This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
A. Star wars knights of the old republic 2. The music and environmental color palette are so dull and drab compared to its predecessor, I despise kreia and atton for being pieces of shit but unfortunately they're important/major characters in the narrative (especially kreia, and how the game itself tries to portray this
shitbag as "correct" especially with the infamous nar shadda beggar scene), it completely doesn't capture the magic of star wars that the first game did (I know it was supposed to be a deconstruction, but it's way too dark and edgy), I hate darths nihilus and sion (again, too edgy, and I think their force power gimmicks are stupid). It also basically invalidates all the player has accomplished in the story of the first kotor game, regardless of side (by the time of kotor 2 both the jedi and sith are collapsing and revan is missing).
Regarding kreia and her portrayal, IIRC chris avellone is apparently a sex pest creep who has had allegations made against him
B. Pokemon Legends Arceus. I think I've ranted about this game before. I personally think that it has a very boring and flawed gameplay loop, dull environments with music that rarely/barely plays (the music itself is good, but why the fuck is most of the game uncomfortably silent then), a botched combat system, unfun/tedious wild pokemon aggression mechanics, a horrible lack of quality of life features and an truly unbearable amount of grinding. Then there's the colonial apologia in the narrative (wholesome chungus peaceful colonizers who just want to make a home in a foreign land and live harmoniously with the natives, d the gracious colonizers' help in dealing with sacred local pokemon they've revered for generations)
It's a bit of a litmus test when asking someone about their opinion of KOTOR2. If they say Kreia/Traya was "based" and actually buy into her bullshit Enlightened Centrist fortune cookie wisdom (which IN THE GAME is shown to be a deceitful bullshit ploy to hide her actual motives), they're probably an asshole.
Looking at the star wars fanbase,
Darth Traya's actual motivation is very interesting, though. Star Wars' pseudobuddhist/pseudotaoist philosophy has always been its best feature, and Kreia is this very interesting character who is aware of the Tao and believes in its existence, and wants to kill it. Its a matter of free will and theology. There is a "god" that controls the entire galaxy, and here is a character who believes its existence is an unjust hierarchy and wants to kill it.
It is interesting but so many people that played it missed the point of her distracting Enlightened Centrism bullshit (which she spews no matter what the player decides to do, which is the point because it was a distraction tactic all along) and see her as some great and wise person instead of a betrayer, which was IN THE NAME.
The big hole in her idea is that she wants to do that for herself and doesn't really ask the rest of the living things in the universe if they want that. It doesn't matter because she wants it.
I think I need to do some self-crit because I was onboard with Kreia's idea to kill the force...
Does it make sense to give a choice to a population of people who don't have free will? The Force can't control individuals, but it controls populations. It can use propaganda to defend itself. Kreia simply sees the force as a state.
Why does Kreia get to make that decision? Does she get a pass that everyone else doesn't?
I don't want to go into a free will debate here. That's exhausting and annoying and I've done it so many times. Rather, I'm asking why Kreia gets to make that determination under the same standards you would apply to the rest of all life in the galaxy.
The same reason a 15 year old girl's parents get to decide that she's not allowed to pursue a romantic relationship with her pedophile teacher: compromised consent
That doesn't justify or excuse her pretenses of "saving" billions of people that didn't ask to be saved (in a way that may very well kill them considering the in-setting significance of the Force and how it relates to living things).
Her reacting against the Force is still being manipulated by it. If you deny agency with deterministic dogma for billions in the galaxy, how exactly is she really free of the same limitation if her only goal is still bound to the same entity, just as its negative?
She wasn't trying to save anyone. It really looked like another lie and another selfish agenda, a revenge motive that drags billions along for the ride.
Calling absolutely everyone children for not agreeing with Kreia is pretty absurd to me.
Unshackling billions from the control of an entity with mysterious but demonstrably harmful motives isn't the same as taking billions for a ride. The Mandalorian War was the will of the force. Krei is of the opinion that another disaster like that is bound to happen, and if she doesn't do everything in her power to kill the force, then the casualties are her fault.
In favor of following the agenda of an entity with constantly selfish and deceptive motives that have actively harmed and murdered many people in the course of the game?
As I have already said, she had no evidence or prior experimentation to prove that other living things could actually survive in any sustainable way in the game's setting without the Force altogether. She was doing a spite-driven experiment, and since she killed so many to get there, she's fine with dragging absolutely every living thing in the galaxy all-in with her.
I get that you like the novelty of what she was doing, but trading one galactic scale entity for a small-scale one and calling the big one murderous and trusting in the little murderous one is bad reasoning to me.
Kreia wasn't emancipating anyone. There was no revolution. She threw away the lives of her own followers just to get them in the protagonist's way. Liberation didn't matter to her. It was another lie. It was all a spite agenda. She was just another tyrant, and she'd throw you away just as quickly if not more quickly for her own selfish agenda.
Kreia had proof that people could survive without the Force. The Exile isn't a force user. I also don't believe her ideal of destroying the Force is synonymous with her methods. The Dark Side of the Force corrupted her from her ideals because that's what the dark side does. That's kind of the tragic irony of her character. She could never really escape the force. She could identify the problem, but unlike the Exile, she was incapable of enacting the solution upon herself. It's a cool story.
Kreia's track record consisted of killing and destroying everything within reach to further her own selfish agenda. Your belief that she was some kind of savior is buying into another lie of hers while her track record says otherwise.
Again, Kreia wasn't emancipating anyone. There was no revolution. She threw away the lives of her own followers just to get them in the protagonist's way. Liberation didn't matter to her. It was another lie. It was all a spite agenda. She was just another tyrant, and she'd throw you away just as quickly if not more quickly for her own selfish agenda.
And as I already said, there was no real evidence that if she got her way that life itself would survive her spite agenda, not with what is known in the setting's canon about how the Force works, tyrannical or not.
Actually, there was evidence. The Exile cut themself off from the force.
And that would totally work just fine for the entire galaxy?
I'll put it another way. Let's say there's a powerful and cruel tyrant that has command of all the grain fields across a land that uses grain as its staple crop and its primary source of food.
One day, someone who really hates that powerful and cruel tyrant orchestrates an elaborate rebellion, its forces consisting of irate farmers that used to harvest grain for the tyrant.
Then, the real master plan goes into motion, that someone starts murdering their own fellow rebellious farmers by setting the grain fields on fire and making sure to destroy each and every possible vestige that might grow back. Ostensibly, it's because the tyrant benefits from people needing grain, but lots of those farmers are killed in the massive grain field fires that keep spreading and spreading.
One person doesn't need that grain to survive; they forage.
You're saying burning all the grain is cool and good and destroying everyone's ability to ever grow grain again is cool and good because the tyrant used it as a basis for their power. And you're saying that all the people burned to death in the grain fields had it coming because they were still dependent on the grain. And the implication is foraging will totally work for absolutely everyone left that wasn't already killed in the grain fires.
You don't speak for me, and neither does Kreia. You can solipsistically say I'd be a slave to the Force (unlike you or unlike Kreia, which already has holes in it considering Kreia was still driven by negative fixation agianst the Force, still driven by its presence and reacting to it) and maybe you'd say if Kreia killed me too that was all part of her oh so heroic plan. And that's not cool to me.
As someone who appreciates KOTOR 2, I think that a lot of the love for the game comes from 3 factors:
Nostalgia for KOTOR 1
The fact that KOTOR 2 improved the combat system and the class/skill system, so if you liked skipping all the dialogue and getting to the part where you could swing your lightsaber around then this game feels like a significant improvement when the combat in the previous game often felt very tacked-on and like an afterthought
The aspirational "But it could have been a masterpiece!" sort of thing, where people see the rushed development which resulted in a game that was ultimately unfinished, this cohort tends to fill in the gaps with how great it could have been rather than extrapolating from what the game really was into what it likely would have been if it actually completed its development cycle, which wouldn't have been all that much better and the lost content restoration mod stands testament to the fact that, no, the bits that got left out weren't really going to be better than the rest of the game.
I think you're right about how Revan's story just got sidelined in the second game and how the villains were kinda meh. I feel like Nihilus was a really bad choice and just a placeholder for an actual villain because they didn't bother with any development, they used in-lore reasons for why he couldn't talk and his character was essentially incomprehensible in his motives aside from The One Thing™ 🙄, and they just kinda dropped him in towards the end and it's supposed to be a big deal because he's... kinda spooky I guess? Oh wait, some characters also tell you throughout the game that he's a big deal and you should invest in his character because they said so.
Kreia I think was decent but not fully realised (see above for what that means to fans) but I think conceptually it was cool to have a greyish-to-evil Jedi as your mentor.
The game did a better job of moral pathways, especially the grey and evil ones. The first KOTOR would pose very simple situations to the player - help and do the good thing, to good outcomes, but you either have to pay extra or miss the opportunity for money/loot or you lie and/or slaughter your way through and you get that loot.
KOTOR 2 made you think about the consequences of your actions more and there wasn't always the clearly obvious righteous path but instead you had to grapple with means vs ends and the ramifications of your choices. There was less [console the orphaned child and give them money to help them get back on their feet/kill the orphaned child and loot their bloodied corpse] options and more morally ambiguous options.
Kreia was supposed to be the fleshing out of the whole fall to evil thing and she did an okay job of it most of the time. If you played the game purely lawful good then she would have been frustrating but if you played it other ways or you weren't certain of your path then she is a more interesting deuteragonist than Bastila, who would just demand that you always take the lawful good path and chide you if you didn't, which wears thin really quickly. (This is from someone who has set out to play the game as evil multiple times and yet has failed and fallen to their better insticts every time lol, and this is also at the cost of Kreia chiding you for doing the right thing, for doing the wrong thing, or for trying to do the right/wrong thing and it backfiring due to circumstances, leaving you feeling as though there was no way to appease her because whatever you do she's likely going to be disappointed in you regardless.) She was, imo, a very clear swing-and-miss at representing something close to representing the concept of Wu Wei because the problem therein is to have a fallen/ultimately evil character who also represents neutrality/neutral-good - those two sit it direct contradiction with one another so it got muddled up in the story. Hence the beggar scene.
Being able to crack characters open and bring them to be your apprentices and to influence their alignment was a pretty cool mechanic that helped flesh out the story imo.
The game was really reaching for gritty realism (see: Atton being an actual representation of a rogue character rather than a caricature of a rogue who once was self-interested but decided to join up and now they're part of a merry band of do-gooders without any real justification or development, also the drab setting for most of the game) and a subversion of the tropes (which, in combination with the gritty realism, often devolved into outright edgelordism) but it often fell short of this lofty vision.
I think ultimately what the game was attempting, and failed to achieve, was a truly introspective player experience where there were more shades of gray than any clarity on anything - will Kreia be the final villain and if so, why is she on your side and why does she not do Big Evil Stuff™? (Which explains Nihilus being largely absent from the game, although that turned out kinda bad.) Why do I not trust the good characters a lot of the time and why do the evil-coded characters make compelling cases (sometimes)? Why is it that I can't always do the correct thing but I am forced to choose between imperfect options? Why do I find myself at odds with my Jedi mentor? Is there truly right and wrong? Are the means justified by the ends and what are the implications? etc.
I think one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that this game came out when the subversion of the trope wasn't itself a massive trope and gritty realism, while popular, hadn't reached peak saturation yet and so for a lot of people who grew up with the game it really did feel groundbreaking due to that context. I think this bookends really well with the discussion on Seinfeld happening elsewhere on Hexbear - people look back on Seinfeld and ask why it was considered so great at the time but they often don't understand that in the context of when it was produced, it was pretty groundbreaking for comedy and its influence was so significant that for a person going back to watch it after its run, it seems like Seinfeld is just rehashed and worn out. But that's not because of Seinfeld itself, it's because it changed the shape of comedy that came after it (for better or worse) such that it doesn't feel groundbreaking at all looking at it retrospectively.
It's a bit like if we were to watch an early husband and wife sitcom like I Love Lucy or something - we'd know all the tropes, we'd see all the punchlines before they landed, we'd consider it a tired and worn out concept despite never having watched it even though, at the time, it was so influential and groundbreaking that it effectively shaped the direction of its entire genre. Sometimes things are just a product of their time and that means that they don't always age that well.
Yeah. Nihilus also felt like a "force of nature" villain more than anything. Don't know if I remember wrongly, but I couldn't really find out what his actual character or motives were when talking to visas marr, other than just consuming everything like a wild animal. The final confrontation with him was really anticlimactic and underwhelming.
The thing is, I could never really please Kreia enough so I opted to spite her, to intentionally decrease her influence as low as possible to "unlock" the various story dialogue lines. Her hyper-selfish, social darwinist obsession with rugged individualism and freedom irritated me more than anything Bastilla did TBH. Obviously not saying that all choices that would align with what kreia would do are bad - far from it, e.g. some of the "smart"/"manipulative" choices that kreia would approve of - I just don't want to be constantly lectured by space libertarian, especially when helping or trusting in others - the whole point of the exile's strength in making bonds with others. And I find it ironically pathetic that someone so obsessed with this stupid idea of "freedom" was so drawn to a force user whose greatest strength was their ability to bond and connect with others. She honestly comes across as one of those deranged people trying to separate themselves from society, who hates the very fundamental dependence of all life on each other (and hence the crazy plot to "kill the force" which binds all things). I also still maintain that the game was excessively sympathetic in its portrayal of kreia.
Yes. Kreia is IMO the most sociopathic and repulsive character in the game, so the writers attempting to portray her as "gray" completely failed from my pov.
Which is kinda funny because star wars is this very cheesy space fantasy that clearly isn't meant to be taken seriously. Introducing "gritty realism" into this series has to be done very carefully to make it work, but as you outlined here they didn't succeed in the case of kotor 2.
Side note, I did appreciate the mechanic of influencing through hatred as much as respect. I remembered that it was very easy to make mical absolutely hate you and thus acquire a light side jedi party member relatively quickly.
Lmao. Point taken.
I think it's clear that your experience of the game came from a place of being radicalised, or well on the path to radicalism, before you played it when my experience of the game came before I was really radicalised (fortunately Randian libertarianism doesn't have nearly as strong a grip where I live and, unfortunately, my path towards radicalism detoured through the much more individually-oriented forms before I broke free from that so these two factors clearly coloured my experience of the game.)
When it's cast in this light, Kreia makes for an excellent villain because she's the embodiment of the self-parody inherent in the bourgeoisie which is not class-conscious (I sincerely believe that some of them truly are class-conscious but the majority of them are Elon Musk-tier with their awareness) or the Randian who dreams of going full-Galt, completely oblivious to just how much they depend upon society and the general goodwill that people extend towards others without any thought of personal gain.
But that doesn't make her any less insufferable or any more sympathetic to deal as a party member lol.
I like KOTOR 2 because Darth Nihilus is hot.
I like KOTOR because Darth Revan is hot.