KOTOR and The Force Awakens: The Wages of Nostalgia

Knights of the Old Republic

Developer: BioWare

Medium: Video game

Release date: July 2003

Timeline placement: 3,956 BBY

 

"Savior, conqueror, hero, villain. You are all things, Revan... and yet you are nothing. In the end you belong to neither the light nor the darkness. You will forever stand alone."

 

It's December 19, 2015. I'm wearing a Star Trek shirt and standing in line for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. I expect it to be a competent, well-made movie, but I don't expect to love it; it feels like it's been a long time since I was excited for Star Wars. Father Merrin speaks the first line of the film: "This will begin to make things right." I laugh to myself.

 

I had loved Star Wars since I was nine years old, but as I'd grown older I'd grown more critical, and Star Wars had grown worse. George Lucas had said the 1997 Special Editions represented his "original vision" for the classic trilogy, but he continued to make increasingly obtrusive changes for the 2004 DVDs and 2011 Blu-rays, as well as preventing any further releases of the unaltered films. 2006 saw the release of the first book in Drew Karpyshyn's Darth Bane trilogy, which ran roughshod over Darko Macan's Jedi vs. Sith, in my opinion the best Star Wars comic in the EU. That same year also saw the beginning of Legacy of the Force, a terrible series that gutted the accomplishments of its predecessor, The New Jedi Order. 

 

In 2008, The Clone Wars debuted on Cartoon Network, kickstarting the biggest and longest continuity clusterfuck in Star Wars history as Dave Filoni tapdanced all over the meticulous timeline of the 2002–2005 Clone Wars multimedia project. The Force Unleashed came out the same year, needlessly rewriting the early history of the Rebellion every time you failed a QTE. Meanwhile, Republic Commando author Karen Traviss was busy trampling her own corner of continuity; Abel G. Peña's article in Star Wars Insider #80, "The History of the Mandalorians," had done the seemingly impossible task of reconciling decades of contradictory Mandalorian lore, only for Traviss to pull it all back apart again. The coup de grâce, or sai cha if you will, came in 2011, when BioWare's MMO The Old Republic and its assorted tie-in media drove the final nail into the coffin of Knights of the Old Republic III, discarding the legacy of two of the best RPGs ever made in favor of a new story nobody asked for.

 

By the time George sold Star Wars to Disney, my favorite parts of the franchise had been eroding for more than five years. I hadn't read a new EU novel since Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor; Star Wars was essentially dead to me. Suicide by Star Wars Apocrypha was just my way of processing the loss.

 

It still annoys me to no end that this DeviantArt drawing remains the best image of the KotOR party all together.

 

I must have been sixteen the first time I played Knights of the Old Republic, or maybe seventeen, I can't remember. I had played a few Pokémon games but I was far from a gamer. My brother, on the other hand, had an Xbox, a GameCube, and half a dozen Star Wars games. For some reason I decided to start playing them.

 

My high school years were the height of my EU fandom, and what made KotOR so special, beyond the story and characters and music and writing, was how it put me into that universe that I had invested so much of my adolescent time and emotion in. I could explore planets and talk to aliens I'd read about. I could fly a starship and build a lightsaber and use the Force. I could exist in the Star Wars galaxy and act like myself, or at least a version of myself that I could imagine being.

I played it over and over and over again, until I'd exhausted every dialogue option, every quest path, every character variation. After a while I wasn't in high school anymore, and I didn't care about Star Wars quite so much. From time to time I'd start another KotOR run, but I'd never make it off Taris before abandoning it again. This compounded over multiple attempts, my familiarity with the tiresome opening planet becoming a wall, a psychological block on my progression. I'd played the game so many times already, and I just didn't have the time or stamina to power through it the way I once had. Best to stop trying.

 

I sat in the theater and watched the lights dim. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... appeared on the screen, for the first time without being preceded by the 20th Century Fox Fanfare. Its absence felt like visiting a grave. But then something peculiar happened. The text faded way, and when the Star Wars logo filled the screen and the first chord of John Williams's main Star Wars theme blasted throughout the room, I felt it in my chest, in my heart, snagged behind my breastbone as if with a fishhook, and I couldn't help but grin like an idiot.

 

It turned out that my original prediction was right: I liked the movie, but I didn't love it. It was a competent film, or seemed so at the time, but at the end of the day, it just felt like watching Star Wars again.

 

Playing Knights of the Old Republic had felt like watching Star Wars for the first time. See the difference?

 

Star Wars had started life as a pastiche of Flash Gordon, The Hidden Fortress, Joseph Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, old adventure serials, World War II iconography, classic Westerns, contemporary political commentary, and George Lucas's abiding love of cars. Someone put all of those things into a machine, pushed a button, and created something new.

 

KotOR was a pastiche of Star Wars, a remix of scenes, ideas, images, themes, and archetypes given the voice and stylings of BioWare, at the time the best RPG studio in the business. Something not entirely new, but done in a new way. Something that felt like Star Wars, but also like itself.

 

The Force Awakens was less pastiche, more Gus Van Sant's Psycho. But it still felt like Star Wars; it had been a long time since anything had. There were plenty of criticisms to be made, and I would eventually make many of them; for example, the scene where Finn witnesses the destruction of a planet light-years away in the sky of the planet he’s on and then nonsensically runs around screaming “The Republic! It’s the Republic!” (the equivalent of Washington, D.C., being bombed and someone declaring “They just blew up the United States!”) is possibly the dumbest and worst scene in any Star Wars movie.

But all this would come later. For now, I sat in the theater and allowed myself to enjoy Star Wars uncritically one last time. I was twenty-eight years old and watching a movie people had dreamed of since before I was born.

I was seventeen and telling Bastila her face was all scrunched up like a kinrath pup. 

I was nine and staring with envious eyes at my classmate Robbie's Micro Machines Darth Vader playset, and all the world yet new.

Luke Skywalker has vanished—and again that tugging in my chest, that fishhook buried in my heart.

After twenty years, Star Wars still had me. I suppose it always will.

The next time I booted up Knights of the Old Republic, I made it off Taris.