Pain Leads To Anger, Anger Leads To Hate, Hate Leads To Suffering.

I just finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and let me proclaim that the ending sucks!

(Long winded rant, with some minor spoilers, follows.  You have been warned.)

So, why does it suck?  Well, for starters, I have no idea what the hell just happened.  The ending left more questions than it answered.  Actually, scratch that, the ending neither posed any questions, nor did it answer any.  Hell, it didn't tell me anything.  The final boss was shown being thrown into a pit, then the camera zooms out to a view of the planet, swings over to a nebula, and the credits roll.  If you happened to have played through Chrono Cross, then I'd compare this ending to the ending you get if you beat the game using New Game (instead of New Game+), and you don't use the Chrono Cross to beat the final boss.  Yeah, the one where the credits roll with short clips of a girl, dressed to look like Kid, standing with her back in various places in a Japanese city.  That's about how frustrating and irritating this ending was.

All the little cut-scenes I was getting as I worked my way towards the final boss, involving the Iridonian's remote droid, G0-T0, and the shadow generator?  Nope, not going to give any conclusion to that.  (In fact, I don't even know what the shadow generator is, but that may be because I never got enough influence on the Iridonian, whose name escapes me, to have that as a conversation option.)  Who exactly was Lord Sion?  Don't look at me, because I never really figured it out.  (Sith Lord, can't die, some connection to Kreia that I won't get into here for fear of spoiling it.)  Or how about Darth Nihilus?  I have even less of an idea of who he was, and he's the guy in the mask who's front-and-centre in all of the artwork.  I saw him in about two short cut-scenes, and then again when I fought him towards the end of the game. (A battle that lasted less than 2 or 3 minutes.  To say that force crush, a new 'ultimate' power eventually given to characters who follow the dark side, is over-powered wouldn't even begin to scratch the surface of just how broken it is.)

How about the other, more minor, quests?  Well, I hope you like the loading screen, because you're going to be seeing a lot of it, as many of the quests seem to consist of: Go to a person in area A, then go to a person in area B.  Now, go back to A.  Now B.  Now A again.  Now, just for the hell of it, C, which requires going through B.  There were several quests where I probably spent more time watching the loading screens for the various areas than I did actually in those areas.

All that bitching aside, the game was also buggy as hell.  All the bugs from the original KotOR?  They're still there (except for the bug where you entire party was replaced by wookies), and then there are the new ones.

• Constant freezes?  Check.  (I had to restart the XBox 4 or 5 times in a row after the game repeatedly froze every time I was trying to equip a character.)
• The ability to get stuck in conversation loops?  Check.  (By this, I don't mean conversations that you can keep asking the same questions over and over again.  Rather, there's at least one conversation where, at the very end, if you pick the wrong choice, the conversation starts over again as if the character had never talked to you before.)
• Characters appearing places where they shouldn't be?  At least two instances of this that I can think of.  (ie: One NPC had left an area for another, yet was still in the original area if you returned there, despite the fact that he was also simeoultaneously in the other area.  What's more, if you talked to him then the scripting acted as if you had never encountered him before.)
• Characters making influence-related comments when they aren't part of your party?  Yep, happened to me.  (Hell, not only was the character not part of my party, I hadn't even met them at the time.)
• Conversation options that no longer make any sense, as the event that they refer to has already occurred?  Yep.
• Event triggers that should only happen once, yet happen everytime you walk past a particular NPC?  Yep.  (On Iziz:  after rescuing a particular NPC from jail, he'll offer to set you up a meeting with another NPC.  He mentions that you probably won't be able to return after this meeting, so that you should take care of any tasks you want to before going to it.  Say that you're not quite ready, then go back to the market.  If you walk past the guard you had to talk to to free the NPC, then the special conversation where you free the NPC will immediately start up again.  (But end when another NPC is supposed to speak, as he is no longer with you, despite the fact that both you and the guard talk to him.)

All in all, the main thing that strikes me about the game is that it really needed more play-testing.  These are all things I discovered in my first run-through of the game, without actually trying to break anything.  In fact, the entire game, in my opinion, has a sort of unfinished, or rushed, feel to it; as if the publishers felt that they had to get it out now, in time for Christmas.  (The amount of games that get released within November and December is also a pet peeve of mine, but that's an entirely different rant.)  Yes, the characters are better than the previous one; yes, some minor issues have been dealt with (there's now a mini-map), but new ones have been added (you can no set the filter to show only new items, something I often found myself wanting to do).  The new force powers aren't anything terribly impressive, both the bosses and the enemies are easier, and a new power, pre-cognition, means that you'll never be surprised by a fight caused by, say, a creature suddenly escaping its handlers and rampaging through a marketplace, because you'll have been given a close-up of the creature as soon as you entered the area.  (And there's no mistaking what the close-up is for, as it's presented in a manner that is pretty much only used when the developers want to tell you that a particular creature is going to be a tough fight.)

Final score: 7 out of 10.  It might have gotten higher, if the bugs and the fact that so much of it being tedious hadn't combined to make me not in the mood to play through to see the light-side ending.

Edit:  Just did some reading.  Apparently the final ending is the same regardless of alignment.  You can talk to the final boss and find out the fate of your party members, which changes based on the choices you made, but not the actual ending.  I re-iterate:  the ending stinks.  (And a further edit:  And other people are claiming that there are alt. endings, but they don't appear to be much different, from their descriptions.)