Knights of the Old Republic: Character Creation I

I start my text Let’s Play of Knights of the Old Republic with the character creation process.

The first step to playing a game is to choose the character. In Knights of the Old Republic in particular, there are a few ways to go about this. The first is to take the route of Star Wars canon. This means that you’re taking the character you know to be Revan, an important character of a comic series and the star of a novel, which is to say, Caucasian male with all Light Side decisions.

The next choice is a more original character. Knowing what I know above, I’m under no illusions about the canonicity of this story: the name will be a lie, regardless, and if the character is not generic, default, and exactly like me except in shape, it will have no place in the Star Wars universe. In certain moods, this wouldn’t matter to me, and I would have no problem going along with Revan’s story. However, something about knowing that Jaden Korr and Revan are both “Fiction default” brings out my angry, rebellious side. In all honesty, it would help if there were a few more customization options, because then there would still be at least some leeway within Word of God.

Since I’m playing a video game character, I’m going to choose one of my favorite characters, and one that I’ve always wanted to see expand and lose her comedy relief origins. I’m referring, of course, to Yuffie Kisaragi, scion of Wutai. It hasn’t been that long since I completed a Yuffie only playthrough of Final Fantasy VII, so it only makes sense to take her on to the next step: IN SPACE!

Now, what is needed for Yuffie? Well, first of all, she’s an Asian female, and there’s only one choice like that, so that’s done. Next, there is the choice of Solder, Scoundrel or Scout. Well, she’s too good of a fighter for Scoundrel. There are ways around it, but my play style is also not conducive to creeping by in stealth mode when there are enemies present. I may be losing my opportunity to have Sneak Attack by skipping out on this class, but I can gain other things. Next, I wouldn’t say that she’s not a good enough fighter for Soldier (although compared to Cloud, this is true), but I do want her to do more than have to beat things in with a vibroblade to get from place to place. Equally important (and possibly more influential on my decision), a Scout starts off with one blatantly combat feat: Flurry, which gives a Scout more attacks.

There are six combat builds in Knights of the Old Republic, at least to start with. These are: Power Attack (decreasing accuracy for the chance to do extra damage), Critical Strike (decreasing your defense in order to take the time to make the equivalent of called shots and do more damage), Flurry (decreasing your accuracy for the chance to make an extra attack), Power Blast (same as Power Attack), Sniper Shot (same as Critical Strike) and Rapid Shot (you guessed it!). There is also Two-Weapon Fighting, which is useful mainly as an extension of Flurry, unless you somehow have two compatible weapons that do radically different things that you want to base your whole character around (hint: a stun stick and a lightsaber are not two great tastes that taste great together!). Each of these seven combat builds has three stages, and by level nine, your character is able to take the third feat in their combat field of choice.

I honestly am not a fan of ranged characters unless I’m being ridiculously cheap, and you need Force powers to do that in this kind of game. That, or grenades. This leaves me with the choice of having a generalized character with no combat specialties, having multiple specialties, or focusing on melee. For melee, I could choose something that makes me more vulnerable with a possibility of doing more damage, or something that will eventually lead to me making several extra attacks with very little penalty. It’s probably not a shock where I chose to take this character, and while Soldiers tend to gain more combat feats, the “level 9” that I quoted did very well for a Scout, plus the class starts with both Flurry and Rapid Shot.

This leaves us with our core character, the unique choices that cannot be easily changed through gameplay: An Asian female named Yuffie Kisaragi, as a Scout. Next time, we’ll go a bit further into some of the decisions that go into transforming Yuffie from a concept into an RPG character.