I finished Knights of the Old Republic yesterday (Light Side, for the curious). I’m not as fanatical about it as a lot of folks seem to be; at its heart, it’s a well-done Bioware RPG with some slight nods to console design and a license slightly less unattractive than D&D. Other Bioware and Black Isle games have done better: Planescape: Torment has an infinitely better story – though Torment’s story and writing are preternaturally good by the standards of any medium, let alone videogames. The Icewind Dale series has a more refined combat system; KOTOR’s three-person party and the ridiculous uberness of lightsabers means that the best strategy is almost always to tank through with a party of three Force-buffed, Cure-casting Jedi. Fallout 1 and 2 give you more freedom in how you play your character. KOTOR’s graphics are sometimes wonky and occasionally outright broken. Besides your party there are like six other people in the entire universe. The game has flaws.

Flaws that are easily ignored, fortunately. I stayed up until literally 3:00 AM every night for a week as I polished the game off. (My final time was just 35 hours, and I completed every sidequest I could find.) The game just clicks in some fundamental way, much like those other aformentioned PC RPGs. Though the overall story of KOTOR doesn’t live up to Torment, it’s perfectly serviceable – occasionally good – and the straightforward plot is bolstered by some great writing and characterizations. HK-47, the chipper protocol droid retrofitted with a killjoy assassination protocol, could be one of my favorite characters in any RPG. The battles, though not overly complex, can still be fun – the wide variety of Feats, Jedi Powers, and equipment available lets you customize your characters to a vast degree, and the depth of the battles comes not so much from what you choose to do during battle but from how you have created your character – what you make yourself able to do.

This freedom to shape your own character and destiny is definitely the game’s greatest strength. It’s common to have eight or so sidequests opened up at a single time, and most of these manage to be more interesting than simply FedExing packages from one side of the galaxy to another. The game also has a nice mixture of battle-based, puzzle-based, and dialogue-based solutions to puzzles. I tried the dialogue-path whenever possible; with a high charisma statistic, a maxed out “Persuade” skill, and the Dominate Mind Force Power, talking to people could be a LOT of fun.

There are also a large number of Light Side and Dark Side based solutions to puzzles. This is perhaps the best design decision, as it brings out a moral aspect of the two sides of the Force completely missing from the movies. In KOTOR, being nice to people is hard. Even the most dedicated Light Side player will find themselves sorely tempted by the simplicity and straightforwardness of Dark Side solutions. “Simple and straightforward” doesn’t always equal kliling, either. For example, a Light Side character could have to do some serious pleading, errand running, and credential gathering to convince a guard to let them pass, while a Dark Side character could just select “[Force Persuade] You want to let me pass” and waltz on through. Almost every Light Side player is certain to slip once or twice during the game – and that’s the beauty of it. The Dark Side isn’t just evil and powerful. It’s seductive in a way it never was in the films, and once you start seeing how much easier the evil path is, it’s a fast and slippery slope to the bottom.

The way KOTOR does things isn’t “better” than a traditional Japanese console RPG, no matter what some whiny message board denizens might tell you. But given the tepid fare coming out of Japan recently, it’s safe to say that KOTOR is a better game than most Japanese console RPGs. Iit’s by far the best Xbox game I’ve played, and I’m looking forward to replaying it on the Dark Side path at some point in the future. KOTOR is a flawed gem, but even a flawed gem is immensely valuable.