I just want to start this off by saying that I would give this 3.5/5 if I could.
Knights of the Old Republic is, unfortunately, a game that the more I play of it, the less I like it. This has been my 4th or 5th runthrough. At its core is an okay Star Wars story told in the form of an RPG. And not just any RPG, but a heavily modified d20 system. That's right, we've got Dungeons and Dragons in our Star Wars.
The game operates basically the same as D&D 3rd Edition. A d20 (20 sided dice) is "rolled" when the player or enemies make an attack or skill check, and that number is compared to the Defense rating of the enemy or the Difficulty Class of the skill check. If the number rolled is bigger, the attack or check succeeds. Damage is then "rolled" with a d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12. The Player's main 6 stats, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma all affect various facets of gameplay under the hood.
However, this being a video game, all of that stuff is done under the hood, just like any other video game RPG that does this style of gameplay. The familiar terms and variables to any D&D veteran most certainly lends itself to build making and strategizing, but the game is playable enough without prior knowledge of the d20 system that the player can really just do whatever they think is cool and not have any issues. Usually. More on that later.
Enough talk about Dungeons and Dragons let's actually talk about the game now. The game operates as a "Real Time With Pause" game, much like other games by Bioware, such as Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Dragon Age Origins. This means that while the game operates in seemingly real time, it is actually turn based, just all the turns happen at once. If that doesn't make sense, let me try to explain it further. You don't actually make attacks like you would in a real time game, like Diablo. You select the attack action and the game "rolls" the results for you in an imitation of Dungeons and Dragon's turn based round combat. However at the same time, the AI is also making its decisions attacking you and you companions, rolling for attacks and such, all in real time. But it still is operating in "rounds" like Dungeons and Dragons. It's actually kind of hard to explain it, but essentially it is taking all the turns so fast and with a certain amount of automation that it's basically real time. That's where the "with pause" aspect comes into play. You can pause the gameplay, survey the situation, and relay orders to you and your two companions. Overall this leads to a fairly passable combat system. It's certainly not engaging, but it is not frustrating. The most interesting thing in combat is the Force Powers. They allow the player to feel powerful, like a Sith Lord, Jedi Master, or something in between.
The story on the other hand, decidedly lacks that something in between. The story is fairly black and white, with few exceptions. Players must either kick puppies and be incredibly petty as a dark sider, or kiss up to everyone and preach pacifism in between the wholesale slaughter of the gameplay as a light sider. It is very much a story of extremes and there is not really a place for a neutral option, despite one of the companions the player can take with them being a Gray Jedi. Often times, there were moments where I was stuck between two dialogue options that either a 60s comic book villain would say or some generic Star Wars light side ham that my character wouldn't.
The companions are probably the most interesting characters, though some of them do lack depth, and almost feel as though they just had to have 9 because the graphic designer produced a companion select square and it had 9 spaces. For example, Juhani is such an afterthought in this game that she wasn't even included in an emergency crew meeting where even the utility droid had a say in events. She does have slightly more depth than the main villain or Zalbaar. The main villain is so one dimensional it's almost insulting to one dimensional characters everywhere to call him such. The token Wookie, Zalbaar, has about as much emotional depth as someone with a Chewbacca soundboard staring at you with dead blank eyes.
Which is an area where this game does not shine. While the areas and combat animations look very fine for a 2003 video game, the facial animations are quite not good, even for the time, in my opinion. The textures are often muddy on aliens as well. There are about a dozen models used for the hundreds of human characters in this game, not including unique ones, like your companions. The animation on the unique models is better but still not very good. Characters have no way of holstering weapons and will fling their weapons about wildly when speaking which just looks goofy and silly. Fortunately while I do decry the game's writing as lacking in subtlety, it does function well as a Star Wars story, so I managed to get over the goofy animations during dialogue. The soundtrack, done by Jeremy Soule manages to capture the spirit of John Williams's iconic film scores, if not exactly match it, which certainly helps the mood and immersion.
Based on all of these merits I would almost say that it's an instant classic from a kookier age of gaming. But unfortunately the game does have a few major issues and I have a personal major issue with it. The first major issue I have with the game is how god-awful the pacing is. The pacing is JRPG levels bad in the beginning. The tutorial planet, Taris, is by far the longest planet in the game. It's not even necessarily a bad planet, but it is a tutorial planet and it does not feel like you're really playing the game when you're on it, not the least of which is because you do not have any Jedi powers when you are on it. Which is fine, from a narrative standpoint. There's nothing wrong with that at all. But the issue with that is that you have to take 2 levels of a non-Jedi class, minimum, before you even land on this planet. And with this being Dungeons and Dragons, the level cap is 20. Those 2 or more levels you gain during the tutorial count against your level cap. This means that if you plan to spec into a Force Power heavy class like the Jedi Consular, you could potentially lose out on 8 out of 20 levels of Force Powers and Force Point growth. It's annoying as can be on replays, and each time I play Taris I find myself hating it more and more. I feel as though it restricts player agency, and is far too long for its own good. It does make sense narratively, but that doesn't make it enjoyable. The planet also features a lot of running back and forth between 4 different areas, all with their own sub areas, all separated by loading screens and restricted by fetch quests. After you leave the tutorial planet, you go to another tutorial planet, this time teaching you how to be a Jedi through much less running back and forth. A solid third of this game is tutorial planet. Even after the tutorial planets, the game still feels very tedious at times, involving long areas that the player has to run through and run back through. No planet is as tedious as the initial planet however. Oddly enough the planet I liked the most is one that features the second most amount of running back and forth. Manaan.
Manaan is the single planet that breaks the mold of rigid black and white. It's a planet that prides itself on neutrality, inhabited by the Selkath, a race of aquatic fish people. The main side quest involves a trial where the Republic individual is actually guilty. It invokes an interesting question of "Do I get this person off the hook, knowing it is the "wrong" thing to do, because it helps my side in the war? Or do I submit him to punishment, because it is right, even though it would hurt the war effort?" It's an interesting subtlety that is sorely lacking in the rest of the game. Every time I play the game I go to this planet expecting a tedious fetch quest planet, because I forget how the planet is the best written in the entire game.
My second major issue with this game ties to the pacing. It's not a hard game at all, and most players will probably not be using any of the stims to boost their stats, until the final area, where the game's difficulty spikes tremendously. It's a problem with a lot of early 2000s video games but it is incredibly frustrating nonetheless. A player with weaker builds or worse gear than I would have had a frustrating experience. Even then, I still had a frustrating experience with the difficulty spike. Even if the player is fairly optimized, if they don't have certain Force Powers or know certain strats, the boss fight will take forever and a half and be incredibly difficult. Which isn't bad in and of itself, it just doesn't fit with the rest of the game's laissez faire attitude.
My third issue, not super major, is how all the minigames suck. The turret gunner minigame which has a random chance of happening every time you leave a planet to go to a new one, is slow, clunky and unresponsive. The only decent thing is that the enemy ships have a gigantic hurtbox and blow up after one shot. Swoop racing is dumb and I hate it. That's really all the criticism I can give. Pazaak is... well... the computer is a cheating bastard I tell you!
A fourth issue is that the game is terribly buggy on Xbox backward compatibility. I am not going to deduct points, because the first few times I played this game was on PC and it did not suffer many if not all of the bugs I have gotten on Xbox. Like the autosave is just straight up broken and has corrupted on me more times than I can remember on Xbox. Quests have broken, soft locks have happened, none of these things have ever happened to me on PC. I guess what I mean to say is, don't play this on Xbox, if you have a PC made in the past decade you can run this game with a little bit of elbow grease.
My own personal issue is that KotOR2 ruins this game for me. More on that when I write my review for KotOR2.
TL;DR: KotOR is a good Star Wars game, it has story and characters. The pacing is a bit off and the writing is a bit childish and simplistic, but it definitely works for a Star Wars game. KotOR 2 with TSLRCM is better imo, but they both form 2 pieces to a whole. I love this game for what it is, but I have to be honest with myself.
