Some Thoughts On KOTOR's Twist

Hello, I'm alive. Sorry for not posting much, I've just had little to discuss recently. Lots of job hunting.

Anyways, this post contains spoilers for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003).

Some Star War

I've been shotgunning a lot of Star Wars media lately as a form of cultural education imposed¹ upon me by my friends, which has chiefly included the original² and prequel³ movie trilogies, and the Knights of the Old Republic games.

So, as I put in my media tracker thing, I thought Kotor was, like, alright. It has some really inspired artistic choices and phenomenal low-level character writing, but the big picture plot is a bit of a mess, there's some Bioware classics of misogyny in there, and the game suffers a lot from clearly having been written with a light side playthrough being the 'correct' way to play, though I'm told this is a pretty classic pain point in Star Wars games.

Anyways, the central conflict of the game comes in two parts:

• Pre-twist, where Darth Revan (deceased) and Darth Malak (successor) loom large medium over the story
• Post-twist, where the player character is revealed to be Darth Revan

The Problems

I feel like the Darth Revan reveal falls pretty catastrophically flat for a few reasons. First, the Sith aren't really present enough in the story to feel any particular way about being Darth Revan. A few ominous flashbacks don't have the same impact as really feeling the power of Revan and Malak in the story. Every dark Jedi you encounter jobs insanely hard, and most of them have no grand narrative importance. They're blips on the radar at best. The hypercapitalist Czerka Corporation are much more directly in-your-face evil when you encounter them, say, enforcing slavery on Kashyyyk, and you're actually provided with ways to materially combat their efforts!

Additionally, the Sith are so flatly evil and under-established that there's not any real temptation to be Revan again. In general, KOTOR feels a lot like playing a very streamlined, childhood nostalgia-filtered memory of my limited cultural contact with Star Wars. The morality is simple and the dark and light sides have a clear, demarcated border. And to be clear, that's fine, but that - coupled with the light side playthrough being 'correct' issue I mentioned - means unless you're doing a bit by choosing intentionally to play a ridiculously evil character, there's just no incentive to be evil. You go to the Sith academy and meet students killing other students so they can rise to the top in hopes of killing their teacher, and that teacher wants to kill their own teacher. The degree of cannibalism the Sith engage in is comical.

This is exacerbated by KOTOR taking place in a basically post-war setting; the Mandalorian Wars, which are the scaffolding for the game and led to Revan and Malak's defection, are over. In the aftermath, you're left with a wounded and indecisive light side Jedi straggler faction feebly squaring off against a Sith who are killing time by feeding prospective dark Jedi to each other for fun. In the absence of a broader conflict, the Sith don't even exist as a compelling strongman to play against the Jedi Academy's overly-legalistic hand-wringing. Likewise, the Jedi Council are occasionally dinged for their failure to act in both high-level and low-level conflicts, but they are still The Good Guys™ in the eyes of the narrative and are therefore never truly scorned for their failures. Not in a 'for as frustrating as being good can be, being evil is never worth it' way, which I think could actually be quite compelling; it's in more of a 'but we're ontologically The Good Guys™' way.

What I'd Do

First and foremost, I think I'd actually make it very clear that the player character is Revan from the outset. While it is hinted that you might be Revan as the Jedi Council trains you, having them straight up tell you you're Revan as soon as you finish training (the training then serving as identity verification, not actual tutelage) would open up a lot of interesting possibilities. Having them immediately tell you would make the Jedi Council's place in the setting morally much more interesting. Here you are, a great villain brought low and before them, but principally they cannot execute you for your crimes or keep you in the dark about your old identity; them wanting you to choose the light this time then becomes a real hope they hang on in their hour of need. In doing this, they would be knowingly opening themselves to infiltration, which also makes a dark side play through less of an afterthought - you could earnestly walk a redemptive path, or convincingly infiltrate their ranks.

This also means the Revan reveal can be to the player's party, rather than the player themselves, which opens alignment-based responses. Low-influence and opposite-alignment party members may leave you, and even oppose you in combat later. This would also make the near-total dissolution of the party a very real possibility for a dark sided player, which would further push them towards the Sith in their isolation - actual commentary on the allure of the dark side beyond 'we like kicking puppies and killing each other.' This also would open some fun meta doors, such as the party turning on the player and killing them in a final confrontation at the end of the game being a real and valid ending.

The other issue, as I mentioned, is that there's really not much appeal to being Revan in a post-war setting, you'd just be choosing evil for evil's sake as a roleplaying choice. In a Jedi-Sith conflict, the Sith are the obvious wrong choice both mechanically and narratively. Setting the game during the Mandalorian conflict, however, uses a third party to play Jedi measuredness-fecklessness against Sith prudence-brutality as a real conversation between ideas. And the game can and should still say the Sith are wrong in both means and ends, but letting it exist as a comprehensible, naturally reachable idea is a lot more narratively interesting, especially when presented in a way that also allows for critique of the Jedi Council as an entity more concerned with preservation of its ways than with actually helping people.

Thanks for reading! It's been a hot minute since I've posted. I'll try to be more active going forwards.

Footnotes