Whatever the first game is like the second game is like, if the first game completely ignores what is meaningful about games as they should be understood, completely, that is to say, immersed in its otherwise predestined sense of coming to be in a fictional or romantic pre-complex, an utter vestige of coming-to-be as a way of getting things going, if nothing else, than it completely reconciles others and products of others to integrated self-serving objects - regardless, if there is such a thing - that can obscure the mappings and multi-constructs, repellents, of another world, to which we can cross over. This attitude towards being free or mobilised, in the same way, requires the participators (and readers of this review) to completely reconcile their requirements and wishes for the future to be directly connected to these estuaries of knowledge, these invigorating but myopic pseudo-histories of unreal or half-real varieties of histories from beyond, that emancipate the innocent, child-like spirit of the marauder that resides in every sleepy player of Star Wars games, but makes it necessary to fall back towards to fictional in a stylised and straight-jacketed form, subject to every will and every necessary will conceivable.
In my review of the second game I already grappled with the problems inherent to games such as this; the sense of waiting, the sense of progress, the sense of limiting growth in the 'adaptation' of the principal character to a way of approaching and seeing multiplicities, as they come together in a future or mere future, that all can aspire to - or that all can come to realise is ultimately worthy of withheld inquiries into its nature -, that become completely automatic, as they look back to erstwhile components of non-engaging predecessor of their own selves. But they cannot merely recede and reserve, and hope for the best as the world itself is obscured. It is necessary to re-engage and contemplate the other way of becoming obsolete, the complete way, that was never fully explored in its full rights until this game itself was subjected to the rigours of sequence and succession. Now I would like to explore the consequences of that in this first game, this predecessor-game, an antecedent paradise-for or paradise-towards the contemplative perspiration of the second game - that is, the midnight sleepy-dark-side motifs that drive and engage the sequels necessary relations with the user interface of all role-playing games that are produced with similar agenda's and concepts, meant to influence and guard players in the same way every game drives and propels the gamer forward, but providing them with a mirror for some reason that can give them the self-insight of being tired or upright, in shape; that is what this game does by its morally dichotomous insider-system, to split the players narrative world in two, judging their actions without judging them, providing a non-judgemental ethics. In the same way that a player requires a future player to follow the same footsteps that he himself followed, because there could not really be a normal route to take that was not predetermined and scripted by the computer beforehand, past players, who were involved with this game, now have to look back and be gamers once more, as they revisited places already revisited, that keep coming back in new guises and cannot be forgotten, as I said, haunting the player forever. That returning and continuously returning motif, that hardness of hearing, that can be felt through all the world's possible iterations in digital or rule-based forms such as this, require the connecting PC-character to accept his existence in a vacuum of knowledge and pre-destined knowledge, the same way one player follows other players as he keeps coming back to what he wanted to come back to. That is what it means to fulfil destiny, even if is only destiny on a small, even microscopic scale.
Similarly in Baldurs Gate or Planescape: Torment, the writers of KOTOR 2 required the player to listen and be patient, being more concious of their own unresponsive selfishness as they waited to continue or simply enjoyed the dialogue, which amounts more or less to the same thing. That is why it is necessary to be a gamer: the community of amply revisited paths towards great building is only built on responsive packages of player-response as it is in nature, as it is in the natural history of connecting with each other on this basis, rugged and rigorous, but malleable. The jovial themes of any party that requires the completely domination and at the same time he simple subjugation and obedience of the required progress in any related or unrelated guise to aspire to life in any angle of set-based or set-derived events that anyone needs or might need, the respect one shows to one's teachers and one's elders, picking their noses and being disgusting, but needing the mechanics of fortune to come to them and deal them a good hand. Being dealt a good hand is the implicit guiding line of this entire game, this entire series of games that follow on each other as if they were good or bad, as if they were good and bad together, coming together, being spiritual or mechanical, and being logical. Loading bar after loading bar fills up, short memento's entertaining the player as he waits for it to fill, and when the game is revealed in a short fade-out gesture the droids and non-droids will be able to speak to the player, who does not listen; even as the real player does listen. But this real player has been dealt a bad hand, that is to say, his pazaak is influenced by the Exchange from Nar Shaddaa, that is waiting, always waiting as a mysterious anti-guide or friend-guide, that is nothing more than a simple matter of saying: I reveal myself here, even though I am a secret organisation. The secrets of Nar Shaddaa, much more decently explored in Jedi Knights II: Jedi Outcast, with Kyle Katarn visiting the endless spires and pits and walking platforms of the 'Smugglers moon', have always been permeating the half-assed attempts of the Ithorians on Telos or on Taris, ready to crack down on the self-servingly pious 'aliens', even though they are not aliens, that are blamed for all the great problems of the galaxy as they are the only ones interested - really interested - in solving them (but nobody is really interested) that comes to a head in the situation on Taris, but was already there on Telos: Bastila's confidant, Carth, having already undergone the tragedy of the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to his son Dustil, who had joined the Sith, and his wife having died in his arms, killed by those same Sith. Why did Dustil "Join the Sith"? The questions are left suspended, unanswered, untreated, waiting as they should be waiting in the great beyond of the great beyond, the uncomputed coping worlds that surround us. That binds us, in the words of Yoda himself. "You must feel the Force around you:" - the rock, the tree, the player sitting behind his computer and pushing forward, a heavily armed PC moving through a crafted world of high towers, high mountains, high trees and high wookies, and high ambitions flying higher and higher above the planets we visit.
The Force. It is not really George Lucas' convention or invention. He does not have the vibe or the convictions of a sage or of a real storyteller. Lucas is a businessman, he always was, and his business has started looming over the Star Wars world more and more as his clout grew and his moneys grew, becoming wealthy, becoming a magnate. Many fans know that games such as KOTOR saw a truer and more nuanced Jedi Order, built on stones of love for a world that never really existed, united in a desire for a universe that was never really spiritual, but could have been. It could have been the Star Wars-universe, but instead it has become an extended universe, an appendix, and as the games slowly wither with the bringing-out of new Star Wars movies and merchandise, and new so-called canons come into being that require all the bend their heads and destroy their beloved fictions, the player will be reborn. I expect that if players of KOTOR can learn to let go of what they have created, and can learn to not take seriously the machinations of their honest-faced producers and script-writers, who have bitten themselves into providing stories for them, there might actually be hope of one day overcoming this unfortunate tribulation that was playing through KOTOR's story, that strongly accentuated impressionist painting, that was never finished because it could not be physically represented. But even when the Force itself was an unstable fiction, I think the franchise will survive the death of KOTOR. The structures on which this game lost its own believability, the capital-motivated schemes and requirements that were laid to rest on KOTORS structure, will never be safe for anyone to built on - but they will keep seducing them.
On a more optimistic note, the full force of any game is not, as the other review also remarked, totally reminiscent of nothing. Anyone who waits for nothing can receive nothing. The mouse and keyboard combination, I think, was never fully surpassed: it needed and required anyone to built on them, but nobody did it. That is unfortunate: as vicious and difficult as it was to get through some parts of this game, because some parts were needlessly complicated and mediocre when compared to controls in simpler games such as Diablo or, perhaps even, Minecraft, the complete gesture of a role-playing role taken on by players is the same in kind as some outspoken representatives of the kind of cosmologists and astronauts that compare notes on where they should go next, confused and entirely immersed in their duties and obligations. As the earlier review said, the game has forced the same restrictions on the politically-correct way of playing on the rebellious way, the empire against the allied forces, planets with hidden bases and hidden solutions, hidden from sight, but plainly in sight. It is to be heartily recommended revisiting the dead ruins of past masters, even if their students were in fact themselves the masters of the world in which they survived, the same way that the program came to being, bringing hundreds together, but requiring only a careful consideration of the computations that brought them down.