StarCraft Campaign Thoughts and Impressions

After a few arguments with various individuals on other boards regarding the merits and failures of Wings of Liberty’s storyline, I figured I should put it into context by playing through the whole story in order. This may or may not be of interest to anybody here, but I’ll be writing my thoughts as I go through the campaigns so that anybody interested can read them. I’d certainly enjoy reading other people’s opinions on the subject, I know that many people disagree with my views on some particulars, especially regarding Brood War.

I will limit my thoughts to the lore presented in the games. I did read Shadow of the Xel’Naga when I was younger and that abominable trash did a good job of dissuading me from reading any further works on the subject. I have shored up my knowledge either by reading on this site or through the StarCraft wiki, but I still feel more comfortable addressing the game lore itself.

Also, I’ll only be addressing my thoughts on the story and character development, not the gameplay.

StarCraft had a special advantage to my mind when it comes to evaluating the stories of the StarCraft series. Basically, it was new. I’ve always been fond of starting science fiction series, even horrible ones, because the premise allows for discovery and exploration. Science fiction allows this in a scope that no other genre can, except possibly the rare fantasy series that involve multiverses (The Malazan Book of the Fallen) or are willing to embrace the truly fantastical rather than be limited by an Earth-like (and often western European medieval Earth-like) setting (Discworld), and I greatly enjoy the wonders of the unknown. I first played StarCraft when I was 11, it was my first RTS (my third computer game, in fact, after The Sword of Shannara and Heroes of Might and Magic II) and I discovered the gameplay as well as the setting. I remember finding those first Hydralisks in the southeast corner of the map in Backwater Station with Raynor and my four starting marines and nearly panicking at how tough they were, never dreaming that I would someday be killing them by the dozens with Psionic Storms.

Eventually however any series is forced to depend on its plot and characters, as settings and villains become recurring and one gains familiarity with the setting. I certainly would never advocate that the StarCraft series attempt to recapture that feeling by doing something foolish like adding a fourth race or something like that, such things frequently either are retcons, annoyingly intruding into the established world, or else diminish the value of previous accomplishments by attempting to make everything seem disproportionately important (and obviously I’ll have something to say about this regarding the Dark Voice and the Hybrids when we get to Wings of Liberty).

I do not think this is a problem for StarCraft, but strangely enough it’s the original game that has the strongest basis on setting and characters to drive the story. Rather than relying on devices such as the Shakuras Temple or the Psi Disruptor or the Xel’Naga Artefact, StarCraft is driven most of all by the motivations of its characters. There are plot driving devices too, but they are not treated solely as such, but they integrate well with the plot and actually emphasise or develop the characters. The main such devices in StarCraft are, I think, the Psi Emitters, Kerrigan and the Dark Templar. Right off the bat, you’ll notice that two of those are characters. I’ll get into specifics as I discuss the campaigns in detail.

Anyway, StarCraft’s plot was fairly simple, at its core it’s an alien invasion that must be survived. Simplicity works well, and allows details to go into developing the characters and world, though any depth needs to be measured by the fact that they’re from an RTS video game. By any literary measure, these characters are definitely not very complex.

In light of all this, I can say with confidence that StarCraft had the best storyline of the three thus far released games in the franchise.

The Terran campaign is about the Sons of Korhal’s war to overthrow the Confederacy, set on a backdrop of alien invasion. It’s fairly important to get these priorities in order, because if you go out thinking this campaign is about the alien invasion itself, you’re in for disappointment. Every mission after you join the Sons of Korhal in Desperate Alliance up to your desertion in The Hammer Falls furthers the goal of destroying the Confederacy in some shape or form, but no steps are ever taken to resist or fight back the aliens. You maintain an entirely reactionary role, fighting back the Zerg when you need to for survival, or stopping the Protoss when they threaten your plans for the Confederacy, but otherwise you ignore them or flee.

Despite this, the reality of the alien invasion is always clear. You can never go two missions without the Zerg being brought up, either because you have to fight them or because you intend to use them for your own ends using the Psi Emitters. Likewise, the Protoss show up periodically and incinerate whatever planet you were just on. The fact that this is all the Protoss do contributes to their aura of menace. Whenever they show up, a planet dies. Of course, this is quite anticlimactic when you do fight them in New Gettysburg and they come off pretty pathetic. Ah well.

There’s obviously some reference to the United States Civil War going on here, the Confederate flag and name Gettysburg are pretty blatant, even when I was 11 I noticed it. However, I am not an American, nor a student of American history, so I can’t really comment much about that. To my untrained eye, there seems to be something of an inversion going on however: I believe in that war it was the Confederates who were rebelling against the established authority. Also, the Sons of Korhal drew much of their support during the campaign from fringe worlds Mar Sara and Antiga Prime whereas the Terran Confederacy was based on the more industrialised and populated core worlds. Whether this is a coincidence or by design, or even a figment of my imagination is beyond me. Arcturus Mengsk at least is not from the fringe worlds, but the son of a senator from the core world Korhal IV.

We are introduced to the world and the Zerg invasion at the small scale – managing a single Terran colony on Mar Sara. While at this point the focus is on the Zerg invasion, the actual intention here is to get us to dislike the Confederacy so we are ripe for plucking by the Sons of Korhal later. First we are greeted by General Duke, who is a condescending self-important arse and naturally unlikeable. Then your friend Jim Raynor gets hauled off to jail for rescuing a Terran colony from the Zerg. And finally, you are abandoned to the Zerg yourself. After all of this, you are naturally predisposed to viewing Arcturus Mengsk and his Sons of Korhal favourably. This makes your desertion as Confederate Magistrate and joining with this rebellion credible and natural.

The missions for Mengsk slowly erode your confidence in him as a leader. I imagine exactly when you realise he is as bad as the Confederacy can be depends on the individual. It’s all very gradual and again, this smooth development makes for a good story. As previously mentioned, you are predisposed favourably in Mengsk’s favour, so you’re probably all too willing to go off and kill some Confederate bastards. When Mengsk says that Confederate arse Edmund Duke would make a powerful ally in a tone of Machiavellian delight, you don’t think too much of it despite Raynor’s and Kerrigan’s protests. It’s true, after all, that an enemy General makes an excellent prisoner, and even better turncoat.

So when does it become obvious that Mengsk is really not the idealistic hero we mistook him from? Is it when he starts using the Zerg as a weapon mere minutes after feigning outrage that Mar Sara was used as a test for that weapon, and comparing the act to the genocidal destruction of Korhal IV that prompted his rebellion? Is it when he actually uses that weapon to eradicate the most populated world in Terran space? Or when he abandons his own loyal subordinates to die at the hands of those Zerg?

The Rebel Yell campaign ends on a bitter note. Disillusioned with Arcturus Mengsk, you abandon ship before he has consolidated his power, forced to fight your way through the men who scant moments ago were your comrades and allies in order to escape the despotic regime that you helped put into power. As the fanfare and Arcturus Mengsk’s coronation speech plays in the background, you get images of dead Terrans and aliens rampaging unchecked, and you realise that nothing has changed. I’ll rant a lot about the lack of change and accomplishment throughout the Brood War campaigns when we get to them, but the difference here is that in Rebel Yell, this is the intended result. Throughout the campaign you feel like you’re fighting to achieve something meaningful, and the conclusion is that your hopes and expectations are dashed and all your efforts have been in vain. It’s a depressing start, but it makes your eventual and ultimate triumphs in the Protoss campaign all the sweeter.

The device that drives much of the plot in Rebel Yell is the Psi Emitter developed by the Confederacy. You get one mission to obtain it, two where you use it and one more where you witness some of its effects. One thing that the Psi Emitter has that makes it a good part of the story rather than an irritating plot enabler like the Shakuras Temple or the Xel’Naga Artefact is that it’s a logical and credible result of established character motivation and development. Despite what that weird instance in Brood War’s Reign of Fire would lead you to believe, the Psi Emitter isn’t some kind of Zerg magnet, it simply broadcasts the psionic signature of a Terran Ghost. The reason this attracts the Zerg is because of the Overmind’s motivations: it feels that it needs to assimilate the Terrans’ psionic potential in order to defeat the Protoss, and apparently hoped to use a powerful Terran psychic to save the Zerg from the Dark Voice’s schemes. The Psi Emitter simply broadcasts to the Zerg where they can find what they’re looking for, it’s a simple decoy. The Zerg don’t have to follow it, they choose to do so. And for the same reasons, it’s a credible technology for the Confederacy to develop. Once they realise that the Zerg are attracted to Ghosts, it’s a sensible theory to think that broadcasting a decoy Ghost’s neural imprint could allow the Confederacy some control as to where the Zerg will attack.

Overall, Rebel Yell has a solid and entertaining storyline, allowing easy immersion into StarCraft’s setting. The constant in this story is betrayal. It begins with the Confederacy arresting Raynor for saving a colony then abandoning you to the Zerg, it gets worse when you realise they actually unleashed the Zerg against you to test their efficiency as a weapon, and then you get the climax, with Mengsk’s betrayal of Kerrigan, and you turning your back on him.

Arcturus Mengsk

When I was reading some of the comments on Wings of Liberty’s campaign, there were many complaints about Arcturus Mengsk not reacting as ideally as a cold, calculating schemer should. And after replaying Rebel Yell, the reason for this became quite obvious: Mengsk is not a cold, calculating schemer. Oh, he’s a schemer all right. Deceitful and manipulative, a talented orator who knows how to pull at his audience’s emotions, but there’s nothing cold and calculating about him. In fact, he’s a short-tempered powder keg. He blows up at the slightest resistance to his desires. Like an arrogant and spoiled child, he tries to be polite and diplomatic because he knows this makes him look good. It is not enough that he be obeyed, he desires to be respected as well. At the same time, he is so certain of getting what he wants that when someone fails to fall in line, Mengsk has little patience for slowly cajoling or persuading him, and instead resorts to forcefulness.

It isn’t that Mengsk lacks intelligence or subtlety, far from. Rather, I suspect that his boundless ego might be the cause of this rapid hostility. He knows that he is convincing and charismatic, capable of influencing and manipulating people to his will, and he is so proud of this that whenever someone resists, he takes it as a personal affront, as though the person were insulting his talents.

The scene replays itself constantly throughout the campaign: Mengsk goes off about how it is necessary for them to do whatever it is he wants to do next, and if he is opposed, he shouts down any objections.

In Norad II, he appeals to his targets’ higher ideals and their ambition, explaining that they’re not doing this for Duke but to save an entire colony of innocent people, then teasing at how valuable a Confederate General could prove to be. When Kerrigan and Raynor fail to be impressed, he pulls rank and coldly states “I’m not asking you to like it, I’m asking you to do it.”

Then, in that same mission when he addresses Duke, he again tries to persuade Duke by drawing a dark picture of the Confederacy’s and even humanity’s future, but as Duke fails to jump on his offer, he grows more and more condescending and sarcastic, calling Duke by his first name in a degrading fashion, calling him a loser, treating him as an idiot for not seeing the obvious.

At the end of The Big Push, he is visibly irate that his subordinates are questioning his use of Psi Emitters, his answers are terse and allow no argument. He’s done with being polite with us. Same with New Gettysburg when Raynor openly questions his decision-making, Mengsk just ignores it and cuts communication. Likely already planning how he was going to get rid of Raynor once he was done with Kerrigan.

Mengsk tries one last time to be diplomatic during the briefing for The Hammer Falls, and it sounds really weird. It’s unlikely that Arcturus himself had any real expectations that this would work, it’s like he’s just going through the motions. Anyway, once called out on it, he goes straight to threats, including the famous “I will rule this Sector or see it burnt to ashes around me”.

I’m noting this because it’s exactly the same behaviour he exhibits in Wings of Liberty after Media Blitz, accusing the news against him of being slander and lies, but when the people fail to be appeased, he flies into a rage and acts as though personally offended. “You dare to question me?” he asks.

His anger also causes him to make some questionable decisions, like abandoning Kerrigan at New Gettysburg. Obviously Kerrigan was blindly loyal to Mengsk, but I imagine that the politician realised that even she might start noticing the truth once his Dominion failed to enact any positive change on Terran space, and having an idealistic highly trained assassin and Zerg magnet near you would be dangerous if you couldn’t ensure her loyalty. Also, I think subsequent lore has it that Kerrigan was the one who assassinated Angus Mengsk, but I doubt that was known at the time and therefore the reason Arcturus abandoned Kerrigan. But all in all, a subtler way of disposing of Kerrigan would have certainly been preferable to a colder, more thoughtful schemer, rather than openly displaying a lack of respect for underlings that would lead to desertion, as it obviously did for Raynor. But Kerrigan had displeased Mengsk by questioning him earlier, and she had outlived her usefulness anyway. I’m sure Mengsk was quite pleased to see her receive what he likely considered her comeuppance.

Likewise, I’m certain that Raynor was slated for death soon too – he had also questioned Mengsk over his use of the Psi Emitters, and his rant in the briefing for New Gettysburg clearly made him someone Arcturus would be eager to dispose of. I don’t think Arcturus in any way wanted to resecure his loyalty when he spoke to him before The Hammer Falls, but merely lull him before Mengsk could kill him.

Overall, Arcturus was a great character in this series, which is good because he’s essentially the one driving the campaign. Sure, Raynor is the protagonist, but it’s Arcturus Mengsk’s desires, ambitions and objectives that carry the plot. It’s his personality and the revelation thereof that leads to the climactic events of New Gettysburg and The Hammer Falls. Without an interesting character in Mengsk, Rebel Yell would most likely have been an uninteresting campaign.

There is the alternative possibility of course, that Arcturus really was well meaning and idealistic at the beginning of the campaign and that getting closer to power as well as the atrocities he had to commit to get there hardened him against the moral implications of his actions, but that’s really never played up in story, so it seems dubious. Arcturus never seems to doubt or question his choices, because he spends all of his time trying to convince others of their validity. It could be self denial, but it’s far more credible that he was simply lying.

Edmund Duke

General Duke is a character that has puzzled me for a while. I’m not entirely sure whether he’s supposed to be a good general or a horribly incompetent one. As I recall from Shadow of the Xel’Naga, he was a complete idiot, but it’s been a long time and as I mentioned in the foreword, I don’t really care for that book and see no reason to base my interpretation of the character from it.

The fact is that Duke is probably the character you defeat the most frequently in the entire game. Technically, you defeat the Overmind or Kerrigan every time you beat the Zerg, but I’m just counting times where the characters are directly implied or stated to be in command of opposing forces. In Rebel Yell alone, Duke is implied to be in command of the Alpha Squadron troops you overcome in Revolution and The Hammer Falls, and you witness him getting defeated by the Zerg before Norad II. That’s three times, in a campaign where he was actually on your side for three missions. The only other character implied to directly oppose you is Tassadar in New Gettysburg. It’s the lot of recurring henchmen of the antagonists to look incompetent because you beat them over and over.

Duke boasts about his prowess and the skill of his military unit, which can turn out to be laughably pathetic, for instance when he attacks Tassadar with a Battlecruiser and a handful of Wraiths, or met with general dismissal, like when Raynor answers a sardonic “right” to Duke’s boasting about Alpha Squadron’s abilities relative to Omega and Delta Squadron. This does indicate that his opinion regarding his abilities does not necessarily reflect reality, which is a staple of the incompetent general archetypes. It can be that he thinks he’s good whereas he is actually inept, or it may be that while actually good, he is deluded into thinking that he is even better.

On that other side, the manual does claim that Duke is one of the finest military minds in the Sector, and if we can believe his boasts, he’s successfully defended the Confederacy capital world numerous times, so some credit is due. Something else that struck me upon replaying the campaign is that he seems to be the only one of the main characters not to be fooled by Mengsk. Of course, as I explained earlier, Raynor and the player are set up in a position where they will be inherently receptive to Mengsk’s ideas, whereas Duke, as an enemy, is not. However, it is telling that even as the Sons of Korhal Dropships arrive to rescue him and his men, he immediately realises that Mengsk is doing this for a personal reason, not out of the goodness of his heart like he earlier told Raynor and Kerrigan.

In fact, if you look at it this way, then it is Edmund Duke, not Arcturus Mengsk, who is cold and calculating. It is an unfortunate assumption that people associate cold and calculating to deceitful and manipulative. Arcturus Mengsk is certainly intelligent, deceitful and manipulative, but as I pointed out above, he is also highly emotional and hot-tempered. Edmund Duke on the other hand has the subtlety of a box of bricks and while I believe he is intelligent and competent, he is not exceptionally gifted either. However, it does seem that barring absolute idiocy, he is a cool and unruffled character. He seems to react to every situation with contemptuous condescension. For example, contrast his mockery of the Magistrate in Desperate Alliance or his arrestation of Raynor in Backwater Station to Mengsk’s rant to Raynor in The Hammer Falls. Mengsk is clearly irate and swears revenge, and while Duke is insulting and threatening, that’s just who he is. There’s nothing personal about it, he likely doesn’t even think you’re worth it. Similarly, in his discussion with Mengsk and Raynor in Norad II, even though he is met with aggression, insults and condescension, Duke seems almost dismissive of the entire thing.

That said, Duke is not a very admirable character. He’s gratuitously offensive in speech and demeanour, he seems to have little respect for human life, especially seeing as how he was apparently hanging out on Mar Sara just watching people get slaughtered by the Zerg, he’s a hypocrite, accusing you of “not knowing where your loyalties lie” in Desperate Alliance then betraying the Confederacy as soon as Mengsk promises him a position in his cabinet – but not when it’s about the Confederacy falling apart or the Zerg rampaging unchecked. He brags and has an unduly high opinion of himself.

For all that, he makes a great antagonist. He doesn’t have the subtlety or power to be the villain of a plot, but he’s fun to defeat on the way, which is probably why he’s so often thrust into that role, as mentioned at the beginning of this passage.

James Raynor

Although I personally liked the device of having the player as an undefined character (here the Magistrate) in the campaign, the obvious problem is that you can’t really interact with the characters – because it is impossible to define your character, you can’t have character development or help other characters develop. That would make for a very bad story, but thankfully Blizzard gave us someone else to be our protagonist for storytelling purposes. Here, we have Jim Raynor. He’s supposed to follow a similar development as the player throughout the campaign, so he starts up, like you, a minor official on a fringe world being invaded by the Zerg. Raynor is an idealistic and heroic character, which makes it easy for us to root for him, as he typically acts in a way that we probably wish we could.

In the very second mission, Backwater Station, when the nasty government fails to intervene to help people in need, Raynor picks up his gun and Vulture and rides off to the rescue, kicking alien arse all the way. And when he gets betrayed and brought to jail for doing the right thing, he takes up arms with the Rebellion to right the wrongs in the system. Idealistic, like I said, and proactive. Even his job as Marshall is to uphold law and justice. With courage and integrity, nearly every action he takes in the campaign is geared towards helping humanity and saving lives. Raynor’s idealism is such that he doesn’t want to even associate with General Duke even despite the obvious advantages this would have for their cause.

Raynor is in for a rude awakening as he gets betrayed again and again. First by the Confederacy, which is probably a kick in the nuts, but worse still by Arcturus Mengsk. Because he joined the Sons of Korhal to improve the system, the realisation that Arcturus was equally corrupt and tyrannical strikes a terrible blow to Raynor. After all, if the system is evil, and the alternative is evil, what hope is there for humanity? All choices lead to ruin, so why bother making a choice at all? What is the point of taking any action at all? And to compound on the disaster, that betrayal kills Sarah Kerrigan. Kerrigan is an equally idealistic character, and probably even more naïve than Raynor, but we’ll get to that when we discuss her. Suffice it to say, the betrayal of Kerrigan means a lot of things for Raynor, most of which we’ll discuss in Wings of Liberty as they are central to that plot, but for now I’ll point out that as someone who shared Raynor’s high-minded ideals, her death is like a message that this is what awaits him: her death, betrayed by the people she was naïve enough to trust or love, is the fate that awaits all those foolish enough to have faith in others. Thus, we have the first major step that would lead Raynor to despair. Of course, Raynor is too much of a badarse to let that alone take him down, so for now he spits in Mengsk’s face and flies off.

Speaking of Sarah Kerrigan, as the protagonist and hero of the story, it was pretty much assumed (by me, anyway) that Raynor would end up with the only female character in the entire game. While Raynor expressed attraction (or thought of it, any way), it mostly seemed like this never came to be in Rebel Yell. Not because Raynor didn’t love Kerrigan, but because she was taken from him before he acted on it. There are two especially significant exchanges on this matter. The first is Raynor’s last conversation with Kerrigan in New Gettysburg. Raynor obviously realised the truth about Mengsk when he unleashed the Zerg on Tarsonis, and his last message to Kerrigan is an appeal to her. He wants them to leave now, before they do even more damage, before Arcturus does even more damage: to humanity, to her. Raynor is obviously protective of Kerrigan, but ultimately, he trusts her and lets her go, free to make her own choices and her own mistakes. This is part of why he blames himself for her fate.

The second is Raynor’s last message in the campaign, a remark he utters to himself. “Damn it, I never should have let her go alone.” You know, with the graphics available at the time, it is left to the voice actors to really bring forth the emotions felt by the character, and this is a great example. The tone expresses all of Raynor’s regrets. That he let her go, that he couldn’t save her, that he never told her how he felt about her. It’s also completely irrational, if he’d gone with her, then he’d be dead too, and nothing more. The whole tragedy which is started in the next campaign and becomes central to Wings of Liberty required that Raynor love Kerrigan, but I would not have expected it to be handled so clearly and yet with such subtlety. Very well done.

A last word about Raynor. I’m not sure how good a judge of character he is. He never figured Duke as the frontal assault type? Really? I have a hard time believing Duke can come up with anything else. The man has all the subtlety of a box of bricks, to repeat myself.

Sarah Kerrigan

We’ve already touched on Kerrigan’s importance regarding Raynor, and that’s a large part of why she was there. The most significant part was so she would be familiar to us when her infestation was revealed.

Anyway, while it was fairly apparent that Raynor loved Kerrigan, the opposite was not. In fact, I did for a time suspect she might be infatuated with Arcturus, her devotion to him went far beyond what should be reasonable. Like I said previously, Kerrigan is more naïve than Raynor, apparently still believing that “Arcturus will come around, I know he will” even after the man had fed an entire planet to the Zerg. That’s pretty extreme, so either she was blinded by her own loyalty, or else she loved Mengsk and couldn’t admit what he really was. Raynor certainly didn’t share her optimism on this issue, even though they were otherwise in usual agreement.

On the other hand, when the Zerg come crashing down it was to Jim and the Commander that she called for help, not Mengsk. So maybe she was just in denial, unwilling to admit that they had worked so hard for nothing.

I’m afraid there’s not much more I have to say about Kerrigan at this point that I haven’t said about Raynor. Idealistic and heroic. She’s clearly intelligent and moral enough to realise that what Arcturus does is wrong, and she confronts him about it, but ultimately she failed to act on her reluctance. She brings a bit of light-heartedness to the campaign for a short while in her early exchanges with Raynor, and her mysterious past in the Confederacy's Ghost program help explore the crimes of the Confederacy, and that's all I have to say for now, I think.

The Zerg campaign is the weakest of the three, I feel. Part of this is because it is fairly straightforward, not like the simplicity I praised in Rebel Yell, but a somewhat boring lack of variation and imagination. In Overmind, the campaign is about destroying everything on your path to invade Aiur. In Rebel Yell, the campaign was about overthrowing the Confederacy. These are somewhat similar, but they diverged in execution in a way that made the Terran campaign more enjoyable. For starters, Rebel Yell started before you joined the Sons of Korhal and played its way into joining the movement, establishing your motivation in wanting to defeat the Confederacy. Obviously this wasn’t feasible with the Zerg campaign. Likewise, the Sons of Korhal were in a position of weakness compared to the Confederacy, which meant you had to employ clever tactics in order to overcome the enemy. Your missions for the Sons of Korhal were to obtain Confederate intelligence, recruit allies to your cause, subvert Confederate officers to your side, and finally assault the Confederacy using an immoral weapon. This obviously allows for more development of both characters and factions than the Zerg campaign, where being in a position of strength, your missions essentially consist of crushing the Confederate survivors, crushing the Protoss survivors, crushing Duke's Dominion troops, crushing Raynor’s troops, crushing Tassadar, crushing Zeratul and crushing the defenders of Aiur. In fact it’s the enemy that employs clever strategies, like Tassadar’s feint in The Dark Templar.

However, that’s not the truest problem with this campaign. In the middle section, the campaign is enjoyable with the conflict between Kerrigan, Zasz, Raynor, Tassadar and Zeratul providing some interesting development that the story structure cannot, but the unfortunate fact is that this stronger passage is bracketed by a slow opening and an underwhelming climax.

The opening is slow, with four consecutive missions centred on protecting the Chrysalis. This is why I mentioned in the StarCraft overview that Kerrigan served as a plot device in the Zerg campaign despite being a character. Nearly half the campaign is spent on simply waiting for her metamorphosis to complete, without any development for the character. Thankfully, the payoff is significant, as Kerrigan’s personality strengthens the middle third of the campaign. Far more damning however is the invasion of Aiur. With Zasz dead and Kerrigan left behind, we are left with only Daggoth and the Overmind in the Zerg cast for these missions, and Daggoth doesn’t even speak except to comment on mission progress. Likewise, while the central part of Overmind was filled with conflict with notable Terran and Protoss characters, the last two missions are against the nondescript Vanguard of Aiur.

The objectives for those missions also rely on one-shot plot devices that never really made a lot of sense to me. Why exactly can the Overmind only “manifest” at the location of the Xel’Naga’s landing site? What use does the Khaydarin Crystal serve? What does "manifest" even mean? Does it mean he has to fly around in space, unable to land anywhere else? What is it that stops him from landing elsewhere? Does it mean that he can only assume corporeal form in such a place? Why would he even want to do that, since it does nothing but make him vulnerable? Why does he event want to “manifest” on Aiur? If he needs to “manifest” to assimilate the Protoss into the Swarm, then how did he “manifest” on all the worlds where he assimilated the Brontoliths and Mantis Screamers and what not? How did he intend to assimilate the Terrans for their psionic potential? Those worlds don’t contain Khaydarin Crystals, nor do they have spots where the Xel’Naga first landed. These elements do not help develop the characters, the factions or the world, they’re just padding to extend the campaign. It’s obviously a huge problem when a story’s climax is padding.

The root cause of these problems is probably the recurring flaw in Zerg campaigns: lack of Zerg characters. Overmind is the only Zerg campaign to offer a full cast of Zerg characters, with the Overmind, Daggoth, Zasz and Kerrigan. However, the hive mind of the Swarm largely prevents conflict, so both Cerebrates are largely reduced to acknowledging or agreeing with the Overmind, at least until Kerrigan shows up, and that prevents their personalities from really developing. The problem is that the Swarm is essentially a single character, with the Overmind, Daggoth, Zasz and even Kerrigan being merely different facets of that character. In a way, the Cerebrates are a means of introspection for the Overmind.

Thankfully, Kerrigan single-handedly saves this campaign, without her presence the campaign would likely have been terribly dreadful. Because Kerrigan was left with “the greatness of her spirit” she is allowed some individual motivation. It’s not that Zasz and Daggoth have no personality, it’s that they have no motivation distinct from the Overmind’s. Kerrigan’s presence thus allows conflict with Zasz, developing both their personalities. Likewise, her ego forces more direct confrontations with her enemies, allowing us to develop them as well. So despite an unimaginative and overextended plot (the entire campaign is essentially two or three missions dragged out over ten) the midcampaign stays enjoyable on the strength of its characters. Which makes the final two missions all the more anticlimactic.

I can’t say I’m a fan of the Overmind retcon from Wings of Liberty, but playing this campaign with that perspective suddenly makes a lot of sense. For example, the original explanation for the Zerg invasion of the Koprulu Sector was the need to assimilate humanity’s psionic ability into the Swarm to overcome the Protoss. This is evidently achieved through the infestation of Sarah Kerrigan, but then she is left behind on Char rather than brought over to spearhead the assault on Aiur. With the new motivation for Kerrigan’s infestation, this suddenly makes sense. Likewise, the Overmind’s final words: “Now shall the events set into motion so long ago be made complete,” and “Indeed, our two species are but opposite facets of a greater whole. Soon shall our two races be made as one.” These take new meaning with the Xel’Naga life cycle in mind.
As I said, Overmind has a weak storyline propped up by interesting character conflict, so I might as well move directly to the characters in question.

Daggoth

I’ve suggested earlier that the Cerebrates, being facets of the Swarm that are mirrored wholly within the Overmind exist as a means of introspection for it. Of course, they were created to allow the Overmind to divide its attention to the numerous Broods, just as the Overlords and Queens exist so that the Cerebrates don’t have to spread their attention to every individual Zerg in their Brood. This also reflects on the loss of these echelons: when Overlords die, the Cerebrates are no longer capable of spawning new Zerg, as their control is already taxed by the existing minds they have to pay attention to. This explains why the Garm Brood had to be put down in The Culling, rather than the Overmind simply taking control of it and creating a new Cerebrate for it, or dividing the Brood among existent Cerebrates.

It also might explain the increased development of Queens and Overseers in Wings of Liberty, as the removal of the Cerebrates places additional strain on the lower echelons of the Zerg hierarchy.

But back to Daggoth. While the Cerebrates might have been created merely as part of the command structure, that role does not require that they have sentience or personalities, anymore than Queens or Overlords. Every Cerebrate seems to have a unique, overriding purpose that is not shared with other Cerebrates and defines their personality. For the player – I assume this is Araq, the Cerebrate in command of the Jormungand Brood – this is a focus on the microcosm rather than the macrocosm. Instead of being focused on the Overmind’s vision, the Swarm’s “grand mission” which apparently drives the other Cerebrates, it looks only to the preservation and development of Kerrigan. This also makes the choice of bringing the player to Aiur bizarre, but then again not showing the invasion of Aiur would have been worse, so I guess the real question, again, is why Kerrigan wasn’t brought along as well.

Daggoth’s main purpose seems to be asking the question: “how?” As the Overmind’s right hand, he oversees whatever the primary concern of the Swarm is for the moment, and ensures that it is handled as well as possible. For this reason, when the priority is on your defending the Chrysalis, he teaches you how to defend yourself and expand your Brood so you can deal with your task, and sends his Hunter Killers to support your forces so you can deal with any threat as efficiently as possible. When you risk having your attention divided between the Terrans and the Chrysalis, Daggoth jumps in to make sure you stay focused on your priority, dealing with the distractions for you. Likewise, he’s the one to decide that the Swarm’s integrity takes precedence over hunting down the Protoss, or that the Dark Templar must be neutralised before invading Aiur.
For this reason, much of Daggoth’s input in the game comes from directions within the missions, as he watches over you to make sure that you’re doing your task optimally, for example warning you that your Overlords are out of place in Eye for an Eye or reminding you of your next objective in the Aiur missions.
Because Daggoth is such a goal-oriented character, and his goals are all the Overmind’s, there’s little opportunity for him to develop much beyond being a competent and efficient Cerebrate. His opportunity should have come in Brood War, after the Overmind’s death, but sadly that did not happen.

Edmund Duke

Duke’s single appearance in Overmind does little to develop the character (few characters in the series truly develop once they have been fully revealed) but it does confirm what I’d previously said about him. His confrontation with the Swarm puts his total number of defeats thus far to four, the runner-up being Tassadar with two if you count the feint in The Dark Templar as a loss, which I don’t. He again comes in overconfident in his abilities and gets crushed. It’s especially funny to note that between his orders that “I don’t want any slip-ups this time” and the shouts of “All right you sorry bastards, fall back!” Duke seems to be placing all the blame for his failures on the heads of his soldiers. Somehow that’s no surprise at all from General Duke.

Since he doesn’t appear directly in this campaign, I didn’t give Mengsk his own section, but I’ll talk about him here since it is his motivations that have brought Duke to Char. He was of course made aware of Kerrigan’s presence there when she reached out to him from within the Chrysalis, but Kerrigan seems to think that Duke was sent to “retrieve her”. Now that seems very unlikely to me, and may be further evidence that Kerrigan may have feelings toward Arcturus that cause her delusions when thinking of him. Mengsk quite clearly left her to die on Tarsonis, if he didn’t save her then, he wouldn’t send Duke all the way to Char to do so now. More likely, and as is suggested by the fact that Duke’s orders contain no mention of rescue or search – or even capture and experimentation – but merely the eradication of Zerg, Mengsk probably sent Duke to finish the job and kill Kerrigan for good.

James Raynor

The tragedy of Raynor and Kerrigan’s relationship takes a huge step up here, as they confront each other once more. Raynor’s theme of doing really stupid things to save Kerrigan also starts here. Raynor has brought his men to a barren, Zerg-infested volcanic world for nothing more than dreams of her. These dreams could very well have been nothing more than nightmare juxtaposing the Zerg that took everything from him, and the defining loss of Kerrigan on Tarsonis, but he still had to come, because there was a chance, no matter how small, that he could save her. How he got his crew to follow him on this venture is a mystery, I guess he didn’t precisely explain why he was coming. Oh, and in case that wasn’t bad enough, General Duke, the guy they were running away from, is here too.

Nobody does that just out of love, mind you. It’s clear that Raynor did love Kerrigan, and as finally is revealed here, the opposite is also true. However, her loss represents a lot more to Raynor than just a single woman he loved. Kerrigan is every single human consumed by the Zerg which Raynor was unable to save. She is every victim of Mengsk’s treachery which Jim helped him commit. She is also the loss of his own innocence, an idealistic young human destroyed by contact with a reality that contains people like Arcturus Mengsk, in a way that reflects both his own waning faith in humanity and betrayed hopes for the future, as well as his eventual fate if he refuses to accept reality. And she’ll eventually become even more than that.

Her infestation adds a nightmarish cast to this tragedy, because Raynor feels responsible for her infestation, he also feels responsible for her actions after she becomes infested. As Kerrigan’s actions draw her further and further from humanity, so does Raynor die a little more inside. Thus, to save Kerrigan is not only to save the woman he loves, or to symbolically renew his faith that he can actually help people, but it is also self-serving. If Raynor cannot save Kerrigan, he will eventually destroy himself.

One final detail. Despite Kerrigan’s infestation, Raynor still acts as though she were human, treating her like the person he once loved. If Kerrigan was delusional about Mengsk sending Duke to “retrieve her”, Raynor is delusional about what Kerrigan has become.

The Overmind

As the “eternal will of the Swarm”, the Overmind’s character is essentially the entire Zerg Swarm’s character. Which raises a curious dichotomy: the Zerg generally behave in an aggressive, erratic and instinctive fashion, whereas the Overmind displays a cold, rational and farsighted personality. Again, every trait exhibited by every single Zerg is fully mirrored within the Overmind, so I wonder. Perhaps the Overmind, feeling that these traits would hinder its analysis and planning of the Swarms grand scheme, decided to thrust it within the furthest extents of its being, where they would be less damaging to the greater organism? Or maybe it’s simply a result of their lack of intelligence, and the Overmind also shares those impulses buts is capable of maintaining itself under control.

Whatever the case may be, the Overmind appears as a strong, authoritarian, father figure throughout the campaign. All Zerg, including the player, are its children, endlessly trying to please it in order to obtain its approval. By the Overmind’s approval are all actions given value. Therefore, as you succeed in your missions, the Overmind gives you praise. “And so long as my prize remains intact, I shall remain pleased.” Likewise, when Zasz questions Kerrigan’s selfish choices, the ultimate remonstrance is incurring the Overmind’s displeasure. Kerrigan even calls the Overmind “father” upon birth. I guess the player would be her mother then, as the nurturing, protective embrace that saw her through her birth and youth, and spared all attentions on her, while the Overmind was out ensuring her future.

The Overmind also has the role of mystic or philosopher. I elaborated on how Daggoth’s personality was all about efficiently accomplishing the Overmind’s vision, he and the other Cerebrates take care of all the work, allowing it the freedom of contemplation. The Overmind is the visionary, and the Cerebrates like Daggoth are the one who turn that vision into reality.

I started this section by stating that the Overmind is synonymous with the Swarm. As a consequence, the Overmind is truly immortal, so long as even a single Zerg remains, as he embodies the sentience of the Zerg hive mind. This is why I suspect that its “manifestation” on Aiur was actually an incarnation – giving physical form to what was previously no more than the gestalt of all Zerg consciousness. Why it would wish to do this, however, is still fairly mysterious to me. Again, the Overmind retcon from Wings of Liberty provides an explanation – the Overmind intended to die, and taking physical form was necessary to achieve this. Still, it seems unlikely that its thought process would allow him to so actively contribute to its own defeat, so there must be something more to it, especially given that this explanation did not exist at the time.

Anyway, I have a hypothesis as to why the Overmind is harmed by the Void energies. The Void is described as being the emptiness of space, and as far as I understand astronomy, most – nearly all – of space is emptiness. It is this emptiness that divides all cosmic objects, the result of the break of cohesion after the Big Bang. As I was explaining, the Overmind’s immortality derives from the fact that it is not an actual physical being, but the unity of Zerg consciousness. The Overmind is every Zerg trait, every Zerg thought, everything that can in anyway be considered Zerg, condensed into a single point. It is the Zerg singularity. I further speculate that the Void would force emptiness into this singularity. Like the emptiness of space from which it draws its power, the Void creates emptiness between the thoughts of the Zerg, causing the singularity to lose its cohesion, until it is no longer a single point, but many. Instead of a single Zerg Overmind, there are trillions of tiny Zerg minds.

Of course, the Overmind does say that the Dark Templar wield energies that are much like its own, so my hypothesis is most likely wrong, since it would mean that the Void is actually the antithesis of the Overmind, and not in any way similar. Still, it’s an interesting thought exercise into the functioning of the Swarm and the Overmind.

Sarah Kerrigan

What exactly the infestation did to Kerrigan as a character is unclear. Evidently, this is not a development of the character of Sarah Kerrigan as she was established in Rebel Yell, while they do share the name, identity and memories, their personalities are nothing alike. While one could expect that being betrayed by the people you trusted most and being infested into the Zerg Swarm are very traumatic events that could lead to drastic changes in perspective and character, this doesn’t seem to be what we have here. Kerrigan, especially in Overmind, never really seems to consider her actions or motives. Her behaviour, her emotions, her thoughts, none have any resemblance to those she had when she was human. Psychologically, she is in fact a new character, not a development of an existing character.

At the same time, it seems unlikely that it is as simple as straightforward mind control. She quite clearly takes actions that do not exactly fit in with the Swarm’s objectives. In Agent of the Swarm for instance, the Overmind commands “Let not a Terran survive” but Kerrigan allows Raynor and his crew to leave. And in The Amerigo, she strives for self-improvement even though that only indirectly serves the purpose of the Swarm. Indeed, the Overmind states that “the greatness of her spirit has been left to her”.

The explanation that sounds most likely to me is simply that her though processes have been altered. It is already well established that brain damage can alter the personality or create various disorders. With all the apparent physical changes the infestation had on Kerrigan, it is not too hard to believe that her brain was altered as well. Likewise, in Agent of the Swarm she says that “I'm one of the Zerg, now. And I like what I am. You can't imagine how this feels...” Despite this, she will later (in True Colors) suggest the opposite. This euphoric feeling to me suggests, like her constant rage, that her new form releases hormones that affect her thoughts and actions.

So all in all, I believe that Kerrigan is in there somewhere, but it’s a Kerrigan that could be compared to suffering from various personality disorders while drugged and drunk. As such, I do not hold her responsible for her actions, because while she is free to make her own choices, she does not have the ability to correctly judge the consequences or moral implications of those choices. She is far gone from the woman who once claimed that “I just don't think anyone deserves to have the Zerg unleashed on them.”

Anyway, Kerrigan claims that she reached out to Raynor and Mengsk telepathically, and while the reason she called out for Raynor is made obvious in Agent of the Swarm – she loved him too – her relationship to Mengsk suddenly struck me as obvious. During my commentary on Rebel Yell I noted that it felt a bit like Kerrigan was infatuated with Mengsk, but now that I think further on it, it seems far more likely that she adopted Mengsk as a surrogate father.

Kerrigan after all was inducted into the Confederate Ghost Program. Raynor says that she was “part of those experiments with the Zerg, that Mengsk came and saved” her. Kerrigan was 26 when StarCraft begins, at what age was she taken from her family? I checked this out on the wiki, and the answer is apparently 8 years old, after she destroyed both her parents in one form or another. Yes, I think this makes far more sense. Evidently, the Ghost Program didn’t feel like family for her, or not a good one, anyway, otherwise she wouldn’t feel that Mengsk saved her. Arcturus, being the manipulative bastard we all know him to be, likely took advantage of this in order to secure her loyalty, providing her with the family she always needed.

This also explains her character portrayal. In the Rebel Yell commentary, I noted that she was far more idealistic and naïve than Raynor. Raynor had a strong faith in humanity, but he didn’t delude himself about their capacity for evil, he simply wanted to work against it. That’s why he acted without Confederate approval early in the game, that’s why he yelled at Mengsk in New Gettysburg, it’s why he eventually turned on him. Kerrigan was portrayed as more childish, a strange depiction for a character that is after all a professional assassin. She built her new life around her faith in Mengsk, taking confidence that his strength and confidence would always be a safe haven for her. That’s why she stuck with him – she was afraid of being without him, she feared incurring his disapproval. It’s why she called out to him from within the Chrysalis, because when lost in the dark and monsters are hiding nearby, who else does a child turn to but her father? In a way, New Gettysburg was Kerrigan being forced to grow up, but that didn’t really turn out well. She was pushed from the nest when she wasn’t ready, so she crashed into the ground.

Thus as infested Kerrigan, she is in her adolescence. The Overmind is a father figure for all the Zerg, but Kerrigan is the only one to directly acknowledge him as such. The Cerebrates call him “Overmind” and Zasz compares their relationship to a master-servant one. This gives a slightly humorous perspective to Kerrigan’s constant rage and her overly boastful demeanour, as a caricature of puberty. It also explains why Kerrigan, as a human and an individual, only ever acted to further father-figure Arcturus Mengsk’s objectives, but as a now enslaved member of the Zerg hive mind she strains to push her boundaries, straining to see how far she can stray from the Overmind’s will but still fearing to displease him and desperate for his approval, quarrelling with her siblings to prove who is the favoured child, and so forth. She also begins to learn more about herself, her mission in The Amerigo being a journey of self discovery.

Her antagonistic attitude toward the Protoss displays an almost laughable insecurity. She tries to cover herself with titles: “Queen of the Zerg” and “Queen of Blades”, trying to force people to respect her with words rather than by her actions. She overcompensates to hide those insecurities – heedlessly charging headfirst at everyone who has the audacity to question her, exaggerating her own abilities past the point of parody: “my stare alone would reduce you to ashes.” Come on, now.

Kerrigan still has memories of her past life, she remembers her love for Raynor, for example, but I don’t know that she actually has the capacity for love in her newly reformed brain. I suspect that the main reason she wants to preserve Raynor is because she fears that she will never experience that feeling again. Raynor is the only thing that can trigger that unique euphoria, and if she loses him, that part of her will be forever lost, like so much else of what she once was is now lost to the Zerg infestation. Unknown to the Overmind, this was probably her greatest act of defiance – her exploration of the Amerigo would ultimately contribute to the development of the Swarm, but saving Raynor is a desperate grasp for the preservation of her past, human, individual identity against the Zerg hive mind – against the Overmind.

Tassadar

We technically encountered Tassadar in Rebel Yell, but not as a character. With what we’ll learn later, it’s likely that the reason he engaged the Zerg directly on Tarsonis rather than purifying the planet is because the planets previously purged were scarcely inhabited fringe worlds – and even then, he gave the Terrans time to evacuate the planet before assaulting it. Tarsonis, as the Confederate capital world, would be so densely populated that Tassadar couldn’t condone the massive number of innocent lives that would be lost from following orders. Arcturus claims that if the Protoss engage the Zerg, the Confederates might escape, and that was probably exactly what Tassadar wanted.

Because Tassadar didn’t purify Tarsonis, the Overmind was capable of achieving its goal and infesting Kerrigan. Thus, Tassadar is at least as responsible as Raynor for Kerrigan’s fate and her subsequent atrocities. While Tassadar does express sorrow for Kerrigan’s fate, he is also much wiser than Raynor. Rather than self-blame and self-pity, he understands that sometimes, there are no easy choices, and sometimes mistakes are made. Rather than regret what cannot be changed, Tassadar looks forward, to correcting those mistakes and trying to learn from them.

Tassadar only appears in one mission, The Dark Templar, which is about his confrontation with Kerrigan. In it, he demonstrates that he is absolutely awesome. It isn’t easy to portray a scenario where you lose in a strategy game, because obviously the difficulty in gameplay is in winning. You can go the route of In Utter Darkness from Wings of Liberty and present an unwinnable scenario where you simply have to lose not as badly as you otherwise could. Or you can simply have the villain shout “all according to plan!” at the end of the mission. While this technically counts as the latter case, as it was a diversion for Zeratul’s attack, it’s also a clear victory for Tassadar against Kerrigan as individual characters. He was toying with her the whole while.
As I expressed earlier, Kerrigan’s behaviour demonstrates profound insecurity and her overcompensation for it. In the briefing for The Dark Templar, Tassadar shows up to taunt Kerrigan. After pointing out all that she has lost due to her infestation, something that she feels strongly about, as demonstrated by her behaviour with Raynor, Kerrigan reacts with a blatant change of subject. Where Tassadar points out her frailties as a character, Kerrigan replies with boasts about her power. Tassadar calls her out on this too, calling this fixation an “infantile test of will”. Kerrigan reacts as most adolescents do when treated like children. She throws a fit.

Tassadar likewise understands why she tries to conceal herself behind titles. He constantly refers to her as “O Queen”, mocking her desperate need for praise, and contrasting her self-glorification with his own presentation. Tassadar gives no titles, not even his authentic position of Executor, he does not boast about his power. In fact, it seems he’s actively decided to show only a fraction of his abilities, as Kerrigan claims that “I sense that your vaunted power has diminished since last we met.” Because I can see no reason for Tassadar’s power to decrease between this encounter and the confrontation in New Gettysburg, and because if anything his powers should in fact be growing now that he has started mastering the Dark Templar’s Void energies, this apparent diminution can only be a voluntary disguise. Where Kerrigan shouts “I am great, don’t you dare judge me otherwise!” Tassadar’s introduction states “Judge me for who I am, and you will not find me lacking.”

This climaxes with Kerrigan’s duel with Tassadar, undeniably my favourite scene in the entire series. In the briefing, Kerrigan called Tassadar foolish twice. With this duel, Tassadar demonstrates who the true fool is, without ever having to raise a hand against her.

Zasz

If Daggoth represents the Overmind wondering “how?” then Zasz is the Overmind wondering “why?”. Zasz is constantly trying to figure out how things work. For example, it sounds eager to watch how the player reacts to its first jump through Warp space, perhaps hoping to learn something from this.

The real opportunity for development from Zasz comes when Kerrigan is reborn. Because she is given unparalleled latitude and conserves some of her memories from before her infestation, she behaves in a manner unlike any Zerg Zasz has had the opportunity to study before. Kerrigan commands Zasz not to question her, but questioning seems to be Zasz’s entire purpose for existing. In words that seem almost prophetic, Zasz claims that Kerrigan will be the doom of them all. Whether this was an understanding that Kerrigan’s ability to defy others who should have been a part of herself would lead her to actively destroy them for her self-aggrandisement in Brood War, or whether it was simply a reaction to being threatened, we may never know as he sadly dies too soon for this development to go anywhere.

Zasz is an interesting character as it expresses self-doubt. Because all Zerg organisms share the same Overmind, every time Zasz questions the behaviour or actions of another Zerg, it is questioning itself. Rather than becoming burdened by these questions, Zasz tries to find answers and thus strengthen the Swarm by resolving any flaw that it might find within its functioning. As Kerrigan would prove to be a major flaw to the integrity of the Zerg, it’s good that Zasz focused on her immediately. Kerrigan, on the other hand, was completely blind by her own volition. If one accepts that the Cerebrates exist for the Overmind to facilitate introspection, then Kerrigan’s own slaughter of the Cerebrates and elimination of every other sentience within the Swarm demonstrates her crippling insecurity, her unwillingness to allow herself to consider her actions, out of fear that it would remind her of all that she has lost from her infestation, and that it would end with self-loathing. Thus, Kerrigan in Brood War will isolate herself within a cocoon of sycophantic adulation, and with people she can clearly treat as enemies. Black and white. No confusion, no questioning, no doubt.

Just as she commanded Tassadar not to presume to judge her, she commands Zasz not to question her. She is gladdened by Zasz’s death. Perhaps her dementia has lead her to consider all who question her as enemies? Perhaps, to her, Zasz was as much of a threat as Tassadar was? If so, then this again would be Kerrigan placing her own needs to preserve her Terran vestiges as a higher importance than the well being of the Swarm.

Zeratul

Zeratul first appears in this campaign, but he does not get a real introduction. He only speaks once, and while he calls Kerrigan a whore, (well, concubine of the Zerg isn’t exactly a whore, but it is fairly close. Concubines are women kept by men for sex and to produce children, but not worth marrying.) there’s not much to say about him. I wonder if he was sarcastic when he replied “Well spoken” to Kerrigan’s calling him a coward? I should hope so, but Zeratul will demonstrate a weird tendency to congratulate Kerrigan for her random violence, so maybe he’s being honest and it’s part of the Nerazim culture. Who knows?

As the one who slew Zasz and gave the Overmind the location of Aiur, the things he has done in this campaign will weigh on Zeratul, though they are perhaps best examined within the greater context of The Fall and the examination of the Protoss whole that will follow.

StarCraft concludes with the Protoss campaign The Fall. In it, we finally retaliate against the Zerg and deal with them. That, however, is not the story of this campaign. The Zerg are the focus of the plot, but the story is about how the Protoss react to the Zerg, not about the Zerg themselves. As such, the campaign starts off a bit slowly. We begin fighting under the direction of the Conclave, so we get to witness firsthand the inefficiency of their methods. Our first mission is to rescue Fenix and liberate Antioch, only to have the two fall as soon as we move over to Scion to scour the Zerg there. And between those, we get another futile mission when Tassadar advises us to strike down the Cerebrates, only to see them reincarnated immediately. If you think the was effort is going badly after that description, then clearly you disagree with the Conclave, because they then decide to have the highest ranking Templar take off for Char with his forces to arrest a suspected subversive. We thus enter into the real point of The Fall: examination of Protoss culture and tradition. Although we do get two mission of searching for the Dark Templar before the story really kicks off.

In my introduction to StarCraft I named the Dark Templar as the third and final plot driving device. Part of this is the two part mission to rescue them – Choosing Sides and Into the Darkness – which feels a bit longer than it really needed to, much like the Chrysalis missions early in Overmind, but more globally, it’s the principle that Dark Templar energies are the only thing that can harm the Overmind. Plots that rely on “invulnerable except to a single device” inevitably revolve around obtaining and using said device, and I’m not too fond of them because they essentially restrict possibilities. Even though it’s a linear story, you feel like you lose freedom of choice, because there is nothing else you can do. There is one right answer, and everything else is wrong. It’s also a lazy answer to any problem. If you have a problem, instead of trying to find a solution with what you have, you simply have to find or use the device that automatically resolves the problem. However, in The Fall it isn’t too bad, because the Dark Templar aren’t so much a device to kill the Overmind, so much as the Overmind’s vulnerability is a device to bring the Dark Templar to Aiur and begin the core conflict of this campaign. Also, “using the Dark Templar on the Overmind” is not exactly as easy as it sounds, so there’s that.

Protoss culture is shaped immensely by the Aeon of Strife. The impact of that bloodshed cannot be overstated as nearly every facet of current Protoss life in some way descends from it. I can imagine that the Aeon of Strife bears a cultural taboo for the Protoss similar to that which the western world has for Hitler and the Holocaust. It was a horrible event, and has become in the haze of memory an incarnation of all evil well beyond its real measure. That is why the Judicator Caste bears such an intense terror of it, to them, it is not just a dark mark in the history of the Protoss people, it is the destruction of their people that was only averted by Khas and the instruction of the Khala. It is the evil that awaits all Protoss should they err from the path. And thence comes the dichotomy in the Judicator’s mind: either adherence to the Khala, or else the Aeon of Strife. And because the Aeon of Strife embodies in Protoss culture evil beyond imagination, there simply can’t be anything worst than that. Not even the Zerg.

In reality, the Aeon of Strife was an intense and enduring age of perpetual conflict between the Protoss, but it wasn’t the end of their species, far from. Khas’ vision was to bring peace to the Protoss, and ensure that in unity they could progress and develop their culture and society. The Khala, or ‘Path of Ascension’, was the means envisioned to achieve this goal. Again, Khas’ vision was unifying the Protoss. However, with the expulsion of the Dark Templar and again in this campaign, we see that the Conclave uses the Khala to justify conflict with other Protoss. Thus, the vision has been lost to the religion. The Judicator are so obsessed with ‘the Path’ that they have lost view of ‘Ascension’.

The Conclave and Aldaris display a lot of fanaticism. Even though they’ve clearly lost sight of what it is that they are supposed to be preserving, they still have firm belief that they know best how to do that preservation. As you’ll recall from my thoughts about the first three missions in the campaign, they are quite clearly wrong. Faith is the belief in the unproven, but belief in the disproven is only denial (belief in the proven is knowledge. Or sanity). The Conclave have an utter certainty that they are correct, no matter how wrong reality proves them to be.

As such, Tassadar could be considered the second coming of Khas, so to speak. It is Tassadar who will return and mend the rifts between the Templar, Dark Templar and Judicator, so that they may be united once more. It is this unity that ultimately allows the Protoss to triumph over the Swarm, more than the simple device of the Dark Templar energies. Therefore, it should be noted that despite their antagonistic attitude and hindering actions, the Judicator are not an enemy, but merely a lost and misguided ally. That is why Aldaris’ speech at the beginning of Eye of the Storm is so crucial. It demonstrates that the Judicator have finally accepted the truth and are going to support the fight against the Zerg. The culmination of the Protoss campaign is not a conflict between Tassadar and the Overmind, but between the Overmind and, as Tassadar puts it, “all sentience, all life”. Therefore, triumph results when all the forces that the Zerg seek to destroy unite against them. The Khalai, the Judicator, the Templar, the Dark Templar and even the Terrans represented by Raynor. Just as the division brought about by the Conclave would have enabled the Zerg to win, as Zeratul claimed, so does their unity cause the Swarm’s defeat. And while Zeratul and Artanis put a great deal of effort in repeating to us that the Protoss are “as one” in Wings of Liberty’s In Utter Darkness, it is The Fall that really displays this for us, and makes us feel and understand it, most markedly to my mind by Aldaris’ final speech. You represent that which is greatest in us all, and all our hopes go with you. En Taro Adun, brave Sons of Aiur!

Aldaris

I must say that Paul Eiding gave Aldaris the perfect voice. Haughty, arrogant, dismissive, authoritative, confident and compelling without ever becoming caricatural, it goes a long way when the character’s voice can so easily express the character’s personality. I haven’t commented on voice acting much, aside from pointing out my opinion of Robert Clotworthy’s great job as Raynor in the final missions of Rebel Yell, mostly because I don’t pay a lot of attention to it. Thus far, I’ve found no reason to complain. But Aldaris’ voice really struck me from the first time he spoke. Probably a good thing too, given how often I am told that I require additional Pylons.

That aside, Aldaris is the voice of the enigmatic Conclave in this campaign. He represents the authority for the Protoss, and religious authority at that. His speeches are cluttered with religious terminology, and his words express a near divine authority, even saying such things as “the sacred will of the Conclave” and “the will of the Conclave is absolute”. Aldaris is accustomed to being obeyed, and possibly even feared. Unlike Arcturus Mengsk from Rebel Yell, however, he reacts to defiance not with rage, but with a terrifyingly certain faith that punishment will come for this defiance. Aldaris does not utter threats, but promises.

Aldaris represents all the failings of the Judicator Caste in losing sight of the goals of the Path of Ascension. Although they have provided an invaluable service in guiding the Protoss throughout the years, they have forgotten that they are supposed to be guides and judges rather than rulers. Unfortunately, fear of the Aeon of Strife caused them to abuse their influence and authority. When Aldaris says that Tassadar is a greater priority than the Zerg, it isn’t because Tassadar has questioned the Judicator’s authority or because he thinks he is a threat to him or his Caste, but because he means just that. He fears the Aeon of Strife more than he fears the Zerg, and he fears that Tassadar and the Dark Templar may lead to another such era of chaos. While his persecution of the Dark Templar is thus explained, his contempt for Raynor is likely nothing more than xenophobia. It seems possible that such xenophobia would also explain some of the underestimation of the Zerg the Conclave proves guilty of. Aldaris seems to hold the Protoss as superior to all other species. Even if that were true, which is unproven, that does not detract from what merits or threats other species might possess or represent.

Despite his errors and follies, Aldaris has always wanted what is best for the Protoss. While the Templar are willing to sacrifice their lives for Aiur, Aldaris and the Judicator must be willing to sacrifice others’ lives for Aiur. When Aldaris therefore sympathises with your grief over Fenix’s death, but states that the Judicator are “called to look beyond such matters”, it is most likely true. Aldaris does not have the luxury of completing his service to Aiur by dying. The Protoss have a very communist society, from each according to his ability for the good of Aiur. The abuse of power by the Conclave is likewise similar to the dictatorships that have always arisen from Communist countries, although unlike those, it seems that the Conclave was actually dedicated to its purpose. I imagine that the mental link provided by the Khala helps in that.

Aldaris has a similar role in The Fall as Arcturus Mengsk had in Rebel Yell – the authority which you start off serving but ultimately betray when you realise the immorality of their actions. However, their respective final speeches illustrate the difference in character between them. When their actions are thrown back to their faces, Arcturus Mengsk says: “You'll regret that. You don't seem to realize my situation here. I will not be stopped. Not by you, or the Confederates, or the Protoss or anyone! I will rule this sector or see it burnt to ashes around me. If you try to get in my -” while Aldaris says: “Executor. Tassadar. This comes too late to you. But the Conclave has witnessed your defeat of the Cerebrate. They know now that they cannot deny the necessity or the valiancy of your actions. We sought to punish you, while it was we who were in error. You represent the greatest in us all, and all our hopes go with you. En Taro Adun, brave Sons of Aiur!” The juxtaposition reveals the characters’ true natures. Mengsk was always a power obsessed maniac, while Aldaris was always trying to help, and he has only just now realised the best way he could and should have done that. Mengsk threatens global devastation, while Aldaris humbly admits his error. Actually hearing Aldaris express genuine humility and regret makes the whole campaign worthwhile, and it is a demonstration of Aldaris’ honesty and maturity that he is willing to admit his mistakes. More than that, it displays a development of his character, that after spending so much of the campaign is stubborn denial, he is now willing to open his mind and accept unpleasant truths. This will actually continue in Brood War. After all, what can be a truer victory than convincing your enemy that turning them into a fully devoted ally? It would have been so easy to simply kill Aldaris, but instead we get this much more fulfilling result to our long conflict with the character.

And if you couldn’t tell yet, Aldaris is one of my favourite characters in the series, right up there alongside Tassadar. From the fate that ultimately awaits Aldaris in Brood War and the lack of mention afterward, I suspect I may have been in the minority in this regard.

Edmund Duke

Edmund Duke is part of an optional branch of the mission Choosing Sides where you get to fight some Supply Depots, Missile Turrets, Wraiths, and a Battlecruiser. This is the totality of the Protoss versus Terran you will encounter in the campaign. Anyway, Duke threatens Tassadar, ending with a fairly humorous line, and adds to his tally of defeats, now five. We really get little new about Duke, but the interaction demonstrates some of the change in Tassadar’s character. He is less patient with the Terrans, perhaps realising that the Conclave was right about burning the Terran worlds, and that if he had obeyed, Kerrigan would never have been infested.

Duke was commanding the retaliatory force that attacked Tassadar after he purged Chau Sara, but Tassadar did not wish to engage him, so he retreated. This is probably what he meant when he said he had shown Duke leniency in the past, though he was perhaps instead referring to Terrans as a whole and speaking of his hesitation in the planetary purifications.

There is an unfortunate lack of Terran involvement in StarCraft, aside from Raynor and his men who appear as allies, there has been no real Terran presence in the game after The Amerigo, halfway through the Zerg campaign. Duke’s presence here is so half-hearted, that during my first play-through of the game, I never even met him. Lack of Protoss versus Terran is one of the enduring flaws of the campaigns throughout the StarCraft series.

Fenix

Fenix. With a name like that and an underwhelming death three missions in, his rebirth was pretty much assured. Fenix acts a bit like our substitute protagonist while we wait for Tassadar to show up. He’s also a bit like Edmund Duke, except that he is good natured and devoted to his cause, and he doesn’t have Duke’s long streak of losses (although he does die twice, which is something Duke has not achieved. Does losing two Norad Battlecruisers count?) Like Duke, Fenix is more of a lieutenant, dutifully following after the more charismatic characters, like Aldaris and Tassadar, and ensuring that their wishes are executed. He is a warrior, he is courageous, he is proud (how else could you qualify “I fear no enemy for the Khala is my strength, I fear not death for our strength is eternal”?) and he has all the subtlety of a box of bricks.

I think the defining quote about Fenix comes when we meet him again on Aiur after his rebirth as a Dragoon. I remember a while back when it was declared that the flash of light in which Protoss disappeared was a teleportation technology meant to save the lives of crippled Protoss. There was some talk that this diminished the pride and honour of the Protoss, that they no longer meant “my life for Aiur” with any real sincerity, but as Fenix here demonstrates, the point of that saying was not that Protoss warriors hope to die for Aiur, but that they are willing to give anything for Aiur, including their lives. A Protoss’ honour is not about personal glory, but about their service to Aiur. And dead Protoss, even Protoss who have died defending Aiur, cannot be of service to it. That is why when Tassadar grieves for Fenix’ crippling state, the warrior responds with “Nonsense! There is no shame in defeat so long as the spirit is unconquered, and I am still able to serve Aiur to a degree.” His cheerfulness and optimism demonstrate the nature of his character, his courage to never give up no matter how harsh his situation seems. And it demonstrates the true priorities of any Protoss: he may have been crippled, but being retrieved and placed within a Dragoon allows him to continue his service. So long as there is some degree to which he can serve Aiur, there is a reason to continue living. Tassadar will express something similar, saying that he would never hesitate to sacrifice his personal honour in service to Aiur.

Fenix, while not the true protagonist of the story, does serve a role similar to Raynor in the early missions. He is portrayed as the player’s longtime companion, and he fights alongside you and sympathises with the player. While you do order him about, for the story’s sake he is an equal, unlike Tassadar, Zeratul and Aldaris who are all portrayed as superior or beyond your reach in some way. Fenix has the kind of character that makes you wish to fight on, not through any kind of inspirational presence, but simply by his refusal to give up. There’s that “There is no shame in defeat” quote I already brought up, and his complete lack of hesitation in “damning himself” to join you and Tassadar. Then in The Trial of Tassadar, he outright states that “All seems lost now, but still we must fight on.” He seems quite trusting too, accepting the Dark Templar without hesitation and gladly inviting Raynor to join in the cause despite not even knowing him or having ever met a Terran before. In others, I might have called it naïve, but in Fenix I think it’s just a bit reckless. After all, he does wonder about the trustworthiness of Zeratul and the Dark Templar after they vanish, but he just dismisses the thought. “What happens, happens” I imagine him thinking.

James Raynor

Raynor is angrier in this campaign than he was in the previous two. Part of this comes from the distrust of authority that has been by now so well implanted into his mind. After his experiences with the Confederacy on Mar Sara and Mengsk on Tarsonis, his hostile reaction to Aldaris is quite expected, and the Judicator himself probably did not help improve Raynor’s opinion of authority figures. It’s pretty funny, actually, since as Marshall he was himself a representation of authority.

Raynor expresses his loyalty to Tassadar for saving Raynor and his men on Char. It’s a bit unfortunate that we never get to see how that happened. I suspect that this was largely Tassadar’s initiative, for while Raynor may be willing to fight alongside honourable individuals like Tassadar regardless of species, the latest events in his life would not have left him openly trusting of others, especially not if those others had participated in the wholesale destruction of Terran planets. Besides, I’ve noted before that I’m not sure how strong a judge of character Raynor is. Tassadar, on the other hand, has shown himself to be very astute, his easy manipulation of Kerrigan and his ability to surround himself with trustworthy allies demonstrate a good grasp of people’s character. This said, Raynor at that moment was desperately in need of someone like Tassadar, a strong, authoritative character who was deserving of Raynor’s faith. Raynor would later develop a friendship with Fenix, the first hints of which are presented in The Trial of Tassadar, but that is much more a friendship between equals, both characters being very similar in many ways.
In his appearance in Eye of the Storm, Raynor expresses his motivation for fighting the Overmind. The Zerg have taken everything from him, he says, and all he has left is to see this through. This is an inverted reflection of Tassadar’s own statement in Homeland that he has given everything to fight the Zerg. The difference is subtle but crucial. For Tassadar, the fight is so important that he was willing to sacrifice it all. Everything he has lost only makes it clearer how important it is to save what can be saved. For Raynor, he might as well fight because there’s nothing else. Tassadar has determination and hope that success will bring brighter days. Raynor is resigned, backed against the wall. Success won’t bring him anything. It really isn’t surprising that his character will continue to grow darker from the idealistic Marshall we met in Wasteland and Backwater Station, right up to the moment he finds a reason to hope again.

Tassadar

Tassadar is this campaign’s protagonist, though we again only meet him halfway through. While he maintains the strength of personality and clear vision that marked him out during Overmind, I was struck by how hostile and aggressive he was in The Fall. Aside from needlessly taunting Edmund Duke in order to fight some Terrans, he also reacts very aversely to Aldaris even before the latter bring up his ridiculous assaults upon Tassadar and the Dark Templar. During Into the Flames, he orders Aldaris to silence when the latter merely asks about Tassadar’s whereabouts, possibly suspecting him of being dead. However, it seems possible that the reason for this is some difficulty in contacting Aiur. Tassadar was being hunted by Kerrigan at the time, so it’s likely that he was in a great hurry to deliver his message about the Cerebrates while he had the opportunity to communicate. However, in Choosing Sides he states that “the Judicator have long since steered the actions of the Templar to their own ends” which is a strange statement. Nothing we have seen from Aldaris or the Conclave indicate that the Judicator act out of selfishness. Misguided, arrogant, overzealous, dogmatic and perhaps even idiotic, certainly, but never selfish as far as I can see. I wonder if perhaps Tassadar has learned some of the Dark Templar’s own prejudice during his stay with them?

There’s also the ridiculously comical bit about being stranded on Char. When you accost him in The Hunt for Tassadar, he says that he had given up all hope of rescue, which leads us to wonder why he never mentioned that he needed rescue? If you remember from Into the Flames, Aldaris orders Tassadar to return to Aiur, which is being invaded by the Zerg, and Tassadar angrily responds: “My concern is for the safety of Aiur, not the judgements of the Conclave. I will return when the time is right.” See, it would make so much more sense to reply “I can’t, I’m stranded and being hunted down by the Zerg” than Tassadar’s choice of “You can’t boss me around, I’ll come back when I want to.” The latter seems especially childish when you remember that Tassadar is implying that his pride is more important than the Zerg threat to Aiur. This runs completely counter to everything else we know about Tassadar’s character, notably his speech in Homeland about how he has sacrificed his pride and honour to protect Aiur. Of course he’d given up on rescue, his last statement implied that the only thing keeping him there was a lack of desire to return to Aiur. It’s a strikingly bad bit of character derailment in a game that was otherwise pretty solid, to my opinion.

Another curious passage is his surrender to the Conclave at the end of Homeland. While it certainly illustrates the quality of his character and that he understands the purpose of the Khala more clearly than any of the fanatical Judicator that worship it, it does seem like a ridiculous gesture. After all, Fenix seems to think that the fight against the Zerg is hopeless without Tassadar, and his first move after Tassadar surrenders is to try to break him out. What would have happened if Zeratul hadn’t persuaded Aldaris to give you a chance? Would Tassadar simply have surrendered again? And besides, Tassadar himself implores you not to give up the fight as he surrenders. It makes it sound like Tassadar’s personal guilt at the slaying of his kindred outweighs the needs of Aiur and all life, which is again counter to Tassadar’s established character. Still, it brings on such a perfect demonstration of Tassadar’s character that I wouldn’t dream of removing it, only, perhaps it would have been better done if Tassadar had been cornered by the Conclave rather than while they’re being beaten back.

Still, it does bring about Tassadar’s “for I am of the Templar” speech, which is as mentioned an excellent demonstration of Tassadar’s character, and the pure results of the combined Khala and Dark Templar philosophies. Tassadar claims that he is willing to sacrifice all that he was, is, and could be for the good of the greater whole, in accordance with Khas’ vision of strength and unity through collaboration, but he says that he will sacrifice these things according to his judgment, his wisdom and his experience, all demonstrating his unwillingness to subsume his individuality to the collective, much as the Dark Templar do. Certainly, there are flaws in that too, which is why we disapprove of vigilantism, but unjust authorities must after all be combated, so it is necessary for people to be able and willing to act on their judgment. This also demonstrates the difference between the Zerg and the Khalai, the Zerg have no individuality, they are one mind controlled by many brains, whereas the Khalai are a gestalt of individuals, growing stronger from the cooperation of many individual strength, compensating for others’ individual weaknesses.

Tassadar’s ultimate sacrifice express his hope for the future. As he embodies the Templar’s cry of “my life for Aiur” and dies to slay the Overmind, he does so in the faith that his sacrifice will bring about salvation for his people. This is Tassadar’s true faith – belief in the unproven better future of the Protoss race, in contrast to Aldaris’ and the Conclave’s false faith – rather denial, as I explained earlier – belief in the disproven efficacy of their traditions. This also completes Tassadar’s development as a messiah, dying for the salvation of his people. Again, the Protoss draw heavy inspiration from religious concepts, as the terminology and the Judicator’s fanatical dogmatism illustrate. His death, and his martyrdom at the hands of the Conclave are easily recognisable religious symbols, someone more interested in religion than I could probably also draw parallels with, for example, his meeting of Zeratul, his acceptance of the Terrans, his wandering on Char pursued by Kerrigan. But this is not something of particular interest to me. Suffice it to say that Tassadar’s enshrinement as an eternal Protoss hero is well deserved.

Zeratul

Zeratul remains a mysterious character in StarCraft. He really has three important speeches in the game, his talk with Tassadar in Into the Darkness, his speech to Aldaris in The Trial of Tassadar, and his explanation of the Overmind and the Zerg in Shadow Hunters. Overall, he remains a mostly mystical figure, matching with his identity as part of the then exotic Dark Templar. Little is known about the Nerazim at this time, in StarCraft they are described as nomadic, travelers of the stars, which fits with Zeratul’s experiences he describes to Aldaris. Given their desire for individuality which lead them to break from the Khalai, one would expect them to be far less traditional and conservative than the Conclave controlled Protoss, but we later learn that this is not so. That is unfortunate, as the differences between the Khalai and Nerazim seem fairly superficial according to later lore. Still, at this time the Dark Templar appear as more worldly, Protoss who have spent their lives traveling throughout the galaxy in search of knowledge and self-improvement, and not like the traditionalist Protoss who would use words like “forbidden” and “sacred” as justification not to explore. We’ll touch more on this deplorable loss of Nerazim identity in future instalments.

Zeratul himself would presumably be the wisest and most experienced of the Dark Templar in his clan. Unlike the Khalai, one would expect that the Dark Templar, living in small groups instead of the immense Protoss Empire the Conclave had to guide, would have the luxury of choosing to follow whoever seems most able to lead them, rather than have Protoss chosen and taught from birth to lead and judge their people. Managing something as extensive as the Protoss Empire would of course require armies of bureaucrats, dignitaries, leaders of all levels and so on, which is probably why an entire Caste was necessary to accomplish this, but for the Dark Templar, this would not be the case. Dark Templar live in groups small enough that they would likely know every other member of their clan individually, and could rely on each other to be mostly self-sufficient, with the ability to discuss important matters with the entire clan before coming to a decision, and knowing which of their members is reliable enough to depend on and follow in case of an emergency. In this case, Zeratul. We can thus surmise that Zeratul has earned his position through the respect of his peers. For likely similar reasons, Zeratul does not discuss much with the other Protoss characters, preferring to simply provide the information and let them come to their own decisions. It also explains why he vanished after Tassadar’s surrender. Tassadar obviously trusted Fenix, but for the Dark Templar, the Praetor would have to be judged on his individual merits. From Zeratul’s announcement that “the Stewards of Tassadar shall not fall while the Dark Templar live” it seems that judgment proved favourable.

Zeratul likely also feels the guilt of revealing Aiur’s location to the Overmind. Because Tassadar did not inform Fenix and Aldaris that only the Dark Templar could harm the Cerebrates when he counselled them to attack, it’s likely that they did not know at the time, and only figured it out later. Thus, Zeratul was chosen to assassinate Zasz not because he wielded the Void, but because he was the stealthiest and most capable of them. Unfortunately, this means Zeratul is responsible for the invasion of Aiur. This undoubtedly factored into his decision to accompany Tassadar back to Aiur. It may also factor into his reserve – nearly all the Protoss on Aiur have lost comrades because of him. But then again, maybe not. Zeratul seems especially stalwart, and it’s also likely that he would only try to atone for this guilt rather than allow it to hurt or hinder him. Zeratul seems very goal-centred, though that may be because he does not feel the need to share idle thoughts.

Zeratul’s first speech, the one he gives to Tassadar, reveals how Tassadar has found completeness beyond the scope of the Khala, and how he fears that the Judicator will prove unyielding in their dogmatism. The first part is interesting. Clearly, Zeratul does not delude himself into thinking that his ways are outright superior to the Khala, but it seems strange that he does not attempt to take this path as well. Understandably, the severed nerve cords might prevent him from learning the ways of the Khala, but one might expect that this path to “completeness” would be taught to younger members of the clan who have not yet performed this rite, so that they too could benefit from this expanded vision. Maybe they have and it simply hasn’t been mentioned. Still, it’s curious.

The second speech, to Aldaris, is the ugly truth the Judicator did not wish to see. Coming as it does from one he hates and fears most, it is probably doubly painful, but it is much needed nonetheless. Here Zeratul finally reveals his wisdom, experience, and the breadth of his understanding. And while he condemns the Conclave for its actions, he also doesn’t provide them with his answer, but simply summons them to open their eyes. You have judged before witnessing, he says, and therefore cannot see anything that goes against your judgment. Instead, you should witness and then judge. This leads to Aldaris’ enlightenment as revealed in his ultimate response to what he has learned: the Conclave has witnessed the destruction of the Cerebrates, and now they know you were right.

One last thing then. Zeratul mentions that he touched the mind of the Overmind when he slew Zasz, and gained an insight into its thoughts. Curious then that he did not know of the Overmind’s imprisonment. Obviously, he couldn’t have mentioned it in The Fall, because it didn’t exist then, but it seems like it would have been credible for the answer to be ultimately found within Zeratul, rather than him having to jaunt back to Aiur and touch the dead Overmind’s tendrils.

When I first played Brood War twelve years ago, I didn’t notice anything wrong about the story. There are a lot of great things about it, more effort was put into mission design and the introduction of the order triggers allowed for more dynamic in-game experience. Coming from the original StarCraft, the first mission in the expansion, Escape from Aiur, really gave a feeling for the devastated state of Aiur, as you wander through ruined and burning Protoss homeworld, with Zerg running rampant, emerging from caves in the cliffs, with small groups of Protoss desperately fighting the enemy on every side. You could even see Scourge flying through the sky above, on the hunt for some remaining Protoss warships. Brood War also gave us Shakuras and the twilight tileset, the first planet to really feel alien to me. There was something about those lightless, barren and lunar expanses, those still, dark pools of water… I imagine it varies according to players, but twilight instantly became my favourite tileset.

However, when I replayed the game years later (I had not on my first run managed to complete the Zerg campaign without cheating, and now that I had improved sought to test my mettle) and without the bias of novelty, I realised something. The story was really poor. As you undoubtedly deduced from my thoughts on StarCraft’s campaigns, I loved the story of the original, so this came as a huge disappointment for me.

The first crucial flaw – and this is one pervades the entire series – is the writers’ apparent inability or unwillingness to build upon existing resources. Instead, they simply create something new out of whole cloth and focus the story around that. I suspect that the reason this wasn’t apparent in the original is because everything was new, there was nothing to build on, but this flaw is observable in both Brood War and Wings of Liberty. Most of the story in Brood War revolves around the UED invasion, a faction that didn’t exist prior to the expansion and in no way develops naturally from the existing story. Instead of working to progress the existing characters, factions and world, the writers simply introduced a new power that would serve, like the Overmind and the Swarm in StarCraft, to threaten the entire Koprulu Sector.

However, this is not the worst flaw with Brood War’s story. The most damning is that nearly all the events in the game might as easily not have happened. You could play the first two missions of The Stand and then immediately switch to Wings of Liberty and you wouldn’t have any difficulty following the story. This is not a question of Wings of Liberty ignoring material from Brood War, but simply that the events of Brood War undo themselves within the course of the game. The UED appears out of nowhere, and then is entirely and utterly destroyed, vanishing back into nothingness. The Dominion is overthrown, then reinstated. The last words in StarCraft tell us that the time of Kerrigan’s ascension has come, and the last cinematic of Brood War demonstrates Kerrigan’s ascension. A new Overmind is created, and then destroyed. A Psi Disrupter is found to confuse the Zerg, then destroyed. Nothing happens of lasting significance, save the Protoss’ departure from Aiur. Good writing should develop the characters or the world, and the utter lack of development in Brood War make it, in my opinion, the worst instalment in the franchise.

The third flaw, and this one is the most minor, is that Kerrigan’s manipulations are really underwhelming. We’ll get into those in specifics in due time, but the intention of Kerrigan’s appearances and betrayals was to make her appear cunning, ruthless and formidable. Instead, everyone she manipulated simply appeared idiotic. It requires a lot of subtlety to write a good manipulation. In StarCraft, Arcturus Mengsk (Rebel Yell) and Tassadar (The Dark Templar) both did this excellently, playing on their targets’ personality strengths and flaws to trigger the desired reactions. In my opinion, Kerrigan sadly does not.

Brood War also ramps up the use of plot devices to further the story. As you’ll recall, I said that StarCraft used Psi Emitters, Kerrigan’s Chrysalis and the Dark Templar in this fashion, but with mostly reasonable explanations, and they served as logical developments of the story. Brood War’s use of the Xel’Naga Temple, the Psi Disrupter and the Second Overmind do not have those qualities. They really only serve as an excuse to do more missions or in the latter case, as a hinge required for the story to go as it was intended.

The Stand is, as far as I am concerned, the worst campaign thus far, and unless I misremember the others, the worst in the series. It didn’t have to be this way. There are two stories in the campaign, one good and one bad. The first revolves around the Protoss departure from Aiur, their relocation to Shakuras and their reunion with the outcast Dark Templar. Given the sacred value of Aiur in Protoss culture, and the complex rift that divided the two branches of the species, this could have made a great basis for the campaign, developing Protoss culture and the characters attached to it. Something with more emphasis on Fenix’ refusal to abandon Aiur, on Aldaris’ newfound humility, on Artanis’ development as the future leader of the Protoss and most of all on the Dark Templar’s reaction to the coming of their long time oppressors: would they hate the Khalai and try to cast them out? Would they tolerate them, taking self-indulgent satisfaction that those who once tormented them now live as beggars at their mercy? Or would they forgive their brethren for past transgressions and welcome them to a new home? Or most likely, variations of these depending on individuals. A character like Ulrezaj could have easily found a strong origin in such a story, serving as a counterpoint for Zeratul and Raszagal, propagating conflict and antagonism with Artanis and especially Aldaris. It would also have been an occasion to finally reveal the Conclave as mortal, have them fall from their lofty perch and forced to interact with their brethren directly. Throughout The Fall, they were faceless and distant, an omnipotent and omnipresent power represented by their loyal followers and speaking through the voice of Aldaris. Losing their mystique would have symbolised their newfound humility, and their presence could have sparked conflict with the Dark Templar.

Instead, the plot focuses on the second story. The one where the Zerg have invaded Shakuras [for unknown reasons] and we need [plot device] and [plot device] in order to activate [plot device] and kill them. I cannot overstate how pointless this entire story is. The entire problem has no coherent reason for existing. Why are the Zerg on Shakuras? We are told that they followed from Aiur through the Warp Gate, but that makes little sense. The Zerg on Aiur are frenzied and erratic. While some might indeed follow through the Warp Gate, certainly not enough that they cannot be cleaned up on the other side? Fenix and Raynor are seen holding the Warp Gate on Aiur in Escape from Aiur and again in Dunes of Shakuras where they shut down the Gate. Later in the Terran campaign, they’ll be shown to still control the Warp Gate. Surely not enough Zerg came through to not only pose a serious threat but in fact completely overwhelm the Khalai and Nerazim on Shakuras? Besides, the presence of two Cerebrates demands explanation. The Cerebrates aren’t erratic, they’d only go somewhere if they have a reason to. With the death of the Overmind, the new Overmind growing on Char, and the struggle for control with Kerrigan, is now really a good time to go off randomly hunting Protoss? Also, Kerrigan’s prior control of Raszagal implies that the Zerg were able to find Shakuras on their own anyway. Why? How? Why does Zeratul call it their “secret” homeworld if it’s so easily found? Maybe the Overmind could have known it’s location from when Zeratul killed Zasz, but not Kerrigan.

And the Xel’Naga Temple is annoying too. For one thing, what is a “nexus of cosmic energies”? It sounds like that weird sacred ground on which the Overmind could manifest, combined with leylines. As you may recall from my thoughts on Overmind, I thought it was nonsensical then, and adding fantasy elements to it doesn’t make it better now. It’s a giant enigmatic alien structure, why can’t it have it’s own alien technological power source? Or why not make the Uraj and Khalis the power sources instead of simple keys. That would make a lot more sense too, since the Uraj and Khalis were an experiment performed by the Xel’Naga to study the divergence in Protoss culture. That seems like a weird choice to use as a key to your global doomsday device, but it could make sense as power sources. Finally, why would the Xel’Naga construct a Zerg-slaying temple? Although, and let it never be said that I do not try my best to make sense of this story, it is possible that this was not the intended purpose of the Temple, and that the Protoss merely changed its functions to serve their needs. For instance, I one believed that it was used as a Xel’Naga terraforming device. After the Temple’s use, Shakuras experienced a sunrise, in a world that presumably rarely if ever has any. Possibly, the Xel’Naga intended to use the Temple to shift the planet’s orbit or atmosphere or whatever it was that prevented it from experiencing sunlight, in order to facilitate the development of life. Of course, that seems a bit unlikely, the presence of Kakaru and the bones of other species indicate that life did develop on Shakuras despite the darkness. Or maybe the Temple needs to be used regularly, and the Kakaru are the only species that managed to adapt when the Xel’Naga were unable to reactivate the Temple, and the bones are all that is left of the species that were born in the light and were unable to adapt to Shakuras’ returning twilight.

Fun speculation on planetary development aside, the campaign’s focus really is terrible. This campaign perfectly illustrates what I would call a shopping list plot, a circular reasoning for storyline as contrasted with the natural progression of the original StarCraft where the story developed from the conflicting interests and goals of the characters and factions. The conflict in The Stand only exists because the plot requires the Uraj and Khalis, and the Uraj and Khalis only exist because the plot requires conflict.

I don’t know why Kerrigan came to Shakuras either. This did nothing to help achieve her overarching goals, so I can only assume her stated objective of destroying the Cerebrates was true, which brings us back with the question of why were the Cerebrates there in the first place? Sadly, I suspect that the reason is the same as that given for the existence of Uraj and Khalis – the plot requires conflict.

Finally, I mentioned in my thoughts on The Fall how Nerazim culture should naturally develop differently from Khalai culture. Here, we see this is not so. Rather than being nomadic, the Dark Templar have a homeworld, like the Khalai. Rather than small, distinct clans operating independently, they have a Matriarch who has the authority to issue decrees, has custody of the planet and the authority to order those who dwell upon it. One might expect from Dark Templar individualism that they would develop a less authoritative, more anarchic social structure, and surely that they would expect to have the right to question anything and anybody. But this is apparently not so. In fact, the term Matriarch, aside from implying that her position comes from her age rather than her merit, suggests that all other Dark Templar are her children – and that she has the authority to discipline them should she judge them foolish. More lenient perhaps than the patriarchal and theocratic Conclave, but still a far cry from what one would have imagined from their defining characteristic.

More confusing still, the Matriarch speaks of sins, temples and sacred ground, implying that the religious lexicon which pervaded the Khalai in The Fall apparently also applies to the Dark Templar. It is perfectly understandable that the fear-driven dogmatism of the Judicator Caste would lead to a heavily traditionalistic and ritualistic culture, and thus highly auspicious for religious connotations, but this is less understandable for the Dark Templar. The Nerazim’s spirituality should be experienced individually, as insight into the betterment of the individual or the whole, understanding of the self or the world. Sacred ground would have no meaning for such a spirituality, for while locations or object might have deep spiritual importance for any individual Dark Templar as part of their personal experiences and development, it would not hold any for his fellows. Temples would not exist, as these are places for the faithful to congregate, useless in a spirituality that is expressed individually.

Raszagal in the campaign orders Aldaris to silence when he disagrees with her and offers dissenting opinions. She expresses fervent xenophobia in Countdown, saying that Shakuras will never again be despoiled by alien species, forgetting that the Dark Templar are themselves alien, and that planets are not “despoiled” by foreigners living on them. And her declaration that “these Zerg shall be the first to fall before us” implies nothing good. Really, she sounds a lot like Aldaris did in The Fall. Consider also, as an example, that instead of a “homeworld”, Shakuras could have been some sort of meeting planet, where the various Dark Templar clans can gather to exchange stories and knowledge they’ve accumulated in their travels, trade in things they’ve acquired from every corner of the galaxy, and exchange younger clanfolk to prevent inbreeding. Zeratul would know to go there, because that’s where the clans would meet to discuss the Zerg and how to react to them. And conflict might have been sparked when the Khalai, being sedentary, tried to erect permanent settlements on Shakuras. But instead, the planet simply became a Dark Templar Aiur. And thus, the Nerazim and Khalai are reduced to simply stylistic variations of a single Protoss culture, and some of the mystery and diversity of the world is lost.

Aldaris

Alas, poor Aldaris. I think that he and Raynor are the only two characters to truly develop and grow throughout the series. Other characters are little different after their last encounter than they were when we first met the, we’ve just grown to know and understand them better. Aldaris, however, has learned from his experiences and has become a better individual from them. He’s still the arrogant, confident and condescending Protoss that persecuted us in The Fall, but now those traits are tempered by a willingness to question his own actions and beliefs. For example, you can see that he’s still a harsh authority by the way he consistently refuses to give poor Artanis any credit. In Escape from Aiur, for example, Artanis tries to convince his boss that promoting him to Praetor was the right choice, and Aldaris pretty much dismisses it with a sceptical “We shall see.” Then in The Insurgent, Artanis tries to defend Kerrigan, and Aldaris snidely remarks that “you can no longer afford to be so naïve, Artanis.” These are actually the only two times the two characters interact, but I found them quite memorable. The dynamic between the old, overconfident and cynical Judicator and the young, timid, idealistic Templar was very amusing to me. It’s also as if now that he has to respect so many people’s opinions, he’s really cracking down on those still subservient to him as an overcompensation for his loss of authority. Also in the vein of Aldaris’ consistent character, there is his complete unwillingness to cooperate with Kerrigan. Although Aldaris was of course correct, I think it was more due to his stubbornness and judgemental nature than any real insight into Kerrigan’s deception.

On the other hand, he’s more open to alternative opinions, and reacts well to rebuke. This is visible in Escape from Aiur when his unwillingness to abandon the planet is countered at by Zeratul, and in his visible deference to the Matriarch when they first meet. This is of course a consequence of Zeratul’s remonstrance back in The Trial of Tassadar and follows from the growth that was first expressed by Aldaris’ final speech in Eye of the Storm. It’s credible and important character growth, that helps to make Aldaris a deeper and more complex individual.

While being the only character in all of Brood War not to be tricked by Kerrigan (well, there’s Duran, but he was working for her most of the time so I don’t count him) gives him a huge bonus, even he doesn’t get spared by the character idiocy driven plot. In The Insurgent, he raises an army of Khalai to strike down Raszagal because he has discovered her to be Kerrigan’s pawn. Artanis, Zeratul and yourself are ordered to kill him for “perpetuating the Conclave’s sins” against the Dark Templar. This whole situation could have easily be resolved by Aldaris communicating with Artanis and Zeratul (or the other way ‘round) and explaining what he had learned about the Raszagal. Moreover, it’s completely expected of him to do so. Recall back in The Fall how often he contacted you and Tassadar to try to get you to either recant your association with the Dark Templar or to surrender to the Conclave? And those were times where he knew you were doing those criminal activities by your own free will. But now that he believes that you’re simply being manipulated, he doesn’t contact you at all. Why? Obviously the plot demands it, but there’s an obvious solution that fulfills both the needs of the plot and a consistent story. Aldaris knows that Kerrigan was able to gain mental dominance over Raszagal. He also knows that you, Artanis and Zeratul have all been away, secluded with Kerrigan for the voyage. It would be credible to play up Aldaris as paranoid, unable to trust any of you because he believes that Kerrigan could have enslaved you as well. This could be played with Artanis or Zeratul trying to contact Aldaris but him simply sounding insane in his responses, explaining why he won’t contact you or trust you, and also making Kerrigan that much more terrifying by demonstrating what her actions have done to such a cold, confident Protoss. In fact, I’d assume this hypothesis to be true anyway, if not for the fact that Aldaris clearly contradicts it by saying “you believe me to be a traitor”, indicating that he believes you to be deceived, not dominated.

Another problem with Aldaris’ fate is that it makes such a vastly more interesting story compared to the shopping list campaign we have instead. How did Aldaris learn of Raszagal’s secret? It’s such a classic story too, our hero discovers a dark conspiracy at the highest levels of the government, but his enemies take advantage of the mistakes of his past to destroy his credibility and raise the masses against him before he can expose the truth. In the end, he dies ignobly murdered by the very people he was trying to save. But no, instead of that we need to get crystals. This is what irritates me so much about this campaign, and Brood War in general. The stories are there, they’re just ignored. It’s actually funny to think that Aldaris’ role has been reversed from The Fall. There, we were trying to save the Protoss from the Zerg and he was hindering our efforts due to his prejudices, here it is he who is trying to save the Protoss from the Zerg, and we who murder him for our prejudices against the Judicator. Aldaris, it seems, will never get the credit he deserved.
Ah well. Even if Blizzard forgets about him, I will not. En Taro Adun Aldaris. Though you were not Templar, you gave your life in the defence of your people. You have reached the Khala’s end, and there is no greater glory than that.

Alexei Stukov

Alexei Stukov is introduced in the mission The Battle of Braxis, but he just orders you to surrender and sounds official. There’s not much to interpret about his character here, the only reason I’m including a section for him is because he introduces himself as ‘Admiral’ Alexei Stukov. His unit rank is also Admiral. However, everywhere else he is ranked vice-admiral. I couldn’t find an explanation for this on the wiki and it always intrigued me a bit. Was Stukov originally supposed to be the superior officer between him and DuGalle?

Artanis

Artanis’ is another missed story opportunity. More of a side-story, really, but it’s another classic. Artanis is young and inexperienced, a bit naïve and eager to please. His personality is perfectly suited as a follower, but the end of his journey has him commanding the Protoss people. Obviously, at some point he needs to grow up. This ‘coming of age’ story is one of the oldest archetypes in literature, and for good reason. Everyone needs to grow up, to emerge from the safe cocoon of our youth into the wider world. While Artanis is already an adult in the more common sense, the development from an idealistic warrior to leader of the Protoss people is similar.

Consider Artanis as he is introduced. He is obviously young, uncertain of himself. He begs for the approval of his elders. This is our first impression – him promising that he will “uphold the honour and traditions of the Templar.” Can you imagine Fenix telling us something like that? Of course not. It’s implied, it’s understood. Fenix would probably be insulted if you asked him to promise something like that, it would feel as though you’re doubting him. Tassadar certainly sounds offended when he has to assert that everything he has done was for Aiur. Artanis is a Templar Praetor, he wouldn’t hold that rank if it wasn’t already felt that he would uphold the honour and traditions of the Templar, but he still feels the need to say it. He then gets verbally slapped by Aldaris and doesn’t say anything. I like Artanis, but he’s not ready to lead at that point.

In a properly executed coming of age story, the natural development would have Artanis facing obstacles and gaining confidence in his abilities, until he comes to be capable of making his own decisions. For some, the naïve idealism collapses in the face of an uncaring world, and the fall into cynicism. For others, they hold on to that idealism and determinedly attempt to force the world to accept it, becoming heroes. The point of decision for Artanis comes in The Insurgent. Raszagal, the Matriarch and parental authority orders him to kill Aldaris. Artanis knows this is wrong – any time you utter a phrase like “right now we have a friend to kill” you really need to ask yourself if you’ve given this enough consideration. Artanis does not. Artanis is a good boy, Artanis won’t disobey mother. This is why I can’t accept that this character is now the leader of the Protoss. He never does grow up. Whether it’s his confusing brashness for bravery in The Battle of Braxis or his need for validation of his battle plan and his exaggerated humility in Return to Char, Artanis remains immature in his portrayal, and that is unfortunate.

Of course, that at least gives him an excuse for falling to Kerrigan’s deception. Raszagal is the authority figure in this campaign, she is Kerrigan’s pawn, and Artanis is portrayed as a very meek character, which all makes it credible that he would be easily manipulated.

Fenix

Fenix only has one line, but he appears twice, doing what he does best: killing Zerg in the defence of Aiur. His unwillingness to abandon his homeworld despite the overwhelming odds makes him both a very heroic and a very tragic figure. The Fall has clearly shown the importance the planet has in Protoss culture, every Protoss Templar is expected to be willing to sacrifice everything in its service. Fenix is simply fulfilling that obligation. If we think back to his quote back in Homeland, where he says that he is not disheartened by his defeat against the Zerg and crippling injuries because he is “still able to serve Aiur to a degree”, we might come to this realisation: abandoning Aiur might be more emotionally crippling for Fenix than the life-threatening injuries he sustained. It’s an interesting perspective into Protoss culture, and it could have been another element in a story revolving around the Khalai evacuation of Aiur and the reunification with the Nerazim, but it was sadly underplayed.

James Raynor

Again, there’s not much to say here, but while the Templar’s willingness to give their lives for Aiur is well established, I’ve got to wonder a bit about Raynor’s decision to stay on Aiur. It might have been simple plot convenience, but I wonder if Raynor might not have something of a death wish. If we continue where we left off in his character development, he’s gradually descending into despair. Tassadar, an authority he could finally trust, someone who might have reawakened his lost idealism, sacrificed himself to save Aiur from the Swarm, and to the perspective of Raynor, that might mean that Tassadar gave his life for nothing. Thus, another idealist dies to a cruel world. Perhaps Raynor hoped to die fighting the Zerg and be done with all this misery?

Raszagal

I’m not sure what to make of Raszagal, given that she was apparently Kerrigan’s puppet the whole time. She seems to oscillate between a generous, forgiving benevolence such as when she welcomes you and the Khalai in Legacy of the Xel’Naga or when she mentions that everyone, even Kerrigan, deserves a chance to atone for their past. This may be vestiges of her original, true personality, since Zeratul describes her as “a wise and gentle soul” and there is certainly something of that which can be seen.

However, that portion of her personality seems to be overcome by what I must therefore assume is Kerrigan’s control over her. Her use of near religious fervour when calling the Protoss to war, like many other aspect of her behaviour, recalls Aldaris and the Conclave at their worst. Which leads us to wonder why exactly she expresses herself this way. Is it Kerrigan toying with the Protoss, subtly mocking them? It might be, though Kerrigan has done nothing to incline me to believe she is capable of such subtlety, and beside which we haven’t seen an opportunity for her to really delve into Protoss culture enough to know how to parody it. More likely, this is simply a result of the merging of Nerazim and Khalai cultures, and therefore we would assume that Raszagal’s persona was always steeped in religious mysticism, even before it was corrupted into this warlike fanaticism.

I also have to wonder at the phrase “my warrior spirit will shine before you, and light your path to victory.” Aside from the glorification of the military which is again a similarity between Khalai and Nerazim culture, it’s really strange to think of Raszagal as a warrior. Her presumed original character, her role in the story, even her title of Matriarch all seem to indicate a role more in tune with “wise elder” than with “warrior”, it’s one of those phrases that always seemed out of place. It’s not unreasonable to believe that she used to be a warrior, from what we know of the Dark Templar, it’s even entirely credible and expected. It just doesn’t seem to fit the character as she was presented. Maybe if her past as a warrior had been further touched upon, I don’t know.

Incidentally, I’ve decided to believe that Raszagal’s possession is due to some form of neural parasite like that of the Infestors in StarCraft II. Psionic domination seems to be what is implied, but that just leads me to wonder why Kerrigan doesn’t use that more often, while the neural parasite offers an explanation – she needs to get close enough to her targets to implant it. Most faction leaders have pretty good personal security around them, so that wouldn’t be easy to achieve. Raszagal, on the other hand, was caught before she learned of the Zerg threat, and Kerrigan being a highly trained Ghost makes that solution more plausible.

Sarah Kerrigan

So, Kerrigan. It’s about time I get into why her scheming really isn’t as impressive as we are supposed to accept. Artanis tells us in Countdown that “this entire chain of events has been masterminded by Kerrigan” and this is apparently what the writers wanted us to believe, but what has Kerrigan really done? She participated in retrieving the crystals, and she murdered Aldaris before he could reveal her secret. So let’s consider both of these in turn.

Why did Kerrigan come to Shakuras? I really have no idea. Apparently, she wanted to help the Protoss activate the Xel’Naga Temple and destroy her Zerg enemies on the planet, so fair enough. But has she actually manipulated anything in order to bring this about? Sure, she had control over Raszagal, and Raszagal was the one to offer the opportunity, but we can’t count her as part of Kerrigan’s manipulation, because she didn’t have to show up in person for this to occur. The fact is that the Protoss had decided to use the Temple before Kerrigan even appeared, so that can’t be why she came. Kerrigan’s presence really didn’t impact the Temple plans in any way, she just provided some military support in the retrieval of the crystals. So there’s no masterminding there.

Then there’s the murder of Aldaris. There’s no masterminding there either, she just killed Aldaris before he could expose her secrets. Since her control over Raszagal was instrumental in her ultimate plan of destroying the second Overmind, that could be considered quick thinking and good reactions, except that the only reason Aldaris learned of that secret was because he was suspicious of Kerrigan in the first place. Recall in Legacy of the Xel’Naga how he treated Raszagal with respect and deference. If not for Raszagal’s unquestioning support of Kerrigan, Aldaris might have never suspected anything. In other words, killing Aldaris just before he revealed her secrets was no more than a last minute save from her own screw-up. Her coming to Shakuras nearly caused the complete ruin of her own schemes, and she didn’t gain anything from it. If at least Kerrigan didn’t explicitly state that she made Raszagal her puppet before this encounter, one could say that she has come to Shakuras in order to enslave Raszagal, that would at least have given her presence some purpose, and then we could have claimed that she had masterminded something.

Then there’s her deception. There’s really no merit there, all she did was say “I’m no longer controlled by the Overmind, promise!” which left the Protoss with two choices: either kill her anyway and risk murdering someone who was essentially an innocent victim, or give her a chance to prove herself. The fact that the Protoss chose the latter has nothing to do with any subtlety or cunning on Kerrigan’s part, it’s just the Protoss’ ethics. And also the fact that they didn’t think too much about it. Consider this. If Kerrigan had really suddenly become free of the Overmind’s control, how would she have reacted? Well, there are a number of possibilities, including suicide or trying to find a way to lose her consciousness to the Swarm again because she didn’t want to face the atrocities she had committed, but I think the two major option are either attempt to retrieve her past, either by confronting Mengsk or by trying to find Raynor, which she obviously didn’t do, or else accept her new situation as a Zerg and try to start a new life. In that case, the first thing to do would probably be to ensure your continued freedom by fighting Daggoth and the new Overmind. So far so good.

But again, why go to Shakuras? The obvious place to fight the Overmind and Daggoth is on Char. If she doesn’t have the means to assault Char directly, then there are still a number of Zerg-touched planets she could fight on – Brontes, Dylar IV, Tarsonis, Aiur. What does Shakuras have that none of those other planets don’t? The answer is obviously the Protoss. If our characters had really thought about it, this would have lead them to the conclusion that Kerrigan was here because she needed them. After all, only the Dark Templar can kill the Overmind or the Cerebrates. And the fact that Kerrigan wanted to use them should have immediately made them suspicious, she obviously wasn’t being honest with them, and if she was dishonest, then how far could she really be trusted? Fortunately for Kerrigan, none of the Protoss thought of this, so she gets away with her poorly thought out deception on the basis that the Protoss have ethics. I don’t count that as an accomplishment.

As for Kerrigan’s character, she is still as adolescent as she was in Overmind. She can’t help but taunt and mock the Protoss even as she’s pretending to be their ally, which again illustrates her failures as a manipulator as she can’t even keep herself under control. And after murdering Aldaris, right in the middle of two battle-ready Protoss armies, she stays around and taunts them, claiming that she’s been using them to her own ends. Only profound insecurity would lead someone to such a stupid and brash gesture. It’s a bit like Artanis’ casual dismissal of the UED stretched out to ridiculous extents.

Zeratul

I’m not sure who of Artanis or Zeratul was supposed to be our protagonist for this campaign. Maybe if Artanis’ coming of age story had been executed properly he would have been it, but in the absence of such a resolution, I think the burden falls to Zeratul. And in this case, it is certainly a burden. Zeratul had all of three noteworthy speaking moments in The Fall. There he was portrayed as a wise and learned mystic. His character was mysterious and distant. This was all intentional, I suspect. Unfortunately, it is a simple fact that the easiest way to destroy the enigmatic is overexposure. Zeratul is probably the character with the most lines in The Stand, over the course of which we cannot help but start feeling familiar with him. And once the shroud of mystery is removed, well, Zeratul is simply another noble and stoic Protoss warrior.

In StarCraft, he speaks to Tassadar, our protagonist and Twilight Messiah, as a mentor and teacher. He hints at an incredible array of experiences and knowledge during his conversation with Aldaris. In Shadow Hunters he reveals insight into the very thoughts of the Overmind. When Zeratul appears, he seems imposing and awe inspiring, and when he can’t be those things, he simply doesn’t speak. Cutting out the banalities helps to conserve his great moments. But when you have him talking every mission, there is simply no way you can ensure that he remains as impressive and memorable. Making Zeratul the protagonist of this campaign changed his character permanently. There is no going back.

This is not saying that Zeratul’s character is flawed or badly portrayed in The Stand, he’s every bit as awesome as you could expect him to be. He demonstrates wisdom and good judgment when arguing with Aldaris in Escape from Aiur, or when calling Artanis to caution in The Battle of Braxis, or by observing the peculiarities of Raszagal’s behaviour. He also maintains that aura of knowledge and experience. It is he who knows what to do when Aiur is falling, it is he who explains what happened to Khyrador, and it is he who remembers the Khalis’ presence on Char. He also expresses a soothing confidence in Fenix and Raynor’s abilities when Artanis fears for them, and it is he who has the strength of character to question Raszagal on her attitude. He is a beacon of strength for all around him. Yes, Zeratul is still a great character, he’s just not mysterious anymore. And now that he has become essentially the face of the Protoss in Wings of Liberty, it’s unlikely that this will change.

However, Zeratul too suffers from the character idiocy driven plot. I could understand him blindly obeying orders to kill Aldaris. I’d be disappointed, but he quite clearly admires Raszagal and respects her judgment, so it’s not curious that he’d do it, it’s just strange that he never tries to contact Aldaris to try to resolve this before slaughtering his way through an entire legion of Protoss. What is unforgiveable, on the other hand, is that he lets Kerrigan go after she admits that she never really changed and that she was using them for her own gains. She already deserves to die for her crimes, the only thing keeping her alive was the possibility that she was no longer that person. Now that she has admitted that she is, and that she has compounded her past crimes with new murders of Protoss, Zeratul just lets her go? This is one of the most incomprehensible decisions in the entire series.

One final detail. Back in Overmind, I mentioned that Zeratul has a tendency to give credit where none is due. Then, it was because he responds to Kerrigan calling him a coward with “well spoken”, but in The Stand he adds to more instances, leading me to believe that this is an actual character trait, bizarre as it may be. The first one is when Kerrigan retrieves the Uraj Crystal and Zeratul says “You have done well, Kerrigan. There is more to you than it seems. Perhaps I have misjudged you.” Why? All she has demonstrated is her ability to slaughter Terrans to achieve her goals, and this was already well established back on Char. Just because her goals happen to coincide with Zeratul’s doesn’t signify anything new about her character. I have no idea what Zeratul sees in this. The second instance is Artanis’s plan on Char. Zeratul qualifies this as a “bold plan” and claims that Artanis’ courage rivals that of Tassadar. It may well be bold, but it’s a pretty stupid plan, and I would hope Tassadar wouldn’t suggest it. If you’re going to start hacking at the Overmind until it loses control of the Swarm, and you have plenty of Dark Templar at hand, why not simply kill it? I could understand using purifier beams to destroy it from orbit, since one would assume they have no orbital weapons that fire Void energies capable of slaying the Overmind, but this is not what they do. The plan really is to send Protoss to hack at the Overmind in melee. It’s really no more difficult to send Dark Templar along. It really is a bizarre trait for Zeratul. Maybe it’s just character derailment, or plot-induced stupidity, but it’s strangely consistent if it’s a mistake.

It occurs to me that the campaigns in Brood War follow the same order they did in StarCraft. Not racially, of course, but thematically. Rebel Yell was largely self-contained, aside from producing the Queen of Blades, few of the events within would impact the rest of the game’s story. Likewise, The Stand has, if anything, even fewer repercussions, as those Protoss will not be seen again until the very end of the game, nor will any of the events that took place within the campaign affect the overall storyline of Brood War. This is not to say that they are equal in merit however – while Rebel Yell did not have much impact on the war between the Zerg and the Protoss that was the core of the first game’s story, it did help define our understanding of the setting through the development of the Terran, Zerg and Protoss factions that participated in it and also served to develop and produce Sarah Kerrigan and James Raynor, characters that would offer significant support to the Zerg and Protoss respectively, not to mention their own worthy contributions to the story. The campaign also has important effects on subsequent games in the setting, as well as having consistently strong missions storywise, every one of the ten missions contributing to the plot, setting or character development. The Stand lacked most of these things, which explains why my opinion of the two campaigns diverged so strongly.

The Iron Fist, like Overmind, introduces their respective games’ primary antagonists, the United Earth Directorate and the Zerg Swarm. In these campaigns, we help the antagonists set themselves up to be on the very brink of total victory, and in the third campaign – Queen of Blades and The Fall – we undo those victories to various degrees and triumph over the antagonists. In StarCraft, while the Overmind is destroyed, the Zerg invasion has completely devastated Aiur, and Kerrigan, whom we spent most of Overmind developing and protecting, is still alive, so it’s not as if everything that was done in that campaign was lost. There is essentially nothing that happens in The Iron Fist that isn’t undone before the end of Brood War, however.

One has to wonder why the United Earth Directorate was introduced to the setting. One reason was likely to force Terrans to have greater interaction with the other races, but if so it was largely a failure. While the UED does appear frequently in Queen of Blades, it only appears once in The Stand, and the Terran campaign itself is surprisingly similar in distribution to Rebel Yell: 5 missions involve Terran versus Terran in both – and with The Iron Fist only having 8 missions total, that’s a greater proportion than the campaign that was expressly about a Terran revolution – a single mission involves fighting the Protoss, and in either case that mission also includes Zerg that end up overrunning you. Finally, there are 5 missions against the Zerg in Rebel Yell (not counting the five Zerglings in The Jacobs Installation) and 4 in The Iron Fist, so surprisingly, the United Earth Directorate campaign involves fighting aliens less than the Sons of Korhal campaign. What’s more bizarre, is that if involving Terrans in the greater conflict was the goal, then the present situation already allows for it. The Terrans are the only race to emerge from StarCraft as strong, if not stronger, than they entered it. With the Zerg confused by the loss of the Overmind and divided between Kerrigan and the Cerebrates, and the Protoss broken and reeling, circumstances seem ideal for Emperor Mengsk to score political points and rally the Terran population by taking the fight to the aliens and keeping them from regaining their strength. Terran versus Terran conflict would also be easily available through the Umojan Protectorate or Kel-Morian Combine, factions that have been mentioned frequently as major factors in the Terran balance of power, but have never been developed or even, aside from the one unimportant appearance of the Kel-Morian Combine in Queen of Blades, even participated in the story thus far. When such groups are hardly even sketched out, it seems a bit overeager to introduce a whole new Terran faction to the game.

There’s a redundancy about the UED too. The characters don’t really feel different than the might have had they been Dominion officers instead. Both are militaristic fascist organisations with ambitions of military expansion, imperialism, aggrandisement of humanity, and so forth. As you will recall, Rebel Yell ended on a note of futility, after spending most of the campaign fighting against the Confederacy only to install the equally corrupt Dominion. In The Iron Fist we experience something similar, though in this case it seems unlikely to have been deliberate – we spend five out of eight missions in The Iron Fist overthrowing Mengsk, which seems silly, since nothing that the UED does is different from what the Dominion’s objectives might credibly have been, given the opportunity. If the campaign had instead focused on one of the existing Terran factions, then those five missions could have been used to develop actual Terran politics or alien conflict instead. As it is, a story that sounds like it should be about imposing human authority over extraterrestrial life in the Koprulu Sector only begins that angle in To Chain the Beast, the very last mission of the campaign, or at best halfway through Patriot’s Blood.

The introduction of the United Earth Directorate brings about a mess of confusion. For one thing, how did they know anything of what occurred in the Sector? They needed something or someone capable of transmitting that information. In the former case, that would imply that at the time the supercarriers were sent from Earth, the UPL was able – and willing – to send in mechanised drones with battery life of centuries and an artificial intelligence capable of adapting to never before chartered environments independent of the supercomputer ATLAS (which even the other three supercarriers didn’t have), equipped with a communication system capable of transmitting data to Earth – with warp drives far more powerful than the supercarriers, since the data has to reach Earth in ridiculous short times even though the supercarriers themselves took 30 years to reach their destination at warp speed – and still be small enough to evade detection, or have a cloaking system (again, with enough energy to remain functional for centuries). That doesn’t sound like antiquated Terran tech, that sounds like a next-generation Protoss Observer.

The alternative, that the information was provided by human spies has its own problems. For starters, why would the UPL put spies in a group of prisoners slated for execution in “Project Purification”, or in a group of prisoners sent to colonise Gantris VI – a planet that was approximately one year’s warp travel from Earth? Surely a colony on Gantris VI would have been well within the UPL’s ability to monitor without needing to send in loyal agents. Unless we want to venture into the possibility that the UPL was responsible for ATLAS’s malfunction and the Terrans being sent across the galaxy as part of some overly complicated conspiracy, but even then one has to wonder who would be loyal enough to embark on this no-return voyage. Which brings us to my next point – even if there were UPL spies aboard the supercarriers, it seems unlikely that they would remain loyal for long to that distant power that had essentially abandoned them to die on the other side of the galaxy. More than that, the loyalty of those spies is irrelevant, since it would be multiple generations before the kind of warp technology necessary to communicate with Earth would become available. It was over sixty years before the Terrans were even able to develop sub-light space travel, after all. So the UPL would need not only stupidly loyal spies, but stupidly loyal spy families. That’s a lot of loyalty to expect from people who are getting all of absolutely nothing out of it.

And where are those spies, anyway? The UED Expeditionary Fleet was sent in response to the second Overmind. When did the UED learn of that? Even the Protoss only learn about it when they are directly informed by a powerful Zerg insider. Not only am I unaware of any Terran group who would know about the second Overmind, it is questionable whether any Terran group outside of Raynor’s Raiders knows about the first Overmind. After all, it only manifested itself on that weird holy ground and khaydarin crystal combination on Aiur, and it dies there at the end of The Fall. Since it never communicated with anyone outside the Swarm, its unlikely any Terran group learned about it outside the Raiders, at least until the latter half of Brood War. And the UED doesn’t have any spies among Raynor’s men either, as we can certainly determine from their curious lack of knowledge about James Raynor (as we can tell by DuGalle’s ignorance of Raynor’s identity even after the “rebel command ship Hyperion” is identified in Emperor’s Fall) or Sarah Kerrigan (this time in To Chain the Beast). Anyone with insider information from Raynor’s crew would know about these two, and at the very least information regarding the Queen of Blades would have been considered important to the UED. On the other hand, they apparently know about “the devastated Protoss homeworld of Aiur”, which is impossible since we’ve just established the UED has no spies among Raynor’s men and that the “secret location of Aiur” was a significant plot point in StarCraft. The knowledge available to the UED is haphazard and incoherent, which is truly annoying, but consistent with their introduction as a retcon.

Oh, and they’d have to be ridiculously efficient too. I’m assuming that the transition between the United Powers League and United Earth Directorate and inclusion of multiple new countries into it happened soon after the aliens first appeared, but given that we are expressly told that the Expeditionary Fleet was sent in reaction to the second Overmind, then they had to start their preparations sometime between the first Overmind’s death in late July and their arrival on Braxis in September. Of course, that’s being optimistic, since I have no idea when the new Overmind was born, nor when the UED learned of it. We – and the Protoss on Shakuras who were informed directly by Infested Kerrigan – only learn of it before setting out for Braxis. By the time we leave Braxis, the UED is already there and has blockaded the planet. We must assume that the UED learned about the second Overmind before the Protoss then. Even if we assume that the UED knew about the second Overmind from the moment the first one died, which is practically impossible since Daggoth himself was on Aiur at the time, that still leaves us with at the very most four months for the UED to receive the information, plan their invasion of the Koprulu Sector, amass and train an Expeditionary Fleet powerful enough to fulfill those objectives – and this can’t have been a simple task, this force would have to be powerful enough to handle threats the likes of which the UED never had to face in its home sector, and yet it couldn’t deplete its active army, which would still be needed to defend the regime from threats at home – devise an Overmind-controlling drug (more on this later) and then travel there. It puts a different perspective on the Adjutant’s references to the “long voyage from Earth” and “long cold sleep” too. A months-long or weeks-long voyage is certainly nothing to scoff at, but neither is it the end of the world.

For all that, I actually enjoyed The Iron Fist. A large part of that is the dynamics between DuGalle, Stukov and Duran, but there is also a return to more significant missions after the horrible plot of The Stand. While I don’t find that overthrowing the Terran Dominion was an especially interesting plot, it is an important objective for the UED to maintain control over the Sector – though one wonders why they didn’t bother conquering the Morian and Umojan worlds too – and the missions we are given help progress that plot in credible and useful ways. With the exception of Emperor’s Flight which is really no more than an extension of Emperor’s Fall, there is actual progression toward your goal, even though Mengsk does end up escaping. That somewhat undercuts the satisfaction of getting this far, since five of the six previous missions had the ultimate goal of his execution. Still, the invasion of Char makes for a satisfactory climax (and it was obviously reused in Wings of Liberty) and Kerrigan’s declaration of war is an appropriate conclusion for the campaign and set up for the final arc.

The Psi Disrupter too makes for an acceptable plot device, for now. While it does, like the Xel’Naga Temple in The Stand, serve as a device to allow you to fulfill your objectives without needing to outthink or outfight your enemies directly, its main purpose in the story is to serve as the source of conflict between the campaign’s three characters, culminating in Stukov’s death and Duran’s betrayal in Patriot’s Blood, which like the Dark Templar’s Void energies in The Fall incline me to be lenient toward it. If the plot device allows the development of character and story rather than propping up an otherwise empty plot (as was the case in The Stand) it is far more tolerable. Patriot’s Blood is also a great mood setter. In a way, it plays out much like The Insurgent should have. Here the lack of communication makes sense – Stukov knows there’s no point in speaking with Duran, and DuGalle won’t initiate contact because he would lose the element of surprise. It also works because there is a solid element – the Psi Disrupter – to provide concrete basis to the accusation of treason. Besides, Samir Duran is a much better manipulator than Kerrigan has ever proven to be, having already started set the seeds for this moment in Ruins of Tarsonis. Alexei’s last words are an appeal to redemption, a gripping demand for vindication and affirmation of his loyalty, driving home your error. Aldaris, on the other hand, was contemptuous and implied that those attacking him were idiots, which while I might agree with, certainly doesn’t endear him to us. And Duran immediately vanishes instead of gloating about how he’s used everyone until DuGalle tells him to “begone from this Psi Diusrupter. You are no longer welcome here.” I’m pretty sure DuGalle would have had Duran killed if he could.

The Disrupter does have significant problems though. Notably, it’s Terran technology. I mentioned back when dealing with Rebel Yell that the Psi Emitters were such clever devices – a simple yet effective application of the observable consequences of the Overmind’s desires in order to create a decoy or lure. The Psi Disrupter is no such mechanism. If it were so simple to disrupt the Swarm’s communications that Confederate scientists were able to build a device to do so from scratch in about a year, one has to wonder why no other Terran faction has done so in the four years between Brood War and Wings of Liberty. Or, for that matter, why the Protoss haven’t. You would think that for such a technologically advanced species, replicating the Psi Disrupter would be easily done after having already seen the Confederate one in effect. Ancient Xel’Naga devices at least have the benefit of being “so advanced it’s magic” technology that prevents easy replication.

The invasion of Char may be a suitable climax for the campaign, however there was one monumentally atrocious element to it: the United Earth Directorate uses drugs to mind control the eternal will of the Swarm. I’ve heard some pretty crazy conspiracy theories about pharmaceutical corporations, but enslaving the Zerg Swarm is pretty insane by any standards. It’s hard to overstate how devastating this is for this story and that of the original StarCraft. The Overmind, after all, is effectively an anthropomorphisation of the Zerg Swarm, an attribution of recognisable characteristics and singular will to a combined essence of a species of countless billions. The Overmind is not a racial leader like Arcturus Mengsk or Raszagal, it is not an individual, it is the entire Zerg race, and to so summarily overcome it reflects poorly on the entirety of the Swarm. It also renders much of The Fall preposterous, not to mention demeaning Tassadar’s sacrifice. It really wasn’t necessary to find the Dark Templar and bring them back to Aiur, because the Void energies aren’t the only thing that can harm the Overmind – so can drugs. Tassadar’s death becomes meaningless because killing the Overmind achieved nothing, the Zerg simply created a new one. Really, had the Protoss had better pharmaceutical scientists among the Khalai, the entire thing might have been averted. What was the Overmind even doing on Char, physically incarnate? I mentioned this in The Stand, but what happened to that whole Xel’Naga holy ground thing from the end of Overmind?

Again, human pharmaceutical companies have the power to enslave the eternal will of the Swarm. I can’t get over how this is canon lore. I imagine it can’t be a coincidence that starting with Brood War, the Zerg lose any personality or identity they ever had. But more on that in the Zerg campaign itself.

Alexei Stukov

The United Earth Directorate officers are certainly selected for competence. Unlike Edmund Duke, there is never any doubt that Stukov and DuGalle are effective at what they do. They also benefit from being manipulated by Duran rather than Kerrigan, meaning that they dodge the character idiocy that is so prevalent in Brood War. Alexei strikes me as cool but quick-witted, he is clearly the more open-minded of the two officers, or perhaps the most adventurous. In the Psi Disrupter, for example, he sees and opportunity where DuGalle sees a threat. He is more willing to trust Samir Duran when they first recruit him, but he is also the first to realise that Duran’s loyalties are not all that they could be. He also goes against DuGalle’s orders regarding the Disrupter and returns to Braxis without informing the Admiral.

Stukov and DuGalle represent something of a first for characters in this series: a pair of linked characters. Other characters link up through the development of the story, but Stukov and DuGalle are introduced as being close friends already, with the implication of a long and complex background to their friendship. They are neither of them young, they have had long lives before they even entered the story. DuGalle obviously trusts Stukov implicitly, as he tells Duran in Patriot’s Blood, and yet… in The Dylarian Shipyards, Gerard mentions how Alexei knows about his intolerance for traitors, and Alexei replies “only too well”. A curious choice of words, implying that Stukov has personally suffered from DuGalle’s perspective on treason. Was Stukov a traitor at one time? It seems unlikely, either that the UED would trust a turncoat with such a critical endeavour, or that DuGalle would grow so close to him, but these are exactly the kinds of unique events that might make such friendships so interesting. There’s a definite tension between the two in Brood War’s introductory cinematic, too. One that isn’t repeated anywhere in The Iron Fist, the closest being DuGalle’s curt dismissal of Stukov’s objections in Ruins of Tarsonis. On the other hand, a more probably explanation is simply that Alexei and Gerard have disagreed on this topic before, likely repeatedly. Stukov may be more willing to use traitors and see great interest in their value, whereas DuGalle would see them as a liability, a situation that mirrors their views on the Psi Disrupter. If so, then in this case Gerard was right – Duran certainly proved to be untrustworthy. Friends who have known each other for long tend to know what subjects will cause disagreement or discomfort, this may be the reason for the tension in the opening cinematic too. It’s not that DuGalle didn’t trust Stukov, he simply knew that this particular element would be something Alexei might be reluctant to go through with.

Alexei seems to give out most of the orders on the field. He was also the one to intercept the Protoss in The Battle of Braxis. I think this is meant to imply that like the player character, he has a more tactically focused role in the Fleet, while DuGalle handles the strategy and logistics. This also fits in with what we’ve observed of their personalities: Alexei reacts fast and well, and is quick to seize opportunities, while Gerard is cautious and meticulous. Obviously, this would make Kerrigan regard Alexei as more of a threat as she has no grasp of subtlety whatsoever, being herself closer to Alexei’s methods.

Alexei also gets flustered. There is an element of fear when he speaks of the Zerg on Aiur in Emperor’s Flight, in contrast to Gerard’s calm and collected rationale. He also gets irate with Duran both in Ruins of Tarsonis and at the end of Emperor’s Flight, which lead him to commit the grave mistake of running off to Braxis without warning his friend. This error gets exploited by Duran and leads to his death.

One of the Ghosts in Ruins of Tarsonis refers to him as Admiral Stukov again. I still don’t get it, maybe it’s something quite simple, and vice-admirals are actually referred to as admirals in unofficial shorthand?

Arcturus Mengsk

Arcturus Mengsk reacts rather curiously to his defeat in Emperor’s Fall. Not only does he sound quite calm about the whole thing, which is unlike his previous or subsequent appearances. Maybe he really was planning his return to power, his threat to DuGalle does seem to contain that note of bragging that one would expect from him. His polite address to Admiral DuGalle is again his conceit of appearing suave and elegant, but there’s really no excuse for his surprise at being told he would be executed. This man is supposed to be brilliant, but he hasn’t even considered the possibility that he might be executed?

Gerard DuGalle

DuGalle is, like Stukov, an excellent character and officer. He seems more methodical than Stukov, slow and inexorable, but still exceptionally efficient at getting his way and capable of adapting to changing circumstances. He has an air of confidence and authority, and when he speaks others fall silent. He gives orders with the certainty that they will be carried out. We’ve already discussed him a bit, how he contrasts with Alexei and what might lurk in their past, there’s no need to retread that ground.

While it is Alexei who addresses the Protoss in the Battle of Braxis and General Duke in The Dylarian Shipyards, DuGalle is the one to speak to Arcturus Mengsk and Kerrigan. While in the latter case Stukov is dead, it seems that DuGalle had something of a personal interest in Mengsk which drove him to meet the man personally. Perhaps he was impressed with the efficiency of Mengsk’s overthrow of the Confederacy, he certainly speaks to him in a very complimentary fashion, which doesn’t seem to be for appearances’ sake like Mengs’s own attitude. After all, there was really no need for DuGalle to speak with Mengsk at all. It seems that Arcturus fails in the Admiral’s expectations though when all he has to answer to the statement of his impending execution is some panicked and ludicrous threat.

He’s pretty reasonable, and always calm about what his next move will be. Think about Patriot’s Blood when he has been manipulated into killing his best friend and sabotaging his own mission. Most other Terran characters would be raging. Raynor would be blaming everyone including himself, Mengsk would be furious at being tricked, Stukov would be yelling at Duran, but Gerard DuGalle has processed all this and has arrived at his new plan: find Duran, kill him. And seconds later he has to change priorities and save the Psi Disrupter, and he just switches over smoothly. If anybody, he resembles General Duke who reacts so dismissively whatever the situation is, but DuGalle is far more cautious, and far more cunning.

This said, I have to wonder at his reasoning for wanting the Psi Disrupter destroyed. True, it could be disastrous to their plans of controlling the Swarm if it fell into the hands of Arcturus Mengsk, but since their established order of engagement appears to be first the Dominion, then the Zerg, and finally the Protoss, one has to wonder how it would really play a part. After all, according to this plan Arcturus was going to be dead before they even tackled the Zerg, so there was no chance whatsoever of Mengsk disrupting the UED control over the Swarm.

Likewise, if the fact that Alexei did not destroy the Psi Disrupter is incontrovertible evidence that Stukov is a traitor and must be executed, then shouldn’t he have executed Duran as well? Duran did move his troops out of position on Aiur, that’s clearly a violation of orders as well, no matter that Duran feigned not to hear Stukov’s orders to return to the position that he had already been ordered to be in.

James Raynor

There’s not much to say about Raynor’s appearance in Emperor’s Fall. For someone working with Kerrigan and saving Arcturus Mengsk, he doesn’t give much sign of the history between them, really. It’s a bit disappointing, I must admit. A reunion between Raynor and Mengsk should’ve had much more fireworks.

Beside, why is Raynor saving Mengsk anyway? Sure, Kerrigan told him to, but she didn’t give a reason why. It’s not like Raynor to just do whatever it is Kerrigan asks him, it is well within character for him to make stupid decisions in an attempt to save her, but this is not the same thing at all. Alas, I’m afraid there will be no answer to this question.

Samir Duran

Samir Duran plays the role of Kerrigan’s hand in this campaign, and as a cunning manipulator, he fares much better than she did. For starters, he at least gives a credible reason for joining the UED Expeditionary Fleet. But mostly, he we can see him actively sabotage the UED’s efforts at numerous occasions. He attempts to make himself invaluable by providing insight into the Dominion’s methods and secrets, he tries to divide the highest officers, he gives hindering counsel and ultimately, he sabotages the mission to capture Mengsk, murders Stukov, and sets the Zerg loose on the Disrupter.

Importantly, his manipulations rely on actual faults within his victims. You can tell when he wants to get something done by his suddenly far more humble tone and manner. He tries to play on Alexei’s pride by insinuating that he doubts his fleet’s capacity, but it doesn’t work. However, you can be sure that when he saw that Alexei had personally dispatched Ghosts to handle the Disrupter’s disassembly, he had strong suspicions about Alexei’s real objective – which is why he let him do it. It’s likely also why he returned to the Fleet after his sabotage on Aiur – with Alexei gone, he knew he finally had an opportunity to turn the UED against itself. Obviously if Stukov had remained, it would have been quite foolish to return, as Alexei was not at all fooled by Duran’s “equipment malfunction” charade and the consequences would likely have been disastrous for Duran.

I wonder about the Zerg Broods on Tarsonis being incapacitated by destroying their Hives. That doesn’t seem to fit with any existing Zerg command structure. Since Tarsonis serves as a base for Kerrigan, and Duran himself serves her, I wonder if the whole thing wasn’t planned between the two of them to make Duran appear more valuable to the UED?

One has to wonder about Duran’s origins, and about the Confederate resistance he commanded, but that ventures close to pure speculation. It’s interesting to wonder how long ago Duran started preparing his backstory to deceive not only the UED, but Kerrigan as well. How could Duran have known about the UED’s arrival? Even if he was contacted by Kerrigan after her encounter with the Fleet in The Battle of Braxis, that leaves very little time for Duran to set himself up. What was Duran and his group really set up to accomplish?

There is very little I can say about Duran, it is after all one of his core character traits to remain mysterious.

Sarah Kerrigan

Kerrigan appears only briefly at the very end of the campaign, to set up the conflict between her and the UED that would drive the next campaign. She’s reverted to her brash, overconfident, taunting personality which, given how pathetic her scheming side turned out to be, is very much appreciated. She’s just being villainous and claiming that she’s going to kick everybody’s arses and that she owns thing. Again, she talks a big deal, it’s really important for her to have her enemies know how powerful she is, consistent with her adolescent, insecure personality. Her parting taunt – about DuGalle murdering Stukov – is particularly delightful though, she’s at least improved in that respect from simply calling her enemies cowards.

Queen of Blades, being the Zerg campaign, suffers most from something that had been hinted of back in Overmind: the disconcerting lack of Zerg characters. Overmind was at its best when it employed the full cast of Zerg characters, plus enemy characters and at its worst when that cast was decreased, perhaps most notably for The Culling, where the Overmind is silent, Zasz has just been murdered, and Daggoth and Kerrigan leave you so they can hunt down Protoss. It also ended anticlimactically with only the Overmind as an important character – Daggoth, as has been mentioned, had good potential as a character but was never able to develop due to being in the Overmind’s shadow. Still, the Overmind was the embodiment of the entire Zerg species, and he could monologue. In fact, the Overmind seldom actually had conversations, it simply stated its desires or intentions or thoughts, and that was that. Kerrigan is different. When Kerrigan is talking alone, or to essentially non-character Infested Duran, the scenes are boring. Prime examples are Fury of the Swarm and Drawing of the Web, where their talk can be considered entirely expository. Kerrigan’s personality really only manifests itself through her antagonism, it’s a very shallow characterisation.

Thankfully, the campaign does provide us with many characters for Kerrigan to antagonise, but the problem is that the story’s dependence on these characters means that there is very little Zerg involvement in this supposedly Zerg campaign. Neither the new Overmind nor any Cerebrate, including Daggoth, get any speaking lines in this campaign, nor indeed, the entire game. Worse still, the closest thing to Zerg characters we do get are Infested Duran – who really doesn’t show any traits that could be qualified as anything but a particularly servile Terran – and Infested Kerrigan herself, who is also largely Terran. I, fortunately, believe that much of Infested Kerrigan’s personality is due to her infestation, but for those who believe that she is entirely responsible for her choices, the situation is even worse: since Kerrigan could essentially be considered human for them, they are left with no Zerg characters at all!

Whatever her personality, her ambitions are clearly human. She seeks control, power, and respect through fear. There is nothing alien there, nothing about what the Zerg want, what they fear, what they desire, and so on. I had previously said that the Overmind was the characterisation of the Swarm, and in this game the Overmind is a non-character. Brood War has reduced this entire alien race to a plot device, a weapon for characters to use against each other. And that means the Zerg campaign is fundamentally flawed. But worse still, the name of the expansion should hint at the Zerg being the focus of its story. And it is, in the same way that the Shakuras Temple is the focus of The Stand or the Xel’Naga Artefact is the focus of Wings of Liberty. But I had hoped for something more. I had hoped that the conflict between Kerrigan, Daggoth and other Cerebrates would give us insight into the identity of the Zerg, that they would all represent different aspects of the Swarm, different and in conflict, but that lie wholly within the gestalt of the Swarm. As the Overmind had once said. This campaign should have been about Kerrigan’s conflict with Daggoth, not fighting with some Terrans. That would have developed the Zerg’s identity, it would have finally given Daggoth the opportunity to fully realise his untapped potential as a character but instead that identity was completely stripped by what we were given. I had expected ‘Brood War’ to mean a war between Broods, like, say, the Napoleonic Wars were Napoleon’s wars, or the World Wars were the wars where the whole world was embattled, instead ‘Brood War’ simply referred to the weapon used in the battle between Kerrigan and the UED, a battle fought using Broods, so closer in definition to naval war or atomic war. There isn’t even any significance to the conflict between Kerrigan and the UED, like the dualistic conflict between the Swarm and the Protoss, it’s just two powers striving for absolute control.

In fact, this could have been the basis for the confrontation between Daggoth and Kerrigan. The Zerg have always had a purpose, and yet they were designed to be unable to provide their own, such that their desires would always be subservient to the Overmind. With the Overmind now dead, the Zerg need a new purpose, but the Cerebrates cannot provide one for them, as they were not created with the ability to forge their own futures. Kerrigan, on the other hand, was left with the greatness of her spirit intact, but she cares for the Zerg only as a tool to be used. So on the one hand we’d have Daggoth, who understands the Zerg but cannot give them what they need, and on the other there’d be Kerrigan, who can give them what they need, but doesn’t care about them.

Instead we get treated to more of Kerrigan’s scheming. Why is anybody working with her? A surprisingly astute Fenix notices that Kerrigan wants the Overmind’s death so she can have absolute control over the Swarm – and remember that starting in Brood War, the Zerg are ridiculously more powerful than even the Protoss, unlike the unstoppable force/immovable object dynamic of StarCraft. Kerrigan deflects this accusation by saying that the UED will enslave them all. Really, let us consider both alternatives here. What is the worst outcome of the UED’s victory? Well, given its obvious Nazi parallels, I would assume humanity being brought under the UED hegemony, which frankly, would probably be little different from the previous tyrannical rule of the Confederacy and Dominion. For the Protoss and Zerg, I should guess genocide. And while that’s indeed a pretty bad fate, consider the outcome if the Swarm is victorious. According to Tassadar in StarCraft, the Swarm will run rampant throughout the stars consuming all sentience, all life. And further, ‘death may be a blessing should we fail here.’ Raynor and Fenix were both there, weren’t they paying attention? And this isn’t a one time thing either, Kerrigan herself tells Tychus and Raynor in Wings of Liberty that death is not the worst thing that can happen to them on Char, referring to infestation. She even says that ‘they will all be mine in the end’ at the end of this very campaign. When offered a choice between death and a fate worse than death, it is typically not sensible to choose the latter. It befuddles me that we are expected to believe that these people will side with Kerrigan. Unlike The Stand, we don’t even have the excuse of a mind-controlled puppet to justify the characters’ idiocy. We actually get a scene of the characters all talking about how they don’t trust Kerrigan, and yet they continue to do whatever she wants and are shocked at her betrayal. Evidently, the writers realised how insane it was to expect us to believe that these characters would agree to work for Kerrigan, and therefore gave us a scene where they all mention how they don’t trust her – and yet the plot demands that they do, creating a disconnect between what we are told and what we are shown.

Queen of Blades’ whole purpose is to undo everything that has been done throughout the game. The UED found and defended the Psi Disrupter, it gets destroyed in Reign of Fire. This is massively anticlimactic, after we spent a significant portion of The Iron Fist building up its importance, and having the fight for its defence as the climax of the campaign in Patriot’s Blood. And it gets easily destroyed in the second mission of the campaign, with no visible repercussions to the UED. Furthermore, that mission tells us why Raynor rescued Mengsk previously – so Kerrigan could use a Psi Emitter to do… what, exactly? How is having a speaker broadcasting the neural imprint of a Ghost supposed to counter the effects of the Psi Disrupter?

Most disappointingly, we get the first reunion of Kerrigan, Raynor and Mengsk since New Gettysburg and its incredibly underwhelming. The interactions between these three characters are depressingly unenthusiastic. Mostly. Queen of Blades has one major redeeming feature, and that is True Colors. Despite the campaign’s failure to build up to this event properly, the interactions between Kerrigan and both Raynor and Mengsk are fantastic, giving us some of the best insight into their characters available. Duke’s and Fenix’s deaths are significant to the player, even though neither of these characters had a particularly important role in the narrative, making their deaths striking to the player.

The ending missions of the game have a somewhat confusing chronology. Zeratul appears on an unidentified Protoss Carrier, but in The Reckoning he has regrouped with Protoss survivors on the surface of Char. Survivors from what, we don’t know. I would suspect other survivors from the battle in Omega, even though that mission comes later, except that Duran is present here and pointedly not for Omega, meaning this mission must come first. But there have been no Protoss here since the retrieval of the Khalis back in The Stand, and there was no mention of abandoned warriors then. Before that we’d have to go all the way back to Tassadar’s expeditionary force, and one would expect most of them to have been saved in the rescue of Tassadar, Raynor and Zeratul. And if they weren’t, it’s unlikely they would still be strong enough to offer a resistance. Finally, it could simply mean other warriors who fought alongside you against the UED and the Overmind, but the briefing from To Slay the Beast tells us of a single Carrier, and we are left with the impression that Zeratul is accompanied only by a handful of warriors – hence his need to regroup with these ‘survivors’ in the first place.

Then there’s Artanis, who pledges to avenge Fenix and Raszagal. These are strange names to bring up, since Fenix has not been in contact with the Shakuras Protoss since early in The Stand. In fact, it was Artanis himself who mentioned that there would be no way for them to contact Fenix and Raynor. As for Raszagal, Artanis should have no knowledge of her death, since the Dark Origins mission specifically mentions that Zeratul is hoping to make contact with Artanis or ‘survivors of our fleet’, again hinting that Zeratul’s escape was after the battle of Omega. Anyway, clearly Zeratul has not contacted Artanis, so how does he know of Raszagal’s death? If he simply assumes Raszagal is dead because there has been no word from Zeratul and those sent to rescue her, shouldn’t he also assume Zeratul to be dead? Shouldn’t he offer to avenge him, too? And strangely enough, the only character Artanis does know Kerrigan to have murdered is the only one he doesn’t mention – Aldaris.

Queen of Blades has two climaxes. The first is To Slay the Beast, where Kerrigan achieves her goals of defeating the UED and obtaining absolute control over the Swarm. This is the resolution of her plotline throughout Queen of Blades and indeed, all of Brood War. The second is Omega, which in contrast with the previously mentioned ascendancy of Kerrigan as an individual, is about the ascendancy of the Swarm as a force in the Sector. After Omega, the Zerg are absolutely dominant in the Koprulu Sector. To Slay the Beast fits in well with the narrative of Brood War, being the resolution of the UED’s schemes and Kerrigan’s struggles to control the Swarm, both of which were the main plotlines for the game. Omega feels somewhat more tacked on. True, it does resolve the ‘three races in conflict’ aspect of StarCraft, at least for now, but it doesn’t feel like much of significance is accomplished. This mission is the culmination of Kerrigan’s scheming and betrayals coming back to bite her, and they are left unresolved. Sure, she beats them back for now, but aside from DuGalle and the UED they are not suitably overcome and left behind, Kerrigan does not move on – both Artanis and Mengsk specifically warn her that they’ll be back again, and in the closing Kerrigan herself suggests that she will wish to face them again. So it’s not so much an ending as it is a continuation. And that’s a strange place to leave us for twelve years. It’s neither a resolution (like Tassadar’s sacrifice) nor a cliffhanger (like Dark Origins) it just sort of is.

Speaking of Dark Origins, there’s quite a bit to say on it, but that mission doesn’t belong in Queen of Blades’ narrative, so I’ll probably be making a separate entry for the entire Hybrid plotline.

Arcturus Mengsk

I had mentioned that Arcturus’ appearance in The Iron Fist was peculiar, but I had forgotten just how pathetic he was in this campaign. Arcturus is petulant, impertinent, impatient, and credulous. I don’t know if it’s actually a part of his character that he normally keeps hidden, or just bad characterisation. We’ve seen hints of such before, back in Rebel Yell when he explodes at Raynor for his defiance. Still, it’s a bit shocking to hear him whine about how they’ve ‘discussed this plan a hundred times, commence the damned attack!’ We see Arcturus here at his lowest point, without resources or subordinates to give him an illusion of authority. I think Arcturus uses his oratory and charisma, his influences and resources to give himself an appearance of respectability or dignity. As he would well know, controlling the way people perceive you is itself a form of power, and Arcturus lusts for any kind of power. So that’s why he tries to create this image of himself as cold, analytical, a master of intrigue. He relishes the power he gets from controlling perceptions, from knowing that you see what he wants you to see. And that’s why he gets so mad when people fail to fall in with that image – they deny his authority, in a way as direct as rebellion, but far more personal. Rebellion denies Mengsk’s worldly influence, but scorn denies his individual powers. Incidentally, when you see Arcturus again in Omega, he does so with a fleet at his back, secure in the knowledge that he is Emperor again, having dealt with other Terran powers and confirmed his influence, and therefore, he’s once again talking with confidence, even after his defeat to Kerrigan he sounds more in control of himself than he did after his victory in The Liberation of Korhal. His image really is crucial to his comfort and confidence.

What’s far more questionable, on the other hand, is his apparent lack of political acumen. There is remarkable impertinence in asking Kerrigan for ‘assurances’ in her proposed deal. It’s quite obvious that Kerrigan is bargaining from a position of absolute strength, Mengsk is really not in a position to be demanding anything, and he shouldn’t need Kerrigan to explain this to him. Then there’s his befuddling credulity. Twice he holds up their deal as though it had any authority over Kerrigan beyond her good will to fulfill her part, after The Liberation of Korhal claiming that he’s ‘earned’ the planet due to their deal, and outraged at Kerrigan’s betrayal in True Colors because they ‘had a deal’. He even needs Kerrigan to explain to him that she lied. This isn’t difficult to comprehend, especially for a morally bankrupt politician like Arcturus Mengsk. It’s unimaginable to me that Mengsk actually trusted Kerrigan. Someone who lies as easily and frequently as Mengsk does would naturally be the most likely to suspect others of lying. A traitor like him would always be watching their back. I’d have been willing to accept that Mengsk agreed to work with Kerrigan because both alternatives were acceptable to him: either she keeps her word and restores him to the throne, or she lies and consumes the Sector. Either option would satisfy his absolutist ‘I will rule this Sector or see it burnt to ashes around me’ tirade, and would have been acceptable character development, except that the game makes it explicit that he actually expected Kerrigan to be true to her word. I just don’t know what to say.

Oh, and if you think Mengsk hadn’t suffered enough, here’s his once second-in-command’s appraisal of his threat rating: ‘Without the services of General Duke, Mengsk will be easy to deal with.’ Damn. Faced with Arcturus Mengsk, Edmund Duke, Jim Raynor and Fenix, Arcturus is the only one that isn’t enough of a threat to be assassinated. And while I like General Duke and accept that he is reasonably competent, the man is not exactly a military genius, he’s got the longest string of defeats in the game, what does it say that this man is considered the greatest reason for Mengsk’s menace, according to Kerrigan?

Disappointingly, Mengsk does not interact with Raynor in any significant way.

Artanis

I’ve spoken a bit about Artanis’ curious choice of names for Protoss heroes he seeks to avenge. Something I haven’t mentioned is that while his choice of Fenix and Raszagal are probably bad writing there might be an actual reason why he did not name Aldaris. Mainly, he was a significant contributor to Aldaris’ death. It could be that Artanis’ pride refuses to let him acknowledge that he was used by Kerrigan, and that Aldaris’ blood is also on his hands, and so he tries to forget it as much as possible. Unlikely, but it is possible.

I’ve also mentioned how I felt that Artanis’ characterisation was of someone far too young to be the leader of the Protoss. Frankly, He seemed a bit too inexperienced to be Praetor. However, his singular appearance in Queen of Blades gives me another perspective on this: perhaps he became the Protoss leader because he is so young. Listen to Artanis in Omega, and he speaks with the self-righteous conviction not of a zealot, but of youth. Words like ‘justice’ have strong resonance for many people, and someone like Artanis, who is naïve enough to speak those words with passion and sincerity always gets followers. I wonder if the Protoss fleet Kerrigan faces in Omega was an actual Protoss military endeavour, or a gathering of volunteers who were caught up in Artanis’ calls to avenge all the Protoss who’ve fallen to the Swarm. Even in defeat, this kind of idealistic leader would be excessively popular, especially among people who’ve just lost their homes and family to the Swarm – as all of the khalai Protoss did.

Edmund Duke

It’s probably good that Duke died, he was starting to lose all credibility as an antagonist, and he never really had much of a purpose beyond being just that. And he does leave in style. Anybody who wakes up to find out the Zerg have betrayed you, come face to face with Kerrigan, and greet her as ‘little Kerrigan’ and ‘little girl’ deserves some manner of respect. I like to imagine that Duke wasn’t deceived by Kerrigan and just went along for this one chance to shoot her in the face. I’ll give respect to Duke, he never flinched. In fact, this may make Duke the only character from the original StarCraft who came out of Brood War looking better in my opinion than he did coming in.

Fenix

When it comes right down to it, Fenix doesn’t have much importance in the narrative either. He was brought into The Fall so that he could help introduce us to the Protoss, but once we are more familiar with them, he loses in importance to Tassadar, Zeratul and Aldaris. Even Artanis. Still, as the player’s companion early in The Fall, there is an attachment to the character, and Fenix’s moments of greatness contribute to making his loss a devastating one for the player. It’s a bit unfortunate that his death does not contribute to Fenix’s own story arc, but rather to the Raynor/Kerrigan story arc. Like his first ‘death’ in Antioch, in fact, where his death helped demonstrate the threat of the Zerg and the ineptitude of the Conclave but had little to do with Fenix himself.

I’m not sure what to make of the nascent friendship between Raynor and Fenix. I think that Fenix is simply the kind of model Raynor needs right now to overcome his own problems. After all, Fenix has known loss. He’s been crippled for life and entombed alive within a mechanical warmech, he’s lost his best friend Tassadar to the Zerg, he’s failed in his life’s purpose as a Templar which was ‘to protect our homeworld ‘till the end’ and will in fact always be remembered as the lesser Templar next to Tassadar and despite all that, he keeps his head up and looks on the bright side. ‘There is no shame in defeat, so long as the spirit remains unconquered’. ‘Stalwart’ doesn’t begin to describe Fenix, and I guess that’s an inspiration for Raynor, who has also lost everything.

Gerard DuGalle

DuGalle only appears in Omega, despite being the campaign’s main antagonist. His role, like most primary antagonists in these games, largely consists of making threats. DuGalle has something of a gentlemanly manner about him. It’s apparent in his conversation with Mengsk back in The Iron Fist, and it’s probably what pushes him to try to surrender to Kerrigan. One has to assume that he knew this was inevitably going to be refused (then again, looking at the reactions of other characters to Kerrigan, like the previously mentioned Arcturus Mengsk, it could also be a moment of unexplainable gullibility, though I prefer to think not) but really, at this point he might as well try it since his fleet was pretty much doomed either way.

It’s worth noting that DuGalle is the only one of those who oppose Kerrigan in Omega that she judges too dangerous to allow to live. That says quite a lot about his abilities. Alternatively, it could be that DuGalle was the only one she could kill, after all it is possible that with the Protoss’ ability to bend space-time to their whim, there’s simply nothing Kerrigan could do to prevent Artanis and his fleet from recalling back to Shakuras. As for Mengsk, Kerrigan has some personal issues with him that might keep her from killing him.

As for DuGalle’s final message, there’s not much to say. Facing inescapable death allowed DuGalle to contemplate his actions and judge his errors and failures. I have to wonder at his decision to shoot himself before the Zerg attack – sure, it’s an easier way to die than facing the Swarm, so it could be the coward’s way out. On the other hand, I’ve mentioned before how death is far from the worst thing that can happen at the hands of the Zerg… maybe DuGalle feared that he might be infested and forced to put his talents in service to Kerrigan? I expect not, but it’s worth considering.

James Raynor

Much as I may blame the other characters for being pawns to Kerrigan’s paltry machinations, at least for Raynor it is an acceptable part of this character. The kind of emotional investment he has in Kerrigan pretty much guarantees irrational decisions at time. His antagonism with Mengsk is barely touched upon, we only get reminded that Raynor hates him and that he is blamed for Kerrigan’s fate. His relationship with Fenix is more interesting, but I’ve talked about that already.

Something new that occurred to me was that Raynor’s progression resembles the five stages of grief of the Kübler-Ross model. Back in Overmind, I mentioned how he continued to treat Kerrigan as though she were the human he once knew. He went to Char because he thought Kerrigan was calling out to him, counter to the evidence of her loss at New Gettysburg. He couldn’t bring himself to admit his loss then. After that came the anger. I noticed that Raynor was acting far more angry and enraged in The Fall than he had in previous campaigns, he shouts at Aldaris at the first mockery, he throws himself against the Zerg without a cause but out of a desperate desire to soothe himself by inflicting death. He’s still quite angry in Queen of Blades, though it’s mostly directed at Kerrigan and Mengsk, the people responsible. If my analysis is correct, then I could categorise his willingness to work for her – rescuing Mengsk from the UED without explanation, helping her achieve control over the Swarm, and so forth as part of his bargaining, somehow hoping that if he does these things for her, she won’t need to keep fighting and can be the woman he knew again. Obviously, that doesn’t work out, I think that in the brief moment after Kerrigan murdered Fenix, Raynor came to accept that the woman he knew was dead, and that Kerrigan would need to die. However, that understanding pushes him to depression in Wings of Liberty, such that both final stages exist simultaneously – until the Artefact comes along and Raynor goes back to bargaining.

Raszagal

You know, I’ve mentioned many things from Brood War as horrible plot devices, most notably the Shakuras Temple, but I forgot to mention how convenient Kerrigan’s mind control of Raszagal is. Apparently it’s so powerful that in The Reckoning she laughs at the thought that Zeratul hopes to save Raszagal from her influence. What exactly does Kerrigan have that is so powerful she can mind control a powerful Protoss to such an extent that she is absolutely confident that nothing the Protoss can do – a race with technology capable of bending space and time to their whims and with the psionic power of Archons and Dark Archons – will be good enough to save her? And we still don’t even know what it was that Kerrigan did, either. I’ve offered the possibility of a neural parasite, but the game seems to imply that Kerrigan has Dark Archon abilities – which she mysteriously chooses to never use again on any other powerful opponent. I mean seriously, if she can mind control Raszagal, how hard can it be to mind control DuGalle, or Mengsk, or Artanis?

It is interesting that Raszagal entrusted the leadership of their people – whether she meant only the Nerazim or the Protoss as a whole is not clear – to Zeratul, but Zeratul has remained in exile since Brood War. I think young Artanis might have benefited from his experience, but Zeratul’s guilt was too great. I’m not exactly sure why Zeratul feels so guilty about what he’s done, since Raszagal herself thanked him for his actions and absolved him of guilt, but it’s hard for me to judge, I’ve certainly never been in a comparable situation. I guess all the justification in the world can’t erase the memory of actually killing someone you loved. In the familial sense of the term, obviously. Anyway, the fact that the first thing Raszagal did was thank Zeratul clearly shows that she understood the way Zeratul thought and felt, which bespeaks of good understanding of his personality, especially given that neither are linked through the Khala, and wisdom and compassion to minimise the harm her death has caused him.

Samir Duran

Since I’m not including Dark Origins here, I’ve got to list Duran’s appearance in Queen of Blades as a complete disappointment. He’s even more of a servile minion to Kerrigan than Daggoth was to the Overmind. There’s really nothing remarkable about him in this campaign other than his absolute servility. It’s especially disappointing because, as a continuation of my argument about the lack of Zerg characters in the game, Infested Duran acts in a way completely in accord with allegedly human Duran. There’s nothing about him that makes the character ‘Zergy’ and given that he’s the second most frequently appearing character in this campaign, all of this is really terrible.

Sarah Kerrigan

I’ve complained about her inability to scheme, her inability to monologue, and her lack of supporting cast, so let me give her something at least: she’s awesome at taunting her enemies. She’s come a long way since StarCraft, some of her sarcasm is really delightful. Like how she says that Fenix died the way all Protoss warriors hope to, as though that were in any way justification for her actions. Or how she replies to DuGalle’s demand for surrender, or his offer of surrender. How she greets Mengsk and mocks him on his newfound fleet. She should stick with taunting her adversary and ditch that whole scheming stuff. When she says “And as you can see, your leader belongs to me now. Not bad, huh?” I just want to groan at how it really is so very, very bad.

There is the one taunt that made absolutely no sense, however. When she tries to use Tassadar’s mockery against Fenix. Tassadar used Kerrigan’s character flaws to bait her into a feint, abusing her weaknesses and predictability. Kerrigan didn’t, she just (somehow) convinced Fenix that the UED were a greater threat than she was and then backstabbed him. Fenix made a poor judgement call (probably due to the wave of stupidity that struck every character in order to make Kerrigan look clever), he wasn’t lured into a trap due to his character failings, he was flat out betrayed. The situations aren’t even comparable. It’s as though Kerrigan realised how ridiculously awesome Tassadar was and was hoping to look equally awesome by using the same words he did, but without understanding the substance behind them.

Which brings us back to Kerrigan’s juvenile behaviour. Her complete inability to be subtle even while she takes so much pride in her ability to deceive, her condescension for everyone she meets, all the titles she gives herself… I doubt it is a coincidence that she forces her servants to call her ‘my Queen’. They’re Zerg, servitude is their very existence, they cannot by the core of their being disobey. What is the purpose of a title like ‘Queen’? There is none. It is meaningless to a species such as the Zerg, leadership is simply a function of Kerrigan’s being (or the Overlords, Queens, Cerebrates and so forth) just like a Zergling has claws and an Ultralisk is gigantic. Calling Kerrigan by her function in a species such as the Zerg is entirely as silly as calling an Ultralisk ‘your Immensity’ or a Zergling ‘your Speedliness’. But this is a leftover of Kerrigan’s human insecurities. It is plausible that she fears that she was abandoned by Mengsk because she wasn’t valuable enough, so she now forces everyone to give her titles that focus on her importance, that way she convinces herself that she won’t be abandoned again.

It is my belief that infestation fundamentally altered Kerrigan’s being, the way she acts, the way she thinks. The warping of her body included the warping of her brain. She still is who she used to be, but altered. You can see both aspects of infested Kerrigan in Queen of Blades. Clearly, she is a continuation of the human Kerrigan, the previously mentioned abandonment issues, for example. Another example could be her obsessive need to betray everyone, a result of her own betrayal. It is possible that she feels that she needs to hurt them before they hurt her. Or the fact that she spared Mengsk and Raynor. Raynor in particular was clearly listed to be killed in the briefing of True Colors, yet she allowed him to leave, just as she did back in Agent of the Swarm. Her interactions with Raynor are especially revealing, Raynor’s accusations about realising what she’s become strike a nerve, especially telling when she accuses Mengsk of being responsible ‘for the hell I’ve been through’… but hadn’t she said in Agent of the Swarm that she liked what she had become? I don’t think it’s an inconsistency, I think it’s actually revealing of the self-deception Kerrigan undergoes. She hates what she has become. But she cannot do otherwise, she is one of the Zerg now, her brain has been reworked to accomplish the Swarm’s goals. As for Mengsk if she hates him so much, shouldn’t she want him dead? But again, Mengsk is specifically spared… twice. I’ve mentioned before how I think Kerrigan views Arcturus as a father figure. Possibly this is why she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. It is worth noting that despite the fact that she clearly labels Arcturus as not being a threat in True Colors, in Omega it is only when speaking with Mengsk that she sounds worried. When dealing with Artanis and DuGalle, she is perfectly confident. Curious, isn’t it?

Oh, and it’s funny that Kerrigan says she doesn’t believe Raynor has it in him to be a killer – given that they met as revolutionaries for the Sons of Korhal. Looking back at Rebel Yell, that wasn’t some peaceful protest group. Hell, The Jacobs Installation has you actually shooting down Confederate civilians, and Raynor’s part of that attack. I’m pretty sure he is a killer.

On the other hand, some of infested Kerrigan’s actions confound any possible reasoning beyond the destruction of her identity by the infestation. For example, she allows Zeratul to live. Her only justification is cruelty, something which is absent from the actually quite compassionate human Kerrigan, and which has no reason to develop naturally from her circumstances, but might be a trait that the Zerg would favour in their Agent, therefore changing her brain to favour this behaviour. The same could be said for her inability to be subtle. Perhaps most interestingly, infested Kerrigan has a bizarre sense of self. This starts back in Overmind when she responds to Tassadar’s accusing her of individual and ethical decay by claiming ‘you will find my powers to be more than match for yours’. What sounds like a complete non-sequitur actually makes sense when you think about her infestation. Individuality does not exist in the Swarm. Therefore, we can deduce that her infestation purged her of self-identification. However, since Kerrigan is still capable of reason and still has her memories, she would naturally seek to identify herself and distinguish herself from others. And how would a Zerg identify self-worth? Possibly by their value to the Swarm. And Kerrigan’s value to the Swarm is her ability to kill. She has power, therefore she is. So her response to Tassadar might actually make sense – he questions her worth as an individual, and her reply is to assert her self-worth, which in her warped mind means her power to kill. This would explain her fixation on power, and why she seeks to gain control over everything. The more power she has, the greater her self-worth. And what justification could be simpler? Amusingly, just like Arcturus identifies himself with the trappings of power, Kerrigan identifies herself with actual power. Maybe that’s why she allows some of her enemies to live – power over life and death by definition requires that people may live at your whim.

Zeratul

You know, hearing the way Kerrigan said that she will ‘allow’ Raszagal to return to him in a way that makes those quotation marks so abundantly obvious, I am again reminded of why Kerrigan is such a horrible manipulator. She couldn’t bluff to save her life. And I can’t accept that Zeratul fell for that again. Kerrigan can call him a formidable adversary all she likes, his actions in this campaign portray the opposite. And really, why did he show up in a solitary Carrier accompanied by a handful of Dark Templar? It’s as if he intended to bargain from a position of absolute weakness. Maybe he was hoping she’d owe him one for letting her go free back on Shakuras?

I actually had a hard time writing this one. The lack of focus in the middle part of the game leads to a similar scattering of my thoughts, so I’ve tried to divide everything into subgroups, largely following the subplots provided by the various characters.

One of the things I noticed is that many of the flaws in Wings of Liberty are continuations of flaws I noted in Brood War, the use of convenient plot devices, the bizarrely underwhelming manipulations, the sudden unforeshadowed world threatening antagonist, the failings of the Protoss, the lack of personality of the Zerg, I mentioned all of these when discussing Brood War, and they reappear again here. Fortunately, Brood War’s fatal flaw – the lack of any actual development in the global narrative – is apparently absent in StarCraft II, though it may be hard to tell for certain before we’ve completed Legacy of the Void, certainly playing The Stand by itself would give you the impression that something would happen in Brood War.

The improvements of technology have also aided in enjoying the setting. I always liked the music in the original game, but aside from Brood War’s opening cinematic, the music was never set to complement story development, so this is a definite plus. The between missions on Mar Sara at Joeyray’s Bar or on Char also helped capture the mood of those places, something which was unfortunately lacking for most of the other places visited throughout the campaign.

The Media

The news programs were a nice addition in theory, allowing the player to see more of the world than the limited extent of Raynor’s experience can bring. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way it was played. Instead it seems unrealistically restricted, focused on whatever your most recent mission was concerned with. Sure, it’s fine enough in the early Mar Sara missions, since Raynor’s guerrilla actions would indeed be considered newsworthy, and since Mengsk wants to use Raynor as the threat that allows him to maintain his excessive authority, it’s likely such stories would be pushed forward by the officials.

But it gets really bad after the Zerg invasion. For comparison, take any local disaster that entailed substantial loss of life, structural damage, or ideally both. For illustrative purposes, I’ll use the well publicised devastating 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre. Even not being from the United States, the events were the perpetual focus of the media for days afterward. And relative to the consequences of the Zerg, that was relatively minor. Imagine if instead of less than 3,000 dead and a few buildings, the loss had been the entire city of New York (less than 20 million dead), the entire United States of America (over 300 million dead), the entire American continent (over 900 million dead), or the entire planet Earth – though at this point there’d be nobody left to broadcast the news. The Zerg are overrunning entire planets, plural, with casualties in the billions in only the first phase of the invasion. But more than that, it’s not just a one-shot event to be televised over and over again, it is an ongoing war effort, and that’s something else that news media lives off. The apparent disinterest UNN shows for the Zerg invasion is not only incredible, it is inhuman. The impossibility of such a massive, destructive situation leaving people so apathetic tends to induce me into thinking that it’s all fairly minor after all, which it is assuredly not, and certainly not the impression Blizzard wanted to convey. And it isn’t as if Mengsk wants to repress this sort of news either, not only has his media control proven underwhelming (next point), but this is exactly the sort of thing Mengsk’s dictatorship thrives off. Not only does the threat of alien aggression allows him to enact all sorts of measures that would otherwise be met with massive objection – which he does (“Emperor declares new austerity measures”, “Conscription age limits to be reduced”, “Emperor declares moratorium on interplanetary travel”) – but he’s actually been using that rhetoric all the way back since his coronation speech, unimaginable and unprecedented though they may be, and to all the enemies of humanity seek not to bar our way, and so forth. Granted, some of the newscasts actually are relevant to the Zerg invasion, like the refugee crisis, or the unveiling of the Odin as a weapon against the Zerg, but these are sadly the exception.

Then there’s Kate Lockwell. In any self-respecting dictatorship with a taste for media control she’d be dead in a gutter somewhere. She certainly wouldn’t be working in some national broadcast station from the dictator’s capital city. I understand that some measure of subtlety has to be removed to make it clear that she’s the one with journalistic integrity, any realistic way of conveying this, especially while keeping with a single point-of-view character would be needlessly tedious. One of the passages where she gets cut off for saying that people aren’t happy with Mengsk, for instance, would have been fine. The problem is that this gag gets used far too much. Whatever value it once had has been completely drained from it. In fact, Lockwell’s obvious distance from Dominion propaganda leaves us with two possible conclusions: either Mengsk is an idiot and incompetent, or Blizzard thinks that we’re too stupid to have caught the intended message. Aside from that, it also detracts from the value of the rebellion climax in Media Blitz. As in most cases, the triumph of victory is proportional to the strength of the adversary. That’s why we cheer for underdogs, for example. If Mengsk’s media control had been portrayed as being ruthless and effective, then the victory of turning that medium against Mengsk would have been much sweeter. And it would have done likewise for Kate Lockwell’s character arc, allowing her to finally bring the televised hurt to the Dominion after being forced to silence for so long. But since she clearly had no problem speaking up at any time during the game, the change does not feel especially massive, neither for us nor for her.

And then there’s the final broadcast. Obviously, I might have been expecting more because news broadcasts served as the final cinematic for both Rebel Yell and The Iron Fist, but the All In broadcast is possibly the most underwhelming thing I’ve seen in the entire game, including the Protoss. I didn’t expect a post-mission broadcast, since obviously Raynor is an enemy of the Dominion, although I guess there could have been something about Valerian and Warfield, but that’s not important. I expected the pre-mission broadcast to be suitably climactic however. Instead we get Lockwell informing us that she’ll be replacing her boss. That’s not in any way related to the development of the world, or the story, it’s not even news! It might have been more forgivable at some other point in the narrative, but this is the climax of the game and story! It clashes violently with the preceding Fire and Fury cinematic, and with the upcoming All In mission, and with the whole Char sequence, really. Such a complete breach of ambiance was it that it shocked me even during my first play-through, and I am exceedingly lenient in first play-throughs.

Removing the Linear Plot

From a gameplay perspective, this was obviously a huge improvement, giving the player the ability to customise the tech they acquired and at when they gets it. But storywise, it doesn’t really fit with the genre. From my experience, games that offer a less restrictive plot path generally focus on the characters and world. For example, one of my personal favourites, Baldur's Gate, is excellent for its memorable characters, not its main plot. While Sarevok’s plan to start a massive war as a gigantic human sacrifice to himself in order to ascend as God of Murder is pretty epic, the whole iron shortage plot never really commands your attention, it’s just something you are aware of. Really, those games are typically more about the world being influenced by who the character is, as the player’s freedom to control the character means there is very little chance of character development, instead the character you chose to make may change the ending of the story. The opposite is the case with StarCraft’s campaigns, interest is focused in the core plot. The Sons of Korhal rebellion, the invasion of Aiur, the schemes of the United Earth Directorate and so forth, these are the events that will draw and hold our attention. The Stand I scorn because it failed to provide a valid core story, but Wings of Liberty has a perfectly good main plot. And indeed, the opening in the Mar Sara missions and the ending missions on Char are quite strong. It’s in the middle of the campaign, when the story development largely stops while the player is allowed to pursue sidequests that stifles the enjoyment of the story. This is because the player cannot really cause change. In games like Baldur’s Gate, the fact that the player can change the world depending on his choices can motivate the player during these sidequests, but here in StarCraft the player’s choices will not change the world because the player does not choose who Raynor is. And that’s fine, we get a consistent character, one capable of growing and changing due to the world around him. Instead of the character changing the world, the world changes the character. You will never see in one of those open-ended games someone start out with an evil character and get a change of heart after meeting some wise, benevolent old man and set out seeking redemption (unless it is part of a pre-existent quest chain the player chooses to undertake). The character simply never changes unless the player chooses to force him to change. But linear storylines allow the development of characters. In the original StarCraft, for example, we see Raynor start off fairly idealistic and grow ever more cynical and self-loathing as he faces betrayal after betrayal. Or Aldaris realising the error of his deeds and asking forgiveness. There’s some of this in Wings of Liberty too, Raynor seems to get more motivated once Tychus gives him something to do, and after he learns of a way to save Kerrigan he becomes very defensive and antagonises his crew. And the trials on Char seem to bring out the best out of him. But these all happen in the Mar Sara or Char arcs, while the middle section cannot provide consistent development because the order the player chooses to take the missions in, and therefore the causes of Raynor’s development, are not predictable. So from one moment he’s depressed from seeing Kerrigan again and in the next mission he jokes about Horner’s relationship with Mira Han, which is completely absurd.

This may be most obvious about the actual choices the character makes at the end of the Colonist and Covert arcs. Some have claimed that the fact that the world changes to make whatever choice you made the ideal choice is a flaw, but I don’t see a problem with it. Obviously Raynor is a good, clever and heroic character, of course he’ll try to make the best choice available. He wouldn’t fight off a Protoss fleet while colonist settlements were getting infested by the minute and wave after wave of infested Terrans were rampaging on the planet. To make such a choice available is tantamount to character assassination. Or what if Raynor chose to trust Tosh and the Spectre proved untrustworthy, so that Raynor was faced with betrayal, again. That’s actually pretty significant for Raynor’s character, it would surely deserve more missions to deal with Tosh, it would go beyond the simple mission choice that is desired and force instead a story arc choice. That’s fine if this is what is desired, but obviously it was not. Does the fact that reality changes based on the player’s choice actually have any significance? I don’t think so. Like I desribed earlier, StarCraft’s story should change the characters, the characters shouldn’t change the story. And that’s where the real problem is, in my opinion. If you choose to take the Safe Haven option, you get a cheerful resolution, and many of the characters seem encouraged, hopeful. If you choose Haven’s Fall instead, you get Raynor facing his inner demons with an obvious parallel to Kerrigan. And obviously he’s depressed after this, he seeks confirmation from other characters. Likewise, the Covert missions have either the Nova conclusion, which is mostly light and humoristic, or the strong, cynical resolution to the New Folsom mission. This is great, the problem is that these results should be maintained for the rest of the story. A Raynor who admits that he is willing to do near anything to take down Mengsk, who had to kill Ariel Hanson and lay a human colony to the torch should not act and speak the same way as a Raynor who took a principled stand against Selendis and Tosh. These events should have changed the character. It could make the difference between the angry, depressed Raynor from Brood War or the idealistic, energetic Raynor from Rebel Yell. These events needn’t change the story, but they should change the character.

Mar Sara Arc

The first story arc serves as an introduction to the game, and does it very well. Due to its linearity, it has better focus than most other arcs. It successfully introduces us to the things that will be relevant to this story: Raynor, his relationship with Kerrigan, his relationship with Mengsk, the Terran Dominion, the Zerg Swarm and the Artefacts, Tychus and Moebius. What it doesn’t introduce us to are the Protoss, but the Protoss aren’t relevant to the story, so it’s all good (narratively speaking). These elements are all introduced in a credible, reasonable manner, with enough identifying characteristics that the player should be able to understand and follow their parts in the plot quite easily. One aspect that might be considered a flaw – it is difficult for me to say so with certainty, because I did not discover the setting with Wings of Liberty – is the choice of Raynor as the point-of-view character. Evidently there were advantages and disadvantages to the somewhat removed ‘player character’ from the original games, but this is not what I’m talking about. Rather, the fact is that Raynor is intimately familiar with much of the wider world. As is said of him later on, he knows more about the Zerg and Protoss than nearly any Terran scientist, and he’s also intimately familiar with Arcturus Mengsk and the Sons of Korhal that became the Dominion. For those of us who are already as familiar with the setting as Raynor is, this isn’t much of a problem, but since Wings of Liberty is the introductory chapter of StarCraft II, perhaps it would have been a better choice for newcomers if the point of view character had been Tychus Findlay. Tychus was imprisoned under the Confederacy, as some of his dialogue in JoeyRay’s Bar indicates, he knows nothing about the Zerg, and presumably the same is true of the Protoss. As an added bonus, it would have allowed more focus on Tychus as he struggled with his mission to assassinate Kerrigan. Raynor’s own storyline with Kerrigan, since it was not intended to be a secret, could have been revealed through chats with Raynor or Horner, who seems fairly knowledgeable on the subject. Still, I don’t think this is a real problem.

The Mar Sara arc also serves as familiar ground for those of us who played StarCraft. Now, as then, we begin with Raynor on Mar Sara. Even the missions follow a similar development. Zero Hour is essentially an upgrade of Desperate Alliance, and The Outlaws, like Backwater Station, involves rescuing an entrenched Terran base on your way to burn down the enemy Command Center (although it isn’t infested this time). Backwater Station itself returns in Liberation Day, JoeyRay’s Bar has references to Raynor’s time as Marshall, to the Magistrate – the player character from Rebel Yell – to the extermination of the planet by the Protoss, and so forth. It helps get returning players back into the spirit, without being ostentatious to new players.

While the arc deals primarily with the Terran Dominion, the Zerg serving mostly to propel the player into space, the later story revolves around Kerrigan and the Swarm, with Mengsk and the Dominion serving only as an actor in the resolution of that plot. This is then an amusing inversion from the plot of Rebel Yell, where the Zerg served only as the element that would allow Mengsk to succeed in his rebellion. On the other hand, the transition from the initial plot of overthrowing Mengsk to the real plot of saving Kerrigan is not as smooth as the one in Rebel Yell had been. But that’s for later on. As far is this arc is concerned, the Terran Dominion makes for a familiar enemy which Raynor has reason enough to fight with. Come to think of it, it’s also a bit like the Blackrock Orcs that appear in the very first missions of WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos before the focus shifts to the Undead. It gives the player a chance to get his footing before we start worrying about the new Zerg invasion. And as this is the introductory arc, the low initial threat level is actually good, these aren’t even a significant Dominion force, they’re just the local garrison, leaving plenty of room for escalation.

Colonist Arc

The Colonist storyline is in my opinion one of the better mid-game story arcs. It achieves this despite Ariel Hanson being an exceedingly bland character, in contrast to the Covert arc which is terrible despite Tosh being an awesome character. The main reason for this is the Zerg. If there’s one thing Wings of Liberty did very well, it was the Zerg, and the colonist arc is the only substory which really deals with the Zerg invasion. In nearly every mission in which the Zerg appear, they are an unrelenting threat that cannot be defeated, only delayed long enough for the Raiders to accomplish their objectives, and must otherwise be evaded. Like Zero Hour, The Evacuation of Agria deals with the invasion of a planet by the Swarm, but where on Mar Sara you only focused on saving your own hides, Agria shows the difficulty in evacuating even a sparsely populated planet’s civilian population. Compared to Mar Sara, Agria is a beautiful world, and it is completely lost to the Swarm, its population left without resources with which to resettle elsewhere, with friends and family lost, either to the Zerg themselves, or else impossible to find in the masses of refugees all fleeing this planet and others. It’s a bit like the early missions of Rebel Yell, actually, with a largely abandoned civilian population forced to survive against the unparalleled threat of the Zerg.

Incidentally, how fortunate is it that there happens to be an ideal unclaimed planet called Haven? Seriously, it would have made so much more sense to have the refugees name it Haven, since that’s what they hoped it would be.

Safe Haven represents the only appearance of legitimate Protoss in the campaign (other than those random Dark Templar in Maw of the Void and the Prophecy arc which I consider as separate). Obviously the thought that Raynor managed to beat back the Fleet of the Executor with the Hyperion and whatever crew and equipment he could gather is absurd, so I prefer to think that since the Protoss didn’t have a significant investment in purging the colony nor are they especially hostile to Raynor, they just decided to desist after Raynor managed to take down the Purifier with some cunning moves. Still, it would have been nice to be given some credible explanation in the game rather than having to make one up ourselves.

Anyway, this is one of the better appearances of the Protoss in the campaign. Selendis has more promise as a character than Lhassir, and the Protoss are given more motivation for the conflict than “Fanatics!” and even within the context of the mission they feel more like Protoss than most of the Tal’darim appearances. I’ve commented that I love how the Zerg feel when encountered in the game (incidentally, I hope Heart of the Swarm manages to convey that impression as well. Turtling off one base is fine for a Terran focused campaign, but if we’re expected to do likewise in the Zerg campaign, that would be terrible) with their swarming, unending nature, but most of the Protoss don’t succeed in conveying their own race’s focus. When I think Protoss, I expect high-tech death machines and special abilities. The first one was probably attempted – Colossi, Void Rays, Carriers, Immortals and so forth are frequently part of the Protoss armies, but this is StarCraft and awesome as those units may be, they’re pretty easily countered if anticipated, so they aren’t as striking as they should be. The use of unique units like the Purifier, the Mothership from Maw of the Void or the stone Zealots from Smash and Grab do a lot to help give the Protoss feeling to those missions, and in Safe Haven especially I felt that the “quality over quantity” philosophy of the Protoss was best represented. There really aren’t many Protoss units on the map, they mostly just get warped in when needed, sometimes directly from the Purifier. And of the course the Purifier itself is awesome with its unit warping, Vortex, impenetrable shield and Planet Cracker. The Dig from the Artefact missions probably represents the other side of the issue: they act like Zerg, running at your fortified base in waves, and worse still, Raynor has the superior technology, a massive laser drill that can take down dozens of Colossi or Carriers from across the map in seconds and raze Protoss bases in minutes. That’s just terrible. Maw of the Void also undermines the Protoss theme by placing them alongside Xel’Naga, which are essentially the same themes as the Protoss, but even older and even higher tech. Frankly, the use of Xel’Naga keeps weakening the uniqueness of the Protoss. The Rip-Fields would have made for some good Protoss ambiance if not for the fact that they were Xel’Naga in origin, and that the player has Battlecruisers.

Incidentally, that second element – special abilities – is woefully underused in the game. Sure, we get Psi Storms which are awesome, but the Sentries focus on Hallucinations (which aren’t especially good in these circumstances) or Guardian Shield (which is good but not very awe-inspiring) while only using Force Field in some scripted occasions in Smash and Grab. Nor do we ever see Blinking Stalkers or Dark Templar (the only cloaking units which make an appearance in the game are those under Lhassir’s cloaking aura, probably because other than the Missile Turret, all forms of detection are tech choices).

So yes, at least the legitimate Protoss manage to make a somewhat dignified cameo in the campaign, so that’s nice. The ending of the mission is one of hope for the future and that Raynor’s actions can actually help people. Or, if you choose to go the Haven’s Fall route, Ariel Hanson manages to get herself infested while trying to find a cure and Raynor has to shoot her down. It’s a reiteration of Raynor’s realisation from True Colors, that no matter who they might have been before, infested Terrans are no longer human and need to be put down. It’s also foreshadowing of Kerrigan’s fate (though it happens to be a red herring.)

Covert Arc

Even compared to the Artefact missions, the Covert missions are boring. The shopping list plot of that substory at least deals with plot significant items. The missions of the Covert arc are really only about funding. Never mind that the Artefact missions are at this point also nominally about funding, or that other more relevant missions also provide capital and that there is therefore no credible reason for Raynor to embark on this mission in the context he’s in. This is the game’s equivalent of those subquests in RPGs where you take a break from saving the known universe so you can arrange for two lovers to finally admit their feelings, or serve as the world’s postal service for irrelevant messages. Except StarCraft II actually has a focused storyline – even though it is relatively less focused than the first game and expansion – meaning that the emptiness is exceptionally glaring. And it has Tal’darim in it, which at this point is a bad sign. More on them elsewhere though.

The only really relevant passage is the climax of the arc. Ghost of a Chance provides a humorous scene as Tosh ineffectually tries to voodoo Raynor to death, striking Tychus instead. It’s funny, but not very significant. The Breakout option, on the other hand, is pretty revealing. By accepting to work with Tosh despite the possibility of him and his Spectres being psychopathic murderers, Raynor acknowledges the very thing he refused to let Swann admit after the Meinhoff mission: having right on your side is no match for gauss gun and combat walkers. But more than just that, while he accepts the need, he still acknowledges that it is wrong. In his dialogue with Matt, he essentially claims the guilt and responsibility for the crimes that the rebellion will commit so that once the battle is won, Matt can lead the way into the future with clean hands. There’s also some indication that he does not expect to live to see it. It should be noted that Raynor already has taken a lot of guilt on himself, he blames himself for helping Arcturus gain his throne and therefore everyone that Mengsk has killed in his reign of terror or fed to the Zerg in his ascension. He also blames himself for not being able to save Kerrigan, and therefore for Kerrigan’s infestations and all those she has killed since. It is my opinion that at the time, Raynor intended to die after killing Kerrigan. Not in the ‘I can’t live without her’ way, which would be absurd and counter to Raynor’s character anyway, but in the ‘can’t live with the guilt’ way. As I’ve commented on in the previous campaigns, Raynor seems to be pinning his hopes for personal redemption in the act of saving Kerrigan, who is a symbol of all the victims of his errors of judgment. By admitting that he cannot save Kerrigan, by admitting that she needs to be killed to prevent her from doing more harm, he would also be admitting that he cannot be saved either.

All in all, quite a heavy scene, undoubtedly my favourite of the darker scenes.

Rebellion Arc

The Rebellion arc is, I think, the only one of the mid-campaign story arcs that manages to be both plot relevant (like the Artefact missions) and provide a good narrative (like the Colonist missions). Sure, Cutthroat could have been cut out, after all the data discs from the Jacobs Installation and Borealis were decrypted offscreen (I have no idea where Kerrigan found a computer to read let alone decrypt the discs she stole from the Amerigo, but whatever) but I approve of its inclusion because Mira Han’s appearance makes for a hilarious distraction. I only pray that she remains an amusing anecdote and doesn’t undergo the ‘Boba Fett’ treatment.

The Rebellion missions deal with Raynor’s hostility with Mengsk and his attempts to strike a solid blow against the Dominion. The first missions in the game were moves against the Dominion, of course, but they were pretty small events, nothing that Mengsk is going to get too concerned about. But now we get the opportunity to really do some damage. Another one of these seemingly insignificant harasses on the Dominion lands Raynor an unexpected prize – a Confederate Adjutant with records of the last conversations in Rebel Yell (and thus General Duke makes a cameo, I guess). From there it’s setting up the critical blow. Unfortunately, an opportunity was lost to add tension by having the Dominion be aware of what Raynor was attempting – Orlan did communicate to the Dominion about the Adjutant, after all – and thus give the missions more urgency and pressure. After all, Mengsk knows what Raynor wants to do, but he doesn’t know how he’ll do it. A few touches would have signified the importance of what you were doing… Tosh catching a Ghost that was attempting to retrieve the Adjutant maybe, or something with Tychus. Maybe a sign that the Dominion security on Valhalla were warned that Raynor was likely to attempt something, or especially high defenses deployed on Korhal. Still, while it could have been better the payoff is pretty good.

Media Blitz culminates from the build up of the previous missions in the arc, and suffers most from the non-linearity of the mid-campaign. Every one of these missions has only one purpose: to bring us here, on Korhal, with this one chance to strike a crushing blow against Mengsk. And to confirm the stakes, this is the only mission where Arcturus Mengsk confronts us himself, along with General Warfield, bringing us a sense of direct conflict with the enemy we’ve been set up against from the very beginning. Tychus and Horner get their chance to shine in the assault and the setup respectively, and with success Mengsk’s control of the media is subverted and turned against him. Well, that’s how it should be, anyway, except that there seems to have been a failure in communication between whoever wrote the Rebellion arc and who wrote the actual news programs. The former needed Mengsk’s media control to be a serious, effective stranglehold, while the latter seemed to think it was to be played for humour, which leads to a climax that would be awesome if not for that flagrant mistake.

Artefacts Arc

In this arc we fly across the Sector searching for things that will allow us to activate a massive Zerg-destroying weapon. If I didn’t hate The Stand with a passion, I’d be getting the warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. But get ready for this, because the Artefact arc manages to be even worse than The Stand. That campaign was at least framed with the escape of the khalai from Aiur, and the execution of Aldaris, meaning some manner of story managed to find its way into the plot. Not so in this arc (though to be fair it fits between the Mar Sara and Char missions, which do contain interesting story elements), though it’s even worse than that. Because this arc features, as its primary antagonists, the Tal’darim.

The Tal’darim represent everything that was wrong with the UED, only without the redeeming quality of Gerard DuGalle and Alexei Stukov being great characters. The Tal’darim pop out of nowhere as a cheap excuse to get the player to fight Protoss without messing with the whole ‘good guys united’ thing Raynor has with them. Here again I suspect focusing the story on Tychus rather than Raynor might have helped, but let’s disregard that. So, the Tal’darim are completely dissociated from the main Protoss (the Daelaam, I guess, though I’ve never read that term elsewhere). All right, fine. Who are they? The Tal’darim have no personality at all, other than being ‘fanatics’. It’s like a grotesque caricature of the revealed flaws of the Judicator Caste back in The Fall. And even though I mostly avoid bringing material from outside the games to these writings, at least having a recognisable character would have done something to give them an identity. Lhassir is entirely forgettable. If we’d seen Ulrezaj, it would at least give us something to ponder about their association with the Dark Voice. But no, they’re just Protoss fanatics. The game could have used anything else to protect the Artefacts and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Zerg, ancient Xel’Naga AIs, creeps like the Kalathi or some such. As a matter of fact, we learn more from the fact that Arcturus Mengsk was searching for that one artefact fragment on Mar Sara than we do about the Tal’darim from any of the other missions. Incidentally, why did the Tal’darim hide a piece of the Artefact on a Terran world anyway? Or is it really just a coincidence that Tal’darim have found their way to every other artefact fragment? In the four years between Brood War and Wings of Liberty, the Tal’darim were created and sent to gather the artefacts, and found every one except the one on Mar Sara? But I’ve already given more attention to the Tal’darim than they deserve.

It’s not all bad, however. By which I mean that the Zerg occasionally show up, and the Zerg are awesomely portrayed in this game. Smash and Grab might be tolerable filler thanks to the inclusion of the Zerg. We get to see them invading a Protoss planet this time, which helps tie the mission in with the rest of the world, something sorely lacking from most of the other Artefact missions. Seriously, The Dig or Supernova might have taken place in a completely different universe and timeline, so disconnected are they from the main storyline. It almost feels like we’re still in that four year period before the Zerg returned. But really, those missions could be jumped entirely. You could go from the Mar Sara missions to the final missions, and assuming the completed artefact required only two fragments, you wouldn’t miss a thing. Though you might want to play The Moebius Factor anyway.

The Moebius Factor is a surprising mission in that it seems to involve the only union of the Wings of Liberty plot and the overarching StarCraft II plot that is handled in a fairly subtle and understated way (in contrast to Zeratul’s Ihan Crystal which was a blunt and unnatural insertion). Here you have Kerrigan and the Zerg invasion of Terran space and the quest for the Artefact fragments alongside Narud who is connected to Duran and therefore, the Hybrids. Indeed, Narud explains at the end of the mission that the Artefact is of Xel’Naga origin, and tells of them creating the Protoss and the Zerg. And Kerrigan appears in person to hunt down the Artefacts, giving the mission an immediate, significant and personal threat. It combines the immediate, short-term relevance of the Colonist missions, the plot significance of the other Artefact missions, the overall, long-term relevance of the Prophecy missions with the personal confrontation of the game’s climax, truly an unexpected gem in the otherwise subpar mid-campaign and especially in the Tal’darim infested Artefact arc.

The ending of this arc finally reveals the campaign’s real foe to us. In the Mar Sara arc I noted that Wings of Liberty was like Rebel Yell in that the apparent enemy is not the real foe. However, in StarCraft the transition is fairly early in the campaign, and the Zerg invasion exists primarily to set up the conflict between the Sons of Korhal and the Confederacy. Here the focus does not transition well. From the very beginning there isn’t much priority given to the Zerg. Certainly, the colonist missions are focused around the invasion, but it’s not about fighting the Zerg, it’s about saving the defenceless humans who have been abandoned by Mengsk. In fact, the Rebellion arc has you outright ignore the entire war against the Zerg to strike at Mengsk. One would point out that this kind of internal strife while humanity’s very survival is at stake would be harmful to the Terran species. Then again, it has been a consistent theme that Terrans have a fixation on fighting each other. Mengsk and the Confederacy spent the first Zerg invasion fighting each other, even the United Earth Directorate whose mission nominally centred around containing the alien threat spent more time dealing with Mengsk than with aliens. And the sole appearance of the Kel-Morian Combine had them blindly striving for capital in the midst of the Brood War.

On the other hand, if we focus on Kerrigan rather than the Zerg, the campaign does correctly prepare for her fate being the climax of the game (whereas Mengsk’s mentions are mostly related to Tychus’s betrayal). Her few appearances strengthen the connection between her and the Artefact, and between her and Raynor. Still, indications throughout the game that Raynor intends to fight the Zerg exist, but are overshadowed by his conflict with Mengsk, something that makes the transition seem forced. The Mengsk storyline, instead, culminates with Tychus’ betrayal later on, a relatively minor event in contrast with rescuing Kerrigan.

Char Arc

With the campaign again taking focus, we get some actual pacing. From the very first moments in Gates of Hell the pressure is on and we get a good look at the challenges we must overcome. Up to now, all our encounters with the Zerg (except Infested Terrans from the Colonist missions) have involved running away or trying to survive long enough to get whatever objectives we needed to accomplish done before getting out as soon as possible. Now we’re supposed to take the fight to their stronghold and strike straight through them? Even with the backing of the actual Terran Dominion armies and fleets the game does a good job of illustrating how truly suicidal the venture is. I’ve said it before, but the depiction of the Zerg in Wings of Liberty is truly fantastic, probably the single greatest aspect of the campaign. And we get that cheesy but awesome Fire and Fury cinematic, which I love despite rolling my eyes at the convenient meteorology every time. Better yet, we get the media actually contributing to the ambiance. After Maw of the Void, we learn that the Zerg have stopped pushing out, indicating the calm before the storm, as Kerrigan waits for what is to come. And after Gates of Hell we learn that the Swarm is actually converging back on Char. In other words, that desperate struggle in Gates of Hell was just against Char’s garrisons, but now all Kerrigan's armies are returning to fight you. All those Zerg you ran away from on Mar Sara, Agria, Monlyth, Tyrador, those who were fighting Warfield’s fleets throughout the Sector, they’re all coming back to kill you. That’s fantastic. And then we get the last broadcast, before All-In, and it tells us that Donny Vermillion is being relieved by Kate Lockwell. What? You were doing so well for once, media.

Shatter the Sky is by far the weakest of the missions. Mostly this is because it’s one of the few missions similar to StarCraft’s or Brood War’s, with its build up your forces into wipe out enemy bases strategy and lack of additional time or resource constraint. Point is, it’s pretty hard to actually lose to enemy attacks when the point of the mission is to have an army capable of not only wiping out those attacks, but actually wiping out the entire enemy base. So the mission is actually pretty easy. At least Brood War artificially increased the difficulty by starting you off with a ridiculously small amount of workers, giving you a larger period of vulnerability in the early game. Another thing I disliked was the Leviathan, which feels like it would be more in line with a Protoss feel, Ultralisks and Kerrigan notwithstanding. Oh yeah, and it’s nice that we’re told that we can’t nuke the platform because the Zerg would burrow into the infrastructure, but once the Coolant Tower plan comes up, why don’t we just nuke those? I know I did. Ghosts are way more awesome than Spectres, by the way.

Both Kerrigan’s and Mengsk’s plots come to a climax here. Mengsk’s involvement in the story apparently culminates with Tychus’ betrayal, which given the buildup, was pretty disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, the moment was pretty awesome from the point of view of Raynor’s and Tychus’ storylines, but not as the result of all the importance that was attached to Mengsk throughout the storyline. Media Blitz obviously also served as something of a climax for that storyline, but it was situated in the mid-game, and the significance of Mengsk, the Dominion and Tychus continue to be played up right to the end. In fact, the build up was very well done, starting in earnest with the cantina brawl. It’s just that with all that, one would have expected the betrayal to be a game changer for the campaign, similar to Kerrigan’s deinfestation, rather than just the culmination of character development.

Kerrigan’s story comes full cycle. She was infested due to Arcturus’ betrayal over Tarsonis, and Raynor always blamed himself for not being able to save her but here she gets a second chance at humanity because Raynor did succeed in saving her from Arcturus’ betrayal through Tychus. What her deinfestation means for the Sector is unknown, but it is going to be huge. With this one victory, Raynor and Valerian have changed the world forever. Or so I must hope anyway.

Arcturus Mengsk

Unlike most antagonists, we actually see a fair bit of Arcturus beyond random threats thanks to UNN. This is mostly to remind us that Arcturus loves to hear himself talk, but we also learn about a few of his actions indirectly thanks to the newscasts. Kate Lockwell accuses him of spending billions to hunt down Raynor, but that seems largely unlikely. Raynor has been driving himself into irrelevance on his own, missions like Liberation Day may be irritants to Arcturus, but they’re certainly not a significant hindrance. On the other hand, we do know that Mengsk has been employing his military force to enforce his will on various worlds. Since these would not sit as well with the populace, it seems probable that such actions were classified under “fighting terrorism” which would explain this figure. And once the Zerg invasion commences, Mengsk wastes no time using it to extend his influence and authority, imposing new austerity measures, rationing, tightening security measures, reducing age limits for conscription, impounding private vessels and restricting interplanetary travel and so forth. This plays into the first of two roles Mengsk plays in Wings of Liberty: the despotic adversary of the rebellion.

This fact occupies a huge thematic place in the storyline of Wings of Liberty, which makes it somewhat strange that its resolution is relegated to a sidestory. Granted, the Dominion is not actually overthrown, and even despite the climax undermined by the poorly portrayed media control the rebellion missions are undoubtedly the best of the mid-campaign story arcs, but still for the importance Mengsk’s Dominion and the Raiders’ rebellion has throughout the game, one would have expected a significant change in the status quo of the Raiders-Dominion conflict, not just a single, however massive, blow like Media Blitz. In the end, even though the victory may be satisfying, nothing really changes between the beginning and ending of the campaign with regards to Arcturus, which was one of my major criticisms of Brood War.

The second role is that of the betrayer. This is the story that bookends the campaign, starting with The Deal and ending with The Showdown. This is a more personal arc, as it relates directly to Arcturus and Raynor’s relationship, which is recalled and built up throughout the game by the ever more threatening allusions to Tychus’ impending betrayal as the game approaches the conclusion, or by referring to the source of the antagonism, Kerrigan’s abandonment on Tarsonis. And this leads to the question: why did Mengsk expect Tychus to have an opportunity to kill Kerrigan? Ironically, it is the fact that this plot is too well structured for Tychus’ mission to be anything else. From the Queen of Blades cinematic after the very first Artefact mission, it is clear that Tychus’ mission had something to do with Kerrigan. And interestingly, Arcturus was digging up one of the Artefact fragments on Mar Sara. And there’s that secret lab on Castanar. Clearly, Mengsk knows more than has been revealed up to this point. Did he actually have some reason to expect Tychus could succeed, or is it just a case of poor writing?

There are two direct confrontations with Mengsk in the game. The first is in Media Blitz, where he gives the mission more importance by his personal appearance, signifying that, yes, this will be a legitimate blow against the Emperor. I really loved the tone of both Arcturus and Raynor during this exchange. Unlike when Mengsk talks about Raynor on television, or when Raynor mentions Mengsk in conmversation with anybody else, there’s surprisingly little rage here. Raynor actually gets pissed at Mengsk when he sees broadcasts of him from television or holoboards, but now that they’re face to face, Raynor seems positively jovial. Of course, most of that is likely because Raynor knows what Mengsk is about to face, but the conversation still gives us an idea of the story behind these two, an air of familiarity between them that in my mind expresses more in this short exchange than their encounter in Brood War ever did. Their meeting in Dangerous Game is also significant, but for a different reason which concerns Raynor personally, as you’ll see, it demonstrates that Arcturus understands Raynor quite well. For all that these are, by the standards of this game, very brief and rare interactions, this is really what I wanted to see from these two. Great characterisation here. Mengsk’s role in the story may not have been up to par with the build up, but as a character he’s fantastic in Wings of Liberty, more than making up for his disappointing showing in Brood War.

Ariel Hanson

I haven’t mentioned voice actors often, and the few times I did was to praise them, but I really hated the voice for Hanson. The most striking moment in this respect was when learning of Tarsonis she responds “My God. Billions of innocent people. That's...that's just...monstrous. No wonder you hate him so much.” And she sounds so apathetic about the whole thing. I can never hear her say that line and not think of Linkara’s Batman joke: “Bees. My God.”

Even aside from that she is an irritatingly naïve character. Now we’ve had various degrees of naïveté before. Fenix was stubbornly optimistic. Raynor in Rebel Yell was idealistic. Kerrigan from that same campaign was naïve. And I mocked Artanis a bit for his naïveté (among other somewhat childish traits), and quoted Aldaris doing the same. But for those characters that was just a part of their character, or a significant part of their story theme. I’ve talked frequently about Infested Kerrigan’s juvenile behaviour, and how her childish behaviour in Rebel Yell may be responsible for the way she is, and especially how she interacts with Arcturus Mengsk. And Artanis obviously had some form of coming of age story going on that wasn’t successfully developed. From our sole sighting of him in Wings of Liberty, he seems to be a bit better now too. We’ll see. Anyway, the point is that in those characters, I could see how that naïveté or idealism was part of their stories or identity. In fact, that obstinate optimism is the reason Fenix was such an epic hero.

But Hanson, she’s got naïveté that makes her look downright stupid. Noteworthy is when Horner asks that the possibility be considered that some of the colonists are infested and Ariel jumps at him for having the audacity of even suggesting it. What, does she think that if we all think happy thoughts it will all turn out okay? How did she get a doctorate with that kind mentality? Now I’m a pretty idealistic person myself and perhaps this is why I have such a problem with the character, I take her as an insult, a straw woman built up to represent idealists as idiots incapable of dealing with reality.

All things considered, I’m being a bit unfair on her, her naïveté does in fact play an important role in the story, but only if you pick the Haven’s Fall option to her story arc. Here her desperation to save everyone leads her to lock herself up in the lab to attempt to develop a cure to the Zerg virus. It seems likely that in order to test it out, she subjected herself to the virus and then the cure, but it failed. This is of course a lesson in respecting ones limits, that reality isn’t perfect and that if one can’t be satisfied with what victories are accessible and overplays their hand, then one risks losing it all.

There’s also the question Tosh raised about why the Zerg invaded Agria in the first place. Tosh hints that it might have something to do with Hanson herself, but he’s always seemed a bit paranoid. Actually given that this arc features the infested Terrans prominently, it seems reasonable that Kerrigan wanted to test out her infestation virus, and given that Hanson is the biological expert of the Dominion, assaulting her world would yield twofold results: the test of fire, by which if Hanson couldn’t stop the virus, then it is unlikely any Terran could, and an attempt to secure Hanson herself, biological expertise likely being exceedingly valuable to the Zerg.

Hanson represents the colonists, the normal folk who are way out of their depth and just want to get out of this galactic war, so obviously her helplessness is played up, and this is also a reason for her naïveté. Naïve people are too trusting, and therefore vulnerable and must be protected. Oh, and obviously, she’s a woman.

All in all, I don’t expect Ariel Hanson to become one of the more memorable characters in the franchise.

Gabriel Tosh

It’s funny how these things go. I like the Colonist arc but hate Hanson, and I hate the Covert missions (with the sole exception of the A Better Tomorrow cinematic, well, and Nova for fun I guess) but like Tosh. For a side character he’s certainly quite memorable. He’s a threatening presence, somewhat mysterious, and he has a peculiar mix of very serious and suddenly light hearted behaviour that makes him sound just a bit deranged. He’s also always seemed a bit paranoid to me, though because of who he is, I can’t be certain if it actually is derangement of if his suspicions are justified.

Either way, he’s a dark one. Even if you do the Breakout mission and it turns out that Spectres aren’t actually psychopaths, Tosh is certainly responsible, directly or indirectly, for the sabotage on Nephor II which killed thousands of innocents. The only laudable moral trait he has shown is loyalty – both in sticking with Raynor and in his anger toward him for his betrayal in Ghost of a Chance, if that’s the scenario that is chosen. His only discernable cause is taking down Mengsk, though for what reason is unknown.

Since his arc was so pointless though, and he doesn’t participate in missions outside his arc, there’s not much more I can say about him.

Horace Warfield

Despite mimicking Norad II’s crash on Antiga in Gates of Hell, General Warfield is very different from General Duke. Warfield is apparently an idealist, which makes one wonder why he’s working with Arcturus. For such a high ranking character, he has to be aware of some of Mengsk’s actions, at the very least. Then again, one of the UNN broadcasts does tell us that he’s newly out of retirement. So who knows? Perhaps he’ll stick closer to Valerian now that his perspective has broadened a bit. Also unlike Duke, he appears to be enthusiastic and energetic. And he has a sense of humour. But like Duke, whose last words we will recall were condescion for Kerrigan, he apparently chooses to meet obvious death with complete scorn. Seeing him punch a Hydralisk in the face immediately makes me like the guy.

We’ve had little opportunity to see him, but it’ll be interesting to learn more about how his relations with Arcturus and Valerian develop. For now his role seems to have been limited to a comrade-in-arms, somewhat like Fenix or Raynor from the original StarCraft, but appearing at the end of the game. Alternatively, he could be a bit like Gnereal Duke once again, an enemy early in the game (though you only confront him in Media Blitz) before he turns to your side. He does not play a significant role in any of the game’s storylines. I probably shouldn’t have included him among major characters, but he punched a Hydralisk and I thought it was worth mentioning.

James Raynor

Obviously Raynor has quite a few storylines going on. But then, the game follows Raynor so Raynor’s storylines are the game’s storylines. And they all develop from New Gettysburg all the way back in Rebel Yell. His storyline with Kerrigan continues off from his last words in Brood War: after her betrayal cost Fenix his life, Raynor vowed to kill Kerrigan for her actions. And obviously, now that the rage has passed, he’s not looking forward to it. He clearly understands that it has to be done, but Kerrigan represents Raynor’s last hope of salvation. Raynor was at New Gettysburg, but he didn’t stop Mengsk from using the Psi Emitters. He didn’t sop him from feeding the entire Confederate capital world to the Zerg. He didn’t save Kerrigan when she was abandoned by Mengsk. Arcturus did all these things, but in his mind he blames himself for not preventing them. He was there. He could have done something. And Infested Kerrigan is a living embodiment of that failure, everytime she kills someone, to Raynor it means “this person would still be alive if you had saved me.”

So for Raynor, saving Kerrigan isn’t just about saving someone he loves, it’s about redemption. If he can save Kerrigan, he can fix that one, single mistake which has defined everything in his life since. And if he gives up on her, if he admits that he cannot save her, then that means he cannot save himself. And thus we come to Arcturus’ striking words in Dangerous Game: “even you've got to realize that treacherous bitch cannot be saved... and neither can you.” This is also part of the beauty and genius of the Tychus betrayal plot: Mengsk doesn’t need to kill Raynor, if he kills Kerrigan it will destroy Raynor. Killing two birds with one Marine, and he avoids that whole ‘martyr’ problem that was brought up. It's be downright brilliant if we had any reason to believe Arcturus expected Tychus to be able to carry it out. And in the early and mid campaign we also get foreshadowing of Raynor’s own death, mostly in conversation with Matt where he speaks about Horner leading the Raiders. Thus my opinion, mentioned above in the Covert arc segement, that Raynor intended to die along with Kerrigan.

Obviously, that all flies out the window once Valerian shows up with a way to actually save Kerrigan. There is simply no way Raynor can justify not taking this chance. This is his only chance to fix the defining mistake of his life. I know that many people were disappointed that Raynor turned back on his vow to Fenix, but I suspect that these people didn’t understand exactly what Kerrigan meant to Raynor. It wasn’t just to save the girl, it was to save himself. It’s actually pretty subtle by the standards of video games, and StarCraft II is damned blatant in many regards, but I’m fairly confident I’m right on this, mostly thanks to the Arcturus quote provided above. It’s simply difficult to determine what Arcturus would mean otherwise by saying that Raynor cannot be saved, the best alternative I can think of is that this is just a way of saying that Raynor cannot escape Arcturus’ wrath, but it would be a very peculiar choice of phrasing if that were the intent.

Of course, his victory is bittersweet because it comes at the cost of his friend’s life. And thus even in victory Arcturus Mengsk causes Raynor woe.

Speaking of Mengsk, his storyline has been covered quite a bit elsewhere, as far as its effect on Raynor goes, Wings of Liberty seems to be a question of how far Raynor is willing to go to fight Mengsk. And here’s where I go crazy, be sure to take the following with the intention I give it, it’s only my opinion, but Raynor in this game reminded me a lot of Arcturus Mengsk from Rebel Yell.

It started with Breakout. When you choose to side with Tosh, you don’t actually know that the Spectres will turn out to be fine. But you do know that Tosh has been lying to you repeatedly, using you to train Spectres in secret, and you know that he’s responsible somehow for the disaster on Nephor II. I could just hear Matt Horner saying “I can’t believe you’re really going to trust this snake.” And the answer, as I’m sure many of you know, would have been “Don’t worry Matt. He’s our snake now.” And from there you can start connecting others too. Sometimes it’s easy. After Supernova, it’s not difficult to see the similarity between “You signed up to follow my orders! If you can't do that anymore then get the hell off my ship!” and “I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to do it.” When Raynor’s crew has doubts about where Raynor is taking them, he says “This ain't about the Dominion. Our war's always been about savin' lives. If the zerg wipe everyone out, it's all been for nothing. So I'm going to back to Char. If you're with me, it's your choice. Just like it's always been.” But it’s not about saving lives. It’s true that this will be a consequence, but it’s not the reason Raynor’s going. And this reminds me that when Kerrigan was having doubts about what Arcturus was doing with the Psi Emitters, he reassured her by saying “We will do whatever it takes to save humanity. Our responsibility is too great to do any less.” Mengsk’s rebellion was also about ‘saving humanity’... or so he claimed.

And so when it comes to the choice between killing Tychus or letting him kill Kerrigan, where there’s no hesitation in Raynor at all. And this had bothered me a lot. But now I see it. Because, well, he’s sacrificed too much to let this fall apart. You know, I wasn’t originally favourable to the Tychus-resurrected-by-the-Zerg idea, but now I almost feel like it would make the irony complete.

Matt Horner

It’s a bit confusing to think that the writers were worried Matt would be too naïve to take seriously, when there’s a character like Ariel Hanson on the ship. Anyway, while Matt is clearly an idealist, he’s neither blind nor desperate. It’s actually surprising that Matt seems to be the strategist among them, making whatever it is that the Raiders need happen. For a moment, I actually considered that maybe Matt was the player character from Rebel Yell, but unfortunately not. That would have been an intriguing perception of the Magistrate.

Back in The Iron Fist I suggested that Alexei might be the tactical expert and DuGalle the strategical one, and here we might have a similar scenario. Raynor obviously handles the tactics of any engagement, but it’s Matt that makes the plan. In particular, the logistical difficulties necessary to get Tychus to Augustgrad in the Odin must have been ridiculously difficult to overcome. Certainly, in a government like Mengsk’s, it’s unlikely important positions are handled by individuals of high ethical standards, but it must still have been a great effort to successfully bribe the corrupt and intimidate the cowards.

Like I mentioned before, there’s quite a bit of foreshadowing that Raynor will leave the Raiders to Matt. At first I expected this was because Raynor would die after killing Kerrigan, then I briefly considered that Raynor and Kerrigan would retire after her successful deinfestation, but that’s silly, Blizzard wouldn’t just retire two of their most important characters. Anyway, now that we know that Kerrigan retains control over the Zerg, that idea is impossible anyway. So, I don’t know what will happen, but it seems likely Matt will be leading the Raiders soon. He certainly seems amply competent for the task.

Sarah Kerrigan

We see little of Kerrigan aside from her general taunts and threats, which are not as good as Brood War’s and closer to StarCraft’s. Although at least she’s given up on those awful attempts at subtlety and reverted to a more straightforward approach. Granted, as the current dominant power in the Sector she doesn’t have much need for subtlety anyway. She’s still quite intelligent though, she’s quick to figure out what you’re up to in The Moebius Factor and as her dialogue with Dr. Narud shows, she’s quite aware and perceptive. She’s also kept up with trying to intimidate her adversaries, suggesting infestation to them on Char. I like that Raynor actually calls her out on her threats being an attempt to cover her insecurities, but I don’t think he meant it the same way I do. Raynor was likely addressing her fear of the Artefact, while I still hold to Kerrigan’s adolescent personality being responsible for all this boisterousness.

Kerrigan’s is one of two characters whose voice change I noticed a lot. Zeratul always reminds me of a WarCraft III Tauren Chieftain now, it’s not bad but it’s a loss from the truly unique voice he had before. And Kerrigan… well, the new actress decided to make Kerrigan sound more seductive. Again, it’s not necessarily bad, but it really clashes with my perception of her as a character. Or maybe not, that could be construed as adolescent behaviour as well, another way for her to mask her insecurities. But still, something I’d have preferred not to be there. If it’s a choice I’ll take the voice over the chitinous high heels any time though.

The plot culminatines with Kerrigan’s deinfestation. Originally, I thought this was great. The Artefact could be excused, after all a magic plot device was really necessary to achieve this end. However, I was hoping that this would actually deinfest her. Completely. The fact that she will return to command the Swarms in Heart of the Swarm seems like it seriously undermines the plot of Wings of Liberty. Worse still, it makes it seem as though the only point of the whole thing was to make Kerrigan’s character magically switch back to ‘human personality’ free of consequence. Now like I said, I was fine with freeing Kerrigan of the Zerg completely, doing all this. But the difference was that this would effectively end the Queen of Blades concept. It was Infested Kerrigan’s death, and human Kerrigan returning to her old life. If instead we get Queen of Blades but now with restored personality, it makes me wonder. Was it necessary to get the damned Artefacts plot device? Why should we allow her to just continue as she was free of repercussions? This is clearly a progression, not a restoration, so it’s important to have the consequences of past actions still apply!

Furthermore, if all the plot wanted was to change Kerrigan’s personality while retaining the Queen of Blades concept and her control over Zerg, then wouldn’t it have been a much better plot to actually have her change to a better person through character growth and development? Have her fight her Zerg instincts. Have her remember what it was like to be human. Obviously this is a strategy wargame, so the mechanics of such a change wouldn’t have been as easy as ‘get a magic alien weapon’, probably quite difficult for the scenario designers at Blizzard, but it would have been so much more gratifying.

Anyway, Kerrigan doesn’t appear much in the campaign, but when she does her characterisation is fine. Unfortunately, I feel that the plot failed to live up to what it could have been.

Tychus Findlay

First off, Tychus Findlay is hilarious. He’s like a concentration of all those nameless Marines from Battle on the Amerigo and the UED Marines from Patriot’s Blood. Engine of Destruction pretty much embodies that kind of siliness perfectly, for me.

Now aside from that, Tychus' story mostly revolves around his loyalty to Raynor. He’s been hired by Mengsk to betray Raynor, but Tychus doesn’t know that yet. He thinks all he has to do is kill the scariest alien in the galaxy and that’s that. I suspect that had he known how things would turn out he might not have agreed to the arrangement (and, ironically, would have been freed in Breakout). I say this because Tychus shows a lot of difficulty as he realises what his part of the deal entails. The closer you get to Kerrigan, the harder he tries to get you to turn away, meaning that he won’t be able to actually do the job. This means, mind you, that Tychus is accepting to spend the rest of his life in that deathtrap suit to prevent Raynor the pain of losing Kerrigan again. And this is why, I suspect, he takes so long to shoot Kerrigan in The Showdown, giving Raynor the opportunity to kill him. It’s not that he wanted Raynor to shoot him, but he was fighting with himself, he didn’t want to kill Kerrigan, and yet he didn’t want to die.

The fact that Raynor, for his part, shows no hesitation in killing Tychus is what really shocked me the most about that scene. It is my feeling that Tychus, the convict, the traitor, the mole planted by Arcturus Mengsk, was the more honourable character compared to Jim Raynor, the people’s hero. Tychus had already taken the blame for Raynor once and ended up in New Folsom for it, and now he died because he didn’t want to break Raynor. But Raynor never wavers. Oh, you can see that it hurt him to do it, that he wished there could have been some other way… well, when you think about it like that, you have to consider that he actually knew that Tychus’ suit was a deathtrap and that something like this was bound to happen, but he did nothing. If we consider that, then Raynor’s apathy for the problem seems downright criminal, but I prefer to blame that revelation on bad writing and pretend that Raynor didn’t know what Tychus was going to do. It makes it more tragic that way, arther than facepalming at Raynor’s sudden stupidity.

As for Tychus as a spy, I very much doubt that happened. For one thing, sending transmissions from a Battlecruiser without anybody noticing would probably not be very easy. For another, I don’t see any reason for Tychus to like Mengsk. While he’s going to do what Mengsk wants because he’s got a gun to his head, I very much doubt Tychus will be volunteering any information to Mengsk that would help him and harm Raynor. Now I’m just imagining Mengsk raging at Tychus for not warning him about Media Blitz and getting the response “Well, you never asked.” That would probably explain Arcturus’ tone in The Showdown.

Finally, as I mentioned earlier I think Tychus might have made a better main character than Raynor. It would have allowed for the whole discovery aspect that was missing from playing a veteran character like Raynor, and allowed better focus on Tychus’ storyline. The writers seemed to hesitate whether they were trying to push it as a mystery or as drama, and therefore were underwhelming in their success. It’s hard to justify giving so many blatant hints that ‘something is wrong with Tychus’ when the opening cinematic outright tells us that he’s working for Mengsk. Instead it just makes Raynor look stupid for disregarding all those hints. I mean, since those hints obviously couldn’t have been meant for us. This is a bit like the complete lack of subtlety that undermined the Media stories and therefore, Media Blitz.

Valerian Mengsk

We see little of Valerian, but what we see is promising. I expect and hope that he’ll be an important character in subsequent games, and that this was just his introduction. We can’t be exactly sure what he’s doing, or what his plans are. He seems like an idealistic kid, trying to gain recognition and self worth through selfless deeds, but because of our experience with Arcturus, we have reasons to doubt. In fact, Valerian seems almost too blatant in his causes. Is this because he’s hiding something? Or is he just trying too hard because he’s young? Or is it again the game’s complete lack of subtlety? I’m not willing to assert anything regarding Valerian yet, but I like him.

One thing though. In one of their discussions, Valerian says that he wants Raynor’s help to achieve recognition among the people as a better Emperor than his father, and Raynor says “So I'm just a cog in your machine.” This makes absolutely no sense. It’s an arrangement of practicality. Of course he’s working with you because he can get something from you. Why are you working with him? Because you have so much love and respect for the Prince? Or because he has something you need? Is Valerian ‘just a cog in your machine’?