Mr. Pickles
Literate
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2021
- Messages
- 5
After finishing KOTOR for the millionth time I drank a fucking ton of energy drinks and spent the next 4 hours writing down all my thoughts about it. It ended up being like 5000 words so I definitely understand if no one wants to read all this shit. I just needed to get all this stuff off my chest and I figured maybe there's someone out there who cares about this crap as much as I do and they might tell me what they think about my thoughts. It would be fun to read shitposts about it too, maybe. I would totally shit on a random stranger's long rant about a video game that has pretty much lost all of its cultural relevance.
Here goes. Sorry if I don't reply right away, I think I might go pass out.
One thing I've learned from being a lifelong video game enthusiast is people don't want to entertain the idea that something they love isn't actually all that great. To be fair nobody wants to watch their sacred cow get torn down. We naturally want to hold on to the enjoyment of it for as long as we possibly can. Most people don't have enough good stuff in their lives to easily afford an about face on something they really enjoy, even for something as petty as a video game. I'm one of those people, but what makes me a little different is my level of obsession with video games.
I used to love KOTOR to an unhealthy degree. The game really defined my early teenage years. The party characters all felt like my close friends and Bastila was the cool Jedi girlfriend I wished I could have in real life. The quest to stop Malak felt like being on a crusade. I played the game so much as a teen that after replaying it again recently I still remembered every story beat, every conversation and every quest perfectly.
But after replaying it for maybe the fortieth time I have to say that the overwhelmingly positive public opinion about KOTOR just isn't correct.
KOTOR is not a masterpiece. It isn't even a flawed masterpiece. Honestly, it's a pretty weak RPG.
The real problems with KOTOR aren't surface level like “the game is old” or “the graphics suck.” They're fundamental problems with the gameplay and characters that have been overlooked by the vast majority of people who played it, including me, for almost two decades now.
One last thing before I get into it: the purpose of this essay is not to convert you. You are not stupid or wrong for enjoying KOTOR. This essay is simply meant to be an explanation for why someone obsessed with KOTOR could fall out of love with it 17 years later.
I'm sad that I don't enjoy KOTOR anymore. This essay is my catharsis.
Combat
Graphics are the least important aspect of an RPG. It's nice to have good graphics, of course, but a good plot, deep characters and functional combat are way more important. It's why the crappy pixelated background on Tatooine doesn't bother me when a more abstract concept like the broken combat does.
If you're new to both KOTOR and DnD it's easy to make the game hard for yourself by building your characters wrong. But if you know how to build your characters right the game is unacceptably easy. The only time the game is challenging for the player is when they're new to it.
Just turning the difficulty up doesn't resolve the issue. With a properly optimized build nothing the additional difficulty adds matters at all. You're always too powerful for the buffs enemies receive on the highest difficulty to make a real difference.
If you do switch the difficulty the menu informs you that the game is balanced around normal difficulty. I think this indicates that at some level Bioware understood that the combat system they were delivering had some serious issues. It's basically an admission that the combat is poorly balanced.
Well-balanced difficulty is incredibly important for role playing games. The moment the player realizes that none of the enemies they'll face can pose a threat, the dramatic tension disappears. For example, why does Bastila suddenly want to sacrifice herself for Carth and I to escape the Leviathan when I am absolutely mopping the floor with Malak?
For some games difficulty isn't that important, but in an RPG appropriate difficulty is necessary to maintain immersion.
Game Feel
KOTOR is full of small time wasters that constantly break up the flow of the game. Did you just make the mistake of walking into a corner to open a locker? Now you have to waste five seconds switching to one of the party members blocking your way and move them so you can get out. The first couple of times it happens it's a little frustrating, but by the tenth time it happens it's infuriating.
Combat is also full of time wasters. When a battle starts you scroll one at a time through your list of abilities and items to find what you want and queue it up. Then you have to repeat the same process with your two other characters. Unfortunately though you were facing some dark Jedi and the first thing they did was use force push on you, wiping your combat queue. Once you finally have control of your character again you have to pause and requeue all of your attacks. But now your character is standing too close to the other party members so you have to move one of them out of the way. Do that, pause, then click through the list of your abilities one at a time again and re-requeue. This entire process can happen multiple times in one battle.
Now let's say you were patient enough with the game's combat mechanics to win the battle and you finally got rewarded with a level up. But this time you opened the level up screen all you can do beyond adding a few skill points is add one new force power. You'll have to wait at least another 30 minutes or so to make any more significant changes to your character. Maybe 30 minutes doesn't sound so bad, but as an example of how long that really is on Korriban you can go through the entire shyrack cave and three of the tombs in that period of time. That's a lot of stuff you've killed and quests you've done to get rewarded with just a few skill points and one force power.
Adding skills and traits to your characters is a fundamental reward in role playing games, and stretching out the period in between receiving those rewards for too long does nothing except waste the player's time. And wasting the player's time does more than just wear down their patience. It ruins the flow, and distracts the player with thoughts about how annoying it is just to do basic things.
Locations and World Building
Overall, KOTOR is a mix of empty places that feel like a slog, places that should be cool but ultimately aren't and awesome places that make you wish you could live in this universe. Dantooine, Tatooine, Kashyyyk and the underwater section of Manaan are all chores to get through. The city section of Manaan and all of Korriban are extremely fun and well executed. Generally speaking the planets with tons of open space full of random stuff to kill ad nauseum are the boring planets. The planets with lots of people who have a personal connection to the war between the Republic and the Sith are the fun planets.
It's important to note for later that the best locations in the game are the ones Bioware created for it and the boring locations are the ones which were established by the movies or the Star Wars Holiday Special. It's unfortunate that Bioware felt compelled, or maybe literally was compelled by Lucasarts, to add in locations the player would recognize from the movies. Admittedly Bioware added some interesting lore to these pre-existing locations but it doesn't make up for how boring they are.
Considering how great some of the locations created by Bioware were and how uninspired the rest was, it's disappointing that we ended up visiting old locations for the memberberries instead of having more of the new locations that worked so well.
Not all of the new locations worked, though. Taris is just Coruscant is just Trantor. There's really no other way to frame it. The idea of a city that has spread across the entire surface of its planet is cool enough that I'm honestly fine with having several of them in the same universe, but it's a missed opportunity to show us something actually new. In the first place Coruscant was an idea that Lucas stole from a better writer, though to be fair to him many people have stolen ideas from Asimov.
Beyond just being a rip off of a rip off, Taris starts to overstay its welcome before you make it to Davik's estate. There's only so many dumpy apartments and dirty walkways you can see before it starts to get a little old. I think there's just enough variety to keep it from getting too boring but I'm always somewhat relieved to escape from Taris.
And while it's true that this planet is directly related to the game's primary conflict, your actions don't have any impact on the planet's situation even though they should. For example, you can deliver a cure for the zombie virus that's killing the people of the undercity but nothing actually happens when you do. There's no scenes of happy people lining up for free vaccines if you donated the cure to the doctor or desperate people coughing up their last credits for the vaccine if you sold the cure to Davik. If we had seen something like this, watching the people who got the vaccine get killed in the bombardment would have been shocking and help to emphasize just how violent and horrible the Sith are. Because as it is you don't actually see any normal people getting killed when it happens.
You shouldn't just dismiss this and say “it would have been nice to see but who cares” because this is basic RPG world building.
In New Vegas, which is much smarterer and betterer, if you kill the fiend leadership near Camp Mccarran 1st Recon will leave and head for Camp Forlorn Hope. And the status of the camp during the second battle for hoover dam gets reported on over the NCR emergency radio. If you didn't bother helping out the report is that the camp got wrecked, but if you did help the camp suffers some damage but survives. To top it all off, Mr. New Vegas will report on some of the bigger stuff you've done on his radio station. So even if you're not personally witnessing all the consequences of your actions, the game is still acknowledging your actions or lack thereof.
This kinda stuff may seem unimportant but it's actually very important because it helps the world seem like it's full of real people and that your actions and decisions are having an impact on them.
Even when you attack the Sith base and kill the planetary governor nothing about the planet's situation changes whatsoever. It's such a massive missed opportunity to show the player their actions have consequences. The governor's death would have made for a much better excuse for Malak to glass the planet than “this is taking too long, it's time to inject some excitement into the story.” The cutscene where Malak orders the bombardment would have become better instantly if instead of randomly ordering the bombardment, Saul had to break the news about the base to Malak and then Malak ordered the bombardment.
Bioware's writer had a great opportunity to make Malak seem truly ruthless in that scene, but in reality he just seems impatient. This is just one example of the writer choosing to make Malak a less interesting villain. More on that soon.
Finally we have the Star Forge, and while it's technically a new location it's so close to being the Death Star that I have to invoke what I said earlier about visiting movie locations for the memberberries. The Star Forge doesn't fire a big fuck off space laser but it serves the exact same narrative purpose as the Death Star. The Star Forge is a massive space station that gives the bad guys an edge over the good guys, and the good guys have to destroy it. The Death Star is exactly the same thing.
Lehon is kind of cool for the mix between tropical paradise and junk planet but it's short length and association with the Star Forge makes it forgettable.
Story
There's a fine line between paying homage and ripping something off, and KOTOR crosses that line often. The best way to demonstrate this is to compare the story beats of KOTOR to the story beats in the Original Trilogy.
The following story events happen in both KOTOR and the OT.
Star Wars is one of those tricky properties to adapt where the fans revere the original material and expect other Star Wars media to give them the same sense of adventure. But KOTOR borrows way too much from the movies to call it an original story. The fact that some of the story elements in KOTOR are in a different order from the movies should not distract you from the fact that they are the same story elements.
Making video games is hard, and making a good role playing game is even harder. I don't mind that Bioware wanted to stick to the Star Wars formula, but every important story beat was lifted from the movies.
I think many fans aren't aware of how much KOTOR directly rips off the movies. On the other hand I'm sure there are some fans who are aware and they're perfectly fine with it. Maybe for those fans the problems with the story aren't important because they enjoyed the characters. If you're one of those people then I'm sorry in advance for what I'm about to do.
Party Characters
Out of the nine party members six are plot devices with one personality variable and one story function. Mission, Jolee, T3, HK and Canderous's only story function is to get the player into a new location. Juhani's only function is to be dealt with at the grove on Dantooine. Zaalbar serves no story function whatsoever other than to be Mission's condition to help you get into the Vulkar base.
None of these characters have any further impact on the main story after they've served their purpose and if you do their side missions the one personality conflict that defines them is more or less resolved. The only exceptions to this are Jolee, who is disturbed by the revelation that his friend murdered someone but is otherwise unchanged, and the droids, who are exempt for obvious reasons.
The party size should have been greatly reduced to make it less work to characterize the remaining characters in addition to making it easier to keep them involved with the plot. In fact, the party members aside from Canderous should have been merged together. T3 and HK should have been combined to make HK, Zaalbar and Mission should have been combined to make Yuthura Ban and Juhani and Jolee should have been combined to make female Jolee. Canderous doesn't need to be merged with anyone because the way he changes in KOTOR2 makes up for it.
I can foresee an argument being made that because they're side characters it doesn't matter if the party members don't have much characterization or story purpose. Unfortunately that plane won't fly because out of the three characters who are actually important to the story only one of them has more than one defining character trait.
Malak
I wish there was a better way to describe this guy than Saturday morning cartoon show villain. He's such a generic bad guy that he usually comes across as a joke.
Malak's one defining characteristic is that he's power hungry. That's it. There's nothing else to him. Being the primary antagonist isn't a character trait, it's his role in the story. And being Revan's old apprentice doesn't tell us anything about him other than he betrayed his master when he saw the opportunity just like any other Sith.
Even the big bad in the movies had more stuff going on. On top of being a political mastermind, Sheev just revels in being evil. You get a sense that he's being evil because he fucking loves it. He enjoys manipulating and hurting the good guys.
Malak on the other hand is a mustache twirler who says and does generic villainous shit and has a good generic villainous laugh about it. There's one scene in particular that really highlights this. For some reason the writer thought it would be cool to start the final confrontation with Malak on the Star Forge where he's choking out a couple Jedi without raising his hand or even looking at them. Whatever they were going for here doesn't work at all because Malak is not intimidating.
If the writer's intention with this scene was to emphasize that Malak's a really bad dude, why? The player already knows he's a really bad dude, and if you romanced Bastila this prick turned your love interest to the dark side. The player doesn't need more motivation to fight Malak at this point. And nobody is gonna care if two generic Jedi dudes we haven't been introduced to get killed. In fact I'm willing to bet that you didn't even remember that this happened.
The scene is actually counter intuitive for his character. It makes Malak seem less threatening. He comes across as a blustering playground bully trying to intimidate a kid who isn't afraid of him. It's almost as if he's trying to hype himself up because he's scared of you, and honestly if that were the case it would give him some character and thus make him more interesting. But nothing else about the scene or any of the following dialogue implies that's what's going on.
Malak is a weak villain, but there have been lots of good stories with weak villains. This story would have been improved if Malak was more compelling, but for my purpose he's useful as the most obvious example of the major problem KOTOR has with how oversimplified most of the characters are. It's not like having simple characters in a story is a crime, but if the writer leans too heavily on certain tropes there's gonna be some audience backlash. Especially if they fuck it up and end up turning a character into a offensive stereotype.
Carth
I kind of hate this character. Not so much because they did a bad job with him but because of how he isn't an accurate portrayal of an active duty soldier with PTSD. In the first non work related conversation you have with him Carth starts unloading his emotional baggage on you. Look, I met many active duty soldiers with combat induced PTSD when I was in the army. They almost never talk about their trauma to anyone, let alone a stranger they just met. In fact, active duty military people are expected by their leadership to keep trauma bottled up and they get punished for seeking out help. In the rare moments when a soldier's trauma comes out it's usually because it's been coaxed out by drugs or alcohol.
Maybe your first instinct is to compare Carth to war veterans who seem unstable. But that's an entirely different discussion about how our real life society fails veterans. In this story Carth is an active duty soldier, and apparently one of the Republic's top guys, but he's way too emotionally unstable for me to accept that either of those things are true. It would be one thing if the writer was using Carth as a vessel to explore the idea of PTSD in this universe where war constantly sweeps the entire galaxy, but that's not what they did. They just used PTSD as cheap and easy characterization.
When I try to look at what the writer was doing with Carth from their perspective, I can see a couple things. The first thing is that they wanted to make an interesting love interest for female Revan. I suspect that having Carth expose his trauma to the player at the very first opportunity is some kind of messed up attempt at making him seem alluring. All I can say to that is I really hope the writer didn't intentionally try to make the player want to “fix” him with love.
The second thing I see is they wanted Carth's personality conflict to be related to the ongoing war with the Sith. Because Saul Karath is his old mentor, Carth stays involved in the story in a way that none of the other party members do, except for Bastila. In that respect it's a logical way to keep him relevant to the story, but it also highlights the writer's failure to do that with the rest of the party.
PTSD is a subject that needs to be handled delicately and Bioware handled it roughly with Carth. It's a subject that pretty much everyone has at least a surface level understanding of and the writer was relying on that common knowledge as an easy way to give Carth some depth.
But let's set aside the PTSD discussion. The worst part about Carth's obsession with what Saul Karath did to him is it's one of the only things that define him. If you subtract that from the equation there's very little left that characterizes him.
KOTOR does have one character with some depth, though.
Bastila
Bastila is an absolutely terrible Jedi. She's hypocritical, demanding, childish, prideful and arrogant.
She's easily the most interesting character, and Bioware's writer did her dirty just like my man Carth. In comparison to every other character in the game the writer managed to do a barely passable job with her characterization. She's the only character that comes close to having a character arc. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and despite how close she comes to having an arc it just ends up being a character... line.
All of Bastila's behavior, her trouble dealing with her emotions, is because she has unresolved mommy and daddy issues. Parental issues are the most generic way of giving a character some depth in all of media, but shit, at least it's something.
And even though the writer establishes that Bastila is struggling with her emotions, they skip over her actual fall and go straight to the end of what should be her character arc. Once she gets captured on the Leviathan she completely disappears from the story for the entire length of the last quest for the Star Forge map. Then she reappears in one scene where she's being tortured, and around three hours later she appears before the player as Malak's evil apprentice. You'd think if it were that easy to turn people to the dark side old Sheev would've just kidnapped Anakin and tortured him until he was evil. He could've just skipped all the trouble!
The really frustrating thing is that Bioware had time. They had the opportunity to show us more. If you pursue the romance with Bastila as often as possible her dialogue is completed before you reach the third planet in your quest for the map. The game wastes this huge chunk of time doing nothing with her before she gets captured.
And just to rub it in, her fall and redemption ends up being way too close to Anakin. The one interesting character in KOTOR is the one who has the exact same role in the narrative as Vader.
Bastila is a powerful Jedi the Jedi council relies on in the war against the Sith who seems fated to fall to the dark side and eventually gets redeemed.
Anakin is a powerful Jedi the Jedi council relies on in the war against the CIS who seems fated to fall to the dark side and eventually gets redeemed.
The only real difference between Vader and Bastila is after they've been redeemed Bastila gets laid while Vader ends up fucking dead.
I haven't even begun to address the worst thing Bioware's writer did to Bastila.
The Force Bond
I absolutely despise how the force bond is used in this game. It obliterates Bastila's character agency and it railroads her into a romance with the player character.
The writer introduced the force bond between Bastila and the player character as a way to circumvent fleshing out a romance. It forces Bastila to fall in love with the player character in a way that seems unnatural and disturbing.
And I should really say love with air quotes because the romance between the player character and Bastila is way too forced to honestly describe it as such. There's no better way to demonstrate this than by looking at how the love confession goes on the Star Forge. First you beat up Bastila with your lightsaber a couple times and then remind her about the brief and awkward relationship you were pressuring her into before she got captured. Then you tell her you love her, and it's like she just remembered that she had those feelings. So she tells you she loves you back with all her heart, even though it didn't seem to matter to her at all until just now when you persuaded her. At this point as far as I'm concerned Bastila has either lost her mind or she's just telling you what you want to hear so you stop hurting her.
Look, I understand that people can fall in love and be in love in many different ways and it would be very stupid of me to assume that everyone sees romance exactly like I do. But for me, every single facet of the Bastila romance seems so incredibly forced.
In the scene where you talk to Bastila privately onboard the Ebon Hawk you either interrupt her babbling with an awkward fade to black implied kiss or she interrupts you to do it. Then she runs away and refuses to talk to you about it until that fucking confession scene happens right before the end of the game.
It's obviously a lazy rip off of Leia and Han's kiss scene in Empire. But the movie is way, WAY better at setting everything up. From almost the first moment you see Han and Leia together you get a sense that she likes him but isn't quite being honest with herself yet. The audience can tell that even though she can't admit it, she's in love with him. And it's heartbreaking when we see Leia finally admit it right before something terrible is about to happen to Han that might separate them forever, in the context of this movie.
Most importantly, we can feel that Leia's stubbornness and hesitation is coming from a natural place. Bastila's stubbornness and hesitation is because she knows that the Jedi are not allowed to fall in love but the force bond is forcing it to happen. When you flirt with her and she meekly begs you to stop instead of shutting you down hard it's because the force bond is forcing her to respond to your advances.
It's not even clear what she likes about you at first. After you've helped her with her dad's holocron and talked to her about her emotions a couple times she mentions something about you “always being there for her,” but that's supposed to be what she likes about you? That you're just fucking there? So what, if anyone had been there to talk to her, would she fall in love with them? What if Jolee Bindo had talked to her about her problems and helped her retrieve the holocron, would she then have feelings for him? Does that seem likely? But it's the only reason beyond the force bond that Bioware's writer offers for why she's falling in love with you.
Everything about this romance is wrong. I don't even need to compare it to the movie it's ripping off to keep making this point.
In KOTOR 2, after you've confronted the surviving Jedi masters Visas senses your character's emotional turmoil. What follows is a heartfelt confession of love that comes from an earnest place that makes complete sense in the context of what we know about both characters. Visas loves your character because the traumatic event that defined who your character is, is very similar to the one that defined hers. She can immediately deny that the force bonds you form with everyone around you have influenced her opinion about you because she knew how she felt the moment she detected you through the force.
Every single person in the world has painful experiences that they wish they could share with someone else who understands. It's just a natural part of the human experience to want that. So when Visas tells your character that she loves you because of the pain you share, it's tapping into a feeling that anyone can identify with.
When Bastila tells you she loves you, it's because you beat her up and persuaded her until she remembered that she was in “love” with you.
But it goes beyond just being forced. It actually doesn't make any sense whatsoever that Bastila has romantic interest in the player character.
Let's apply the thought exercise we used earlier with Carth. If we subtract the force bond from the equation, what reasons does Bastila have to fall in love with the player character? Well, it turns out that without the force bond in the picture Bastila has way more reasons not to fall in love with the player character than to.
Here's just some of the reasons Bastila has to not fall in love with the player character based on his backstory:
Let's say that there's this charismatic man. Let's call him Adolf. Adolf participated in a huge war that was being fought for no good reason. He was a hero in this war and the soldiers under his command worshiped him.
Now let's say that after the war Adolf develops some extreme views about society and how it should be. Let's also say that he hates the weakness of the democratic government in charge of his country and he wants to change it by force. To convince people to follow him he promises them that the galaxy's bounty would be redistributed and only handed out to the worthy people.
Then Adolf acquires an army and he uses it to start a war to conquer the known universe. To stop him, the Good Guy Council decides to set an ambush for him.
Let's introduce a new character now. Let's call her Ava. Ava is part of the team sent to ambush Adolf. But during the ambush something goes wrong and Adolph is rendered unconscious and half dead. Ava decides to bring Adolf to her bosses, the Good Guy Council.
The Good Guy Council doesn't like the idea of executing prisoners. Being the highly moral and very ethical good guys that they are, they decide to wipe Adolf's memories and reprogram him with new ones. At this point the Good Guy Council should either throw Adolf into a very secure jail cell or at the very least keep a close eye on him. But instead of doing either of those things they decide to send Adolf off with Ava on a mission in the outer rim that has no real goal.
The mission goes bad and Ava comes back into contact with Adolf. Now it's revealed that Ava is very powerful but her power makes her arrogant. She wants to do the right thing in the right way, but it's hard for her.
Adolf thinks Ava is hot and he flirts with her constantly. He knows Ava is having a hard time controlling her emotions but he pressures her into a romance anyway. Ava knows Adolf's real history and really shouldn't be attracted to Adolf at all, but because of an insanely convenient thing that happened earlier when Adolf got knocked out, Ava starts to like Adolf back.
Then Ava becomes a bad guy off screen. Adolf redeems Ava and then himself by killing some gullible sap who used to be his friend.
I'm sorry if that comparison is offensive, but it serves an important point. If you were Bastila and you knew this man who was basically Hitler times 100 before he took an amnesia pill, do you think you would fall in love with him if you weren't being forced to?
Final Thoughts
I think all this shit begs the question: Why is KOTOR so well loved if it has so many problems and copies so much of the Original Trilogy? The answer to that question is probably a little different for every person who likes it, but generally speaking KOTOR appealed to a desire that all fans of Star Wars have. It was a Star Wars movie adventure you could be personally involved in, and the sheer joy of that is so enormous that many people really do see KOTOR as a nearly perfect game. You'd be very naive to think that wasn't exactly what Bioware was hoping for.
They developed the story of KOTOR with the intention of copying the feelings the movies inspired instead of creating a story inspired by it's characters. As an original story it's a failure, but by most measures of success KOTOR was wildly successful. The combat is poorly balanced, most of the locations are boring or meh, it's full of time wasters and none of that mattered to the vast majority of people who played it. For better or worse, KOTOR put Bioware's name on the map for millions of Star Wars fans. Even to this day new players are discovering KOTOR for the first time and loving it.
I can tell you from personal experience that for a teenager who was in love with Star Wars and the idea of adventure itself, KOTOR felt life changing when it came out. But as the years passed and I played other RPGs, KOTOR didn't maintain the same sense of fun it initially had for me.
It's possible that my real life adventure of joining the Army influenced my opinion on KOTOR and adventures in general. Maybe experiencing the harsh reality of adventures made me less forgiving of this adventure that defined my youth. Maybe I'm just shitting on KOTOR because I'm tired of shitting on the army.
Or maybe I'm just right, and KOTOR doesn't deserve all the praise it still receives.
Here goes. Sorry if I don't reply right away, I think I might go pass out.
One thing I've learned from being a lifelong video game enthusiast is people don't want to entertain the idea that something they love isn't actually all that great. To be fair nobody wants to watch their sacred cow get torn down. We naturally want to hold on to the enjoyment of it for as long as we possibly can. Most people don't have enough good stuff in their lives to easily afford an about face on something they really enjoy, even for something as petty as a video game. I'm one of those people, but what makes me a little different is my level of obsession with video games.
I used to love KOTOR to an unhealthy degree. The game really defined my early teenage years. The party characters all felt like my close friends and Bastila was the cool Jedi girlfriend I wished I could have in real life. The quest to stop Malak felt like being on a crusade. I played the game so much as a teen that after replaying it again recently I still remembered every story beat, every conversation and every quest perfectly.
But after replaying it for maybe the fortieth time I have to say that the overwhelmingly positive public opinion about KOTOR just isn't correct.
KOTOR is not a masterpiece. It isn't even a flawed masterpiece. Honestly, it's a pretty weak RPG.
The real problems with KOTOR aren't surface level like “the game is old” or “the graphics suck.” They're fundamental problems with the gameplay and characters that have been overlooked by the vast majority of people who played it, including me, for almost two decades now.
One last thing before I get into it: the purpose of this essay is not to convert you. You are not stupid or wrong for enjoying KOTOR. This essay is simply meant to be an explanation for why someone obsessed with KOTOR could fall out of love with it 17 years later.
I'm sad that I don't enjoy KOTOR anymore. This essay is my catharsis.
Combat
Graphics are the least important aspect of an RPG. It's nice to have good graphics, of course, but a good plot, deep characters and functional combat are way more important. It's why the crappy pixelated background on Tatooine doesn't bother me when a more abstract concept like the broken combat does.
If you're new to both KOTOR and DnD it's easy to make the game hard for yourself by building your characters wrong. But if you know how to build your characters right the game is unacceptably easy. The only time the game is challenging for the player is when they're new to it.
Just turning the difficulty up doesn't resolve the issue. With a properly optimized build nothing the additional difficulty adds matters at all. You're always too powerful for the buffs enemies receive on the highest difficulty to make a real difference.
If you do switch the difficulty the menu informs you that the game is balanced around normal difficulty. I think this indicates that at some level Bioware understood that the combat system they were delivering had some serious issues. It's basically an admission that the combat is poorly balanced.
Well-balanced difficulty is incredibly important for role playing games. The moment the player realizes that none of the enemies they'll face can pose a threat, the dramatic tension disappears. For example, why does Bastila suddenly want to sacrifice herself for Carth and I to escape the Leviathan when I am absolutely mopping the floor with Malak?
For some games difficulty isn't that important, but in an RPG appropriate difficulty is necessary to maintain immersion.
Game Feel
KOTOR is full of small time wasters that constantly break up the flow of the game. Did you just make the mistake of walking into a corner to open a locker? Now you have to waste five seconds switching to one of the party members blocking your way and move them so you can get out. The first couple of times it happens it's a little frustrating, but by the tenth time it happens it's infuriating.
Combat is also full of time wasters. When a battle starts you scroll one at a time through your list of abilities and items to find what you want and queue it up. Then you have to repeat the same process with your two other characters. Unfortunately though you were facing some dark Jedi and the first thing they did was use force push on you, wiping your combat queue. Once you finally have control of your character again you have to pause and requeue all of your attacks. But now your character is standing too close to the other party members so you have to move one of them out of the way. Do that, pause, then click through the list of your abilities one at a time again and re-requeue. This entire process can happen multiple times in one battle.
Now let's say you were patient enough with the game's combat mechanics to win the battle and you finally got rewarded with a level up. But this time you opened the level up screen all you can do beyond adding a few skill points is add one new force power. You'll have to wait at least another 30 minutes or so to make any more significant changes to your character. Maybe 30 minutes doesn't sound so bad, but as an example of how long that really is on Korriban you can go through the entire shyrack cave and three of the tombs in that period of time. That's a lot of stuff you've killed and quests you've done to get rewarded with just a few skill points and one force power.
Adding skills and traits to your characters is a fundamental reward in role playing games, and stretching out the period in between receiving those rewards for too long does nothing except waste the player's time. And wasting the player's time does more than just wear down their patience. It ruins the flow, and distracts the player with thoughts about how annoying it is just to do basic things.
Locations and World Building
Overall, KOTOR is a mix of empty places that feel like a slog, places that should be cool but ultimately aren't and awesome places that make you wish you could live in this universe. Dantooine, Tatooine, Kashyyyk and the underwater section of Manaan are all chores to get through. The city section of Manaan and all of Korriban are extremely fun and well executed. Generally speaking the planets with tons of open space full of random stuff to kill ad nauseum are the boring planets. The planets with lots of people who have a personal connection to the war between the Republic and the Sith are the fun planets.
It's important to note for later that the best locations in the game are the ones Bioware created for it and the boring locations are the ones which were established by the movies or the Star Wars Holiday Special. It's unfortunate that Bioware felt compelled, or maybe literally was compelled by Lucasarts, to add in locations the player would recognize from the movies. Admittedly Bioware added some interesting lore to these pre-existing locations but it doesn't make up for how boring they are.
Considering how great some of the locations created by Bioware were and how uninspired the rest was, it's disappointing that we ended up visiting old locations for the memberberries instead of having more of the new locations that worked so well.
Not all of the new locations worked, though. Taris is just Coruscant is just Trantor. There's really no other way to frame it. The idea of a city that has spread across the entire surface of its planet is cool enough that I'm honestly fine with having several of them in the same universe, but it's a missed opportunity to show us something actually new. In the first place Coruscant was an idea that Lucas stole from a better writer, though to be fair to him many people have stolen ideas from Asimov.
Beyond just being a rip off of a rip off, Taris starts to overstay its welcome before you make it to Davik's estate. There's only so many dumpy apartments and dirty walkways you can see before it starts to get a little old. I think there's just enough variety to keep it from getting too boring but I'm always somewhat relieved to escape from Taris.
And while it's true that this planet is directly related to the game's primary conflict, your actions don't have any impact on the planet's situation even though they should. For example, you can deliver a cure for the zombie virus that's killing the people of the undercity but nothing actually happens when you do. There's no scenes of happy people lining up for free vaccines if you donated the cure to the doctor or desperate people coughing up their last credits for the vaccine if you sold the cure to Davik. If we had seen something like this, watching the people who got the vaccine get killed in the bombardment would have been shocking and help to emphasize just how violent and horrible the Sith are. Because as it is you don't actually see any normal people getting killed when it happens.
You shouldn't just dismiss this and say “it would have been nice to see but who cares” because this is basic RPG world building.
In New Vegas, which is much smarterer and betterer, if you kill the fiend leadership near Camp Mccarran 1st Recon will leave and head for Camp Forlorn Hope. And the status of the camp during the second battle for hoover dam gets reported on over the NCR emergency radio. If you didn't bother helping out the report is that the camp got wrecked, but if you did help the camp suffers some damage but survives. To top it all off, Mr. New Vegas will report on some of the bigger stuff you've done on his radio station. So even if you're not personally witnessing all the consequences of your actions, the game is still acknowledging your actions or lack thereof.
This kinda stuff may seem unimportant but it's actually very important because it helps the world seem like it's full of real people and that your actions and decisions are having an impact on them.
Even when you attack the Sith base and kill the planetary governor nothing about the planet's situation changes whatsoever. It's such a massive missed opportunity to show the player their actions have consequences. The governor's death would have made for a much better excuse for Malak to glass the planet than “this is taking too long, it's time to inject some excitement into the story.” The cutscene where Malak orders the bombardment would have become better instantly if instead of randomly ordering the bombardment, Saul had to break the news about the base to Malak and then Malak ordered the bombardment.
Bioware's writer had a great opportunity to make Malak seem truly ruthless in that scene, but in reality he just seems impatient. This is just one example of the writer choosing to make Malak a less interesting villain. More on that soon.
Finally we have the Star Forge, and while it's technically a new location it's so close to being the Death Star that I have to invoke what I said earlier about visiting movie locations for the memberberries. The Star Forge doesn't fire a big fuck off space laser but it serves the exact same narrative purpose as the Death Star. The Star Forge is a massive space station that gives the bad guys an edge over the good guys, and the good guys have to destroy it. The Death Star is exactly the same thing.
Lehon is kind of cool for the mix between tropical paradise and junk planet but it's short length and association with the Star Forge makes it forgettable.
Story
There's a fine line between paying homage and ripping something off, and KOTOR crosses that line often. The best way to demonstrate this is to compare the story beats of KOTOR to the story beats in the Original Trilogy.
The following story events happen in both KOTOR and the OT.
- Open with a shot of a spaceship under attack.
- Bad guys wearing armor fight good guys wearing weird helmets.
- A Damsel in Distress has something the bad guys want.
- The good guys are stranded on a shitty planet.
- The good guys want to rescue the Damsel.
- The good guys get attacked by the indigenous people.
- Seedy underbelly cantina(s).
- An adventure through enemy territory to save the Damsel.
- The Damsel can hold her own in a fight.
- Adventure through enemy territory with the damsel.
- Ugly crime lord.
- A battle to get onboard the ship and escape.
- A WW2 B-17 anti-aircraft gunner escape sequence.
- The bad guys destroy a planet because of the damsel.
- Training montages with a Jedi Master.
- A call to adventure.
- Guy teases girl as they fall in love.
- The bad guys pursue the good guys.
- The good guys get captured and tortured.
- A minor character frees the good guys.
- Earth shattering revelation about the hero and his relationship with the bad guy.
- Solo confrontation with the bad guy.
- The bad guy wins and one of the good guys gets captured.
- One final adventure before the endgame.
- The good guys have to destroy the Death Star.
- Breaking into a base on a moon near the Death Star.
- A giant space battle near the Death star.
- Final confrontation against a fallen good guy.
- A formerly evil character redeems themselves by destroying the ultimate bad guy.
- A medal ceremony at the end.
Star Wars is one of those tricky properties to adapt where the fans revere the original material and expect other Star Wars media to give them the same sense of adventure. But KOTOR borrows way too much from the movies to call it an original story. The fact that some of the story elements in KOTOR are in a different order from the movies should not distract you from the fact that they are the same story elements.
Making video games is hard, and making a good role playing game is even harder. I don't mind that Bioware wanted to stick to the Star Wars formula, but every important story beat was lifted from the movies.
I think many fans aren't aware of how much KOTOR directly rips off the movies. On the other hand I'm sure there are some fans who are aware and they're perfectly fine with it. Maybe for those fans the problems with the story aren't important because they enjoyed the characters. If you're one of those people then I'm sorry in advance for what I'm about to do.
Party Characters
Out of the nine party members six are plot devices with one personality variable and one story function. Mission, Jolee, T3, HK and Canderous's only story function is to get the player into a new location. Juhani's only function is to be dealt with at the grove on Dantooine. Zaalbar serves no story function whatsoever other than to be Mission's condition to help you get into the Vulkar base.
None of these characters have any further impact on the main story after they've served their purpose and if you do their side missions the one personality conflict that defines them is more or less resolved. The only exceptions to this are Jolee, who is disturbed by the revelation that his friend murdered someone but is otherwise unchanged, and the droids, who are exempt for obvious reasons.
The party size should have been greatly reduced to make it less work to characterize the remaining characters in addition to making it easier to keep them involved with the plot. In fact, the party members aside from Canderous should have been merged together. T3 and HK should have been combined to make HK, Zaalbar and Mission should have been combined to make Yuthura Ban and Juhani and Jolee should have been combined to make female Jolee. Canderous doesn't need to be merged with anyone because the way he changes in KOTOR2 makes up for it.
I can foresee an argument being made that because they're side characters it doesn't matter if the party members don't have much characterization or story purpose. Unfortunately that plane won't fly because out of the three characters who are actually important to the story only one of them has more than one defining character trait.
Malak
I wish there was a better way to describe this guy than Saturday morning cartoon show villain. He's such a generic bad guy that he usually comes across as a joke.
Malak's one defining characteristic is that he's power hungry. That's it. There's nothing else to him. Being the primary antagonist isn't a character trait, it's his role in the story. And being Revan's old apprentice doesn't tell us anything about him other than he betrayed his master when he saw the opportunity just like any other Sith.
Even the big bad in the movies had more stuff going on. On top of being a political mastermind, Sheev just revels in being evil. You get a sense that he's being evil because he fucking loves it. He enjoys manipulating and hurting the good guys.
Malak on the other hand is a mustache twirler who says and does generic villainous shit and has a good generic villainous laugh about it. There's one scene in particular that really highlights this. For some reason the writer thought it would be cool to start the final confrontation with Malak on the Star Forge where he's choking out a couple Jedi without raising his hand or even looking at them. Whatever they were going for here doesn't work at all because Malak is not intimidating.
If the writer's intention with this scene was to emphasize that Malak's a really bad dude, why? The player already knows he's a really bad dude, and if you romanced Bastila this prick turned your love interest to the dark side. The player doesn't need more motivation to fight Malak at this point. And nobody is gonna care if two generic Jedi dudes we haven't been introduced to get killed. In fact I'm willing to bet that you didn't even remember that this happened.
The scene is actually counter intuitive for his character. It makes Malak seem less threatening. He comes across as a blustering playground bully trying to intimidate a kid who isn't afraid of him. It's almost as if he's trying to hype himself up because he's scared of you, and honestly if that were the case it would give him some character and thus make him more interesting. But nothing else about the scene or any of the following dialogue implies that's what's going on.
Malak is a weak villain, but there have been lots of good stories with weak villains. This story would have been improved if Malak was more compelling, but for my purpose he's useful as the most obvious example of the major problem KOTOR has with how oversimplified most of the characters are. It's not like having simple characters in a story is a crime, but if the writer leans too heavily on certain tropes there's gonna be some audience backlash. Especially if they fuck it up and end up turning a character into a offensive stereotype.
Carth
I kind of hate this character. Not so much because they did a bad job with him but because of how he isn't an accurate portrayal of an active duty soldier with PTSD. In the first non work related conversation you have with him Carth starts unloading his emotional baggage on you. Look, I met many active duty soldiers with combat induced PTSD when I was in the army. They almost never talk about their trauma to anyone, let alone a stranger they just met. In fact, active duty military people are expected by their leadership to keep trauma bottled up and they get punished for seeking out help. In the rare moments when a soldier's trauma comes out it's usually because it's been coaxed out by drugs or alcohol.
Maybe your first instinct is to compare Carth to war veterans who seem unstable. But that's an entirely different discussion about how our real life society fails veterans. In this story Carth is an active duty soldier, and apparently one of the Republic's top guys, but he's way too emotionally unstable for me to accept that either of those things are true. It would be one thing if the writer was using Carth as a vessel to explore the idea of PTSD in this universe where war constantly sweeps the entire galaxy, but that's not what they did. They just used PTSD as cheap and easy characterization.
When I try to look at what the writer was doing with Carth from their perspective, I can see a couple things. The first thing is that they wanted to make an interesting love interest for female Revan. I suspect that having Carth expose his trauma to the player at the very first opportunity is some kind of messed up attempt at making him seem alluring. All I can say to that is I really hope the writer didn't intentionally try to make the player want to “fix” him with love.
The second thing I see is they wanted Carth's personality conflict to be related to the ongoing war with the Sith. Because Saul Karath is his old mentor, Carth stays involved in the story in a way that none of the other party members do, except for Bastila. In that respect it's a logical way to keep him relevant to the story, but it also highlights the writer's failure to do that with the rest of the party.
PTSD is a subject that needs to be handled delicately and Bioware handled it roughly with Carth. It's a subject that pretty much everyone has at least a surface level understanding of and the writer was relying on that common knowledge as an easy way to give Carth some depth.
But let's set aside the PTSD discussion. The worst part about Carth's obsession with what Saul Karath did to him is it's one of the only things that define him. If you subtract that from the equation there's very little left that characterizes him.
KOTOR does have one character with some depth, though.
Bastila
Bastila is an absolutely terrible Jedi. She's hypocritical, demanding, childish, prideful and arrogant.
She's easily the most interesting character, and Bioware's writer did her dirty just like my man Carth. In comparison to every other character in the game the writer managed to do a barely passable job with her characterization. She's the only character that comes close to having a character arc. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and despite how close she comes to having an arc it just ends up being a character... line.
All of Bastila's behavior, her trouble dealing with her emotions, is because she has unresolved mommy and daddy issues. Parental issues are the most generic way of giving a character some depth in all of media, but shit, at least it's something.
And even though the writer establishes that Bastila is struggling with her emotions, they skip over her actual fall and go straight to the end of what should be her character arc. Once she gets captured on the Leviathan she completely disappears from the story for the entire length of the last quest for the Star Forge map. Then she reappears in one scene where she's being tortured, and around three hours later she appears before the player as Malak's evil apprentice. You'd think if it were that easy to turn people to the dark side old Sheev would've just kidnapped Anakin and tortured him until he was evil. He could've just skipped all the trouble!
The really frustrating thing is that Bioware had time. They had the opportunity to show us more. If you pursue the romance with Bastila as often as possible her dialogue is completed before you reach the third planet in your quest for the map. The game wastes this huge chunk of time doing nothing with her before she gets captured.
And just to rub it in, her fall and redemption ends up being way too close to Anakin. The one interesting character in KOTOR is the one who has the exact same role in the narrative as Vader.
Bastila is a powerful Jedi the Jedi council relies on in the war against the Sith who seems fated to fall to the dark side and eventually gets redeemed.
Anakin is a powerful Jedi the Jedi council relies on in the war against the CIS who seems fated to fall to the dark side and eventually gets redeemed.
The only real difference between Vader and Bastila is after they've been redeemed Bastila gets laid while Vader ends up fucking dead.
I haven't even begun to address the worst thing Bioware's writer did to Bastila.
The Force Bond
I absolutely despise how the force bond is used in this game. It obliterates Bastila's character agency and it railroads her into a romance with the player character.
The writer introduced the force bond between Bastila and the player character as a way to circumvent fleshing out a romance. It forces Bastila to fall in love with the player character in a way that seems unnatural and disturbing.
And I should really say love with air quotes because the romance between the player character and Bastila is way too forced to honestly describe it as such. There's no better way to demonstrate this than by looking at how the love confession goes on the Star Forge. First you beat up Bastila with your lightsaber a couple times and then remind her about the brief and awkward relationship you were pressuring her into before she got captured. Then you tell her you love her, and it's like she just remembered that she had those feelings. So she tells you she loves you back with all her heart, even though it didn't seem to matter to her at all until just now when you persuaded her. At this point as far as I'm concerned Bastila has either lost her mind or she's just telling you what you want to hear so you stop hurting her.
Look, I understand that people can fall in love and be in love in many different ways and it would be very stupid of me to assume that everyone sees romance exactly like I do. But for me, every single facet of the Bastila romance seems so incredibly forced.
In the scene where you talk to Bastila privately onboard the Ebon Hawk you either interrupt her babbling with an awkward fade to black implied kiss or she interrupts you to do it. Then she runs away and refuses to talk to you about it until that fucking confession scene happens right before the end of the game.
It's obviously a lazy rip off of Leia and Han's kiss scene in Empire. But the movie is way, WAY better at setting everything up. From almost the first moment you see Han and Leia together you get a sense that she likes him but isn't quite being honest with herself yet. The audience can tell that even though she can't admit it, she's in love with him. And it's heartbreaking when we see Leia finally admit it right before something terrible is about to happen to Han that might separate them forever, in the context of this movie.
Most importantly, we can feel that Leia's stubbornness and hesitation is coming from a natural place. Bastila's stubbornness and hesitation is because she knows that the Jedi are not allowed to fall in love but the force bond is forcing it to happen. When you flirt with her and she meekly begs you to stop instead of shutting you down hard it's because the force bond is forcing her to respond to your advances.
It's not even clear what she likes about you at first. After you've helped her with her dad's holocron and talked to her about her emotions a couple times she mentions something about you “always being there for her,” but that's supposed to be what she likes about you? That you're just fucking there? So what, if anyone had been there to talk to her, would she fall in love with them? What if Jolee Bindo had talked to her about her problems and helped her retrieve the holocron, would she then have feelings for him? Does that seem likely? But it's the only reason beyond the force bond that Bioware's writer offers for why she's falling in love with you.
Everything about this romance is wrong. I don't even need to compare it to the movie it's ripping off to keep making this point.
In KOTOR 2, after you've confronted the surviving Jedi masters Visas senses your character's emotional turmoil. What follows is a heartfelt confession of love that comes from an earnest place that makes complete sense in the context of what we know about both characters. Visas loves your character because the traumatic event that defined who your character is, is very similar to the one that defined hers. She can immediately deny that the force bonds you form with everyone around you have influenced her opinion about you because she knew how she felt the moment she detected you through the force.
Every single person in the world has painful experiences that they wish they could share with someone else who understands. It's just a natural part of the human experience to want that. So when Visas tells your character that she loves you because of the pain you share, it's tapping into a feeling that anyone can identify with.
When Bastila tells you she loves you, it's because you beat her up and persuaded her until she remembered that she was in “love” with you.
But it goes beyond just being forced. It actually doesn't make any sense whatsoever that Bastila has romantic interest in the player character.
Let's apply the thought exercise we used earlier with Carth. If we subtract the force bond from the equation, what reasons does Bastila have to fall in love with the player character? Well, it turns out that without the force bond in the picture Bastila has way more reasons not to fall in love with the player character than to.
Here's just some of the reasons Bastila has to not fall in love with the player character based on his backstory:
- Revan betrayed every organization he ever fought for.
- Revan wanted to conquer the entire galaxy at gunpoint and was in the process of doing it before he got stopped.
- Revan wanted to replace democracy with a society run by force users who decide on leadership with murder.
- Revan is responsible for Saul Karath and therefore shares some responsibility for the destruction of Telos.
- Revan is at least partially responsible for any and all mass murders conducted by the Sith during his time as the Dark Lord.
- Revan had no qualms about owning and manufacturing assassination droids.
- Revan most likely personally murdered people who got in his way.
Let's say that there's this charismatic man. Let's call him Adolf. Adolf participated in a huge war that was being fought for no good reason. He was a hero in this war and the soldiers under his command worshiped him.
Now let's say that after the war Adolf develops some extreme views about society and how it should be. Let's also say that he hates the weakness of the democratic government in charge of his country and he wants to change it by force. To convince people to follow him he promises them that the galaxy's bounty would be redistributed and only handed out to the worthy people.
Then Adolf acquires an army and he uses it to start a war to conquer the known universe. To stop him, the Good Guy Council decides to set an ambush for him.
Let's introduce a new character now. Let's call her Ava. Ava is part of the team sent to ambush Adolf. But during the ambush something goes wrong and Adolph is rendered unconscious and half dead. Ava decides to bring Adolf to her bosses, the Good Guy Council.
The Good Guy Council doesn't like the idea of executing prisoners. Being the highly moral and very ethical good guys that they are, they decide to wipe Adolf's memories and reprogram him with new ones. At this point the Good Guy Council should either throw Adolf into a very secure jail cell or at the very least keep a close eye on him. But instead of doing either of those things they decide to send Adolf off with Ava on a mission in the outer rim that has no real goal.
The mission goes bad and Ava comes back into contact with Adolf. Now it's revealed that Ava is very powerful but her power makes her arrogant. She wants to do the right thing in the right way, but it's hard for her.
Adolf thinks Ava is hot and he flirts with her constantly. He knows Ava is having a hard time controlling her emotions but he pressures her into a romance anyway. Ava knows Adolf's real history and really shouldn't be attracted to Adolf at all, but because of an insanely convenient thing that happened earlier when Adolf got knocked out, Ava starts to like Adolf back.
Then Ava becomes a bad guy off screen. Adolf redeems Ava and then himself by killing some gullible sap who used to be his friend.
I'm sorry if that comparison is offensive, but it serves an important point. If you were Bastila and you knew this man who was basically Hitler times 100 before he took an amnesia pill, do you think you would fall in love with him if you weren't being forced to?
Final Thoughts
I think all this shit begs the question: Why is KOTOR so well loved if it has so many problems and copies so much of the Original Trilogy? The answer to that question is probably a little different for every person who likes it, but generally speaking KOTOR appealed to a desire that all fans of Star Wars have. It was a Star Wars movie adventure you could be personally involved in, and the sheer joy of that is so enormous that many people really do see KOTOR as a nearly perfect game. You'd be very naive to think that wasn't exactly what Bioware was hoping for.
They developed the story of KOTOR with the intention of copying the feelings the movies inspired instead of creating a story inspired by it's characters. As an original story it's a failure, but by most measures of success KOTOR was wildly successful. The combat is poorly balanced, most of the locations are boring or meh, it's full of time wasters and none of that mattered to the vast majority of people who played it. For better or worse, KOTOR put Bioware's name on the map for millions of Star Wars fans. Even to this day new players are discovering KOTOR for the first time and loving it.
I can tell you from personal experience that for a teenager who was in love with Star Wars and the idea of adventure itself, KOTOR felt life changing when it came out. But as the years passed and I played other RPGs, KOTOR didn't maintain the same sense of fun it initially had for me.
It's possible that my real life adventure of joining the Army influenced my opinion on KOTOR and adventures in general. Maybe experiencing the harsh reality of adventures made me less forgiving of this adventure that defined my youth. Maybe I'm just shitting on KOTOR because I'm tired of shitting on the army.
Or maybe I'm just right, and KOTOR doesn't deserve all the praise it still receives.
But keep at it, son. Maybe one day your enduring butthurt and inability to handle someone criticizing something you like will get you the hugbox of your dreams here on the Codex. 
