Why Did The Twist in Knights of the Old Republic Work?

God grant me the ability to pull off bald as well as Malak does, I'm going to need it in the next few years.

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PLEASE DO NOT ADAPT KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC

In the post-Rise of Skywalker era of Star Wars, fans frequently call for the return of material from the Expanded Universe (EU) Legends. Dissatisfaction with where ROS left the story has left fans eager to revisit the rich backstory. This sentiment has only grown with the work of uber-fan Dave Filoni and his Mando-verse, which has reintroduced favorite Legends characters into canon. Recently, for example, Ahsoka brought Grand Admiral Thrawn to live action.

As Filoni works through the top of the “Disney Please Canonize” list, and ignores the ones that aren’t compatible with the new canon(Dash Rendar and Mara Jade will live on forever in our hearts), the calls regarding Knights of the Old Republic into the canon have been consistent since the EU purge. Beyond bringing the game into canon, something we might anticipate if the remake ever actually comes out(and have optimism for, as KOTOR characters continue to appear in Action Figure form, and star in the mobile gacha game Galaxy of Heroes), fans have repeatedly expressed an interest in adapting Knights of the Old Republic into a Disney Plus series or a movie.

KOTOR is on my personal Mt. Rushmore of favourite games. Alongside Homeworld, it is forever near or at the top of said list, with the other two spots probably shifting in and out of a broader list of mostest-favouritest games depending on my mood. Star Wars itself has always had an outsized footprint in my psyche. I grew up on the X-Wing novels, playing the Decipher card game and, of course, many Star Wars Video Games. Rebellion, Shadows of the Empire, Rogue Squadron, Racer, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Jedi Academy, and quite a few more.

However, KOTOR rose above the rest. My nostalgia undoubtedly obscures my vision to its flaws and creakiness, and I suspect that had I played them back-to-back (especially with the Restored Content Mod), KOTOR 2 may have exceeded the original in my estimation. You might call it The Last Jedi to KOTOR’s Force Awakens, and I mean that as a compliment to both games. But KOTOR stands alone in my mind as the pinnacle of the many, many, many attempts to bring Star Wars into the video game medium.

I’m going to beg for an extended pardon for what is to be a lot of generalization to come in this section. If I refer to something as being the opinion of a group of people, I do so only to illustrate a point. For example:

When asked about what makes KOTOR so great, some fans will give specific answers. And I agree that the soundtrack IS great, the characters ARE well realized, and, despite being in a fully 3D game rather than its usual home of isometric pseudo-3D, the DnD based combat IS well balanced and interesting. The fans who offer these answers are likely doing so in an attempt to give a non-vanilla answer to the question immediately after giving such a common answer to the “What’s your favourite game of all time?” question that spurred it. However, much like KOTOR, vanilla is a GREAT flavour, and saying so does not make you boring. The vanilla answer to what makes KOTOR so great is, of course, the “Story”.

“Why the scare quotes around story there?” I hear you ask. I’m glad you asked, rhetorical reader, because it’s the whole point I’ll be attempting to make here. Despite KOTOR being one of my favourite games ever, and despite my undying love of all things Star Wars (I consumed ALL of Book of Boba Fett AND Obi Wan like I skipped breakfast AND lunch), I do not want Disney to adapt KOTOR. Not as a live action series, not as a comic book, not as a movie, not as a trilogy of YA novels, and not as a Dave Filoni-produced animated series. The why is also why I think the twist in KOTOR worked. If you have somehow made it this far into my weird blog post about this 20-year-old video game, don’t know the major twist, but ARE interested playing in this game, go play it! It’s been ported to mobile devices and you can get it for the Switch, or for almost nothing on Steam, and I clearly recommend you do so. Okay, spoiler warning issued.

PART 1 – WHAT’S IN A NAME or THEMES

Pressing "Random" here is truly peak Star Wars. I don't know how they did it, but it's the best Star Wars name generator ever made.

The first thing you do in Knights of the Old Republic is make your character. You select your class, your appearance(from a selection of existing templates, no character creation here), your skills, and then your name. If you don’t have a name in mind, don’t worry – a Star Wars-y type name is pre-suggested for you, and you can press the Random button to generate a new one to your heart’s content. Look at all the different people you could be!

You aren’t offered a choice of backstories per say, though one is hinted at by the description of the classes. This is backed up by some of the first dialogue you experience after starting the game.

The tradition in CRPGs, both past and present, is to treat the protagonist as having influence over the world only from the start to the end of the game, often in a broad, undefined way. Fallout 1, though not the first example, established this archetype with “The Vault Dweller.” Players can choose the Vault Dweller’s name, gender, appearance, and character build, role-playing in various ways. However, world-builders had to balance these variations within a cohesive fictional universe, so the character becomes “The Vault Dweller”—a mythical figure known for completing the main quest, often with a “canon” ending, while their minor choices remain obscure. This approach is mirrored in games like Mass Effect’s Commander Shephard, Skyrim’s Dovahkiin, Oblivion’s Hero of Kvatch, Dragon Age’s Warden, South Park: The Stick of Truth’s New Kid, Vampire: The Masquerade’s Fledgling, and Knights of the Old Republic 2’s Jedi Exile. These games, anticipating sequels, create a “canonical” lane for the player character that leaves room for every player’s unique version to coexist—even if each one made completely different choices.(Some of the particulars of the above listed examples don’t quite do exactly that, but that’s the general idea).

KOTOR opens with the player character waking from a dream (more on this in part 2) and immediately discovering they suffer from amnesia. How well the twist works—and whether you see it coming—depends on how much you buy into this premise.

At first glance, a character with amnesia often raises suspicion. If a movie opens with a character claiming they have no memory of who they are or what they’ve done, the audience would naturally expect the plot to revolve around that amnesia. However, many first-time players of KOTOR—especially when it was first released—did not make this assumption.

Why didn’t they? Because you’re a blank slate CRPG protagonist. There’s always some sort of obscuring of your character’s backstory – either you choose a specific one, or you’re a mysterious blank slate, or vague allusions are made, or whatever. There’s no way for the developers and writers to account for the volume of material required to have different backstories, and while it’s possible to write a pre-set background in such a way as to allow meaningful freedom that feels cohesive.

This blank slate is not just a mechanical necessity of the free choices provided by this type of game, it’s also the key to one of the game’s primary themes. Whatever your character’s choices and actions up until now don’t matter – who this character is will be defined by who they are going forward. You spend the game making choices about how to resolve various squabbles, which faction should win over another, how much to assist with the plight of others when you could gain instead… This is how you define the character you are role-playing. The blank slate component makes your choices more impactful. If your character were a noble Jedi at the beginning, it’d be out of character for them to demand a reward for assisting someone in need. If they were a duplicitous scoundrel, it’s be out of character for them to help someone without expectation of reward.

By forcing you to build a character through choices, you are literalizing the idea that we are defined by the choices we make, and not “who we are”. The game is building a foundation that it will then challenge by revealing “who we are”. Mission makes this explicit when the crew is told about your identity – “You are who you are now, right?”

At the very end of the light side path, after you’ve defeated Malak, you can offer him one last chance at salvation. No matter what you’ve done in the past, your next choice can be different. If you’ve wronged people in the past, you can always do right by the next person you meet. Hiding Revan’s past from the characters and from you forces this question upon the player. If a person changes what they do, do they change who they are? And if so, does it matter why?

PART 2 – FORESHADOWING or SUBVERSION

Does the way in which this echoes Anakin's being accepted for training in Episode 1 make us more suspicious, or less?

Someone whose opinion I respect but whose identity I cannot recall, said that for a twist to work, it has to be foreshadowed and logical enough that about 10% of your audience is able to see it coming. Any more, and it’s not really an exciting twist. Any less, and it seems like it came out of nowhere. Having spent literal decades discussing this game and consuming media about it, I am nowhere close to knowing how many people Saw It Coming. I can tell you that when I played it for the first time at the age of 14, I had absolutely no idea that it was coming, and given the online discussion I see, I suspect that a decent portion of players didn’t either.

A memorable montage plays immediately after the reveal, standing out not only for its narrative impact but also because it’s prerendered. In a game rendered almost entirely in real time, this is one of the few prerendered scenes. While not remarkable on its own, the montage revisits previous events with enhanced textures and smoother animation, adding a cinematic and authoritative feel to these flashbacks.

As I said earlier, whether or not the twist works on you is largely dependent on whether a character with amnesia raises your suspicions. The game isn’t passive about this though. It does throw some doubt on the story it presents you, and nobody does more of this than Carth.

Carth tells you that the force can do terrible things to a mind, even causing you to forget who you are. He tells you that your being aboard the Endar Spire makes no sense. He tells you that you always seem to be in the right place at the right time.

And he’s a dick. He is characterized as a paranoid, untrusting jerk who is unappreciative of what others do for him. Carth not wanting to talk about something after explicitly bringing it up has been a meme since the age when that word was applied specifically to motivation-poster style TOP TEXT / BOTTOM TEXT templates.

It’s no accident – The other character who casts doubt on the player character is Master Vrook. Aside from being voiced by Ed Asner of all people, Master Vrook is also a dick. If you google “Master Vrook” (Or rather, if I google Master Vrook while writing this) the first result is his Wookieepedia page. The second result is a Reddit thread on the KOTOR subreddit titled “Does anyone else hate Master Vrook?”

Vrook, as we later realize, is not suspicious of our character’s identity or circumstance, they are suspicious of Revan’s nature. He expresses concern about allowing Revan to be trained, about allowing Revan and Bastila to pursue the Star Maps, and he is stern. His peers on the council seem to reprimand this sternness, and in the moment we receive this as chastising his close-mindedness to the scenario, which reinforces our skepticism of it. In reality, they are chastising the degree to which he almost reveals who you are. It is an incredibly deft bit of dialogue writing.

While in the instance of Carth, his suspicion and questioning is likely to be received as strong characterization, Vrook is filling the role of an archetype. Oftentimes in RPGs where an ascendant hero is called to action, an elderly skeptic is there to remind us of the stupendous nature of this ascent. In the archetypal role, this function is not there to cast doubt on the nature of the hero, but to enforce just HOW special your special boy/girl is, and Vrook fills this role well.

Vrook’s skepticism is also received within the context of what IS known about the game. This is a game about choice – YOU CAN BE THE BAD GUY! Purchasers of the Xbox version of the game would flip its case over to read “CHOOSE YOUR PATH” atop the blerb, which includes the line “Can you master the awesome power of the Force on your quest to save the galaxy? Or will you fall to the lure of the dark side?”

When Vrook expresses concern that the player character may fall to dark side, it is not received as something that should cause us to question our assumptions – You start this game knowing that turning the dark side is a path available to you! Of course a wizened Jedi Master is concerned you might do exactly that.

Here’s where I make my confession – As a 14-year-old, I did not see the twist coming. The extent to which I can access my initial experience at the time is very limited. However, it leaves me with the conclusion that I was not dissuaded of my suspicions by the game’s inserting them into The Mouths of unlikable characters. My media literacy was pretty poor. That said, it is a move made by the game, and one I argue it makes very well.

The line of demarcation between “Too much foreshadowing” making a twist obvious and “Not enough foreshadowing” making a twist seem unearned and out of nowhere is, on an individual level, largely dependent on your experience with the convention, the medium, and your overall media literacy. Is the twist as surprising now as it was then? Would it be as surprising to the 35-year-old writing this as it was to the 14-year-old who first played it? To be honest, I doubt it, but I still see people raving about the twist online every so often to this day, so who knows?

Would it be as SATISFYING? Absolutely…

PART 3 – THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD or THEMES

If you've never checked out the David Suchet Poirot adaptations, do yourself a favour and check them out.

Spoiler warning of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – If you’ve not read the novel, go read it now. Forget you were reading this stupid blog post and go read one of the best mystery novels ever written.

Okay, with that out of the way… While The Murder of Roger Ackroyd can compare to a multitude of other fiction wherein someone unassuming is revealed to be the bad guy all along, the obvious throughline with KOTOR is the first person nature of the narrative. Much like in KOTOR, Agatha Christie uses the conventions of her medium and genre to blind her audience to the twist coming down the tracks. The Poirot novels are never written from his point of view – something they have in common with Sherlock Holmes’ adventures – but from the POV of his assistant Captain Hastings. Christie gives us a new narrator for Ackroyd, but our hackles are not raised by this, as Hastings has retired after being married. This isn’t a temporary contrivance for a one-time gag, either – Hastings would not return until The End of Poirot’s career, and only appeared in 8 of the 33 Poirot novels.

However, Hastings’ (and Watson’s, for that matter) time in the narrators’ seat had conditioned the audience to trust the narrator to a level that renders them almost invisible. Their characteristics are meant to serve their role as observer and stand-in for the audience, with occasional mentions of past or off-screen happenings with our detective to give some flavour and depth. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, our new narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, is a new character in the world of Poirot. His assumptions are different, though the reader is likely receive these as a refreshing view on a character the audience (and Captain Hastings) is deeply familiar with.

A novel’s narrator is not completely invisible – They have thoughts, assumptions, and lines that make their characters real in the world of the fiction. A novel’s audience stand-in is not so much the reader as they are the lens through which the view the events.

Part of what makes the Ackroyd twist so compelling is the position it places the audience with. Reading the words of a narrator is, in no small measure, to enter their perspective. By revealing that perspective belongs to a murderer is, in part, to place the reader in a position of culpability. The eyes you were looking out of belonged to a murderer. In the novel’s conclusion, we do not shift perspective, but instead stay with Dr. Sheppard as he outlines his deceptions and crimes, and even seems to gloat in them.

This brings us back to KOTOR. The twist of Ackroyd is, fundamentally, a magic trick. It is play within the genre and the established world of Poirot that brings with it an incredible rush. I would argue that KOTOR’s twist goes much deeper.

The primary theme of KOTOR is choice. This is also the primary mechanic of KOTOR, setting aside combat. Choosing how to respond to scenarios, how to react, which path to pursue isn’t just how the story unfolds, it was also a primary selling point. Again I will cite the back of the game case, which leads with “CHOOSE YOUR PATH”.

Within the bounds of the story, this theme is hit repeatedly like a gong. Inherent to the nature of The Force is the question of destiny. Why were you on the Endar Spire? Why can you can Bastila share visions? These potential clues are presented within a context of the Force as a guiding hand, steering a chosen hero towards their destiny.

The rudimentary light side/dark side scale in your character screen isn’t just there to present your character looking all noble or sinister – it’s there to remind you of the path you’ve walked, and the decisions you’ve made. If you make an evil choice (and believe me, there’s not a lot open to interpretation in this game), then this is reflected physically on your character – a sum total of the decisions you’ve made until that point.

But the game does not lock you in to anything – Even if you choose the most sinister of outcomes throughout your play (up until the endgame), you can make the next one as nobly as you want.

And when it is revealed who the player character is, the question is literalized by the discussion of your party members. Are you Revan, the terrible Sith Lord bent on conquering the galaxy? Or are you the character you’ve been since you woke up on the Endar Spire? Are you both?

The reveal does not just perform a neat magic trick, it plays into primary theme of the game – Is your past also your destiny? Can you walk a different path? If you’ve done everything in your life wrong, can you do the next thing right? As if to hammer these themes home with a sledge hammer – If it turns out you’re a terrible Sith Lord, can you choose to be good?.. Whatever that is?

PART 4 – DOING THE RIGHT THING or COMPLICATING THE FORCE

Good point Carth

Knights of the Old Republic released in 2003, just over a year after the release of Episode II: Attack of the Clones. While the EU had spent a lot of time playing around with varying moral themes, the idea that the Jedi might not be perfect was not frequently visited. The Jedi Academy trilogy, the Dark Empire comics, and 1998’s “I, Jedi” all explored the potential for overconfidence and arrogance that could come with Jedi training, and these things were usually the unspoken assumed reason for the downfall of the Jedi. However, as was the fashion of the time, the EU only gently tread on the ground that Lucas had staked. The fall of the Republic and the Jedi Order was left a mystery – And with it, the nature of the thing which fell.

KOTOR is often acclaimed for choosing the setting of “The Old Republic”, wiping away any potential relevance or connection with the original trilogy or any existing EU material through thousands of years of temporal distance. But this decision was as much practical as it was inspired – The consequences of the different paths the player character could walk in the game must be made irrelevant to the canon Star Wars story, and nothing better obscures the consequences of decision than thousands of years of time.

But that didn’t mean that Bioware wanted to do a fresh take on Star Wars. Much as they brought new ideas to the universe, they have a Yoda on the Jedi Council (Master Vandar), you visit Tatooine, you fly around in a disk-shaped freighter, and while Darth Malak is not Darth Vader, he’s also not not Darth Vader.

However, this game came out before Revenge of the Sith, and even then, the notion that the Jedi were not the “good” guys was not a common one. It’s worth revisiting what the reveal tells us about the Jedi Council, because the moment of the story where the reveal occurs is also the moment where Malak blows up Dantooine(hey, remember Dantooine? That’s the planet Princess Leia mentions in Empire!), Malak captures Bastila, and removes our ability to have any reckoning with any of the people involved in this decision.

The Jedi Council sent a hit squad of Jedi after Darth Revan to kill him. When Malak betrays his master, and his ship’s fire on Revan’s knocks Revan unconscious, Bastila captures and escapes with Revan subdued. the Jedi Council, presented with the captured dark lord of the sith, choose to wipe his memory in hopes that he’ll lead them to the Star Forge.

Within the mechanic context of the game, the power to affect or dominate one’s mind is not a light or dark side power, but one of a very few powers universal to users of both sides of the force. With that said, as Carth so pointedly puts it in his particular piece of foreshadowing, wiping someone’s mind of their memories is a terrible thing to do to them, to say nothing of the deception of doctoring Republic Naval records to place Revan on the Endar Spire, to play along with the charade of Bastila having encountered them by chance, and to be astonished at the prodigal potential of this person in using the force.

Even in the post-Revenge of the Sith (and post-Acolyte) world in which I write, I cannot think of an individual choice as reprehensible as this made by any iteration of the Jedi Council. Of course, it’s not a completely black-and-white issue. Wiping Revan’s mind was the only way the council saw to locating the Star Forge, and without doing that the Republic would surely fall to the endless stream of war machines employed by the Sith Empire, and the galaxy would fall to tyranny.

What is the worst thing you can do to a single person in the name of preventing greater evil? KOTOR was released on July 15, 2003. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp was opened in January 2002. Was this in the mind of Drew Karpyshyn when he lead the writing of KOTOR? I don’t know, but it was something in the minds of the people who played it.

The game pulls this punch in the end – Either path you choose, there is no reckoning for the Jedi Council for what they did. If you choose light, everybody’s happy in a victory ceremony (held on the steps of the Temple of the Ancients?!?). If you choose dark, Master Vandar’s ship is destroyed, and we are left to assume that the rest of the council falls to Revan’s unstoppable conquest.

But the nature of the choice is still stark, and undermines any suspicions about our player character. Main characters have amnesia all the time, and Revan was last seen in battle with Bastila. If you were Revan, that’d mean the Jedi Council wiped your memory, and they wouldn’t do that, right?

CONCLUSION – NO PLEASE, THANK YOU

A pretty typical fan casting of KOTOR.

To briefly summarize:

  • A main character with amnesia is much less suspicious in a video game than in any other medium.
  • Many elements that would normally cause the audience to suspect the main character’s identity are obscured by common conventions and mechanics specific to video games.
  • The primary theme of KOTOR’s story is choice. This theme is deepened by the nature of the audiences interaction with it, which is choice. The thematic resonance of the twist would be wiped away if presented in another medium.

Disney, please do not adapt Knights of the Old Republic. Go ahead and fund the remake, but do not let Dave Filoni make a Disney Plus series about it, do not let someone pitch it to you as a successor to the “prestige” Star Wars slot that Andor is about to vacate. Leave it be.

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