I Read The KOTOR Comics

Back in September I had the opportunity to attend Stockholm Comic Con, and while browsing one of the booths there I found Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: The Old Republic Volume 1 on a shelf. (And you thought that SWTOR written out in full was a mouthful!) "Neat," I thought, "that must be that SWTOR comic series I remember hearing about" and bought it.

I was wrong and apparently the SWTOR comics are a different thing, as the series collected in this volume actually takes place in the KOTOR era, but that didn't diminish my enjoyment. Also, it still has some relevance to the game as several Cartel Market outfits were inspired by ones worn by characters in the comic for example. So I'd look at certain images and go...

Hey, that's the chest piece my Sentinel is wearing!

Or: Hey, that's the set Cal's Sage used to wear!

That was kind of amusing.

The comic itself was also entertaining enough, and I liked it enough to buy the other two volumes from Amazon.

The story is set during the Revan era, and s/he even makes several appearances as a shadowy figure, with the comic leaving his/her identity unclear as it was still respecting the fact that every KOTOR player had their own unique Revan. We get the backstory of the mysterious mask of Revan too.

The main story was interesting enough on its own as well, though it had its ups and downs. There were parts that were very good, but others were fairly mediocre.

I quite liked the main character Zayne Carrick, a Jedi who has a slightly awkward and uncomfortable relationship with the Force and who slowly learns how to deal with it over the course of the series (while pursuing other objectives).

The secondary protagonist and main female character Jarael left me feeling a bit disappointed: While she started out strong, she quickly became way too passive, mainly serving as an object for other characters to obsess over, which struck me as quite a shame.

The art was a bit of a mixed bag - I'm neither an art critic nor a comics connoisseur but I honestly wasn't that impressed by a lot of it. The worst thing was that the artists and style often changed quite drastically from one arc to the next, from pretty realistic to highly cartoonish. The former sometimes struggled to deliver the more humorous moments appropriately, and the latter was mainly used in an arc that was clearly meant to be quite dark and serious, leading to a horrible clash between tone and imagery.

Still, overall I can recommend this series. The writing is about on par with some of the better Star Wars tie-in novels (of which the author has also written several), so definitely worthwhile if you're into that sort of thing.

Commonalities Between Books And MMOs

It's been quiet on here because I was on holiday for a week, largely unplugged from the gaming world - though for the first time not entirely unplugged from the internet, as I recently surrendered to various internal and external pressures and bought a smartphone (yes, I'm quite late to the party). This meant that I could at least read blog posts on the train and check my email.

I spent a lot more time reading good old-fashioned books during those days though. I clearly have MMOs on the brain at all times however, as I suddenly found myself contemplating similarities between long-running book series and massively multiplayer online roleplaying games.

I'm currently reading the Foreigner series by C. J. Cherryh - incidentally I found out about the first book in the series due to being friends with Wilhelm on Goodreads. Hurrah for blogosphere connections. Anyway, when Foreigner first came to my attention I noted that it was the first part of a series and this immediately made me cautious - knowing that something is part of a series is a sign that greater commitment may be required to get full enjoyment out of the thing, not dissimilar to how you can't expect to get a good idea of what an MMO is like without being willing to invest more than a couple of hours of play time.

The cover of the first book as pictured on Wikipedia.

Luckily for me, in this particular case general consensus in reviews and comments seemed to be that you didn't need to read the whole lot to have a satisfying experience, and that the first trilogy was quite self-contained, which was enough to convince me to take the plunge. And I enjoyed myself enough that it didn't take long at all until I was sure that I wanted to read more.

I'm up to book six at the time of writing this, and even though I enjoyed the series from the start, I think that books four and six (so far) feel like considerable improvements on the first trilogy, while having been read by fewer people, at least based on the number of reviews they've received on places like Goodreads. Which is somewhat sad but also makes sense: Lots of people are willing to give the first one in a series a go, but not everyone's going to like it, and those people aren't going to bother with buying any sequels. Again I couldn't help but be reminded of an MMO's launch hype and how most players drop off after the first few months because for one reason or another the game just couldn't hold their attention.

If a game can't draw you in to begin with, you're unlikely to care about the next expansion pack... but MMO players are probably more likely to give a game that didn't grab them another try than readers are likely to re-engage with a book they didn't like. After all a game's low-level experience can change, but a book will always remain the same. (Your perception of a book can change over time too, but I think it's fair to say that it generally takes longer for that kind of shift of perspective to occur - years or even decades.)

But just like an MMO can live off a relatively small but dedicated fan base for a long time, a book series can keep going for quite a while too as long as people keep buying those sequels. The first Foreigner novel came out in 1994, when I was a mere eleven years old, but Cherryh is still churning them out today. Apparently book #20 in the series is supposed to come out next year. And as long as there are enough long-time readers to keep buying them, with the occasional late-stage drop-outs being replaced by newcomers like myself who came to the series late, this can keep going for a long time.

Like an ageing MMO, such a book series isn't really interested in attracting new audiences with its latest releases... though that doesn't preclude the occasional awkward attempt to try anyway. I found it strikingly strange when book three for example started with a hundred-odd pages that basically did nothing but re-cap the first two books I'd just read, presumably for the benefit of readers jumping straight into volume three? Like a level boost in an aging MMO, it doesn't make for the smoothest of experiences.

Finally, like an MMO, a long-running book series quickly acquires degrees of complexity that are hard to keep track of even for the well-initiated. I'm only six books into a series consisting of nineteen novels so far and can't help but notice how many named characters of importance there are already, and I expect that number to only increase over time. It's not a problem with me reading these back-to-back right now, but I expect that after a couple of years away while waiting for the next release, it could be hard to remember who's who and just what is going on - not unlike the way you struggle to remember what all those buttons do when you return to an MMO you haven't played in a while.

Re-reading this a day after I wrote the initial draft, it all seems slightly inane or at least like stating the obvious, but I'm going to hit post anyway. It's vaguely on topic! And I can't help but wonder now how much overlap there is between MMORPG players and people who follow book series that go on and on for years...

The SWTOR Encyclopedia

The Star Wars: The Old Republic: Encyclopedia (that's a lot of colons) was released in 2012 to serve, as its sub-title claims,  as "The Ultimate Guide to the Epic Conflict". Initially it was quite expensive, and not unfairly so, since it's one of those giant hardcovers with big, colourful pages and lots of pictures, but once it turned out that SWTOR wasn't turning out to be the next World of Warcraft, retailers quickly slashed the prices, which is when I decided to pick up a copy of my own.

Product picture from Amazon.

I remember being quite pleased with it when it arrived, but then I opened it on a random page and landed on what were basically spoilers for the entire bounty hunter story. As I was nowhere near having completed all the class stories yet at that point, I went "argh" and banished it to the top of a shelf, never to be touched again. Well, I was planning to read it after there was nothing left to be spoiled for me, but then I just kind of forgot about it... until recently, when I realised that actually, it's been safe for me to finally read it for a while.

I slowly leafed my way through it a couple of pages at a time and actually found it quite enjoyable. There are a lot of little lore bits and pieces about the base game in there that are nowhere to be found in the game - well, some might be hidden in codex entries that I haven't read or forgotten about, but I'm sure a lot of them are exclusive to this book.

For example, did you know...

- that Chancellor Saresh grew up a slave on an Imperial planet but escaped by leading a revolt? Or that she had a husband who died when the Sith retook Taris? I know that in many ways she's been set up as the kind of character that people love to hate, but if that woman doesn't have genuine reason to hate the Empire, nobody does.

- that Senator Dodonna (from the smuggler story) was nicknamed "Shimmersteel" and had a reputation for using her feminine viles to her advantage in politics?

- that General Garza (from the trooper story) was married three times, one of them to the head of the Strategic Information Service, Marcus Trant?

- that Gearbox (also from the trooper story) was a long-time personal friend of Jace Malcolm? Wonder what the Supreme Commander thought of what happened to that iteration of Havoc Squad...

- that Jedi Master Oteg (from Taral V/Maelstrom Prison) used to be a member of the Jedi Council but stepped down because he was more needed as Fleet Admiral?

- that Master Orgus (from the Jedi knight story) was close friends with Harron Tavus of Havoc Squad?

- that Jaric Kaedan was the one who led the strike team that originally captured the Dread Masters?

- that Grand Moff Kilran is supposed to be 51 when you meet him in game? He always seemed a fair bit younger to me... quite a lot of the ages are slightly baffling to be honest. For example Talos Drellik is supposed to be only 27, when I would have pegged him as older (maybe because of the receding hairline). Yet Quinn is apparently already 37 at the start of the game...

- that the late Lord Kallig's first name was Aloysius (teehee)?

Anyway, the main point of this post is simply that I really enjoyed the book and if you are a big fan of the game too, I can only recommend picking it up.

(I just realised I'm posting this on Black Friday. Sorry, I'm not aware of any great deals, nor is this posted with an affiliate link. Just so you know.)

Book Review: Annihilation

The other week I found myself in Forbidden Planet thanks to some friends, and unsurprisingly it turned out to be the kind of place where it's pretty hard not to spend any money as a geek. Among other things I ended up with the paperback version of SWTOR: Annihilation by Drew Karpyshyn.

Set some time after the main plot arc of the base game, it tells the story of how the Republic sets out to destroy an Imperial space ship which is apparently so special and powerful that its mere existence is apparently totally turning the tide of the war in favour of the Empire. Hrm, where have I heard that before?

I have to admit that the summary on the back didn't exactly fill me with high hopes for the book, and things turned out pretty much as I expected. I liked it less than the previous two SWTOR tie-ins I read, though it was alright I guess.

The main problem I had with it was that it all just felt very generic. The plot is a classic "destroy the superweapon against impossible odds" story (which kind of gets overused in Star Wars fiction in general), and I struggled to get myself to care about any of the main characters as they all seemed pretty flat to me and had little personality. To be fair, apparently the book is a sort of continuation of a comic series featuring these same characters, so maybe they were fleshed out previously and the book feels more rounded if you've read about them before.

On the plus side, the writing is fast-paced and you never have time to get bored. Occasionally there are glimpses of the author trying to touch on a deeper theme (I quite liked Theron's thoughts on who is and isn't part of his family), but they are few and far between. Also, if you have any interest in Old Republic lore whatsoever, Annihilation contains some very juicy bits of information about Darth Malgus, Master Gnost-Dural, Satele Shan and Jace Malcom.

Basically, I can still recommend this if you can pick it up for cheap, feel like immersing yourself in an easy to read little Star Wars adventure and have some interest in learning more about the background of some of the more important NPCs in the game. Just don't expect it to be more than that.

Book Review: Deceived

I got Deceived by Paul S. Kemp at the same time as Revan, so I guess it should be no surprise that I have a couple of things to say about that book as well. (Though in case you are wondering, a Fatal Alliance review won't be coming up any time soon.)

The book starts with the sacking of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and then follows the fates of three main characters during the days right afterwards: Darth Malgus, Jedi Aryn Leneer and the smuggler Zeerid Korr. The writing felt slightly more sophisticated to me than Revan's, except for the occasional strained metaphor sneaking in here and there.

On average it seems that Deceived has received better reviews than Revan, but I got roughly equal enjoyment out of both books. Deceived has some moments that stand out in your memory more than anything in Revan did (to me at least), but it also has passages that outright bored me, such as the 20-odd-page move-by-move re-narration of the "Deceived" cinematic game trailer. In the end it pretty much evens out.

Also, like in Revan, I found that once again the Sith actually made for the much more compelling character. You get some absolutely fascinating insights into the mind and background of Darth Malgus, and he goes through a very compelling character arc. I had to laugh a bit when it was revealed that for all his power he's not actually very good at Sith politics - not something that I ever expected, but it certainly explains a lot.

Comparatively, the Jedi and the smuggler fell relatively flat for me, the smuggler in particular. Their characters are mostly reduced to being focused on the one thing they care about more than anything else (Zeerid on his daughter, Aryn on her revenge), and where Malgus finds himself forced to re-evaluate his priorities, the other two just keep going on and on about the same thing without any significant development. While they are faced with physical obstacles, they always end up overcoming them quite easily. Aryn has a revelation at the very end but it comes too suddenly and randomly to be truly convincing, and the end of Zeerid's story just left me with a slight feeling of discomfort, not being quite sure what the point of it was.

The way the book ties in with the game is slightly less obvious than it was in Revan (for example Aryn Leneer isn't obviously a Guardian or a Sentinel, as she uses abilities from both), but it still caused me a fair amount of d'oh moments. For example it took me until about halfway through the book to realise that T7 was the same T7 as in the game. And until Malgus mentioned that a trooper had once set off a grenade in his face, I never even realised that that was him in the "Hope" cinematic. It's all tied together in so many ways...

Book Review: Revan

It's been a while since I last read a video game tie-in, but during the last couple of days I've had a chance to read Revan by Drew Karpyshyn.

It's set about three hundred years before The Old Republic, and like the title implies it focuses on Revan. He shares about equal page time with Lord Scourge however, a character featured in the Jedi knight class story, and there's a lot of background on the Sith Emperor as well. In a nutshell, the book tells the story of how all these characters end up in the positions they are in when you meet them in the game.

As I've mentioned multiple times before, I never played either of the KOTOR games, but even so it was quite obvious to me that the book relies heavily on the story foundation set by those two games. Apparently some KOTOR fans were rather unhappy with how this turned out, as their in-game experiences didn't match what has now been declared official canon. Supposedly some things were retconned as well. Personally I was unburdened by such emotional baggage however, and coming at it purely from a SWTOR perspective I was happy to be provided with some background for characters and events featured in the game.

The writing is fluid and fast-paced, and I soon had trouble putting the book down as I wanted to see where it was all going. Scourge in particular was a fascinating character to me: powerful and power-hungry, ambitious and paranoid. That's not to say that Revan himself was boring to read about, but relatively speaking I found Scourge to have the more interesting personality.

The book also ties in very tightly with the game without being cheesy. Seasoned players will recognise familiar locations here and there (such as the Nexus Room Cantina in Kaas City), and many of the fighting moves described during the combat sequences are reminiscent of actual in-game abilities. There's even a small reference to the player character.

Like any good tie-in should be (/cough), it's completely optional reading. Even if you've never heard of Revan before by the time you encounter his name in the game, everything relevant will be explained as you go along. However, if you'd like to know more about how he ends up where he does, or almost more importantly how the Emperor has ended up where he is, I can heartily recommend this book to fill in all the gaps.