“Repercussions throughout the Republic” – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords** (Obsidian/LucasArts, Xbox, 2004/2005)

[Content warning: mention of sexual harassment and sexual assault]

2004 may have been the year of the sequel in a particularly intense way, but it wasn’t much of an outlier. The same factors were still around before and after. Knights of the Old Republic was one of the Xbox’s biggest successes and that inevitably led to pressure for a sequel to capitalise; it arrived with remarkable haste barely a year and a half later. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords typified some of the best and worst aspects of this impulse, from the unwieldy title on down.

Firstly, it is yet another tale of a game made to an unsuitable and arbitrary deadline that shows the evidence of that pained development all over it. It has a tendency to slow to a crawl or randomly ignore button presses that goes well beyond the issues of the already temperamental original. It had lots of content hacked out late on, and gaps are not hard to identify. Things happen that show the strain. At one point in it I talked to someone whose offices were in the process of being marauded by murderous mercenaries, and they offered the same explanation of the function of the premises as always. For a game that prides itself on events reacting to developments as a result of your choices, that is far from ideal.

One aspect of the creation of The Sith Lords which is relatively rare, particularly at the time, is that it wasn’t the same overworked developer trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. Bioware had other, bigger things in mind and willingly passed the series on to Obsidian, a new developer trying to get a foothold. This was presumably a big part of the way they reuse the engine of the first game with barely even the pretence of new elements, but also without any sense of being jaded.

The fact that the narrative and characters are designed as so central to the appeal of the games makes them ideal candidates for a sequel in this way (just as it should in theory make the first game an ideal candidate for the remake it is now getting). And just as Knights of the Old Republic was Bioware taking advantage of the opportunity to carve out a bit of space away from the time covered by established Star Wars media, its sequel makes its own further little getaway. Five years have passed and there are largely only cameo appearances for anyone from the first game, though the ship the Ebon Hawk makes a fuller return.

The Sith Lords is also more linear and less concerned with trying to give you a sense of scale and a million things to do. Whether it’s because of not needing the same kind of wow factor, or for entirely pragmatic reasons, it suits a focus on getting away and on smaller mysteries. A long chunk of the game plays out as a series of nested escape rooms, with lots of puzzles based on recordings that fill in the backstory at the same time as helping you move forward. That’s then reflected in the whole structure of the game, as you gradually gain more understanding of the recent past. The way that the identity of its ultimate antagonist is almost an anti-twist is a neat mirror of the first game, too.

The dialogue frequently goes deeper into the realm of philosophical, of interrogating the ideas of Jedi and Star Wars in a way that’s refreshingly expansive. And it has conversations that get further beyond the morality structure of you choosing between “a) obvious right thing to do, b) completely pass on the question, c) be a dick for no reason”. At its best, like in a conversation trying to outwit an elegantly conceited murderbot, it is funny and stimulating in a way that reminded me of the type of game I grew up associating LucasArts with: their clever and creative point’n’click adventures.

At the other end of character interactions, though, its quipping can feel smug in its cleverness, something that feels distancing in the way it shows off. And The Sith Lords gives a terrible first impression. The first game started off with the main character in their underwear but only until an immediate equipment tutorial. This one keeps them in it well past credulity, and the first ally you come across is a man who repeatedly makes related sexualised jokes about the female main character, played for humour. That set of choices for inclusion felt like a deeply unpleasant look behind the curtain at the attitude of the creators, and made it hard to ever get completely swept up in a world or its philosophies when that was where it was showing itself as coming from. And that was even before learning that several women have said that the game’s lead writer sexually harassed or assaulted them.