hey..this is koopa again....i havent been here in a loong time
uh well im pretty far into kotor, and ive gotta say its probably the best game ive played this year, if not one of the best of the last few years (yes, including Halo, Zelda:Wind Waker, Splinter Cell, Metroid Prime, Warcraft 3, and Battlefield 1942)
The combat is really very innovative..at first glance its very action-ish...but once you play it and look for the turn based engine "beneath the hood" its definitely noticable. you can queue up moves in real time, or pause, choose moves, fight, pause, choose more moves, unpause, etc....depending on your stats and using a dice-rolling system found in dungeons and dragons, the engine determines hits, misses, and counter-attacks and animates them so fluidly you'd swear they weren't turn based.
and thats not all...theres also the really cool dialogue system that actually affects things (unlike in zelda where they ask you to do something and you say no and they say "pleaseeee" until you agree)
most things have really nice, nice, neutral, bad, and reallly bad choices....and not all are as clear as you might think
for exampleeee...heres a VERY minor spoiler...theres a group of kids picking on an alien (some people are really racists..er ...alien-ist...prejudiced...) and so you can talk to them and either help the say "im not gonna get involved" or ask them to stop or tell the kids you'll murder them in cold blood if they dont stop, or help them beat up a poor old alien.
another minor spoiler invovels a a combat situation in which you can possibly redeem a dark jedi...i chose to keep fighting, and i found out later that she could have joined my party...in addition, her best friend got realllly mad at me for forsaking her and not trying to turn her back to the light....so about 20 horus later i find her in a sith base and she wants to kill me still.
graphics are okay...theyre great in combat, but in open areas they're just okay...although there are some nice money shots overlooking the sand dunes of tatooine, or having the sun behind yoru character in the tall grasses of dantooine.
uh the music...is great...very star-wars ish....a few tunes ripped from the trilogy, but mostly original stuff that has obvious influence from john williams (i wonder if he wrote the score) and any star wars fan will be in heaven hearing the cracks and hisses of lightsabers. oh yeah and, for a game, the voice acting is really great. i particularly love the slightly homocidal assasin droid HK-47...some of his lines made me laugh out loud
er...the story has loooots of nice influences from the trilogy...a fast ship, a wookie, a hint of some sort of dysfunctional romance, lots of bad guys in lots of armor that doesn't seem to work, and an evil empire with haughty, british accents. on an ironic note...and this is a minor spoiler................................when the sith are interrogating one of your party about where a jedi base is located, she lies says its on alderaan, when its really on dantooine....in the star wars trilogy, the imperials interrogate princess leia about the location of a hidden rebel base, which she lies about and says is on dantooine....but they imperials blow up alderaan...the star wars nerd inside me was grinning when i heard that. and theres an awesome plot twist that rivals the "Luke, I am your father." thing.
this game is so addictive, i swear...i'll tell myself im gonna play for 10 more minutes, and when i glance at the clock an hour has gone by.
games don't get much better than this...it might be a bit audacious to say this is the best rpg ever, but its certainly the best star wars rpg ever!
(get it, cuz theres only two, and galaxies sucked...
)
seriously.. buy this now...or if you must, wait for it on pc.
Hybrid Mode
