Dantooine… they’re on Dantooine… parts of the Jedi Council are at least. Honestly, I always forget how much I love this planet because it is so completely and utterly ridiculous at times. Take this woman Elisa. She wants you to find her droid because it’s all she has left of her dead husband. One problem: the droid ran away because she was treating him a little too much like her dead husband. Yeah. It’s exactly what your brain went to and it makes me laugh every time.
The real point of Dantooine though is for you to be accepted into the Jedi Order and learn to use the Force because you and Bastila have some sort of connection and some super weird dreams about Darth Revan. (In retrospect, my 14-year-old self should have picked up on this foreshadowing way sooner but more on that later.) This means that you’ve got to study the Jedi way of life, their code, make your lightsaber, and decide what class of Jedi you want to be. I used to go for Sentinel but then I realized that I just want more of those sweet, sweet Force powers so Consular it is! It’ll be a cold day in hell before I go for Guardian.
There’s one final test before they make you an official padawan: you must cleanse the ancient grove of the dark side taint. Or something like that. This is flashing warning sign number one that the Jedi Order is kind of screwed up. You have to redeem a Jedi padawan named Juhani who fell to the dark side after her own master was testing her and made Juhani think that she’d killed her. It’s kinda messed up. Incidentally, that’s a good tagline for the Jedi Order.
But hey! If you cleanse the grove, you become an official Jedi padawan! (If I remember correctly, this happens even if you kill Juhani which the game doesn’t want you to do even if you’re a dark sider. Basically you only fail if you die.) Now the Jedi Council has two jobs for you: go investigate these strange ruins that Revan and Malak went to and also go help settle this Space Montague and Space Capulet family feud amongst the locals. I’ll give them points for using black and Asian character models for the two families. Actually, KOTOR has a pretty decent track record as far as scattering diversity amongst its bit and background characters goes and I am very proud of them for that since they made this game in 2003.
The Space Family dispute gets settled about how you’d expect and the strange ruins reveal something called the Star Forge to you. What’s the Star Forge? We have literally no idea but heeeeeey look at this convenient map with four planets that probably have more pieces of the map that’ll lead to whatever this Star Forge thing is!! (In retrospect: this may actually make slightly more sense than Artoo having part of a map that magically leads to Luke Skywalker because of the Death Star.) But now you have a quest!
What I really want to talk about though is Carth. The more you talk to him, the more you learn about his trust issues and while they’re easy to mock… they make a lot of sense. He feels betrayed by his mentor Saul and by Revan, Malak, and all the other Jedi who joined/became the Sith. They fought together and now they fight against each other. There’s not much worse than watching your heroes become the villains. Seriously, look at this screencap:
That said… the dialogue option to tell Carth “You were born out of the loop!” is still hilarious even though I never use it. One day maybe…
But now? I’ve got the entire galaxy at my finger tips! …okay I’ve got four new planets at my fingertips. Which one shall I go to? (Spoilers: it’s the one with the murder droid.)
