As I posted before:
While it is good and right to blame Disney and JarJar for turning all the OT into a bunch of losers who watched their dreams crumble to dust before their eyes, don't forget that Lucas had 15 fucking years pre-episode one, and a further 13 years before he sold to the Rat, to give us something besides the Holiday Special with the original cast, with the bonus they'd have been young enough they weren't eating at the Golden Seniors buffet, and did not do this out of greed.
Timeline:
- Kenner rakes Lucas over the coals on toy royalties as long as they give him $10,000 in continuence.
- After ROTJ, Lucas decides to 'cool the franchise'.
- Kenner is bought by Hasbro and in 1997, Kenner (now Hasbro) neglects to send the check, their sweetheart licensing deal on Starwars Toys expires
- 1999 the Phantom Menace comes out, with Habro needing to fight Mattel for the toy license, letting Lucas keep a greater cut of the merch
(Which to be clear: I don't think taking a break from Star Wars movies break was a bad idea (though he put out Ewoks movies which I believe were exempt from the Kenner license), and I don't think it was wrong for him to spent time with his kids given he'd spent about a decade shooting the films.... the minute the license deal is expired by negligence on the part of hasbro is the minute he decides its time to make movies again)
I'm sure there's ample cause to accuse Lucas of acting on greed in some (maybe a lot of) instances, but do the dates really line up here? Supposedly, he began work on the first draft of the script for
The Phantom Menace back in 1994, a year before Hasbro's first "Power of the Force 2" figures hit shelves, so he was, apparently, already committed to making the Prequels several years before Hasbro fucked up his royalty payments.
TORtanic still remains the only video game I've played where the fucking beta had more content and was more fun than the actual launch product. That game was such a fucking disaster and making it a WoW themepark clone did no favors for it. The new-ness of fully voice acted quest givers wore off after first play through and after that you're just spacebarring though it all anyway so that was a huge waste of money. The customization for your character in a world as expansive as Star Wars was shitty, lightsaber nerf bats AGAIN, stupid romance subplots, etc.
To this day, the only game I regret preordering as much as TORtanic is MechWarrior Online so that ought to tell you just how bad both of them are. How could you have trailers for a game be so goddamn awesome and epic and yet the game itself be so milquetoast and disappointing?
That's interesting. I started playing the game just after Christmas (which, incidentally, is why I dropped off the face of the Earth again) and I actually found it it to be pretty engaging (though not unflawed) so I'm curious, how was the beta different the game's state post-launch? I've heard that the developers started wasting a lot of updates implementing those all-important same-sex flirting instances for various characters, and now apparently are more concerned with creating new costumes to milk their established set of whales than creating new content or fixing old content (there's apparently a certain mailbox that has been facing backwards for a full decade now, and the disparity between the original character models and the newer, more detailed ones for Valcorian and Arcann is pretty jarring). Anything else I should be aware of?
Revan is probably the weakest of the Old Republic books, but its also written as kind of a companion piece to the KOTOR games, so it covers the events between the games. If it feels incomplete, that's why. But the rest of them though (Darth Bane, Deceived, Annihilation, etc) are quite f'ing good. Generally, I find the Old Republic material for Star Wars to be pretty good. Its an Era of the Star Wars timeline that is ripe for material and (thankfully) hasn't been made into a shitty movie to ruin it for me.
I think Kathleen Kennedy and her clique would have a collective aneurysm if they tried to play through TOR. The ambiguous, nebulous and morally-conflicted atmosphere of the main campaign is so far removed from the starkly black and white (and yet white and black when convenient) SJW ideology now reigning at Lucasfilm that I can only imagine heads spontaneously exploding if Kennedy's current "story group" were to be exposed to it.
And maybe Star Wars fans get particular about what era or what kind of EU books they like. I personally LOVED The Vong as they were a much needed breath of fresh air for Star Wars, and their threat also forced an alliance between the New Republic and what was left of the Imperial Forces to form an alliance which, again, was a breath of fresh air.
Brother!
The Revan book's segments with Canderous and Revan are actually pretty kino, and the rest isn't too terrible either
The whole "two buddies on a road-trip" plot with Revan and Canderous searching for Mandalore's mask is great, and the glimpses of where the Mandalorians are at, mentally and emotionally, in the immediate aftermath of the war are definitely worth the read, at least if your thoughts on the Mandos as a distinct faction within the GFFA ascend to a level of greater sophistication than "hurrr-durr Spaes Vikings/Mongols".
The book's worst sin is picking a canon sex/race/name for the two main KOTOR characters
I think that was going to be inevitable, though, simply due to the in-universe historical significance of Revan and the Exile. I mean, it's one thing to talk about "a group of spacers" achieving some quest from
Star Wars Galaxies, but forever referring to galaxy-shaking figures like Revan in sexless terms is asking a lot of authors, and would make for some really awkward prose.
Like I said before, there's a reason for that:
And I'm not talking about Flesh Eaters.
I thought that it was supposed to be the other way around, though, according to
Supernatural Encounters: The Trial and Transformation of Arhul Hextrophon.
Regardless, that doesn't really excuse the Rakata for being so conceptually
dull (it really says something that their most infamous creation is basically a big, blank white room in the middle of nowhere/nothing).
I mean, here you have a bunch of Rakata starfighters, which are basically just smaller versions of their capital ships, which are themselves basically smaller versions of the Star Forge oriented horizontally rather than vertically:
It's like an entire civilization based off of
Matryoshka dolls.
This in a nutshell. The book isn't bad, at least not for me, but the more glaring and obvious problems though show themselves when they try to cement the Exile's character and history, resulting in even more inconsistencies that don't match up with what can happen, and even some with Revan. Also as much as I didn't mind Revan's changes compared to the Exile's, he was in a way a very personal character for a lot of fans, a self-insert, like say Fallout's Vault Dwellers for comparison among many other RPG characters, so naturally seeing him be completely different or only slightly similar to how you played him is gonna put people off no matter what, and it wasn't probably for the best. The first half of the book is lit at least.
To be fair, though, KOTOR II isn't even 100% consistent with its predecessor (Canderous, as I've previously noted, gives different accounts of the Battle of Malachor V in each game that don't really line up with each other at all), so it's not like the retconning started with the
Revan novel. Mind you, I still think the whole idea of the planet-eating Immortal Sith Emperor is absolutely
terrible, just because of how it diminishes Palpatine as evil top-dog in the history of the GFFA.
you know what would have really helped sell sequel toys?
if the characters ever actually changed their outfits throughout the whole thing.
even soyboys can only buy so many duplicates of rey, poe, fin, kylo and phasma.
The costume design for the Soy Wars sequels in general was just garbage. Oddly, most of the outfits created for Disney projects set in and around the OT (
Mando,
Solo,
Rogue Uno) have been much more "Star Wars" looking and just more aesthetically pleasing on the whole.
I never really had an obsession with Revan as a character, so I think I'll be good. A lot of my favorite characters are the supporting cast and villains from KOTOR II.
Yeah, I've always thought that Revan was the weakest part of the KOTOR setting (well, Revan and the Exile, and that whole "wound in the Force" concept).
