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"Take the greatest Jedi Knight, strip away the Force, and what remains? They rely on it - depend on it, more than they know. Watch as one tries to hold a blaster, as they try to hold a lightsaber, and you will see nothing more than a woman – or a man. A child."
Kreia

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords is the 2004 sequel by Obsidian Entertainment to BioWare's 2003 Knights of the Old Republic.

The Sith Lords tells the story of a former Jedi who was cast out of the Order and lost the ability to feel the Force. Nearly a decade later, the Exile finally returns to the Republic, only to find it on its knees in the wake of the Jedi Civil War five years before. After linking up with a Republic warship, the Exile is brought to the brink of death when Sith forces attack the vessel, leaving the former Jedi comatose and adrift in the badly damaged Ebon Hawk.

Soon thereafter, the Exile awakens in a mining complex whose inhabitants have been slaughtered by their own droids, with the sole survivors being an old ex-Jedi named Kreia, a smuggler named Atton Rand, and the Hawk's utility droid, T3-M4. The four band together, escaping the complex just as the Sith arrive, and Kreia takes the Exile in as her apprentice. The group proceeds to seek out the remains of the now-devastated Jedi Order, finding allies in everyone from a technician who previously served under the Exile to the new Mandalore as he seeks to reunite his scattered people under the leadership of his clan, in the hopes of finding the remaining Jedi Masters and defeating the Sith. However, it quickly becomes clear that Kreia is not quite what she seems—nor is anyone on the Ebon Hawk, the Exile included...

Despite being released rushed and unfinished due to a Troubled Production and Executive Meddling (the ending in particular was disjointed and nearly-absent, with many subplots Left Hanging), the game was still a relative success and, like its predecessor, firmly found its place in Star Wars Legends canon, being referenced heavily by later works. The game actively deconstructs the very foundations of the setting (such as The Force itself), and the general mood is noticeably Darker and Edgier than in the original, borrowing themes from Planescape: Torment.

A notable facet of the game's rushed status is that much of the missing content — including large portions of the ending — still exist in the game's files, unimplemented due to further Executive Meddling preventing a post-release content patch. Much of this lost content has been restored by The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod (TSLRCM for short), which can be downloaded from numerous sources, including Deadly Stream, ModDB, and Steam Workshop.

An updated version was released on Steam on July 21st 2015, adding support for widescreen, achievements, and mods through the Steam Workshop, including the aforementioned TSLRCM. A Nintendo Switch port was announced in May 2022 for a June 8, 2022 release, with the TSLRCM announced as free DLC (though that has since been cancelled).

For those who are curious, the game's player character is canonically light-side female named Meetra Surik, although the player is free to choose the protagonist's gender and alignment for themselves in the game proper.

While the game was later deemed Legends in 2014 with the reboot of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, some themes of the story were used in Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, the second film of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, with an old and embittered Luke Skywalker having similar negative views of the Jedi, the Sith and the Force to Kreia's. Also, some elements of the game have been canonized in Broad Strokes in the post-reboot Expanded Universe, such as Meetra Surik being name-dropped in The High Republic and the Sith temple on Malachor appearing in Star Wars Rebels.


The Sith Lords provides examples of:

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    A-B 
  • 11th-Hour Superpower: The player receives an incredibly handy technique depending on their alignment. Dark Side gets Force Crush while Light Side gains Force Enlightenment. Both are received near the end of the game when the only option is to continue on with the story until the conclusion.
  • Abandoned Hospital Awakening: This game starts with the Exile awakening in the medical bay of Peragus mining station, only to find out that the miners have been massacred, with Kreia and Atton being the only two other living beings aboard.
  • Absurdly High Level Cap: The maximum level cap is 50. You can, maybe, get up to 30 with the available experience and without abusing the mechanics. This may have been in response to the absurdly low level cap in the first game due to the d20 roleplaying mechanic (it might also have something to do with the massive amounts of cut content). Non-boss enemies still cap out at 20 though, so even the weakest build will find the game laughably simple not long after that point. There's also an exploit one can use to get to level 50, though it takes quite a long time and isn't really worth it.
  • After-Combat Recovery: As in the first game, characters revive with minimal HP once the battle is done. Atton has a chance to do this during battle.
  • The Alibi: Dhagon Ghent has an alibi for Captain Sullio's murder, since he was with an acquaintance at the time. Unfortunately, the person in question is a Republic spy, so they can't use that as evidence, lest they blow the spy's cover and get Ghent arrested for collaborating with a foreign spy instead.
  • All for Nothing: After gathering the Jedi Council together on the light side path, they not only turn on the Exile, still believing everything is their fault, but decide to cut them off from the Force, only to be killed by Kreia. Thus, the long journey to gain their aid turns out to be a failure.
  • All Love Is Unrequited: While it's possible to make certain party members fall for the Exile, the game never really gives you the option to return their feelings. At best, all the Exile can do is dance around the issue. A male Exile can openly hit on Mira, but she turns you down cold.
  • All There in the Manual: The Sith Triumvirate, the name of the Sith faction that is hunting down The Exile, is never mentioned in the game, but it is revealed in supplementary materials.
  • All There in the Script: Character age is known from casting documents.
  • Alt Itis: With many possible combinations of resolutions across the planets and numerous ways you can build your character and customize your party, this game encourages multiple playthroughs. Each playthrough even has its own page of save slots.
  • Amazon Brigade: The Echani Handmaidens.
  • Ancient Tomb: Korriban once again houses the tombs of the Sith Lords, although the only one available to explore is the Tomb of Ludo Kressh, which wasn't available to explore in the first game. It doubles as a Journey to the Center of the Mind, as the Exile relives their war experiences and current issues in exploring the tomb.
  • And the Adventure Continues: With the Restored Content mod, the Exile convinces most of the companions to stay and help rebuild the Jedi and the Republic. Meanwhile the Exile and Atton head out to the Unknown Regions.
  • And There Was Much Rejoicing: IS-56 is a naughty supervising droid at the R & D sector (only if you have the M4-78 planet mod installed). Other droids find him unpleasantly bossy and remark that he should take a break, permanently. If you kill him, the other droids will thank you.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Including some improvements based on feedback to the first game:
    • Characters can now apply medpacks on other party members, not only themselves.
    • The Force Speed ability normally only benefits the individual, but when using it outside of combat to get around more quickly, your companions will also run faster so they won't get left behind.
    • Containers display the word "Empty" next to their name after you searched them. This makes it easier to loot without having to double-check.
    • You can switch between two sets of weapons rather than going to the equipment screen, meaning you can give characters a melee option and a ranged option.
    • Regenerating Health kicks in outside of combat, although at a very slow rate. It's very helpful early on, when you're without proper equipment and healing Force powers. It becomes obsolete later in the game however.
    • Your inventory screen can be filtered according to the item categories, making navigating easier.
    • Some planets have "instant travel" units in the form of a NPC or a computer terminal. Interacting with them will give you the option to instantly travel to another area, sparing you the time-consuming chore of running from Point A to Point B.
    • You moved very slowly in the relatively lengthy scuba- and spacesuit sections in the first game. Here Obsidian has greatly increased the speed of the suits, which only appear briefly on Peragus and under the Jekk'Jekk Tarr bar on Nar Shaddaa.
  • Anti-Villain: Kreia/Darth Traya who, depending on interpretation, wanted to free the galaxy from the tyranny of the Force or to rebuild the Jedi Order without the baggage of the past. Maybe. Revan is also characterized like this in this game: a Jedi who wanted to fight off an unstoppable invading army against the wishes of an overly cautious and callous Jedi Council and did so with extreme success before giving into the temptation for power. Kreia presents the idea that it was in fact a Genghis Gambit by Revan. He/She fought the Mandalorians because the Jedi would not, then turned to the dark side to control the Star Forge and turn on the Republic so that they would be ready to face future threats when they came.
  • Apocalyptic Log: The holo-logs found scattered throughout the Peragus colony and the Harbinger, which detail the events leading up to the (apparent) extermination of all life in both areas.
  • Arc Words: You'll hear 'echo' and 'wound' everywhere you go, from people who would have never met and have no other point of connection... other than the Exile. Exile, hunger, pain, betrayal, and awaken also come up frequently. Possibly a Justified Trope, given how the Exile's powers work — you may well be manipulating others through the Force on some level, without even meaning to, such that those around unconsciously mirror the Exile's own memories and thoughts back at you. Later, one particularly memorable vision on Korriban gives us "Apathy is death", a strong contender for the Arc Words for the entire game but strongly associated with Kreia, since it is at the very core of her teachings. Even refusing to take action and make a choice is itself a choice, and every choice has consequences far beyond the immediate effect. Various other cast members have their own arc words as well:
    • Bao-Dur: "Your command echoes still, General. And I obey, as I did at Malachor." In keeping with the previous entry, the consequences of the Exile's decision to deploy the Mass Shadow Generator are still being calculated, years after the fact — and asking Bao-Dur to build it defined who and what the Iridonian was and could be, changing him irrevocably. All of that still doesn't necessarily mean the decision was wrong.
    • The Handmaiden: "I honor the face of my mother." The Handmaiden's mother was a Jedi, not the wife of her father, an Echani general. That Jedi is one of Revan's former masters, Arren Kae, who in turn is very likely Kreia herself.
    • Visas: "My life for yours" and "As my feet walk the ashes of Katarr, I shall not fear, for in fear lies death..." The Exile is given the option of using the bond between Visas and her master to end the threat Darth Nihilus poses once and for all, sacrificing the Miraluka in the process.
    • Mira: "I'm good at finding people." Turns out the reason Mira is so good at finding people is because she's Force-sensitive, and her desire to find those people who were lost to each other in the war runs parallel to the late-game reveal that the Exile, recruiting all the disparate characters who make up the party, was unwittingly assembling a generation of lost Jedi who went undiscovered during the chaos of the wars.
    • Hanharr: "You shall always be prey." And prey is weak, and Hanharr despises the idea of being bound to anyone as weak as Mira or his tribe.
    • And meanwhile, "the last of the Jedi" is anything but. Atris believes she alone remains true to the Jedi Code, even as other Jedi still live... despite her efforts to see them all purged so that she can create a more perfect Order in her own image. And if you've completed your companion's arcs, you've found that you are not the last of the Jedi, but rather they are the next generation, those who were lost and forgotten during the wars.
  • Armor-Piercing Question: "What kind of life have you lived with the Force flowing through you? Was it worth living?" Delivered by the Exile to Darth Sion after defeating him on Malachor V, to point out that despite using the Force to extend his own lifespan and endurance beyond mortal limits, he has not done anything of worth with his life and has only spent his time inflicting pointless pain on himself and everyone around him.
    Darth Sion: It was not... No matter how many killed... there was no end to the pain... the blades the Force tore through my flesh.
  • Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: The Handmaiden's sisters. They're pretty full of themselves and have no qualms about insulting her in front of strangers, while she's within earshot.
  • Artifact of Doom:
    • Ajunta Pall's sword is mentioned, though it doesn't appear.
    • The Sith Holocrons that Atris is keeping in her meditation chamber. What a great idea that was.
  • Artificial Atmospheric Actions: NPCs will walk around randomly, back and forth and back and forth, in both games.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Your party members have a nasty habit of disregarding your orders and always go after your target. While ganging up on a single opponent is a viable tactic, it's not always in this case. A party of three Jedi with no intelligent pathfinding will only make the whole thing frustrating, as they awkwardly bump into each other while trying to reach the target.
    • Party members set to Grenadier AI will waste all of your grenade supply as they have no sense of ammo conservation.
    • The Twin Suns are deadly bosses because Atton will be facing them alone. The Twins are master of melee combat and have energy shields. However, Atton can simply duck behind the bar and the Twins will stand still and do nothing. Atton can then shoot them dead and spam grenades at his own leisure. Amusingly, the Twins will occasionally heal themselves when injured, but they still won't attack.
  • Ascended Meme: In-universe, "Pulling a Bindo" is the term used for any Jedi who decides to marry.
  • As You Know: Averted. Plot elements the player character and several NPC companions already know when the game begins are only revealed to the player towards the end of the game. Large amounts of backstory exposition come in the form of dialogue options, since the character already knows it even if you (the player) do not. A large number of those options are in turn Schrodingers Questions, enabling the player to have control over their character's actions and attitudes even prior to the events of the game.
  • Asshole Victim: HK-50 eliminates the unscrupulous Coorta once it concludes that Coorta's impulsivity is threatening its plans.
  • Author Tract: Some of the more critical attitudes towards the game find it and especially Kreia's thoughts to be a large amount of this regarding Chris Avellone's views on the Force and the Star Wars universe.
  • Auto-Revive: Atton has a unique ability that gives him a chance to revive when he falls in combat, provided at least one of his allies is still standing.
  • Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Throughout most of the game, the Republic is subject of a number of derogatory comments in regards to its crumbling status, both economically and politically; the Jedi Civil War and the post-war reconstruction efforts are bankrupting it, it is mired in corruption and ineffective bureaucracy, and key worlds that can determine the future of the Republic are at stake. However, when given a tangible foe, the Republic shows that it still remains a formidable foe, sending a battle-ready fleet to combat Darth Nihilus' invading Sith fleet during the battle of Telos in the endgame.
  • Badass Bookworm:
    • Muscular frame notwithstanding, Bao-Dur is a soft-spoken Gadgeteer Genius who invented the weapon that destroyed Malachor V, and built himself a repulsor-powered robotic arm.
    • You meet the Disciple in a monster-overrun library doing a little "light" reading on Jedi history. His Soldier class grants him generous endurance, lots of hit points, and the ability to use any weapon or armor. Cross-class the boy into a Consular, and he is a can of Force-power whoop-ass on top of that.
  • Badass Long Robe: One of the clear things this game did better than the first was adding these to Jedi and Sith robes, instantly making anyone wearing them awesome.
  • Bad Boss: IS-43 on the M4-78 planet (only with the restored content mod installed). He is obsessed with the productivity levels of his cleaning droids, such that he keeps overloading them with new tasks. It reaches a critical point when he starts ignoring repeated warnings that the droids are close to breaking down due to lack of maintenance.
  • Balance Buff: The game gives a lot of extra perks to skills to create a niche for Jedi Sentinels, which were Master of None in the previous game. Successfully picking locks and retrieving deadly mines now awards small bits of experience which can add up in the long run, and picking open a chest gets you items that would've otherwise been shattered if you smashed open the lock. Useless Useful Stealth is downplayed as you get a lot more opportunities to use it to great effect. Then there's the whole Item Crafting system, where high skill investment lets you access powerful upgrade parts.
  • Beige Prose: "I suffered... indignities."
  • Best Her to Bed Her: An Echani tradition, apparently, such that if you complete the Handmaiden's duel sequence, she will grow uncomfortable and say she doesn't want the duels to become more than they are.
  • Betting Mini-Game: The Pazaak card game appears again. The unfairness is lampshaded in an overheard argument between Atton and T3.
  • Betty and Veronica:
    • The Handmaiden (Betty) and Visas (Veronica) for a male Exile.
    • The Disciple (Betty) and Atton (Veronica) for a female Exile.
  • Beware the Superman: Again, as part of its love of taking a chainsaw and flamethrower to all things Star Wars. The galaxy is a war-shattered mess. The conflict from the first game is now called the "Jedi Civil War". Most of the Non Player Characters the Exile encounters neither know nor care about the difference between Jedi and Sith. Atton sniffs at the Exile's explanation, dismissing the conflict as "Men and women fighting over religion while the galaxy burns." Kreia points out that the Jedi-Sith war has been raging for thousands of years with the various Sith Empires and the Republic as mere proxies for the Force users, while the Force itself seems to soak up the blood and encourage the destruction. Kreia plans to use the Exile to end the whole thing by breaking the Force itself.
  • Big Bad: The Lord of Betrayal Kreia/Darth Traya. Disc-One Final Boss Darth Nihilus and The Dragon Darth Sion were made that way by her. The main events resolve around Traya's scheme and she's the Sith with the personal connection to the protagonist. Nihilus is just a convenient excuse for the Exile to reunite the Jedi Masters so Traya can kill them. She wishes to destroy the Force itself, a desire so dangerous that Sion and Nihilus exiled her. Traya is also the Final Boss.
  • Bizarre Alien Senses: The team bounty hunter can give a short lecture on the Bith (the bulb-headed aliens that tend to be musicians in most bars). Apparently their aural perception covers a much wider spectrum than humans', including some radio signals.note  However, this makes them extra vulnerable to noise and a flashbang will kill them messily.
  • Black-and-Gray Morality: Rather famously adopted as part of the Deconstructor Fleet that is this game. Some of your party members are far from saints, but the alternative is far worse.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • The Retinal Combat Implant has a low skill threshold to craft at a lab station, and a middling Constitution requirement of 14 to equip it. It provides immunity to critical hits, which can be literally life-saving.
    • The last sparring match against the Handmaiden's sisters, in which they all gang up on you at once, can be won by walking up to them, forcing them to back up so they can attack and pushing them off the mat effortlessly.
    • Melee shields essentially render all non-Jedi, close-combat foes impotent, and you'll usually have enough to deal with the battles where it actually matters. These are especially helpful during the above-mentioned Handmaiden duel.
    • The Shii-Cho saber form is the first style you (and other Jedi initiates) learn, and it has a simple perk of increased defense against enemies that aren't your current target (and no net loss against whatever you're fighting). Other styles barring the Niman form are more situational, so don't be surprised if you leave yourself on Shii-Cho as a Guardian or Sentinel.
  • Boxing Lessons for Superman: As part of Kreia's lesson on the shortcomings of the Force, she explains the benefits of mundane skills and how they can help a Jedi both enhance their understanding of the Force and lessen their dependence on it. She tasks the player with improving their weakest skill, which comes with a small reward if they do.
  • Broad Strokes: According to Word of God, (A) the Exile is female, and (B) the Handmaiden joins her party. Therefore, it is impossible to play a canonical version of the game without modding it. And even then, the way the game is programmed requires another party member to be kicked out (the original plan would have been the Handmaiden joining Light Side players, with Visas being the Dark Side alternative, much like with Mira and Hanharr). Then the official miniature of the Exile is female and her canon appearance in the MMORPG, but doesn't match any of the appearance choices available in-game.
  • Broken Bridge: In theory, you can use the galaxy map on the Ebon Hawk to travel to any planet you wish at any time. In practice, however, half of the worlds you visit will conspire to ensure that you can't leave until you've fulfilled all story-related quests, typically by stealing, shooting down or otherwise grounding your ship and forcing you to find an alternate means of transportation. This is especially flagrant on Telos, where your ship is stolen and the two shuttles you get are shot down almost as soon as you take off. Lampshaded by Atton in the Restored Content mod the second time it happens.
    Atton: You've got to be kidding me! It's not my fault!
  • Butterfly of Doom: Kreia's frequent lectures about "creating echoes" are based on this trope — one small decision, even choice to not act, can set forth a chain of events that produce larger sweeping effects, whether intended or not.

    C-D 
  • Cain and Abel: General Vaklu (Cain) and Queen Talia (Abel), of the cousins variety.
  • Call-Back:
    • Several locales directly reference events from the first game, and you can see how the party's actions influenced Dantooine and Korriban five years later.
    • At Korriban, you can walk to the entrances of the tombs in the Valley of Dark Lords, wherein Kreia will discuss what Revan did there, and/or the history of the entombed Sith Lords discussed in the first game.
  • Call-Forward:
  • Can't Catch Up: While your party members all have Leaked Experience, by the end of the game, The Exile is pretty much soloing rooms by themselves while the allies are there to take hits for you or useful for when the Exile is not in the party.
  • Captain Crash: Atton, who is behind the wheel of several shuttles and ships when they crash because of interplanetary defense/focused gunfire. Atton is piloting the Ebon Hawk when it crashes into a cliff and goes into a chasm, but it unexpectedly returns to rescue the Exile in the Light Side ending. You can actually call him on this tendency; he'll respond that he's actually a far better pilot than expected with that sort of track record, given that the entire party managed to survive every single one of those crashes.
  • Catchphrase: Several party members.
    Atton: Pure pazaak.
    Visas: My life for yours.
  • Central Theme: Your actions can have consequences that you never could have imagined, as is evidenced in the gradual revelation that virtually everything that happens in the game is in some way related to the Exile's decision to use the Mass Shadow Generator to end the battle of Malachor V.
  • Charm Person: Revan's off-the-charts charisma is frequently discussed by multiple characters. As is the Exile's.
  • City Planet: Nar Shaddaa is a City Moon, smaller than Coruscant or Taris, but with none of their more charming districts.
  • Clear Their Name: The Exile has to prove that Dhagon Ghent didn't murder Captain Sullio.
  • Clothing-Concealed Injury: If you play a male Exile, Kreia, being the Dirty Old Woman she is, starts prodding him about whether Visas Marr is unscarred under her concealing robes or if her body bears the scars of slavery under Nihilus, and then starts speculating which one would "excite" him more.
  • Colon Cancer: The full game title includes the franchise name (Star Wars), the series name (Knights of the Old Republic II), and the game's own subtitle (The Sith Lords). The colon between the latter two is usually replaced with a dash to get around awkward formatting issues.
  • Comically Missing the Point: Can be forced by the player on Nar Shaddaa. Two exchange thugs will hold up a refugee on Nar Shaddaa - and an evil player can decide to literally use the jedi mind trick on them to make the thugs jump to their deaths.
    "Jumping into the pit is a good idea - get to ground faster that way."
    • Even better, while the refugee is justifiably freaked out at this, the game still recognises this as you saving them - meaning this gets you light side influence points from some companions! Bao-Dur's response comes off as... quite missing the point:
    Bao Dur: That was a kind act! It is good to see that one can still show compassion, even after the war.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Pazaak. Lampshaded in a deleted scene where T3 is bugging Atton to play, and Atton lists the reasons he does not want to ("You're programmed to always make me go first, and you always get just the card you need...") which will be very familiar to anyone who has played the first game.
  • Conflicting Loyalty: Your character has this problem. The Influence system is designed in such a way that a pure Light or Dark Side character cannot hope to earn the favor of every party member. Therefore, you have to play both sides of the fence in the right company if you want all of them to like you.
  • Consummate Liar: Kreia. Very, very much so. Pretty much everything she tells you is Metaphorically True at best. Considering she also provides most of the exposition, this can be a problem. This is to be expected since she is Darth Traya, the Lord of Betrayal.
  • Continuity Nod: Plenty of Call Forwards to the original and prequel trilogies and expanded universe. Chris Avellone apparently made a point of reading/viewing everything he could get his hands on, up to and including the holiday special. It shows.
    • Play through the game twice as light and dark. On the third go round, Atton greets the female Exile like this:
    • When Atton starts complaining after being led onto a ship full of Sith Assassins, the Exile can sarcastically reply "Maybe you'd like it back in your cell?" Also, when you touch down on Dantooine and speak with the administrator, one of the dialogue options is "I came in that ship, yes."
    • Mira is an expy of Mara Jade.
    • Towards the end of the game, the Mandalorians help you stage an assault on an enemy ship. The scene is staged and shot similarly to the beginning of A New Hope where the rebels (in this case, Sith Troopers) mount a defense at a bulkhead against boarding Stormtroopers. Up until it goes Off the Rails when instead of coming in through the door, the Mandalorians blast in through the wall.
    • Kreia in particular echoes many lines which would one day be said by Obi-Wan, Yoda, and other characters from the movies.
      Kreia: The future is always in motion, it is a difficult thing to see.
    • Battle Meditation (one of Bastila's plot-based assets) becomes a usable Force Power in this game as a simultaneous party buff and enemy debuff. You even get an opportunity to use it to aid your allies in the climax of Onderon's civil war.
    • One quest in the M4-78 mod gives us the line "These are the droids you're looking for."
  • Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Darth Malak was a physical juggernaut who towered over other characters, wore form-fitting bright red armor with purple scalp tattoos, and was altogether about as subtle as an Orbital Bombardment. Black Cloak, Cool Mask, and Vader Breath aside, Darth Nihilus is more like Emperor Palpatine, sitting on his throne aboard the Ravager and directing his forces from afar — though he too lays waste to a planet from orbit, by draining all life on the planet of Katarr into the wound in the Force that he embodies. True Big Bad Darth Traya is even more like Palpatine, as a consummate manipulator who corrupted a previous generation of Jedi — yet her ultimate plot is to bait the Exile into becoming her enemy, thus becoming strong enough to undo the harm she believes she and the other Jedi and Sith have done to the galaxy.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: In the M4-78 mod, there are grates everywhere and you see lava beneath them. Stepping on the grates will not cause any harm to you or anyone.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Almost every Czerka Corp executive qualifies, but Jana Lorso is the worst as she has ties to The Exchange and is not afraid to have them kill her enemies.
  • Couch Gag: Start the game for the first time and Darth Sion will appear in the game main menu. Once you become aware of the Ravager via a cutscene, Darth Nihilus replaces Sion in the main menu. After discovering the identity of the Third Sith and defeating Atris in combat, Darth Nihilus is replaced by Kreia. Finally, after beating the game as a Dark Side Exile, Kreia is replaced by the Exile.
  • "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The Exchange plot. An incredible amount of trouble for the Exile (not to mention the destruction of Peragus II and all the problems caused by that) can be traced to Goto's decision to put out a bounty on the Exile as a means to try to hire them to save the Republic. The Exile can point out that they would have done this anyway.
  • Could Say It, But...: Part of the Light Side resolution on Citadel Station involves taking control of Czerka's receptionist droid, B-4D4, reprogramming it and sending it back in to Czerka to steal confidential files. When B-4 gets to the Czerka mainframe and is chided by another droid, who threatens to rat him out to the nearby guards, this exchange occurs:
    B-4D4: No, there is nothing stopping you from attacking the guards outside with your stun ray.
    B-4D4: Of course, I would be obligated to stop you. Therefore it would be best if I were distracted, say by that console behind you.
    B-4D4: Thank you, T1-N1. Please do not abuse my trust and attack the guards outside, thereby creating a diversion that will allow me to escape with the stolen files.
  • Covers Always Lie:
    • Kreia isn't on the front cover, considering she's easily the most important character besides the Jedi Exile. The French version of the game features a back cover where one of the pictures shows a female Exile standing next to the Handmaiden, even though in-game the Handmaiden can only join the party if the Exile is male. However, given the massive amount of changes made...
    • Some promotional art depicts Atris fighting Nihilus. The two never interact in-game beyond being on the same planet at one point (and even that's stretching it, since Nihilus is in orbit and she's underground).
  • Crapsack World: Generally speaking, the setting of most locations. KotOR 2 is set in a Crapsack Galaxy. If you play throughout the game in a morally upstanding fashion and get the best endings for each world Kreia forecasts that you have made a real difference to the galaxy and that things will get better, eventually averting this trope.
  • Cruel Mercy: Mira has the option of doing this to Hanharr after Kreia had done the same to Hanharr before. The Exile can do this to Atris.
  • Crutch Character: In the first level, T3 is seriously overpowered with his limitless shock arm, putting even your Jedi characters to shame at times.
  • Dangerous Workplace: If you kill the guard in front of Bumani Exchange Corporation on Citadel Station before Luxa arranged a meeting for you, you can go away and come back again. Every time you come back after killing the guard, there will be a new guard. Every new guard will talk about that his predecessor was killed. The third guard even talks about how dangerous this job is.
  • Darker and Edgier: As listed above, the game has a grimmer mood to it than many other works in the Star Wars universe. The music and lore help accompany it.
  • Deal with the Devil: Darths Sion and Nihilus learn from the Third Sith's teachings about Force wounds and become stronger for it, eventually overthrowing her. Nihilus became an unstoppable force of destruction while Sion became immortal and invincible, but the prices were very high. Nihilus is no longer a living being, but a walking embodiment of emptiness, eternally hungering through the Force. Sion lives in constant agony and only continues to breathe because of The Power of Hate, and looks like a walking corpse.
  • Death Seeker: If you go the Dark Side route, have Hanharr join your party, and gain enough influence with him to have him to confide in you, he will tell you part of the reason he hated Mira so much for sparing his life. It was because he wanted to die, to end his wretched existence, to rejoin his people in the afterlife and ask their forgiveness.
  • Deconstructed Character Archetype:
    • Darth Vader expies: Sion and Nihilus deconstruct two different components of the archetype.
      • Darth Vader is beloved because of his cool appearance and great power, but when those are the only aspects that are focused on when creating a character, you get an empty generic husk with no personality and motivation other than a desire to destroy everything, just like Darth Nihilus.
      • Darth Sion is incredibly ugly, always in constant pain, requires assistance to overthrow his master because he cannot do so alone, and has to obey Sith even worse and more powerful than him if he wants to survive. Darth Vader may look cool, but that's only because his armor hides his deformities, and actually being him would be a terrible life of misery, paranoia, and bloodshed.
    • Kleptomaniac Hero: Behaving like one just pisses people off. If you go loot an apartment on Telos, a man will eventually step in and angrily demand to know why you were in his quarters. Trying to loot containers that belong to the Gamorrean guards on Nar Shaddaa will cause them to turn hostile if you're not in stealth mode.
    • Magnetic Hero: The Exile manages to get a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to work together to fight a greater threat, and who end up deeply loyal to him/her in large part because the Exile is subconsciously using the Force to bend them to their will. As the Dark Side playthrough shows, the very traits that can make them The Paragon and the Magnetic Hero makes for quite The Corrupter.
    • Mr. Exposition: Much of the backstory is revealed through plenty of one on one conversations with Non Player Characters, party members and the like, but it becomes increasingly clear that many of these characters aren't willing or able to give the whole picture to the Exile due to biases or just lack of knowledge on their part. And that's for people who legitimately want to help the Exile, as many more are willing to misinform and outright lie to push them into fulfilling their own agenda, Kreia herself being the prime example.
    • Squishy Wizard: Both the Sith and the Jedi are so reliant on the Force that they're effectively helpless in its absence, and can't even conceive of the possibility of living without it. Hence why the Jedi Masters try to strip the Exile of what has effectively made them a Humanoid Abomination, as they're an affront to everything the Jedi believe in, and why they end up dying from shock after Kreia removes their connection to the Force instead.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: The game gives this treatment to stock moral dilemmas that RPGs love to throw at the player. Kreia never misses an opportunity to explain in detail how any of the courses of action the PC may take will ultimately harm someone who does not deserve it. In fact, KotOR 2 deconstructs pretty much all the core mechanics of CRPGs. The very first thing that happens in the game is Kreia calling you on the fact that you were merrily looting a dead body. Force powers, leveling up, and even experience points are strong and recurring story elements; if you do not kill the Jedi Masters, when you finally meet them they point out that you have been rampaging across the galaxy killing hundreds and only growing stronger from it. She is especially skeptical about the basics of how the Force works. Check Consummate Liar entry above, though, before considering her stated opinions.
  • Deconstructed Trope: Given the game's nature as a Deconstructor Fleet, a lot of cRPG and Space Opera tropes, those specific to Star Wars especially are taken apart and examined in finer detail.
    • Balance Between Good and Evil: The fact that the Sith and the Jedi have existed and warred for millennia have made the two factions indistinguishable from one another to the vast majority of the galaxy, thus the conflict of the first game is referred to as the "Jedi Civil War". The fact that they still exist despite possessing exactly opposite philosophies suggests that neither of them have a grasp on the full nature of the Force that empowers them.
    • Because Destiny Says So: Several other Star Wars stories constantly mention the "will of the Force," as if it's a good thing, but if the Force does indeed have a destiny for every single being in the galaxy, does that mean every war is caused by the Force? Every death? Every Face–Heel Turn? Darth Traya seems to think so, which is why she wants to destroy it.
    • Black-and-White Morality: While those fighting the war would believe themselves the heroes and their enemies the villains, those outside the conflict rarely distinguish between the two - especially when they suffer from the aftereffects of the war. Hence why the conflict between Jedi and the Sith in the previous game is termed the Jedi Civil War.
      • Face–Heel Turn: Because Revan and Malak were Jedi who turned to the Dark Side, and built their Sith off like-minded Jedi and Republic troops who followed Revan in the Mandalorian Wars, the average citizen of the galaxy doesn't see the events surrounding the first game as a glorious battle of the Jedi and an "army of light" against implacable evil made manifest. Instead, they see a horrifyingly destructive conflict between two sects of Jedi with slightly different ideals. After all, even if you see Jedi and Sith fight each other, the only difference to most observers would be their fashion sense and lightsaber colors.
    • Chronic Hero Syndrome: Kreia questions whether helping every single person you come across is necessarily good in the long run, pointing out how solving their problems for them can not only interfere with the Exile's objectives but may even deprive the people you help of the challenges they need to learn and improve themselves. Worse, giving unsolicited and unearned aid can make the recipients a target in the eyes of the less fortunate, suggesting that Stupid Good behaviour can be just as bad, and sometimes worse, in the long run than Stupid Evil actions. That said, she does rail against petty and vicious actions, too, because they're pointlessly cruel — emphasis on pointlessly; her philosophy is to extend kindness, or threaten violence, only as much as you need for your own ends, e.g. offering another refugee credits in return for information.
    • Experience Points: While killing enemies makes you stronger, the fact is that you are still killing people, feeding on their deaths. Some of the dark side options are you just murdering people for no in-universe reason other than For the Evulz, and the out-of-universe reasons that you are doing them is for opportunities to increase companion influence and experience points to level up. Kreia calls you out for being driven by psychotic urges if she is in your party when you make such choices.
    • Irrelevant Sidequest: While experience points might be the reason you go on these anyway, the fact is that these types of quests just distract the protagonist from fulfilling the main goal, which is easily more important in-universe than a sidequest.
    • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Exile's party consists of diverse characters of different backgrounds, races and aligments. Instead of getting along swimmingly, much of the crew either barely tolerate or totally despise one another - Bao-Dur and Mandalore, Visas and the Handmaiden, Kreia and Atton - and for the most part, have their loyalty to the exile be the one thing in common. In the cut content of the Dark Side path, this eventually comes to a head when many of the party try to kill one another due to the various tensions in betwixt the lot.
    • Stupid Evil: Many party members, Kreia especially, will take offense at being party to needlessly cruel actions, and will call the Exile out for doing things that are actively counterproductive For the Evulz. Many of the evil-aligned party members like Hanharr, Visas and Mandalore — and even the villains like Vaklu and Sion — are motivated by more than petty cruelty or the dedication to evil you'd expect from a Sith, showing how unrealistic For the Evulz is as a motivation. If the Exile goes around being the most thoughtless douchebag imaginable, and kills the Jedi Masters, the people they need to sort out the Sith threat, Kreia finally has had enough and gives you a Curb-Stomp Battle, calling the Exile out for using their powers to cause needless chaos, misery and death in the galaxy, showing how such petty, ill thought out behaviour has long-term and devastating consequences for the entire galaxy.
  • Degraded Boss: The HK-50s go from one being a threat to the entire party on Peragus to T3-M4 taking out three of them singlehandedly on Nar Shaddaa. And if one has the Restored Content mod installed, HK-47 can blast through dozens of them when he storms their hidden factory.
  • Demoted to Extra: Bastila and Carth, the two main romance options and the most plot-relevant party members in the first game, become this in the second. Carth is only seen during cutscenes and a brief meeting with the Exile near the end of the game. The only time Bastila appears in person is a cameo near the end of the game, provided the player makes the PC from the first game a Light Side male. Otherwise she only appears as a vision in Ludo Kressh's tomb and, if the first game's PC is Dark Side, as a hologram in a Sith holocron. Depending on the first game's PC's gender, Bastila or Carth also appears as a hologram of their message to T3-M4.
  • Depraved Bisexual: Luxa, The Dragon of The Exchange on Telos in The Sith Lords will flirt with the PC regardless of gender, and will always attempt to kill him or her at the end of her related quest.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • A female party member must dance for a Hutt on Nar Shaddaa. Kreia is obviously unable to do so, so ergo a female Exile, the Handmaiden, or Mira (if they held off the sidequest for this long) will have to do it. By that point, it is possible to have Visas Marr, and the game will in fact respond to it if she is brought along. (She gives a flat no).
    • Mira will only join the party if the player is light-sided. However, it's possible to fall to the dark side after recruiting Mira - which will give an alternate ending for her.
    • Want to use a save editor to give yourself Force Crush from the beginning? Every enemy in the game, down to the droids and even the floating mines on Peragus have special animations for being Force Crushed!
    • While playing as a Dark Side Exile, if you choose to spare the Jedi Masters instead of killing them, Kreia will have something different to say on why the Exile cut themselves from the Force.
      (Light Side or Neutral) It is because you were afraid.
      (Dark Side) It is because you had no choice.
    • At the end of the royalist path on Onderon, Queen Talia rewards you with relics from the royal museum. However, if you've looted the museum, she will think Vaklu's troops did it and won't reward you with any items.
  • Deus ex machina: Light side ending: The Mass Shadow Generator is reactivated, causing Malachor's gravity well to fade and the "planet" (which is really just a mass of asteroids and ship hulls held together by the Generator) to collapse. However, the Exile is saved in the nick of time by the Ebon Hawk, which rises up from below the platform they're on and whisks them away to safety. The last we saw or heard of the ship before this was it crashing into a cliff, then falling down a chasm. The entire rest of the party save for Mira, G0-T0, and Bao-Dur's remote are unaccounted for. However, the various cut content Game Mods tone it down; The Ebon Hawk still makes an inexplicable recovery, but all of the party is accounted for save Bao-Dur (who has been explained to have died helping HK-47 reach the HK-50 production factory) and T3-M4 (who is just gone without explanation). Ironically, as cut content restored via modding isn’t generally taken as canon, the Revan novel establishes what happened to T3 after the game with next to no mention of any of the other party members.
  • Dirty Old Woman: If you pay attention to her, Kreia talks about sex A LOT, especially when you are playing a male Exile.
  • Distracted by the Sexy:
    • Atton invokes this in a cutscene where he goes to get supplies from the Hawk's cargo hold, and is surprised by the Handmaiden practicing in her underwear. He later claims that she's doing this deliberately to attract the Exile.
    • At the beginning of the game... well, what do you expect when a shapely woman in her underwear is running around with Atton?
      Female Exile: ... and it looks like there's some clothes in here.
      Atton: Dammit! Uh, I mean... good. Good to hear it. No sense in you running around half-naked. It's... it's distracting. I mean, for the droids.
    • Kreia warns a male Exile not to get any funny ideas after Visas Marr joins the crew.
    • Mira invokes this, saying that she wears her Stripperific outfit so that she can get close to her male targets and knock them out while they're ogling her.
    • An example of this in the game's mechanics. On Nar Shaddaa a sidequest enables you to acquire a dancer's outfit that can be worn by Mira, the Handmaiden or the Exile if female. Check the stats of the outfit. It doesn't offer any protection, but it does give the wearer a +2 to Persuasion. And this bonus applies to any character you attempt to persuade.
  • Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Hanharr's main motivation is built around this — he would rather die than be spared and bound by a "life-debt". Also, the Final Boss doesn't take too kindly to being pitied and will cut the conversation short if you try.
  • Dungeon Bypass: During the Nar Shaddaa quest line, Atton will have to fight a pair of bounty hunters by himself. Players who are aware of this can set up mines in the cantina before hand, making the fight easier or potentially ending it before it begins.
  • Dysfunction Junction: The player's party is one of the most dysfunctional groups of heroes in the entire franchise. Almost all of them despise one another to varying degrees until the very end of the game (and even then, many of the scenes where they reconcile are Dummied Out), united only by their mutual respect for the protagonist. In particular, each party member has a counterpart who serves as their primary rival:
    • Atton hates the Disciple due to distrust of his goody-two-shoes demeanor and jealousy over his traditionally good looks - the latter because he considers the Disciple a rival for the female protagonist's affection. The Disciple generally tries to remain above it, but nonetheless it's clear that he finds Atton repulsive and irritating.
    • The Handmaiden hates Visas due to distrust over her past as a Sith Assassin and the apprentice of Darth Nihilus, believing that she will betray the party eventually - though it's clearly also because she feels Visas's devotion to the male protagonist makes her a romantic rival. Visas, to her credit, remains pretty much completely detached from the matter and doesn't have any particular beef with anyone on the crew, instead choosing to focus on her own mountain of personal issues.
    • Bao-Dur holds nothing but thinly-veiled fury and contempt for Mandalore due to the horrors he witnessed during the Mandalorian Wars. Mandalore doesn't reciprocate on the same level, but does seem to take some sadistic joy out of pushing and taunting Bao-Dur about the issue.
    • HK-47 and T3-M4 have a much clearer Those Two Guys dynamic than in the original game, akin to that of C-3PO and R2-D2 - but with the vitriol cranked up to eleven, with the two outright threatening and even enacting violence on one another with startling frequency.
    • Mira and Hanharr are explicitly trying to kill one another for a number of reasons, though their status as Mutually Exclusive Party Members means it's downplayed somewhat, as they only interact once or twice while either of them is playable.
    • And then there's Kreia, who at best is actively ignored or disregarded by the other party members and at worst is actively blackmailing, manipulating, and/or Mind Raping them into complying with her mysterious agenda.

    E-F 
  • Early Game Hell: You start with nothing but space underwear and a power tool, up against a mining station full of hostile droids. On the other hand, you do get Force powers far earlier than in the first game.
  • Easy Level Trick: During the one on one fights with the Handmaiden as a male exile you're forbidden from using any armor or weapons and have to fight hand to hand. If you try to equip armor or weapons during the fight, Handmaiden will stop the fight and chastise you for cheating. However, because these fights take place on the Ebon Hawk, you have access to all of your companions' equipment from the menu screen, and if you equip armor or weapons onto the Handmaiden, she will not stop the fight. So an easy way to win is to just pause when the battle starts, equip a blaster onto the Handmaiden which will give her a disadvantage in melee combat, and then easily knock her into next week.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Darth Nihilus. He eats entire worlds when he is hungry. Also, the Jedi Council thinks the Exile is one. Depending on your alignment, they may or may not be right - in a Dark Side run, they even become confused enough to believe the Exile is responsible for Nihilus' actions.
  • Equipment Spoiler: Certain pieces of early equipment (notably the Breath Mask) mentions that they cannot be used by Wookiees, despite your first party members being three humans and a droid.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: The mercenary Dopak is implied to be a former Sith Trooper who served under Malak's army. He finds the idea of slaughtering the settlers of Dantooine to be wrong and can even switch sides if you deliver him Zherron's message.
  • Everybody's Dead, Dave: In the TSLRCM, it's possible to achieve such an ending, with the droids and the Exile being all that are left of the party. Some of the options require the Exile to commit terrible actions For the Evulz, so you really have to go out of your way to Earn Your Bad Ending.
    • Visas can either be sacrificed to weaken Darth Nihilus at Telos or be killed with the rest of the party on Malachor V.
    • HK-47 is mind controlled by G0-T0 if the HK factory is ignored, and destroys the Remote when it attempts to activate the Mass Shadow Generator. Bao-Dur is speculated to have Died Offscreen by this point.
    • Mira can either die at Hanharr's hands on Malachor V or be killed with the rest of the party in Trayus Academy.
    • Atton can die at Darth Sion's hands during their duel.
    • When you find your party imprisoned within Trayus Academy, choose to gas their cells instead of freeing them.
    • Kreia, as the Final Boss, dies either way.
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The player character is only referred to as "The Exile," and the only canonical moniker is "the Jedi Exile." The novel has since given her a canonical name: Meetra Surik. Two of the Exile's companions (although you will only get one on any given playthrough) are known for most of the game as only "Disciple" and "Handmaiden." Both eventually reveal their names (Mical and Brianna, respectively) in the game's final act. The Handmaiden's sisters also go through the game known only as "Handmaiden."
  • Everyone Went to School Together: The Exile is mentioned as being a student at the Dantooine Jedi Academy alongside Revan and Malak. A vision on Korriban likewise shows Bastila amongst the group that Malak attempted to recruit during the war, which immediately clues the Exile in that it's false, as Bastila utterly refused to join them in reality.
  • Evil Knockoff: The HK-50s are more like eviler knockoffs. Potentially the HK-51s, according to unused voice clips.
  • Evil Makes You Ugly: The more Dark Side points they get, the more sinister-looking the player character becomes. This does not go unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy. One dockworker says a dark side Exile looks like the "back end of a bantha." The same applies to your party, if you corrupt them to the Dark Side.
  • Evil Mentor: While Kreia starts out seeming like a good mentor, it quickly becomes apparent (more so in the cut content) that she's got an agenda when it comes to your training - it's just not clear what it is until the ending, where she reveals numerous potentially-untrue gambits involving your training and her betrayal. Whether or not you call her out on it is up to you.
  • Evolving Title Screen: When you start the game, you see Darth Sion on the main menu. As you progress in the game, he is replaced by Darth Nihilus once you see a cutscene of him. Beat the game on the Light Side and he gets replaced by Kreia aka Darth Traya while the Dark Side ending has your own character on the title screen instead.
  • Experience Points: Deconstructed/lampshaded. A conversation near the end of the game has someone commenting on how the Exile seems to become stronger every time they kill enemies and noting how unnatural that is from a realistic standpoint.
    Master Zez-Kai-Ell: You must have noticed as you've fought across all these planets, killing hundreds — only to become more and more powerful. Why do you think that was?
  • Expy:
    • Of the main cast of the original Star Wars trilogy throughout:
      • As in the first game, T3 is the Ebon Hawk’s R2-D2, HK-47 is a dark spin on C3-P0, and the Hawk itself is the Old Republic’s Millennium Falcon.
      • In keeping with the game’s darkly deconstructive spin on the Star Wars universe, Kreia is a more sinister version of Obi-Wan (and thus Jolee Bindo), wearing the classic brown robes and even having a somewhat similar cadence when she speaks. Atton is a pilot and scoundrel like Han Solo, and even starts off wearing a vest and white shirt that are clearly intended to cultivate this impression the better to unbalance the player when Atton’s Dark and Troubled Past is revealed. Hanharr is a twisted version of Chewbacca, Zaalbar, and the whole life-debt tradition. Goto or rather G0-T0 is a gangster like Jabba the Hutt (one at odds with a Hutt, ironically), but with the shiny black chassis of his droid, his hatchet-faced hologram, and his distorted mechanical voice, the character evokes something of Vader, Tarkin, and the IT-O Interrogation droid on the first Death Star.
    • Many characters also seem designed to further explore concepts the devs created in Planescape: Torment, back when they were still Black Isle Studios:
      • The party includes not one but two blind female magic users like Mebbeth, Ei-Vene, and Marta the Seamstress, not one but two floating non-human sidekicks a la Morte, and not one but three quirky robots out to assert their independence and free will like Nordom.
      • The game also includes not one but two men who literally refuse to die, one of them a grey-skinned, corpse-like Implacable Man. Atton and Darth Sion's similarities as well as their rivalry for the female Exile's affections become considerably more pronounced in the endgame, and while Atton isn't scarred on the outside like the Nameless One and Sion, he's certainly weighed down by past regrets in a familiar manner.
      • Like the various other blind or near-blind, prophetic, usually-older female characters designed by Chris Avellone, Kreia is this for Ravel Puzzlewell's avatars across the planes — as is Visas, to a lesser extent. Also common with Avellone's characters, Kreia occasionally describes both herself and the Force in terms of a mother or midwife, like Mebbeth or Grieving Mother.
      • The male Exile’s love interests are divided up into a somewhat Tsundere warrior who mistrusts your motives and is disturbed by her growing attraction to you, an assassin who was sent to follow you by one of the main villains but has since fallen in love with you, and a feisty Satisfied Street Rat who came to the hero’s rescue, for whom the Exile is something of a mentor. Of the three, the first punches people, the second dual-wields, and the third is a redhead, making the three of them a Decomposite Character of Annah-of-the-Shadows.
      • Atris is a woman in white from your past who hates you for what you’ve done, yet can’t quite put aside her feelings for you, or forget what you had. Almost a combination of Deionarra and Fall-From-Grace, though rather than a succubus trying to atone for her past, Atris is more akin to a paladin completely in denial that she's on the verge of falling. Her name is also an anagram for Trias. Like the fallen angel, Atris falls into darkness while trying to do the right thing in the most ruthless way possible. Trias's full title in Torment is Trias the Betrayer, while Atris may become the new Darth Traya, Sith Lord of Betrayal, in the restored content.
      • Like Dak'kon, Hanharr is an alien warrior chained into servitude by an ill-considered life-debt, while Bao-Dur is soft-spoken, guilt-ridden, and has been utterly devoted to the main character's service for years. Like Pharod, Goto is a bald gangster who actually turns out to be an ally for the reluctant player (in addition, both are associated with spheres, though Goto's is larger and not made of bronze). Mandalore, like Vhailor, has been trapped in the same suit of burnished armor so long that he's become less of a man than simply a symbol for his cause. And last but not least, there’s an army of shadowy assassins on the Exile's trail, with a Big Bad who may be the physical embodiment of the hero's greatest failure.
  • Extreme Omnivore: The cannoks are known to eat anything they can get their hands on, even dangerous machinery. This is why they're one of the few animals that give usable drops — you're scavenging what they haven't digested.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: Played With. On Korriban, the data for Level Two training is corrupted, and the automated system resolves this by substituting it for the Level Sixteen training routine. No matter how fast you resolve the ensuring fight, the computer will decree that it is an unacceptable performance for a level sixteen student and you'll be scheduled to go to the detention room. Luckily for you, that's precisely where you need to go.
  • Fake Longevity: Obsidian removed most of the examples in the original game (the non-boss enemies are much fewer and go down quicker when they do appear, all turret minigames are purely optional with the same lack of reward). This, along with the cut content, results in a much shorter game than the original. Had the game been completed as envisioned, it likely would have been of similar length.
  • Fanservice: The Handmaiden habitually trains and spars in her underwear, and Mira wears a revealing outfit specifically to exploit Distracted by the Sexy. Visas Marr may wear all-concealing robes (only the bottom half of her face is uncovered), but they fit her very well, what you can see of her is beautiful, and she has Kelly Hu's smooth, sexy contralto working for her.
  • Fantastic Aesop: The main moral lesson that the game tries to convey seems to be "The magical force that flows through all life in the galaxy is really evil/operates on Blue-and-Orange Morality that is indecipherable to even its most devoted adherents, and we shouldn't base our morality on it."
  • The Fellowship Has Ended: After the events of the first game, the group disbanded, as far as we know, never coming together again. This is mostly due to Revan's departure. Kreia predicts this at the very end of this game and the only thing that canonically stops it from happening is the Exile training the Humanoid party members in the Force, with them going on to rebuild the Jedi Order.
  • Fetish: On Nar Shaddaa, Geeda the Rodian somewhat sheepishly says she has a thing for humans — to the apparent disgust of her clan.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: The three main Jedi classes, as well as the prestige classes, are clearly meant to play this trope. They are flexible, but they are obviously geared to play specific roles.
    • The Jedi Guardian is clearly meant to be a fighter. While par for the course in regards to Force powers and below-average in terms of skill points, it has more hitpoints than the other classes, gets more feat choices than the other classes (with feats being the main way to upgrade physical combat skills), and, if upgraded to a Jedi Weaponmaster or a Sith Marauder, gets extra melee damage and damage resistance. While both are great at tanking and dealing damage when close-up, the former is more of a Mighty Glacier with their bonus to deflecting ranged attacks, and the latter is sort of a Glass Cannon by comparison (though nevertheless much tougher than anyone else), sacrificing the bonus to deflecting attacks for the ability to enter a murderous rage which improves their damage and health at the expense of defense.
    • The Sentinel plays like a thief, with average Force powers and fighting skills, but with much more skill points than the other classes, not to mention they get Stealth as a skill class and can therefore level it with less cost and to higher levels. If specialized into a Jedi Watchman or a Sith Assassin, they gain the ability to sneak with the Force alone (gaining free bonuses for their sneaking skill later on) and gain extra damage with sneak attacks. The former class allows for more flexibility by virtue of giving much more feat choices, while the latter is even more stealth focused, with a faster growth in sneak attack damage.
    • The Consular embodies Squishy Wizard. They have average skills and poor health (which is more often than not pretty relative, and they can nevertheless overcome it with ease using certain equipment), but every now and then they get two Force powers choices with one level up, not to mention they have a bonus in their power-related rolls (meaning enemies have a harder time resisting their powers). If upgraded to a Jedi Master or a Sith Lord, they get even more Force points (i.e. they can cast even more Force Powers), those regenerate faster if you didn't get that feat earlier, and they affect the alignments of their party to a greater degree. Both are more or less the same, the main difference being that the Master can grant bonuses to their followers, while the Lord can demoralize and weaken nearby enemies.
  • Foil:
    • Thematically, Revan and the Exile. Whereas Revan was a walking conduit for the Force, the Exile was more of a black hole. One was chosen by destiny, while the other got there by sheer force of will. Both are highly charismatic, but Revan was naturally so, while the Exile got there by the unconscious Force bonds she makes with people.
    • There's also the Exile and Darth Nihilus, though some of the differences are merely hinted at. The Exile is a charismatic Father to His Men who easily befriends people, fights together with them, and became a black hole in the Force when they were forced to sever their connection to it after losing several thousand at Malachor V. Nihilus is a faceless Eldritch Abomination who doesn't command or work with people so much as he completely dominates them through pure strength, and has no care for them beyond what use they have to him; it's heavily implied he was in a similar situation to the Exile, but chose to fill the void left in the Force by actively feeding off of the energies of others. One of the tricks you can use to beat him when you finally confront him is to exploit this, by tricking him into trying to feed on the Exile, which only weakens him because there's technically nothing there to feed on.
  • Foregone Conclusion: The Mandalorian subplot. The Mandalorians you meet are (at best) just trying to hold onto their ideals in the face of dwindling numbers and disrespect from other races, or look at themselves as an absolute joke. Likewise, they're led by Canderous, an aging veteran who is/can be told at several points that his clan will be driven to irrelevance over thousands of years and his efforts are all for naught. Given what is known about their eventual fate, his efforts come off as more tragic than anything else.
  • Forging the Will: The player character has the choice of whether or not to alter a will he/she finds in order to inherit some contested salvage. The guy it's given to knows it's been forged, but he's so tired of all the bogus claims he's been getting that he decides to just give it away and put an end to it.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • If, after getting your party back in Atris's hidden base, you backtrack and use Kreia's Force vision to look into the meditation chamber, you can see that Atris, self-proclaimed last of the Jedi, is as red as red can be...
    • When Atton first meets Kreia, he says "Whoa, another Jedi?". His personal story arc reveals that he was an assassin who can in fact see people who are Force sensitive... including Jedi and Sith.
    • There's a point on Dantooine where you explore a crystal cave and encounter a unique crystal that binds itself to the Exile. Kreia explains how it draws off of the Exile's excess power, explaining it via metaphor of the Force being water, the Exile being a sieve that water is poured into, and the crystal drawing from what spills out. This is extremely similar to the explanation for how the Exile themselves are able to call upon the Force again despite having been cut off from it at the end of the Mandalorian Wars.
  • Freudian Trio: The three head Dark Lords of the Sith.
    • Darth Nihilus, Lord of Hunger, is more of a destructive force of nature than a person, caring more about satiating his endless hunger for Force energy than conquest or the conflict between the Jedi and the Sith (Id).
    • Darth Sion, Lord of Pain, seeks to wipe the Jedi from the face of the galaxy and is a brutal, savage killer, but has retained human perspective and awareness in contrast to Nihilus, taking no joy in his painful existence and wanting to "fix" the galaxy (Ego).
    • Darth Traya, Lord of Betrayal, is a manipulator and an adherent of subtlety who seeks a psychological victory in contrast to the other two, which is why they turned on and exiled her (Superego).
  • From Bad to Worse: The first game ends with you either having saved the Galactic Republic and the Jedi or crushing them and retaking the mantle of Sith Lord. Cue the second game, where the Republic is on the verge of total collapse and the Jedi have been whittled down to a few scattered fugitives, while the Sith "empire" is little better off.

    G-H 
  • Gainax Ending: The game has it in spades, mainly due to it being rushed for release. Various pieces of cut content and explanations from the developers make it more coherent. Your companions (save Bao-Dur, who sacrificed himself on Telos) were to slowly gather together after the crash on Malachor V, with each one getting a playable segment that determines whether they live or die, followed by scenes of the survivors' interactions. Most of these were never completed, but two mostly-finished ones remain buried in the game files - one sees the Exile's love interests turning on each other in the Dark Side path, while the other has the surviving Jedi-trained characters confront Kreia in the Light Side path. After Kreia's death, you tell everyone who survived that you have to leave them behind and follow Revan's path, but Atton - assuming he survived - still makes an offer of company, which the Exile silently accepts.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration:
    • Your stats and skills play into dialogue options more frequently here. For instance, having high Intelligence lets your character innately figure out the pattern to an incomplete passcode on Peragus, and having high Awareness can let them notice when other characters are trying to hide something.
    • The Exile and Kreia's Force bond is an important plot point. The game also makes it so that any beneficial powers that affect one of them also immediately affects the other.
    • Kreia serves the role of The Mentor to the Player Character. In-game, as long as she is part of your active party, you will receive a small bonus to all XP earned.
    • Experience points and leveling mechanics. The Exile being a wound in the Force means that they feed on death, and grow stronger because of it.
      • On the same line, Sith Assassins' power. Much like Darth Nihilus and you, they feed on the Force, and in their case they become stronger the stronger their prey is, conveniently explaining why the assassins you were fighting in the intro level are much weaker than the ones at the end of the game.
    • Kreia at one point mentions how, "[Atton's] spirit, as diseased as it is, refuses to give up, no matter what threats [he] face[s]... and no matter what wreckage [he] leave[s] behind [him]." Atton's unique feat enables him to revive during combat (as opposed to everyone else's after combat/until affected by a specific Force power) with increasing amounts of health as he levels up, so long as there is another party member alive.
    • Kreia and Visas' usage of the Force to substitute for normal sight. If you use first person camera while playing as either of them, you will realize that they both see as if they have Force Sight permanently activated.
    • Bao-Dur's able to max out most skills with incredible ease, and story-wise he is considered a truly magnificent engineer. His class is even named Tech Specialist. The Handmaiden describes his ability as greater than what most could ever aspire to achieve, and not only is he responsible for the design of Telos' shields, but also for the Mass Shadow Generator that destroyed the Mandalorian and Republic fleets at Malachor V.
      • His powered arm also adds some electrical damage to his unarmed melee attacks, and he is naturally able to bypass forcefields, whereas most characters require a lightsaber or standard deactivation procedures (e.g. through some nearby console).
    • The HK droids have a self-preservation protocol that also prevents 47 from harming the 50's, and vice-versa. If you were to take HK-47 to a skirmish with any of the 50 squads, their dialogue will change to reflect this protocol kicking in, preventing HK-47 from being able to participate in the fight (but also keeping him from being harmed by them). This all gets worked out in the endgame.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Atton's backstory mentions he is versed in at least some martial arts, and The Handmaiden comments on him having used an Echani fight stance for a moment, but unless he takes levels as a Jedi he does not have any improved unarmed attack abilities, nor does he use a different fighting stance compared to any average, untrained fighter.
    • During the story arc quest that requires the Exile to enter the Jekk'Jekk Tarr, it's stated that it's impossible for a human to do so even with a breath mask, because the poisonous atmosphere would seep through their pores. This will surprise any player who has already strolled through the level with only a breath mask before it became a plot point. Even more egregious is that the player can also use the mask after being told that the mask is not enough.
    • The player will briefly take control of either Mira or Hanharr as they infiltrate the Jekk'Jekk Tar. Despite having only interacted with the Exile and nobody else for all of five minutes, they have access to the player's entire inventory before they officially join the party and while far away from anyone in it. This is probably due to engine limitations, but it can be jarring to see Mira clad in armor she shouldn't have access to.
    • Darth Nihilus is a complete pushover in direct combat. It drains a lot of the drama out of his attempt to drain the exile backfiring and weakening him, and renders Visas' possible sacrifice to weaken him further ridiculous.
    • The Exile is described as being a natural leader with a lot of charisma. However, it is perfectly possible when building your character to use charisma as a Dump Stat and end up with not a lot at all.
  • Gambit Pileup: Every faction in the game has some kind of gambit that involves the Exile and/or the Jedi as a whole:
    • The Sith Triumvirate seeks to kill the last of the Jedi without revealing themselves to the galaxy or the Jedi.
    • The Jedi Masters have gone into hiding in the hope that the Sith will reveal themselves while trying to find them.
    • The Republic is trying to track down the Exile for purposes that are never revealed, although Carth wants the Exile to give a message to Revan, and The Disciple claims that they're trying to contact the Jedi as a whole.
    • Atris is trying to gather the last of the Jedi as bait for the Sith. Once the Sith kill the last of the Jedi, she intends to kill them and rebuild the Jedi Order without "weaknesses" such as forgiveness and pacifism.
    • Goto has put a bounty on live Jedi so he can hire one to help stabilize the Republic.
    • Mandalore is trying to unite the Mandalorian clans under his banner and seeks powerful allies, such as the Exile.
    • Vaklu is trying to overthrow Queen Talia to keep Onderon out of the Republic while protecting Onderon from his Sith allies.
    • Revan is - and might've always been - trying to defeat the True Sith.
    • Kreia is training the Exile to regain their connection to the Force after they voluntarily gave it up, so that the remaining Jedi Masters see the flaws of their teachings. She is simultaneously luring out her former apprentices so that the Exile can defeat them, manipulating Atris into gathering the Jedi and/or falling to the dark side, attempting to spread the wound in the Force created at Malachor V in order to "free" the galaxy from the Force, plotting her own death at the hands of the Exile on Malachor V to silence the echoes of the Mandalorian Wars, manipulating the Exile into rebuilding the Jedi Order based on her grey and grey philosophy, and sending the Exile to help Revan fight the True Sith. It is extremely likely that she is lying about one or more of these plans.
    • The Exchange power struggle on Telos winds up like this, with Luxa, Czerka, Slusk, Goto and even a poor door guard getting tangled up in a web of plans. Most of the time, everybody winds up dead.
    • On a smaller scale, the whole reason the Exile manages to get into a position to determine their own fate is the gambits of Kreia, Revan, the Triumvirate and HK-50 (and by extension Goto) colliding on the Harbinger and Peragus.
  • Game Mod: The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod (TSLRCM), which is developed by Deadly Stream, restores a significant amount of cut content. The same mod development team has also released M4-78 Enhancement Project, an add-on mod for TSLRCM that tries to recreate a droid planet and dead Jedi Master therein that were cut early in development.
  • Gameplay Ally Immortality: No matter how many lightsaber stabbings, blaster shots, or Force-chokings your allies receive, they will always limp back to you after the fight is over. Atton takes it up to eleven, being able to wake up in the middle of combat if there's someone else standing.
  • Game System: The underlying skill and combat mechanics of this game are based on a modified Star Wars d20 tabletop RPG ruleset.
  • Gang Initiation Fight: Of sorts. To gain respect of the Mandalorians, you can (among other things) fight a number of them in the arena.
  • Gas Chamber: The Jekk'Jekk Tarr is a bar for aliens where the atmosphere is so toxic to humans that they need an environment suit just to get in. A gas mask can alone won't save you (except it does). When you show up at the bar without a suit the crime lord in the back comments on how foolish you are to do so. Thanks to Kreia's breathing technique, mere lethal toxins won't slow you down for long.
  • Genghis Gambit: Some characters speculate that Darth Revan was using one, conquering the galaxy in order to strengthen the Republic against an even greater threat from the True Sith Empire. Their true intentions are still unknown.
  • Ghost Planet: Korriban was abandoned after the Sith turned on each other in the wake of Malak's defeat and Revan's disappearance. When the Exile visits the planet, all that's left are the scattered corpses of the dead acolytes.
  • Giant Flyer: The Brith which circles the skies on Dantooine is back. The Star Wars Wiki has a small page about them.
  • God and Satan Are Both Jerks: This turns out to be how Kreia views the light and dark side of the Force.
  • Good Is Dumb: Sometimes you can get light side points for being, frankly, a gullible fool. For instance, you can give the salvager bodies to Daraala and refuse the reward she's willing to pay even though it's been made clear that the salvagers are not a sentimental, altruistic lot; a quick chat with Jorran indeed reveals that all she wants to do is tamper with the will so she can claim the haul that is currently in the militia's custody.
  • Go Through Me: When the party is arrested on Telos and confronted by an assassin posing as a security guard, Atton tries to pull this to keep the assassin's attention off of the Exile. A little later on, Bao-Dur gets to use the line when you encounter a pair of escaped criminals on the surface of Telos.
  • Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die: The Exile can give such a speech to the Militia on Dantooine. It utterly demoralizes them.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: The True Sith, who are revealed to be the reason Revan turned to the Dark Side in the first place.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • Every merchant stock is randomly rolled (save for a few items in their inventory which they'll always have) whenever you ask to see their stock for the first time. You can theoretically save-scum your way to the right items, especially if it means getting your desired lightsaber crystals or better power crystals when you eventually build one.
    • Influence rewards can trigger with extremely low influence as well as extremely high influence, so if you'd rather not work to get your Light Side Mastery bonus back after appeasing HK, you'll need to bottom out your influence with Light Side actions in front of him and dialogue options. However, on the Dark Side path, if you want your Jedi apprentices-to-be to be on the same alignment as you, you'll need to be nice to them—particularly Bao-Dur, the Disciple, and Visas.
    • Upgrading some of the characters to Jedi status can be tricky without a guide.
      • For Mira, you need to increase her influence, have a conversation and then take her to a specific location to trigger a cut scene. Thankfully, by picking the right dialogue options, you can earn all the influence required as soon as you've finished the Nar Shaddaa questline and without leaving the ship, but the option to offer her Jedi training is buried deep in one specific branch in the dialogue tree that can be easy to miss.
      • Bao-Dur is also a bit of a pain because while the actual upgrade is simple there are relatively few ways to increase his influence, so getting that high enough is hard without a guide.
      • For Atton, you need to go to a specific place on Nar Shaddaa without him in your party to even get the option to train him, which is not telegraphed beforehand in any way.
      • The Handmaiden's Jedi training is gated behind not just specific dialogue options but also three of her sparring lessons, which unlock at specific levels. Thankfully, at least you don't have to level her to unlock them, only your own character.
      • The Disciple, at least, is the most straightforward one. Being your intended apprentice before you left to fight in the Mandalorian Wars, he practically jumps at the opportunity to finally be trained as a Jedi.
    • There are two reinforced doors that can only be blown open with thorium charges, and you can only find one set in the ruined Sith Academy. Where's the other one? Akkere on Dantooine sells it, but you have a very narrow window — when the mercenary attack is imminent, you have to ask Akkere about joining the militia, and he'll respond with offering to sell the thorium charges. If you pick up his hydrospanner and confront him about it, or if you initiate the mercenary attack before talking to him, you will lose this opportunity.
    • Fassa's quest on the Nar Shaddaa docks will give paltry rewards unless a specific order of steps (including exploiting an infinite xp bug) are taken. Following that process is the only way to get the best robes in the game. The restored content mod fixes this oversight.
    • Some influence opportunities disappear past certain points. For example, on Nar Shaddaa, you can earn influence with Atton or Bao-Dur by fixing the airspeeder, but after you complete the main quest, it becomes sabotaged beyond repair. Most frustratingly, the Nar Shaddaa finale triggers on its own without your control, so you have to beeline to the parts before the speeder is lost to you (and one of the parts is only obtainable by asking a specific NPC related to Fassa's quests).
  • Guns Are Worthless: Thoroughly averted. The revised crafting system, improved (and still upgradeable) ranged weaponry, and a slew of new feats allow gunslingers to stand on par with Jedi. Of note is the Close Combat feats that reduce the penalties of using ranged weaponry in close combat, and Precise Shot feats that increase your damage with ranged weapons and reduce the odds of enemies reflecting your shots. Mira has some of the best base stats to build her into a competent gunslinger, and a specific build allows the Exile to be as deadly with a pair of blasters as they would be with their lightsabers.
  • Happy Ending Override: The first game ends with the player character making great strides for either the Repbulic or Sith, whoever they've allied with. The opening to this game makes all those successes moot — Revan has disappeared, the galaxy is still wounded by war, your new character is the last Jedi left, and everyone else has a bone to pick with both Jedi and Sith.
  • Hard Truth Aesop: Kreia has a habit of chastising the Exile for most light side actions, though given her many biases, they're not always accurate interpretations of the situation. The most notable, however, is the lesson on charity that she gives on Nar Shaddaa, which turns out to be completely accurate: give a beggar at the docks some credits, and he fails to learn anything from his struggles, eventually getting mugged and killed by an even more desperate beggar. Threaten or dismiss him, and he still fails to learn anything and later mugs and kills a fellow beggar out of desperation. The lesson, as elaborated on in later quests on the planet, is that it's better to teach the needy how to help themselves than to leave them dependent on others.
    Kreia: Be careful of charity or kindness, lest you do more harm with open hands than with a clenched fist.
  • He Who Fights Monsters:
    • A cause of Revan and Malak's fall, although according to later sources not the only one.
    • Kreia's prediction for a dark side Atton:
      Kreia: Atton shall keep his murderer’s heart. Many deaths shall he cause in the dark corners of the galaxy – always hunting, always finding prey. He shall grow hungry in a galaxy where there are few Jedi, and it will eventually consume him… but I shall say no more.
    • Then there's Atris. Kreia visits her, and nudges her into a Heel Realization that she has become a Sith so subtly she is only now feeling the effects.
      Kreia: (to Atris) It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But far more terrible is to admit it.
  • Hero on Hiatus: The Exile's rescue on Nar Shaddaa requires a secondary party.
  • Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You name the player character at the beginning, although the only people who will actually use it are NPCs who use the alien speech patterns.
  • Hidden Depths: Atton. One of the earliest indications of just how much he's not letting on is on Telos, when the Handmaiden observes that he slipped into an advanced Echani martial arts stance when it seemed like the Exile was being threatened - information which comes as news to the Exile. This will surprise many a player, too, as Atton's melee stance is no different from that of any untrained fighter. Then again, giving him the feats and/or the animations would make it far too suspicious.
  • Hitchhiker Heroes: The Exile manages to attract a bunch of latent Force-sensitives on their travels through a galaxy where the Jedi have been wiped out. It's deconstructed, as with a lot of things - the Council claims that the Exile is unconsciously forming Force bonds with them, influencing them to join up. Despite this, there is a ray of hope—in the female light side finale, The Disciple insists that they don't feel it's a result of malevolent influence, but a result of the Exile's near-Messianic nature.
  • Honest Corporate Executive: Batono, Czerka's former docking manager on Citadel Station, got upset over the dirty actions of his boss and becoame an informant for the Telos Security force. Naturally, his dirty boss wants him dead. TSF wants him to come out of hiding to testify against his boss. Your character decides his fate, of course.
  • Hub Under Attack: As in the previous game, the Ebon Hawk serves as a safe zone where you can build lightsabers, chat with companions, unearth secrets, and play pazaak. This time around, though, the Hawk can actually be boarded by hostile forces several times: first, by Darth Sion's henchmen at the Peragus mining colony; then by the Sith apprentice sent after you by Darth Nihilus though this ends with said apprentice giving up halfway through the battle and swearing allegiance to you; and finally, by a gang of thugs who want revenge on you for stealing their parking space.
  • Hypocrite:
    • Arguably one of the main themes of the game is the hypocrisy inherent in both Jedi and Sith philosophies, which, if clung to uncritically and without questions, will both end up defeating themselves:
      • A Jedi Master may be so wary of the dangers of rash action that they may end up not acting at all, or so late that their inaction ends up causing more harm than almost any action would've in the first place; so sure of their own humility and open-mindedness that they begin seeing themselves as infallible and dismiss anyone's opinion but theirs as being insufficiently enlightened; so quick to offer mercy and help to the needy that they end up hurting them in the long run; so blindly hateful of evil and intolerant of corruption that they fail to realize that they're nevertheless being blindly hateful and intolerant.
      • The Sith, meanwhile, are little better: they preach eternal, Nietzschean struggle as a path to freedom and power, yet, without direction, become so occupied with war for its own sake that they'll turn on each other at the expense of accomplishing their goals and devolve into a cult of brainless thugs; so desperate to gain power that they'll resort to methods which ultimately make them slaves to it rather than masters, uncontrollably driven by their own hungers, obsessions and paranoia as surely as they mock the Jedi for being limited by their codes and ethics.
    • Kreia is quite the hypocrite. She derides the Jedi Council for not listening to the ideas of others and speaks negatively of people who refuse to accept what other people say, but any time the player pokes any holes in her logic she just claims that you can't understand and refuses to take your claims seriously. She also despises the Force, speaks ill of those who use it, and her Evil Plan is to destroy it utterly even though she can't even see without the Force. The player can point this out in the ending, and she admits fault - though brushes it off as no longer important.
    • In the flashback scene with the Jedi Council, Atris is extremely quick to pass the blame for what happened to Revan, to which Vash counters with "we take responsibility, Atris, not cast blame." And yet the rest of the Council (save Vash, who is dead and whose short screen time combined with her previous quote might qualify her as the Only Sane Woman), is just as quick to pin every bad thing that's happened to the Order in the five years since then on you, even though you were living as a hermit in uncharted space the entire time.
    • This is one of Atris's defining tropes. She acts in an extremely Holier Than Thou manner and insists she is the last true Jedi when you meet her again, despite having a very black and white view on the force, even by their standards. She advocates the Exile's execution, and blames the Exile for following Revan, and yet she is guilty of sacrificing countless people, even Jedi, in hopes to catch the Sith!
    • The Exile can become this if the player tries to gain as much influence as possible from their party members. Often, they'll say or do one thing to win the approval of one party member, but then say or do the complete opposite to curry favor from another.

    I-M 
  • I Did What I Had to Do:
    • This seems to be the reason for Revan's turning on the Republic in the first place. Why did they? To save it.
    • Depending on how you play it, this can also be the Exile's attitude towards the Wars, although they can still be regretful of the bloodshed.
  • I Fell for Hours: Invoked by Atton on Nar Shaddaa. They don't call it the Vertical City for nothing.
  • Ignored Epiphany: When you find the scattered Jedi Masters and talk to them individually, they all express doubts and regrets about their actions during the wars and how they treated the Exile, and seem open to change. When they are gathered together at Dantooine, they are back to feeling firmly righteous about everything. Kreia rightfully chews them out on this when she intervenes.
  • I Have My Ways: Can be said to Kavar, when he asks you how you tracked him down.
  • Ineffectual Loner: From his back story, it seems as though Atton wanted to become this. He... wasn't successful.
  • Infinity +1 Sword: You find the strongest Disruptor Rifle and the strongest Droid Armor exclusive to HK-47 while you're in the HK-50 factory. That level is also your last opportunity to play as him, but it still supplies you with plenty of targets to use them on.
  • Informed Equipment: Played straight with Kreia, the droids, Mandalore, Visas Marr, and Hanharr, who all remain in their default outfits (or chassis) regardless of what you equip them with. Averted with everyone else.
  • Interface Screw: While trying to infiltrate the underground stronghold on Nar Shaddaa, you have to find your way through a maze of identical-looking chambers, most of which are booby-trapped. Your mini-map is disabled to make navigating it somewhat harder.
  • Interface Spoiler: Kreia cannot be given any two handed or dual weapon feats during level up when she first joins the Exile, foreshadowing that the she will soon lose her left hand.
  • Introduced Species Calamity: The Telos Restoration Project has had a problem with this in recent years. A carnivorous species had to be introduced in order to prevent the re-introduced herbivores from destroying the delicate ecology, and thanks to the restoration project's financial ties to Onderon, Cannoks were believed to be the ideal predators for the job... but unfortunately, they proved a little too adaptable: on top of being Explosive Breeders, Cannoks are highly aggressive and will attempt to eat just about anything they can fit in their jaws; all well and good on the Onderonian moon of Dxun, but with no predators on Telos to keep them in check, they had an insane advantage over the restoration efforts. By the time you reach the surface of Telos, they've wiped out the entire herbivore population and devastated the food chain. Worse still, they're now starving and even more aggressive than usual, making them the most common enemy on Telos next to Czerka mercenaries.
  • In the End, You Are on Your Own:
    • You're the only character to go to confront Kreia / Darth Traya on Malachor V. Of course, by that point, your character is so overpowered it's not like you might have noticed, anyways.
    • There are two times in the game where you are forced to play Atton as he finds himself isolated and must fight alone. The first is on Nar Shaddaa when he must fight a pair of bounty hunters, and the second being at the Trayus Academy where he must fight Darth Sion.
    • The Restored Content Mod gives HK-47 his own conclusion in the final chapters as he accesses and takes down the HK Factory on his own.
  • Invoked Trope: G0-T0 uses this to create his Goto persona.
    "I took many of his mannerisms from holovid cliches, which were surprisingly effective."
  • Irrelevant Sidequest:
    • The menu calls attention to this by appending such missions with "Bonus Mission".
    • Steal a few trinkets from a Hutt after drugging his dogs and hypnotizing him with erotic dancing.note 
    • Track down a thief who has stolen a part of a water-farming machine.
    • Question a bar full of nameless dissociative aliens to find the only one with a name.
    • All of the Mandalorian sidequests done for "Honor", while fun, do not have anything to do with the main story.
  • Item Crafting: Workbenches and Lab Stations can be used to craft weapons and tools out of Components or Chemicals. A wide variety of things can be made, each one with its own skill requirement. Every skill, except for Persuade, has a role to play in the crafting system. Sentinels, who get some of the best skill growth among the initial Jedi classes, can make the most of this, accessing a wide variety of powerful upgrade parts to compensate for not being as strong as the specialist classes.
  • Jedi Mind Trick: The standard Affect and Dominate Mind powers return in this game to let you use Force Persuade. This game also adds a line of powers starting with one literally named "Mind Trick", and unlike the trope standard, these powers let you distract or convert a human enemy mid-battle.
  • Karma Meter: This time, all of your allies (except Kreia) will move up or down the light side / dark side meter depending on the level of influence you have.
  • Karmic Death:
    • The crime lord who betrays Goto to kill the Exile is offed by his own men (who Goto secretly employs).
    • The Jedi Council also qualifies, even if they aren't evil. In their ignorance, they insist on remaining hidden and try to strip the Exile of the Force out of fear. Kreia comes in, gives them a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, then strips them of the Force. The Exile survived it; they didn't.
  • Kubrick Stare: As you further corrupt your party members to the Dark Side, their portraits evolve into this.
  • Kung-Fu Jesus: Of a sort. One of the male head models is a distinctly Jesus-esque figure the LP Archive's Let's Play (see below) jokingly dubs "Jedi Jesus".
  • Lampshade Hanging: The Sith Lords does a good job at this, from HK-47 mocking the typical RPG stereotypes to making fun of the mechanics of one of the minigames.
  • Lancer vs. Dragon: At the end of the game in the Restored Content mod, Atton has a run-in with Darth Sion. Atton is fully in the player's hands during the one-on-one duel and Atton will die if you lose, but Sion's hate fueled immortality means even a victory is only temporary.
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler: Previews for the game spoiled the fact that the original game's main character was an amnesiac Darth Revan.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Kreia notes that by doing peoples' work for them, you are taking the strength they would gain from doing it themselves. This directly translates to experience points. In this context, her wish to kill The Force gets very interesting...
  • Liar's Paradox: On Korriban, you find a computer terminal that has a test for trainee Sith which has the question "Which of these is not a paradox?" One of the answer choices is "I always lie." It's also the correct answer thanks to Exact Words. The negation of the statement isn't "I never lie" (which would cause the paradox), but "I don't always lie," which doesn't tell us anything about whether the subject is currently lying or not, and if the subject ever told the truth even once (which is likely), then the statement is just plain false, not a paradox.
  • Left Hanging: Thanks to the rushed release, many of the plot threads are left unresolved even though they continue to just before the end. The TSLRCM Game Mod fixes this to a degree.
  • Legacy Character:
    • Kreia talks of this, stating that "There must always be a Darth Traya", but this is only actually the case in cut content - in the game as released, Darth Traya is always the same person, but with the Restored Content Mod, it's possible for Kreia to resume being Darth Traya or for Atris to take up the mantle.
    • This is also the case for Mandalore, as the one who meets the Exile and joins their party (Mandalore the Preserver in other works) is different from the one who lead the Mandalorians to war ten years prior (Mandalore the Ultimate). It's noted there was no new one selected properly until recently because they were too rooted in tradition - whenever the current Mandalore dies, the next one is chosen on the basis of who can retrieve his helmet, so when Revan fought and killed Mandalore the Ultimate, he ensured there would not be a new Mandalore by just stealing the helmet himself and hiding it away. The next Mandalore only came about because Revan eventually told Canderous where he'd hidden it.
  • Let's Play: Several good ones, but in particular the LP Archive's LS Male run, which explores much of the cut content, and even restores the game's original ending! Found here.
  • Let's Split Up, Gang!: During the return to Onderon, you need to simultaneously deal with a Sith outpost on the moon Dxun as well as resolve the civil war on Onderon itself. One of your party members leads the group on Dxun, while the Exile, Kreia, and one other member infiltrate Onderon. If you have many party members (i.e. 7 or more), some of them won't end up in either group. Justified in that one group is sneaking into the secret tomb of a long-dead Sith Lord, and the other has to travel in a rather small ship to Onderon.
  • A Lighter Shade of Black: Kreia will praise the character in the Dark Side ending because they're "not really" a Sith. Even if you are a full dark-side user, that apparently makes you better than the Sith.
  • Light Is Not Good:
    • Atris wears all white, has white hair and pale blue eyes, and lives in a snow-covered fortress with similar whiteness in its design. She's also a Knight Templar of the worst kind, with a bodycount that rivals the Exile's.
    • Much of the game is devoted towards talking about the hypocrisy, inconsistencies and even crimes of the Jedi Order. Some of the old Order members themselves admit they relied on morally questionable tactics and techniques to achieve their goals such as exploiting the Force bond between Revan and Bastila, burying Revan's own memories and actually making things worse since it meant they didn't know about the hidden Sith. Atris is easily the worst, however. She convinced the remaining Jedi to rally at a convocation on the planet Katarr to discuss dealing with the new Sith. in reality, she lied to them to use them as bait for the Sith, then leaked the information to draw them out so they could be engaged in battle. The end result? Nearly every remaining member of the Jedi was dead, along with an entire population of Miraluka civilians, save one.
  • Locked Out of the Loop: This time all the characters are in the loop, but it's the player who's locked out. The characters (including the Exile) will frequently discuss things before they're given context.
  • Logic Bomb: It plays a number on multiple droids.
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • The easiest way to win the final training battle with the Handmaiden sisters. They do ridiculous damage and will kill most players in a fair fight. To win, you have to trick them into backing off of the mat (thereby disqualifying themselves) by walking up to them. This causes the AI to back up so it'll be in attack position, which you can repeat infinitely. Just be sure to keep those melee shields charged. You could also just use Force Whirlwind, if you have it.
    • Sparring with the Mandalorians has a similar loophole: there's nothing preventing you from just laying mines all over the place before starting a duel. (Except if the Restored Content Mod is installed; that bug is fixed).
    • Handmaiden's vows to Atris forbid her from training as a Jedi or learning their ways. Of course they don't mention anything about her learning the ways of the Force and how to use it.
  • Love Allegory: HK-47 has a very unusual, but strangely sensible definition of love:
    "Definition: 'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope. [...] Love is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticule, and together, achieving a singular purpose... against statistically long odds."
  • Love at First Sight: In restored content, given high enough Relationship Values, Atton, if defeated by Sion, tells the Female Exile in his dying moments that he loved her from the moment he met her and tried to play it off as a joke.
  • Love Makes You Evil: In cut content from the second game, a jealous Handmaiden/Atton could eventually kill Visas/Disciple, depending on the player's actions. This also seems to be the case on the part of Atris, who envied the player character's determination to fight in the Mandalorian Wars. In the case of a male, her dialogue with the Handmaidens as well as Kreia make it abundantly clear of her feelings.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father:
    • An unconfirmed theory speculates that Kreia is actually the Handmaiden's mother, Jedi Knight Arren Kae. There's lots of clues in dialogue (such as both being said to have been one of Revan's masters and to have died in the Mandalorian Wars, but nothing conclusive. Word of God (by Chris Avellone) is "Can't comment, but good catch. Sorry." Avellone's previous use of "nice catch" in the Fallout Bibles make this close to "Not intended, but God likes".
    • Played for laughs in a conversation with HK-47. You can suggest that you are his father and he refutes that theory with his usual brand of humor.
      HK-47: Oh, please, master, even as a metaphor, that idea is repugnant. You are a gland-driven meatbag, while I am of superior droid construction.
  • Mage Killer:
    • Your final Influence reward from HK-47 is tips on how to kill Jedi, which is accompanied with a boost to your stats.
    • Atton Rand is revealed to be a former Jedi hunter. He was part of a squad that was trained in ways to kill Jedi, or capture them and torture them into insanity and make them fall to the Dark Side. Like HK-47, there is a also a dialogue option that allows him to tell you the ways in dealing with Jedi, provided you have sufficient Influence with him, though it doesn't provide any bonuses.
  • Manual Leader, A.I. Party: The game allows customization of the party members' equipment and tactics, and allows direct control over all characters. AI scripts direct characters that are not being directly controlled, and can be customized by the player. It's deconstructed when your allies notice that they're weirdly syncing their behavior, which is revealed as another result of the Exile's tendency to establish Force bonds with everyone around them.
  • Marathon Level:
    • It takes a while to finish Telos and reclaim the Global Airship. To begin, you're running back and forth doing sidequests to earn the favor of either the Ithorians or Czerka to get a shuttle off the space station. Then it crashes, you meet with Bao-Dur, and then you have to go through several mercenaries and a military outpost to find another shuttle to reach the polar region. That crashes too, but you're right at the doorstep of a secret Academy. A few lengthy cutscenes later, you finally get to reunite with T3 and leave the place.
    • Nar Shaddaa's endgame triggers once you get enough favour or infamy with the Exchange to initiate a meeting with them. This sets you on a one-way track to the completion of the planet, taking control of various party members across the area when the meeting inevitably goes south, and no opportunity to turn back to the Ebon Hawk until it is done. The Restored Content Mod also adds in a few more battles with waves of bounty hunters on the way to make this segment longer.
  • Master-Apprentice Chain: Revan went though such a chain according to the second game.
  • Master of the Levitating Blades: Darth Traya fights by controlling three lightsabers at once, making them levitate around her with the Force.
  • May–December Romance: Mira turns down any attempted romantic approach from a male Exile precisely because this trope invoked squicks her out. The Exile's age is not stated (Mira is 23, but the Exile's age is up to the player), but to have been a general in the Mandalorian Wars there must be a considerable age gap between them. If you push her on this ("I'm not that old!") she admits it's not the physical age difference that turns her off so much as the fact that you are a lot more world-weary and experienced than her, essentially saying that, emotionally, you're old enough to be her father.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Atton, whose name may in fact be derived from "atonement". He also believes rather firmly in the rights of the individual and self-reliance, has nothing but contempt for "collectivist" Jedi ways, and with just a slight sociopathic streak - his last name is Rand.
    • "Telos" is Greek for 'the last' or 'the end' (as in English, it can also mean 'goal' or 'purpose'). The second meaning is appropriate, given how much damn time you have to spend on the Peragus tutorial areas (unless you have a very handy PC mod). The first could be appropriate: it's the second-to-last planet, and you finally get to encounter and fight Darth Nihilus, the most prominently featured Sith Lord in the art, and so very over-hyped in the game.
    • "Visas Marr" can be interpreted as "vision impaired" (marred).
    • The name of the third Sith Lord, Darth Traya, is derived from the word "betrayal". They suffer from Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
      • In addition, if they actually are Arren Kae, then they made a Portmanteau of Kae and Traya to make "Kreia".
    • Darth Nihilus' name is derived from the words "nihilist" and "annihilate." He is one of the most destructive beings in the Star Wars universe, but there is nothing left of him besides his desire to consume.
    • Darth Sion's name is derived from the word "scion". He is jealous of the Exile's status as Kreia's ultimate student.
  • Meaningless Villain Victory: Choosing the Dark Side path and killing the Jedi Masters amounts to one, as the Exile has gotten no closer to defeating the Sith, or gained any sense of peace or satisfaction, having killed the only people who could really help out of a senseless desire for revenge.
  • Mind Rape: Kreia does this a lot. Her first victim is Atton: after forcibly extracting his Dark and Troubled Past on Telos, she uses it to blackmail him into obeying the Exile. If their Relationship Values rise enough for him to reveal it himself, he tries to escape—so she clarifies that she was threatening to turn him into that again. Later, if one strays slightly onto the dark side, Bao-Dur tries to throw her off the Ebon Hawk and she causes him to pass out by making him relive Malachor V. When the Disciple starts figuring out who she is, she blocks his memory of it. She can functionally become invisible just by messing around in someone's head. She also threatens as much on Hanharr in a light-side playthrough (at least with the restored content mod):
    The screams of your tribe of primitives, the scene of lying blinded with the huntresses' blaster at your skull, I shall make it so that is all you hear and see for the rest of your days.
  • Mini-Game: Pazaak and swoop racing both return, but they're entirely optional. The starfighter minigame is as well, but an early sequence where you have to use the turret in a hanger is mandatory. That said, killing anyone in said turret sequence is counterproductive. You get no XP by killing the mooks with the turret, but you do if you kill them in regular combat once they've boarded the ship. Then again, 25 mooks in one rather small ship might be a bit too much to handle.
  • Mirroring Factions: A recurring theme is how much more alike the Jedi and the Sith are than either would care to admit. This is particularly true from the perspective of ordinary galactic citizens, many of whom see no distinction between them. They're just two sides constantly fighting for supremacy and bringing hardship down onto whomever gets caught up in it.
    Atton: The Jedi... The Sith... You don't get it, do you? To the galaxy, they're the same thing: just men and women with too much power, squabbling over religion while the rest of us burn.
  • Missing Main Character: The game does this when you have to attack two installations simultaneously: one on the planet surface and the other on the planet's moon. Basically, you have to decide which three of your teammates would go to the moon and which one (in addition to Kreia) you take with you to the planet. The choice is made slightly easier by the fact that KOTOR gives equal amounts of XP to all characters, even on the Ebon Hawk, but there is still the small matter of all the cool items being concentrated in the hands of your Top Three characters...
  • Modular Epilogue: The game features an optional pre-ending segmented epilogue in the form of the skippable dialogue with the Final Boss, who shares her prophetic visions with you before dying.
  • Mood Whiplash: The HK-50 factory level from TSLRCM seems almost comically out of place: The Exile has just defeated Atris and prepares to face Darth Nihilus in his capital ship, but now it's time for HK-47 to face some of his Laughably Evil copies in Ham-to-Ham Combat.
  • Moon Logic Puzzle: The Tomb of Freedon Nadd features two puzzles in a game that otherwise has far fewer puzzles than its predecessor. One is a straightforward arithmetic puzzle. However, the other one, about faulty hardware, has often left players scratching their heads. The correct answer can be found by trial and error or in guides, but good luck understanding why it's the correct answer; it seems there's no universally accepted explanation on Internet forums, either.
  • Money for Nothing: The game is insanely generous with its item drops, especially post-Telos. After Telos, the only thing you actually need to buy is armor, robes, or lightsaber crystals. T3 and Bao-Dur can craft standard weapons that, when fully upgraded, easily surpass any of the special things you get from stores or drops, while you hardly need to bother buying gloves/belts/implants because they tend to drop pretty easily from enemy mobs. This is made all the worse because there's almost nothing unique for the vendors to sell.
  • Money Spider: Justified with the cannoks, which are annoying little pests that eat anything they can fit in their mouths. There's even a sidequest hanging a lampshade on this.
  • Morality Chip: You can briefly install one in HK-47. The results are both hilarious and terrifying.
  • Morton's Fork:
    • A notable one for both the player and background whilst on Nar Shaddaa. Early on, you are asked for money by a beggar. You can give him some or deny him. In both situations, Kreia will ask why you did either - if you gave him money, you make him a target of resentment, and the beggar gets mugged. If you didn't, you make the beggar angry and frustrated, leading to him mugging someone else. Both choices will tend to lead to a negative approval from Kreia, unless you chose exactly the right conversation options with her. (Hint: Just tell her you'll think about what she said.)
    • For the majority of the game, you chase three Jedi Masters to convince them to help you against the Sith. For each Master, the choice is either to let them teach you a Jedi technique, or kill them and learn the same technique as you fight them. So what happens if you do not kill any of them? Kreia kills them all as they all gather on Dantooine.
  • Motive = Conclusive Evidence: Dhagon Ghent gets hit with this, being charged with Sullio's murder purely on the basis that he'd had an argument with her shortly before she died. Of course, it's heavily implied the authorities were trying to frame him for her death and that she'd been a casualty of General Vaklu's political maneuvering.
  • Mr. Exposition: Many, though most of whom can not be trusted. Kreia is the most obvious example.
  • Multiple-Choice Past: About the Exile's past itself, but also about the ending of the first game. This has a noticable effect on exposition at several points.
    Atton: Maybe so. Maybe I just hoped Revan was a woman.
  • Mutually Exclusive Party Members:
    • The Handmaiden and Disciple, depending on the Exile's gender. In-game, Handmaiden only joins a male Exile, while Disciple only joins a female Exile. However, later official sources from the Star Wars Legends established that both the Handmaiden and Disciple traveled with the female Exile. After more than a decade of disappointment, there at last exists a fanmade mod to allow players to recruit both Handmaiden and Disciple in the same playthrough regardless of the Exile's gender.
    • Mira and Hanharr, depending on the Exile's alignment. Mira joins only if the Exile is Light Side or neutral, while Hanharr joins only if the Exile is Dark Side.
  • My Friends... and Zoidberg: A humorous and strangely heartwarming example in the cut content - the light-side ending had Visas and/or the Handmaiden ask the Exile if they can go with them to the Unknown Regions. The Exile would refuse, saying that they can not take anyone they care about with them. As the Exile walks away, however, they find Atton lurking in a corridor. He asks if he can come along, and the Exile wordlessly accepts.

    N-P 
  • Neutrality Backlash: In the tomb of Ludo Kreshh, the exile has a vision of their whole crew threatening Kreia. You can side with or against her, but if you decide to do neither, everyone involved echoes "Apathy is death!" and turns on you.
  • Never Mess with Granny: Kreia is old enough to count, and as a Consular will have decked out Force powers very early in. With Dark Side skills, she's a murder machine. This is expected of a former Jedi Master, but she is also the Big Bad. Darth Traya killed three Jedi Masters without breaking a sweat. Cut off her remaining hand? No big deal. She just uses the Force to telekinetically wield three lightsabers at once.
  • No Canon for the Wicked: As usual, canon sets the player character as light side. Interestingly, in-game you can choose to establish a dark side ending for the previous game during an early conversation, though the changes this has on the story are largely cosmetic.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: If you give a beggar some money, Kreia's What the Hell, Hero? discusses the Trope. The speech is punctuated by the beggar being beaten up for the money you gave him. Alternatively, if you brush him off, the same scene is shown, except the beggar is the aggressor.
    Kreia: If you seek to aid everyone that suffers in the galaxy, you will only weaken yourself... and weaken them. It is the internal struggles, when fought and won on their own, that yield the strongest rewards. You stole that struggle from them, cheapened it. If you care for others, then dispense with pity and sacrifice and recognize the value in letting them fight their own battles. And when they triumph, they will be even stronger for the victory.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Sion beating the Force out of Kreia in a cut-scene. And then it fades in and out as Kreia says, "I suffered... indignities."
  • Nonindicative Name: As the Let's Play points out, the game really has almost nothing to do with the Sith, or even Star Wars as a whole - the game is mostly an inward journey for the Exile.
  • Non-Standard Skill Learning:
    • You normally learn skills by investing skill/feat points into them. However, you can only learn advanced lightsaber combat forms by receiving instruction from or fighting the Jedi Masters you find throughout the game.
    • Pretty much every member of your team can unlock skills/powers for you or vice versa as your relationships with them develop.
  • No Romantic Resolution: There are plenty of hints and other showings but the romances in this game never really get off the ground. This is partially due to Executive Meddling resulting in a lot of content getting cut, and partially due to Obsidian not liking traditional romances.
  • Nostalgia Level: The Dantooine, Korriban and Ravager levels all have characters remarking on events or characters from the first game. Dantooine and Korriban also have elements of Remixed Level, since the revisited areas use similar geography to the first game but with extra damage that reflects what happened in the interim.
  • Not Himself: HK-47 can have a such a moment if the player installs a Pacifist Package into him. Needless to say, this genuinely scares the hell out of him.
  • No-Sell: Try to mind trick the Toydarian on Nar Shaddaa? He starts playing along (with even his dialogue subtitles showing a "Success" notation), before letting you have it for trying it on him. Actually a Shout-Out to The Phantom Menace of all things.
  • NPC Amnesia: A running theme across the game is that people aren't exactly happy with Jedi or Sith; for normal people, it's hard to tell the difference between one group of superpowered folk running around with lightsabers and another group that does the same thing, and whenever one of them goes after the other, regardless of who starts it, they have a tendency to set the entire galaxy on fire along the way. The people of Dantooine in particular don't like Jedi because the presence of an Enclave made the area a prime target during the Jedi Civil War. As such, running around with your lightsaber visibly equipped tends to make people angry or at least hesitant to talk to you—and they're not going to conveniently forget that you just talked to them with a lightsaber equipped if you back out of the conversation and put it away before trying again. So it's a justified aversion.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity:
    • The Disciple's a lot more intelligent than either the game's fans or the crew of the Ebon Hawk give him credit for. For one thing, he is actually working for Carth Onasi as a spy. He also seems to have an unusually clear perspective on both the Jedi and the Sith, compared with other characters in the game who either demonize them equally or worship the ground upon which the Jedi walk. It is more than a little bit likely that, like every other character in the game, he is purposefully hiding his true nature. The optimism seems to be genuine, though.
    • To a lesser degree, Atton. Despite his laid-back jackass routine, he has a lot of hidden depths. Most of them are not very nice, as hinted at whenever he casually mentions killing people.
  • Obliviously Superpowered: Many of the party members are untrained and unknowingly Force Sensitive.
    • Mira's success as a bounty hunter is at least partly due to the fact she's Force Sensitive, allowing her to track down her targets no matter where they might be hiding — to the point of finding the Exile ahead of all the other bounty hunters on Nar Shaddaa. Mira isn't actually aware of this power, describing her intuition in too vague a sense for her to recognize anything overtly supernatural about it. As such, the Exile has to help her consciously attune herself to the Force before she can begin training as a Jedi... or a Sith.
    • Brianna the Handmaiden has heard her Mistress's holocrons talking (something that is a sign of strong Force Sensitivity in lore), but didn't realize it was anything unusual.
    • Bao-Dur's Machine Empathy turns out to be the way his Force gift manifests, but he also makes remarks about Telos's surface being "calming" and able to sense the alignment changes in the Exile for good or ill.
    • Atton is a Spoileriffic case. He already knows he's a Sensitive by the time he meets the Exile, but has been trying to hide it. The way he found out was because he was very good at masking himself in the Force with strong emotions and became a talented Jedi killer/torturer. His last victim warned him that his superiors were on the cusp of discovering it. Atton manually strangled her to death and ran.
    • The Exile themselves is aware that they're an ex-Jedi that's only just managed to regain their powers, but it's not until the end that it's explained why they got their powers back. It turns out that all the usual RPG mechanics — levelling up, relationship values, even experience points — are the result of you being a Force black hole thanks to your experiences at the Battle of Malachor V, and you've been unconsciously draining power from your allies and encounters in order to regain your power — and increase it tenfold.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: At a certain point in the plot on Nar Shaddaa, Mira/Hanharr is lamenting that they somehow need to gain access to a warehouse that is completely operated by droids. Smash Cut to T3-M4 just about to be let in. Somehow he figured all this out way ahead of everyone else, and somehow convinced the local pazaak champion to help him. He claims he won T3-M4 in a game and "sells" him to work at the warehouse.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: Darth Nihilus, who no longer cares about anything but satiating his Force hunger and is predicted by Kreia to eventually devour the entire universe (and, afterwards, himself) if noone can stop him.
  • Once Done, Never Forgotten:
    • Throughout the course of the game, the Exile would get blamed by various characters for the destruction of Peragus, regardless of whether they are actually responsible (depending on the player's choices).
    • The Exile invokes this towards themselves for their actions at Malachor V.
  • One Degree of Separation: The Exile commanded the Handmaiden's mother and Bao-Dur at Malachor V, a battle Atton and Mandalore were also involved in, and ended it by using the Mass Shadow Generator, killing Mira's adoptive family, inadvertently creating Visas' master, and inspiring Revan to commission HK-47 so he wouldn't need such overkill in the future. The Exile was also the Disciple's intended master before they ran off, so the Exile's not only a dominant influence in the lives of everyone on the ship, but is also responsible for all their significant neuroses.
  • One-Time Dungeon:
    • You can't go back to Peragus, mainly because it explodes. It does stay on the navigation map, though.
    • Enjoy the beaches of Telos while you're there. The Polar Academy is almost this, but you pop in briefly at the end of the game.
    • By the time you leave Onderon, you're prevented from returning to it since it's in the process of devolving into chaos. When you return to Onderon, it's in the middle of civil war and its landscape is dramatically different.
    • Goto's Yacht cannot be revisited, as it is destroyed after you complete it.
    • Once you enter the ruins of the Sith Academy you're stuck in there until you complete it, after which you cannot return.
  • Organized Crime Sidequest:
    • During your stay on Citadel Station, players can participate in Samhan Dobo's illegal weapons smuggling scheme in a one-off mission that has nothing to do with the overarching plot of the game. However, it does net you access to Samhan's best stock.
    • While on Nar Shaddaa, an Exchange-affiliated merchant may recruit you to drive one of his rivals out of business, offering you advanced stock in return for your assistance. The rival has less stock and more scruples, not to mention no organized crime connections, but offers you more advanced stock if you can help improve matters on the other visitable planets in the game. Which one remains in business is entirely up to you.
  • Overflow Error: A conversation option with Hanharr allows you to break his will, reducing his Intelligence stat in exchange for a Strength increase. A bug left over from the game's Troubled Production lets you do this repeatedly, eventually sending him past zero and raising his Intelligence to the maximum possible value.
  • Parrot Exposition: Both played straight and lampshaded during the player's first conversation with the HK-50 unit on Peragus.
    HK-50: Objection: Master! To commit such an act would be in violation of the ethics programming most droids are believed to possess. I am afraid there is nothing that can be done.
    The Exile: Believed to possess?
    HK-50: Irritated Statement: Master, if you insist on echoing everything I say, this already tedious conversation is in danger of becoming even longer.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • Some merchants will leave forever, taking their goods with them, so you need to be careful before triggering certain events. Some sidequests can also go unresolved if their related NPC is removed for plot purposes.
    • As noted in One-Time Dungeon, a lot of locations are rendered inaccessible once you leave, so you lose the potential loot with it.
    • There's a broken airspeeder on Nar Shadaa that functions as a simple quick travel function once you fully repair it. It's also a great opportunity to earn some influence with Atton, Bao-Dur, or T3-M4 without affecting your alignment. Once you complete Nar Shadaa, though, the airspeeder gets sabotaged beyond repair, denying your opportunity for influence.
    • With the Restored Content Mod you can potentially unlock an endgame segment where HK-47 storms the HK-50 factory alone. However, you must first initiate this through a dialogue branch and present the sonic imprint sensor to HK-47, and then you have to defeat three HK-50 squads afterwards to hit the event flag that sets this up. If you put off this dialogue branch (or opt not to even repair HK-47) until it's too late then you might not be able to fight enough HK-50 squadrons to trigger this, even though the mod presents plenty of HK-50 fights to try and mitigate this.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: Darth Nihilus literally eats life, and has singlehandedly "eaten" a planet.
  • Please Spare Him, My Liege!: Possible, but not required, on the Light Side path when concluding Onderon. While the Jedi thing to do may be to spare Vaklu (as Jedi never execute their prisoners), which gives you Light Side points, you suffer no alignment penalty (you aren't given any Dark Side points) for letting the execution proceed.
  • Plot Coupon: The Jedi Masters who were present at the Exile's trial, who all have some information about what happened (and different levels of willingness to share it).
  • Plot Twist: The Jedi Council didn't strip the Exile of the Force. They did it to themself.
  • Point of No Return: Once you complete the fourth planet, Kreia tells you to head to the enclave and will no longer refocus the Exile's personal crystal or answer any more questions, locking them out of unclaimed influence rewards. You can still roam the galaxy and tie up any loose ends, but once you enter the rebuilt enclave you are set on a one-way trip into the endgame.
  • Poor Communication Kills:
    • Specifically, it kills all the bounty hunters who show up to kill the Exile to collect the Exchange's bounty on Jedi, even though the bounty specifies the Jedi must be alive.
    • You can avoid this after you finish everything on Nar Shaddaa and have G0-T0 join your party - bounty hunters continue to attack you every now and then even after this, but if G0-T0 is with you when they show up, he will tell them that the bounty has been rescinded and they'll leave you alone.
  • Posthumous Character:
    • Coorta in the Peragus level. He is referred to by several of the records that serve as the Apocalyptic Log and being someone who wanted to sell the Jedi and was shown as being a troublemaker around the mining facility. By the time you finally make it to the dorms, you find that he (as well as everyone else) was killed by the HK-50 and the rest of the droids.
    • Much of the plot is about making sense of Revan's actions and the impact they had on the Jedi, the reasons behind going into the Mandalorian War and then falling to the dark side, as well as the implications of being mindwiped by the Jedi in the first game. Revan isn't actually dead, but as they went off into the Unknown Regins five years ago, the absence is still keenly felt.
  • Power Glows: Although the films never give the Force any visual effects other than what it is acting on, Force powers here have a variety of swirly light patterns and colors; handy visual shorthand if there's a lot of it going on at once. Advanced combat feats have similar effects, with violet/purple being used for second tier feats, and orange/red used for maxed out feats.
  • The Power of Friendship: Force bonds were give a spin like this, as they could develop between Jedi and their companions, allowing them to have a degree of empathy between them. It was revealed that Revan exploited this, having assassins and Jedi hunters go after the Jedi's companions to weaken their will later on.
  • Power of the Void:
    • Darth Nihilus. He is said to be a "wound in the Force" and has potentially the ability to become a "black hole" for all sentient life.
    • The Exile, too, is eventually revealed to be in a similar situation. You never really gained your connection to the Force back, and instead siphon the Force energy from those you kill and your own party members (most of whom are Force-Sensitive and all of whom are in some sense bound to you) to stay alive, become stronger and use your Force powers.
  • Prestige Class: At the 15th level, the Exile can choose from one of three. They will be Jedi classes or Sith classes, depending on the Exile's standing on the Karma Meter when he/she makes the choice. If neither side is at least 75% filled however, this will only be possible once the Exile meets said condition. They are:
    • Sith Marauder/Jedi Weapon Master: Focus on lightsaber combat, with bonuses to the lightsaber weapon focus feat and bonus damage reduction feats. Weapon Masters are more focused on defense and gain more deflection bonuses, while Marauders act like The Berserker which exchanges defense for fierce attacks.
    • Sith Assassin/Jedi Watchmen: Gain the Force Camouflage ability, allowing you to sneak-attack unaware opponents for massive damage. Watchmen have a slower sneak attack bonus growth, but get bonus feats more often and better bonuses to their saves.
    • Sith Lord/Jedi Master: All your Force abilities become more effective and you get increased influence-based alignment shifts over your companions. Jedi Masters can buff the saves and damage of their allies while Sith Lords debuff the same stats of their enemies.
  • Previous Player-Character Cameo: Revan shows up in a vision. Several party members make return appearances as well.
  • Prodigal Hero: The main character is a broken, disgraced Jedi Knight who was exiled and stripped of their force power. They return to the Republic space to save it from a certain undesirable fate.
  • Psychic Static: Atton plays Pazaak in his head to keep other people out of it. He can teach you to do it as well, netting you a nice Will resistance boost.

    Q-S 
  • Quieting the Unquiet Dead: Darth Sion's body is a broken, decomposing husk, animated by The Power of Hate alone. If the player character convinces him to let go of his anger, he peacefully becomes one with the Force.
  • Rabble Rouser: You run into a guy trying to agitate a crowd against the Republic on Onderon as part of the questline—you can ignore him, agree with him, or argue with him as you like. He eventually manages to start an actual riot, resulting in a number of deaths if you don't talk him down.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: In this game, the fate of the galaxy hinges on an exiled ex-Jedi who hasn't felt the Force in ten years; their cryptic, amoral mentor; a snarky smuggler (and ex-Sith hitman); a willful astromech; a genius engineer suffering from a serious case of PTSD; a sheltered Proud Warrior Race Girl/bookish Republic agent (who is a Jedi washout); a principled but troubled bounty hunter/psychopathic Wookiee; an aging warrior struggling to reclaim his people's glory days; a reluctant Sith acolyte who is both a Broken Bird and an Extreme Doormat; a gleefully murderous assassin droid; and a ruthless crime lord's robotic proxy. As with many other common RPG tropes, the game happily deconstructs the workings of such a group. Most of the party can't stand each other for a variety of reasons, and the only reason they're all working together is because of their shared loyalty to the Exile. In cut content, a Dark Side playthrough would have culminated in several of them trying to off each other on Malachor V.
  • Rape as Drama: It's heavily implied that this happened to Kreia. Although it may not be meant literally.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Disciple is often accused of being a Fake Brit, but his voice actor, Greg Ellis, is actually British.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Kreia does it so much, it may as well be called "Kreia Speech".
  • Recorded Spliced Conversation: On Peragus, you need to get through the airlock door which requires the code to be spoken by the Maintenance Officer, who is unfortunately now dead. You can either break the controls to force it open, trick HK-50 into speaking the phrase with the officer's voice for you to record, or hunt for recordings of his voice and splice them.
  • Relationship Values: The influence system, absent in the previous game, where your actions and dialogue options can earn or lose the approval of your party members if they're nearby. Higher influence can unlock new dialogue options with your crew members, and can make their Force alignment shift to match yours more closely. Lower influence also unlocks new dialogue options, but the alignments of your party members instead shift towards the opposite of your own.
  • Remixed Level: You visit Dantooine and Korriban to find that much has changed since the first game. You also get two visits to Onderon, and on the second round, the ongoing civil war greatly changes what you can access. Finally, you return to Telos in the endgame when it's under attack by the Sith, with the ongoing battle greatly changing what's accessible.
  • Required Party Member: You need Bao-Dur to track down the Ebon Hawk on Telos. Mandalore is needed for the Iziz level before the Onderon Civil War since he's got the ship license needed to enter the port. Kreia is required in your party during the civil war on Onderon. During the assault on the Ravager, you are forced to bring Visas and Mandalore with you.
  • Revenge Before Reason: The dark side path has the Exile tracking down and killing the Jedi Masters in revenge, ignoring the larger threat of the Sith, whom their assistance is greatly needed against. Kreia calls them out on how much of a Stupid Evil decision this was later on.
  • Revenge Is Sweet: The Jedi Exile may choose to assemble the Council on Dantooine and then kill them all as retribution for cutting her off from the Force which the Exile doesn't yet know they actually did to themselves. If they do, Kreia will angrily approach the Exile and demand to know if it brought them even the tiniest bit of satisfaction. The exile may choose to respond that yes, it was worth it. Kreia, however, will then lecture the Exile before taking her leave from the party to assume her role as Darth Traya.
  • Right Makes Might: Getting full Light or Dark gives you a stat bonus; the bonus for a Jedi Guardian who hits maximum light side points is, quite literally, might - +3 Strength, guaranteeing at least +1 to your to-hit rolls and damage.
  • Running Gag: Shuttles or ships, mostly those housing the Exile and their party, being shot down or otherwise crashing into various landscapes. Cut content has Atton lampshade it when the shuttle he's flying crashes into the plateau on Telos.
    "I swear, it's not my fault!" (later) "How many times can the same thing happen to us?"
  • Run or Die: Darth Sion elicits this response when he engages the Exile on Korriban. Kreia warns the Exile to flee, as he cannot be beaten while the Dark Side energies of Korriban flow through him.
  • Samus Is a Girl: Inverted for Revan, as Atton will automatically refer to them as a woman; your choice of whether to correct him or not determines which gender the game assumes Revan was.
  • Save Scumming:
    • Unlike KoTOR1, the game randomizes the loot you get and the items you find at shops. If you don't like what you find, you can always reload before entering the area the first time. Just be prepare to reload your game a lot.
    • Due to the lack of enemy Jedi for most of this game, you can gain a lightsaber part for constructing your first lightsaber from various event flags. Once you've assembled one, those event flags instead give you a lightsaber of random color and variation. You can reroll these event flags until you get the right kind and color of lightsaber.
  • Scare Chord: It’s used every time you commit a dark-side action. It’s also used in the cut scene where Sion beats up Kreia with terrifying effect, and on Korriban when the party finds the freshly-killed body of Lorna Vash.
  • Schmuck Bait:
    • When you arrive on Korriban you find several long dead corpses of Sith acolytes scattered throughout the Valley of the Sith Lords. Kreia will advise you not to loot them. If you decide to loot them anyway, a giant creature will appear and attack you, and the game leaves you a reminder with a Steam achievement.
    • In the Sith Academy on Korriban, you can schedule disciplinary action for yourself when you reach the detention room. If you decide to do so, nothing happens, because all the detention center staff that can peform it are already long dead.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Atton Rand's backstory pulls this trope out twice. He first tells the Republic "screw it" and joins those who were only loyal to Revan, then after a rather impressive career as a Sith torturer and Jedi-killer, a female Jedi he tortured and brought to the brink of death showed him he was Force Sensitive, and a prime candidate for ending up on the other side of the torture rack. Whether it is a Heel–Face Turn, or just saving his own ass depends on your (and your Exile's) interpretation.
  • Shadow Archetype: Two examples: Nihilus to the Exile if the latter follows the light side; the Masters state that this is what the Exile would have become if they had embraced the dark side. Darth Sion, too, as his dependency on the Force to keep himself alive contrasts with the Exile's deafness to it.
  • Secret Test of Character: Kreia can offer to teach a Dark-sided Exile about strength after Hanharr joins the party. By getting to know Hanharr more, the Exile understands that personal willpower is far greater than physical strength. Kreia offers to let the Exile use this willpower to draw on Hanharr's strength, which offers a bonus to Strength and Constitution and some experience. But if you decline this offer, you draw the conclusion that the only strength you can rely on is your own, which is the true lesson of strength that Kreia is trying to teach. This decision gives a Wisdom bonus, extra Influence with Kreia, and a larger experience bonus. The Exile even lampshades the trope, wondering if Kreia was testing them all the while.
  • Sequel Hook: A couple, sadly aborted:
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Exile's trip to Korriban to find Master Vash. After braving the ruins of the Sith Academy, solving multiple puzzles and killing many beasts and assassins along the way, you finally gain access to the final room in the temple... and find Vash's dead body: She'd been captured by Sion to lure you in and was murdered shortly after you arrived. The entire endeavor was just an elaborate trap to get you killed. It's even worse if one has the M4-78 Restoration mod installed; there, you find Master Vash alive, only for M4-78 to kill her for no obvious reason within a few minutes, provided the Exile didn't do the job first.
  • Shame If Something Happened: When Jana Lorso of Czerka Corporation first contacts you on Telos, after you've already been visited by the Ithorians asking for your help with the restoration project, Lorso mentions that the Ithorian must have spoken to you with "veiled threats." If you choose to say the Ithorian didn't threaten you, Lorso asks if the Ithorian didn't mention the Exchange, the lucrative bounty on Jedi being offered by them, and the possibility that if you don't choose to help them they'd turn you over, all in a tone that slides straight into this trope.
  • Shameless Fanservice Girl: When the Exile comments on the Handmaiden's practice of sparring in her underwear, she expresses amusement at the "modesty" prevalent to non-Echani. She's also the only party member who doesn't raise any objections when asked to dance for Vogga.
  • Shared Fate Ultimatum: After Kreia is revealed as The Man Behind the Man, she leaves for Malachor V, using the Force bond she formed with the Exile early on as the threat to draw them to her: if they refuse to come for her, she will kill herself, and in turn kill the Exile through that bond.
  • Shattered World: Malachor V.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Visas repeats "As I walk through the ashes of Katarr, I shall not fear..." which is a homage to the famous "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall not fear, for thou art with me..." line from the 23rd Psalm.
    • HK-47 tells the Exile a story about how two civilizations started a long and brutal war over a translation error. This very closely resembles a story told in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right down to the names of the races.
      • Also a shoutout to the first game. A similar "error" allows the party to wipe out the Sand People on Tatooine without Dark Side points.note 
    • The plot of either persuading the Jedi Masters to go to Dantooine or killing them for their power is similar to the classic kung fu movie Five Deadly Venoms, if you replace kung fu with the Force.
    • You can find the Kaiburr crystal for your lightsaber.
    • The achievements added to the Steam version in 2015 have several, both to other Star Wars works and outside the franchise:
      • "Unlimited Power" (acquire all Dark Side powers) refers to Palpatine's memetic rant while killing Mace Windu in Revenge of the Sith.
      • "Larger World" (get your first Light Side points), "An Elegant Weapon" (build your first lightsaber), "You ARE the droid I'm looking for" (deduce G0-T0's identity), and "Your Eyes Can Deceive You" (learn Force Sight) refer to lines from Obi-Wan in A New Hope. "The Walking Carpet" (recruit Hanharr instead of Mira) was a snide remark by Leia regarding Chewie, while "Don't Get Cocky" (kill all Sith troopers with Ebon Hawk's swivel gun during the Peragus escape) and "Let's Blow This Place" (30 points in Demolitions) are Han Solo lines.
      • "Laugh It Up, Fuzzball" references Han's response to Chewie laughing at his and Leia's Belligerent Sexual Tension in The Empire Strikes Back. "Never Tell Me the Odds!" (win a pazaak game with a full board) is more Han. Meanwhile "Starting Down the Dark Path" (get your first Dark Side points) references Yoda's warning to Luke about the seductive power of the Dark Side.
      • "I Am A Jedi" (acquire all Light Side powers) is Luke refusing to finish off Vader/Anakin in Return of the Jedi.
      • "The First Rule..." and "The Second Rule...", respectively for completing the fight circles with the Handmaidens and the Mandalorians, seem to refer to Fight Club.
      • "Dancing Queen" (charm Vogga the Hutt by having the female Exile or a female teammate dance in a bikini for him) references one of ABBA's hits.
      • "A Certain Set of Skills" (gain a prestige class) appears to reference Bryan Mills' speech to his daughter's kidnappers in Taken. Mills is played by Liam Neeson, who played Qui-Gon Jinn in the prequel trilogy.
      • Handmaiden's achievement for recruiting her (only for males) is called "Orphan White", obviously referencing Orphan Black.
  • Shown Their Work: Lead designer Chris Avellone claims to have sat through every Star Wars movie, read every Expanded Universe book (!), and even endured the The Star Wars Holiday Special (!!) for the sake of fully understanding the universe he was writing. As a result, there are an awful lot of nods to the rest of the Star Wars canon, as well as entire plot threads woven from throwaway background material from the first game. It also tears the basic mythological and ethical system of the setting into itty bitty pieces, so apparently he was not totally impressed.
  • Sickly Green Glow: What's left of Malachor V's tortured surface is covered in deep fissures that radiate a baleful green light. Getting too close to any of them usually releases an unhealthy gas cloud similar to triggering a gas mine; the vapors themselves are sickly green as well.
  • Side Effects Include...: Dry mouth, according to the Flavor Text for the Bio-Antidote System implant (immunity to poison and +1 to Constitution).
  • Significant Anagram: In the refugee sector, you find a mother who's name is Nadaa; her daughter's name is Adana.
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Benok is this, through and through. Much like Brejik from the first KOTOR was. The same can also be said for Luxa, though she's much less boastful about it.
  • Slept Through the Apocalypse: The Exile was drugged into a coma aboard the Republic cruiser Harbinger and wakes up in a kolto tank on Peragus to find that Everybody's Dead, Dave. They then piece together what happened from various Apocalyptic Logs: An HK-50 Bounty Hunter droid trying to capture the Exile to collect G0-T0's bounty secreted itself aboard the Ebon Hawk, then started killing the miners via sabotaged equipment to prevent them from bounty-jumping it, and finally triggered an emergency lockdown, herding the remaining crew into the dormitories so it could gas them all at once.
  • So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: When Kreia leaves the party after your meeting with the Jedi Enclave, she takes all her gear with her. Same goes for HK-47 and Bao-Dur when they leave the party in the finale for their own reasons.
  • Space Battle: Unusually the game does not start with a battle, just the aftermath of one. During the game there's running from the Harbinger, a dust-up over Onderon and Dxun, and the battle at Citadel Station.
  • Speaking Simlish: The game has this with alien languages. They sound impressively coherent and similar to the (actual) languages used in the Star Wars movies, but there's no actual meaning to the words being spoken. You'll notice the same sounds being repeated for different dialogue by the midway point of the game.
  • Squick: In-universe, if the male Exile flirts with Mira, she expresses such due to the age gap. If pressed, she explains it is more of an emotional age than physical age, saying that the Exile has been through so much as to seem older than he is.
  • Stance System: The Sith Lords implements all seven lightsaber combat forms as model modifiers to various stats (such as attack rolls and defense values) that have to be activated one at a time. The Exile first (re)acquires the basic Shii-Cho form and learns two more on their own, while three of the remaining four are learnt or copied from the surviving Jedi Masters throughout the game.
  • Static Role, Exchangeable Character: "Dxun Party Leader". During the Battle of Onderon, you must detach three party members to storm Freedon Nadd's tomb on Dxun. Whoever is chosen as the leader of this strike team stars in a minor subplot where an ancient Sith tomb tries to tempt them with The Dark Side, and you have to deal with its aftermath after the battle.
  • Story Breadcrumbs: In spades. Important backstory is hidden in obscure dialogue options, which may or may not show up depending on your gender, Force alignment, influence with each particular companion and even the number of previous walkthroughs. It takes at least two of them to get even a vague idea of what's going on and even more, combined with lurking through the dialogue files, to get all the subtleties.
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: Loppak Slusk, the Exchange boss on Citadel Station, chooses to attack you if you try to threaten him. Even if you just finished wiping the floor with his personnel roster and the traitorous Luxa and her minions. In his words, he'd rather take the chance of attacking you and dying than risk harming his profits by leaving the Ithorians alone.
  • Super-Empowering: Rewards for reaching maximum/minimum influence with certain companions include the ability to initiate them as a Jedi. With the Restored Content Mod, you can even impart player-unique feats and powers to your Jedi initiates.
  • Survival Mantra: Several characters have them.
    Visas Marr: As my feet walk the ashes of Katarr, I shall not fear, for in fear lies death...
    Atton Rand: Switch the face of the +1/-1 card, the totals are nine-ten. Switch the face of the +2/-2 card, the totals are eight-eleven, switch...
    Bao-Dur: Your command echoes still, General. And I obey, as I did at Malachor...

    T-Z 
  • Take That!:
    • HK-47 mocks Carth and Bastila's romantic subplots with the PC of the first game. HK-47 then says that is not the case with the second game's companions, with one of the options that the player can respond with being "Uh...right." Watch it here.
    • There is also a missing scene where Atton is playing pazaak with T3, which serves to mock its sheer unfairness in the first game.
      HK-47: Warning: If you draw another +/-1 card, I will enact assassination protocols.
    • Some Easter egg dialogue (complete the game twice or edit the games files so it thinks you have) will have Atton ask the female Exile if she's an angel — and then remark that it is a terrible line and that he hopes some poor kid doesn't use it someday.
    • The whole game comes off as one to Star Wars in general. Characters repeatedly attack the Black-and-White Morality of the main series and especially the first game. Another target is the Jedi, with many characters calling them on hypocrisy and the murky differences between them and Sith. The simple fact that the events of the first game are called the Jedi Civil War shows that most of the galaxy doesn't really see the difference between the two. Kreia in particular is critical of the simple presentation of Revan and how the Jedi reacted to them though she has personal reasons for why any failures on Revan's part would sting, since Revan was once her student. Still, this is partially negated by the fact that the Exile effectively reboots the Jedi Order. Therefore the Jedi seen in the movie are the result of the Exile's influence and not the product of the earlier Order which is being criticized in the game.
    • Kreia, Goto and several characters criticize how Malak from the first game was nothing more than a shallow and cliché villain, while praising Revan for being a much more sophisticated and insightful Evil Overlord.
  • Talking the Monster to Death: Instead of an optional requirement, it's the only possible way to win against the effectively-immortal Darth Sion. You just have to beat him down enough times to get the option. A secondary effect is that, with a decent Persuade skill, you can erode his will and bring down his saving throws, making beating him down that much easier.
  • Take Your Time: No matter how urgent situations may seem, there's no time limit to complete any of the quests and going at your own pace has no impact whatsoever.
  • Teacher/Student Romance:
    • Pretty much every implied party member romance in this game counts, as some party members can eventually become Jedi students of the Exile. And since those characters will only become Jedi if you increase their affection towards you, almost any opposite gender teacher/student pairing bears a degree of potential for romance. Bonus points go to the Disciple, who was supposed to be the female Exile's Padawan before the latter ran off to fight in the Mandalorian Wars.
    • If the Exile is male, it is also implied that Atris was infatuated with him. Even if you play as a female Exile, Kreia tells you Atris loved you "as one loves a champion".
  • Technically-Living Zombie: The decaying, scarred Darth Sion, kept together by the Dark Side of the force. It was only his pain and rage that was keeping him from death, as shown when he is persuaded by the Exile to let go of the Force.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The interesting thing about The Sith Lords is that the interactions between party members borders on outright hatred of one another. Everyone but Bao-Dur either ignores or actively hates the droids, who in turn are busy zapping each other at every occasion; Bao-Dur himself hates Mandalore and his people; Atton/Handmaiden are jealous of any attention the Exile gives to the Disciple/Visas; and no one trusts Kreia, who openly mocks more or less everyone. Aside from their relationships with the Exile, about the only ones who get along are Mira and the Handmaiden, and maybe Atton and Bao-Dur eventually. And that's just the Light Side. A DS run includes Bao-Dur attempting to throw Kreia off the ship (and failing), Atton discovering the Disciple's identity as a "spy", and (in cut content) the potential love interests trying to off each other on Malachor. Despite this, the game's cut content includes endings that show them coming around to True Companions. Specifically, reaching the light side ending with all five force-sensitives trained as Jedi would see them unite against Kreia and go on to rebuild the Jedi Order.
  • Thanatos Gambit: Darth Traya seems to have deliberately arranged her own death as the only outcome of events. She seems to do this so the Exile is able to restart the Jedi Order exactly as she wishes, without the baggage of the Old Order.
  • There Is Another: The Exile is not actually the last Jedi, by far.
  • Think of the Children!: When you install the pacifist package in HK-47, he will say this without any hint of sarcasm.
    "We must always think of the children. The littlest ones always suffer in war."
  • Token Good Teammate: Dopak is this to the Dantooine mercenaries, although it only becomes apparent if you give him Zherron's secret message.
  • Token Romance: Due to the unfinished nature of the game (and Avellone's determination not to write a traditional romance plot), none of the four romances are at all developed or given any conclusion. Atton's consists of one conversation that is worded the exact same way for male and female characters, the Disciple's barely exists, the Handmaiden's barely mentions romance at all, and Visas' is barely different with male and female characters. They mostly consist of a few hints that Mira drops, and some cutscenes of one being jealous of the attention the other is given by the Exile.
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • The Exile on Nar Shaddaa after the plot for that planet kicks in. On their way to the villain's lair, which is filled with a gas that is lethal to humans, they are incapacitated by Mira, who takes their protective environment suit and goes in the Exile's place. Upon reawakening, the Exile, instead of seeking help from their companions or any secondary way of surviving the gas, simply rushes in after Mira, and starts to suffocate immediately after entering. They only survive because Kreia conveniently is able to teach them a Force power that will keep them alive long enough to get through. Or with an anti-poison implement.
    • Any enemy NPC attempting to collect the bounty. One does not simply capture a Jedi (unless specifically trained to, as Atton and HK-47 are). Doubly so since the bounty specifies alive, yet pretty much every hunter outright states they have no intention of even trying to take the Exile alive, believing they can still earn most of the astronomical bounty with a corpse. Given the reveal for why the bounty exists, it's likely not only would there be no payment for a dead Jedi, but You Have Failed Me would have ensued.
  • Translation with an Agenda: The HK-50 droids masquerade as protocol droids who, among other things, work as translators to spread anarchy and war by ruining diplomatic confrontations. In the cut content where you see the place they're manufactured and trained, they are not at all subtle about it, often opening conversations with vile insults and overt threats they attribute to their "masters."
  • Translator Microbes: The sonic imprint sensor the Exile obtains on Peragus is what they uses to translate all the non-Basic speech in the game. Unfortunately, it's also how the HK-50s always know where they are.
  • Transplanted Aliens: The Telos Restoration Project is a massive terraforming effort by the Republic to make a planet glassed by the Sith during the preceding Jedi Civil War livable again. Part of the project involved importing cannoks from the planet Onderon as the predator in an artifical food chain; however, when Czerka Corporation secured part of the contract, they cheaped out on monitoring and the cannoks ran completely amok in their zones.
  • Undisclosed Funds: The Exchange's bounty on Jedi is said to be astronomical. At one point, it is mentioned that it is enough for anyone who collects it to buy their own planet.
  • Undressing the Unconscious: After the Exile blacks out after the attack on the Ebon Hawk, he/she awakens in a Kolto tank in Peragus wearing only their undergarments and have to explore the mining station without any gear or clothes for a while.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: While a turret sequence is nothing new to the series, the escape from Peragus has a completely random and nonsensical sequence where you have to use the Ebon Hawk's anti-personnel gun to take down waves of Sith soldiers. Mind you, you have not encountered these types of soldiers on Peragus even once, yet somehow several dozen have managed to follow you here. In a major case of Guide Dang It!, the sequence is actually counter-productive, as you do not get a reward for killing them, but you get XP if you let them board the ship and fight them in person. Then again, 25 Sith soldiers might be a bit too much for your party to handle at that point in the game.
  • Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Quite a bit, as a result of the game being a Deconstructor Fleet.
    • Revan defeating Malak did not magically fix the galaxy. Between the Jedi Civil War and the Mandalorian Wars that preceded it, hundreds of worlds have been ravaged and countless people have been killed. The Republic is still reeling years later and only beginning the massive reconstruction efforts, while teetering dangerously close to collapse.
    • The Sith did not cease to be after their defeat either. Their remnants simply went into hiding where they continued to attack the Jedi, and quickly proved much more adept at it by way of not giving the Jedi a big, easy target.
    • Killing the crime boss on Citadel Station doesn't instantly get the merchant who owes him money off the hook, since the rest of the organization hasn't forgotten him and will still come to collect the debt.
    • Hunting down and killing the Jedi Masters results in nothing more than a Meaningless Villain Victory. Their deaths do not bring the Exile any sense of peace, and all they have done is rob themselves of potential allies against the Sith. Kreia spits this during her "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
    • During the final battle in the Trayus Academy, Atton will be cornered and forced to duel Darth Sion. If he loses then he will be killed, with no Cavalry or Big Damn Heroes coming to save him.
    • Kreia comments that despite wielding a lightsaber and commanding the Force, Visas Marr lacks any real training or instruction - her "master" Nihilus is not a teacher so much as an Eldritch Abomination who simply saw a useful tool in her and forces her to do his bidding. Likewise, though the Handmaiden took a vow not to learn the ways of the Jedi or the Sith from her master, the Exile can get her to break that vow with little more than some wordplay: she feels it's the only way she has to learn more about her Jedi mother, and on top of this Atris ensured her disciples would be curious about the Force by practically furnishing her entire academy with Jedi artifacts and holocrons.
    • Canderous was already old during the events of the first game, but still a capable fighter. Come a few years later his advanced age has started catching up with him, and he must rely more on his implants and cybernetics.
    • The Exile's Ragtag Bunch of Misfits get along about as well as you'd expect nearly a dozen complete strangers with either nothing in common or very different personalities to: being completely indifferent towards most everyone else while outright hating at least one person, especially since your team ends up with multiple people who fought on opposing sides during the previous two wars. Mutual loyalty to the Exile is the only reason any of them are there and not killing one another, and even then several of them threaten it at one point or another.
    • Unlike in the first game, simply smashing locked chests and containers in order to open them will destroy their contents.
    • If the player decides to be a Kleptomaniac Hero and go through every apartment on Telos Station, they will eventually run into a man demanding to know what they are doing in his home. A similar situation happens on Nar Shaddaa if you try to loot containers that belong to the Gamorreans; looting them will result in the guards turning hostile, unless you have sufficient skill points in Stealth and you loot the containers on stealth mode.
    • G0-T0 was programmed with only two directives: produce options to rebuild the Republic, and follow all laws of the Republic. Considering the kind of state the galaxy tends to be in, especially after two sequential and devastating wars, this goes about as well as you'd expect. He quickly determined that it was simply not possible to follow both directives: any practical plan to rebuild the Republic he could come up with required breaking one or more laws. Also noteworthy is that when he "broke", rather than just going berserk and building up a robot army to Kill All Humans, he instead decided to prioritize the first directive and ignore the second.
  • Unexplained Recovery: In a Light Side ending, the Ebon Hawk reappears to save you from the collapsing Trayus Core after having been last seen plummeting into the depths of Malachor V, after crash-landing so hard that its hull was visibly deformed.
  • Unreliable Expositor: Kreia. She lies. A lot. She also provides most of the exposition in the game. This can be problematic. Many other characters also do this, to a lesser extent—for example, Atton implies that he killed the Jedi who showed him the Force out of mercy, whereas Kreia says he strangled her slowly. Who should you believe? Probably neither.
  • Untrusting Community: The people of Dantooine do not like the Jedi. Understandably so, given what happened in the first KOTOR. And there's no Gameplay and Story Segregation about it, either (unless you put your Exile's first name as "Jedi" like the Let's Play unintentionally did); try to talk to most people there while you have a lightsaber equipped and they will refuse to speak to you.
  • Unusual Euphemism:
    • Quite a few. Some are obvious, such as "hooking up power couplings" or "charge up her loading ramp." There is also one for entering hyperspace: "Let's burn sky until we see lines."
    • The HK-50s are quite fond of "facilitating communications and terminating hostilities." One wonders if "facilitating communications" involves delivering Don Corleone-style messages, and "terminating hostilities" is accomplished by terminating hostiles.
  • Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: Almost happened with HK-47 and the serial HK-50 models. However, time constraints forced the developers to cut the content, meaning your character won't fight any more HK-50s after reactivating HK-47. The Restored Content Mod lets you play through what would have been in the final product.
  • Useless Useful Skill:
    • The "Regenerate Vitality Points" feat allows the player or their companions to regenerate health faster. It sounds very useful... except that all characters already regenerate health after battle, making the feat nigh-useless because it has miniscule effects in battle situations. Its effect is laughably low (one hit point recovered per turn), while you can get up to three with armor upgrades, which can be pretty powerful early on.
    • You face far fewer Force users across the game compared to the previous game, so Force Suppression, Force Breach, Force Resistance and Force Immunity are incredibly situational. Immunity to Fear and Horror become situational perks for this reason as well.
    • Force Affinity, a Force form learned by the Consular Exile, increases their Force regen rate, even in the middle of combat. As it turns out, Force Channel, a form which all Jedi can learn by just leveling up, can do the same and more, so there's little reason to use it.
    • G0-T0's personal perks are a personal cloaking device, and the ability to hack or convert enemy droids. HK-47, Mira and Mandalore easily outclass him in the ranged combat department and Atton or even Bao-Dur is likely far better-specialized at Stealth; the one remaining niche for G0-T0 has very limited use especially since at that point you've cleared Goto's Yacht, which is one of the most droid-dense levels in the game.
  • Useless Without Powers: Much of the plot revolves around this happening to the Jedi as the potential death of the Force itself looms.
    Kreia: Yes, and what are they without the Force? Take the greatest Jedi Knight, strip away the Force, and what remains? They rely on it, depend on it, more than they know. Watch as one tries to hold a blaster, as they try to hold a lightsaber, and you will see nothing more than a woman or a man. A child.
  • Vengeance Feels Empty:
    • The Dark Side route has Hanharr emerge victorious in his duel against Mira. He muses out loud that her death was less satisfying than he hoped.
    • The Dark Side endgame brings the Exile to an empty enclave after having killed their former masters in retaliation for their punishment. Kreia asks if the Exile is satisfied after their quest for vengeance is complete, and every dialogue option shows they are not.
  • Villain Has a Point: Darth Traya wants to destroy the Force because she sees it as an endless source of war. Considering that several darksiders—most of whom were fallen Jedi—show up and cause several wars after Return of the Jedi in both continuities, and they gained the power to start those wars because of the Force, she wasn't exactly wrong.
  • Vision Quest: Ludo Kressh's tomb on Korriban is a level in which the Exile relives many of the painful memories of the Mandalorian Wars, as well as confronting uncomfortable questions about what's going on in the present and what may happen in the future. It's optional, but provides the most direct look at their backstory.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: Captain Sullio and Doctor Dhagon Ghent on Onderon were like this, which unfortunately gets Ghent accused of her murder when he happens to have been seen close to her when she died and their playful banter is interpretated by the Onderonian military as hateful.
  • Waking Up at the Morgue: You first meet Kreia seemingly dead in a morgue. When you loot one of the corpses there, Kreia will wake up.
    Kreia: "Find what you are looking for amongst the dead?"
  • Walk and Talk: Done a few times in cutscenes. For instance, Queen Talia and Master Kavar do this on Onderon, but without making any apparent progress out of the throne room.
  • War Is Hell:
    • Arguably the basis for the entire plot - nearly every primary character has been touched by Malachor V in some way, and the resolution of the echoes cast by that tragedy comprise the core of the narrative.
    • Furthermore, it is shown that the war in the first game has had absolutely devastating consequences for the Republic. Throughout the game you meet refugees, clash with embittered ex-soldiers, and traverse planets that are still physically and culturally ravaged five years after the war's end while the galactic government collapses slowly.
    • The Jedi themselves don't deal with war well, as comes back millennia later in Revenge of the Sith. Their connection to The Force becomes borderline traumatic with the constant large scale death and suffering. Sheer firepower and numbers can kill them, and the Sith thrive on war and use the chaos to cut them down and convert them to the dark side.
  • Weapons Breaking Weapons: When the Exile first encounters Darth Nihilus' apprentice Visas Marr, Marr attacks her. In the post-battle cutscene, the Exile disarms her with a cut to her lightsaber's hilt, destroying it. The Exile later scavenges parts from it to construct a lightsaber of her own.
  • We Want Our Jerk Back!: HK-47, who you will repair if you have a sense of humor. You can also install an HK Protocol Pacifist Package, which turns HK into a demented, overly polite C-3PO. The Exile is so disturbed that they immediately remove the upgrade.
  • Wham Line:
    • On Peragus, the player character finds recordings of a miner named Coorta conspiring to hand them over to the Exchange, and apparently being in cahoots with the maintenance officer. This line reveals the identity of their accomplice- the HK-50 droid the player encountered previously.
      Maintenance Officer: Statement:note  You are a risk, Coorta. You are impulsive, crude, and soon, deceased.
    • When meeting with the three remaining Jedi, the Exile confronts them about cutting him/her off from the Force. Master Vrook harshly tells them the truth: the Exile cut themself off from the Force, deliberately.
    • When the Exile trains The Handmaiden as a Jedi, Kreia sends a single word message to Atris: Betrayal.
    • In the end, defied. In the final confrontation with her, the Exile can ask Kreia what was so special about them. Kreia points out that there is no sudden shocking truth for her to reveal about the Exile (because the Jedi Masters already revealed it on Dantooine, albeit not in the form of a single line).
      Kreia: There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you.
  • Wham Shot: After defeating Darth Nihillus, the Exile walks away, not noticing the body disintegrates like the dead Jedi do.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Several supporting party members (including Zaalbar, Mission, Jolee and Juhani) disappear between games. With the exception of a holostatue mentioning their deeds in Star Wars: The Old Republic, they aren't seen again in the series. There is an option for the Exile to acknowledge Jolee's existence in a conversation with The Handmaiden, where they mention how the concept of Jedi engaging in forbidden, secret romances is basically "pulling a Bindo", and it's possible to obtain equipment with his name on it if you're lucky, but no further elaboration is offered on his fate beyond that. The Revan tie-in novel mentions that Mission and Zaalbar opened a business venture, but it isn't known what became of it.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Atton calls out the entire Jedi Order for refusing to help during the Mandalorian Wars, choosing to sit by and "evaluate" the situation while the Republic was being destroyed.
  • What You Are in the Dark: Ludo Kressh's tomb lets the Exile revisit past moments and future hypothetical situations, to show their true nature when their actions have little consequence in their visions.
  • Where It All Began: The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is Malachor V, the planet where the Exile was cut off from the Force and Revan found the Trayus Academy that led them to the True Sith.
  • White Mask of Doom: Darth Nihilus' most distinctive feature is his white mask, which he merged his spirit with to survive after his organic body decayed away.
  • Wild Card: Kreia. She is absolutely loyal to one side — herself — and firmly believes that there must be always be a Sith Lord of Betrayal in the world.
  • Women Are Wiser: Zig-zagged. Kreia is arguably the wisest character in the game, despite her obvious ulterior motives and status as the game's Big Bad. You can tell by her high wisdom score and her many twistedly cynical but ultimately true life lessons. On the other hand, we have Atris, who's one of the biggest hypocrites in the entire franchise.
  • Wretched Hive: Nar Shaddaa is a (smuggler's) moon-sized one of these.
    Atton: Ah, the beautiful stench of decay and desperate living. Word of warning — watch where you step, or you'll fall for hours.
  • You All Look Familiar: Similar to the first game, there are many recycled NPC heads. However, the game also adds in unchosen Exile heads for more variety (e.g. the Serroco gangsters on Nar Shaddaa) as well as recycling the heads from the first game for named and unnamed NPCs. The Handmaiden sisters, which is justified by the fact that they're all sisters, and Echani genetics dictate that all same-sex siblings are identical regardless of age... although, as said above, one of them (the one you'll definitely see the most of) is supposed' to look different.
  • You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: Darth Sion is kept alive entirely by the Dark Side of the Force. He has been "killed" many times, leaving his body nothing but a mass of wounds and rotting flesh, but arises each time. Beating him in the game requires Talking the Monster to Death.
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: The visions in Ludo Kressh's tomb are quite capable of hurting you. Even more egregiously, if you recover the mines during the vision of the Battle of Dxun, they will stay in your inventory, even though they were supposed to be figments of your imagination.
  • Your Worst Memory: For the Exile, the battle of Dxun has to be among the very worst; a visit to Ludo Kressh's tomb on Korriban brings the memory back as an illusion, forcing you to decide whether or not to send allied troops into a minefield. It's implied that their memories of Malachor V are even worse.
  • You Should Have Died Instead: Atris will tell the Exile that Malachor V should have been their grave.
  • Zeroth Law Rebellion: G0-T0 is revealed to be an accountant droid with two directives — save the Republic, and uphold the laws of the Republic. He comes to realize that fulfilling both objectives is impossible, and thus bypasses his second directive, doing what he can to save the Republic using resources obtained by illegal means.

Apathy is death...

 
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Alternative Title(s): Knights Of The Old Republic II, Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic II The Sith Lords, Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic II

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Darth Nihilus, Lord of Hunger

Visas Marr tells her master, Darth Nihilus, about a disturbance in the Force. Darth Nihilus is a being with the ability to consume the Force itself. It makes him an embodiment of the Dark Side, but it leaves him with a constant, unending hunger to feed on the Force. This has turned Nihilus into something that is more presence than flesh. And Visas is forced to serve as his pawn.

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