Okay, so I'm bad. Shortly after my previous post, I decided to abandon my current save and start the game over with a different character build. This kind of flightiness is not at all uncommon for me, when it comes to rpgs. You get to a certain point in the game and you realize that your choices while leveling-up have not lead to the sort of gameplay experience that you were hoping for.
My turning point was when I realized the character I've been playing would eventually become a Jedi. Having played the game before, this is something I already knew would happen, but for some reason, it did not at all occur to me to design my character around that fact. I wound up being level six and having no facility whatsoever with melee attacks. Which, you know, makes getting a lightsaber awkward.
My new character is an unstoppable melee powerhouse, though I'm starting to think that choice was a mistake too, because I managed to get that combat ability at the expense of my out-of-combat skills. Blame the d20 system Knights of the Old Republic is based on - it forces you to make decisions that will confine a character to a particular niche, and it isn't particularly careful to make all niches equally fun to play.
Yet I'm going to resist the urge to start the game a third time. I'm six hours into my new character, I've finished the main quest on Taris and have traveled to the Jedi academy on Dantooine. It would be too much of a pain to scrap that progress when I could just use my NPCs to cover my main character's weaknesses.
Not that I'm especially thrilled by the prospect. So far, none of my compatriots have been the sort of person I want to hang out with for extended periods of time. Mission Vao is fine, but her "plucky and chipper street urchin" routine managed to wear thin with surprising speed. Canderous, the Mandalorian, has a good voice, but I don't really need another heavy, and I'm worried that he might start spouting macho "being good at violence is the only way to be a real human being" gibberish at any moment. Carth is bland and whiny, and can't help reminding me of the much superior Kaiden Alenko. And Bastila is . . .
I don't want to get down on her just because she is abrasive and arrogant. These are character flaws you might expect any brash and callow hero-in-training to have, and I'm well aware that there is a tendency to judge women more harshly for traits that, in a man, would be considered "gruff" and "no-nonsense." That being said, I don't find it particularly pleasant to be around an imperious person who doubts my abilities, second-guesses my decisions, and takes credit for my success. I'm sure she mellows as the story goes on, but from a pure meta game-design level, I'm not sure why Bioware found it necessary to include such an antagonistic character in your party. What experience were they hoping to create? That of having an annoying coworker who is clearly angling for promotion and won't shut up about her kooky religious views?
That leaves me with a party of basically mute characters - T3-M4, the astromech droid, who is impossible to screw up and Zaalbar the wookie, though, for reasons I can't quite articulate, I find the whole "life-debt" schtick to be vaguely icky. I guess it's because I'm constantly saving people with no expectation of reward besides basic gratitude and perhaps whatever junk items they happen to have lying around.
Speaking of which, the Sith bombarded Taris, exterminating all surface life, and rendering everything I did for the first five hours of the game completely pointless. All that shit with the gangs, both the prisoners I released from holding cells, the woman whose psychotic stalker I bribed into leaving her alone (in what may well be the dumbest plot point in an otherwise good game I've ever seen - apparently I could not beat him into compliance, despite being a massive whirlwind of vibroblade death, because he worked for a crime lord - who I would eventually come to kill) - none of it meant anything, because they are all nothing more than radioactive ash.
Maybe the point was for me to become invested in the people of Taris so that Darth Malak's destruction of the planet would strike me as more personal. He wasn't just messing with a bunch of nameless NPCs, he was fucking with people whose lives touched mine, and thus I have a stronger motive for revenge. However, if I'm being perfectly honest, it really feels more like the game itself pulled the rug out from under me. Like, I didn't need to have a tour of the surface, with developed and likeable characters, to understand that the Death Star blowing up Alderaan was a bad thing. I'm just not used to seeing that kind of existential futility in Star Wars.
Oh well, at least (according to Wookieepedia) the outcasts who I helped find the "promised land" survived . . . for a few generations before starvation and disease wiped them out. Life is pretty pointless when you think about it.
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