subversion of the cRPG genre: you think you're playing a blank slate character, just like every other BioWare game, and then it turns you're Hitler. Thematically, although the writing is not exactly high brow, the story is about coming to terms with identity and choosing your own destiny.
The fact that Revan in KotOR is a self-insert customizable PC, therefore, is instrumental to the game's success. It is the crux of its narrative. The twist would not work otherwise, or at least wouldn't be so effective. You need to think that Revan is you for it all to be meaningful.
KotOR2 inherited this status quo of character creation from its predecessor. Like with all of Obsidians preceding cRPGs (by which I really mean the Black Isle games), you build up the Exile before entering play.
This is such a horrible mistake in retrospect, and it's evident that Avellone and the rest of the game's writers fought against giving the player this freedom all throughout the game.
The Exile is not a blank slate in the way Revan is. She doesn't have amnesia. She has a rich and interesting personal history. She's an important agent in the world. She is a real character, not just a vessel for the player.
...but there's no way to communicate this in the type of cRPG KotOR2 is trying to be. It's only been ten years since the Mandalorian Wars, but for some reason the Exile has forgotten everything and has to task the other characters for exposition. On events she was personally at. Even as a kid I remember feeling like the whole conceit hardly made sense: everyone talks about events as if they were hundreds of years in the past--and not within recent living memory.
I applaud Avellone's decision to make the Exile into a real character. My biggest problem with recent Obsidian games like The Outer Worlds is that the protagonist has no depth: he's like the god of death, a black hole capable of genociding anyone he deems worthy of such a fate, with no personality, who travels around the galaxy asking people questions and making arbitrary decisions.
The Exile does not suffer from this problem.
I personally think giving the player a real character, and not a black hole, to inhabit makes the roleplaying elements of a cRPG for more interesting than the alternative.
But the dialogue tree system in KotOR2 does not work for playing an established character. It wasn't designed for that. The narrative seriously flounders on this point.
There's an obvious solution, though, in retrospect. An innovation that would have made the Exile work so much better as the PC.
She should have been a voiced protagonist.
Of course there was no such thing in 2004. I can't hold this against Obsidian. But writing now in the post-Mass Effect and Witcher world, it's hard not to see how much better KotOR2 would work if the Exile was less like Revan and a lot more like Geralt. The problem of awkward exposition would be solved, because the Exile would be able to simply give the exposition herself, and the relationships which the game tries to focus on would have been so, so much more compelling.
As usual Avellone suffers for being a handful of years before his time with narrative design. I have no doubt that, if released a decade later, KotOR2 would have been a game with a dialogue wheel. And it'd have been much better for it.
Yeah, I know, real cRPGers don't like dialogue wheels. But there's a time and a place for everything, and as shallow and flawed as dialogue wheel systems can be, I still tend to think them preferable to "black hole exposition" syndrome described above, where the PC only ever asks questions and doesn't feel like a real part of the setting.
(For an example of a voice protagonist gone horribly wrong, click here.)
Speaking of Dialogue Trees...
BioWare perfected the art of writing good, easily navigable dialogue trees for non-voiced protagonists in Dragon Age: Origins, just in time to never use them again. KotOR1's are sometimes flawed but generally good.
KotOR2, on the other hand, has some of the worst dialogue trees ever. Of all time. There's no indication that you've selected a dialogue option before, and every dialogue option is always visible. You can get stuck in loops very easily, choosing the same things over and over and over again, unsure of how to escape from this newfound Purgatory of Kreia enigmatically explaining how she's definitely not evil to you OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
This probably comes about due to a lack of testing. I had bad memories of this game's dialogue navigation from previous playthroughs and it seems, if anything, the reality is worse than I remembered.
Companion Influence
Each character has an invisible influence score with the player. This is basically the same as Dragon Age's love/hate meter, but here it matters much more: with high or low enough influence, you can turn any biological companion into a Jedi.
Or so they tell me. In all of my years playing this game, I've never actually managed to do this--even on my latest playthrough, in which I very deliberately was trying to turn Atton and Mira into Jedi!
The notion of an influence system is flawed, as it is in DA:O, but it's still a step in the right direction. Mechanizing relationships is challenging but vital in any game that's serious about being a game.
Except unlike in DA:O, there are a couple of reasons why influence in KotOR2 utterly and completely fails.
Most obviously, you can only really earn influence via events that happen while traveling through each hub. You'll walk by a homeless man asking for money; murder him for the slight and HK-47 approves, give him some spare change and Mira approves. Some can be earned via dialogue trees, although not enough.
In effect, what this means is that the number of Influence points that exist in any playthrough is totally finite, and they're shared between every companion. If you want to earn a point for Mira and Kreia, you're literally giving up a point for Atton. This makes the system impossible to game without using a strategy guide or focusing entirely on specific companions.
But you can only take two companions on adventures with you in KotOR--unlike the three permitted in Dragon Age--even though the cast is fairly enormous, and assembled steadily throughout the entire game. They're all well-written, too, so if you're like me, you're going to want to spread out party-time between Atton, Mira, Kreia, HK-47, Bao-Dur, and Visas.
If you do do that, you will never accrue enough influence with anyone to unlock any interesting dialogue options. You'll never make anyone a Jedi. The opportunities for influence are too limited to permit players to spread out points in that way.
Any player's impulse is probably to try and appease his companions, but because Influence needs to be high or low this basically means you need to focus on farming a single type of response--negative of positive--per each character, and if you ever say something that gives the wrong type of Influence for a character, reload.
I didn't do that, so Mira and Atton continued on as not-Jedi...despite my active attempts to padawan them.
And if you do game the system, you're going to have to leave Kreia behind at the ship, which means you'll miss out on most of the game's most interesting character interactions. Kreia is the best character, after all, but influence with her means the least, especially if you've played the game before. This is the same reason why it makes no sense to ever bring a droid along, or, in fact, Mandalore, despite the fact that he's a great character: anyone who's played the first game already knows that T3 belonged to Revan, and that Revan built HK-47, and that Mandalore is actually Canderous Ordo and one of Revan's friends.
What we don't know is what's up with Atton and Visas and Kreia. From a simple economic viewpoint, then, the returns on farming influence for the droids are miniscule, and you should never, ever bring them along on a mission. Doing so actively costs you information and content in the game.
The decision to make Kreia a companion in the first place was a mistake. She should have stayed on the ship and offered her insight to the Exile either telepathically or via comms. Making her a literal PC companion wrecks her mentor relationship with the player, and she basically has to be taken along on every mission to get the most out of this game's story.
...which means you only have one slot for companions, further making the Influence system pointless and punishing.
If I wanted to fix this utterly broken system, I'd eliminate all three droids, make Kreia ship-only--like Joker in ME, I suppose--and cut out at least half of the other remaining characters. Which ones? I don't know, it's hard to say. They're all good. But the mechanics of the game gain very little by having such a huge cast.
Way Too Many Cutscenes; and, Why Am I Now Playing Mira?
Star Wars has always been a franchise with an objective PoV. We follow Luke and Han, but we are not restricted to their perspective. KotOR does a fairly good job at capturing this in cRPG format.
KotOR2 does not.
The game is absolutely filled with in-engine cutscenes of people the Exile doesn't even know exists talking to each other. In several places you have to play as your companions while the Exile is missing to advance the story. It's true that a few other cRPGs do this--Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and The Witcher 3 all come to mind--but it's almost always a mistake. Playing as Ciri and Joker is pointless and terrible. I actually like the section where you get to play as Morrigan & Company in Dragon Age because it lets you see how the companions get along without your PC holding everything together, but it's still not great.
Playing as Mira in KotOR2 when we don't even know who she is surpasses terrible pointlessness. It's awful, as are most of the cutscenes between Kreia and the other party members or random antagonists and their lieutenants.
No Apathy Allowed
A homeless man comes up to me on the streets of Nar Shadda. He asks for change. I have 40,000 credits, more than I can possibly spend (there's nothing I want to buy), so I say "okay, sure, whatever."
Kreia takes grave offense at this. "Why did you help that man?" she says, before launching into a harangue about how conflict breeds character and I robbed him of an opportunity for strength or whatever. My dialogue options are as follows:
"PASSION AND FRIENDLINESS ARE VITAL IN BETTERING THE FATE OF THE GALAXY."
"AS A JEDI I HAVE A DUTY TO HELP OUT THOSE AROUND ME, WHATEVER THE COST!"
"I KNEW THAT ALREADY, OLD CRONE; I WANTED TO SEE HIM SUFFER!"
"I WILL TAKE THIS LESSON TO HEART, MASTER."
"I don't want to talk about this."
In actuality the reason why I gave the man five credits was because it seemed like the easiest way to get him off my back, in addition to earning a few Light Side points. This, in case you haven't noticed, was not an option.
This pattern repeats all throughout the game. There are very rarely "neutral" dialogue options. Hitler or Gandhi, what's it going to be today? You can't be apathetic. You have to choose a side.
I played a "good" Exile, but I loathed the Republic--it's a giant oppressive space EU that tramples over planetary sovereignty--and had no interest in becoming a Jedi again. All I wanted was to get the Sith off my back, before returning to my comfortable exile. I had no interest in revenge or being evil.
But if you don't like the Jedi, that makes you a Sith. If you don't like the Republic, that makes you a dirty space fascist!
In general I tried to maintain apathy all throughout the game, but it didn't really work. Many of dialogue options are explicitly only good or evil, especially toward the end, and being Dark Side is generally little more than being evil for no reason. It's fun to play bad guys in games, but only when being bad is for some higher purpose, or to some greater effect. I really don't see the point of going out of my way to murder innocent people. That isn't evil, it's psychotic.
KotOR2's morality is less black-and-white than its predecessor, which is especially cartoony, but in some ways its more mature writing exacerbates its still present issues of shallow and uninteresting moral choices.
Hop Onboard the Railroad; and, Why Doesn't Anything Make Any Sense?
KotOR2's third act is a disaster. Everything falls apart. The Restored Content mod would have helped here more than anywhere else, but I can only write on what I played, and I'm not going to be able to stomach replaying this game again for at least another ten years.
I did Onderon last and sided with General Vaklu. The Jedi Master challenged me to a duel immediately upon my arrival at the Queen's palace. Apparently, according to him, I had fallen to the Dark Side: this was why he had me exiled! I couldn't be trusted with the Force! My dialogue options? Only three: "I WILL KILL YOU AND MAKE A HAT FROM YOUR BONES, PUNY JEDI;" "THE DARK SIDE HAS ALWAYS BEEN STRONGER, NOW I AM THE MASTER;" and "LET US END THIS NOW!"
You may note that "I'm doing what I think is right. I don't want to fight you, but I will if I have to" is not an option. In fact you can't talk this Jedi down at all. A fight is railroaded, even though I was gathering the Jedi on Dantooine all game and hadn't killed any of them yet.
Upon returning to the enclave on Dantooine, I was more or less immediately attacked by the two remaining Masters for my betrayal. Apparently siding with the planetary nationalists on Onderon forces you to later kill them, even though I had no desire to do so.
Then, Kreia will show up and ask a few meaningful questions. No matter how you respond, she'll say "YOU HAVE FAILED ME, STUDENT," and betray you.
This offends me less than what the dialogue options actually are, none of which actually fit the character I've been playing. In fact I had taken many of Kreia's lessons to heart and probably would have given her 5y3answer she was looking for if given the choice. But I wasn't.
The railroading had begun.
Pretty much everything to follow is linear and messy in the extreme. This all can be attributed to the short development cycle. Worse than the railroading, though, is that the entire story stops making sense.
There are cutscenes between Kreia and the other companions that don't seem to mean anything. Disciple starts saying stuff that doesn't fit into the story. Apparently Atris, a character I don't even know, views me as an older sister, and she's ALSO become a Sith lord? Wasn't she on the council that exiled me? Why is she treating me like I'm older than she is? Next for some reason we go to Malachor V, site of the battle which everyone has been talking about all game even though its actual events are never really explained, and then all brakes are off.
With the exception of the final confrontation with Kreia, which is good, Malachor V makes no sense. Bao-Dur starts talking about something called a Mass Shadow Generator? Which apparently can blow everything up? And the Ebon Hawk crashes, but then flies away at the end? And Mira just randomly teleports down to the planet? But no one else does? And the Exile goes to face Kreia without any of her companions? What? What's happening? Why is no one explaining anything? Where's the exposition?
I think a lot of the background information that I lacked can be gleamed from Bao-Dur over the course of the game. Unfortunately, even though I like Bao-Dur a lot, I was so busy trying to get influence with Mira and Atton that I never once took him on an adventure, which meant I never earned any influence with him, which meant I never unlocked any dialogue options with him. Ever. He literally had nothing to say to me all game. When engaged with in dialogue, the only option was "Goodbye."
Some guy on reddit explained the Malachor V thing to me and I think I understand it now, but without that the game's finale is utterly incomprehensible. It's a mess of cut content and--not exactly plot holes, but exposition holes.
But you probably knew all of this already.
A Lot of Other Stuff, Too
In general game design terms, despite its intelligent ambitions, the first KotOR game is so much better overall. KotOR2's level design in particular is just awful. It's labyrinthine, ugly, confusing, easy to get stuck or lost, and generally poorly done. There are often too many combat encounters that go on for too long. You have to run around each map constantly on pointless fetch quests and errands, and the Fast Travel system of the first game is inexplicably missing. You will spend literal hours just walking around between locations, often not knowing where to go or what you're supposed to be doing. The crafting mechanics are awful and the changes to how Spikes and Parts work makes the game worse in every respect. The gameplay is better than a Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale but still miserable, especially at the end, where I had to turn things down to easy just to get it all over with.
As much as I like the writing throughout most of this game, it was a real slog finishing it. KotOR1 has its share of issues, although it will always remain important to me as my first cRPG, but it's fun playthrough after playthrough. With the exception of the first swoop race, and maybe also the underwater part, there's nothing that makes me think "oh jesus, now I have to do that part to get to the good stuff."
In KotOR2, I think that about Peragus. I think that about Telos. I think that about Atris' lair. I think that about most of Nar Shadda. I think that especially about the space yacht. I think that about solving the murder on Onderon. I think that about the assault on the Sith base on Dxun. I think that about about the Ravager and the Sith academy. In fact, the only parts of the game I don't dread replaying are Korriban, most of Dantooine, and...some of Dxun, maybe. That's it.
A lot of internet contrarians like me will sing paeans of KotOR2 whenever someone mentions the first game, saying that "actually it's much more better and way smarter," but this couldn't be further from the truth. KotOR2 has a lot of interesting aspects and some immensely intelligent writing, but it's a terrible game on the whole.
I don't blame Obsidian for it. They were dealt a bad hand. But even with most of the bugs patched out, and even with the Restored Content mod, nothing can ever fix the broken companion mechanics, the poorly thought out dialogue trees, the mediocre systems, and the hellish level design.
Ready for a Remake
Lately, and about every other month for the last ten years, rumors of a KotOR1 remake have been in the news. That's certainly an exciting prospect. I love KotOR, but it's getting old. Give it some better combat mechanics, though, fix the shitty camera controls, overhaul the graphics--it'd be a welcome change.
Except KotOR is good. What flaws it has are in the narrative, not so much the systems. It doesn't really need a remake. It's still playable.
But KotOR2? I mean come on!
I can't think of any better game to get remade. Preserve the design intent and as much of the writing as possible and come in and fix the game's problems. Overhaul the companions. Maybe implement some of the suggestions I've indicated here. Change the level design to be something less odious. Update the awful graphics. Come up with some new gameplay that might actually be more engaging than "press force lightning 5 times to win" in every encounter. Finally, give the Exile a voice and the space she needs to work as a character. And change her name from "Meetra Surik," because that's literally the stupidest name ever committed to fiction.
Remaking good games is a waste of time. Give KotOR1 a remaster and there you have it, it's good as new. But no matter how much paint you put onto KotOR2, the core of the game is still going to be flawed. Fixing its issues and making it the game it always should have been, rectifying the rushed design, requires a complete overhaul. You have to change EVERYTHING to make its ideas, and the quality of its writing, shine.
Isn't that what remakes should be for?
Conclusion
Every cRPG fan should try to play Knights of the Old Republic 2 at least once. Like with watching boring ass old classical Hollywood cinema it might not be a very fun experience...but it will make you a better person. It's like broccoli, but for gamers.
Or so I like to think.
If you do go and play this game, make sure you do it with CRM, and maybe a few other mods, too. That'll get the game close to its maximum potential. You might even enjoy yourself along the way! Unfortunately I didn't, although I was engaged enough to finish the thing.
As for the iPad port? It's pretty good. So long as you can still mod it, I'd give it a solid recommendation, and the same for the first game. Playing video games in bed automatically makes them ten times better, after all.