In 2003, Bioware (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights) and LucasArts (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle) decided to make a Star Wars RPG. This news was received a bit skeptically, mostly because there were very few good Star Wars games out at the time (besides the SNES Star Wars games, brutal difficulty notwithstanding). However, once the game came out, it ended up getting 7 "Best of" awards from IGN, almost universal GOTY awards, and made enough money to fill a boat and warrant a sequel.
You begin the game by creating a character. You can choose a male or a female, choose from three classes, and choose from several portraits. The rest of the customization can be summed up as "make a D&D character sheet". While the aesthetic choices could be a bit more...varied, the rest of the customization more than makes up for it.
After this, the game starts with a starship under attack (cliche 1). Your character wakes up because of an explosion, then immediately afterwards, your roommate runs in, telling you to go find a Jedi named Bastila Shan (Jennifer Hale, who also does the voice of Samus Aran in the Metroid Prime games). You can tell him, basically, to go screw himself, but it doesn't matter, and the two of you go search for her. Eventually, after your roommate sacrifices himself (cliche 2), telling you to go on without him (cliche 3), you run into a pilot named Carth Onasi (Raphael Sbarge, who also did the voicework for Kaiden Alenko in Mass Effect). After the two of you leave in the last escape pod, the ship explodes (cliche 4). After crashing onto the planet of Taris, the two of you start looking for Bastila. And so does someone else...
Over the course of the game, you will visit Taris, Kashyykk (I think I spelled that right), Korriban, Tatooine, Dantooine, Manaan, and Rakata Prime. These are, in order, a city, a gigantic treehouse and jungle, a volcanic planet, a desert, a grassplain, an underwater metropolis, and a beach. As you can see, they really took their time developing these worlds and making each of them unique. What's more, each planet has creatures not seen elsewhere. For example, Tatooine has Sandpeople, Manaan has these fish-like creatures, Kashyykk has Wookies, etc. All in all, the environments are quite varied and will keep your interest.
The plot in this game, while it has its share of cliches, is still original enough to keep your interest, and is definitely deep enough to keep you wanting to keep playing, though the end is still kind of a WTF ending. A later twist, very nearly on the level of "Empire Strikes Back", will make you want to replay the game from a new perspective. There are also added props to making the story somewhat non-linear, in that there are multiple paths you can take to the end. Granted, no matter what the ending, the bad guy dies, but it's the journey, not the destination, that matters. The sidequests are also plentiful and varied enough to make you want to do them all. Some of these sidequests will take cliches and throw them on their head. Of course, you don't have to do all the sidequests, but they give you plenty of opportunities to be a complete jackass.
The voicework in this game can be summed up as "perfect". There is not a single voice in the game that does not fit the character. In particular, major props must be given to the voice actor of HK-47, Kristoffer Tabori. The character itself is very darkly comic, and that is only underlined by the skilled voice actor. That said, I found Mission Vao's voice to be grating, but I also found the character annoying, so it still fit. The music fits the game like a glove. It's ambient enough to not stand out, but it still flows well with the game, setting the mood.
Going hand-in-hand with the voice acting, the characters themselves are deep enough to hold your interest. Rather than being a case of "the gunner, the *****" etc., here you have a person with a personal vendetta against the Sith due to being betrayed, a very conflicted Jedi, a street-smart Twi'lek, a Wookiee with a heart of gold, a mercenary who just wants to blow shit up, a droid that loves to see people, or as he refers to them, "meatbags", suffer, a lesbian half-cat Jedi, and finally, an old, cynical Jedi who is refreshingly not "the paragon of good" but rather "moral, but still laughs at other's stupidity". Each character has even more development that can only be gotten through your talking directly to them. What's more, your party members will occassionally chat with each other. For example, if you have Canderous, the aforementioned mercenary, and Bastila in your party, Canderous will insult her and the fallability of her beliefs, and she in turn will struggle to avoid getting emotional.
The battle system is one of the few problems I had with the game. It uses an active-time turn-based system, which works decently, but you never really feel like you are in any rush, since you can stack moves to use for later turns to buy you some time. Also, this kind of game would probably have benefitted more from a real time system.
The graphics, for the time, were astounding. However, five years has made a lot of progress in graphics, causing this game to now look somewhat archaic.
The morality meter was basically created with this game. Here, the morality meter makes an impact in gameplay. Unless you are high in Charisma, a light-side Jedi will want to avoid stuff like Force Choke, Force Lightning, and Fear, while dark-side Siths will try to avoid stuff like Force Heal and other such paladin-like abilities.
Overall, if you have a PC (which I know you do) or an Xbox, pick this up without any qualms. However, if you have a 360 and have already played Mass Effect, I would still recommend picking this up, seeing as it is quite obviously a good game and is backward compatible, but be warned that you will see very little that was not improved by Mass Effect.
