This is probably the best 4X I've ever played. It's got everything that I wanted.
Complex economy, logistic network, unit design, personnel management, population dynamics.

The only thing is that the UI is terrible and all over the place. Kinda ugly too.
But it is not as hard to learn as it looks.

I prefer it over the first one, mainly because of the improvement on the dialogue, it is not cartoonish, you don't go evil mad scientist over small stuff and you don't go naive good towards everyone, very sobering after what BioWare made on the first one.
It is certainly a much better decision to make the player character a Jedi from the start, as it saves you the pain of dealing with the botched multiclass that KotOR 1 forces you into.

Sadly this is a game that you feel how rushed it was. For the most part it is great. The start of the game is kinda too focused on combat, but it picks up nicely on Citadel Station, still, you have plenty of opportunities to RPG your way on the asteroid medical station.
But then you start to get into the parts of it that had cut content due to weird deadlines, even before you arrive in the final area of the game (which suffers a lot from this).

The game is still solid, the combat challenges are, in average, very well done and fair. The dialogue is amazing, it is amazingly entertaining to talk about the nature of the force and the role people have with it with your party members. All interactions you have with non-party members are centered on this theme too, in some way, which makes the game feel thematically consistent. Light side and dark side choices feel whole, both sides are reasonable and unreasonable at times, the game wants you to think about it yourself, like it is trying to convert you to one of them for real or like it is one of those buzzfeed personality tests, amazing.

BUT, fuck the last boss I hate it, savescummed to the end of times that fucking crap, better than what I did on the first one with grenades and mines and running.

Played this one a lot over the years and I have to say that it isn't that good of a game as people say so.
The D20 implementation is quite good, they did away with spell slots and introduced mana to balance force powers, the classes feel good (but more on that later).
Then the game starts going in weird directions from the get go.

The first section of the game, Taris, gives a very good taste of how the game is written throughout its entirety.
The dialogue is poor, darkside options are TERRIBLE, I get the feeling no one played this going darkside because there is no way the average player would go that way. I didn't, I tried once and thought it was so bad that changed to light side; playing it again now and sticking to darkside and it is HORRIBLE. On Dantooine you go HAHA I'm evilman and no one does a thing, the Jedi are completely incompetent and you party members, especially Bastilla lets you get away with the most insanely cruel things you've ever seen a Jedi do and she's fine with it. It's just so childish. Lightside is too, but at least it is comprehensible. I believe that it has something to do with the game being the first(?) cRPG release on consoles, BioWare had made games that were way better written than this on PC, and that market didn't play games like that and there's the issue of most of them being young and all blahblah, I can't think of no other reasons for it being this way.

Then we're left with the gameplay. On PC the game feels very clunky, but not unplayable. I don't know if on XBbox the game was as bugged as it is on PC, even with community patches. You get stuck on geometry, party members get stuck anywhere and you initiate combat with 1 member at the beginning of the map. my character one time refused to attack that guard droids on the ruins of Dantooine for no reason.
Apart from those issues there is also how the game forces you into multiclass and in becoming a Jedi. It's not even a proper multiclass, actually, you can't choose on which class you'll get a level, you're forced into getting Jedi levels. The thing is that there are builds that don't transition well into becoming a Jedi, like I was building a scoundrel, the rogue of this game, and ALL Jedi classes have poor skill growth. The game just completely destroy your skill progression and forces you to rely on the specialist party members (the droid) to take care of security and computers. Also if you try going with certain builds the game will break you in its last moments, especially in the last boss, good luck realizing you're gonna have to just run around the arena throwing grenades and setting up mines because there is no way you're gonna be able to space wizard your way through that.

It is just not as good as people remember it being and it actually never was. There were no games like it on console and there never was a Star Wars RPG before it (we still only got two, counting it and KotOR 2).

And now that I think about it, at least a goofy cartoon boss fight where you run around with your favorite cartoon chase song is very on brand for KotOR 1.

Also. Plot is like a proto Mass Effect of sorts. Kind of amazing to play both and compare.
Maybe all BioWare RPGs are like that, dunno.

Amazing game that mixes RTS and city-building gameplay to give a very complete experience.
The only units you control directly are military ones, everything else is done by requests and priority sliders. Once you place a building to be built, your labourers will flock to the location and prepare the terrain for construction, next are the serfs rushing in to gather the materials necessary to build it.
Complex economy with priority lists (you decide what the serfs should prioritize delivery of some base materials like iron and timber), citizens get hungry, soldiers get hungry, and there are enemy armies about.