My original draw to the character of Kyle Katarn was that he was an average kind of guy. He wasn’t Luke Skywalker, or some ancient mystical occultist warrior. He was just a guy with a gun, trying to get by under a tyrannical regime. And finally, circumstanced draw him into the Rebellion.
I was irritated when the story turned into, here is you father’s lightsaber, he was murdered by an evil Sith Lord…you must learn the ways of the Jedi, and follow in your father’s footsteps… Suddenly he is a cheap ripoff of Luke (or almost a cocktail of Han and Luke). Even the showdown at the end of the game, much like the showdown in Return of the Jedi, has Kyle tempted to turn to the darkside. Please!
Even having him turn to the darkside later on was pretty lame. It is kind of silly how in the movies we get the impression that once you turn to the darkside you don’t come back, and yet in the EU just about everyone turns to the darkside sooner or later and have absolutely no trouble coming back with a little help from their friends. Gets a little old.
I completely get what you’re saying, although i wouldn’t define Kyle Katarn an ordinary guy anyways, he was a goddamn one man army.
If Lucasfilm ever shot a movie about the first Dark Forces back in the day, i would have made him more like a spy that knows when to shoot and when to pull off his imperial rank to infiltrate (of course the game was a Doom clone, so that couldn’t be translated into the gameplay.
To me Jedi Knight (which was the first pc game i ever played, well… the demo at least) always felt like a parallel dimension to the movie, it had enough of a Star Wars feel, but looked different somehow, i don’t even know if i’m able to explain it properly, i just know that that’s the impression it always gave me, since i was a 7-years old laddie.
Then the lines got blurred by a lot when they inserted him more into the SW inner circle of Luke and Lando (and consequently Han and Chewie as well), of all the titles Jedi Knight is the one that feels more removed from “things we know”, it’s a self-contained story that’s in fact so self-contained that passes more or less debatably as a Star Wars lookalike, but i will say it does have more of a Kurosawa feel than actual SW.