KOTOR II - Explain the ending to me. (BIG SPOILERS!.)

Quie frankly, I’m surprised there isn’t a thread already for this game. The first installment was an amazing RPG, with as much or more responsiveness to character actions than the much-ballyhooed Fable.

Sure, it was passed on to another development team, but the team that got it was responsible for Planescape:Torment, possibly the best RPG ever made. And computer games tend to be the opposite of movies: because of advances in technology, combined with higher budgets because of known profit, sequels tend to be better than their originals. (Not in all cases, but it’s the general trend.)

So, I had high expectations for this game. And, quite frankly, it mostly delivered. It lost a bit due to being a bit buggier than the first one: my character fell into clipping errors at least three times, none of which- thankfully- screwed me up, but that’s still three more than I remember from the first game; in addition, some of the quest results and displays- and the quests themselves- didn’t seem to flow correctly. But still- the writing was great, the modulation (slowly turning party members into Jedis, and making most of them darker or lighter as you choose) was amazing, and the flow… I think this was a great game.
But I don’t understand the ending. Not at all. Can someone explain it to me in simple terms? By “the ending”, I mean everything that happens after you get all the Jedi Council back together.

My understanding- sketchy at best- is that the Council decrees you to be the hole in the force that Lord Nihilis (also?) is, but Kreis comes in and kills them all before you suffer your fate. Atris fell, and had set you up as a target to draw out the old Sith, so that she could destroy them and take the lead as the new Sith, though that doesn’t fit in with Lord Nihilis- a new Sith- being the one drawn out. You attack Nihilis’ ship, and despite him being built up the entire game as something no longer human, something more powerful than anything yet ever experienced, a minor skirmish takes him out. (I think I can rationalize this one as Nihilis having knocked himself senseless trying to feed on you, an equal hole in the force.)

You go after Kreis because she’s the one who set everything into motion with her manipulations, and eventually best her, and get a long winded “this is what will happen to everyone in the future” discussion because that’s what the dev team did with Fallout 1 and 2. (Which I liked in Fallout 1 and 2, but seemed kinda tacked on to this game.) And Kreis’ explanation for why she did everything she did to you: set you up, helped Atris fall, destroyed Lord Nihilis, attempted to cause the Force-death of the universe is… because you were too beautiful to deserve the universe? Because she hated the Force, and therefore wanted to destroy it by setting up plans guaranteed to not work? Whudda?

Oh, and G0-T0 sets up a nasty situation in which he truly controls what will happen, but somehow- without any explanation at all- everything works out the way you want it to. Huh?

So, to reiterate: great game. Loved it a bunch. I’ll probably go back and play it as Dark Side. But I still don’t understand anything about what happened for the last three or four hours of the game.

Sure, I’ll give it a whirl. I finished my first Light Side run through on Monday. My interpretations follow:

Atris didn’t realize she had fallen and she never planned to become the new Sith Lord. Her fall was just the result of a long chain of cascading mistakes dating back to the end of the Mandalorian wars. She honestly intended to use the Sith holocrons and their techniques in the service of the light; in the Expanded Universe there is a name for this kind of thinking - the something-or-the-other heresy.

I was (pleasantly) surprised that they made the Jedi Council so un-likeable. I didn’t like Vrook in the first game but here they really went out of their way to make him into a bastard.

I would generally agree with your theory. I would also theorize that this whole time Kreia has been guiding you into situations where you could gain enough power to take out her old rivals. Nihilis, on the other hand, was only barely aware of you and the game seems to indicate that he couldn’t exactly perceive you fully - kind of like the situation between Disciple and Kreia and Atris (initially) and Kreia.

In Kreia’s case she was hiding herself from the other Force Sensitives, but in your case by turning away from the power at Malachor had accomplished something similar.

Well for what it’s worth you don’t have to go through it all. It made me happy to discover that the people I trained (in my game Atton, Mira, Bao-Dur and Disciple) end up forming the new Jedi Council.

I don’t think her plans were neccesarily doomed to failure from the start; I think that by playing the game as a Light Side jedi it just seems that way. If I can find some way of forcing my way through a Dark Side game (something I could never do all the way in KOTOR I since I’m a big pansy) I imagine the situation would be very different.

I think her plan makes sense, in a certain crazy Sith supervillain point of view. She wanted to destroy the Force and acheive final total victory not just over the Jedi but over the other Sith who had betrayed her as well. She didn’t care that she would destroy everything else along the way.

I can’t explain this at all. I was also confuse by it - but I’m hoping that it was just a result of the game being rushed out the door for Christmas (with no cool opening video, no less) and that the missing cutscene / quest is there somewhere on the disc and a bonus disc/patch will unlock it (they can do that, right?) or that the PC version will correct it.

I agree. I also thought the somewhat ambiguous ending had a real “Empire Strikes Back” quality. I’m hoping that the third game is already in the works.

Kreia had decided that if all life was “guided by the Force” then it meant that there was no such thing as free will - ever, for anybody. Then along comes you, who has voluntarily turned away from the Force so strongly that it was like a gaping wound to anyone who could feel your presence. A “beautiful thing” that survives without any piece of the Force at all. And if you could live in such a way, then that meant that possibly you were the only living being who will ever have any say in its life. She had to have you, and teamed up with Nihilus and Sion in order to find you, eventually kidnapping you from the Republic ship. But Nihilus and Sion wanted you in order to kill you, so she had to take you and flee from them as well.

Whichever way you played through the game, you failed Kreia because you fell to ideals regarding “good” and “evil” when in fact the universe just is.* Her speeches about utility and pregmatism (“Think of your followers as tools.” “Maybe I’ll think of you as expendable.” “Good, you’re learning.”) are meant to teach you that there isn’t balance in life; there isn’t a scale at all. She thought that once you regained your powers, and your incredible talent to affect other people through force bonds (which is what made you such a great general), you could then tear yourself away from the Force again - and with it, tear the Force away from everything. Only then would people be accountable for their own actions, and be unable to trust or blame everything on “the Force.” That would be her victory over the Jedi and the Sith, and her gift to the universe of total free will.

It’s the interpretation of both the Jedi and the Sith that life flows from the Force, so if you cut off the Force you’ll destroy all life. That wasn’t true in your case, and Kreia hoped that you aren’t just a fluke. For if you can destroy the Force, then everything that survives will be stronger for it. And anything that doesn’t survive was too weak to consider saving anyway.

But because you can’t follow her teachings, her dream is gone. She has to kill you, since you’re now such a big weight on the scale you’ll ruin any chance she has to put her ideas into practice.

*Default setting for playing perfectly neutral is the good ending. Sad, I know.

Whoa. That’s a very interesting interpretation, Brahe. Have you tried going through as true neutral to see if the ending is different?

JDeMobray- good points, all. I do think they’re leading up to the third installment, which involves Revan and The Exile out there on the rim dealing with the “old” Sith.

I first did the goody-two-shoes route, and finished a Light-side game, with the ending as you describe.

I just finished the Dark-side campaign, and I am left with a WTF? ringing through my mind.

You throw the old bint into a pit and the game pans out to some nebula (no Ebon Hawk flying away), and thats it.

Huh? No tying up loose ends? No cool-ass KOTOR (first one) style evil victory march? Just AAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!!! and game over? I am rather disappointed that a game that plays so well has such a lame ending, either way, but especially the Dark-side ending.

My $.02? They rushed it to give it time for Christmas sales. No way did the staff sit down and say, ‘Ya! That ending rocks!’

(Off to play some Baldurs Gate, the last of the RPGs…)