3.5/5 ★ – BucketKnight's review of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Very impressive for the technical constraints of a 6th generation game, but may be looked at with rose-colored glasses by its core community. As a newcomer who didn’t grow up with this game, I found the story to be a worthwhile, but flawed experience. Combat is what it is. Certain encounters (especially in the final act) can feel tedious and some enemies at times seem like strangely placed power checks, but the combat system does its job well enough for being a turn-based combat system of the early 2000s, and I don’t fault it for being a product of its time. On the creative side though: While the overall narrative and companions in the game are well written, the game design itself can sometimes impede the experience. At times, I found that some of the more important story beats for your companions would/wouldn’t activate due to some unclear circumstances. While the idea of “making choices and forging your own unique path” is one of the appeals of role-playing games, I feel like sometimes I got my path not because of the choices I was making, but because the developers decided that the next step in a companion’s personal quest could only activate under some oddly specific conditions. In the case of romancing your main companion Bastila, it seems the actual “romance” scene won’t trigger if you have Bastila keep her father’s holocron at the end of her personal quest instead of giving it to her (terrible) mother. While I sooorta understand the idea that Bastila not reconciling with her mother would lead to her to not fully open up to the player character, both endings to that questline gave her character a sense of closure, and I feel like a romance storyline could’ve continued, just with a few alternate conversations. I felt like there wasn’t a clear correlation between player action and consequence in this instance, but to make matters stranger, the player and Bastila can still confess their love for one another in the final mission, but it comes off as incredibly rushed/jarring as you’ve been locked out of the previous romance moments. While a better, more natural version of Bastila’s romance *does* exist in the game, I wouldn’t have been able to guess what locked me out of it if I hadn’t looked it up online. Juhani’s dialogue was also soft-locked for me about halfway through the game. After a few conversations, her personal quest activates with Xor, a figure from her past, spawning in a spaceport and threatening her. From that point on, speaking to Juhani will always result in her just repeating the same line of dialogue about how much she hates Xor and how he’s likely now following us, and how we’ll undoubtedly be seeing him again… and then we never saw him again. Despite traveling to several different planets with Juhani in the party, Xor never spawned again due to an apparent well-known bug regarding that quest having janky triggers, and Juhani’s personal quest was never able to continue - so I was locked out of dialogue with her through the rest of my playthrough. Upon completion of the game, I still have no idea what Juhani’s reaction to the game’s main twist was, but I certainly know how much Xor makes her “Cathar blood boil” because that’s all she ever says now. Even with KOTOR’s role-playing feeling needlessly constrained at times when compared to BioWare’s future titles, it still remains one of their best games, as the overall plot, characters, and locations (with great skyboxes btw) fit right into the better realm of Star Wars stories.