A good start for The Old republic books - too bad it's 3 books in.

The Old Republic – Revan is a really good start to what will hopefully be a series of books that detail the clash of the Sith Empire and The Old Republic culminating into Darth Bane’s final solution to the Sith conundrum – The Rule of Two. Since Revan is written by Drew Karpyshyn, I have high hopes that these books are in the works.  Otherwise, Revan will be yet another video game-based Star Wars book that doesn’t really go anywhere which would be really too bad because the story has so much potential.

Occurring in the time before the other two The Old Republic books Revan is based on the popular character from the two Star Wars games Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic 2 and seemingly finishes out Revan’s story while providing what could be the starting point for the rest of The Old Republic books such as Fatal Alliance and Deceived. It’s unfortunate that Revan was released after the other 2 books of the Old Republic since it could be the basis for the storyline moving forward and with its (hopefully) follow-up books, Fatal Alliance and Deceived wouldn’t seem so disjointed and out-of-place.  I am sure this is a condition of the writers trying to stay within the canon but at the same time stories are hard to follow when they’re jumping around in a period stretching thousands of years.

For me, what made Revan interesting was not Revan himself or even his story but the character Sith emperor himself who had, up till now, just been referred to in the previous Old republic books. Now this guy, this guy is someone who could make Palpatine look like a prep school bully. You can almost see in Karpyshyn’s description of the emperor the characterization that Lucas was going for and did a pretty decent job of achieving with Palapatine.

The workings of the emperor and his Dark Council should be of great interest to Star Wars fans and fans of The Old Republic books and I was left wanting to hear a lot more about what happens to them to the point that Darth Bane comes along. Let’s hope Karpyshyn has many more books to write.

8 out of 10

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jameswynne

Latest posts by jameswynne (see all)

• Star Wars: The Old Republic – Revan - May 14, 2012
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