Knights of The Old Republic: Programing is the Dark Side

“Knights of the Old Republic” is a classic Star Wars game. Despite not featuring any of the familiar characters from the movies it has worked its way deep into Star Wars lore (until Disney decided all that lore is no longer cannon. Sorry.) Yet despite its iconic status amongst hard core Star Wars fans, some aspects of it have aged better than others.

Knights of the Old Republic, or KOTAR for short, is set four thousand years before the Clone Wars. A Sith army as appeared from seemingly nowhere, led by Darth Raven and his apprentice Darth Malak. But since then Malak killed Raven and has taken control for himself. The main character finds himself on a beleaguered ship above the outer rim world of Tarsis. After a battle you find yourself crashed on the planet and on a quest to locate the Jedi Ballstila whose special abilities are key to winning the war. Eventually you gain your own Jedi powers and begin searching the galaxy to clues to the origin of the Sith army’s resources. 

The interesting thing about KOTOR is throughout the game you are given a series of moral choices. These choices influence your alignment with the dark or light side of the force. What is interesting about these choices is that they often change elements of the story. Also interesting is that always doing what is right or wrong does not always benefit you. Sometimes helping people gives important information, other times the dark side is a path to easy credits and experience points. At the same time many powers are only accessible if you choose to embrace the light or dark. All of this adds a layer of complexity to the emphasis on stark moral choices in the game and Star Wars as a whole.

The writing in KOTOR is very good for a videogame with only a few silly concessions to the format. The most notable thing is the many side quests scattered throughout the galaxy. You can choose to complete these quests in a number of ways. Which adds to the games replay value, and given that there are both light and dark side endings the game is worth at least two good playthroughs.

The combat system is somewhat fun but also somewhat repetitive. You pause the game to enter commands and you control whatever character you are using, otherwise the computer takes control of things. This makes combat either very easy or absurdly hard depending on the enemy. That said watching the light saber fights and force powers play out can be very entertaining. It all looks right--except for the part where enemies and party members alike shrug off blaster bolts and grenades exploding in their faces—it is a videogame after all. 

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but considering the game is sixteen years old they’re ok. I admit being more impressed when I was a teenager, but the graphics were not bad for a retro game. In fact the in game movies actually still hold up. 

What has not held up is the programing. It took a lot of work to get the game to run on my modern operating system. I had to add values to the games registry, and that was just to keep it from crashing. It was still very glitchy. Characters often stopped moving after combat forcing me to switch party members or save and reload. One time I even had to take my characters gear off to get him to load properly into a cut scene, thus stopping the game from crashing. Why this worked I have no idea but it did. All of this understandably deeply decreased my enjoyment of the game, though I was able to work around it. 

While Darth Raven and KOTOR are no longer cannon, they do hold a dear place in my heart, and the hearts of many hardcore Star Wars fans. Hopefully someday the characters will be reestablished in the new cannon. Until then we only have a classic Star Wars game which is still very much worth playing.

9.0-10

-Gedaemon