Doctor Akemi
Homura Akemi's Time Lord counterpart.
- Location
- inside TARDIS in time stream
question I have is... HOW DO THEY REPRODUCE? I mean we know Protoss have families like mother and daughter... but then how are they born?
StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void
- Thread starter ChasCT2
- Start date
question I have is... HOW DO THEY REPRODUCE? I mean we know Protoss have families like mother and daughter... but then how are they born?
Doctor Akemi
Homura Akemi's Time Lord counterpart.
- Location
- inside TARDIS in time stream
From what I can tell... LOV suffers from what I'd call PMMM Rebellion syndrome- in which while main story isn't THAT bad, the ending is so... outta nowhere that fans are very divided on its quality. Some fans liked it while others think it is horrific abomination to the franchise.
No, uh, the main story is pretty bad too. It's generic, shits on the previous games, and possesses no real weight. The ending is just the wilting cherry on the puddle of melted ice cream.
An actual example of that PMMM syndrome is ME3, which has an alright plot, good characters, and an absolute suckerpunch of a shit ending.
Xexilf
Oblivion Sempiternum Daemonis
Well...
The Xel'Naga retcon goes away. They were really there at Aiur and Zerus. They were destroyed in combat with Amon, that can stay. Also, they look less dumb, although that is admittedly personal taste.
The story becomes longer, more complex, and less feeling like a rush of a dozen sidequests.
Kerrigan plays a big role, as her chosen one thingie suggested she would. Shes necessary to fight amon somehow.
As much as i loved someone going with the correct response to an incarnate dark god in a sci-fi setting (orbital bombardment), we get to fight amon directly at some point. With all our heroes and kerrigan, and an army. I dont care if the level ends up feeling like diablo or Warcraft. Keep the orbital bombardment scene in some capacity though... would need to think about this a bit.
The Epilouge... First, if its this critical to the story, including the villains defeat, dont call it an epilouge.
Second, the base story can stay in some form, with empowering kerrigan, but she dosent turn into phoenix, she stays kerrigan. She also stays with the swarm, wether she burns up that power killing amon or as empowered.
Third Amon. ... Well, the final level was dumb. There were some good ideas to make him seem threatening, like the landscape destroyed, but most was just annoying. To win, you have to destroy nonsensical crystals that randomly spawn, sometimes in places you cant reach. His power otherwise mostly consists of getting enemy spawn points and raining overpowered towers from the sky. This dosent feel like a dark god, this feels like someone who cheats at strategy games. And while a feeling like that could in theory work, here it very much didnt.
The end, not sure if we get a fight or just a cutscene, but it will be very epic, not fifteen seconds. Afterwards we get an actual ending, not a slideshow that tells us nothing.
And Amon, he needs either more characterization or less. He could be developed into an actual character with serious motivations, or remain as this incomprehensible cosmic horror thing. As its now they just bungled up both.
Doctor Akemi
Homura Akemi's Time Lord counterpart.
- Location
- inside TARDIS in time stream
most players seems to agree that main story line of LOV is quite decent... it is Epilogue that they have problem with and... I kinda agree.
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/19878237631
also LOV has ALARK... who is probably BEST character out of ALL Starcraft 2 franchise.
Last edited:
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
Going through the Cinematics and...is it just me or do they not look quite as good as you'd expect from Blizzard pre-rendered cutscenes in a lot of places?
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
God I'm just looking at some let's plays and the heavy handed messages in the cutscenes are smacking me in the fucking face hard enough to give me a concussion.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@Dekutulla basically has the right of it yeah.
Wings of Liberty was...it was solidly average/mildly below-average story-wise honestly. A lot of the stuff lacks weight or, uh, sense. "Oh man suddenly Kerrigan's back and she's killed like a bajillion people in the time we've had this conversation, what're we going to do Raynor?" "MUH WAIFU I KNOW SHE'S IN THERE" "Sir I-" "NEVER GAVE UP ON YOU SARAH" etc. And as it stands? It's still the most coherent/least stupid of the three. Keeping things mostly sensible and focused around Raynor's fight with the Dominion with the Amon nonsense more of an ominous specter in the background than anything else.
That said Duran being Narud was fucking retarded. That is Dracula levels of laziness. To be fair to the man there's some brilliance in disguising yourself as an old, rich, white dude given you can get away with basically anything. But still.
But retardation aside it was...it was largely okay? Broadly I mean. It was at the tipping point before Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void began the series's long, slow, yet inevitable slide up it's own ass several times over like some kind of anal ouroboros. And even then. Even solidly entrenched in mediocrity as it is? If you want to fix LotV you have to start at Wings of Liberty and strip out everything but the bare skeleton then light HotS and LotV on fire and go from there. Because the trilogy is made with that whole prophecy schtick in mind and making Kerrigan some super sphesul savior of the sector is sincerely stupid shit.
It removes her agency. Her culpability. It degrades her character.
It's dumb.
If you want a good story you really just have to let all the high powered "SAVING THE GALAXY" stuff go. A story can be fine without that. A story doesn't need that. Like by all means keep Duran (proper Duran, as the shapeshifting backstabbing Nyarlythotep type dude, a face to the malevolent evil of the Dark Voice) around. Keep the Hybrids around. But Amon himself shouldn't make an appearance, Cthulhu isn't improved by getting conked in the head with a steam ship. And first and foremost?
It needs to be a story about war.
That means constricting the scope back to the Koprulu Sector. And it means taking a hatchet to the characters as they're written in the new trilogy.
A tired and weary Raynor waging a war against Mengsk's Dominion even as the ground shrinks under him, increasingly bitter over the fact that people don't want change. That Mengsk gives them safety and security and he can't tear that idea down by blowing up a few statues. Kerrigan's struggle to give the Swarm shape and vision while keeping armies of hyperaggressive superpredators in line. As smart and canny and powerful as she is she can't maintain the Overmind's perfect control. The Protoss's conflict to recover Aiur, their homeland, and wrestling with the dozens of little compromises they have to make to their pure warrior ideology along the way.
Have Valerian and the Dominion be sympathetic without being on Raynor's side. Have the UED show up in full force as Kerrigan starts to make ready her plan to subsume the Koprulu sector, itching for round two. Have the Protoss as fractional and squabbling, with the leaders among them trying to come to some consensus about what to do. Have Duran flitting around behind the scenes, nudging events just so towards some inscrutable but increasingly ominous outcome. His Hybrids should be set up as profoundly destructive and immensely clever. They should be things to be afraid of, not a different flavor of mook you mow down for a few timed missions.
Make Duran the ultimate enemy behind the enemy but make it clear that he's not turning people into meat puppets. He's just doing what he did with Stukov and DuGalle, clearing the way and giving them a little push. Letting their own fears and failings do the rest. The Dark Voice doesn't even have to be an "evil" Xel'Naga it can just be a Xel'Naga. Nothing indicates that they were particularly nice or caring people or inherently benevolent. And if you're not making it some kind of existential threat that can only be delayed or deprived but not defeated? Then make it a bitter, weary scientist. Unhappy over the loss of its race and unable to abandon its millennia long plans. Kill it in a cutscene after the showdown with Duran, I mean it's not like they were particularly robust either considering ancient Protoss and primordial Zerg wrecked their shit.
And y'know? Kerrigan doesn't have to survive. She should live to the end yeah but she doesn't have to survive and she shouldn't be "redeemed". The Dominion can be subsumed into the UED as a protectorate. The Protoss can change into something else. Shit doesn't need to work out nice and neatly. And ultimately a good story is about why people can't have what they want.
Not about how many proper fucking nouns you can use to describe the bad guy.
I...don't care what "most players" seem to agree with? The thing is pretty fucking flawed. Like, irreparably so.
Doctor Akemi
Homura Akemi's Time Lord counterpart.
- Location
- inside TARDIS in time stream
and I don't care what you think. To me it is decent game with some flaws.
Nyxistence
satisfied, jovial, wise
Alright, I finished up LotV a little while, and it's been a few days to let my thoughts really settle on it. I'll get this out of the way first: it's fun. Really fun. The missions are consistently challenging (or, well, sometimes not), but never demands anything outrageous from you. Building up the Spear of Adun in a few different ways is cool, and while I never took it to the fullest extent (and so wound up with tons of excess Solarite), since I preferred most of the utility options over the crazy super-ability ones (who wouldn't pick Chrono Boost for the absurdity of maxing out an expansion point in 20 seconds?), it was nice to always have stuff on the table. Picking out your units was cool, but the game I don't think ever really challenges you to make your own different 'builds', since so much of the missions are an unknown quantity before you play them, and there's generally just very limited space to experiment for synergies beyond 'what works'. Like, I wanted to experiment with Corsairs. While I largely appreciate that the mission design largely doesn't bully you into achieving certain things under pressure, the requirements are so soft, you can - on Normal, at least - roll over pretty much every mission in the same way.
At the end of the day, it's a great RTS game with a lot of cool missions and progression mechanics.
But god, the words I have to say about the story. I have to reiterate this: LotV is obsessed with trying to be a lot of things at once, and in doing so, fails at essentially all of them. It is:
- A campaign about the Protoss.
- A story about reclaiming their lost homeworld, a wound that extends as far back as Brood War.
- A story about resolving ancient divisions between people.
- A story about unbinding yourself from the shackles of tradition (which was 100% a good thing until this guy randomly just... stole it)
- A story about uniting together to fight a great evil.
Almost none of these are handled with much grace, although you can certainly agree that LotV is about Protoss. Actually bafflingly so, at times.
I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with the emerging consensus that the story, taken by itself, is worse than anything that came before it. Heart of the Swarm was an irredeemable mess and what I would call the absolute nadir of SC2's character writing. Artanis at least has the courtesy of not being Kerrigan, who Blizzard has somehow(???) rendered the worst part of the franchise. But again, LotV lacks focus entirely. The first two missions rush you from one premise to the next, with your stated mission objective of 'save Aiur' going from 'get the fuck off Aiur and Save The Galaxy'. Nothing has any real context or weight. But fine, if you let go of the fact that basically nothing in the first few hours matters, and Amon can brainwash Protoss for literally no apparent or explainable reason, just go along for the ride with 'stop Big Evil Guy', then it's not actively offensive or whatever.
It's just really, really, really boring.
LotV is a story about going through the motions until stuff happens and things go well. There's no urgency to anything you achieve in the game, because you never see the bigger picture of 'Amon taking over the galaxy'. There's some incidental dialogue about how the hijacked Protoss fleet is taking over worlds, but you never see any of it. The fluff about the loss of the Golden Armada is effectively meaningless because you never actually see it in action. It's just, like... important, I guess. The fact that they're Proper Pronouns makes it important, but the story makes literally no demonstration of this. You never see anything Amon is doing to take over the world. There's nothing the game demonstrates to you that you are a problem that Amon is actively trying to solve.
All we really establish is that Amon is a huge loser who doesn't appear to be effective at stopping you at all, or apparently lacks the foresight or intelligence to actually deal with you. All of his dudes die when they fight your tiny ship. He does nothing personally to hinder your cause.
You go to planets that Amon took over sometimes, but they just like happened to be there. There is zero urgency to anything that happens, and zero impact you ever appear to be making. It doesn't matter who you kill, what you kill, how much of something you destroy, there's always another massive army of Tal'darim or Mobius Core dudes or whatever else. I hate to keep drawing from this well, but Brood War had a tangible sort of progression in this regard as you steadily backed Mengsk against the wall in the UED campaign, or turned your former, exhausted allies against you in Kerrigan's.
The visible scope of the story is limited to the interior of the Spear of Adun, and a bunch of characters who's story arcs are almost completely inconsequential. At the end of the day, none of them really matter. Fenix in particular is fucking bizarre, because his entire arc is on auto-pilot. It makes this thing about him not knowing he's just a copy, but he just finds out suddenly and gets over it. Artanis never, at any point, rocks the boat, and most of his conversations with Fenix amount to 'you're a cool honourable warrior' while Fenix just like... gets over himself between missions. And he's also useful for recruiting the Purifiers for some reason. They never really show the case he makes for them. Hmm.
Rohana is the closest thing to a dynamic character among your crew, but Rohana is fucking stupid. The story makes her out as stupid. And sometimes it doesn't, because it seems very confused about Rohana. She's possessed multiple times by the big dark evil guy, and every time she promises NO BUT IT'S USEFUL THO when it blatantly is not. There's an interesting conflict about removing yourself from a collective that has defined your sense of individuality and belonging that SC2 reduces to 'oops, all Amon!'. Rohana is just stupid, and in multiple instances is possessed so that Amon can gloat about how dark and evil and angry he is. And when Rohana gets a 'look into his mind', she confirms that... yep. Dude sure is angry. The only time that her remaining connection ever proves useful is the time they get No Really, We're Serious about cutting her link. The game doesn't know what to say about Rohana. She's just wrong about everything. In terms of her dynamic with Artanis, she's literally just there to be wrong. About the Dark Templar. About aliens. About literally anyone and everything, so Artanis has someone he can moralize to about unity and shit.
And at the center of this, is this amazingly convincing statue someone molded out of white bread and animated, called Artanis. I'll say nothing of the character who Artanis was in Brood War, because waxing on about that is pointless. Artanis in SC2 is a heroic sort of individual. He's also... uh, really heroic. And kind. And magnanimous. And very naive. And completely and a hundred percent right, a hundred percent of the time. He's the definition of milquetoast questing hero. Nothing about his viewpoint is ever challenged, which is why characters like Alarak are simultaneously better than everyone else, but also representative of how boring Artanis and his impact on the plot is. Alarak calls him out for his optimism and faith, but every single time, it works out. Nothing about his sunny outlook on life is ever wrong. Everything he tells anyone is correct. No one ever proves him otherwise. Artanis is a character without conflict or any self-doubt. He's right. He's always right. Characters who challenge his viewpoint are wrong. There is zero in-between.
I read in an interview leading up to the release of this game that Metzen wanted to make this story about Artanis trying to satisfy a bunch of different forces at once to hold together his coalition, but I don't see any notion of that. No one seriously challenges Artanis throughout LotV. If they question his decision, they're proven wrong, and they'll probably admit how wrong and stupid they were. There is, weirdly enough, more resistance among the characters to accepting a bunch of space ninja people who you've been living with for years (in fact you resolved most of the gap in the last game) to helping out the guys who have spent the past couple hundred years waging a secret war against you.
Alarak is a fun character, but his society of Dark Eldar knock-offs who decide their leaders through a contest of angry psychic mobs and death tug of war, and worship a scary voice literally because they're angry all of the time everywhere are blatantly wrong. His existence and place in the story is as a notion of division and cynicism to Artanis's way of seeing things, but... there's no real argument. The script just flies out and auto-corrects to prove Artanis right. Everyone sort of just forgets about it, because Alarak promises that the Tal'darim will be Dark Eldar knock-offs in their own corner of the galaxy instead.
But I digress. LotV is full of messy plot points and small arcs packed together with thin justifications. When I said going through the motions, I meant it as... well, going through motions. You just do stuff. And then the ending happens. There's no serious lead-up to going back to Aiur. It's just suddenly decided, and this is where the weird inconsistency of what LotV wants to be crops up, because it's the culmination of two separate plots it's been trying to develop at the same time. It's about taking Aiur back. And it's about stopping the big bad, and events have transpired so that it's two birds with one stone. Except no one invited the Terran or the Zerg to the party, so uh, okay then. They'll have to wait until the time is stupider, I guess.
But whatever. Fine. Amon is a huge loser who gets owned before he even hatches. The Protoss handle that shit easy, and banish Amon with this artifact that apparently just does whatever is relevant to stopping him. Everyone unbinds from the Khala, because StarCraft 2, among other things, attempts to introduce an idea of 'forging a new destiny' and unshackling yourself from tradition for a new lease on life, but... uhm, like. The only problem with the Khala is the fact some evil guy uses is as a radio broadcast for his brainwashing signal. There's something so inherently bizarre about Artanis and everyone else moralizing about how the Khala was bad when there is literally no actual stated problem with it. And are like... people just gonna get rid of baby Protoss nerve cords or something? Has the problem passed? Is the Khala good and okay now? This has no sign of anything that was remotely thought out.
Though I've gotta mention right now that it's surprising and incredibly disappointing how little of 'retaking Aiur' you actually do. You just drop off by Amon's place with a tiny force and roll him over once you're good and ready. The last mission is just another take on Wings of Liberty's All In, and I can't help but be bothered with the fact that the story was bent around in a way that even a climax that culminated on a final assault for the fate of the galaxy somehow turned into another 'stop thing from being destroyed' sort of mission. There's a lot of them in LotV, and boy, are some more clever than others.
The epilogue is its' own brand of shit and might actually qualify as some of the worst things I've ever seen with my eyeballs and processed with my brain.
The problem just suddenly presents itself, because the story remembers that Kerrigan and Raynor are unfortunately characters that exist, and need to be relevant somehow. So the story creates a new problem that no one ever discusses or brings up before this point, which is that Amon is still out there and we need to follow him into The Negative Zone and kill him for good.
The story loses any sense of any fucking coherency from here. People start spouting shit about 'essence' and 'void energy' and a bunch of unexplained dumb terminology that now make up, somehow, the fabric of the story that StarCraft is now. I won't spend too much time on how dumb the concept of 'essence' is in general and how transfusing it makes you powerful, so, I'll stop using 'void energy' and just call it what it actually is: magic. Xel'naga are magic squids growing out of big tablets who used magic to make new species which reproduced via magic to make a new species of magic squids, because the magic between two specific species combine together.
And somehow Kerrigan is relevant and important to all this, and indeed, fated to receive their magic for reasons... uh, because of magic. They wrote it like a hundred thousand years ago on their walls. And clearly, the path everyone saw coming when she came out of a cocoon on Char.
We'll stop here for a second because all this garbage about fate and prophecies that SC2 introduces renders literally everything about the previous games fucking pointless. Nothing mattered. No one did anything relevant. Everything was going to arrive here. They saw everything coming from, like, closer to literally than not, a million years away. I'm sure Fenix rests easy, knowing he died for no reason for a reason.
But yeah, Kerrigan absorbs the Xel'naga magic and becomes that weird energy kaiju that Korra becomes at the end of Book 2 of Legend of Korra, and it's somehow more of a bewildering development. All in all, it's the furthest the story has ever taken its' absurd fantasy elements, its' horrific treatment of Kerrigan as a character, and its' insulting and incredibly baffling love story between Raynor and Kerrigan that it's force-fed you for the past three games. They mind meld for a couple seconds to swap spit, and the last embers of who these characters actually were before this point just peter out. It's the perfect little bow on Raynor's selective amnesia over all of the pain and betrayal Kerrigan ever inflicted on him and his friends, of his sudden obsession with her in Wings of Liberty, of what I can say with little exaggeration as one of the worst and least chemically sound romances I've ever witnessed in anything.
The story doesn't even have the decency to just let Kerrigan suddenly be a good guy without ambiguity, because it has to entertain the notion of whether or not she deserves 'redemption' as this is going on. Because if there's anything a Blizzard story ever lacks for, it's a redemption plot. Just ask the Overmind. It's a bizarre question for the game to ask, because it already has the answer. It's been feeding it to you for the entire story. Yeah, she does. She is literally destined to be the good guy. She regrets every moment she's ever spent being a bad guy and doing bad things and it was all Amon's fault anyways. Amon's last minute equivalencies are dumb and stupid, because Amon is wrong about everything and evil.
What a deep villain.
The climax to this seventeen year old franchise is a fart in the wind. Once you've destroyed enough arbitrary magic crystals, because Amon is apparently fucking helpless in its' own realm surrounded by evil miasma, he just goes down like a punk to Kerrigan's weirdly flaccid Beam Of Game Ending. Fade to white. In a feat that I almost find impressive, SC2's ending manages to be utterly unsatisfying yet somehow completely devoid of any actual angle to take the story from this point forward. Raynor sits in a bar, still fucked up over the death of his waifu, is visited by her who has become, like, Godoka or something, and as the story tells you suddenly and abruptly:
NO ONE EVER HEARS FROM JIM RAYNOR AGAIN.
amazing
stupendous
wonderful
(and flowers start sprouting on dead planets how magical :0)
At least we have a bunch of speed paintings that tell us nothing except that no conflict ever exists in the Koprulu Sector because every bad guy is gone and the Terrans now live in an egalatarian and equitible society at peace with its' neighbours, the Zerg are led by Kerrigan's protege, and the Protoss are, uh... huh. They never really talk about what happened to the Protoss. In their own campaign. Except that they're like... unified and stuff. Which we kind of already gathered.
At least we know Alarak decided he didn't want to be part of this story anymore. Go him.
Ugh.
I've written way too much about this.
At the end of the day, it's a great RTS game with a lot of cool missions and progression mechanics.
But god, the words I have to say about the story. I have to reiterate this: LotV is obsessed with trying to be a lot of things at once, and in doing so, fails at essentially all of them. It is:
- A campaign about the Protoss.
- A story about reclaiming their lost homeworld, a wound that extends as far back as Brood War.
- A story about resolving ancient divisions between people.
- A story about unbinding yourself from the shackles of tradition (which was 100% a good thing until this guy randomly just... stole it)
- A story about uniting together to fight a great evil.
Almost none of these are handled with much grace, although you can certainly agree that LotV is about Protoss. Actually bafflingly so, at times.
I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with the emerging consensus that the story, taken by itself, is worse than anything that came before it. Heart of the Swarm was an irredeemable mess and what I would call the absolute nadir of SC2's character writing. Artanis at least has the courtesy of not being Kerrigan, who Blizzard has somehow(???) rendered the worst part of the franchise. But again, LotV lacks focus entirely. The first two missions rush you from one premise to the next, with your stated mission objective of 'save Aiur' going from 'get the fuck off Aiur and Save The Galaxy'. Nothing has any real context or weight. But fine, if you let go of the fact that basically nothing in the first few hours matters, and Amon can brainwash Protoss for literally no apparent or explainable reason, just go along for the ride with 'stop Big Evil Guy', then it's not actively offensive or whatever.
It's just really, really, really boring.
LotV is a story about going through the motions until stuff happens and things go well. There's no urgency to anything you achieve in the game, because you never see the bigger picture of 'Amon taking over the galaxy'. There's some incidental dialogue about how the hijacked Protoss fleet is taking over worlds, but you never see any of it. The fluff about the loss of the Golden Armada is effectively meaningless because you never actually see it in action. It's just, like... important, I guess. The fact that they're Proper Pronouns makes it important, but the story makes literally no demonstration of this. You never see anything Amon is doing to take over the world. There's nothing the game demonstrates to you that you are a problem that Amon is actively trying to solve.
All we really establish is that Amon is a huge loser who doesn't appear to be effective at stopping you at all, or apparently lacks the foresight or intelligence to actually deal with you. All of his dudes die when they fight your tiny ship. He does nothing personally to hinder your cause.
You go to planets that Amon took over sometimes, but they just like happened to be there. There is zero urgency to anything that happens, and zero impact you ever appear to be making. It doesn't matter who you kill, what you kill, how much of something you destroy, there's always another massive army of Tal'darim or Mobius Core dudes or whatever else. I hate to keep drawing from this well, but Brood War had a tangible sort of progression in this regard as you steadily backed Mengsk against the wall in the UED campaign, or turned your former, exhausted allies against you in Kerrigan's.
The visible scope of the story is limited to the interior of the Spear of Adun, and a bunch of characters who's story arcs are almost completely inconsequential. At the end of the day, none of them really matter. Fenix in particular is fucking bizarre, because his entire arc is on auto-pilot. It makes this thing about him not knowing he's just a copy, but he just finds out suddenly and gets over it. Artanis never, at any point, rocks the boat, and most of his conversations with Fenix amount to 'you're a cool honourable warrior' while Fenix just like... gets over himself between missions. And he's also useful for recruiting the Purifiers for some reason. They never really show the case he makes for them. Hmm.
Rohana is the closest thing to a dynamic character among your crew, but Rohana is fucking stupid. The story makes her out as stupid. And sometimes it doesn't, because it seems very confused about Rohana. She's possessed multiple times by the big dark evil guy, and every time she promises NO BUT IT'S USEFUL THO when it blatantly is not. There's an interesting conflict about removing yourself from a collective that has defined your sense of individuality and belonging that SC2 reduces to 'oops, all Amon!'. Rohana is just stupid, and in multiple instances is possessed so that Amon can gloat about how dark and evil and angry he is. And when Rohana gets a 'look into his mind', she confirms that... yep. Dude sure is angry. The only time that her remaining connection ever proves useful is the time they get No Really, We're Serious about cutting her link. The game doesn't know what to say about Rohana. She's just wrong about everything. In terms of her dynamic with Artanis, she's literally just there to be wrong. About the Dark Templar. About aliens. About literally anyone and everything, so Artanis has someone he can moralize to about unity and shit.
And at the center of this, is this amazingly convincing statue someone molded out of white bread and animated, called Artanis. I'll say nothing of the character who Artanis was in Brood War, because waxing on about that is pointless. Artanis in SC2 is a heroic sort of individual. He's also... uh, really heroic. And kind. And magnanimous. And very naive. And completely and a hundred percent right, a hundred percent of the time. He's the definition of milquetoast questing hero. Nothing about his viewpoint is ever challenged, which is why characters like Alarak are simultaneously better than everyone else, but also representative of how boring Artanis and his impact on the plot is. Alarak calls him out for his optimism and faith, but every single time, it works out. Nothing about his sunny outlook on life is ever wrong. Everything he tells anyone is correct. No one ever proves him otherwise. Artanis is a character without conflict or any self-doubt. He's right. He's always right. Characters who challenge his viewpoint are wrong. There is zero in-between.
I read in an interview leading up to the release of this game that Metzen wanted to make this story about Artanis trying to satisfy a bunch of different forces at once to hold together his coalition, but I don't see any notion of that. No one seriously challenges Artanis throughout LotV. If they question his decision, they're proven wrong, and they'll probably admit how wrong and stupid they were. There is, weirdly enough, more resistance among the characters to accepting a bunch of space ninja people who you've been living with for years (in fact you resolved most of the gap in the last game) to helping out the guys who have spent the past couple hundred years waging a secret war against you.
Alarak is a fun character, but his society of Dark Eldar knock-offs who decide their leaders through a contest of angry psychic mobs and death tug of war, and worship a scary voice literally because they're angry all of the time everywhere are blatantly wrong. His existence and place in the story is as a notion of division and cynicism to Artanis's way of seeing things, but... there's no real argument. The script just flies out and auto-corrects to prove Artanis right. Everyone sort of just forgets about it, because Alarak promises that the Tal'darim will be Dark Eldar knock-offs in their own corner of the galaxy instead.
But I digress. LotV is full of messy plot points and small arcs packed together with thin justifications. When I said going through the motions, I meant it as... well, going through motions. You just do stuff. And then the ending happens. There's no serious lead-up to going back to Aiur. It's just suddenly decided, and this is where the weird inconsistency of what LotV wants to be crops up, because it's the culmination of two separate plots it's been trying to develop at the same time. It's about taking Aiur back. And it's about stopping the big bad, and events have transpired so that it's two birds with one stone. Except no one invited the Terran or the Zerg to the party, so uh, okay then. They'll have to wait until the time is stupider, I guess.
But whatever. Fine. Amon is a huge loser who gets owned before he even hatches. The Protoss handle that shit easy, and banish Amon with this artifact that apparently just does whatever is relevant to stopping him. Everyone unbinds from the Khala, because StarCraft 2, among other things, attempts to introduce an idea of 'forging a new destiny' and unshackling yourself from tradition for a new lease on life, but... uhm, like. The only problem with the Khala is the fact some evil guy uses is as a radio broadcast for his brainwashing signal. There's something so inherently bizarre about Artanis and everyone else moralizing about how the Khala was bad when there is literally no actual stated problem with it. And are like... people just gonna get rid of baby Protoss nerve cords or something? Has the problem passed? Is the Khala good and okay now? This has no sign of anything that was remotely thought out.
Though I've gotta mention right now that it's surprising and incredibly disappointing how little of 'retaking Aiur' you actually do. You just drop off by Amon's place with a tiny force and roll him over once you're good and ready. The last mission is just another take on Wings of Liberty's All In, and I can't help but be bothered with the fact that the story was bent around in a way that even a climax that culminated on a final assault for the fate of the galaxy somehow turned into another 'stop thing from being destroyed' sort of mission. There's a lot of them in LotV, and boy, are some more clever than others.
The epilogue is its' own brand of shit and might actually qualify as some of the worst things I've ever seen with my eyeballs and processed with my brain.
The problem just suddenly presents itself, because the story remembers that Kerrigan and Raynor are unfortunately characters that exist, and need to be relevant somehow. So the story creates a new problem that no one ever discusses or brings up before this point, which is that Amon is still out there and we need to follow him into The Negative Zone and kill him for good.
The story loses any sense of any fucking coherency from here. People start spouting shit about 'essence' and 'void energy' and a bunch of unexplained dumb terminology that now make up, somehow, the fabric of the story that StarCraft is now. I won't spend too much time on how dumb the concept of 'essence' is in general and how transfusing it makes you powerful, so, I'll stop using 'void energy' and just call it what it actually is: magic. Xel'naga are magic squids growing out of big tablets who used magic to make new species which reproduced via magic to make a new species of magic squids, because the magic between two specific species combine together.
And somehow Kerrigan is relevant and important to all this, and indeed, fated to receive their magic for reasons... uh, because of magic. They wrote it like a hundred thousand years ago on their walls. And clearly, the path everyone saw coming when she came out of a cocoon on Char.
We'll stop here for a second because all this garbage about fate and prophecies that SC2 introduces renders literally everything about the previous games fucking pointless. Nothing mattered. No one did anything relevant. Everything was going to arrive here. They saw everything coming from, like, closer to literally than not, a million years away. I'm sure Fenix rests easy, knowing he died for no reason for a reason.
But yeah, Kerrigan absorbs the Xel'naga magic and becomes that weird energy kaiju that Korra becomes at the end of Book 2 of Legend of Korra, and it's somehow more of a bewildering development. All in all, it's the furthest the story has ever taken its' absurd fantasy elements, its' horrific treatment of Kerrigan as a character, and its' insulting and incredibly baffling love story between Raynor and Kerrigan that it's force-fed you for the past three games. They mind meld for a couple seconds to swap spit, and the last embers of who these characters actually were before this point just peter out. It's the perfect little bow on Raynor's selective amnesia over all of the pain and betrayal Kerrigan ever inflicted on him and his friends, of his sudden obsession with her in Wings of Liberty, of what I can say with little exaggeration as one of the worst and least chemically sound romances I've ever witnessed in anything.
The story doesn't even have the decency to just let Kerrigan suddenly be a good guy without ambiguity, because it has to entertain the notion of whether or not she deserves 'redemption' as this is going on. Because if there's anything a Blizzard story ever lacks for, it's a redemption plot. Just ask the Overmind. It's a bizarre question for the game to ask, because it already has the answer. It's been feeding it to you for the entire story. Yeah, she does. She is literally destined to be the good guy. She regrets every moment she's ever spent being a bad guy and doing bad things and it was all Amon's fault anyways. Amon's last minute equivalencies are dumb and stupid, because Amon is wrong about everything and evil.
What a deep villain.
The climax to this seventeen year old franchise is a fart in the wind. Once you've destroyed enough arbitrary magic crystals, because Amon is apparently fucking helpless in its' own realm surrounded by evil miasma, he just goes down like a punk to Kerrigan's weirdly flaccid Beam Of Game Ending. Fade to white. In a feat that I almost find impressive, SC2's ending manages to be utterly unsatisfying yet somehow completely devoid of any actual angle to take the story from this point forward. Raynor sits in a bar, still fucked up over the death of his waifu, is visited by her who has become, like, Godoka or something, and as the story tells you suddenly and abruptly:
NO ONE EVER HEARS FROM JIM RAYNOR AGAIN.
amazing
stupendous
wonderful
(and flowers start sprouting on dead planets how magical :0)
At least we have a bunch of speed paintings that tell us nothing except that no conflict ever exists in the Koprulu Sector because every bad guy is gone and the Terrans now live in an egalatarian and equitible society at peace with its' neighbours, the Zerg are led by Kerrigan's protege, and the Protoss are, uh... huh. They never really talk about what happened to the Protoss. In their own campaign. Except that they're like... unified and stuff. Which we kind of already gathered.
At least we know Alarak decided he didn't want to be part of this story anymore. Go him.
Ugh.
I've written way too much about this.
Last edited:
Ivar
Dark Reaper
- Location
- Russia Moscow
That is your opinion. My opinion is that the very framework of the entire plot of the trilogy it is a working concept. It details that were bad. It is not the concept of the plot makes the heart of the swarm the worst of the three parts of the story. It is the details of which either do not have or do not need them. Aka Kaldir and Char.
As well as a general failure of writers to choose which direction they want to take with the character of Kerrigan. Apparently it is too difficult to decide who she is.
The universe did not explode into ashes, the galaxy is not destroyed, and we just poke the next plot hooks. Moreover, the package was announced for Nova missions. Which will be released in spring 2016
Well, unless you have no problem at all with the story, yes. Even I, a person who loves the epilogue, I have some problems with the story.
Last edited:
Doctor Akemi
Homura Akemi's Time Lord counterpart.
- Location
- inside TARDIS in time stream
same I had no problem with the story of LOV and will even admit that it is quite decent ( around B grade if I have to rank it). And I had no trouble with Epilogue BUT I'll admit it could have done better.
Honestly I think story of Starcraft could have been better if they left Zerg story as the last instead of protoss if they wanted focus on Kerrigan THAT much... I mean wouldn't it made scene to make Zerg story all about Kerrigan's fight against Amon?
Ivar
Dark Reaper
- Location
- Russia Moscow
I dont know. Story of Legacy of the void is well, but suffers from two things that holding it from become beautiful. These two things is Amon, he is a bad villain. As mentioned above, he needs someone more character development, or do not to develop his. Let Hybrids speek for him.
The second problem is an attempt to shove too many topics into one company. Two missions to do with Fall of Shakuras or any other event. It's too little. To be honest I would have removed the Ulnar and Korhal from the game and suffered these events in the epilogue. And the epilogue would be a separate company with 6 * 3 missions. At six for each race.
Also, I see the error of Marketing in a high pressure to return Aiur. That was a lie to say the least
I do not see how it could be worse than the heart of the swarm.
But as I said, the epilogue terribly short and last fight against Amon totally lame.
Last edited:
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
You know the weirdest part, for me?
Where the blueberry fudgemuffin did the Tal'Darim come from? And why does nobody seem to care?
I mean back in Wings of Liberty they could've been just a bunch of regular Protoss who were really into their Cleanse And Purify kick, who maybe fell under Amon's sway circa Heart of the Swarm, but now apparently they've been worshipping the big scary evil voice forever because they're so angry, you guys, so mad. Apparently they got some details at Blizzcon about how they left with Amon millions of years ago and did their own thing?
So why aren't the Protoss at all curious about where the hell this offshoot came from and why they're such psychos? The Tal'Darim just seem to suddenly show up out of feckin' nowhere, and nobody seems to give a single solitary shit about where they came from.
Where the blueberry fudgemuffin did the Tal'Darim come from? And why does nobody seem to care?
I mean back in Wings of Liberty they could've been just a bunch of regular Protoss who were really into their Cleanse And Purify kick, who maybe fell under Amon's sway circa Heart of the Swarm, but now apparently they've been worshipping the big scary evil voice forever because they're so angry, you guys, so mad. Apparently they got some details at Blizzcon about how they left with Amon millions of years ago and did their own thing?
So why aren't the Protoss at all curious about where the hell this offshoot came from and why they're such psychos? The Tal'Darim just seem to suddenly show up out of feckin' nowhere, and nobody seems to give a single solitary shit about where they came from.
ArchAIngel
Sorcerer Supreme.
- Location
- Right behind you.
Tal'Darim are a bunch of crazy druggie Protoss that the rest of the race just quietly shoved to the side and proceeded to ignore them because holy hell do you want these nutters to know what you feel?
And than Amon happened.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Yeah, but I'm talking about the Protoss perspective. As far as they know the Tal'Darim are this weird bunch of psychos who suddenly turned up from Somewhere, worshipping Space Satan and wearing an awful lot of black spikes, but people seem to just take this in stride like it's Tuesday or something. Nobody seems to so much as raise an eyebrow that there's an evil army of red-and-black Protoss charging out of bumfuck nowhere.
Last edited:
ArchAIngel
Sorcerer Supreme.
- Location
- Right behind you.
Nah, they know that the Tal'Darim are a bunch of crazy psychos, they're just generally stuck on some backwater doing space drugs. Amon taking them over isn't exactly unexpected. Also, they're the Dark Eldar to the Protoss's Eldar before Amon showed up. They probably didn't even bother to change their gear before running out.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
/me scratches head
So, when the Nerazim refuse to join the Khala, this is apparently grand heresy that must be met with attempted genocide that forces them to flee through a wormhole or something and hide as far from the Protoss as they can.
But when the Tal'darim refuse to join the Khala in favour of worshipping Space Satan and doing Space Cocaine all day, that's... That's just fine so long as they don't get it on the Khalai's doorstep or something?
I repeat: What the blueberry fudgemuffin.
So, when the Nerazim refuse to join the Khala, this is apparently grand heresy that must be met with attempted genocide that forces them to flee through a wormhole or something and hide as far from the Protoss as they can.
But when the Tal'darim refuse to join the Khala in favour of worshipping Space Satan and doing Space Cocaine all day, that's... That's just fine so long as they don't get it on the Khalai's doorstep or something?
I repeat: What the blueberry fudgemuffin.
Last edited:
ArchAIngel
Sorcerer Supreme.
- Location
- Right behind you.
*shrugs* poke the wiki. It explains it a lot better than I can. Also, Space Satan worship was a recent change. The Space Cocaine was not.
ArchAIngel
Sorcerer Supreme.
- Location
- Right behind you.
I just chalk it up to different writers. Like Prototype 1 and it's theoretical sequel. No agreement at all.
ganonso
Compulsive Quest Starter
- Location
- PACA France
If I understood correctly Tal'Darim chronology goes like this
Amon arrives on AIur and uplift the Protoss
The first Tal'darim are composed of those protoss most faithful to their god
The protoss kick Amon out of Aiur (How exactly?) He takes the Tal'darim with him as he leaves the planet (This is the main branch with the Dark Eldar esthetic) The word Tal'darim remains in Aiur culture as a synonym for "exalted servant of the Xel'Naga" or something like that and some groups call themselves thus (Perhaps the remains/descendants of those Tal'darim not taken by Amon?)
Protoss History happens : The Aeon of Strife/Khas/Adun. During this time the Dark Eldar Tal'darim remain discreet on Slayn. We have no information on how the Tal'darim you fight in WOL happen but I would place them as a movement in Protoss culture dedicating themselves to the protection of Xel'Naga artifacts.
Starcraft 1 happen.
While most of the Khalai Protoss fled Aiur an handful of survivors are indoctrinated by a renegade Dark Templar name Ulrezaj. They don't appear in the game and I think are anhilated in the novels.
So to answer to @Imrix question the Tal'darim title encopass two factions with nothing in common: The worshippers of Space Satan that presumably remained hidden until the ressurection of their dark lord. (If that seems unlikely to you, let me remind you the Khalai never found Shakuras that is described as to be in range of their fleets)
And the Xel'Naga's fanatics that were perhaps considered as innofensive lunatics when the Protoss were powerful and would be interpreted as "a faction of Khalai Protoss refusing to rejoin the greater community after Aiur's Fall)
Amon arrives on AIur and uplift the Protoss
The first Tal'darim are composed of those protoss most faithful to their god
The protoss kick Amon out of Aiur (How exactly?) He takes the Tal'darim with him as he leaves the planet (This is the main branch with the Dark Eldar esthetic) The word Tal'darim remains in Aiur culture as a synonym for "exalted servant of the Xel'Naga" or something like that and some groups call themselves thus (Perhaps the remains/descendants of those Tal'darim not taken by Amon?)
Protoss History happens : The Aeon of Strife/Khas/Adun. During this time the Dark Eldar Tal'darim remain discreet on Slayn. We have no information on how the Tal'darim you fight in WOL happen but I would place them as a movement in Protoss culture dedicating themselves to the protection of Xel'Naga artifacts.
Starcraft 1 happen.
While most of the Khalai Protoss fled Aiur an handful of survivors are indoctrinated by a renegade Dark Templar name Ulrezaj. They don't appear in the game and I think are anhilated in the novels.
So to answer to @Imrix question the Tal'darim title encopass two factions with nothing in common: The worshippers of Space Satan that presumably remained hidden until the ressurection of their dark lord. (If that seems unlikely to you, let me remind you the Khalai never found Shakuras that is described as to be in range of their fleets)
And the Xel'Naga's fanatics that were perhaps considered as innofensive lunatics when the Protoss were powerful and would be interpreted as "a faction of Khalai Protoss refusing to rejoin the greater community after Aiur's Fall)
Karuadin
Vago Mundo
Going through the wiki, I have to agree with ganonso.
The problem is that a significant portion of relevant pages, like 'Tal'darim', 'Protoss history', or 'Aeon of Strife', were never properly updated to indicate the exact point of diversion between Tal'darim and the rest of the Protoss.
Only Amon's page actually reflects that he retained a group of Protoss after he left Aiur the first time, which would later become the Tal'darim.
The problem is that a significant portion of relevant pages, like 'Tal'darim', 'Protoss history', or 'Aeon of Strife', were never properly updated to indicate the exact point of diversion between Tal'darim and the rest of the Protoss.
Only Amon's page actually reflects that he retained a group of Protoss after he left Aiur the first time, which would later become the Tal'darim.
Doctor Akemi
Homura Akemi's Time Lord counterpart.
- Location
- inside TARDIS in time stream
Let me ask Starcraft fans here- do you guys believe the OPINION that Starcraft one and brood war are better than Starcraft 2 and those that like Starcraft 2 are blinded by Blizzard fanboyism?
cause that is argument that is happening in Starcraft forum.
cause that is argument that is happening in Starcraft forum.
