I finally finished Knights of the Old Republic 2. While I liked how ambitious the gameplay and writing was, I ended up being deeply disappointed by the missing content, particularly at the end.

Apparently there's some fantastically epic story about Malachor V, the Sith training at Trayus Academy, and the triumvirate of Darth Traya, Darth Sion, and Darth Nihilius. And some cool side plots involving HK-50 droids, G0T0, Bao-Dur, and Atton or my Disciple falling in love with me. But the only way I know this was planned out is because people scraped some of the missing bits off the game image. When you actually play the game, what you get is a horribly rushed sequence of barely coherent events capped off with some deliciously epic writing that barely makes sense.

And the most ambitious part of the game design was neutered. There's a complex system where you interact with the characters who join you, try to gain influence over them. You could tell the game was being designed so the end depended heavily on whom you influenced through the game, a brilliant idea. Alas, an idea that is totally absent in the actual ending.

I feel cheated, like reading a novel that's missing 80 of the last 100 pages. If they had the same number of hours of content, just more coherent, it would have been great. They were just too ambitious on too tight a schedule. I wish more reviewers would punish game publishers for rushing things out the door before they're ready.