I thought the lava one was cool, but it's been a while.
JO nor JA come anywhere near the level design of DF or JK. DF and especially JK had some amazing puzzles. Take the valley puzzles in JK. Spread across several levels, you had to do all that stuff with the cargo lift and stuff to get down into the valley. If you replay it and pay attention to the level instead of just hacking stormtroopers :hist101:, you'll find that it's actually quite brilliant.
Oh yes it did. Don't you remember those ridiculous jumping puzzles? The Doomgiver comm stuff? It was a giant room with 27 cubes that you had to jump between and press the right symbol in order to change the comm frequency. That made no sense. That kind of thing might have been acceptable in a side scroller a decade ago, but not today.
Yeah, that's Kevin J. Anderson style writing right there. DF involved a superweapon, the Dark Troopers, but they were so much more feasible than KJA's other crap that it was kind of cool. JK wasn't a superweapon at all in the traditional sense, and was more about Dark Jedi, which I thought made it very redeeming.
KotOR was even stronger. Waaay stronger. The writing in those two games, especially the first, is easily the best of any Star Wars game. It's some of the best in most games.
Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.