Monday, November 10, 2014

Jedi Consular Done!

This post contains significant spoilers for the Jedi Consular storyline in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I finished the Jedi Consular story yesterday. I played as a Light Side female Jedi Shadow tank. I used the 12x promotion, so I leveled strictly by class missions.

When you see most rankings of the TOR stories, the Consular story is often near the bottom. I disagree with this. So far, the Consular story is my favorite Republic story. It's not as good as the Agent story, but it's solidly in that second tier with the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior.

However, I can see why some people don't like the Consular story. It's focused inwards, on the Jedi and the Republic. It's all about healing and diplomacy. I actually liked it a great deal. I really liked the hints of history in Chapter One. And then slowly building your alliance and armies in Chapters Two and Three. Corellia was very well done too, as you got to see the payoff of your recruitment efforts.

As well, I do not think think that going Dark Side works with this story. It really feels that you have to be Light Side, to unironically embrace the Jedi code and philosophy.

There are other minor criticisms. Tharan Cedrax is an excellent character, but his "Did you know I'm a pacifist?" is excessively annoying. I know he's supposed to come off as somewhat annoying, but there is a line, and the overuse of that phrase crossed it.

The main villain was very predictable. But even so it was very well done, with a nice twist.

The story also does suffer slightly from early choices constraining the future. It would have been nice for some of the characters from Chapter One, especially Yuon Parr, to come back in later chapters. But because killing them is a Dark Side option, they don't appear again, even though you saved them if Light Side.

Those are pretty minor criticisms. Overall, I thought it was an excellent story. However, I also think that it is not the best story to do first. It works really well as a later story, because of the perspective it provides on some of the later planets, especially Belsavis and Voss.

Force Persuade

If Obi-wan Kenobi had not been the one to use Force Persuade in the first movie, do you think it would have been considered a Dark Side action?

After all, you're literally overriding the mind and will of your target, forcing them to obey you. If you had put a shock collar on them and forced them to obey by threatening shocks, there would be no doubt that is Dark Side. Is Force Persuade so much better?

Maybe Force Persuade is really a Dark Side action. That makes for an interesting perspective on Obi-wan, with him being a little more "gray" than he first appears.

6 comments:

  1. I just finished Consular too, and I liked it as much as the Inquisitor's story. Now that I think about it, both stories focus on diplomacy and politics, but from different angles. While the big bad was predictable, I almost expected the big bad to be a certain individual on the ship.

    Honestly, I've not had a bad storyline yet, but I've still got to finish the Knight, Warrior, and maybe take up the Agent (again).

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  2. I agree that the Consular story gets an unnecessarily bad rap. I enjoyed the diplomacy angle as well, and the first time around I found the mystery in chapter 1 quite intriguing.

    I think the story's biggest problem and what probably puts a lot of people off is the extreme amount of repetition it features early on, as in chapter 1 you basically get asked to do the exact same thing on 4-5 planets in a row (find the missing master and cure or kill them). The only other class story I recall embracing this amount of bland repetition is the bounty hunter, but that felt like it was framed in a better way.

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  3. As the only class story I finished to 50 I can actually read/comment about this one.

    I definitely agree that the story is a good one overall, it does get stronger as you progress. As Shintar points out they were a bit lazy in the early planets with the very repetitious Jedi Master curing missions.

    I wonder how much playing with certain companions over others affects the playthrough? As a healer specced Sage I kept Qyzen throughout except for the forced-companion missions. It avoided me having to regear multiple companions all the time.

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  4. Force Persuade is a tool, like hammer is a tool.

    You can use a hammer to build shelter and save people from freezing, and you can use a hammer to break a living person's skull.

    Force Persuade can remove the need to kill people (Obi-Wan example) or it can facilitate killing people (in Jedi Knight story, you can do it to the inexperienced Sith apprentice).

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  5. I mentioned this in your last TOR post, but I feel that Bioware got the Light/Dark idea right on the Empire side (and not so much on the Republic side); the essence of Light isn't typical good-guyism, but the sacrifice of self for the greater good. Conversely, the essence of Dark is the sacrifice of others for personal gain.

    If mind-controlling a person serves the greater good, then it is definitely a Light action. Same with shooting lightning from your fingers, or crushing someone's throat from afar. It's not the powers themselves that pushes a Jedi towards Light or Dark, but what they choose to do with those powers. It is easy to see how access to some powers can lead one to the Dark Side, though, because they're just so powerful and useful in every situation.

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  6. I actually really liked Chapter One. Yes, it's the same "cure the Master" story, but I liked watching the story of Malachor III unfurl. I liked seeing the different personalities of the Masters, and the different ways they broke. Finally, bringing Parkanas Tark back to the Light was the perfect ending for that chapter.

    Perhaps Chapter One benefited from the 12x bonus. Doing all four Master missions in quick succession accentuated the differences between them.

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