In 2003, a new Star Wars role-playing game called Knights of the Old Republic hit the market to critical acclaim (93% score on Metacritic). Its legacy has been enduring, largely due to the storytelling in the game. Revan is an attempt to pull that acclaimed storytelling into a new medium. What happens to the game’s main character, Revan, after the events of KOTOR? How is the galaxy shaped by the rise and fall of Darth Malak, and what threats await after that final showdown?
I picked up this book as a mass-market paperback using a Christmas gift card. I read it as a continuation of my goal to read through the Star Wars Legends canon. However, I did not read this purely because of that goal. I bought the book before I started that goal because I was curious about the story of Revan. I have played pieces of the KOTOR game multiple times in the last couple of decades (on a PC, an Android tablet, and an iPad–the game is truly versatile and has been adapted plenty of times!) and wanted to see the continuation of the story.
Revan was written by Drew Karpyshyn (author’s website and Amazon page with his other books) who wrote other Star Wars books including the Darth Bane trilogy. It was released on September 25, 2012. The paperback comes in at 368 pages long, a pretty typical length for a Star Wars novel.
Read on for a detailed breakdown, or click here to jump to the conclusion.
But he was not the same person he was back then. He no longer clung to simplistic ideas of right and wrong or good and evil. He understood better than anyone that dark and light were intertwined in strange and complex ways.
Plot
Revan follows the fairly common pattern of alternating viewpoints in each chapter. It switches between the title character, Revan, and a Sith named Scourge. At first, I was struggling to come up with goos synopses for both viewpoints, but then I realized that both are tales of discovering oneself. Revan’s chapters focus on his rediscovery of the galaxy (he had his memory wiped during the events of the video game), while Scourge’s chapters focus on his discovery of his place in Sith society.
I think coming up with decent synopses was difficult because the book really does not hit its stride until over 1/4 of the way through. The plot is quite meandering at first with no real direction. Even once the pacing picks up, the plot has some significant issues. The goals for the characters jump around quite a bit with a fairly harsh break, accompanied by a complete redirection, coming around 2/3 into the book.
The harsh break is somewhat understandable because it has to give the narrative a break to skip around the events already covered in Knights of the Old Republic 2. However, the break does still detract from the book. Though the plot has some fun moments before and after the break (including a great section with some Mandalorians chasing a MacGuffin and a pretty decent jailbreak scene), the change in narrative is abrupt enough that the two sections feel like two separate books that have been artificially stitched together. More effort could have been made to integrate the two sections and make them tell one overarching story.
Worldbuilding/Series Connection
With Revan being a video game tie-in, it certainly had plenty of potential connection to the larger Star Wars story. However, I felt that this adherence to the game was one of the weakest points to its worldbuilding. Just before the action starts to take off, Revan has a 2-3 page section where one character mechanically recites reasons why the remainder of the Knights of the Old Republic crew are too occupied to assist on the mission.
Also, while the book has callouts to events in the game, they are given as history in info dumps rather than being sprinkled throughout the story as subtle Easter eggs. I think that connection would have been deepened if the references served more as spice to flavor the story than as blunt instruments to say “Look, I continue that excellent story from the game.”
On the positive side, Revan does present a couple decent new Star Wars locations. None are particularly exceptional, but the worlds are at least marginally interesting. Revan also does some great work in presenting a new Sith society structure. At first, I thought it was a pretty bland take on Sith hierarchy, but then Karpyshyn creates some interesting complications with the Sith emperor and dark side rituals (which I do not want to get into too deeply to avoid spoilers). After that additional information, the Sith world he presents deepens significantly and adds to the story.
Characters
The characters were decent, but I found them mostly flat with occasional weird responses to their circumstances. Revan was particularly frustrating. He was the title character, and he had tons of unique traits that could have made him really interesting: both hero and villain of the last galactic war, missing memories, and a propensity to skirt the light and dark sides. However, I felt like I never really got to know Revan, and he responded quite weirdly to some major personal news (you will know it when you read it).
Scourge was at least slightly more interesting, but he also did not have anything to make him distinct from many other dark side users in the Star Wars expanded universe. One character from the game does end up making a major return in this book, and he is probably the most well-realized of the characters with more complex personal motivations for his actions. I would have liked to see more of him, but he sadly steps out of the story all too soon.
Prose
The prose in Revan is pretty standard for a Star Wars book with little to recommend it or detract from it. The main thing to call out is that related to the weird character responses I mentioned in the “Characters” section. I think some of the weirdness came from the language used rather than the actual response. A great example is the Revan situation I mentioned above. His response was far too formal for the occasion and seemed to come out of nowhere–it is not the way most people would have responded so early into the situation (again, I do not want to discuss just to avoid spoilers). If the response felt more natural for the setting, I may not have considered it to be such a weird and sudden character response.
Conclusion
Overall, I was a bit disappointed with Revan. I was excited to read it since it was connected to the Knights of the Old Republic, it sounded like it would be a fun adventure, and the cover was really cool (covers do matter when selling books from a shelf). However, it did not live up to its promises. The characters were a struggle to relate with. The plot was disjointed and thrown off by poor pacing and a glacial start. The prose had a few moments that threw me completely out of the book. That being said, Revan was fun in places, and I do not regret seeing just a little more of the Star Wars universe.
You should read this if …
- You are a dedicated Knights of the Old Republic fan and want to see what happens with Revan
- You like gray Jedi (even though this is not quite the best depiction of one)
- You want to get more of the backstory of the Star Wars universe
