Star Wars KOTOR #8: Moving on.

A very long time ago someone wrote a series of posts where they just talked about themselves playing a Star Wars game by the name of "Knights of The Old Republic".

Some time later that person got kinda bored of playing the same game and then posted a bunch of other stuff and eventually forgot about this series at all.

Today, that person (who is me by the way, in case you haven't realized yet) will continue whatever it is that he was doing back then on his very early steem days.

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The last time I talked about KOTOR was when I was still in the "tutorial" planet of the game (Taris) where the party was trying to steal a ship in order to escape the wrath of the evil guys. One of the most important characters in the party is the Jedi Bastila, who is the cause of the evil guys being in Taris on the first place. Before the party could escape Taris though they had to find Bastila, since they were separated before landing on the planet.

After they did find the Jedi, the party was approached by a new party member Canderous Ordo who said that he would help them escape if they helped him steal a ship from his boss, Davik Kang.

Before the party can try and steal the ship they first have to steal some codes from the local Sith base (evil guys headquarters). This is so that their ship can pass as a "friend" to the weapons belonging to the Sith ships in orbit (evil guy headquarters in space) so that they don't get blown up.

That, is exactly where I left off last time.

In order for our heroes to "infiltrate" the Sith base they have to find a droid that was made for Canderous' Boss. So their first objective is heading to the Droid Shop in Taris. It's here where the first obstacle on their journey appears, the lady in charge of the place asks the party to pay a lot of money for the droid, an ammount that can either be lowered or completely ignored (if you threaten the shopkeeper) but since this is a good guy playthrough i'll just ask her to lower it a bit and pay.

The party is then introduced to T3-M4 who acts as the R2-D2 of the game and as a magical robot that can open doors by hacking the air:

They are now allowed access to the Sith base, which is basically a video game dungeon painted sci-fi and stocked with a bunch of enemies with the prefix "Sith" added into their names.

An interesting fact is that before you enter the Sith base you posses a somewhat decent number of party members and from this point on it's important to think about the composition of your party, or rather "what does this guy do, and why do i need him with me?"

It's really easy to just drop whatever characters you like the most into your party and going with them to whatever place you wish, but you'll soon realize that not all enemies are built the same way and that not all of your party members can take them head on. You'll have to think: "Do I really need three glass cannons in my party?"

The Sith base is, in my opinion, the best place to learn about this because it's literally put in front of the player as soon as they get five party members (and you can't take more than two with you at any time). Since there's a decent amount of enemies that could probably end up killing the entire party easily, it's important that the player starts recognizing what makes an enemy a threat and what abilities does a party member have that can counter it.

But that's only my opinion, it's still a pretty basic level. The goal here is simple, kill everything in your way to the computer that holds the codes you need to retrieve and this is also how a lot of levels go in the game.

Every level has an objective and you usually have to solve a puzzle or talk to an NPC before you can complete said objective. It's a normal, most games do it, but KOTOR barely puts any effort in making a level with puzzles or secondary objectives that must be completed before you reach the end. While the puzzles can be entertaining, most times they're just there to add a little bit more game time.

There's a prisioner inside the Sith base, an NPC the party saved all the way back to episode 1 if i remember correctly, and he asks for our help.

He asks our protagonist Avren Drath to open his cell by changing the color of the panels in the wall. He also tells Avren to turn them red, not green. I actually got this wrong the first time because my mind went "Hey, green is good right?"

I was shocked, and terribly ashamed of my mistake so I reloaded. The NPC doesn't give you a physical reward, but how you deal with him gives you either positive or negative karma (good boi or bad boi points).

Anyway, once you get to the end of the Sith base you have to fight two different "bosses" and depending on the strength your party has they can be somewhat difficult.

_{The first boss is this robot thingy. The real difficulty comes from its shield, you have to disable it first.}

_{Then there's this guy. He's a Sith so he can use Force Powers, usually the types that stun your party members.}

Once you're done fighting them you're free to grab the codes and escape, from here you have to go to Jayvar's Cantina which is where Canderous Ordo is waiting for the party in order to continue with the plan.

From this point on the player will not be able to complete any more quests in the tutorial world Taris. As the party will be leaving the planet for good.

Once you speak with Canderous you're then brought to Davik's Estate (That's his boss' place) and it's here where you play the part of a potential new employee. By this point the player has already done a bunch of stuff in Taris which gives them some popularity, this makes Davik be more interested in hiring the player.

More cutscenes happen in which Davik monologues about his Space Ship and how it's the bestest ship ever, he then leaves the player in a guest room and essentially tells them to "be a good boy and stay" an order which is promptly ignored as we're here to steal stuff not sit around.

This is another "dungeon" level (if you can call it that) it's extremely straightforward and the only thing you have to do is search for Davik's technician, a guy by the name of Hudrow. There are several guys that will attack you but nothing to big of a deal, until you get to the robots that is.

After you find Hudrow (and release him) he gives you the codes of Davik's ship "The Ebon Hawk" and then you're free to go towards the estate's Hangar and take the ship out.

Before you can do that though, Davik enters the hangar with Calo Nord (another underling of his) and a boss battle ensues. It's here where the party realizes the Sith are shooting the planet (because they got tired of searching for Bastila)

What's peculiar about this fight is that the objective isn't to kill both of them but to lower Calo's health to a certain amount(or just kill Davik), in my experience it's better to kill Davik than trying to kill Calo since Davik falls way faster than Calo does. Although some people say that Calo is the weaker of the two every time I make a new character and play through the game Davik is usually the first to die.

Now you're free!

...Not really, not yet. After you defeat Calo and Davik you're supposed to enter the Ebon Hawk, but as soon as you reach outer space you're immediately attacked by fighter ships (smaller, somewhat faster ships). This is when the player is introduced to a somewhat annoying minigame which shows up every now and then, specially when you're trying to go from one planet to the other.

In this minigame you must destroy all of the attacking fighter ships before they destroy you, in which case the Ebon Hawk is destroyed and you get a game over. What makes this annoying is that it's a minigame that usually pops up whenever you're sidequesting through planets or when you want to get from A to B quickly.

Other than that it can be bugged if you decide to skip the cutscenes before the minigame begins. You can fix this by alt tabbing, but it usually scares people the first time they experience it because the sounds and the minigame are still there, you just can't see anything.

When you succeed in this minigame you're taken to Dantooine, planet of the Jedi one of them at least.

It's in this little place where the plot starts picking up and it's also here where the protagonist (Avren) will be trained in the Jedi arts.

It's also the point where i'm going to leave this post at.

If you've read the previous episodes, or if you read the title, you'd notice it took me 7 or so episodes to leave the "tutorial" of the game and if you've actually read all episodes you probably noticed how I changed the "writing style" for this one, this is because I feel that how i'm writing now is better than how I was writing before in this series.

With all of this said I thank you for reading my post and I hope you have a fantastic day! See you later!

_{Here's a little teaser for the next episode: Once you learn how to levitate chairs you're apparently done with Jedi training.}