(Very) Big City Blues: A Review of the Jedi Consular Story Part 3

In the Old Republic, your experience begins the same way: an origin planet followed by an intermediate stage on the Capital of your respective faction. In our case it's Coruscant, everyone's favourite ecumenopolis. Everyone get your sad face ready for why the Republic's Capital is such a sad, sad place.

The glittering jewel of Coruscant has more than a few cracks as a result of the Sith beat-down they got a decade or so earlier. The damage done runs so deep that they're still recovering.Your character has the option of expressing surprise at how the devastation  lingers. Generally (and this goes for all classes) this is your character's first time visiting the Capital world.  The planet missions are all built around the attempt to rebuild those sections of Coruscant that have the most difficulty recovering. These lower levels are full of marginalized refugees, vigilante fiefdoms and criminal opportunists. It's actually quite compelling and I felt some satisfaction whenever my character could help out.  Alignment choices here seem to be about prioritizing. A Dark Side choice is likely to be about privileging the bigger picture at the expense of the vulnerable person suffering in front of you.  For my Consular, the ends definitely justified the means.

Coruscant itself is unfathomably huge, tall, deep and endless. The areas that you are able to explore feel like the tip of the tip of an iceberg. The time of day whenever you're on Coruscant is a lovely golden afternoon  in contrast to Tython's  permanent cool morning. The senate tower is suitably majestic and the lower levels suitably decrepit.

The class mission for Coruscant is very simple: SAVE MASTER YUON!!!! You see, poor Yuon scarcely announced you a fully-fledged Jedi before dramatically collapsing (in a very cinematic first person viewpoint with shifting focus and fade-to-black...). Master Syo Bakarn  has had her shipped off to Coruscant to be treated for... whatever is wrong with her. Your first undertaking as a newly-minted Jedi is to help find out what that is and do whatever be necessary to help cure her.

The knowledge you need exists in the form of three noetikons. These are basically AI's designed to fascilitate research in the Jedi Archives. Each appears to take on the persona of three ancient Jedi Masters (in the form of holograms) to facilitate interaction with whomever is using them. Unfortunately for you, the destruction of the Jedi Temple entailed the destruction of the Jedi Archives or, at least, the structures housing them. The noetikons have been scattered as a result. I really like the noetikons and finding each one yielded a cool scene of your character interacting with them. It's a good callback to the teaching holocrons that you collected back on Tython.  Also a few characters from KOTOR make cameos as noetikon holograms.  Anytime familiar names and faces from the KOTOR games show up I'm a happy gamer.

The scenes with Yuon herself are effective mainly because she's familiar to us from Tyhon. Her deterioration is quite sad if a bit cliché. Once she's been cured you have an audience with the Jedi Council who inform you that several other Jedi Masters have been afflicted with the same madness. I don't know why, I'm not sure what exactly they expect you to do about it...