Lit The Dark Forces Saga

I have been led to believe that he's wearing a white shirt on Ruusan, but I suppose it's possible it's the lighting and the artist was confused like I was:



I think the shirt is white on the player model throughout the game though, so maybe that's where the confusion arises.

 

Who are they loyal to? Fyarr was Desann's second-in-command, wasn't he? Or was Fyarr the true leader?

 

Desann was loyal to Hethrir.

 

Hethrir was a Force user. An apprentice of Vader, AMONG THE MANY SCRUBS.

 

Hethrir was Force-sensitive, though...wasn't he? I'd check The Crystal Star but I am petrified of opening that horror again.

 

Hethrir's claim to fame was that his lightsaber had no activator switch but required telekinetic activation or somehow using the Force to complete a circuit to turn it on. I thought this was cool, even though I knew the novel was bad.

 

That is what I thought. And for the record, I also thought Hethrir and the Solo-kids portions of the book were the least-terrible parts. They introduced Lusa, after all; they weren't all bad!

 

Kyle does still change his clothes -- he has the duster he wears in some of the cutscenes.

 

He wears the same duster in Equals and Opposites. I've seen some pretty cool mods that give him the duster in Outcast, too.

 

It seems a lot of the cosplay and fan created toys of Katarn feature a white shirt as well.


Edit: As an aside, as a Magic the Gathering and Star Wars CCG player in the mid nineties, since both the Weatherlight saga and Jedi Knight were released in 1997, I've always had Kyle Katarn inextricably linked to Gerrard:

 

Was Hethrir loyal to Palpatine?

 

Here's the duster mod...



Interesting that the comic (and the Hasbro toy with it) gave Kyle a white shirt, black gloves, brown boots, and a blue shirt, instead of a tan shirt and brown...everything else. He looks more like a farmer (as he was described in a LOTF or DNT book) with the "jeans."

 

I don't think that's an actual mod, but drawn onto a model of Kyle.

 

You're probably right, I do not claim to know anything about modding video games, so I'll take your word for it. He's also wearing the duster in the post-NJO images of him...

 

That's not the duster, though -- that's the leather jacket, which also appears in the Zonama Sekot picture in TEGTTF. Kyle's got all kinds of things going on over and around the same shirt. That's not even getting into DF, either.

 

I do love his DF appearance; as a kid I had the DF Kyle Katarn action figure and I bloody loved it. I am sad that I lost his Bryar blaster pistol, though; now he just has his rail detonator.

 

I love that picture.

That sounds interesting

 

Actually, the novellas never did it for me (and while the audio books are... entertaining, they don't hold a candle to the game either). I feel like the games should be able to stand on their own, and that the experience you have shouldn't be chained to big extrapolations of who's where in the universe. Maybe that's what I love about Jedi Knight: it's able to be its own story since there's no need for "the inexperienced Jedi" to find an excuse to be the hero instead of Luke. Jaden Korr is one of many Jedi, and his "little" destiny of solving that one problem isn't so great when you have Kyle and Luke standing around as living legends. In the Jedi Knight game, there was no-one else to go to. First of all, it was Kyle's personal crusade; second, there was no time to call for reinforcements, chat with settlers and flying furballs, or to not just rush aboard the freight ship heading for the valley.

Which leads me to the anecdote that Fuel Station Launch must be my favourite level ever since it was the demo. I played it over and over and it never lost a miligram of its atmosphere.

By the way, RC-1991 did a great job in "threepioing" the audio dramas when we discussed the novellas last year.

 

I can see your point; why didn't Luke and Kyle just go waste everything themselves? Luke could've ROFL-stomped Tavion, and Kyle wouldn't have even blinked while fighting the Reborn twins. But we had to have a story about the new, young hero so things conveniently worked out so that only the young hero could save the day. Still, I found it fun.

What is the general favorite level of Jedi Academy? I love the Tatooine levels but I also really love the Korriban levels; wasting all those Reborn with a bunch of Jedi Knights at your back is really fun, and it's the opposite of the final levels of Jedi Outcast, too–did anyone notice, in Outcast the Reborn attack the Jedi base, and in Academy the Jedi attack the Reborn where they live. Kind of cool.

 

Funnily enough, I don't remember a lot of the levels in both games. Just roughly where they take place; a bit of sand, a bit of snow, a bit of sith temple... I guess the level I remember best would, ironically, again be the demo level (this time of Jedi Outcast); you know, the one that wasn't in the game but was a really solid stomp-through experience.

 

I enjoyed the Alzoc III demo; I like to think it's going on at the exact same time as The Crystal Star; that way Hethrir's holdings fall apart all at once.

 

Why didn't Obi-Wan and Yoda deal with the problems of the OT, or at least Darth Vader?

The reason Jedi Knight works, and why Luke doesn't get involved -- he's aware of the proceedings in the affiliated media -- is because it was Kyle's destiny to fulfill the Poem of Ages, not Luke's destiny, and it was Kyle's mission. Jerec murdered his father and he wanted revenge. Luke had no personal stake.

I think this is an important element of Star Wars which is lost. Destiny is lobbed around a lot, and Luke had his destiny, Kyle had his destiny, Jacen had his destiny, Starkiller had his destiny, et al. The wiser Jedi knew when to step back and let their students grow through conflict and fulfill their destiny. What is Ben's destiny? We'll never know because Luke doesn't want to let him fulfill it.

What I said about Jedi Knight being Kyle's destiny was true of Jedi Outcast as well. Desann murdered Jan. Having given it more thought, I think the story to Jedi Outcast is actually better than I gave it credit. Kyle picks up a lightsaber again for the same reason he did in Jedi Knight: revenge. This led him to the dark side on Dromund Kaas, and it's leading him to the dark side again on Bespin. Fortuitously, Jan isn't actually dead, and Tavion blurts this out when Kyle is about to destroy her. Once Kyle rescues her and learns of Desann's plan to wipe out the praxeum, his motivations shift from revenge to defending the Jedi, and it's through this unconscious shift in character that Kyle finally becomes a Jedi. When he's facing Desann, there's no motive for revenge. His personal stake is to defend the Jedi, not a selfish one. Kyle has become a Jedi.

In Jedi Academy, Jaden is just doing various cult related investigations and it's implied that equally important ones are being carried out by other Jedi. Kyle and Jaden happen to be sent to Bast castle, but there's other important stuff going on we don't even know about. Jaden and Kyle even go to Taspir III while all the other Jedi go to Korriban to deal with the cult. I don't think Jaden's importance in the story is amplified, except he just happens to be the one that runs into Tavion first on Korriban.

My favorite level was the Chandrila Jedi tomb that was in the demo. The level design is really neat and the track they took from ROTJ fits.

 

That's why I liked Kyle's story in JO so much; he was clearly not doing the light thing by taking back his lightsaber and learning the Force again; he was doing it for selfish reasons and he was quite willing to go dark to do it. Once he realizes Jan is alive he gets a spark back that was missing before then. He is uppity, almost, as Jan notices when Kyle finally rescues them. And I like the whole fight toward the Academy on Yavin, but without a doubt the fight inside the Academy itself is the best part of the game, to me.

Also, did anyone notice that one of the character models used for the Jedi in the Academy is the model used for Morgan Katarn?

 

While I don't remember it being my favorite, I do remember getting seriously psyched when Vjun showed up. I think I had just read Yoda: Dark Rendezvous at the time so it was completely surreal. I mean they even had the acid rain! So cool.

 

I can't pick one level as my favorite, but I loved Vjun, the Korriban levels, the one with the mutant Rancor (can't remember the planets name) and the one mission where Kyle and Jaden are stuck on the Imperial Remnant base, where you have to turn of the tractor beams to escape with the Ravens claw.