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.
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.