Ruzha Dotsina

KOTOR 2 is darker, sadder, brooding as it is over battles that did not turn out as expected. The matricidal story which overwrites the patricidal bravura of Star Wars is deeply disturbing. With the mother so irretrievably dead, there is nothing left to screen the emptiness of the universe: this might be the true source of complaints about the game rather than bugs and flaws in the plot. The Byronic arch-rebel Kreia is a magnificent creation in its own right, the confrontation with Malak in Shyrack cave (“Now that you know how things turned out, would you do it again?”) is uncanny, the language (of Visas, Kreia…) has moments of genuine poetic power. Whatever its flaws, the game stretches towards new potentialities for the genre (will the new technology be able to rival the past glory of literature and the cinema?) and towards an audience that may not yet have come into existence. Will the market allow for this potential to be realized? I doubt it.