Intro:

The Immortal Emperor, for me, both succeeds and fails at being an interesting villain or an effective antagonist.

For the longest time, I really did not get why I felt like this, but now I believe I have found the answer as to why I find Valkorion such a mixed bag as an addition to the Sith Emperor’s story and I hope you enjoy reading my subjective take on the Old Republic’s main villain.

The expansion on his character:

It is interesting to see the Sith Emperor on a closer, more personal, level as he was portrayed pretty stereotypically as a generic doomsday villain big bad before the KotFE expansion who just wants to consume everything to become a god.

Pretty standard bad guy stuff right?

Well, actually yes but with some nuance: in the Jedi Knight storyline, the Sith Emperor tells the Hero of Tython why he wants to consume the Galaxy, which he reveals is so that he could travel to other galaxies experienxe everything like the life a “farmer”, “artist” or just that of a “simple man”. In other words, he wants life in it’s full breath at the expense of everyone else’s.

I feel this point is touched on and expanded upon in KotFE: we see that outside of being a tyrannical Sith Lord, he is capable of being a family man and he himself is a ruler that his Eternal Empire considers both good and heroic.

Yet, he ultimately doesn’t care about his family at all and the only reason why he found his Eternal Empire to be more worthy than the Sith is because they literally molded their whole culture around himself (unlike the Sith who, despite their obedience to him, maintained their individualistic roots beyond Vitiate), and I think that’s the point: despite how wise he claims to be and how inferior or shortsighted he deems everyone around him, Tenebrae, at his core, ultimately never grew beyond being a selfish and murderous being.

Fitting, that a man who wanted the ultimate evolution and plurality of states of being for himself, actually never changed anything about himself; remaining a narcissistic, self-absorbed and death-fearing child from beginning to end.

An unfocused goal for the character:

However, I do have some gripes with how he is portrayed and it mostly has to do with consistency and threat level. When we see Vitiate at the end of “The Rise of the Emperor” he is a true menace who is absolutely ready to devour the whole Galaxy just so he can get the power he desires. He brainwashed everyone in Ziost, ruthlessly consumed the whole planet and our character was completely and utterly powerless to stop him.

That whole arc elevated his threat level to a state of horror that Nihilus himself might envy, right?

Yes… for about a minute before promptly being killed in the next expansion and then doing nothing other than try (and fail) to invoke a bad impersonation of Kreia on the main character and sit around as a ghost. To make matters worse, during both KotFE and KotET, nothing is done to reach the same levels of threat he had at Ziost and even downplays them, showing fear at the sight of Vaylin… who is literally killed off the moment before we can face Valkorion.

But the greatest thing that baffles me is how they decided to essentially retcon his motivations by saying that he now just wants to rule the Galaxy as Immortal Emperor. Really? He is an entity of 1,300 years who remained committed to the single goal to kill anything and everything so that he could have the universe now just wants to rule this Galaxy because he… changed his mind? Suddenly? On a whim?

At first I thought he was just manipulating the player but no, when the player reads his mind he explicitly says that he will rule as Immortal Emperor.

After this, coupled with the above, the menace and apocalyptic threat he previously evoked dropped down to zero: by the time I was about to fight him, I have to tragically say that engaging Darth Malak in KotOR felt more tense than this fight. A disappointment, considering the character we are talking about should have been way above Malak in terms of scale.

Additionally, his later appearance in Echoes of Oblivion, while trying to evoke a sense of grandeur and closure by pulling a TROS and invoking all spirits he killed, they ultimately reduce him to a side dungeon boss that is defeated swiftly after his “resurrection”. It only takes so much of those before the novelty of your threat dies off.

Conclusion:

Looking at forums and videos, there is a wide range of people who either think this character is “brilliantly written” or that he is a just a cheap copy of Nihilus and Palpatine molded into one. I think neither is the case: he is a horrifying apocalyptic villain with interesting motivations who was given more complexity later that in some cases, enriched his character and in some others, diminished him.

So what did ‘Valkorion’ as a concept, do for the Emperor?

I myself, personally conclude that the expansion of personality of the Emperor was good in its concept, but it fell short in execution due to not reconciling both aspects of the character as naturally as they could have; ultimately creating too big of a narrative and character inconsistency for his story to land properly. They tried to create a personal antagonist out of a threatening force of nature and we ended up with an unfocused character who could never fully live up to being either of them.

Anyways, now that I’ve written my bible on the subject, what do you guys think?