G-pinions

Thirty-nine hours later, I finish KOTOR. I've gotta say, before anything else, that I thought the last quarter of the game was shit (the first being Taris, the middle two being the regular planets, and the last being after the big plot revelations for those who have played before). Well, shit is a harsh, smelly word, so we'll just say that it was vastly inferior to the rest of the game.

Everything seems to be going swell, until you happen upon and realize several things: While Lucas created a wonderful, whimsical universe, most of Bioware's original creations for it are lame, from planets to creature races; most of the items you find in the game are useless, and you can easily get through the game without ever using most of them; the story is actually somewhat simple, only every character beats every nuance of it into your head dozens of times; the latter worlds seemingly disable your shit transit ability just to artificially extend the game by making you run back and forth on tedious fetch quests; the fucking Rakatan people's base looks like a palette-swapped version of the Sand People's base; some of your more advanced force powers (see: stasis) make every battle ludicrously easy, while others are fairly pointless; most of the game is crazy easy, except for the last area which just uncharacteristically throws wave after wave of guys at you; the crappy pathfinding of your AI teammates becomes a big hassle when you actually need them to keep bad guys busy, and not die; some skills (such as awareness) are a waste of time, while others (security) are very important, and you don't realize this until way too late when you've already developed the majority of them; you find the best weapons that you're going to get about two thirds of the way through, yet the game continues to throw them at you.

Blah, I could go on. As I say, these things really only become big issues late in the game, but it all crumbles almost as cohesively as it melds together earlier in the game. I mentioned in an earlier post that basically the game is much more than the sum of it's parts, but that doesn't last forever. Even the voice acting starts to slack, which is weird. And jeez, the inevitable final battle - you spend all game developing badass force powers, only to end up fighting an opponent who seems to go down easiest using your most basic attack.

I guess I'm just kinda pissed right now that I crammed this weekend to finish KOTOR before GTA:SA tomorrow (drool...), and didn't even enjoy it that much. I'd probably still give the game an 8.5 or something overall, but I'm not sure how anyone gave it game of the year last year who actually played it through to the end, especially with PoP as a choice. Speaking of which, Tom says he beat it in 17 hours, and even with not getting two of the characters, I think he's crazy, a liar, a crazy liar, or a gaming god and found the most streamlined way through the game possible.