KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 8: End Times

Time for another detailed and spoiler-laden discussion of a Knights of the Eternal Throne chapter. We're up to chapter eight! Though if you missed it...

Click here to go back to Chapter 7.

The Story

You arrive on an Odessen under siege by a vengeful Vaylin, who has nothing holding her back anymore. The Gravestone was caught in dry dock when the attack happened and hasn't been able to join the fight yet. While the Eternal Fleet does its usual thing of just floating in space, with the frontline ships pew-pewing the surface a bit, you land your shuttle and, with Lana in tow, do what you can to help out your ground forces.

You commandeer a walker and get to play through another version of the walker assault on Voss from chapter one - only with the ability to heal at will as long as you're out of combat. While fighting your way through the Odessen Wilds, you make contact with various allies until you reach the Gravestone, where you meet up with either Arcann and Senya, or if they're dead, Theron. You manage to protect the ship just long enough for it to be able to take off and shoot a bunch of enemy walkers that are approaching your position. Then the Gravestone is off to help in the space battle.

At this point, you either continue with Lana and Theron, or Senya and Arcann, with Lana and Theron conveniently buggering off somewhere else. At a comm station, you contact Vaylin just as one of her underlings informs her that the battle is as good as won even though it's still going to take a while. You bait her into coming to the surface to face you (and potentially her mother and brother) personally, and she cannot resist.

After another brief stint in a walker, you receive distress calls from both Torian and Vette, both of whom claim to be pinned down. Valkorion unsubtly whispers in your ear that you can't possibly save everyone, and you are forced to choose to go support either one or the other. When you arrive at their location and try to raise the other on the comm... they are not dead, but Vaylin happened to land right on their head and has taken them prisoner. She gives you coordinates where she'll want to meet you. Your new target ends up being the Alliance base itself.

Just outside the base, where you usually bum around with other people while waiting in queues, picking up daily quests and stuff, Vaylin awaits you with some troops and her prisoner. After Valkorion shows up and they exchange some taunts, she angrily hurls her prisoner to the floor... but just as you kneel down to help them, Vaylin uses the Force to twist their neck.

With that final gauntlet thrown down, it's time for the big showdown, in which Vaylin's barely contained power cracks the very walls of the base, but with the help of your allies you finally defeat her. Her forces immediately break and retreat upon her death and it seems that the fight is finally over.

When you talk to your closest allies, they express grief about the death of either Torian or Vette, and Arcann or Lana comment that they could feel Vaylin's power flowing into you, though unlike her father she doesn't seem to have possessed the strength of spirit to live on in your head. Just then, you receive distress calls from the Sith Empire and Zakuul, and the Republic is under attack as well. The Eternal Fleet has gone rogue and is bombing planets everywhere into oblivion. Valkorion opines that the only way to stop it is to take control over it via the Eternal Throne. So you ask for the Gravestone to be readied as you have to pay Zakuul one more visit.

My Thoughts

In a nutshell, End Times is what Battle of Odessen should have been: an actual planetary battle, with armies clashing, people dying, and a big showdown at the end. (In fact, I accidentally keep referring to this chapter as "Battle of Odessen" in my head... KotET chapter 16 is more of a "Showdown with Arcann".) It's not perfect, but I certainly found myself sufficiently engrossed by the events to be excited about what was going to happen next and not nitpick any details until later.

The walker section from chapter one makes a return and feels less annoying due to the ability to heal up wherever you want, but at the same time the fact that there's two vehicle segments along the road makes it feel like the mechanic is overstaying its welcome a little bit. On replaying it, I found that it didn't actually feel as long as it did on my first playthrough, but the problem is that it's way too easy to run into some kind of nuisance. For example you cannot voluntarily exit the walker, and for some reason it walks quite slowly and has issues with obstacles that your character could ordinarily leap over with ease. During my first playthrough of this chapter, I realised fairly late that I had missed a companion for the bonus mission near the start... but since I was in a walker bit at the time, I had to plod back to the start really slowly, making the whole thing take forever. On this playthrough, which was on veteran mode, I died a couple of times and it respawned me way back at the start every time, enforcing a really annoying run back. I've also heard that the walker doesn't play nice if you want to bring a friend along to the chapter - since they can't get into the walker with you, they basically get swarmed and killed by the mobs every time.

The choice between Torian or Vette is simultaneously great and a bit cheap. It's contrived because you have several highly competent characters with you who can single-handedly turn the tide of many a battle, but for some reason you can't freaking split up? But it's also great because it really forces you to think and makes for a great talking point with other players. The emotional punch hits all the harder because while Valkorion pretty much warns you that the one you don't choose to help will die, nothing happens right away, allowing you to keep hoping that things will be alright somehow until Vaylin delivers the killing blow at the very last moment. Ouch.

The fact that you run most of the chapter either with Arcann and Senya or Lana and Theron makes for some interesting variety too. Personally I find facing off against Vaylin with her mother and brother by my side the much more satisfying option, but that may just be me. Considering the emphasis the Betrayed trailer put on the relationship between Senya and Vaylin (plus everything we saw of the two of them interacting in KotFE), the final confrontation between them feels kind of subdued, but that's what you get when Senya could theoretically already be dead by that point and the moment has to be more about you than about any of your companions.

Onwards to Chapter 9!