Knights of the Old Republic (video game)/Headscratchers

Headscratchers for the video game Knights of the Old Republic:

 * What's the deal with the Darkside character models? I don't see why me being a Darksider to the max means I have to look like I haven't been outside in a decade. There's no canonical basis for this hell EU doesn't really follow this all that much either.
 * Emperor Palpatine disagrees with you.
 * Funny how Palpatine's deformity had nothing to do with the Darkside and was a result of his fight with Mace. Anakin, Maul, and Dooku looked normfal as well (aside from their eyes).
 * Yeah, all that lightning Luke absorbed did a number on his face, which really goes to explain why getting shocked by Force Lightning made Palpatine....oh. Yeah. Neither Anakin, nor Maul, nor Dooku had been using the Dark Side for long enough or with such strength to have it so heavily affect them, unlike a Dark Side Revan would have been.
 * Anakin was thus affected in Revenge of the Sith. And personally, I feel a little let down with a game like Jade Empire, where your character isn't physically warped by the force of his/her own evil
 * That's the whole point, you shouldn't change based on how many dark side points you have, you should change based on how many powers you use that could effectively alter your appearance. In KotOR II, it's possible to use only light side powers, not neutral or darkside, and with the right conversational choices you can still look like you've been using force lightning for half a decade before you even get to the first planet! Even if handwaved with the Force altering the person's looks to fit their personality, it should be much more gradual, with the change happening more -quickly- based on how good or evil one is, not more -extensively-. Evil Is Sexy sith can convince people of things without even having to resort to force hypnosis, why must KotOR be otherwise?
 * You're asking a lot from a relatively simple old-school RPG system. And keep in mind that to go * all the way* Dark Side, you pretty much have to reveal yourself as the kind of person who doesn't give two shits what people think of you and actively enjoy having people dislike you (you know, doing stuff like insulting people, kicking them in the groin and laughing about it), so the appearance change is in-character for you. Remember that Evil Is Sexy Sith are almost invariably * lesser* Sith.
 * The earlier Expanded Universe material (West End system went into detail on it) explained it as a Dark Side side effect. I could also see it this way - the Force changes its user. They push the universe, the universe pushes back. A Dark Sider will gun for as much power as quickly as they can grab it, not allowing their bodies time to acclimate. Plus, the constant stress of the Sith way of life and its reliance on fear and anger is like being on steroids. A constant stream of stress hormones will screw someone up and make them look a lot more old and worn than they really are. Light Siders have the Good Feels Good relief on occasion, and are about slow, incremental increases in ability - which may (only partly) justify their still-reprehensible infant conscription.
 * Specifically, Dathomiri Force Witches who use the Dark Side often suffer burst blood vessels under their skin. The game's just presenting a more stylistic representation of that sort of thing.
 * Luke also seems to fit the trope. I mean, he still looks like he's 20 on the cover of Outcast, but on the cover of The Swarm War, he's aged. He's also shooting lightning. So he can even reverse his aging. The trait seems to be sexually transmitted, looking at the cover of Sacrifice.
 * Guys. Being Dark Side DOES affect your face. Anakin never used force lightning, and before he got his helmet he had evil eyes. Darth Maul's teeth can't possibly be that dirty really, and his eyes aren't natural for his race. Long story short- You are evil, you are a jedi, you will look evil. That's how it works.
 * I've never heard it directly confirmed one way or the other if the lightning actually deformed Palpatine or just stripped away some disguise technique he was using and showed what he actually looked like. I mean, yes, he said he was deformed, but... well, he lied all the time, and saying the horrible Jedi assassination attempt deformed you seems a pretty good way to score points with the senators. So I can very easily believe that long-term, extensive use of the Dark Side just turns you into a pale, yellow-eyed freak, and the Sith that don't look like that haven't been Dark Side long enough, aren't powerful enough in the Force for it to affect their bodies, or are able to hide the changes to their appearance somehow.
 * And the reason that main character turns all evil looking faster could well be related to how powerful he's supposed to be.
 * KotOR 2 pretty clearly showed that Maul WAS affected. Get Bao-Dur, a member of the same species as Maul, full Darkside, and his skin color changes to match.
 * Except that Darth Maul's skin was naturally red from the start (the black was tattoos), so we know he wasn't affected in that sense.
 * Wait, what? What source said that? Bao-Dur's a Zabrak, just like Maul...
 * if you do your research like humans Zabrak come in different colours - http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zabrak
 * How could Alek and Malak be the same person if Alek isn't remotely Malak's size?
 * It's possible that he had some sort of bodily-modification surgery to make him stronger. Hey, he might even have a suit of Vader-like armor under his clothes that bulks him up.
 * Or like many Sith lords he eventually bulked up on stims or by actually working out.
 * Some people view it as simply an unneeded Ret Con, tying the comics into the game when there is no need to do so.
 * Retcon? The KOTOR comics are so tightly plotted, and Squint was so blatantly set up as a Well-Intentioned Extremist from the start (not to mention other hints like the red suit), that he very likely was supposed to be Malak all along.
 * And while we're on the subject of Malak--Alek Squinquargesimus? Really? Really? I know, I know, stupid names are a Star Wars tradition, but It Just Bugs Me.
 * I think that's the point
 * ... How the hell are you supposed to pronounce that!?
 * "Meat-bag".
 * How did Calo Nord survive the "that" in No One Could Survive That? And why does Malak bother at all with sending him, a mere bounty hunter, to destroy the protagonists? Wouldn't sending Bandon immediately be a more logical choice?
 * Malak is as genre blind as they come. Obviously he feels obliged to follow the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, even though this makes no sense (the protagonists are clearly the biggest threat he faces, so he should send a bloody army of Sith rightaway, not keep them squirreled away in his base). On the other hand: Bastila and co. are making a point of staying low, so sending the best bounty hunter you can buy after them may not be such a stupid choice. Bandon may be a Jedi, but that doesn't necessarily make him good at finding people -- and of course an army attracts attention. But there's still no excuse for not hitting you with everything he has after he does find you.
 * Partially true (in that he was Genre Blind) but still rather unjustified. You most certainly are NOT the biggest threat Malak is facing, unless you happened to miss the Galaxy-spanning WAR he is waging with the Republic- which is well on the way to loosing but doubtless has billions of servicepeople- with even billions more waiting in the wings as conscripts- and hundreds of millions of ships. To say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of enemy Jedi. Your team is a strike force sent on a very important but very, VERY limited mission which does not entitle directly confronting Malak's main war machine until the very end. Malak has other things to do until you start getting to close to the Star Forge.
 * He does finally become slightly more genre savvy towards the end, when asked if his whole army will be enough to stop the player, he responds 'Of course not, but it might slow them down'. Too little, too late, though.
 * At that point, he knows you're threatening him because you're right in his base. Before that, he may have suspected or known how powerful you were, but that wouldn't matter much if you weren't doing anything important. Then again, why not assume anything someone so powerful was sent to do was correspondingly important...
 * Well, if you want guessing... my theory for how Calo Nord survives: As soon as Malak is notified that a small freighter just got away from Taris, using the Sith governor's access code for the planetary defenses no less, he immediately sends troops down to its takeoff point to find out the very important piece of information he now needs -- "Who was on that damn ship, and was Bastila one of them?" These troops would of course have to pick up and question any survivors to find this out... and Calo Nord was that survivor.
 * Despite being blown up and having half a ton of girders land on his head, you mean. It's still a ridiculous example of No One Could Survive That, even without being bombed with the rest of the planet.
 * The girders didn't land on his head. A bunch of girders landed on * Davik's* head, leaving a bright flash and a lot of smoke and a two-second interval when we can see nothing. * Then* a bunch of girders fall down on the spot where Calo was standing the last time we could see him. If this didn't scream "Calo escaped when you weren't looking!" in neon letters ten feet high for you, you really are Genre Blind. Notice that Calo is nowhere to be seen when the smoke clears -- the lack of a body labeled "Calo Nord" in that scene is very intentional.
 * Actally you CAN see Calo after the girders fall down, but the body is unreachable because of said girders. When playing through a second time I took a good look and it seems like the girders fell on his back not his head... And like mentioned below he has some VERY good armor...
 * Don't forget, a considerable number of people survived the orbital bombardment. Taris did recover, but the only way Calo Nord could have survived the thermal detonator, collapsing roof is by jumping out of the way and then heading for the nearest air raid shealter.
 * False. Surviving a Thermal Detonator even in the original, non-EU canon is VERY doable, albiet generally requiring quite a bit of luck. Calo has very, VERY good armor and likely suffered worse injuries during his early life as a slave. The main question is how he survived it when his facial area is more-or-less exposed, but given the severe wounds we have seen people come back from in the mythos, it isn't unbelievable. From what I remember, you can see that the girders fell on his legs rather than his back, and the ceiling itself likely didn't collapse altogether.
 * If Lord Malak wants to question survivors from a particular building, he's obviously going to stop bombing that building. As for the girders and being blown up -- you did notice that Calo Nord's suit of armor is the second-most powerful in the game? He only has to have enough still-living bits stuck together to throw in the bacta tank, after all... he doesn't show up healthy again until a full act later. Besides, in a game where the main protagonist once survived a ship-to-ship turbolaser broadside through the window, Calo Nord got off easy.
 * Now, as to why he didn't send an entire Sith army after you right away... simple, he didn't know where you were going past Dantooine, and he can't attack Dantooine until he's had time to assemble his fleet. Likewise he can't throw armies of Sith around at random, hoping to bump into you somewhere. So, he sends a very skilled tracker after you to try and find out where the heck you are and what you are doing. Later on in the game, once they've had enough reports on your movements to figure out a pattern and figure out a likely ambush point on your route, then you run straight into Saul Karath's flagship. Funny how that works out.
 * Did the Outcasts survive? Did they reach the Promised Land?
 * To the first question well it is stated that the undercity and surrounding areas may have possibly remained intact (only the surface of Taris was bombed).As for the second question whether or not the Outcasts found the promise land depends on the PC did in K1 so it's probably going to be kept ambiguous.
 * Of course, that all hinges on their promised land being real anyway. The whole thing sounded flakey.
 * The Promised Land is most likely real since you found proof of it's existence (and the bigwigs having an underground bunker with supplies that can last for a hundred years, is a pretty popular rumor so it doesn't sound all too flakey either), and if the Outcasts did reach it, they are most likely alive. An underground colony has got to be the safest place on the entire planet.
 * This has been answered by The Old Republic MMO. The outcasts did reach the Promised Land, and it was wonderful...for five minutes, before the planetary bombardment irreparably damaged it. The outcasts struggled on regardless, and ended up dying out about a dozen generations later from radiation sickness and rakghoul attacks. There are some traces of them left in the form of holocommunications, but all that indicates is that they eventually lost even basic technology and knowledge. They really had no chance thanks to Malak's spurious decision to destroy Taris. Isn't learning fun?!
 * Why did the Jedi allow a team of non-Force-sensitives with no real affiliation to the Republic to travel with Revan? The Jedi are allegedly masters at everything so why permit them a motley crew of unaffiliated support staff?
 * Well, Carth was heavily affiliated with the Republic, and his piloting skills ended up being essential. T3 was needed for his slicing skills. Zaalbar had sworn a Life Debt to Revan, so good luck trying to get him to go away. And Mission wouldn't want to be separated from Big Z, not to mention that she had a number of useful talents herself (stealth, demolitions, etc). The only one who really doesn't make sense is Canderous, since he did used to be a sworn enemy of the Republic and there was no guarantee that he wouldn't stab everybody in the back.
 * The Council said that the reason that the only Force-adepts in the party were Revan, Bastila, and Juhani was that traveling with more or more-skilled Jedi was likely to attract Malak's notice. Revan and Bastila both had to be present and Juhani's padawan status put her beneath the notice of the Sith leadership.

"I am a Jedi, Sunry. I am a Jedi, and I will never bow down to a Sith."
 * Why couldn't they just bash open the door leading to the Vulkar base? It seems to work everywhere else.
 * True, but if you made your approach that obviously, by the time you reached the swoop garage they'd have just picked up the prototype and carried it out the escape tunnel. Sneaking in via their back door lets you catch them cornered in the basement.
 * Even more obvious when Bastila makes her Heroic Sacrifice and you and Carth can't bash the door down to retrieve her. You have lightsabers of all things, why do you constantly have to make round trips or give up at all? The sequel at least handwaved it away with "magnetically-sealed" doors.
 * How come the Sith never recognize the Jedi among the player's party, especially Bastila, except for that one smart Sith officer on Manaan? Bastila makes a big deal out of staying on the Ebon Hawk on Korriban, fearing the Sith would recognize her, but, well... they didn't on Taris and Manaan.
 * On Taris, there's really no choice -- you're stuck in a city the Sith are practically doing house-to-house searches in to find you, so Bastila's even less safe hiding alone somewhere than she is with the entire group. On Manaan, there's an enforced truce between the Republic and the Sith, so the risk of her being yoinked off the street by a platoon of Dark Jedi is low. But on Korriban, she'd be in the middle of dozens of enemy Force-sensitives, on a planet where the Sith are the government and could literally throw an army at her if they wanted.
 * Juhani is a padawan, Jolee's been out of contact for 40 years and Revan always wore a mask. Since there are hundreds of Jedi at this point in history, the arrival of a few is not going to cause that much panic amoung Sith forces. Also, while the actual Dark Jedi with probably know her, not every single Sith trooper is going to know what Bastila looks like.
 * Then it makes no sense that Bastila follows you to Korriban in the first place. Even if she stays on the ship, the Sith are going to learn about her the moment some port inspector boards you.
 * Czerka runs the Korriban port under subcontract, remember? You only start running into Sith after you leave the docking bay area.
 * Also remember that what she's most afraid of is being recognized as a light-side Jedi by an enemy Force-sensitive... and there are way, way fewer of those walking around Manaan and Taris than there are on the home planet of the Sith Academy.
 * So how come your even more light-side heroic protagonist can walk around freely and the most these Sith she's so worried about can sense is "There's something odd about you..."?
 * Really? The very first Sith Academy instructor you talk to picks up immediately on the fact that you're a Jedi. Only you're "Yes, but I'm here to defect to the Sith, like a lot of other Jedi are this year" tactic gets you an invite to the Sith Academy rather than a lightsaber upside the head. The problem is that unlike you, Bastila can't use that tactic -- the instant she sticks her head inside the Sith Academy, she's getting dogpiled and Fed-ex'ed straight to Lord Malak. Your identity, on the other hand, is somewhat less widely known.
 * That's not what happens; when you pull that with Yuthura Ban, she calls you a liar to your face and says that even if you're telling the truth about being a fallen a Jedi, she knows you're hiding some ulterior motive, and she specifically says she'll welcome you to the academy like anyone who has let-me-in-MacGuffin, if you can get one, because she won't give you one herself.
 * Note that sensing the bare fact that someone is Force-sensitive is a * lot* easier than sensing whether someone is Light Side or Dark Side, which frankly seems to be an entirely separate issue (as much as some people lump them together). If it weren't possible to hide your LS/DS alignment, Revan and Malak wouldn't've been able to get away with their grand plan in the first place, given that it's pretty clear they'd already started tumbling to the Dark Side long before they defied the Council.
 * The Force power that lets you actually see someone's "Force aura" as Light Side or Dark Side is stated to be very rare and something special the Miraluka keep to themselves. The fact that you can learn it from Visas in KotOR 2 is because of how special your talent is and your relationship to Visas; it's not meant to imply that all Jedi or even Jedi Masters can do it.
 * It's because the Sith know who she is, and you happen to be on a planet controlled entirely by them. It doesn't matter as much for Juhani, Jolee, or your character since you're all pretty much no-names to most Sith. Whether Bastila's light-side or not, if she got spotted, the whole planet would be on top of her before you could say "hey, that's Bastila!"
 * Also, Taris is a eucemenopolis with many billions of people on it. Most of the Sith troopers are there on police and patrol duty, and its well-known and acknowledged that police officers on such duty could easily pass a known fugitive within a few feet in a crowd and never realize they were there, unless they were actively checking every single face they saw - which, with the crowds on Taris, isn't going to happen.
 * Why do you need a map to get to the eastern dune sea on Tatooine, even if there are markers everywhere that keep you on track?
 * Sand storms.
 * Cartographer's Guild. They're willing to resort to some pretty underhanded measures to ensure people use their maps.
 * Can someone please explain to me why Force-persuading witnesses to tell the truth (in a murder investigation!) gets you Dark Side points, but bribing them to lie in court does not?
 * I could give you a big, long, complicated, philosophical discussion about the Force, but essentially, Force morality works however the writer wants it to work, so really, the best answer I can give you is 'because'.
 * The morality in the courtroom thing is really contradictory, but that's because they intentionally wrote it to be a morally gray situation. It really * isn't* clear whether the "right" thing to do is to get Sunry a conviction (upholding justice and honor) or to get Sunry off (sacrificing the outcome of one court case for the sake of the countless innocents who will be harmed if the Republic loses its supply of kolto). Playing the case straight or trying to fix it are both morally neutral actions.
 * ...However, mind-raping people remains one of those things that inherently fucks up your mind and drives you mad and sucks you toward the Dark Side regardless of your intentions when using it -- Dark Side use of the Force is like a kind of mind control that warps your personality to evil even when you try to use it for good.
 * And note that this gets even worse in the sequel, to the point where there seems to be a Gray Side of the Force. Once you go beyond simple good/evil stories, an actual manifested alignment like the one in D&D or the Star Wars RPGs becomes one of the more difficult elements to use well.
 * Bribing people to lie in court doesn't actually use the Force, correct?
 * No but it's still a evil act.
 * It's a chaotic act, in D&D terms. Whether it's "evil" is much more up in the air, given that you have a * specific reason* to want to get Sunry off that has nothing to do with Sunry himself at all (if Sunry is convicted, the Sith get one step closer to seizing control of all of Manaan's kolto, and this is because the Selkath remain foolishly deluded about what the Sith are like).
 * The Jedi don't believe in the death penalty. If you disagree with them, you get dark side points.
 * Aren't we forgetting the in-game answer? Using the Force to unethical ends is darker than simply performing unethical actions. Using the Force to do it corrupts not only oneself, but the Force as well. It's stated early on that use of the Force for unethical purposes is dark.
 * In regards to the Trial thing earlier: I'm told that cut content indicates that at some point the player would find a message that the Sith whom Sunry was accused of murdering had sent earlier to a superior, revealing that she was planning on killing Sunry on the very same day when he killed her. Perhaps the developers cut this element to add some moral ambiguity to the game.
 * Where did you get this? I certainly got DS points when I bribed the hotel manager.
 * Since you haven't been surgically altered or anything, why is it that almost nobody seems to recognize THE MOST INFAMOUS JEDI IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY, BIG BAD TO END ALL BADS, DARTH 'GOD DAMNED REVAN'!?
 * How badly was Revan hurt when Malek attacked his ship? Maybe bad enough for Bastila to rush him off to the nearest plastic surgeon quick smart. Remember the protaganist in Saints Row? You can give her a sex change and this is hand waved by her being blown up and needing surgery.
 * Because he always wore a mask, as seen in the cutscenes. The only people who know Revan's face are in on the secret.
 * Even as a child?! Remember that the Jedi Academy at Dantooine has several of Revan's teachers who reminisce about him, who teach him again without realizing what was going on. For this to make sense, Revan had to have been wearing a mask since birth that he never took off - EVER.
 * Not impossible. Just look at Michael Jackson's kid.
 * People develop and change in appearence. Sometimes the change is subtle enough that they are still recognizable even to acquiantences years later, and sometimes they change to such a degree that one's best friend or other familymember wouldn't recognize them when looking right at them. We don't know to what degree Revan changed due to development, but it is very concievable that he looks fairly different than he did as a boy. To say nothing of the fact that Revan as Revan's true identity is probably not that famous. Only a handful of people from his generation and the elder ones would make the connection and many of them are either dead, defected, elsewhere, and/or in on the conspiracy. Revan is famous across the galaxy (and even canonically) as Revan and the "Revanchist." We do not know his canon name or appearence- and many even thought that Revan WAS his actual name (which we now know is not the case)- and we know this is a fictional world, fercripssake. How do you think somebody INSIDE that world would manage when the only connecting point would be his appearence (which was almost entirely obscured when he was in any way truly notable prior to the ambush), his rough physical profile (which he likely shares with a billion or so other people in the galaxy), and his voice (which we have little reason to believe was recorded with any frequency, much less dispersed with enough regularity for him to be instantly identifiable to every single layman even in the dregs of the galaxy like Anchorhead).
 * The only teachers I remember running into on Dantooine were the Council, who were the guys who altered Revan's memories in the first place. Even if I just never talked to the right people, it's not too much of a stretch to say that Revan as an adult looks different than he did as a callow youth, and he certainly wore the mask for most of his military career and his whole time as a Dark Lord of the Sith.
 * Pretty much what the above guy says. Anybody who actually knew Revan without his mask was in on it. These are Jedi, they can read minds. "He knew Revan's face, let's put him in the conspiracy.
 * Wait a minute, wait a minute. The jedi at the council KNEW that the player was Revan. Remember the arguments you weren't privy to? The comment "We fear this may lead you down an all-too familiar path?" How they covertly steer you towards the Star Map? The only people of consequence who knew Revan's true face were the Jedi Masters that did, in fact, recognize you and use you to their ends. Heck, the whole POINT of a dark-side conversion later on is anger that the Jedi were intentionally misleading and manipulating you to achieve their own ends.
 * Yeah, weren't you paying attention to the Tomato in the Mirror? Everyone who would have recognized you was in on it. When you learn you're Revan, you ask Jolee about his loyalty, "What about you, Jolee?" "What ABOUT me? I already knew who you were!", so really, everyone who recognized you either was in on it or didn't give a damn.
 * Although in the above case Jolee wasn't in on the plan or knew Reven (he can't have been either, he's been stranded for 30 odd years), he was just a clever bastard and figured it out. Probably within five minutes of meeting the party.
 * Jolee was stranded on a planet that Revan went to only a few short years before to access the Star Map. More than likely, they met then.
 * It should also be pointed out, no one expects to see Darth Revan walking around. Everyone except those "in on it" think he's dead. You know Michael Jackson's dead, but if you saw a guy walking around who looked like him, would you think it's him?
 * Does anyone in the world look like what Michael Jackson did before he died? The whole grown-man-with-unbroken-voice thing is also pretty distinctive.
 * Why did Revan and Malak decide to start wearing obviously evil outfits while they were still Jedi doing what they believed to be the right thing?
 * They looked cool.
 * The same reason Anakin is wearing straight-up black robes at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. And then everyone is surprised when he turns Sith.
 * The prequel comics reveal that they wore toned down versions of their uniforms before they fully announced their darkside nature, not to mention being only vaguely associated with the Jedi Council as a whole.
 * Revan in his original guise as "The Revanchist" went around telling people he had to wear a mask and deliver his message anonymously because otherwise the Council would unfairly punish him for telling the truth. (And he was, after all, right, from his point of view.) It was only after the whole Revanchist movement turned Sith that people started speculating the mask was part of a Sith getup.
 * Why would the council even consider sending the unstable Juhani (who just recently failed the most important test of her Jedi initiation) along with a hopefully reformed Sith Lord and the most important war weapon the Jedi have? I know they can't send the whole Order, but one competent Knight (or, better, a Sentinel who actually exists for this kind of mission) wouldn't draw any more attention than a Cathar, I think.
 * Given that Juhani's still being alive at this point means that you must have passed your test, presumably they are slightly less worried about you going Dark Side than they would be otherwise. Also, they have empirical proof that of all the Jedi on Dantooine you might try to corrupt later, Juhani is not one of them -- as you already had your opportunity to and never even bothered to try.
 * It would be pretty stupid for Revan to do anything evil like trying to corrupt Juhani while the Jedi were basically holding him prisoner. They can't discount the possibility that he was just playing nice while he was in their power and the minute he took off he'd be back to his old ways. Or if they believe that they can't be fooled like that, why would a newly fallen Revan not corrupt Juhani just because he didn't before he fell?
 * And they're right to put their faith in Juhani, after all -- if you go Dark Side, Juhani is one of the party members you have no chance of converting to your side and that you have to kill.
 * Cynical Translation: She is well and truly indoctrinated, and due to pathetic fighting skills, she is therefore useless for anything besides endless self-pitying monologues. Another reason to go to Kashyyyk first.
 * Right. Because it is of absolutely no use whatsoever to have a fairly competent Jedi who by enough counts has survived quite a bit of hell and who by any count succeeded in defeating and severely wounding her Master. Not every Padawan can come anywhere close to accomplishing that.
 * While I agree with you here is one thing I'd like to point out: The game implies Juhani's master let her win to test her dedication to the light side. Depending on what dialouge path you go through, Juhani herself will point out how arrogant she was being to think she could actually defeat and critically wound a Jedi master when she was still a novice.
 * Why didn't Malak destroy the Jedi Enclave earlier?
 * It was on his to-do list, and he wasn't in a secure enough position until recently.
 * What kind of Sith name is "Darth Bandon"? I mean, don't they take new aliases after the "Darth" title exactly to avoid that kind of idiocy?
 * Hey, at least it's better than the Legacy Sith names. Darth Krayt! Darth Talon! Darth Kruhl!
 * Darth Krayt named himself for the firce, deadly, legendary draconic beasts . Seems like the right sort of thing to inspire fear.
 * Besides, Revan and Malak started the "Darth" bit, but didn't take aliases; their given names were apparently ominous-sounding enough. It was the Traya/Sion/Nihilus generation of Sith that followed that paired aliases with the "Darth" honorific.
 * "Darth" apparently comes from a Rakatan word meaning "Emperor", or something to that effect. And Revan and Malak rediscovered the Rakata. Makes sense, right?
 * The theory of Rakatan origin has been Jossed by the KOTOR comics, which show that the word "Darth" was in use before Revan became one.
 * That's contradicted by the comics (and not stated outright by the games). According to the comics, Malak's real name was Alek (not too clever with the alias, granted) while Revan's real name is... conveniently never revealed. His alias derives from his sobriquet, "the Revanchist". Pretty transparent, but still not just using their real names. Darth Bandon, on the other hand, is just an idiot. At least it wasn't Darth Barry. And we can all be glad that Carth wasn't Force-sensitive, if you get my drift.
 * a) We don't know Darth Bandon's real name. b) Bandon= Abandon. As in he abandoned the Jedi. See? Makes sense.
 * I say half-right. Bandon = Abandon. But in the definition of "Audacity". In-Universe the Audacity to become the Apprentice of the Dark Lord of the Sith. In my opinion, the Audacity to consider yourself a primary character.
 * Given that he's a character with no backstory that exists to show up and get killed, you can see why they didn't bother with a cool name.
 * Am I the only one who keeps reading that as "Darth Brandon"?
 * No
 * Why does Jolee Bindo have a "neutral" stance to the light and dark sides, even though he emphatically shouts down any "dark" actions you might take, to the point of sending his own friend to be executed for a (somewhat justifiable) murder?
 * Jolee does * not* "send" Sunry to be executed. Jolee expresses immense disappointment and contempt at Sunry's actions, but remains ethically torn about what the right course of action is (given that it's not just his friendship at stake but the Republic's position on Manaan). No matter what you decide to do in the court case, Jolee tells you that he understands why you did what you did but wishes there could've been a better way.
 * Jolee is Chaotic Good. Since KOTOR games have only one Karma Meter (light/dark), "chaotic" and "good" probably cancel each other out.
 * You cannot meaningfully explain an abstraction with another abstraction. D&D alignment is just as ridiculous as Light/Dark.
 * And, no, he isn't. Jolee isn't a member of the Jedi Order, but he actively tries to respect the Wookie's customs, wants the Republic to succeed, and is willing to take orders from the Main Character. Where's the chaos?
 * The fact that he went to Kashyyyk in the first place. He actively chose to neither help the Jedi try to hold the Republic together or the Sith to take it over; he chose to withdraw and do nothing. And * actively choosing* to withdraw and do nothing when you've spent all your time gaining the power to intervene on one side or another is what makes you Gray.
 * This might make sense, except that playing the game, you often get Light Side Points for "chaotic" actions, such as using terrorism against Czerka.
 * The LS Ps are for using minimum necessary force against bad people. Wantonly killing Czerka employees who haven't opened fire on you yet is a DSP-gaining action.
 * I think it represents Jolee's following of the Potentium view of the force, enabling him to use both light and darkside powers equally.
 * Jolee is not a follower of Potentium. He does not question the existence of the dark side.
 * Aye, I don't believe it had even been named yet. But he DOES use darkside powers (or can at least), which is more than halfway there.
 * Jolee is actually a little bit light sided. Also, being neutral doesn't mean that he doesn't care what happens. He's not a saint, but he doesn't have to approve of killing innocents.
 * Considering that most of the truly Dark actions you can undertake tend to be the actions of a psychotic killing machine, you don't really have to be a good person to find them objectionable.
 * No matter how much he talks about being done with the Jedi, Jolee still consider himself a Jedi deep down. He says as much when Sunry admits to murdering a Sith agent in cold blood and again if you turn to the dark side at the Rakata temple.

"Explanation: Statistically, overplanning the assassination of a Jedi seems to backfire. Extrapolation: There are many theorists who claim Jedi can see the future, and I do not know if that is true, but it seems impulsive acts are more common to succeed than planned incidents."
 * Jolee is a Gray Jedi, like Anakin Solo later becomes. He knows that both sides exist, but believes that there must be balance between them.
 * Except that Jolee usually approves LS aligned actions and he disapproves DS actions. And he tries to kill you on the Rataka Temple when you accept Bastila's offer.
 * Jolee disapproves of DS actions but he will occasionally acknowledge they are necessary. He asks you to avoid killing the Czerka employees if you can, but then muses that maybe killing them wouldn't've been so bad -- and if you * do* kill the Czerka employees he basically accepts it. This is nothing like the kind of lip you get from Bastila for Dark Side or even neutral actions.
 * Maybe Jolee is using the "do as I say, not as I do" principle, in as much as Jolee knows he's grey, but he is determined to make sure that he man knows to once have been Revan is not going to become dark again.
 * Jolee follows the light side, but not the Order. He doesn't like the Order as he disagrees with some of their positions, particularly those on love and attatchment. He does what he wants to do, and isn't going to let anybody tell him any differently. He believes in the Republic, but the Order is too restrictive. Mostly he wants to be left alone, with a screw everybody else" philosophy, but not a "kill everybody else" philosophy. To put it simply, there's Lawful Stupid and Chaotic Stupid, Jolee is in the middle, leaning towards good, and considers the council to be the former.
 * Note that Jolee's stated reasons for following you around are that he was bored on Kashyyyk and he's curious to see what becomes of you. He follows you around with full awareness that you're Darth Revan and you might revert to Sithhood at any time but, unlike Bastila, sees no need to desperately try to force you to stay in the Light. (One might surmise he's old enough to have made his peace with the idea that following you might mean death.) He does * not* actually care all that much about killing Malak and openly rants to you about how he thinks all these life-and-death Light-and-Dark struggles are a waste of time, and no matter what you do eventually your choices will be canceled out by someone else's. (And, hey, in KotOR 2 it turns out to be true -- Light Side or Dark Side Revan, the galaxy ends up looking about the same.)
 * On the whole true, but with several minor falsehoods: Bastila did not so much see no need to desperately try to force you to redemption- she clearly did if you speak with her- it's just that her own stability and loyalty to the Light was starting to fall down beneath her feet and thus she was increasingly in no position to force HERSELF to stay on the Lightside (even when you YOURSELF are Light), much less a fanatically Dark Revan. And Jolee certainly doesn't believe they are pointless, only that they are needlessly costly and bloody.
 * If you take Jolee and Carth around in the same party, they'll get into an argument about the importance of the current war. Jolee says himself that he cares about the Republic and doesn't want Malak to win, but he also knows that even if Malak does win that things would sort themselves out in time, so he doesn't worry about it as much as the others do. As for not worrying about death, his story about the boy and the snake basically sums up his feelings on that subject.
 * Jolee believes (as do followers of Potentium) that the Force itself does not have a Dark Side, but that its powers can still be used for evil, which originates in sentient beings independent of the Force. They belive that any Force power can be used for evil (even supposedly Light Side ones) and that supposedly Dark Side powers can be used without fear of corruption, as long as the intent isn't evil.
 * Doesn't work. He continually talks about the light and dark side and even says that the dark side can never be truely defeated.
 * Jolee is a light sider, but he's less puritanical about it than Bastila et al. A fair few older Jedi in the Star Wars universe seem to end up a bit more relaxed. Qui-Gon Jinn was a light sider, but he broke the rules a lot and Yoda is hardly a paladin. Jolee is just an irrasible old man that has no time for the Order these days, but still would prefer the light.
 * Unlike the traditional Jedi, Jolee doesn't use the Dark Side/Light Side distinction as a moral criterion in itself, but he's neither blind to it nor to the implications of the Dark Side. He's a good person, if not a zealous one, so of course he objects to something that will turn you into a yellow-eyed homicidal maniac. He's largely on the Light Side to the extent that it implies moral goodness, but his position supposedly balanced in the exact middle comes perhaps more than anything from the fact that he does not entirely approve of the Light Side either, at least as the Jedi teach it. The Sith believe in drawing strength from your passions until you're just about tearing people's throats with your teeth for the fun of it; the Jedi believe in extinguishing all your passions out of fear some of them might lead you to the Dark Side. (This probably doesn't work, considering how many cases like Anakin Skywalker we have who snap precisely because of trying to hide emotions they can't get rid of and don't get to deal with openly.) It's easy to see why one might want to seek a middle ground.
 * Basically, he's a demonstration of why games eventually moved away from single-axis morality systems; they don't really make sense from a storytelling perspective and frame moral issues in a very weird way. He has a complex moral and philosophical outlook that he explains over the course of the game.
 * What in the bleeding blue blazes is up with Igear? "I want to stop myself and everyone else from living in a flawless paradise so I can continue to sell junk in a trash heap and get pushed around by the Sith!" "Cool, how much will you give me for condemning everyone here to a dirty, short, meaningless existence?" "Oh, a hundred credits."
 * Turns out, he was also selling Villain Balls. Meaning that he had to be in possession of several.
 * If I recall correctly, it was because he believed that the promised land was a wild goose chase.
 * You recall incorrectly. Igear tells you in his first conversation with you that 'there might be something to it'. But, since all of Igear's social status and power is tied up in that his salvage shop is the only source of credits to the community, and going to the Promised Land means that they wouldn't need his shop anymore...
 * He's a particularly over the top variant on the Card-Carrying Villain. That accent and a name like Igear, I mean seriously? He's obviously putting it on for professional reasons, to maintain his standing in the Guild of Shifty Shopkeepers or something. The pained innocence act is part of the guild charter.
 * I would agree if there weren't so many sad examples in our world right now of people wholeheartedly destroying the world just so they can maintain their position in it.
 * "Better to rule in Hell, then serve in Heaven".
 * To sum up, he's just generally a prick.
 * In the sequel, why is siding with the Ithorians considered better than the Czerka Corporation? Granted, the ecosystem is nice and cute and cuddly, and Czerka aren't exactly the nicest people. However, when rebuilding is done, which one is going to help the planet more? A pretty ecosystem, or a stable economy?
 * You try maintaining a stable economy when the planet in question is inhospitable.
 * Well, the technological level does allow for air scrubbers, artificial farms, and substitutes for what a thriving ecosystem could have provided better.
 * There's also that Czerka Corporation, famed for its abysmally low ethical standards, has been known to define 'stable economy' in some pretty horrific terms. Witness Kashyyyk. And that's assuming they're actually telling you the truth about the Ithorians' plan being economically inept, given that Czerka also lies like a rug.
 * Czerka is committing the usual political lie of conflating "stable economy" with "massively profitable economy".
 * Telos eventually recovers regardless of which you side with. If your with the Ithorians it's a natural paradise, while if you went with Czerka it's a more technological world.
 * The Czerka/Ithorian conflict is mainly a question of "Do the ends justify the means?" There are, of course, some deeper things...KOTOR 1 was made by BioWare, a Canadian company, so liberal actions are going to be considered more ethical than conservative actions (easy light side points for me, since I'm pretty damn liberal). Obsidian may not have quite the same "nationality bias", but may have wanted to maintain some ethical continuity. Beyond that, of course, is the fact that KOTOR 1 also established Czerka as a corrupt, uncaring corporation. Also, the Ithorians originally were scheduled to get, so they likely had Republic backing, and the game has a strong pro-Republic bias. Economies typically stabilize at one point or another, so that motivation is out, becoming merely a question of "when?"
 * Rather than it being a Canadian vs U.S. thing, (Of which I highly doubt) It's far more likely that they were operating of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Furthermore czerka has been shown to Deal in slavery, trade with the Sith (KotOR 1), Hiring Bountry Hunters and conduct cooperate sabotage. It's plainly obvious that they're painted as a faction of Corrupt Corporate Executives.
 * I'm pretty sure it was also stated that restoring Telos to the way it was, was necessary to restore the planet's connection to the Force. Ironically, despite Czerka's claims, it is actually their plan which is short term in the end.
 * Um, Czerka has been known to be corrupt, evil arsehats. They were more-or-less openly alligned with the Sith in the JCW and were definitively tied to charming activities like mass enslavement, unethical accounting, attempted genocide (though in the case of the Sand People that might not have been ENTIRELY unjustified), and smuggling. In the second, it is obvious as frell in the game-regardless of which path you take- that Czerka has been making deals with the underworld, smuggling weapons, and violently annexing Ithorian Restoration zones. They clearly are gigantic scumbags who will stab anybody in the back if it suits their needs and who cavort around with Sith. Hence the distinction.
 * You can be a wonderful ally for Czerka who never has annoying moral qualms and they still shoot you down.
 * More puzzling is the choice between supporting the Queen and the General on Onderon. The two sides of the conflict seem to be given pretty equal footing; I suppose that the General is supposed to bring to mind Franco or Pinochet or some such, but you're flat out told several times that the people seem to largely resent the current government and are anxious for change, and the General seems like an alright guy, as far as the leaders of military coups go. It's at least not nearly cut and dry as most other Light/Dark Side decisions in the game, and yet the "right" choice is to prop up the corrupt, unpopular government by helping them brutally pacify a popular rebellion.
 * So did you skip through most of the plot developments related to Vaklu?
 * Um, General Vaklu was allied with the Sith, having opponents to his coup and their families quietly murdered, snatching reporters and random citizens off the street to be imprisoned or executed without trial, and (if you pick that particular quest option) contracting the player character to selectively assassinate, intimidate, or mindwhack various pro-Talia military officers so his own people can move into their positions. There's also that much of Vaklu's 'popular support' for his secessionist agenda came solely from his Goebbels-like manipulation of the news media, to the point where the population of Onderon believed that the Republic was committing unprovoked acts of war against Onderon solely because Vaklu's puppets were falsely claiming such. What with all that, its really stretchin' things some to put him and Queen Talia on the same ethical level.
 * Also note that even in the last century, many "corrupt, unpopular governments" were overthrown by "popular rebellions", which swiftly turned out to be even worse. A noteworthy example that can be seen in media was Idi Amin's coup and dictatorship over Uganda. Generally speaking, most military coups become "popular" in the first place by paying lip service to everything the people dislike about the current government, meaning that they will remain largelty unopposed until they are in power, at which point, anyone who realises that the junta are not fulfilling their promises will be quietly (or loudly) removed. Overall, the government being unpopular is not justification for violently overthrowing it with a dictatorship. If you want things to get better, you need affirmative action for gradual change which the people control.
 * At a certain weird level, the thing about "Talia good, Vaklu bad" comes from the Tales of the Jedi comics, where the Jedi set up the new monarchs in the first place, and Talia was supportive of the Republic. As for Vaklu, he was opposed to the Republic, and wanted to split from it... Part of it would stem from the fact that Canada, home of BioWare, supports the Queen, but Obsidian, of course, isn't Canadian as far as I know... Of course, I, being the kind of guy who believes in "DESTROY THE MONARCHS THAT EXPLOIT THE WORKERS! LET THE PROLETARIAT RULE! RISE UP, YE WORKER!" got suckered into supporting Vaklu, even when I intended to go mostly light side (I thought Kavar had fallen or something), and ended up forced to kill Kavar, as did one of my friends, so it got confusing. I guess sometimes the ruling power really DOES know what's best for the people...
 * In which case the problem happens to be YOU YOURSELF not examining the situation clearly before choosing sides. However inherently corrupt monarchism as a system of government, it is pretty clear if you studied the situation that Talia is a comparatively good monarch and Vaklu is a despot. May I remind you that the VERY first encounter you have with Vaklu's faction is when his scounts on Dxun attempt to hunt down and kill you without provocation. And then they attack you and start a fire fight in the middle of DOZENS of ships- many of them certainly civilian- claiming who knows how many lives and undermining Onderonian-Republic relations even more. THEN they lie about it by claiming YOU attacked them in your 'Capital Ship' the Ebon Hawk. And then if you carefully study Iziz, you learn about little things like his supporters trying to start riots which would doubtless cause much bloodshed. And the truly nasty "big lies" being peddled by the media- which is dominated by Vaklu- along with the countless journalists and outsiders who have been "vanished" to perserve that propaganda mill. And the effective neutering of the elected organs of Iziz's government. And the attempts by various Vakluists to murder fellow Onderonian soldiers for simply dissenting and remaining loyal to the crown. And the willingness of Vaklu's men to use heavy firepower in areas crowded with innocents. If you pay close attention, the entire "backed by the Sith" and "planning a horrifically costly civil war" matters are just the icing on the cake. Sure, perhaps you could argue that Vaklu was a Well-Intentioned Extremist not unjustifiably angry at the heavy sacrifices Onderon has made for the Republic without much reward and who might have ironically been pushed to radicalization by overly paranoid and/or extremist Monarchists (for instance, we don't know whether Vaklu was actually planning a coup by the time of the ill-planned assassination attempt on him by an Iziz Councilman), but it is made pretty damn clear to the observant and completionist player that he and his supporters have long since crossed the Moral Event Horizon by the time you show up.
 * Again, more along the lines of Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism than Canada vs U.S. In this case it's the the Benevolent Queen, versus the Evil Chancell- err General
 * Well, a lot of the decisions were supposed to seem grey-and-grey. Plus, as Tales of the Jedi showed, Onderonian rulers have like, a fifty-fifty chance of being crazed psychopaths who take Sith lessons from the spirit of Freedon Nadd. So if you weren't paying attention to some of the crap Vaklu was pulling while you investigated the planet, it's totally understandable that you might have distrusted queen Talia.
 * Not quite so bad these days, since Exar Kun destroyed the sprit of Freedon Nadd and the monarchy Talia descends from is half Beast Master.
 * That and the Jedi finished off the Sith-worshipping Onderonian royalty and merged the bloodline directly descended from Nadd with that of the Beast Riders, which almost certainly drove down the whole "probability of Sith activity amongst the Royalty" by quite a bit.
 * Keep in mind that Vaklu was just the leader and personification of the anti-royalty movement; if you depose Queen Talia, Vaklu also gets killed afterwards, and presumably, replaced by some less-evil people. The real battle was between the Republic and Onderonian nationalists: if you sided with Talia, the Republic gets to annex the planet, and if you sided with Vaklu, Onderon stays independent. Considering how the Republic is a bloated mess that is destined to die in 4000 years, I'd say Vaklu is a preferable alternative.
 * Is the fact that the Republic will end in four thousand years really a good reason to not be a part of it? I mean, all it's other problems, sure, but that's forty centuries. If a system of government can last that long TOTAL then it's remarkable, let alone a government that is already ancient by the time it has four thousand years left
 * Except you don't KNOW how the Republic will turn out and you don't KNOW that Vaklu will get axed by somebody soon after the coup. For all your character knows, Vaklu will live for all eternity as ruler of Onderon. And besides, while the Republic is certainly inefficient where it is not openly corrupt and there are many arguments for some form of Onderonian independence, you forget to ask exactly WHAT the independent Onderon will LOOK like down the line. Remember: Vaklu already defacto instituted a totalitarian police state at least in part prior to his open attack on Talia, complete with Secret Police, an utterly subservient media that would make Pravada blush, the effective elimination of the democratic checks on his power (as shown by his takeover of the Iziz council), and the willingness to terrorize his own populace (as shwon by the attempted riots and the attempts to kill the Loyalist officer corps). Sure, Vaklu gets killed a year or so after his coup, but THE DAMAGE IS ALREADY DONE! Even if the "replacements" are like Khruschev to Vaklu's Stalin or even Juan Carlos to Vaklu's Franco, the groundwork for a totalitarian state is already in place and his successors would be hard-pressed to dismantle it even if they tried very hard, and it would seem that is not the case. In short: the Vakluist Separatist movement is primed to become a longstanding dictatorship that will harm Onderon almost as badly if not far moreso than Talia's integrationist policies would and whose secession from the Republic would greatly cripple the Republic, particularly in reconstruction. To say nothing of the fact that they are allied with the Sith, whose influence rarely works for the better. In short: whatever the validity of the Separatist complaints and the harm of integration by Onderon, the Separatist leadership are gearing the planet towards a totalitarian dictatorship which will likely endure even Vaklu's deposition and which will harm not only the people but also the galaxy at large.
 * Regardless of the player's or the Exile's political allegiances here, the real reason to support Talia is that Vaklu has a death warrant for Kavar. You know, the guy you're supposed to find in the first place? So if you want to assemble the Jedi Council, even if you sided with Vaklu at first (because the Exile doesn't know at this point that Kavar is the Queen's advisor, even though the player knows), the game gives you a final chance to switch sides during the cantina showdown, when it becomes clear that Kavar will turn on you if you side with Tobin.
 * Where the hell did the "anyone can fight a Jedi if they know how" idea come from? Specifically KotOR 2 seems to have this idea that the Jedi are weak. Atton claims to have several skills that work against Jedi, the Mandalorians claim that the Jedi would be nothing without the Force (of course, no one points out that the Mandalorians would be nothing without their hands and feet, which are much easier to remove than the Force). Did the writers not see the films? Boba Fett, one of the most well known, best skilled bounty hunters out there got owned by a rookie Jedi in ROTJ. Han Solo, skilled smuggler, couldn't even put up a decent fight against a broken down Sith like Darth Vader in ESB. The then-depowered Kyle Katarn in Jedi Outcast, gets thrown around like a rag doll by Desann. Yet KotOR 2 claims that anyone can fight these demigods as long as they have a sword that doesn't get cut in half by a lightsabre!
 * Uh, no? Atton and HK-47 lay out what you need to do to defeat Jedi without being one yourself: Don't face them in single combat. Don't use blasters. Don't fight them directly. Use grenades, use rockets, use gas weapons, use mines. Attack the padawan to disrupt their Force Bond. Attack civilians to draw their attention away from you. Use mental recursion techniques so they can't read your mind. In other words, fight the Jedi with weapons they can't defend against. Use known techniques to avoid being subject to Jedi tricks and mind-reading. This doesn't exactly guarantee victory, but Jedi are not gods.
 * Boba Fett example: Boba Fett had Luke restrained in a cord that his lightsaber couldn't cut. Fett was only defeated by sheer dumb luck when Han swung around and blindly hit his backpack. Not a good example of an ordinary human being defeated by a Jedi, esecially as said ordinary human was not defeated by a Jedi.
 * Darth Vader example: Han was surprised, and only got off three blaster bolts, before a simple Force pull ripped his weapon out of his hand and then he was surrounded by Stormtroopers. Not a good example of an ordinary human taking on a Jedi.
 * Good example of ordinary fighters taking on Jedi and winning: Battle of Geonosis. 200+ Jedi, most of whom were quite handily slaughtered, including one instance of a Jedi with his lightsaber ignited who was casually disposed of by Jango Fett with three blaster shots.
 * Better example of ordinary humans taking on Jedi and winning: Order 66. And the Clone Troopers only used regular blaster weaponry against those Jedi, many of whom were Masters, and none of the specialized techniques and weapons Atton of HK-47 suggested. Although, the attacks ARE NOT premeditated, and are based on an order presumably preprogrammed into the clones. No premeditation means no mind-reading.
 * Well, yes, but note that Order 66 involved the Jedi being taken entirely by surprise, mostly alone, and usually surrounded by two hostile armies.
 * Which just goes to show that the trick to killing Jedi is planning, planning, and more planning. Isolating the Jedi, surrounding them, and catching them off-guard are all part and parcel of the basic Jedi-killing strategies people like Atton and HK-47 advocate.
 * Actually, HK-47 says exactly the opposite. I quote:


 * Well, for HK himself this might be the case. He is supposed to be a protocol droid so if he just suddenly starts shooting the Jedi he's with when their guard is down he might succeed. If, however, he set up something elaborate then something might make the Jedi suspicious and they'd be on their guard.
 * Long story short: it is entirely possible for Muggles to kill Jedi. The mythos is literally laced with examples, the most apparent being the Battle of Geonosis, where the piece-of-tripe TF droids did it by the bushelload, albiet primarily to a Jedi order far past its prime and which has let its military capability ebb away. For harder and more competent Jedi targets, you really need to train yourself up on how they operate and keep a few basic principles in order (which Atton and HK mention). It is not foolproof, but well equipped, trained, and learned combatants can do it with fair regularity. And note that neither Atton nor HK were in fact "anyone" but they were very well primed to take down Jedi: HK was an Assassin droid built by Revan himself even as he prepared to come back into known space to wage war on the Republic (and by extension the Jedi Order), and Atton was a member of an elite Sith commando unit organized by Revan- who it must be noted was a Jedi and thus knew their weaknesses and probably passed that knowledge around- specifically organized to take and neutralize Jedi by either (if possible) converting them or (if not) killing them. And It must be noted that they were on the whole aiming to take the Jedi alive rather than killing them off, which is doubtless even harder. This in no way translates to "any random barfly or mook can go against a Jedi and win."


 * This troper would advocate the use of fully automatic weapons, as opposed to the (seemingly) semi-automatic blasters their enemies use. Jedi may have incredible reflexes, but it's impossible to block a hail of bullets with one parry.
 * All blaster rifles and repeating blasters have automatic settings. That doesn't really stop the Jedi in KOTOR from parrying them.
 * It doesn't really stop Jedi in other games either - it could just be game mechanics, but I once made a kill in Jedi Outcast multiplayer simply by standing in place with my lightsaber active while a guy three feet ahead fired an Imperial repeater at me. A few shots did get through and injure me, but the volume of fire that got reflected and hit him instead was far greater.
 * And how exactly are you going to fire accurately? Blasters have recoil, you know. Your aim will be thrown off after three full-auto shots, without the Jedi even having to block. There's a reason only fixed positions fire rapid fire consistently.
 * Which suggests a way to take down Jedi- hose them down from long range with a fast firing, tripod-mounted repeating blaster. This also puts you far enough away that if they manage to survive your assassination attempt, you may be able to escape being chopped to bits by a lightsaber.
 * Or you could just use a whole lot of semi-auto blaster rifles firing simultaneously. No matter how good a Jedi is, there will be some upper limit on how many incoming shots he can deflect or dodge at once. If you have a whole platoon of troopers shooting at them at once, that limit is almost certainly going to be "not nearly enough." And if they manage to cut through part of your platoon, well, We Have Reserves.
 * Which is precisely how Jedi are taken down in canon. There's a reason most Jedi prefer to run away when fighting armies, you know.
 * The swoop track on Taris is regarded as the most popular race track in the galaxy, right? And when you win (only needing to beat a time of roughly forty seconds), the guy tells you that you're the best racer in twenty years. But then on Manaan and Tatooine, you have to beat times of about twenty seconds! I can understand that they have to make the one mandatory race easier, but if so, why hype it up as supposedly being better than the other two tracks?
 * I always saw it as that swoop accelerator making the Taris track look simpler than it really was. The next swoop bike you get was simply left aboard the Ebon Hawk by Davik, with no acceleration cheat to simplify things.
 * This troper always thought the Taris race was a longer track than the others
 * It also doubtless helped that Taris- and its Galactic-standard Swoop arenas, racers, and the like- were blown up by Malak, which means that any other Swoop racers looking to compete would naturally gravitate elsewhere (in this case mainly to Manaan). Doesn't entirely account for the amazingly low times in backwater Anchorhead, but since Anchorhead is so out of the way, it is possible that nobody knows about any accomplishments the swoop racers there have made.


 * How is it that moral characters like Bastila and Carth with casually stand by if you decide to go around killing people for no reason? Yes, I know the council needs Revan to find the Star Forge and with the Exile, they're just banding together in troubled times, but you would think some of these supposedly good characters might actually try and physically stop you, not just dismiss your actions with a "You just better not do it again" attitude.
 * At least until the final break at the Rakatan Temple, the entire Dark Side playthrough of KOTOR is one giant What the Hell, Hero. By all rights, as soon as Bastila starts seeing you performing every depraved, psychotic action in the book for virtually no reason except sadistic fun, she should be warning the council that the plan is failing and you're on your way back to the Dark Side. But, of course, she doesn't. The entirety of KOTOR as a Dark Sider feels like a school play where everyone else is going by the script and you're the pain in the ass kid who just makes up lines as he goes, no matter that they violate the entire spirit of it. Except the play keeps going as if it never happened. KOTOR II was much better about this.
 * "The play" took care to mention that Bastila is being drawn to the Dark Side herself, through the mental bond her and you share. This is how Malak gets into her psyche in the first place. (And in the Light Side version, she's vulnerable to him because of all the guilt and self-doubt she's carrying over having violated the Jedi Code by falling in love with you. Or if you're playing some kind of Dark Side psychopath romantic, she's got both. Underneath that icy exterior Bastila's head is simply not on straight for the middle third of the game, no matter which way you slice it.)
 * It also helps that they to a very large degree probably have no choice in the matter. The main objective is and always has been to find out where the frell the Sith are getting their seemingly limitless war material and shutting it down, because if that fails the war is entirely lost. The increasingly evil nature of their commander is likely to be a concern, but can anybody really do anything about it? Bastila is already slowly coming undone, HK-47 ENJOYS it, T3-M4 probably doesn't know one way or the other, and everybody else probably is suffering from a combination of "what the hell are we supposed to do?/What the hell CAN we do?", "Focus on the mission, that is more important", and "Better to keep an eye on him to be able to intervene if necessary (yes, that is Genre Blindness, but it is hardly irrational)." And what ARE they supposed to do? You effectively command the ship and order everybody too and fro; you pick the destinations, you pick the gear, you pick the crew. Suddenly shipping out back to Dantooine or even Coruscant without warning would likely tip a DS Revan off and have him do something unpleasant and- possibly worse- might tip MALAK off. And for all we know, perhaps somebody DID call the Jedi Council when Revan was away only to get the word that Wait and see, because we will be able to deal with this problem after the mission is complete.
 * In KoToR 2, its explained that the Force Bond the exile forms with the party compels them to aid you, and doubles as an emphatic link.
 * Case in point, If you get pissed off and kill a guy after breaking into his house early on, Atton demands what happened, describing being 'suddenly filled with such rage and malice', later on, Mira demands to know why she can't stop herself from killing the mooks you encounter, something she's loathe to do.
 * The Sith Academy on Korriban. Masses of wannabes are slaughtered just trying to get into the Academy, before training even begins. Still more are slaughtered during training, by failing tests or killed in petty feuds and power maneuvering. Master Uthar even declares that only one Sith will be selected from four apprentices vying for the position, and all the other three will have to wait another year before trying again. Given such an insanely selective training program, why is your average grunt Sith a complete pushover who couldn't make it through even one of the trials you finish? Furthermore, why are there gazillions of them on the Star Forge and elsewhere?
 * I think the Sith Acadmey was more about training Dark Jedi rather than basic Sith troops. After all, while they were Sith officer uniforms, all the hopefuls you meet carry lightsabres and use the Force. Sith troops themselves are probably trained at military academies elsewhere.
 * Sorry, got my terms mixed up. What I meant by grunt Sith in this case was the Dark Jedi who you regularly encounter...and generally kill with only slightly more effort than the Sith Troopers. By the end of the game, you've very likely killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of these Dark Jedi. Could any one of them have made it through the training portrayed on Korriban alive? I doubt it very much. And even if they could, the 'one Sith a year' thing doesn't exactly fit well with the Sith Zerg Rush you get on the Star Forge. Gameplay and Story Segregation for the win!
 * Is it possible that there are other Sith acadmies dotted around the galaxy? After all, there's the academy on Malachor V. In addition, remember that many Dark Jedi in Malak's army were original regular Jedi who turned to the Darkside. Presumably most of their ranks are made of fallen Jedi, not brand new ones.
 * Pretty much. A lot of the Dark Jedi you encounter in the game are simply that: fallen Jedi who were pulled away from the Order, either at the beginning by Revan or during the subsequent war. Its worth pointing out that Revan apparently had a policy of bringing Jedi prisoners or potential converts to the academy on Malachor V and using the Dark Side powers there to break them and turn them.
 * The Korriban academy's teachings probably altered to reflect Malak's viewpoint instead of Revan's once Revan "died." In that case, Malak's whole schtick about brute violence makes a lot more sense if its some recently-adopted doctrine.
 * It is instructive to note that no one at the academy, not even Master Uthar, had ever met Darth Revan.
 * Very possibly the whole there-can-only-be-one thing is just Uthar's personal approach. There's probably other academies and the masters of those might run things differently. But Uthar's kind of a dick.
 * No matter what the dynamics were with the different Dark Jedi and the Academy, even if the Sith being trained there were to be the very elite of the whole Sith Empire, there's no way Uthar could have reasonably expected any student-wannabe to pass the final test he set. As part of it, you had to deal with two Terentateks at once. I'd be surprised if Uthar himself could have killed one. The only way it makes sense is if they didn't know about them at the Academy, but this isn't made at all clear.
 * The Korriban Academy was set up to train potential Sith Masters, not the low-level grunt Sith trainee-trash you run into on the Star Forge. The standard is probably higher on Korriban than on other Sith academies.
 * Average grunt Sith Troopers, as opposed to force sensitive Sith. Imagine the sales pitch from Revan after the Mandalorian Wars: "Ok, guys, we've beaten the Mandalorians after suffering staggering losses and years of misery. You're all exhausted and want to go home to your friends and families. But how's about this instead: let's all betray our oath to the Republic we just sacrificed everything to save and go back as murderous, bloodthirsty, Dark Side-tainted conquerors loathed by everyone! In return, we force sensitive Sith will reserve the right to randomly kill you lowly grunts for any petty infractions and treat you as meaningless cannon fodder to be casually expended in our conquest of the galaxy. Deal?" KOTOR II made a valiant and unexpected attempt to explain this through the influence of Malachor V and Revan weeding out the disloyal, but the whole premise is still something it's best not to think too hard about if you want to keep suspension of disbelief intact.
 * What are they going to do? Defect to the open arms of the Republic? Let's see how that'll turn out...
 * Why not? The soldiers fighting the war weren't tratiors in the eyes of the Republic. It was the Jedi who were kind of stuck.
 * This Troper assumed it was the same deal that the grunts under Ceasar did; they had more respect and loyalty to their commander than they had the senate and decided to put him/her on the throne.
 * This is why I find it so difficult to believe KotOR 2's theory that Revan was a good guy all along. It simply makes more sense if we just say s/he fell to the Darkside and forced all the Republic troops to become Sith through fear and intimidation. It's hard to say no to a person who can choke you to death without even touching you.
 * Not everything a fictional character ever says is objective truth, especially if it's a lying liar who lies, like Kreia. She might just be deceiving herself and trying to redeem her student in her own and the Exile's eyes.
 * KOTOR 2 never SAID Revan was a "good" guy, only that he was a visionary who realized an even greater threat from beyond the rim and took stepts to counter that threat. That does NOT mean he was a good man, only a good strategist, tactician, and politican. It also helped that it was quite likely the troops with Revan were rather disenfranchised with the Republic and ESPECIALLY the Jedi Council, and who simply trusted Revan more. It also helps that Revan killed off most of the likely turncoats and a combination of persuasion, threats, charisma, and force trickery.
 * Even the theory that Revan intimidated his soldiers into following him seems a stretch, though. If that were the case, wouldn't they defect back to the Republic the second they had the chance? Wouldn't the Sith Troopers you encounter in game be a little less gung-ho in their Snidley Whiplash-style villainy and support for Malak? Or, for that matter, given the sheer number of troops Revan and Malak had as followers, I don't think the threat of violence would work. No matter how tough the Sith, it's a bit difficult to force choke an entire army.
 * You seem to be assuming that every single Sith soldiers and Dark Jedi you see came from the original Army Revan corrupted after Malachor. We know more than enough to say definitively that that is not so. A LOT of the regular Sith grunts are- as per the pre-launch site- new recruits/conscripts, Republic deserters, fugitives, and plain old oppertunistic thugs hiding behind the steel sheen of the Sith uniform because it allows them to do what Republic law forbids and get away with it (which is rather Truth in Television). The Dark Jedi doubtless recieved countless members from Jedi "broken" by the Sith (Atton in KOTOR 2 was part of a commando unit tasked with capturing and doing exactly that to Jedi), new force-sensitives detected by the Sith and trained fresh (the Selkath in the Sith Embassy on Manaan are such a case), and even some Jedi who fell on their own and sought the Sith out. And once they were in, the Sith- against as per the Prerelease website- instituted enough fear to prevent anybody from leaving easily with their necks intact. Suffice it to say the original military Revan corrupted was several times smaller than what they have now. And Malak was also with Revan, and thus it is likely they also had some measure of respect for him (after all, he WAS Revan's 2IC and best friend who fought the Mandalorians with them) and those who were less respectful.. kept their mouths shut if they wanted to live.
 * Well the writers try to hand wave it with: "Revan was really charismatic", so I guess that either means Revan was using a super power mind trick, or s/he just writes really inspiring military speeches.
 * Godwin's Law aside, the example of Hitler's rise to power in Germany may provide a possible alternate pitch that Revan could have used: "You republic grunts are truly the best of the best. But if it wasn't for us force sensitives who defied the Jedi council, you'd have all died. But we refused to obey the council when they told us to abandon you, and between your training and the leadership of us force sensitives, we beat the MANDALORIANS. But if you'd been left with just the Republic for guidance, you'd have been dead in two, maybe three weeks. That's unacceptable, the Republic is long past its usefulness, and we're the ones who'll change it. And now that we're training even more force sensitives to lead you, together we'll be unstoppable. With your strength and our leadership we can remake the galaxy in such a way that you'll never be abandoned by the Jedi again. You just need to remember that whatever we do, even if some die, it'll be better in the long run
 * Atton mentions the resentment soldiers had for the Jedi that didn't come to their aid grew into hatred over time. Add that to the fact many of those same soldiers likely didn't have a home or family anymore and its easier to see why they stayed loyal to those that fought beside them. When Sith teaching began to filter through the ranks from the only Jedi they did respect, Atton makes it clear that it made perfect sense for them to go along with it. It's worth noting the whole "lets turn evil, destroy the Jedi and conquer the republic" speech probably never happened. Becoming an invading Sith army likely evolved gradually over years during the conflict and their time in the Unknown Regions.
 * They mention in the game how the Republic was bloated and ineffectual, and that people were already resentful of the Republic's incompetence. Revan took advantage of the existing animosity towards the Republic to convert people to his philosophy.
 * How is it that on Manaan, if you leave the Sith embassy, you get arrested by 3 Selkath with handguns? I kind of thought that Revan would be able to kill 3 little fish with dinky pistols... or maybe he was just very obedient of the laws.
 * There's a dialogue option you can choose, where you try to resist arrest. It's not the three measly Selkath that Revan would be afraid of, it's the fact he would have to fight his way through the entire facility, plus turrets that tend to kill you in one hit. It'd basically be the entire planet versus you.
 * This troper honestly believes that getting to fight your way through the entire Selkath army to get back to your ship would not only have been feasible, but probably been a Crowning Moment of Awesome, letting you get revenge on the annoying fish.
 * And what happens when they lock down the Ebon Hawk's hangar before you get there, cutting off your escape route? Revan may be strong, but come on, everyone has their limits, s/he's not going to be able to fight every single guard in the entire city at once.
 * Considering you killed half the population of the Star Forge by yourself, I humbly disagree. Besides, those bloody Selkath need to die.
 * So Revan's just a Boring Invincible Hero then? Yay...
 * How did you get Boring Invincible Hero from One-Man Army?
 * Sure, great, wipe out all the Selkath. Now the Republic can't get Kolto. And so Roland Wann won't send you to the underwater base. So you can't find the Star Map. So you can't complete the game. Crowning Moment of Awesome, sure. But completly fucking up the story, both Light and Dark.
 * No aliens are allowed on the top level of Taris. So, how can I walk around with Mission and Zaalbar in my party without getting bothered?
 * Several inaccuracies: aliens are legally allowed, or have you forgotten the aliens who live in the same apartment building as you, or the one you help rescue from those kids on the street? Now, aliens are normally discriminated against and harassed in the Upper City, but given that you're a very formidable person (who depending on what point in the game you're in is publicly known as a master duelist, a badass swoop rider, a top-end bounty hunter, or all of the above) most Tarisians are probably not going to want to hassle your friends. The part where Zaalbar's a freakin' Wookiee and both him and Mission are visibly packing heat would also serve to deter casual bigots, given that most Upper City residents aren't armed.
 * Even then, there are a few people in the Upper City who will speak poorly about Mission and Zaalbar if your bring them with you. Like that man who hangs out near the elevator, talking about the "evil of aliens".
 * Furthermore, after getting Bastila, how do none of the Sith on Taris recognize her? Other planets I can kind of get, but on Taris, she's the only one carrying a lightsaber, and the Sith are looking specifically for her.
 * Given that even the Sith Governor (who is a Force-Sensitive Sith Acolyte) didn't recognize Bastila even while looking straight at her, apparently Malak didn't pass out a good description of her to his troops... which is ridiculous, as him and Bastila were students together at the Dantooine Jedi Academy. I guess we're supposed to believe that Bastila is taking care to keep herself disguised or with a bag over her head as long as she's on Taris, even if the graphics and equipment selection totally don't support this. Ah, gameplay vs. story, the eternal battle...
 * Then again, judging from the slackness of Lieutenant Party Girl (or Party Guy) and how easy it was to steal their uniform, the Sith ground troops on Taris are obviously not their best and brightest.
 * Neither were those in charge of defending the planet in the first place considered "grand military stratigists".
 * Taris is a ecumenopolis, a city covering an entire world. It has tens of billions of people living on its surface, and the average Sith soldier patrolling the streets would lose interest in checking every single citizen's face somewhere between a hundred people and twenty thousand, which would be somewhere in the first hour, and they've been fruitlessly searching for her for weeks. Sith soldiers would probably pass within five feet of Bastila and not even notice her presence, let alone recognize her.
 * Speaking of the Governor, why do you put someone who hasn't even gotten a light saber yet in charge? I mean, why not Bandon?
 * Bandon's got more important things to do than play governor of a planet under temporary occupation with the Dark Lord himself already on-site.
 * And it could also be a "test of competence"- perhaps even the equivalent of the final test you go through at Korriban- for him: can he handle the occupation of a planet and find Bastila?
 * On Taris, I personally thought that siding with the Black Vulkars should have gotten you at least a net zero alignment gain in the end. Now, Gadon Thek is certainly a more benevolent figure than Brejik could hope to be, but beneath the leaders, even where the Hidden Beks are concerned, they're still criminal organizations. They're defined as 'swoop gangs,' the SW equivalent to biker gangs, which are engaged in a turf war over the Lower City. In the first few seconds of entering the Lower City, you're witness to a brawl between Vulkars and Beks, and the Beks are shown to be just as willing to kill the Vulkars as the Vulkars were willing to kill them. On top of that, it's made clear that the two gangs essentially have the same goal: Win the swoop race, eliminate the rival gang, absorb the lesser gangs, and take over the Lower City. Both the Vulkars and the Beks were willing to use illegal engine parts to tip the odds of winning in their favor. The Beks sent you into the base knowing that you would have to kill the other gang's members to get at the prototype accelerator. However, no matter who you sided with in the Vulkar Base break-in, you end up having to kill Brejik. Which outcome is most favorable? The one where sided with the lesser of two evils, which ended with them becoming the dominating criminal force in the Lower City, or the one that required you to side with a less ethical party in order to wipe out the hierarchy of both gangs, clearing the Lower City of its dominant criminal presence? You decide.
 * If you side with the Vulkars, you do so with the clear intention of assassinating the Beks leader with no provocation. As Yoda says, a Jedi never attacks, only defends. You do technically end up wiping out both leaders, but Revan never intended to deliberately take out Brejik, he attacked, Revan defended him/herself.
 * That holds true for Brejik, but what about the rest of the Vulkars? You basically waltz into their base like you own the place and then slaughter everyone who attempts to resist this invasion of their territory. Yeah, a light-sided Revan didn't go there specifically intending to kill anyone, but it had to be somewhat clear that that was where things were heading. True, the Vulkars don't give Revan much of a chance for diplomacy, but would you want to wait to see if the guy who just killed your guard Rancor just wants to talk things out?
 * The Vulkars were openly dealing in slave trading. That puts them pretty high up on the Jedi's list of "people whose faces need to be lightsaber'd."
 * Not to mention how it is stated that the Vulkars attack people on sight in the street, without caring who they are. Besides that, you do not even kill all the Vulkars in the base, at least if your fully light side anyway, as the one Vulkar who was from the gang back before Brejik took over surrenders to you when you start fighting him.
 * Crime is a sociological factor. You can't simply stop it. You wipe out one crime group, you get another one moving into its place, or another one forming in its place - one you don't control. Wiping out both the Vulkars and the Beks leaves a power vacuum, and anyone can come in and take over. Better you have your Neighbourhood Friendly Gangsters in charge than an unknown.
 * Killing the leaders of the gangs may be removing criminal leadership, but in the end, it will destablize the area and in the end, the Beks are a relively benign and "good" organization (for criminals). Removing them means someone more ruthless will rise to power.
 * What's the deal with swoop racing? It seems more dangerous than podracing; the times you have to beat are Olympian in challenge, and the tracks seem to scream "death trap" especially in KOTOR II.
 * Some people just like dangerous sports. Although in all fairness, podracing definitely seems more dangerous to me. True, there are traps in swoop racing, but too much damage and you simply drop out of the race (unless you're using a prototype accelerator which will explode after too many times, but that's technically illegal anyway). In podracing...well look at The Phantom Menace. Eighteen racers started, only four survived.
 * And one of those survived only because his pod failed on the starting line.
 * If the bombing is going to take such a long time to set up, why not get as many troops as possible out in that time? Malak I could get, but Karath is a different story.
 * Were you paying attention when Malak gave the order? Karath was clearly disturbed about the order, but Malak essentially threatened to kill him if he didn't follow his orders.
 * Because Bastila might escape in the interval. Which she did anyway. And Malak is a jerk but is also Supreme Commander of the Sith Fleet.
 * They were trying to get as many troops out as possible. However, having an army large enough to occupy a eucemnopolis just pick up and leave inside an hour is slightly difficult.
 * If you check on YouTube, there's a cut scene with Dead Eye Duncan on Manaan describing how he escaped from Taris by hitching a ride on a transport meant for Sith troopers escaping the planet. So yeah, they were trying to get them out, but if you have to sacrifice an army of your own henchmen (and an entire planet of civilians) in order to win the war, then that's what you've gotta do.
 * ^ Ok, so they do attempt to minimize casualties according to cut content. Question answered.
 * In Episode 1, a great lot of internet noise was made when Qui-Gon died, and didn't crumple away to nothing the way Yoda and Obiwan did. Why, then, am I seemingly the only person that noticed that as you walk away from Darth Nihilus' body, it seemingly collapses into nothing under the robes?! For the love of Han shooting first, people!
 * So...you're complaining that a powerful Force user....dies like other powerful Force-users?
 * Oh, I'm peachy with that. I'm less than thrilled that the general playerbase seems not to think it means anything.
 * Nihilus had no body. His essence was stored in his armor and robes.
 * Wrong. Several of the official artworks for Nihilus show him having a face behind his mask.
 * No, I am afraid that you are wrong. Those artworks showing Nihilus' nose beneath the mask were done by a third-party merchandising company, not by the developers. Nihilus was always intended to be a being of pure Negative Space Wedgie.
 * Funny, his lightside-turned apprentice disagreed when she took his mask.
 * You mean the woman with no eyes you sees the universe as streams of Life Force? Methinks she saw a man's soul, not a man's body.
 * Actually she's talking metaphorically. She didn't see a horrifying demon or an unstoppable force of nature. All she saw is that despite all his power, he could be destroyed, like any man.
 * Another explanation would be that Nihilus' willpower is the only thing that keeps his hungry hungry black hole force powers from eating himself rather than everything around him. After you kill him and Visas gets her look, Nihilus' little black hole gets too hungry and eats him.
 * So, KOTOR 3 is going to be a MMORPG? (Or better: there won't be a KOTOR 3, and the closest thing we'll get will be a MMORPG?) Anyone else wonders why? The first game was quite simply a triumph, and even the second, although released too soon while still incomplete, was far from a bomb and was generally well-received. I think it's pretty safe to say that a KOTOR 3 RPG would sell well, so... why?
 * First of all, the upcoming MMO is not technically KotOR 3. It's called Star Wars: The Old Republic. No mention of knights anywhere. Secondly, it's set three hundred years later, so you can't really see it as a sequel in terms of plot. That being said, one of the guys at Bioware considers this to be "as good as KotOR 3 right up to KotOR 12", based on the amount of content. It's possible that Lucasarts does want to bring KotOR back, but are reluctant to start a new sequel so long after the previous one. My guess, or at least my hope, is that the MMO is meant to test the waters and see if the majority of people are still interested in the Old Republic saga. Right now, it's a wait and see kind of thing.
 * Once you buy a single-player RPG, it's yours and you don't have to pay anything else. A MMORPG allows to charge the players a monthly fee.
 * Saul Karath. When Malak tells him to nuke Taris, he seems hesitant, if not outright horrified at the prospect of murdering billions (many of his fellow Sith, especially), yet when he's interrogating you on the Leviathan, he gleefully talks about how awesome it was to kill everyone on Taris and Dantooine. What gives?
 * I'll need to replay that scene again, but from my memory he barely even mentions Taris. Not to mention that he's interrogating you; he's deliberately pushing your emotional buttons.
 * The only possibility I can think of is that it's a sign of him being corrupted by the Darkside. At one point he tells Malak how the Star Forge is operating, perhaps he's been on the station itself and was tainted by its Dark Force energy.
 * His initial hesitation about bombarding Taris makes little sense anyway, given that he had already bombarded Telos two years ago. Perhaps actually devastating not one but two planets made him snap and finally made him easier to cope with it, discarding his Even Evil Has Standards hesitations.
 * We DON'T really know what his response to the order to blast Telos was, but even if he was OK with it there is a quantifiable difference between Telos and Taris: namely the latter as hundreds of thousands (at LEAST) of his men on it. And in addition to the likely corruption over time, keep in mind that (again) he was in interrogation trying to break you, so it is likely he was doing it. It also helps that he definitively is not a man reknowned for strong wllpower or standing up to Malak's bullying (and god knows what the punishment for a "disappointing" interrogation would have been).
 * Where the heck are all those Dark Jedi coming from? In both games, you fight hordes upon hordes of them... despite being told repeatedly that Force users are exceedingly rare. WTF!?
 * This is the Old Republic. Jedi are a lot more common. That being said, exactly how many do you fight? There's a total of a dozen on Manaan, who were part of the critical Sith garrison/embassy there. There's three on Tatooine, three on Kashyyyk, and three if you include Bandon and his two homeboys, but those are simply hunter teams pursuing you in particular. Korriban has several dozen, but as it is a Sith world where only Sith go to, a high population of Dark Jedi is to be expected. The Leviathan is the flagship of the entire Sith fleet, so seeing a couple dozen Dark Jedi there isn't unusual. There are, at most, a hundred or so Dark Jedi that you fight on the Star Forge and Rakatan Prime. That totals up to, at most, about two-fifty to three hundred Dark Jedi you fight across the entire game. The Jedi Order consisted of tens of thousands of Jedi, not including the many hundreds of thousands of potential Force users they've never found, and not including the Sith. You're also deliberately stomping through locations that are either strategically important to Malak's war effort or locations where Dark Jedi would naturally congegate, which explains why you're putting your lightsaber through so many Dark Jedi faces.
 * tl;dr - There's a lot of Dark Jedi, and you're headbutting your way through specific places where they're commonplace.
 * just going to point out that its set pre Rusaan Reformation so the jedi's 'entry requirments' were much looser
 * Something that just bugs me is the idea that Revan didn't fall to the dark side. Okay, let's say that he had the best of intentions and he simply decided to use the dark side to help maintain the Republic. You know what that's called? Falling to the dark side. You use the dark side and you become Crazy McEvilGuy. Also, Revan's plan nearly caused the destruction that he presumably wanted to avoid when he was usurped by his stupider, less of an magnificent bastard apprentice. The same dude that Revan turned to the dark side in the first place. The dark side: Never, ever a sensible solution to your problems.
 * The only person who ever even hinted that Revan may not have fallen to the Dark Side was Kreia. Think about that for a second. Are you honestly believing Kreia's words here?
 * This whole thing was Obsidian trying, very poorly, to make Revan a better character as a way of sucking up to the fans. Also note the numerous times that someone claims that the Jedi masters are to blame for fallen students because of flawed teachings. It all adds up to the writers doing whatever they can to assure us that whatever evil things Revan did were not his/her fault.
 * No it doesn't. It adds up to morally questionable characters commenting on what really are questionable morals being taught by characters who are not infalliable. Black and white has been turned to shades of gray. And as stated before, the one person who is trying to redeem Revan here is Kreia. A Sith. The villain. If you believe everything Kreia is telling you about Revan, especially after the revelation that she is a Sith and also the villain of the entire game, then you are doing it wrong.
 * Its also worth noting that the characters that actually try to justify Revan's actions are G0-T0, Kreia, and HK-47. one of them is a Sith Lord, one of them is an amoral computer with no qualms about outright murder, and the other is an assassin droid that enjoys its work and happened to be programmed by Revan. These are comparatively amoral characters who are obviously biased in favor of Revan's viewpoint. If you are blindly taking their words at face value without considering that bias, you are doing it wrong.
 * Exactly. Besides, it's a theme throughout the game that no one really knows much about Revan and why he did what he did. What we hear from characters are conjectures, not facts. Of the above characters, G0-T0 never knew Revan, and only HK was actually with him during part of the wars.
 * The people complaining about "Revan never fell to the dark side" are missing A LOT of points. As posted numerous times above and below this post, the point KOTOR 2 was making was about gray morality. It's basically giving a big "Fuck You!" to the simplistic Black and White Morality of the first KOTOR and many Star Wars stories in general. Nowhere in the game does Kreia or anyone else talk about Revan as if he is this saintly good person. They are admiring his STRENGTH, CHARISMA, POWER, and DETERMINATION to fight the Mandalorians while the Jedi Council sit on their asses and did nothing. Kreia states that she thinks Revan did not fall per se. She believes he sacrificed himself to the dark side to fight a greater threat he discovered while fighting the Mandalorians  It's true that we shouldn't see Revan's actions and atrocities as justified (at least not completely) and it's also true that more evil characters like GO-TO and HK-47 have questionable reasons for supporting Revan. However, there are other things we must consider. The sequel is getting people to ask questions about the Mandalorian Wars, Jedi Civil War, the Force, and, hell, Star Wars in general. Examples: Why did the Jedi Council refuse to help the Republic when it was clearly in dire need of help? Was their decision justified? Why did it take Revan to rebel to effectively turn the tide against the Mandalorians? If practically half the Jedi Order went on to follow Revan and lay destruction on the galaxy WORSE than that of the Mandalorian Wars, shouldn't the Jedi Council and teachers receive at least some blame? In addition to bad teachers, do the Jedi teachings themselves contain great failings? Sorry to sound so heavy-handed, but I just felt obligated to clear all this up.
 * I don't know about you guys, but I like being a bad guy now and then, in between saving the world/galaxy. This is one reason I like the MGS series so much. The lines are horribly blurred, blurred some more, entirely wiped away, brought back to confuse you further, and then made clear, only to be blurred more.
 * Well fair enough, but you said you liked being the bad guy. The idea of Kreia claiming that Revan didn't fall was her saying that Revan was never a bad guy, even when s/he went to war against the Republic, slaughtering troops and torturing Jedi to break their wills and turn them to his/her side.
 * Kreia is a Sith. I don't know about you, but when a Sith is throwing around comments on morality, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
 * Kreia isn't exactly a Sith, though she does share some of their ideals. But the thing to remember is that she was booted out of the jedi because everyone she taught turned to evil, and it is implied in the game that this really bothers her. I wouldn't be suprised if she was making up the story of Revan being a hero in order to make herself feel better.
 * The game is basically a Take That at the Jedi/Sith. Kreia cares for neither side, which is why her alignment is neutral. She follows her own philosophy, and spends the game trying to convince the player that she has the right idea. In the end, Revan is probably just another example she twisted to make a point that supports hers.
 * Kriea said Revan sacrificed himself to the Dark Side. She meant that she believes Revan knew what he was getting himself into when he began using the Dark Side; he knew it would make him evil. Instead of thinking "I am capable of using the Dark Side without becoming evil", he thought "I am going to use the Dark Side for my goals, knowing full well it turn me into Complete Monster." That is my interpretation on what she said, anyway. It's been a while since I played the game, but I do remember her telling you that the difference between a sacrifice and a fall can sometimes be hard to see.
 * The pressurized environmental suits bug me a lot, because they have no logical reasoning behind them. In a civilization with laser guns, starships, and faster than light travel, one would think they'd have a better method of travelling around in the vacuum of space or underwater. We have more mobility underwater and in space with current technology that those clunky peices of crap. And it clearly wasn't for gameplay reasons as it was about as fun as a punch in the face. So, why were those suits so outdated?
 * They were being cheap. Really. The simplest and most realistic reason why they would have such crappy suits is that the Sith and the Republic are cheap.
 * You ever see the vaccuum suits the stormtroopers had in the Thrawn Trilogy? They're huge, but like Dark Troopers, they use a jetpack to get around swiftly.
 * While it's a very lazy Hand Wave, the "Cheap" explanation does have its good points. Think about it: where DO you use those hulking pieces of tripe anyway? On Saul Karath's flagship (where boosters would probaby tip somebody off outside so they would take you out while you were effectively imobilized), in the underwater Kolto facility (where they are rarely used by all accounts and protection trumps manueverability, plus we don't know how far down the facility is, so the water pressure may in fact be several times greater than possible on Earth), and the Peragus mining facility (which is very strategic but also very run down and where spacewalks are almost certainly very unusual). In short, most of the places you use them, the people in charge (both in game and meta) probably didn't put a lot of thought into actually going out in them, or there were valid reasons for their inconvenience (either avoiding detection on Karath's flagship or preventing you from getting squashed like a bug potentially on Manaan). Yes it's not the best explanation, but it IS one.
 * Why does fighting Starskiller net darkside points? He is willingly making a choice to risk his life for what he finds to be "fun" with another person (you) aware and agreeing that one of you will die. What is so evil? Yes, you are breaking the law, but one dialogue explicitly says the banning of death matches was done under the current sith martial law, and you don't get darkside points for all the many crimes you commit against them the rest of the game.
 * Because you're taking a life for no reason besides sport.
 * And for credits.
 * And because Starkiller has literally killed over a hundred people in his death matches. He's a criminal and the Dark Side points for taking him down when there is no other way to capture him are a bit silly.
 * Again: you are killing Starkiller for personal profit. You aren't defending yourself. Starkiller isn't trying to kill anybody. Hell, everyone he's killed was in a legal, consentual deathmatch. Killing someone for credits is wrong.
 * Actually, death matches were banned years previously. There's no specific Sith law banning it.
 * There is a mention of new authorities doing it, Sith are a few weeks old.
 * Incorrect. It is explicitly stated by a few people that the Sith * CONTINUED* the old law, which means it was there before them.
 * What the hell is with that eye-searing armour Carth wears in Kotor 2? And while we're at it, what was with the orange Jacket of Doom in the original? All the other characters looked pretty cool in their normal clothes, so why did the designers do that to Carth?
 * Same reason they thought repeating the Anomen romance that everyone hated was a good idea.
 * Carth is an officer of the Republic Navy. The Republic Navy hates your eyes.
 * Well, Admiral Dodonna's uniform in K1 wasn't too bad, and as her replacement Carth should really be wearing the same uniform, so I guess obsidian was too lazy/ran out of time to adapt a male version of that model. As for the orange jacket, it's clearly channeling WWI flying jackets and I've personally seen tanned leathers that were naturally a similar shade, so...
 * I liked that orange jacket. (Admittedly, his admiral suit needs to be taken, set on fire, and shot into a sun)
 * Why is the Exile thought to be the last of the Jedi if Bastila makes no attempt whatsoever to hide?
 * Figure of speech.
 * Bastila apparently is hiding, given that she only steps out of the shadows after you leave Carth and they remain in the room by themselves.
 * The military stratagy used by both the Republic and the Sith Empire is particularly bad (even by First World War standards). Firstly, Bastila's Battle Meditation can afect the morale of troops on the battlefeild, so the Republic stuff her on one warship and send it off to to Taris, a world crawling with Sith troops and the main Sith fleet. Malak decides to stay in orbit around Taris while looking for Bastila (without using the local cops or bounty hunters) instead of simply jumping into hyperspace for Coruscant and seizing power, which would be easy given how bad the Republic military is at defending planets.
 * Taris was part of the Republic, but was invaded and conquered by the Sith at roughly the same time they were ambushing Bastila's ship. Malak doesn't go rushing off to attack Coruscant because jumping headlong into the heart of your enemy's territory in the middle of his forces and smashing headlong into his strongest point is an act of monumental idiocy. Even if the Republic is losing, they've still got a massive fleet, and there's no way in hell he's going to be able to hold Coruscant from thousands of nearby worlds who will all be sending reinforcements.
 * Also, there were no local police, as they had probably been killed or relieved by the Sith during the invasion. Malak did have the local bounty hunters looking for Bastila - note the number of Davik Kang's men searching the area where the pods went down.
 * Haig, Plumer, Monash, Foch, Diaz, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Brusilov demand an apology for the insult because they didn't exactly HAVE the luxury of mobile warfare and had to build modern military strategy more or less from the ground up. And so does Malak, Revan, and the Republican bigwigs because you overlooked matters. For one, you are forgetting that the Jedi Council didn't SEND Bastila off to Taris when it was under occuption, and the pre-release website specifically noted that Taris was a Republican planet but VERY strategically isolated. The tutorial you play is the Sith Fleet's attack on the Republic Navy's forces arraigned to defend Taris, in which they thoroughly crush the defenders and land and occupy the planet AFTER you all have been forced to bail out. This is roughly comparable to VIPs being trapped behind enemy lines after a sudden and violent shift in the battle lines, so they certainly didn't plan to have her on a planet occupied by the Sith. From what little we DO see of Taris (with it being a massive city-planet with billions of people and a strict caste system) the Sith ARE trying to organize the locals to track down Bastila, mainly though criminal contacts. It's just that Taris is really, REALLY large and your party are the EXCEPTION in being able to access all three layers of the planet. And Star Wars- from the original series to the KOTOR legacy and beyond- have shown that you cannot hope to topple the ruling galactic power by going straight for the heart and driving on Coruscant. Because even if you DID manage to take it, the surviving loyalists in the countless systems and planets and fleets around it will promptly cut you off from reinforcements and crush you. That is what happened to the Original Sith Empire during the Great Hyperspace War, Exar Kun's Empire in the Great Sith War, by all accounts the Tionese war back when, the Yinchorri, and PLENTY of others. The camapaigns against the sitting government we HAVE seen turn out even remotely successfully- the Rebellion, the True Sith invasion of Republican space, etc. have pretty much ALL been won by slowly chewing away at the power of the sitting government. Which means going for pretty much everything BUT Coruscant and the Core until you have conquered more or less the rest, at which point you can more or less do whatever the hell you want with Coruscant and the Core, as the True Sith and then the Rebels showed. Since Malak HAS to know that a direct drive on Coruscant would be unwise if not outright suicidal, he probably taking advantage of the advantegous position of his fleet to blockade Taris and search for Bastila- who is believed to be the ONLY thing preventing the Republic from dying outright-, solidify the occupation, regroup after the battle to smash the Taris defense fleet, monitor subordinates in other sectors, and generally wait and plan his next move.


 * If the Exile's special abilities are what allows her to command the rest of her allies (at least Atton, Disiple, 1and Mira (Handmaiden may do it anyways) will run into combat half-naked, why can't she have Mandalore take off that stupid outdated armor?
 * ....because the Exile doesn't command them to do that. You (the player) command the character to do that. (unless you want to argue that Revan has that same power....) The Exile's ability draws other people to the Exile to follow in his/her wake. It doesn't give the Exile lolmindcontrol.
 * Because the life support in his armor is the only thing keeping him alive. And every general knows, that if you have the frickin' terminator on your team, it might not be too smart to order them to commit suicide.
 * Does it bother anyone else that your all-powerful Jedi warrior can miss while striking a door?
 * At first glance, yeah it does look kinda dumb, but I guess what's really happening is that the character missed the lock, not the door. The lock would be a lot smaller after. Of course that does beg the question, why swing your swords around so wildly when you're aiming for such a small target.
 * Because you have to look awesome and deadly, no matter what your target is!
 * So, you have to slay Bendak Starkiller in order to cash in on a government bounty. He won't fight you in the arena unless you beat everyone else and challenge him to a deathmatch. You can't Just Shoot Him because the cantina he stays in is full of autoturrets that will cut you apart. He specifically says that he doesn't leave the cantina because without the protection of the autoturrets someone might try for the bounty. All well and good, a nice Strictly Formula questline. So, you slice-and-dice the competition, challenge Bendak, he accepts, tells you it'll take time to set it up... and then walks out the freaking door. So tell me, why can't I follow him and shoot him in the head?
 * You can walk out after him, but he's gone by then. I suppose once he leaves the protection of the cantina, he runs away really fast.
 * He's a Mandalorian. Maybe he's got a jetpack and flew away.
 * If he had the jetpack, and could get away from the cantina with it, why didn't he do that in the first place?
 * He's a former death match champion and, since he's a Mandalorian, presumably a veteran of several wars. He could probably take a couple of guys who try to attack him when he leaves of the cantina, but the more time he spends unprotected by the autoturrets is more time for the people who want him dead to come after him in numbers too big for him to handle.
 * If I recall correctly, you get Dark Side points for killing him. Why is that? He's a wanted criminal, and has consented to a death match.
 * You don't get them for killing him, you get them for breaking the law -- before the fight even starts.
 * The hologram pop-quiz in the Shadowlands of Kashyyyk. Giving the "evil" answers (accusing Zaalbar, leaving a city full of civilians to die) nets you dark side points. Now, that'd be fine and dandy if the fact that you answered the questions that way actually meant that you would do those things, but why can't I just be a Light Side character who is telling the hologram what it obviously wants to hear so it doesn't shut down on me? I suppose you could argue that lying is a dark side action, but none of the Jedi council have a problem with lying to you about your identity, and I don't think lying earns you any dark side points on any other occasion, unless the lie actually causes harm to the person. Here, it doesn't. In fact, it's not even a person you're talking to; it's just an information terminal. You're getting dark side points for tricking a MACHINE.
 * When you access the computer, it says stuff like "neural scanning" and "neural recognition complete". I don't think the machine is just talking to you, it seems to be actually reading your mind to find out whether you match what's in its memory banks. It would probably be able to tell if you're lying. So, in other words, you can't trick it, if you say it you really have to mean it.
 * That would beg the question of why the quiz is even necessary in the first place. That, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to get dark side points for saying you would do something. If you actually do it, sure, but if you just say you would and are telling the truth...well, that would mean you were dark-sided to begin with. But it doesn't actually affect anything until you say it out loud? So really you're getting retroactive dark side points? I don't know. Karma Meters suck.
 * The quiz is necessary because the computer doesn't completely recognize you. It was programmed to recognize Darth Revan, but since you are Darth Revan with amnesia, it gets confused and decides to see whether or not you think like Darth Revan. If you give Dark side answers, then you are thinking like Darth Revan and it acknowledges you. If you don't, it tries to kill you, you fight a couple of droids, and during battle you start thinking like Darth Revan which the computer detects and it acknowledges you anyway. As for why you get darkside points, the computer is basically giving you choices. Even a dark-sider can still choose to do something different, and every evil choice someone makes corrupts them further. It's worth noting that the choices the computer gives you haven't really come up before, like deciding whether or not you would turn on one of your most loyal followers, or allow one of your cities get wiped out to ensure victory. It isn't something your character would have thought about before, so it makes sense that deciding that you would act like a bastard would make you more of a bastard.
 * Wait, are you saying a good guy would be likely to lie? Light Revan holds onto his beliefs completely and utterly, without ever letting them go in the face of anything. Including a quiz machine. Dark Revan loves showing off how evil he is, so he does.
 * The game biases your choices as little as it can; you can play light-sided however you want as long as you get enough points. Agreeing about the machine detecting lies, though.
 * So what was the reason behind Kreia's speech in KotOR 2, about the galaxy "needs its betrayers"? Why? What would be so terrible about a galaxy that didn't have betrayal? She certainly didn't seem too happy about Sion and Nihilus betraying her.
 *  * coughDarthVadercough*  Remember, not everyone who is being betrayed is necessarily a good guy. At the risk of hitting Godwin's Law here, the July 20 Plot is a good example of a betrayal that (if it had been successful) might have been a good thing.
 * Not to mention that Kreia's perspective is not that of someone who wants the best for everyone in the galaxy. She seems to be more of the opinion that conflict provides people with opportunities to become stronger.
 * Dustil, Carth's son. "I don't believe the Sith are evil! Prove it!", followed by a search for some incriminating evidence. Here's a thought: why not just take Dustil down the corridor a bit and show him the room where the other Sith trainees are using living, unarmed prisoners of war for lightsaber and Force Lightning practice? How completely blind can someone be that they could spend any time at all on Korriban, much less do the things they're expected to do to enter and train in the Sith Academy, and not realize the Sith aren't entirely on the moral up-and-up? I could understand a bit more if Dustil was rejecting the idea of Good and Evil, but in-game he comes across as pretty insanely stupid.
 * Isn't he just acting like a brat to spite his father? That was the impression I got from it.
 * I figured he was being corrupted by the Darkside of the Force. He was already justifying the Sith's actions quite a lot even going as far as justifying the Sith killing his mother. When you show him evidence that a friend of his was killed and he was lied to, he just couldn't keep the justifications up. Plus there is a dialouge option where you tell him to accompany you so you can show him what's going on, but he refuses because he doesn't want the Sith to see him with you.


 * The Sand People have one base at a clearly marked location with no anti-air defence. Why doesn't Czerka just glass them from the air? Hiring a few bombers seems more cost effective than the money you are given for killing single sand people (who wouldn't last long with their homes destroyed.)
 * The Sand People are stealing Czerka equipment. It stands to reason they stole Czerka anti-air weaponry too.
 * Or, alternatively, Czerka wants to recover their stolen equipment after the Sand People are wiped out enough to make it possible. Maybe they don't want to blow it all to smithereens.
 * How the hell do Mandalorians fight effectively with those helmets? Their helmets have preposterously long necks that gradually thicken as it goes down to meet the shoulders. Anyone wearing such a ridiculous, painful-looking helmet would be completely unable to bend their necks or turn their heads, only exacerbating the obvious peripheral vision issues they would presumably suffer from due to having T-visors. Apparently during the Old Republic era, only Mandalore himself was granted the privilege of having a comfortable and practical helmet.
 * They probably like to think they look hella cool in that armour.
 * Elastic material for the neck part? I'm pretty sure it already looks like they can move their necks at least a little when they're talking, though of course that could just be a game graphics thing.
 * They're Mandalorians.
 * One of the books says that Mandalorian helmets somehow have 360-degree vision, and the T-shaped visor is to make people believe that they can't see much. So that's not an issue. Batman's cowl in Batman Begins had an immovable neckpiece too, but he did just fine. S'long as you can see and fight in it, it doesn't matter how comfortable the armor is -- and being Mandalorians, they care even less about comfort than other people.


 * Kreia hates the Force, and hates how the Jedi rely too much on the Force while lacking the ability to cope without it. If so, then why is her character class the primarily force-using Jedi Consular? Or why does she see using the Force even when she admits she can easily fix her eyes? Then she wouldn't need to use the force to not bump into walls.
 * She gives an explanation at the end about using the Force so she can come to understand it, and hopefully destroy it. Still, she admits that she's kind of a hypocrite.
 * In her exact words, she uses it "as a poison:" Its something she sees as evil, but necessary for the time being. One of her things is how everyone has their own strengths (even when she's looking down on everyone), and hers is using the Force. That's one of the reasons she hates it so much; its like a reformed alcoholic only being good at brewing beer.
 * Presumably since Kreia plans on killing the Force, by the time she succeeds and thus won't have her eyesight, she'll have already won anyway, and dealing with blindness after that would be a small price to pay.
 * GO-TO's Insane Troll Logic. He places a bounty on live Jedi, and deploys a number of the HK-50 units after you. These two things in tandem result in the Jedi Exile ending up on, or at least being heavily delayed on, Peragus, and results in the death of all the miners on board the facility, and perhaps the destruction of the facility. GO-TO still happily blames you for the incident, just for being there. After that, he decides Telos isn't worth it anymore, despite anyone and everyone, including him, asserting the success of Telos' restoration is vital to the future of the Republic, and is unwilling to work with the Hutts to save the project, rather than perhaps turning his efforts instead to ensuring the Hutts won't rip off the Republic but still allowing them to provide the much-needed fuel for the station. Next up, he feels it'd be OK for the Sith to be the ruling Force-Users in the Galaxy, even though three wars have happened all in a few years because of the Sith. After finally getting you, and being responsible for fifty billion assassins and bounty hunters chasing you to that point, he decides you're too dangerous anyways to use in saving the Republic, and, again, blames you for the destruction of his Yacht, which was only necessary because he didn't want you to leave and take care of the job he captured you to send you to do in the first place. Finally, he wants Malachor to not be destroyed, because evidently it'd lead to anarchy somehow, and tries to keep around an eyesore of a dead planet that cripples and draws in anything that comes near it. HOW did this guy become a crime lord when he operates with logic like this?
 * He's a droid that went insane. It really isn't suprising that his logic doesn't make sense. He probably doesn't have any problems with building and running an organization devoted to carrying out specific economic activities, as that's more or less what he was designed for in the first place, but coming up with a plan to save the galaxy is so far beyond him that he is incapable of managing it, and failing to figure something out was pretty much the reason he went crazy to begin with.
 * I fail to see how it takes Insane Troll Logic to reach this simple conclusion; there can't be a war if there's only one side. You can't assume everyone is telling the truth in KOTOR 2, because hardly anyone is. Even the DROIDS. The bounty exists because he wants the Jedi wiped out. So there's no one to conflict with the Sith, so a period of peace can be achieved. Or because this forces Jedi into hiding, to prevent gatherings like the one that resulted in the Miraluka being wiped out. The rest of his story can be dismissed as an Indy Ploy to keep existing and to keep tabs on you to use you to reduce conflict. Or neutralize your chaotic influence at some point.
 * There can if that one side is the Sith. And how did he come to the conclusion that the galaxy would be more stable with the people whose mission statement is all about killing each other than with the people who either actively help out or sit around and do nothing?
 * Because either through the same ignorance that many civilians in the first game had about Jedi and Sith, a machine-like inability to grasp the implications of organic philosophies/ideologies/religions or plain blindness against the legacies of Sith regimes of the past, G0-T0 has somehow come to the conclusion that "stability" can be simplified to "lack of external dissent" and is utterly independent of which of the two sides is in control.
 * Why is the Scout class the one who gets the clothing that resembles Han Solo's outfit? Wouldn't it make more sense for the Scoundrel?
 * Han Solo was only a scoundrel back in 1977, and even then only for about thirty minutes. At any point after that, everyone in the series was saintly good or dog-kicking evil.
 * The effect on your bodily appearance I can accept, but why does going fully darkside give you evil underwear?
 * Going fully darkside gives you a 40% off coupon at Evil-Underwear-Mart, obviously.
 * What was Atton doing on Peragus in the first place?
 * He's not a miner, or at least he doesn't give the impression of being one - he's wearing his own clothes in his cell rather than a miner uniform, and he (mistakenly) refers to the exile and the rest of Peragus' population as "you miners".
 * If he just stopped off to refuel, where's his ship?
 * Wookieepedia mentions that he stopped off there for unknown reasons (possibly refueling as you mentioned) and was detained for a security violation and imprisoned in a force field. Beyond that, it's not entirely out of the question that the HK-50 unit destroyed it to prevent miners in the hangar bay from reaching it and possibly escaping.


 * The Jedi Council's entire method of handling the Exile. First off, one of Revan's most esteemed generals defects after Revan successfully turns everyone else under his command to the darkside, and the council's response is to... banish her. Some of their most promising young Jedi are all either dead or evil, but they make no attempt to put Revan's own freaking general to any sort of tactical use. Well, fine, they were clearly unsettled by the Exile's disconnection from the Force (though this seems extra-egregious when one considers that they were willing to use amnesiatic!Revan himself in the first game) and hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Things take a nose-dive after the Exile leaves and the Sith start their war, and keep getting worse until Malak makes his ill-fated assassination attempt on his boss. Then things (canonically) get better for a while, as Revan beats the crap out of Malak, thwarting the destruction of the Republic and the Jedi. Then Revan leaves, chasing some half-remembered threat into the dark edges of space, and in his absense, more Sith unexpectedly turn up. Havoc is wrought. The Jedi are decimated. Then, after a large portion of this havoc has been wrought, the Exile comes back, too, and (canonically) goes around trying to pick up all of the mangled pieces of the Order and help the remaining Jedi Masters get out of trouble. Said Masters then decide that the Exile is the reason for all of these problems, and opt to sever her from the Force. Okay, I can see that as maybe being a feasible option after the much-more-immediate threat of Darth Nihilus and Darth Sion has been dealt with, but how did they think that killing the Exile would do anything to hinder those two? At worst, the Exile is the same sort of aberration in the Force as they are, but one willing to help try and destroy the other, much more hostile aberrations out there. An Enemy Mine situation would be the very baseline for common sense. Did they think Nihilus and Sion were like Summoned Familiars or something, and that cutting the Exile's connection to the Force would just make them 'poof' out of existence?
 * They weren't simply unsettled by the Exile's loss of the Force, they were terrified by it. When they looked at the Exile, they saw the very antithesis of their existence. Later, when the Exile returned, the council began to see the Exile differently, as a real and direct threat. Maybe not immediately, but at some point they were afraid that the Exile would become like Nihilus. While the Sith were at that point a unknown threat to them, the Exile presented another danger that they could and would deal with there and then.
 * The Jedi Masters weren't just worried about the Exile, they were worried that others could become like her. They were afraid that others would "learn the lesson of Malachor V," fears that were realized when the Sith discovered Trayus Academy.
 * What's more, if the Exile really could cause the death of the Force, then as long as the Exile was around, the Jedi were at risk. Not just at risk of losing their powers, but even losing their lives. When Kreia cuts them off from the Force, the implication is that they were unable to survive the process. If they let the Exile go and take on Nihilus, what guarantee was there that the Exile wouldn't (even accidentally) cause the death of the Force before she came back and let them cut her off?
 * If the Exile could cause the death of the Force, then the Masters are still massively incompetent for banishing the one person capable of finding the guy that devoured an entire fucking planet. "You may be a danger to the Force some day so we'll ignore you and steal your powers. I'm sure that much bigger danger who has actively consumed entire planets won't be a problem at all." The Masters, Vrook in particular, are short-sighted, grudge-holding assholes who can't see two feet beyond their own dogma. The Republic would have died under their watch, and they would have let it happen.
 * ^ Except they didn't take the Exile's force powers at all. Kreia told you so in order to make you crave vengeance and/or understanding why. The Exile lost his force powers because he turned away from it in disgust.
 * No, the Jedi never actually take the Exile's powers. However, if you don't end up killing them yourself then they put you in stasis and are in the process of stealing your powers when Kreia comes in and kills them for you...while the much bigger danger who has actively consumed entire planets is still out there. And they know at least a little about him because that's why they all went into hiding.
 * Although the Jedi Masters didn't know about Nihilus, they knew that the Sith were able to form bonds with Force sensitives and siphon their power. These Siths exist because of the Exile's actions on Malachor V. Nihilus learned his powers from the Exile and the Jedi Masters believed that so long as the Exile has a connection with the Force, there will be the potential for another Nihilus. Sending the Exile against Nihilus would be too much of a risk. She could become like Nihilus or someone else could learn from her and become another Nihilus. The Masters believed that it would be best to just sever her connection with the Force and cut their losses.
 * Except that logic falls flat, too. The assassins already learned it. They are still learning it, for them to continue existing. Unless they believe the Exile is actively teaching them to do it, then stripping her of the Force to correct the problem is like killing an inventor after he's already passed out blueprints of his work. Besides, even if they didn't know about Nihilus, the Exile does. She could tell them "Hey, I have the student of the guy who wiped out Malachor on my ship." In fact, she should have, but oh well. They're punishing their only source of information out of fear of a possibility of danger, rather than fighting the actual threat.
 * Why does Saul even need to interrogate the PC on the location of the Jedi Enclave? It's no big secret. Malak knows it's on Dantooine -- he was trained there, and he entered the nearby ruins with Revan in search for the Star Map.
 * He tells you immediately: He just wanted to see if you are willing to cooperate, and show you what happens when you lie to him. In fact knowing him, it's not entirely unlikely he just wanted an excuse to electrocute Carth/Bastila.
 * Karath is holding you prisoner and Malak won't arrive for quite awhile. Why does he need an excuse to torture you all? Even if you tell him everything immediately he still tortures you all into unconsciousness afterwards.


 * Kreia insists that the Exile should follow neither the light side nor the dark side of the Force. So on this troper's second playthrough, she attempted to stay neutral. Not only was this not rewarded in any way, but when the Exile reached Korriban, she was unable to proceed without turning to one side or the other, and having gone there late in the game, there was no way to gain enough points either way. Game over. In a game that introduces greys to a world of Black and White Morality, why should the player be punished for following the game's own philosophy?
 * You only need sufficient LS or DS points to enter the secret tomb, a completely optional level. You can just do the Sith academy and be done with Korriban.
 * Kreia's Philosophy and the game's philosophy are two very different things. The game points out that the ways of the Jedi, of pacifism, caution, and patience, cause people to die because action is never taken, while the methods of the Sith are just plain immoral and petty- it never tells you that neutrality is best, but that what Star Wars typically shows as "good", isn't what good is at all. Kreia, on the other hand, just thinks that any attempt to help people or to cause needless pain is a sign of weakness, and that the best way to survive is to manipulate others to achieve your goals without being caught up in needless cruelty. In other words, they're both Gray, but very very different types.
 * Why in two in the tomb is it a darkside choice to turn against Kreia when it is made entirely clear that she has been manipulating you from the beginning and throughout the game. Maybe I am just too Genre Savvy but I could tell she would turn out to be evil from the very beginning yet it is the darkside action to side with the illusions of your companions despite them being completely right!
 * It's because the only way you can announce your intent to turn against Kreia is by viciously saying she deserves to die and that she's beyond redemption. Not a particularly Jedi thing to do.
 * Thats kind of my point why is the only option either too side against your companions who are acting irrationality but for justified reasons or siding against Kreia for the wrong reason.
 * Oddly enough, during this sequence, I ran into a bug on the Xbox version in which, after choosing the Light Side response (protecting her), and killing Atton and the others, she respawned, and the only way to proceed was not to take a side.


 * In KOTOR 2 I understand that the entire point is that the Jedi of this era are effete and too worried about the negative consequences of their actions that they would rather do nothing at all, but Vrook's grouching to you about how reckless you are seems especially stupid and hypocritical. He says that all actions have consequences and the result of you saving him from the mercenaries is that they will attack Khoonda. He claims that by allowing himself to be captured he'll find out who is attacking the Jedi and his removal from the equation will allow a peaceful conclusion to the hostilities between mercenaries and settlers. We learn that the Exchange wanted Khoonda's administrator dead so they could move in and use the place to their own ends and that they already had plans to attack the settlement even before you rescued Vrook. But let's assume we didn't know that and that the Exchange wasn't involved; the hostilities between the mercs and settlers escalates and a full blown conflict is triggered. Without the presence of Vrook to either negotiate or just fight with the Khoonda militia, the mercs win. That's an entirely plausible consequence of Vrook's action, but rescuing a former comrade from bounty hunters when someone is systematically killing Jedi is "not thinking things through." Again, I understand that these Jedi have decided that they are right and base all their actions accordingly, but the message they normally espoused was "taking risks is bad, don't rock the boat." instead of Vrook's "My risks are foolproof plans, your risks will always end badly."
 * You have to remember one thing: Vrook hates you. He's an overly critical ass who blames you (and only you) for going to war because he has no one else to blame. His logic doesn't make any sense because he's just being vindictive.
 * In my opinion? Sloppy writing. In the first game, Vrook was actual fairly reasonable. He was mistrustful of you at first, but with good reason, considering who you were. But do things properly and you'll earn his respect. But in the sequel he got Flanderized into the overly critical grouch most people remember him as.


 * Why does all the light side dialogue for the post-Leviathan having Revan and others referring to him as 'formerly being Revan'? Revan's new identity is just a cover and simply isn't real. His memories are coming back and, like it or not, he is Revan. Choosing to reject everything about the Sith and Revan's plans for the past few years doesn't make him no longer Revan. If anything, it just sends him back to the pre-Mandalorian War days when he was a Jedi. This Becoming the Mask aspect of the light side is really disturbing.
 * His new identity is real, From a Certain Point of View. All the lessons and experiences he had in the first part of the game were formed without his knowledge of who he was. Once his old memories returned he could recall who he was and what he did as both Jedi Revan and Darth Revan, but the game treats these more like memories from a past life rather than suppressed memories. So yes, he is physically still Revan, but his new self was never erased when his memories were restored and is still, for lack of a better term, the dominant personality. It's not a cover, at least not on his part, and he Became The Mask because he didn't know he was wearing one at all.
 * Also remember that "Revan" is not the person he was as a Jedi - "Revan" is his title as a Sith: the Revanchist. There are several places in which actively choosing to embrace or reject the name of Revan will affect your companions. The Jedi who -became- Revan had their own name and identity, which for gameplay purposes has to be kept secret.


 * In the Restored Content Mod HK-47 tortures an HK-50 unit until it divulges the location of the HK factory. How exactly is he able to do this when it's established that HK-47 cannot harm other HK units? Because his self-preservation protocols prevent him from inflicting harm upon himself and his processor recognizes the other HK units as himself, he is unable to harm them. It seems unlikely he's inflicting pain without injury since the captive HK-50 would know he's not experiencing any actual harm. The only way that would work is if they made assassin droids feel pain and then programmed in a pain threshold.
 * That might actually be a reason why it was cut. Massive, glaring plot hole you found right there.
 * Other HK-50 units are able to torture one of their own in cut content. HK-47 can't kill others of his model, but there's evidently nothing keeping him from inflicting horrible pain. Just because the HK-50 knows it isn't being damaged does not mean that it wouldn't want the very real pain it is feeling to stop.
 * That HK-50 in the cut content was "modified to serve as a diagnostic tool", though, which probably meant they temporarily made him not register as an HK-50 or something so they could torture it for practice.
 * The same logic could apply to HK-47 and his subject. Just have the Exile modify the captured droid. Dialog fails to convey it, of course.


 * okay, massive Fridge Logic moment here, but if most aliens like Wookies and Rodians and so on all have subtitles because Revan and Exile can understand them, why doesn't T3 have subtiles when it's stated that the Exile learned how to understand astro droids?
 * Because he's an R2 expy and it's funnier that way.


 * I'm having a hard time wondering why Sion did not kill Kreia at the beginning. If she manipulated him, I might understand, but I question how that would work. Can anyone else perhaps shed some light on this?
 * Best guess I can wager is that he thought being stripped of the Force by Nihilus was more torture than simply killing her would have been.
 * Actually, I meant on the Harbinger after he cut off her hand, but that's my mistake. But yeah, I never thought of it that way now that you mention it...


 * I hope this won't come off as too silly, but three things at the beginning of the second game REALLY puzzle me:
 * 1) Why did the Sith bother with the secrecy when it came to boarding the Harbinger? Sion is so powerful and pretty much immortal that he could have easily just wiped out the Harbinger's crew by himself, find the Exile a lot sooner and more easily (before HK-50 drugged and locked him/her away and Kreia brought him/her to the Ebon Hawk), and kill him/her.
 * 2) As cool as it was to see the Harbinger arrive at Peragus during your space walk, I really think it would have made A LOT more sense for it not to arrive until at least you're about to fight HK-50. In-universe, the Exile has probably got to take quite a while getting through the dormitories and back to the Administration level. How are the Sith (especially Sion himself) not all over the place? If they are, why did they not only leave Atton and Kreia alive, but also let them join up with the Exile, and then let them all board the Harbinger?!! Especially if Sion entered the fray, the Exile, Kreia, and Atton would be dead in seconds. Atton has no powers (not yet, unless you count in-game automatic self-revival lol) and Kreia and the Exile (we know via their Force bond) are just barely regaining Force powers at this point; they're nowhere near that powerful. I can understand that the Sith (probably) don't realize why the trio boarded the Harbinger in the first place, but still.
 * 3) Where the hell did the Sith troopers that attack you the Ebon Hawk and the hangar come from??? I could understand if they were Sith Assassins, but regular Sith Troopers (at least as far as I know) don't have the ability to invisibly cloak themselves; where were they all hiding?
 * They could be wearing stealth-field generators.
 * In order:
 * 1) Sion implicitly did wipe out the crew all by his lonesome. As to why he didn't do so sooner, he probably wanted to be sure that the ship couldn't call for help. They are trying to avoid their presence being known.
 * 2) Sith rarely seem to be so proactive in this game, again because they are trying to be secretive. They knew the Exile was on the station but they couldn't know HK had gone and murdered the entire crew. They no doubt wanted the Exile to board the Harbinger (it is a friendly ship, as far as she would know), where they could take care of her quietly.
 * 3) That part was just poorly thought out.
 * How? How are Taris's laws allowed to exist in the Republic? Their Fantastic Racism is sickening by Republic standards and yet they're (until the occupation) part of a multi-species democracy that embraces the unity of the galaxy's races. How are their laws even allowed to be in the books, never mind eagerly enforced? Even moreso, how does the Republic even allow the treatment of the Outcasts to continue? It's explicitly stated that the only two punishments for crime on Taris are either death or exile to the undercity, and that the convicted's children aren't allowed to return to the surface despite having nothing to do with the crimes of their ancestors. Why hasn't the Republic ever come in and put a moratorium on any of these before the Sith occupation?
 * The KOTOR comics explain that Taris' Republic membership is something very recent which was obtained through corruption. Taris is full of Republic business interests, and when the Mandalorians came a little bit too close to it, the Senate gave the planet Republic membership, a Jedi presence and a huge fleet to protect the sector. Also, the Senator was crooked and gained his Senate seat in exchange for tax cuts for some businesses.
 * The 2nd game tries deconstructing RPG leveling up mechanics by saying you siphoning the force from what you kill, but one problem that, you level up in fights with DROIDS. There's even dialog after the fight with the two HK-50s on Telos saying you are starting to get closer to reconnecting to the force, so the game say's your siphoning the force from machines with no connection to it.
 * As far as I remember, the only droids the Exile herself fights that aren't accompanying other Humans are the HK-50's, and ... well, I don't know what the fuck, actually. Maybe she's just regaining her connection to the Force automatically and getting into fights, no matter what with, helps it along?
 * On Citadel Station, you are assigned to go to the docking bay to retrieve a droid intelligence, either to escort it safely back to the Ithorian compound or to steal it for Czerka. While there, you are attacked by thugs who try to take the droid from you. This makes sense if you're there on behalf of the Ithorians (in which case, Czerka sent the thugs), but what if you're working for Czerka? Did they hire goons to attack their own hired goon?
 * Related to the above, when you fly down to Telos to look for the Ebon Hawk, Czerka's mercenaries shoot your shuttle down and then attack you. Again, this makes perfect sense if you sided with the Ithorians on Citadel Station (in which case, you've spent the last several days sabotaging their operations), but not so much if you were a Czerka merc yourself. Why would the company try to kill one of its best "assets"?