This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
It’s a bit of a litmus test when asking someone about their opinion of KOTOR2. If they say Kreia/Traya was “based” and actually buy into her bullshit Enlightened Centrist fortune cookie wisdom (which IN THE GAME is shown to be a deceitful bullshit ploy to hide her actual motives), they’re probably an asshole.
Darth Traya’s actual motivation is very interesting, though. Star Wars’ pseudobuddhist/pseudotaoist philosophy has always been its best feature, and Kreia is this very interesting character who is aware of the Tao and believes in its existence, and wants to kill it. Its a matter of free will and theology. There is a “god” that controls the entire galaxy, and here is a character who believes its existence is an unjust hierarchy and wants to kill it.
It is interesting but so many people that played it missed the point of her distracting Enlightened Centrism bullshit (which she spews no matter what the player decides to do, which is the point because it was a distraction tactic all along) and see her as some great and wise person instead of a betrayer, which was IN THE NAME.
The big hole in her idea is that she wants to do that for herself and doesn’t really ask the rest of the living things in the universe if they want that. It doesn’t matter because she wants it.
I think I need to do some self-crit because I was onboard with Kreia’s idea to kill the force…