"Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic" Wait This is Actually Good?

 

    Look, I've played my fair share of old games, and time and time again, the same process occurs, it's ridiculously clunky and jank, forcing you to trudge through the mud until it just clicks, it finally all makes sense and everything becomes infinitely easier. That is how I felt playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic for the first time. I mean it isn't the first time I've played a game from the 2000's, I've played Morrowind, and I'm not completely stupid, but I'm going to be completely honest, if it wasn't for the captivating story holding it all together, I'd be hard pressed to recommend this game to in the year 2023.

    I'll get it out of the way immediately, this game is ugly, frankly if you told me this game was developed in the 90's (it probably was to be honest) I wouldn't bat an eye. There's a fast travel, called transiting, but it makes no sense, why is it that I can transit in certain zones, and in other zones not transit? There's a lot of retreading in this game, and you just end up using master speed in order to zoom past the area, but even then master speed has this awful motion blurring effect that looks like you pissed vaseline all over a screen. For your information, they also use this weird effect on cutscenes because 90% of them look worse than the game itself, if you can believe it.

    No seriously, did people just have more time back then? Look, I sound pissy because I'm whining about fast travel, but even in Morrowind they had those weird tentacle creatures to drag you around the place. There are other aspects that feel out of place in todays landscape of RPG's, most specifically, the inventory system, Jesus Christ is it so clunky. There is no excuse for it, look I love the fact that you can carry as much as possible, but when you have to scroll through a billion items, it really makes you question what the point is.

    At the very least it has voice acting, can't say the same thing about a certain Pokemon game. Look, this game is good though, and while it is extremely, extremely confusing, it's pretty much Star Wars flavored Dungeons and Dragons. What I mean by this is that the combat system quite literally runs off of "turns" and "dice rolls", with term such as "saves" thrown in there as well. While to someone unaccustomed to the system it might seem confusing, it eventually becomes less and less cumbersome. I mean on the first planet, Taris, you pretty much miss every shot you take with flurry, yet slowly but surely, eventually you become good enough that spamming a basic attack, like flurry should be able to get you out of 90% of situations.

    Now, the story and worldbuilding is fantastic, and its what carries this game. You can excuse a lot when you really want to know what happens on the next planet, or try different configurations with different followers depending on the quest. Personally, I typically ran a lot of Canderous, mostly because I just thought the idea of an ex-merc was pretty cool personally, but pretty much every companion, other than like T3, has something to captivate a person. I mean I knew the major spoiler to this game by accident, and I still loved it to the very end.

Final Score: 83/100

    Yes I know, technically I did spend like most of this article complaining about how jank it is, but that's mostly because the one thing that carries this game is the lore, especially if you're a big Star Wars fan. Everything is pretty much standard RPG stuff, or just outdated in the year 2023, so if you're big into story, you'll like this game. I also didn't want to really spoil the story, as I think it's just that good, so if you're ever looking to play some older games that don't really take much to run, definitely give Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic a shot.