Let's play Knights of the Old Republic 2, because games with endings are for jerks.

Well, I think he also sorta blends into the background because he's naturally rather quiet. He's not a dramabomb like Atton, that's for sure. But I liked him because of his unwavering loyalty to the exile. On a ship that's full of people who are secretive and sometimes hostile, it's nice to know that someone's got your back.

I love how, due to the third person perspective, the camera is looking right at the Exile's fine prominently displayed ass when you comment, "This looks promising."

;)

Great game, should be an interesting LP. Out of curiosity, since I may have missed it, but what class is your exile?

We might be able to figure out where we are and what happened if we look at the logs. Let's do that.



Log 253-12:


The Ebon Hawk? Gee, that sounds awfully familiar.



Er, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it was another ship. That, or mercenaries have mastered the art of zero-g fighting.





An old woman? Hm. I guess now we know who's in the morgue.



T3 repairing the ship was the prologue that I didn't show you. It's mostly a tutorial, and the opening level is much more interesting as a survival horror-style mystery when you don't play through it since you won't know what's going on.

Well, that was... enlightening. On to the next one?

Log 253-15:



I guess she's talking about us.



Wait, don't break into static! Who's Coorta? What's he doing? This is need-to-know information, dammit!




That... doesn't sound good. What is going on in this place?

I thought it was at least two, but like I said, it's been a while since I played the game, so I can't say for certain. And I did Onderon third to last (right before Korriban) so there's the difference in our gameplay. And to be honest, except at the end, Mandalore really doesn't do anything in this game. Seriously. Not a damn thing. It's just that he's so involved in the end that it almost makes up for it (but not quite in my opinion). Wait, nevermind. You do get to help him gather the clans. But that's easily missed and not all that interesting to me.

Er... don't worry about it? I love this game, but not quite that much. And I'm not looking to step on your toes. Just expressing my unorthodox love of the only LS alien onboard <3

Whoops, let me post a shot of the character screen.



I prefer to play balanced characters.

Same! I always play Sentinel.

Mandalore doesn't do much off Dxun, but he does let you ride a Basilisk droid and that wins him points with me. ;D

Nah, I've just had people get... touchy, when they feel like you're insulting a character close to their heart and I was trying to make it clear that wasn't my intent.

(Never tell a hardcore Alistair fangirl you traded him for Loghain. Seriously, don't. The resulting backdraft will singe your eyebrows clean off.)

I forgot about the Basilisk...

I'm just going to say PLEASE SOMEONE DO THAT. That is my favourite Suikoden, it was such fun playing it on the PS, back in the day~ And it's not that long! <--blatant lies.

Log 253-18


This situation seems to be going from bad to worse.




I have a baaaaad feeling about this.



Bad feeling vindicated! BAD FEELING VINDICATED!



This explains why we haven't seen any people. I, er... hope they're not all deceased in various horrible ways. That would never happen in a Star Wars game, right? Star Wars is for kids!

Checking the patient life signs just tells us what we already know: everyone's dead, Dave. Checking the treatments, however...



This smells like sabotage. It's time to go deeper.



Murder, my dear Watson. Murder is afoot.

Unfortunately, we don't have the computer spikes necessary to trace the request to its source. The only thing we have left to do on this console is to open the morgue.



Like so.

Nothing bad can come of visiting the morgue on the creepy station where everyone seems to be dead, right? Right! :D

Hmm.



Looks like we found the old woman retrieved from the Ebon Hawk alongside us. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like we're going to get any information out of her. We can't even loot her corpse.



Luckily, the same is not true for the other corpse in the room. Stealing from the dead is fun!



Oh god, I told you not to go to the morgue! Game over, man! Game over!



Uh... I was not stealing from this corpse. I was merely... paying my final respects! By stealing this plasma torch.

Please don't be a zombie.



...Yes?



You can't hear voice acting through screenshots, but the voice that said "Awaken" as the Exile was in the tank was indeed this old woman.

: Yes, I had hoped as much- I slept here too long, and I could not awaken. It may be I reached out unconsciously, and your mind must have been a willing one. Or perhaps you have been trained for such things?

Lady, you were definitely dead when we came in here. We say as much.

: Close to death, yes, closer than I'd like. You have the smell of the kolto tank about you... how do you feel?





Ah, Kreia. You magnificent bitch.



: Your ship was attacked. You were the only survivor... a result of your Jedi training, no doubt.



My name is the Exile, remember?



My walk could be heavy because I woke up from almost dying in a kolto tank wearing nothing but a potato sack and am now running around a facility with killer droids. You never know.




OH, COME ON.

The Exile seems pretty chill about a corpse getting up and talking to her.

I like to think that a former Jedi is pretty blasé about everything. "Walking corpses? Bitch, I saw a red dude with tattoos all over his body try to blow up a sun."

The medical log woman has one hell of an awesome afro.

Oh god, Chibi Kreia is fantastic

Chibi Kreia looks so wonderfully grumpy.

I just remembered how much dialogue is in this game. I was tempted to pick it back up when I saw this made (YAY, btw), but then i remembered all the reading I would have to do. After a while, my eyes kinda glaze over and I just start clicking with wild abandon.

Tell me there's chibis for everyone.

On the character discussion, I'm pretty cool about these things since I as a minimum play the ame two ways to see what happens, so I have DA saves with Alistair both dead and alive, king or Warden, Loghain dead or alive. Different character appeal to different people and that'll never be a problem for me. It's the militant REVAN WAS THE GREATEST GREY JEDI EVAR crowd who grates on my nerves a bit.

And can I say I love how Obsidian chooses to open the game as sort of a survival horror mystery? The ridiculous underwear aside, it really sets the scene and the ame seems to always keep this sense of 'okay, here I am, what the HELL is going on?' that kept me playing through midnight, which is not always good when you're a schoolkid.

That survival horror mistery part was what made me fall in love with the game. It was the first time I played a game who wasn't like The Sims or Zoo Tycoon (I should LP that) or franchise-related and it was amazing. (I know it's a Star Wars game but I never watched Star Wars before).
I actually like having to listen to all that holograms and having to figure out things. Also, the characters there are great and they just do all the right things at the right time. It's really well written.

x2

But the dialogue is the best part!

You can always close your eyes and listen to the voice acting or, if you're a fast reader like I am, skip the dialogue after reading it. It's no worse than your average VN.

I'll probably do something different for everyone, but if I can find any more chibis I'll be sure to use them.

I usually run through different ways, too, just to see what happens. I do have... preferred ways to play, though. ;P Militant anyone tends to be annoying. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to take much for some groups of fans to tip over into crazyville.

Yes! It's so different from the opening of the first game and it sets the stage for the kind of game you're about to play. It's one of the reasons I'm not fond of the prologue. It's got some nice sequences (T3 on the hood of the Ebon Hawk was gorgeous!), but it does kind of detract from the disorienting mystery that is the first part of Peragus. It drags later on and kind of wears out its welcome when you're just fighting waves of droids in the mines, but the beginning and the end with the Harbinger are both absolutely fantastic.

It's fun, isn't it? You don't need some big action sequence to draw your audience in, all you need is a mystery to solve. TSL plays it very well.

It's actually amazing how much mysteries there are in this game and how all of them are very good. And one of them is "Who the hell I am playing as". Really, there isn't a real introduction, the character just wakes up in a tank.

I also want to praise Obsidian for making the tutorial skippable. If I never hear Trask murder the line "WE HAVE TO DEFEND BAH-STEE-A" again I will die very happy. In general it feels like they had done the polishing for the early parts by the time they were told to start rushing, because it plays very well and have a lot of good ideas in play. As I recall the restored content mods never add anything to the first level, either, do they?

The huge blocks of text isn't a bother to me. I usually take my handweights or something and just listen to it (reading it gets distracting), or fetch something while it runs and I can still hear it. I know it so well now 'still hear it' can easily mean just in my head, though.

I appreciate any tutorial level being skippable, but still, the tutorial level of KOTOR2 is the most fun one I've played in an RPG.

I wish I could play this game with sound. (One of these days, I will be able to afford a PC that's not half-broken.) I might start a new game because my last attempt to play a dark side Exile started making me feel bad, and all I had done that was "evil" was be mean to Atton. I should not feel bad about being mean to Atton. I'm just balls out terrible at being video game evil.

Did you draw the chibis or did you find them?

Found it. I was actually looking for Kreia's little character portrait. but when I saw that I couldn't resist.

Tangenitally related, something else I found while flipping through images looking for ones to use in this LP: some guy built legos of this game and it is fantastic.

How could you not? I tried to be mean to Atton first time and...I felt like a kicked a puppy. I don't have troubles being horrible to Alistair or Kaidan, but Atton makes me still feel bad about it. Probably because of how likable he is, he's funny and friendly from the start and has this thing going on with Kreia.

And being evil at videogames is hard, there is always something that I can't bring myself to do.

Atton is just...

Half the time I want to slap him upside the head, and the other half I want to run off with him and have Jedi babies.

Being mean to him at the beginning of the game is totally in character even for a LS/neutral Exile who just doesn't feel like putting up with his crap right now. But it still made me feel like I kicked a puppy.

Yeah, I basically never even try to be evil in video games, especially RPGs like this one and all of BioWare's RPGs, because they're all populated with such likeable characters.

So I've never tried being mean to Atton either - but I do find him fascinating for the fact that he's the only RPG character I know of you can win points with by being either good or a puppy-kicking psychopath.

Atton's got some issues. And oh, how I love me some fictional men with issues.

I really liked him since the start - maybe because he didn't hit on me since I was playing as m!Exile but I'm sure he wanted to - but probably because I just like this type of character. It was clear that the game wants you to be friends with him and he is actually someone you won't mind be friends with. And he balances Kreia well. The only character I really found annoying was the Handmaiden because goddamit, she was never going to leave me alone.

^THIS. Seriously, he is one of my favorite characters ever. And has a really good voice.

I can be mean in BioWare's games but...I can't let a rapist go. Or killing an entire tribe without a reason.

The problem with the good/evil split in video games is that your options are saint or jerkass. Neither really feels right to me; I'd rather be, y'know, a person, with dimensions and grey areas. That's why I prefer games without a karma meter, like DA:O. It helps with role playing, too.

I like not being decked for every decision so I can nuance a bit - like indeed the DA series where you can certainly by a jerk and a saint, but it's not every other choice, it's pivotal choices. That said I tend to veer towards the goody-two-shoes side because I et very emotionally invested. I care about and speak to even companions I don't like initially and it sometimes change my mind, even, because sometimes you have hidden depths and sometimes you just find the jerk was a jerk with a jerk-shaped center.

I always liked Atton and he is one of the major reasons I never went DS in TSL, because I didn't want him to be dragged down with me, None of the 30 times did I have the heart. I am a complete and hopeless softie.

A logical suggestion.



All of these dialogue options are stupid, so I just pick the first one.

We were attacked once, and I fear our attackers will not give up the hunt so easily- without transport, weapons and information, they will find us easy prey indeed.



Asking Kreia for information is a lost cause, so we're going to use our awareness instead. She could just be nervous because she came back to life on a mining planet covered in killer droids, but enhhh.


A last word of caution... I would find out as much as you can about this place quickly- I fear we will need to depart as suddenly as we arrived.

I hope the Ebon Hawk has been repaired and gassed up, or else we won't be leaving at all.

Anything else you'd like to share before we go?





Let's just move on.

So I guess I can expect the entire thread to explode at me if I'm mean to Atton, huh? Good to know.

It feels too mean when I do it myself, but watching you do it is fine.

Be mean to Atton for forum Darkside points.

Great! I generally like Atton, but he says some incredibly stupid things sometimes.

I love how she voices that last bit. Kreia's acerbic sense of humour has always been my favourite part of her character.

Since it's giving us the option, we might as well pretend to care about the miners.




Option 2 doesn't make much sense in context of the question (option 1 fits better), but we're picking it anyway.

Indeed, a Jedi trance could protect one from such poisons... in fact, the sedatives may have been intended to keep you unconscious for some time.

This doesn't really make any sense if you're familiar with Jedi trances from the EU. From what I understand, the Jedi puts themselves into a meditative, almost coma-like state in order to heal themselves more quickly. It's implied to use the Force. The Exile, obviously, is still cut off from the Force at this point.

At least, that's how it works in the books I've read. Maybe they do it differently in one of the eight billion other spinoffs.

It would prove lethal to those untrained in such techniques, however. Most curious.



I actually misclicked here and picked the second option instead of the first. Oh well, it's not like Kreia answered the question anyway.



It's probably for the best.



Anyway, telling Kreia we'll come back to check on her gets us our first light side points of the game! Woo.

My screenshots get messed up here; Steam seems to have eaten the shots of me opening the door with the plasma torch and entering the next room. Well, that happened.



Here's the next room. Looks like we found the miners.



This poor, unfortunate soul had a vibrocutter, which I steal. It's not like he's going to need it.



The door behind the looted corpse is "magnetically sealed." "Magnetically sealed" is code for "cannot be opened by lightsabers/security skills/plasma cutters so open it the right way or go around, you lazy fuck."



The other door is open, though.



Welp, I knew we couldn't avoid combat in a Star Wars game. Looks like it's time to... get to scrapping.



Get it? Because metal can be scrapped and scrapping also means fighting... okay, I'll stop.

I'd forgotten just how bad that starting outfit is... the game does a good job of making your first time getting specific gearpieces feel special.