Because, as I've hopefully made clear in my earlier parts of this review, the RPG class stories are the heart and soul of the Old Republic's success and are really the main attraction of the game, I'm going to spend the rest of of the parts of the "mother of all SWTOR reviews" talking about them, two at a time. Today we'll tackle the two Jedi class stories which start on the planet Tython. Reviewing class stories and how they play means that there are a few common things that I need to cover, because they are the main inputs that determine how well the class experience plays. I'll reiterate very briefly in each subsequent post what these are, but here I'll explain why I think these inputs are the ones that need to be discussed.
1) The character itself and his portrayal, voice acting, etc. I can't comment on this entirely; I've only played through each story as a male character, so I don't know much about the female voice acting. Obviously, which options on the dialog wheel you pick will make this somewhat different, but mostly you'll find that those options often have little real impact, and you kind of get funneled by inertia into a certain portrayal of the character for the most part anyway. While it's possible to try and play a dark side Jedi, I suppose, the reality is that surveys by BioWare have shown that on the contrary, most people play their characters—regardless of faction—as more or less good guys, doing what they themselves would like to think that they'd do, or as close as they can approximate with the choices on option. That said, the writing makes certain characters all kind of have a certain temperament and personality, regardless of what choices you make or try to make for your character. The smuggler is a flippant wit and the Jedi are fairly serene, bland sticks in the mud, for instance.
2) That last phrase may have been a bit of a spoiler; the character of both of the Jedi classes is not their strongest element. It's almost like they went out of their way to make them as uninteresting as possible. But the main character is only one input; the plot of the story for the class is the one of the next big ones. In this, I'm also including the villains or rivals that you face, since they are so integral to the plot. A really good villain can raise a mediocre story, and if there's a good villain with a good plot, even a bland main character won't hold the story back.
3) Given that this is a BioWare game, another important aspect is the supporting cast, i.e., your companion characters. An interesting ensemble of sidekicks can also really help bring a mediocre main character to life. Given that this is a BioWare game, this also includes the romance options available, since romancing companion characters is such an on-brand trait for a BioWare game. If you've got a cute, plucky sidekick that you can make into your girlfriend in a reasonably charming romance, then that goes a long way towards adding charisma and likeableness to the main character too. Again, I've only played male characters so far, so I'm only familiar with the girl romance options (the weird gay and alien options only are applicable in the expansions; the main story had fairly "normal" romance options.)
4) How well do the class mechanics play and how fun is the class? Obviously, I can't comment fully on this. There are two advanced classes for each class story, and each advanced class as three "specs" although these changes are a bit more on the subtle side compared to the differences between the advanced classes. But they're not immaterial. For the most part, all of the specs are fine, but some aren't really as suitable for solo play. Mostly, I'd recommend picking a DPS (damage dealing) spec rather than a tank or healer, and keeping your companion on its default heal setting. The other settings are probably best explored by people who are actually using the character for grouping content. However, I didn't always do this correctly, and I did find that, for instance, using a tank spec Jedi Shadow was sometimes kind of suboptimal; I got a bunch of abilities that in hindsight I didn't really end up wanting to use very much. It's possible, to be honest, that I simply don't really like the Jedi Shadow advanced class (or its Sith equivalent) as those are the two I had the least fun playing from a mechanical perspective. I think that the other alternative is now considered the more "classic" take on the class, so I probably just made a mistake there in picking an advanced class that I didn't like as much, and picking the same mirrored one on the Sith side at the same time.
JEDI KNIGHT
It took me a while to actually get going on this game. I played a demo of it way back in the very early days, and I played a female smuggler up to 20th level or so. I also played bounty hunter for a bit on another account. When I really started playing for real, I played a bounty hunter again, but because I didn't realize that you could lock out your story if you jumped into an expansion, I messed it up after spending many hours on it, doing all of chapter 1, including all planetary and exploration missions. This guy is level 75, and I need to keep him because he's my armormech character (Crafting. I haven't even mentioned that, have I?) Anyway, I decided finally to quit messing around, and made a chart of everything that I'm supposed to do and when I'm supposed to do it so that I don't accidentally kick off something that locks me out, and then started over with the Jedi Knight class as the first organized and well managed character I played. (ed. aside: This game isn't quite as open world as it may seem. Just because a guy is standing around with a quest icon over his head doesn't necessarily mean you should always go talk to him.) I kind of leapfrogged my Jedi Knight and the Sith Warrior, chapter by chapter, and played them concurrently.
It's clear that the Jedi Knight is the canon class of the game. It's kind of the one that the devs consider the most iconic. It's got most of the stuff that leads into the expansion stories integrated into it too. I feel like the most effort was put into it in some ways. It's the one that has the most "Knights of the Old Republic III" feel to it. If for some reason you only ever play one class, this is the one that I'd recommend the most. Not necessarily because I think it's the best story, but it's just the most iconically Star Warsian of them all.
Let's go through the numbers then, shall we? First, the portrayal of the character itself is probably one of the weakest aspects of this story. The voice actor that they cast has a very relaxed, "serene" delivery, no doubt at the director's insistence, that accentuates the fact that he's really kind of written as a boring stick in the mud. Ask him anything, and you get an out of context fortune cookie quote as an answer. I don't want to call him a goodie-two-shoes, although that's really how he comes across. This is also accentuated by the fact that right off the bat you're treated to an inane "moral dilemma"; the Jedi council on Tython sits around hand-wringing about an illegal settlement of twi'lek trespassers. These entitled, bratty little princesses complain that the Jedi don't help them more—when they're the ones trespassing on the Jedi's planet in defiance of the legality of their settlement—and then ultimately (and this is a minor spoiler) they stab the Jedi in the back and betray your character specifically.
In spite of this, if you advocate with the council for telling them that the party's over, and the crashers have to go back home and leave, you get a bunch of smug lectures delivered in a hall monitor tone from the useless Jedi masters of the council. I actually thought that the start of this story was fairly inauspicious and frustrating. Luckily, once you leave the rest of the Jedi behind, for the most part, it improves tremendously. This has almost always been a problem with the portrayal of the Jedi Order across all mediums in Star Wars; they're supposed to be these paragons of virtue and wisdom, but in reality they more often than not come across as the villains of the story. Not in the comic book swirling dark capes around and laughing menacingly kind of villains; those are the Sith, of course—but in the sense that they are a fifth column chewing away at social order and cohesion, destroying the Republic from within with their smug, self-righteous craziness. I think the problem is that all too often the writers are SJWs, women and betas, including all too obviously George Lucas himself, so they have a poor idea of what good and evil actually is. Their attempt to portray good sometimes is just flat-out evil. In any case, I was actually kind of annoyed with the story during Tython, but it improved significantly once I left.
In fact, it's probably best that we turn to that now; the plot of the Jedi Knight is the most "high fantasy"; the biggest, swashbucklingest, high stakes craziness space opera plot of the whole game, and it is certainly one of the stronger portions of a Jedi Knight playthrough. While the Empire and the Republic are technically in a state of peace, a rogue element of Sith are waging open warfare against the Jedi and Republic and this character in particular for personal reasons, using illegal superweapons that the Republic developed (but shouldn't have) which have been stolen. After rushing around desperately stopping all of these at the last second, the war starts for real. The Hero is caught up in a strike team to go assassinate the Emperor himself (because I guess that's now a legitimate way to wage war. SJWs.) This goes disastrously wrong, the entire strike team is brainwashed and turned to the dark side, but our Hero manages to escape thanks to the ghost of his old master and an unexpected ally close to the Emperor himself, who now admits that he's known for centuries that the Emperor wanted to consume all life in the entire galaxy and had a vision that this guy, our Hero, would be the one to stop him. The story ends on a final, epic second confrontation with the Emperor himself. Again; once you get past the fart-sniffing, hand-wringing of Tython, this story is fantastic, and it hits all of the right notes for what a truly epic Star Wars story should have. It's on par with other equally well-regarded Star Wars stories, like Knights of the Old Republic itself, in my opinion. The classic well-rounded villains as well as the gripping plot alleviate the blandness of the main character, who gradually grew on me over time once he didn't have to spend time sweating contrived, hoaky "moral dilemmas" clumsily constructed by writers who wouldn't know morality if it beat them up in a back alley.
The Jedi Knight also has probably the best collection of companion characters too. T7, your first one, has most of the charm of R2-D2 himself. Kira, your second, is probably the best, or at least tied for the best, romantic option in the game. She's a great girlfriend and a charming NPC. Doc is a little try-hard, but he's good for some laughs, and Scourge, when you get him, is one of the more unexpected and interesting characters you can get. He's also probably the best "last character" you pick up in the game; most of those last companions you pick up just don't have the time to develop properly, so they feel kinda meh. The only exception to the great companions is Sergeant Rusk; a character that I never really figured out what his role was other than that they needed one more character. He's kind of a cipher filling space like goods in a package, and I could do without him and never really notice the loss.
Did I mention that Kira is probably the best, or at least among the very best romance options in the game? (I know, I did.) Laura Bailey, now of Critical Role fame, does the voice acting. She's one of the best developed and best written and best portrayed of all of the romanceable characters, and because you have access to her as a companion for almost the entire game (you pick her up officially on Coruscant, the second planet) you have plenty of time to develop the romance. She's also actually got an interesting story of her own to explore where she had been an Imperial asset as a child and has to deal with the fallout from that past. The plot, villains and companions of the Jedi Knight are really top notch; probably the absolute best in the game, and go a long way towards alleviating the plank of wood personality that the main character himself is kind of saddled with by the writers.
I played the game with the Guardian advanced class. This one uses a single lightsaber, and has a variety of very classic Jedi moves. In fact, I think it does a really good job of making you feel like you're playing a Jedi as they're portrayed in the movies, with similar abilities and combat styles. Some of the classes don't really feel quite as much like the moves in game match what you'd expect from the source material, but in this case, it very much does. Again, I suspect that the devs put their greatest effort here, making the Jedi Knight feel like the most iconic class to play in the entire game. It's a shame that they didn't see a more dynamic and human protagonist as consistent with being a paragon of the Jedi Order. If they had, they'd have managed to do literally everything right with this story. In spite of a little bit of a rough couple of hours of play at the beginning, I think this is the one that I ended up having the most fun with overall. It's the most Star Warsy of them all too.
JEDI CONSULAR
There is another Jedi class, though. It also starts on Tython. Like the Knight, the Consular is also, unfortunately, a plank of wood, who's voice actor was coached into portraying him as if he's trying to put everyone he talks to to sleep. In fact, this character is probably a good order of magnitude more boring and bland than the other Jedi. And unfortunately, the rest of the elements that make up his experience aren't good enough to ameliorate it as they are in the knight. To wit:
The plot is a little bit all over the place. It tends to focus on hidden, mystical, mind-controlling corruption type things. A Dark Plague is turning Jedi masters to the dark side and controlling them. Our Hero finds some kind of mystical ritual that removes the plague and restores their personalities, so for the first chapter, you have to run around rescuing Jedi masters who've been taken by this plague. At this point, he gets an extremely precocious honor, and he's called the Barsen'thor. Of course, nobody knows what a Barsen'thor is, but supposedly it's an incredible honor that hardly anyone has ever been given, you being only the third in the entire Jedi history. And this is at the end of chapter 1. Following this, you're sent on a kind of run-of-the mill diplomatic mission to deal with some entitled and bratty politicians who are skeptical that the Republic has their planets' best interests in mind. The third act involves dealing with sleeper personalities loyal to the Emperor embedded within unknowing people throughout the Republic. This is an interesting callback to Kira Carsen of the other Jedi class, because she was supposedly one such who had that sleeper personality rooted out of her. The same was not the case of many others, who had no idea that they were secretly pawns of the Emperor until he "turned on" their Child of the Emperor subroutine and they became agents for evil.
Sadly, this space opera Manchurian Candidate idea sounds cooler than the actual execution of it ended up being. I felt like the reality was kind of jumbled and confused rather than a tense standoff where you never know who to trust. Overall, I'd give the plot of the Consular story as mediocre; it has some good ideas, and sometimes its reasonably well executed, but it's never as good as it sounds like it would be, sadly.
Some of this could be salvaged with interesting characters, but again, I felt like the companion characters that this character gets sound better on paper than they are in reality. For quite a long time, you only get the weird Trandoshan as a companion, and they tried too hard to really explore this strange Trandoshan culture and religion, which feels too much like a boring anthropology lecture and too little like a swashbuckling space opera story most of the time. Next you get Tharan Cedrax, the eccentric inventor with a holographic AI girlfriend, who comes across as all high concept and no thoughtful development. His whole story is trying to compete with fellow scientists to develop the coolest invention. He's kind of weird and creepy, in my opinion. Zenith, the unlikeable revolutionary political figure from Balmorra is what left wing weirdos think of as a hero, but everyone sees correctly for a villain. He didn't interest me in the least either. In fact, quite the opposite; I'd have ditched him right away if I'd been able to choose to do so. Felix Iresso is a slightly more interesting character, who's had his mind tampered with and discovers that Sith secrets are buried in his head somewhere. But again, this is a more interesting concept than a reality; you never actually even dig into what the secrets are or find them! Given that we're discovering all of this at the same time that the Manchurian Candidate Children of the Empire plot is running amok in the story, it seems odd that it's a weird parallel to that but which goes nowhere. Finally, Nadia Grell is the only romance interest. She shows up extremely late and isn't really all that cute. The relationship feels rushed, forced, contrived and just-so.
I played the character as a Shadow, a double (Darth Maul style) lightsaber wielding guy. In combat, I actually found him kind of boring; and I was mostly just button mashing a few basic moves. It didn't feel very Star Warsy. I will say, though, that the stealth ability was gold. When I played this class, I'd already played four classes in a row, and being able to just waltz right past loads of trash mobs was such a relief, because I was imagining having to stop and fight them with any other class. Ugh, tedious.
Overall, while I'd say that the Consular class experience isn't a complete wash, it was probably my least favorite of the eight. It's a shame because there's good ideas buried there, they just never were able to rise to their potential due to poor execution. The Consular is like the prequel trilogy of the Old Republic. While the Jedi Knight can be savored in all its glory, (minus the very first part on Tython) the Jedi Consular is best saved for a time when the double XP event is active and you can blow through just the class story as quickly as possible without lingering on the disappointing aspects that otherwise make up the experience of playing this class.
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