Critical Fail: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords, Part 1

Part 1: The Prologue to Horribleness, or At Least My Expectations Aren't Being Set Very High

This is the game I am going to be looking at for the foreseeable future. Now to jump right in:

(If I manage to figure out Fraps and youtube I'll put the opening cinematic on youtube, but for now you will have to read D;)

Normally you would have to sit through the character creator, but because I am playing and I get to do all the obssessing I'll post the short version:

Meet Meetra Surik (according the the cannon, i.e. Wookiepedia, that is the Exile's name). She is a light side Jedi Sentinel. If you care here are her stats:

The opening crawl is thus:

It is a perilous time for the

galaxy. A brutal civil war has

all but destroyed the Jedi

Order, leaving the ailing

Republic on the verge of

collapse.

Amid the turmoil, the evil

Sith have spread across the

galaxy, hunting down and

destroying the remaining

Jedi Knights.

Narrowly escaping a deadly

Sith ambush, the last known

Jedi clings to life aboard a

battered freighter near the

ravaged world of Peragus....…

Then we see the ship from the first game the Ebon Hawk. Now I will be playing this game like someone who has never played it, but I will be analyzing it like the Star Wars nerd that I am. So a newbie will play the Prologue. The Prologue is important. It severs several functions: combat tutorial, game mechanic tutorial, and hook for the entire rest of the game.

That being said: this is one of the worst tutorials in the history of gaming. This is how it starts:

To save you some more pictures the GPS navigation voice lady continues to say things like: "The Hyperdrive is damaged. Main power must be restored in order to bring the engines online and dock with the nearby Peragus mining station for much needed repairs. Meetra Surik's fate, and that of the Ebon Hawk, depend of T3-M4, a lone astromech droid."

The real taunting gets started right away with the option to skip the Prologue.

God I want to hit the second one. 

Instead I diligently play the prologue, and go about hacking into computers

opening crates,

doing stupid target practice,

and repairing everything.

Now the chief failing of this Prologue is that it doesn't function as a good enough hook. Does anyone feeling excited when the Prologue asks you to take over as a repair droid to fix a broken ship? And another thing: it doesn't make the player feel awesome when the character they just spent 2 hours 10 minutes making, personalizing, assigning feats and skills to is incapacitated from a fight that WE DIDN'T SEE. Also this robo-DM lady is super annoying. I don't know why we have this narrator lady, but literally never hear or see her ever again. She describes the dumbest things, it breaks the flow, and constantly reminds the player that they are playing a game. Not only does the Prologue take place after what looks like an epic fight that we aren't allowed to participate in, but we get to play as the useless secondary character. The Prologue or opening in almost anything is this big moment in the story, you have to draw in the reader, viewer, player, whatever, and this utter fails to do so. In Star Wars Episode 4 you get the crawl followed by a brief silence and then BAM! A blockade runner getting its shit creamed by a giant star destroyer, a princess getting captured over stolen battle plans, and a badass black robot evil bad guy voiced by James Earl Jones. In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark we get Indiana Jones being a stone cold badass, disarming bad guys with whips, dodging sweet underground traps, taking ancient relics, and narrowly avoiding death about fourteen times. All of these openings (and probably about 325511343155678653246 more of them across all of fiction) have these super exciting moments that introduce us to the world, certain key characters, and set the tone for the rest of the movie, story, game, whatever.

What is the tone that we get from this Prologue? The Exile is rather useless, we missed out on the Civil War and the Purge, we missed the battle that broke the Ebon Hawk, and that T3-M4 is apparently the protagonist.

Screw that. I want to play as the Exile and I want to know why the hell I am floating through empty space in a broken ship.

The Prologue's only saving grace is this:

How awesome does that look?

Anyway, T3-M4 saves the day and the Ebon Hawk docks with the mining facility. The Prologue utterly fails to get the players attention or instill any kind of awe or sense of mystery into the player. Whoops.

Oh and this happened:

It looks ominous, but the reveal is stupid as hell.

With that what I am going to call Act 1 begins and so does the rail roading!

Our protagonist everyone! Arbitrarily incapacitated twice and currently passed out on the floor. I think I might pass out too.

Saving Throw:

[This little section will be the bonus section of the article where you can go to get back ground, flavor text, or things I feel are awesome but only tangential related]

For the development side of why this tutorial sucks so hard we turn to the best show on the internet: Extra Credits. If you haven't been watching it then get on it and come back. I shall not allow you back until you have watched all three seasons. Extra Credits is a webshow dedicated to make games better through sheer knowledge. And it is awesome. This is their episode on how to make a tutorial. Watch it and keep count on how many rules the Prologue breaks.

Extra Credits: Tutorials 101