Let's get back to what we were doing... (the KotOR love letter essay)

I've been playing my absolute second favourite videogame (after Joust) the last couple of weeks - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I think we may have mentioned the game before.

This may not seem like anything out of the ordinary for me, the man who plans to name his first child 'Darth Revan' regardless of gender, and his second either 'Carth' or 'Carthette' (and I had a goldfish named Trask, we worked opposite shifts; I guess that's why I haven't mentioned him before) but this is interesting because I haven't played this thing in years. The reasons are firstly that the original Xbox game plays very badly on the Xbox360, and secondly... I was really worried that it wouldn't be as good as I remembered.

Knightfall and I really, really love this game, and I enjoy the nostalgic talks about it so much - and I enjoy using it as a baseline for comparison to any other videogame RPG - that I would have been truly sad if it turned out that I'd embellished it. After all, when I played this game I was in a rough place. I was lonely and miserable and got sucked into Bioware's strange 4000-year-old Star Wars world just because I needed some escapism. I wasn't particularly a Star Wars fan at the time (though I liked the movies in a silly, self-aware jokey way) and I'd never played a role-playing game. It was actually the first game I'd picked up since the Nintendo 64... I needed something silly to do to cheer me up, so I got an Xbox and the Star Wars game.

And it totally worked. After the intial day of "what the hell is this turn-based combat" confusion, I played this 40-hour interactive story through over and over, ten or twenty times through. What I loved was how every single time, I found a quest or a line of dialogue that I'd never experienced before. Nowadays we have DLC for that, but in KotOR, there was no need. It was already massive enough. It was all in the details, the sheer quality of the writing and the acting. I remember playing through it again and again, dreaming the story at night and living it all day, and thinking "God-damn... this story is so much better than the Star Wars prequel movies."

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And, playing it again, thanks to a new laptop...

I was right! I'm very happy to report that it's still the best damn game out there... provided you know the difference between a Rodian and a Duros, anyway. But then, when I picked this thing up, I didn't know much about Star Wars, 3D games or role-playing. But once I had made it through the training area and the first planet... once I had touched down at the Jedi training academy and built a lightsaber (with my choice of colour - I went with yellow because I fancied Bastila)... once I had role-played the process of becoming a Jedi knight with my own lightsaber, robes, Millennium Falcon-looking spaceship and team of fascinating, beautifully-acted sidekicks... I was hooked. For about 7 years.

I remember thinking, "Where are the cool starship and the amazing sidekicks in Phantom Menace? There's... Jar Jar, I guess, and that black guy with the plastic guard outfit... and that shiny ship that Amidala had that time... the HMS ShinyShip I think it was..."

So I'm about halfway through my game now, my first in a fair few years, and once again getting totally caught up in it. Even though I know, almost word for word, I want to know what happens next. I want to influence the tiniest of details in this story, fine-tuning it as only a loving fan can. I want Carth in Jamoh Hogra's black-and-white cowboy armour. I want Mission to cheer up without forcing her to (she's my surrogate daughter, that girl) and I want to crack dumb jokes at Juhani until she snaps and tries to behead me in that wierd... little bathroom place she lives in.
And I absolutely won't get on with my life until I've done those things.

Carth wears the black and white cowboy armour. The protagonist has a random surname and a real-world first name, and that face that looks a bit like a young Barbara Streisand with the blue eyes and the black hair tied in a small ponytail. She has a single yellow lightsaber and brown Jedi Master robes and levels-up in repair and persuade and I LOVE THEM.

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What I truly love about this game, more than any Bioware game that's come since (I've played them all to death and somehow I'm always just a touch disappointed) is that the good/evil decisions are... a little something more than that. As Carth, that handsome bastard, said to me last night outside the Ebon Hawk, "I used to think 'The Dark Side' was a fancy way of describing what I see every day. People are cruel and selfish, and cowardly. But I'm starting to think for the Jedi, it's different." That handsome fuck. That sums it up - because the characters are Jedi, the good / evil aspects of this particular story really allow you to create a character - and better, they allow you to make the story into one of temptation. You know, like Anakin Skywalker, only not rubbish. That's Star Wars.

Your guy can be a noble hero, a cartoonish villain, or a bit of a rogue who wears a leather waistcoat and cracks jokes because she's got a real nasty streak and keeps finding herself swinging between massive acts of charity and Vader-choking that jackass in the cantina who keeps insulting her. And near the end (all good/evil RPG's should have this) there is a distinct choice: the game stops and gives you one heroic dialogue choice and one that just says 'Death to the Jedi'.
The game is saying this is it - good or evil, no turning back. Save the galaxy in the last dungeon, or else murder your friends right now and take over the woooorld instead. I loved to craft the character as if s/he were a recovering addict: always wanting to solve her problems by lightsabering people's knees off, and being kept juuust on the right side of things by her endless invasive chats with the various party-members who were all sick of her, and all hesitant for various reasons, to mentor her. You can't do THAT in Mass Effect 2.

I remember landing on Dantooine for the first time and really liking how there was a flock of birds who followed you in. I thought, 'Huh! Birds in Star Wars - awesome!' (I hadn't been paying attention to Naboo in Phantom Menace, but I ask you, why should I?) The birds were there on Kashhyyk, too. That's a really nice touch. When I saw those birds again a week ago, it honestly felt like coming home. I've missed these birds, and I've missed the poorly-animated fictional Space Opera characters onboard this ship. All their superb little nuances.
And I'm looking forward to seeing my favourite, Jolee, again so damn much. He was a better Ben Kenobi than Alec Guinness (or even Professor Frink), if you took the time to keep pestering him.

That's all I can think of, at any rate. Let's return our thoughts to the mission, please. I'm here if you want something done right, you know?

I should go.