Last time I wrote about Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was cautiously optimistic about the game’s direction. How did that optimism pay out in the back half of the Knights of the Fallen Empire story?

Unlike last time, which was a first impressions post, I’ve run five characters through all the Fallen Empire content, and a sixth through the first batch. Also, I wrote that first post before covering all the initial batch of content, so there’s going to be some thoughts on that as well.

• Alliance Alerts: The first batch can be divided into four groups: quick conversations to get companions like the ship droids and Nico Okarr, stories to (re)introduce old companions, like Yuun, Talos Drellik, and Xalek; “try out this activity” prodding like M1-4X, Pierce (PVP for the last two), and Qyzen (world bosses); and Star Fortresses, which I’ll get to in a bit. Dr. Lokin straddles the middle two, requiring doing a bunch of crew skill gathering and playing with the Rakghoul event. The first set is a quick way to get a few quick extra hands. The second is the best set, giving insight to the character for people who may not have done the particular class story. And then there’s the third set. Qyzen at least has an alternative, but the PVP quest – well, I complained about that last time and nothing has changed.
• Star Fortresses are good, if buggy, challenges – doable solo, even on heroic/veteran mode, but requiring some skill/knowledge of your character. They reward exploration with bonus bosses and extra power-ups to make the final challenges a little easier, and there’s an achievement for skipping them and still finishing solo. Doing all of them to get the companions gets a bit tedious by the end, but it’s worth it. It’s a good thing
• The late seven chapters tell a story, although it takes a step back to see. SCORPIO wants control of the GEMINI network and comes up with a plan to get it. The first plan, which involves one and eventually both of the companions recruited in Chapters 10-11, fails over Chapters 12-13. Then Chapters 14-16 are her second plan and its fallout.
• Gameplay in the chapters is pretty bad. Skytroopers are – I’d say cannon fodder, but it’d be a waste of that much effort – and there are way too many bosses that are “hit them a couple times, they go invincible while a few Skytroopers pop up, repeat.” Chapters 9 and 14 each have sections that are copy-pasted, helping Kaliyo take control of the network and storming bunkers with Torian.
• Chapter 12 is a disaster. It starts with Lana randomly suggesting asking Valkorion for advice when she should know as well anyone why that’s a bad idea, and you have to go along with it even though it’s a bad idea. Surprise, it turns out to be a bad idea. Then Satele and the Ghost of Marrs Past show up and start talking about how Zakuul is superior to anything the Empire/Sith and Republic/Jedi have, which foreshadows a lot of my problems with Eternal Throne, and honestly the only way I can remotely accept this is to think they’re actually illusions conjured by Valkorion because the Outlander rejected him.
• Chapter 13 is the best of the lot, joining with a couple fun companions (Gault and Vette) for a heist against the Eternal Empire’s treasury ship. The writing is fun, and it’s nice to have a low-stakes objective with the only moral choice being “do we keep the spoils for ourselves, or share them”? Really, a lot of the stuff from this era showed the writers had a strong hand for comedy.
• The rest of the Alliance Alerts follow in the mold of the best ones from the beginning: character-focused stories. Instead of Khem Val, we get a different Dashade (or don’t, leaving him locked up is a valid choice, and I never liked Khem and have no use for this guy either). Blizz and Guss are great additions to the Alliance, and it’s good to be definitively rid of annoyances like Broonmark and Skadge. (I think Rusk’s in there somewhere, too, but he’s so boring I can’t remember.)
• As for Bowdaar, the Eternal Championship is a fun minigame that brings flashpoint/operation mechanics to the single-player game. The difficulty is weirdly tiered: rounds 1-5 are easy, then 6-7 are the hardest two, with 8-10 being a step down. (I was lucky enough to get the Cybernetic Rancor – and Deathless Champion! – on my first run. Sprint Champion took a while to get.)
• The selection of companions is… ehh. Aside from Vette and Blizz, I can’t think of any I was really happy to see back. They were saving most of the favorite companions for interesting material that never came to be. More on this in later posts.
• At least we got HK-55 back. His bonus chapter and the extra companion who came with it are great – again, working those comedy chops, and wrapping up one story from way back in the day in as anticlimactic a fashion as you could want.
• And the terminal works so I had Kira back, rather than waiting another three years for her.
• My opinion of Vaylin and Arcann is unchanged – Arcann bland and boring, Vaylin actually interesting. It’s Arcann that ends this part of the story potentially heading for healing/redemption while Vaylin takes command of the Eternal Empire, forced into an uneasy alliance with SCORPIO.

And that’s where we leave off as we head to the next expansion.

Next: Knights of the Eternal Throne.