laaaagy save us and depart the vile temptress of FF14
On that note, I should talk about other Laggy-Eph-anime games, like the
StarCraft II Legacy of the Void campaign. Yes, for whatever reason the writer decided that the true goal of StarCraft's plot arc would be for our scruffy main character to go date a goddess and then they team up and kill the nihilistic emo 'bad' god. (I am not making this up.) See totally anime amirite.
The gameplay is actually pretty fun! Laggy said he was bored by it becuz it was too easy, but I thought it was fine. Heart of the Swarm I played on Brutal and was notably easier, partially because you could hypothetically screw up and choose all bad evolutions, or not use Kerrigan well, I guess. LotV was definitely a step up from HotS; I played on Hard and still haven't beaten all the missions on Brutal. The totally busted mechanic you get in LotV is the Spear of Adun, which is a Protoss ancient super-spaceship (I guess technology hasn't advanced much in the past few millenia?) that can be configured to have a variety of busted abilities. Oh the AI is raiding your base? I could send my army back to defend it OR I could have doom lasers zap them from the sky mwahaha. It auto-pauses the game, too, to line up your shot right, which is fine by me; this is single-player, not MP, let me be awesome. You can only set so many cool abilities at once, and you're usually limited by energy anyway, but... it's enough to make your forces considerably more badass than they 'should' be for their supply. The final ability is particularly broken: Time Stop, which costs 0 energy but has a long cooldown, and does what it says on the tin: freeze your ENEMIES in place, not attacking but capable of taking damage, for... entirely too long. (10 seconds or so?) So yeah, watch as your army wrecks theirs without them firing back.
If I have a complaint about their scenario design, it's that they still love "defend your flag from 3 different openings where infinite enemy troops pour in" missions. Yes, the original SC1 mission (and Wings of Liberty homage to it) of bunkering up against Zerg while waiting for evac from Zerg is something of a classic, but these missions secretly aren't very interesting once you know what you're doing, so are best as tutorialish missions early. And the final mission to Wings of Liberty, "All In", was at least an interesting twist on the idea: there are two variants of the mission (Zerg air vs. Zerg nydus ground units), there's a boss who attacks you and messes up your static defenses in Kerrigan, and you've got the artifact power waves to manage. Anyway there are no less than 3 (!) missions in LotV that are just "uh sit back, build a lot of defensive units & structures, and watch the chaos ensue." The twist they add to 1 of them isn't even an interesting twist (you can't use certain parts of the Spear of Adun. In the last few minutes only, anyway. Oh boy less choices exciting.)
Also, while classically campaign missions have been sometimes susceptible to "sit back, macro up to max supply, wreck", and Blizzard does do a good job of trying to add some time pressure with various concocted scenarios to make you act sooner... I wish they actually had a few more missions like "The Host" where there's just a crapton of enemies, macro up whatever army you like, and go have fun. More generally, they kind of run out of "real" bad guys, so you're basically fighting evil ghosts for the back half of the campaign, and evil ghosts don't need silly things like "bases." (Ghosts in the sense of "Boo!" and not "Nuclear Launch Detected", of course.) Aside from the plot lameness, it feels less like StarCraft, you know? I want there to be an enemy base and enemy economy, and if I wreck it, for that to actually help my cause, rather than being told the rifts are becoming even more unstable and so even more evil ghosts are pouring out.
I still want some kind of "free battle with campaign units" that let you do 8 player FFAs with that or the like, but grah, whatever, that was a problem with the other campaigns too.
Plot! The first half of the plot is a disaster. THe second half is weird but I think the writers were trying to put a nail in StarCraft's coffin by intentionally writing the happiest, most final ending possible. (Not that this will stop Blizzard execs, there's already a new mission pack they're trying to make you preorder despite it not coming out until June.) This also might explain why they structured the plot to remove as much as they could about the Protoss that makes them any different than Terrans - let's have Artanis realize that American values are basically correct and get rid of group telepathy, the caste system, and xenophobia. All very nice and I even agree with it, but it cuts off later opportunities for conflict.
First half of the plot: rargh surprize all the main ("High Templar") protoss get mind controlled by the big bad guy. Somehow this is vaguely their fault but in a nonsensical way - Zeratul wanted the Templar to stop Amon, Artanis wanted to retake Aiur now that the Zerg Brood was in disarray, and it turned out Amon was actually on Aiur after all! So we were achieving both objectives at once, except somehow nearby Protoss means he could mind control 'em all. Not sure if they explained why he couldn't before (shouldn't this be HARD? I mean, yes, it's doable in-setting, but the Zerg were *designed* to be mass telepathically controlled, and the Overmind was hard to make, and Cerebrates were a Big Deal. I guess you can say that Amon is just MORE POWERFUL now because that's more imposing but whatever.) The only solution is to give up the group telepathy and become like the Dark Templar (who are unaffected). And only very few High Templar get to do this. Luckily we find an ancient spaceship that has tons of ancient warriors kept in stasis or something? So you're not exactly playing as the Daelaam Protoss anyway. This is so weird they could have made it work, but they don't do anything cool with it; they have one of the ancient uber-High-Templar woken up, but her only purpose is to be wrong about everything and show how enlightened modern Protoss are compared to their xenophobic, clannish ancient ones. No comments from the ancient warriors you wake up and send to their belated graves, or why they volunteered to get sealed in a ship to begin with! Anyway there are now Amon-controlled Zerg (fine), Amon-controlled Protoss (the Daelaam AND the Tal'darim, which HotS decided were secretly followers of Amon anyway), and... uh... Amon-controlled Terrans, mostly the remnants of Mobius Corps, which they basically play like Mass Effect indoctrinated humans, and the plot would like to pretend are a threat to the Dominion. Kinda lame, actually. Also SC was in general pretty good about not being Star Wars and blowing up entire planets, but for stupid reasons we decide to blow up Shakuras due to a Zerg invasion. uhhh guys pretty sure we did this plotline already, we can just scorch it into a desert and that'll kill the zerg, and hell, even if it is filled with zerg, they spawn fast enough that it's not worth wasting a perfectly nice planet for this.
Second half of the plot: So the one good thing about all this is that it does mean you're desparate to find allies, which is always interesting, since 1 spaceship + the now planet-less Dark Templar aren't going to cut it. This is actually pretty fun. Your two sources of potential allies in strange places:
* The ancients built the "Purifiers" which were basically battle-bots with AI copies of real people in them, but they revolted and were bad, so the technology was forbidden and locked in stasis. Artanis basically goes "Forbidden Weapons? Sounds great, just what we need. And besides maybe the ancient robots were just AWESOME, too awesome for the crazy xenophobic ancients to handle." It'd have been nice if someone pointed out this was desparation talking and that Hope Is Not A Strategy, but whatever. Anyway, he was right! The ancients did just mistreat their robots as slaves, but now we can have a bro team-up between protoss and protoss robots. Sweet.
* For whatever reason, Amon has "betrayed" the Tal'Darim, because he prefers mindless slaves over willing followers, or something. And the Tal'darim Highlord had been holding out the promise of turning his people into awesome Zerg-Protoss Hybrids if they served well... but Amon won't do that... despite that all the Hyrbids just seem his slaves anyway? Okay just don't think about this too hard. The point is that Alarak thinks he's been betrayed, so he wants Artanis's help to challenge the current Highlord to a ritual duel... by which we mean strat-RPG map of having lots of friends in your duel killing the other guy's friends... take leadership, then help Artanis take out the traitor Amon. And put a little spine into Artanis's leadership. Because we all know that if Donald Trump challenged Obama to a duel then killed him he'd get the White House, right? Anyway, Alarak is fun. He's basically the equivalent of Tychus in Wings of Liberty of being the "shoulder devil" that advises all the brutal / violent / wrong ways to solve problems while being perfectly confident of himself and charming in his own way. This is something the mostly bland Protoss lineup direly needs (Zeratul isn't around for the campaign). Also Tal'darim units he brings along have fun lines and busted abilities, like the Sentry-variant that increases nearby units range (11 range Colossi!!!1!) or the Void Ray variant that has chaining lasers that kill everything instead of just one thing ("The Death Fleet descends." Oh yes it does indeed.).
So yes, we get the inspiring story of how zillion-year old ancient protoss, dark templar, ancient robots, & crazed megalomaniacs teamed up to beat up evil ghosts. In the epilogue, Raynor's Terrans & Kerrigan's Zerg come along to go invade hell, kill more evil ghosts, and face off with Amon's TRUE FORM or something. i dunno.
I suppose I should talk a bit about the changes to the SC backstory. I should first say I am not particularly tied to what SC1 did with its backstory, and furthermore that one man's "retcon" is another lady's "cool plot twist." So there's nothing wrong with changing things around, but the new result should be at least as cool as what it was before. The old SC backstory was something like "The Xel'Naga were an advanced race that screwed around with genetic engineering, and modified both the Zerg & Protoss. They also made the Overmind to control the Zerg, but the Zerg went out of control and killed them." Fine. So the Xel'Naga are morally neutral but not super-powerful. SC2 does... strange things with this. The Xel'Naga aren't of this dimension at all. They're basically multidimensional gods who can also forsee the future and place "prophecies" that tell their followers (e.g. Zeratul) what is coming and what to do, but they actually don't interfere at all. They still want "purity of form" and "purity of essence" but there's apparently no need to intervene to make this happen. So... who the hell modified the Zerg & Protoss, then? Apparently Amon was a Xel'Naga who was in a hurry, and that was his rogue meddling along with "his followers" (not clear if this means other Xel'Naga, or modified normal people a la Narud). And I guess these followers were what was overthrown by the Zerg? They don't really say, since it seems hard to overthrow the other Xel'Naga if they're gods that lurk in the Void. Anyway the goal of the Xel'Naga is for purity of form & essence come together, which is why Amon loves creating Zerg-Protoss hybrids and they're his favorite and possibly his own personal vessel when he manifests. Although why he wants to manifest is a little unclear; if he can be trusted, he just wants oblivion and to wipe the universe out, which sounds like something that manifesting won't really help or hurt at doing. Also all the other Xel'Naga are dead... maybe? Maybe just the ones watching this universe? Did Amon do this? The Zerg? How? Oh well.
Anyway, it turns out there's 1 Xel'Naga still alive in the Void, but for whatever reason he can't fight Amon and is trapped. Luckily he can dump all his power into someone else and then THEY can fight Amon?! Yeah this plotline gets trotted out in a lot of shonen-esque fiction but still makes no sense. Obviously Kerrigan is the choice to become the new Xel'Naga super-goddess because the reason people like Kerrigan is because she has MAXIMUM POWER right? It is kind of interesting in what it implies, though, since LotV Kerrigan is sort of a hybrid herself... of Terrans & Primal Zerg. So does that imply that the Primal Zerg were the true purity of essence and the Terrans are the true purity of form, since they were untouched by Amon's meddling?! That's... actually kinda cool if so, although weird to stick in the Protoss's campaign. (ATTENTION PROTOSS: Sorry, you are not good enough to hold the power of a god.
)
So.... that's pretty much it. Raynor gets to date a goddess, the Zerg are still crazed strength-is-everything types but we'll pretend this is okay and healthy, the Protoss grow up, everyone lives happily ever after. The end! I guess there's nothing wrong with an ending like this, but I do hope that Blizzard execs, if they ever decide to revive SC, either make prequels, or set things in an alternate dimension, or a zillion years in the future, since the writers intentionally tied everything up.
