Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

This game appeared on many "best of the decade" lists, and since I'm a fan of both Star Wars and RPGs, I figured I'd be an instant fan of a Star Wars RPG. Yeegh. For some reason I had this idea going in that "Knights of the Old Republic" simply meant "Jedi Knights from the Prequel Trilogy," which of course would have been Yoda and Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi and Mace Windu and such. I had this idea in my head that the game would involve plot points from just before the prequel trilogy involving these familiar characters. I also thought the game would involve turn-based battles. None of this was true. What I found instead was a game set 4,000 years before the events of the Star Wars movies. "Old Republic" - I should have seen this coming. I know there's a whole expanded universe in the Star Wars canon, but that shit just ain't for me. And furthermore, this was a Western RPG. I should have seen that coming, too. There's nothing I find inherently wrong with Western RPGs, but I'd really been looking forward to some turn-based battles and less open world exploration when I began playing Knights of the Old Republic. Here's another criticism. I played this original Xbox game on my Xbox 360. The system is backwards compatible, but a documented glitch occurs in this particular game when you pause and then unpause the game - all the background music disappears! My time spent here wasn't a total loss, though. While I never really grew attached to the characters or the story, I was caught off guard by the big twist at the end of the game. I'm not even going to say that I should have seen it coming; it was effective and well-played and was probably the thing I'll remember most about this game ten years from now. Sadly though, nothing else was all that memorable. I'll chalk this one up to a gaffe on my end; had I always known just what this game was, I probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place, critical acclaim and all. I can now say, however, that I've finished off the Xbox section of my backlog, and honestly, given the overall lack of compelling titles in the original Xbox's catalogue, I'm pretty sure I'm done for good.