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thankskenpenders · 1 year ago

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Sonic Superstars!

Superstars is out! And guess what? It's good! It's a worthy new entry in the series, and I mostly like it. Mostly. Except for the handful of parts I don't. As usual, allow me to share my thoughts.

(For the record, I got the PS5 version of Superstars. I can't speak for how it plays on older hardware like the Switch, or how the weird Steam version that seems to make you log in with Epic runs. But I encountered zero performance issues, personally.)

General thoughts

The thing is, aside from two notable flaws I'll discuss in greater detail below, I can sum up my feelings on most of Superstars quickly. You see, it's... a Sonic game. This will either be a blessing or a curse depending on who you ask. It's not a bold new take on the series that'll blow you away, but they also didn't fuck it up. There's no catch this time! There's something refreshing about that straightforwardness, given how rare it is to get a regular-ass New Sonic Game from Sega. It's just a new classic-style game where you can play as Amy, set on a new island with all new zones, and Fang is in it! This might be damning with faint praise, but that's what it says on the tin, and they did a good job overall.

(It also has co-op. That's nice. I didn't play it in co-op.)

It plays exactly how it should. At no point did anything feel Wrong. The graphics might not have the absolute highest fidelity, but I think the character models look really nice, and the levels look appropriately good with vibrant color palettes. A couple zones like Sky Temple gave me Klonoa vibes, which I like. One zone is an absolutely incredible homage that I won't spoil. The story here is minimal (as expected), but there are a few good moments of telling the story through the gameplay, particularly one very cute sequence with Trip. I did find a couple stage gimmicks moderately annoying (Speed Jungle 2 and Press Factory 2, looking at you), but like... I could say the same thing about Mania, and also damn near every other Sonic game ever made. There's always That One Level. Superstars may not raise the series to new heights, but it generally executes well on the standard beats of the series. It's an easy recommendation for all fans of 2D Sonic.

Really, aside from the two big flaws (we'll get to them), this game's greatest crimes are simply not being quite as good as Mania, and also coming out the same week as the more creative and polished Super Mario Bros. Wonder. If we hadn't gotten Mania, I would easily be calling this my favorite 2D Sonic game since... what, the Advance trilogy 20 years ago? I like the Rush games, but if you asked me to replay one or the other, I might have a better time with Superstars. And, yes, it beats the hell out of Sonic 4. It's not even close. Anyone who says this game is exactly like Sonic 4 is just being a hater.

...I guess I would say that $60 is a bit steep for this, but you know it'll be on sale for a more appropriate $30-$40 in a few months. This isn't a Nintendo game we're talking about here.

Nice little tweaks

Superstars also features a number of welcome quality-of-life updates over Mania, bringing it more in line with the design ethos of modern platformers.

You have infinite lives! No more getting a game over on the final boss and having to redo the whole final zone - or, god forbid, the entire game

Time overs are gone! It'll warn you before you go over ten minutes, but I have no idea why because it doesn't kill you anymore

The game features a hub from which you can easily replay previous levels, rather than needing to beat the game or put in a cheat code to unlock the level select

This means you can easily go back and hunt for any special stage rings you missed. However, as a tradeoff, it seems like you can only get one Emerald per zone now, rather than being able to get Super Sonic by the end of the first or second zone

You can swap characters between levels! No more having to start a whole 'nother save file to play as Tails

And those characters even have optional little movement tutorial rooms available from the hub, which is great for new players who may not know about things like the Drop Dash

And, finally, checkpoints now feature arrows pointing in the direction you were supposed to be going, in case you forget upon respawning

Of course, while you might not be getting game overs, Superstars certainly compensated with some bosses that kicked my ass.

Bosses

Here's what I would consider notable flaw #1.

I have mixed feelings on the bosses in Superstars. I don't think many of them are poorly designed - in fact, a lot of them are good, and offer fun moments of spectacle. But for a 2D Sonic game, they're REALLY long and drawn out, and by the late game this was starting to get draining.

Bosses tend to be the type where you have to dodge their attack patterns for a while until you get the chance to hit them exactly once, MAYBE twice. A few bosses seem to have quicker options if you abuse your post-hit invulnerability or play as a character with a double jump, but many will either be completely invincible or run away to the background for long periods of time, making it impossible to damage them outside of the allotted windows. And even if it seems like you'll be able to get in a second hit, many bosses turn invincible and skip ahead to the next attack pattern as soon as they take the first hit. Again, most of these fights aren't BAD, but because of this behavior they sometimes take almost as long to beat as the entire levels preceding them. This didn't bother me much early in the game, but against the more challenging bosses towards the end that kept killing me several minutes into a long fight, it got tiring. The final boss of Story Mode probably took me like an hour.

While this certainly isn't an uncommon style of boss design, part of me suspects they did this for the sake of co-op players. For one, playing in co-op means that you don't necessarily have to start the entire fight over if one person dies, so I assume the length is less of an issue. But in particular, true classic-style Sonic bosses that you can just hit repeatedly with good timing would go down in a few seconds against a team of four players. Likewise, the swarm of clones from the "Avatar" Emerald power would probably obliterate every Genesis era boss with one button press. So I get why every boss needs all these invulnerability periods, but still. I at least wish they'd made some of those attack patterns shorter and given you more frequent opportunities to deal damage.

Emeralds and their powers

Speaking of the new Chaos Emerald powers: they're neat, I guess? They're fine. I didn't use them much. Actually, I kept forgetting I even had them - although the game will play a noise and show an icon in the corner of the screen to remind you any time you reach a spot where a specific power is useful. Avatar, the first power you get, is at least good for getting a couple free hits in on the trickier bosses. Yellow's ability to slow time is obviously good, but, again, I always forgot I even had it and made it through just fine without it. I was also pleased to realize that the swimming power is useful for the water levels and not just for climbing up waterfalls.

Oh, and the new grappling-based special stages kind of suck, but they're not the worst, and I'll at least give them credit for trying something new. (Motion Sickness Zone from Sonic 1 does return as a bonus minigame, but I only did it once lmao.)

Battle Mode

I haven't played Battle Mode. Couldn't tell you if it's good or not. It did, however, give us official designs for Metal Tails and Metal Amy after all these years, and also it let me make this:

...Okay, enough beating around the bush. Let's talk about the thing that REALLY drags down the experience.

The soundtrack...

(This lengthy section on the music will feature some light spoilers for things like zone names and themes.)

Now, don't get me wrong. There are some bangers in here that I've been listening to on loop. But this is one of the most inconsistent soundtracks I've ever heard, and I'm not sure I've ever played another game where the music has such a sharp dip in quality in the back half.

As anyone following this blog knows, prior to release I was a little obsessed with trying to gauge what the soundtrack would be like. "Jun Senoue" and "new Classic Sonic game" naturally evokes the memory of Sonic 4, but from the start we knew Tee Lopes was involved as well, and almost all of the music previewed before released leans more towards the sound of Sonic Mania than anything else. I was hopeful! I was excited! Jun deserved another chance at doing another classic Sonic OST, and Tee is one of my favorite game composers of all time between his Sonic material and other works like the TMNT: Shredder's Revenge OST. I frequently thought back to this Sonic 4 remix medley by Jun and Tee as a reminder that these two could really be the dream team, bringing out the best in each other's work.

Sure enough, the front half of the game is largely dominated by the Mania sound, whether it's a track by Tee himself or one by an in-house Sega artist that's compatible with his style. Pinball Carnival Act 1 by Rintaro Soma (an up-and-coming composer who wrote a bunch of the Cyber Space themes in Frontiers) takes obvious inspiration from Mania's Studiopolis Act 1, to the point that I was shocked when Sega posted the track and revealed it wasn't written by Tee. Act 2, however, forges more of its own sound by leaning into the act's spooky haunted carnival theme. And despite being the music lead, the only level theme that I know for sure was written by Senoue in the front half of the game (Bridge Island Act 1) was actually arranged by Tee Lopes to give it more of that Mania sound. Hell, the level clear jingle is literally just the one from Mania. A few level themes by other composers don't quite match that style, but they fit in well enough.

But there are early signs that this sound won't be consistent throughout the game. Our first warning of things to come is the boss music:

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When early copies started floating around and the soundtrack leaked, many, many people hoped that this was merely a placeholder, like the literal Sonic 4 Episode II music used in the earliest previews of Speed Jungle, and that it'd get replaced with a day one patch. Oh, those poor, innocent fools...

Even if you don't mind the poor production with the returning Sonic 4 faux-Genesis sound, this is a very simplistic thirteen second snippet of music that then plays a second time in a higher key before it loops. This wouldn't be the end of the world if the bosses were as short as the ones in the Genesis games, of course, but they're not! This theme is used for a ton of lengthy fights throughout the game, including an EXTREMELY long and tedious autoscroller boss at the end of Golden Capital Act 2. Maybe I would've enjoyed the bosses in this game more if they were paired with some earworms that'd get me hyped up and sell how cool and exciting the fights are supposed to be, but grating songs like this just made the minutes spent fighting those bosses feel like an eternity.

Still, boss music (and menu music) aside, all of the level themes in the front half of the game ranged from decent to great, with the peak easily being the phenomenal Lagoon City Act 2 by Tee Lopes. And then... I got to the back half of the game. And the Mania style completely disappeared, replaced largely with the dreaded Sonic 4 sound. That isn't the style for EVERY song in the back half, but even the ones that try something different tend to be weaker than the material from the first six zones, with less engaging melodies and less intricate arrangement. Many sound straight up unfinished, leaning on extremely basic synth patches with no personality. And there isn't a single track from Tee in the back half. He just disappears from the project altogether.

What this means is that we go from this absolute banger by Tee Lopes in zone 6, which elevates what's otherwise a bog standard desert level to a thrilling adventure:

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To... this, in zone 7:

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It's EXTREMELY jarring!

The thing is, this is actually one of the better tracks in this style. I have to assume this is by Senoue, because you can totally hear a good Adventure or Heroes era Senoue track in there once you get past the crude synth replication of the Genesis era Sonic sound. Senoue is still a great composer, as you can hear clear as day with Bridge Island, but he's working with a restrictive sound palette that doesn't play to his strengths at all. If only he'd bust out that damn guitar, or at least pick some better synths.

(And no matter what people will tell you, no, this is not an accurate recreation of what the Genesis's YM2612 chip really sounded like, nor is it representative of what it CAN sound like at its best. Go back to the Streets of Rage 2 or Ristar soundtracks if you need a reminder.)

While I can at least see what the Press Factory tracks were aiming for, some other faux-FM synth tracks are just really bland. They don't have anything interesting going on, and they also don't seem particularly tailor made for the levels they accompany. They're just attempts to mimic what Sonic 1-3 sounded like on a very literal level. Take, for instance, the Golden Capital Act 1 theme, AKA "we've got Sky Sanctuary at home." While the better level themes in this game enhance the mood or even completely carry the vibes of a level, the weaker tracks can really suck all the air out of the room and make a level feel like more of a slog.

What kills me is that there are, in fact, a couple examples of how to do throwbacks to classic Sega FM synth music well on this very soundtrack! They're just not the Sonic 4 type tracks. I love the Frozen Base Act 2 theme, presumably composed by legendary Sega composer Hiroshi "HIRO" Kawaguchi, who's responsible for all-time classic arcade soundtracks like Fantasy Zone, Out Run, Hang-On, After Burner, and more, as well as the hacking and pinball themes from Frontiers. Maybe to an untrained ear this doesn't sound all that different, but it has a catchier tune, better instruments, and stronger production overall. I'm also a fan of the track for Sky Temple, which isn't perfect, but it blends a few Genesis-esque instruments like the Sonic 1+2 snare with other instruments for a richer sound. If the whole soundtrack sounded more like these examples, I'd definitely be complaining less.

I really just have to wonder... how did this happen? How did this end up being so inconsistent? Many fans on social media are jumping to the conclusion that Senoue is just extremely stubborn and refuses to ditch the style from Sonic 4. I can't deny this possibility, but some things just don't add up. The almost complete lack of "retro" style music in the promotional material. The fact that the style just suddenly shifts halfway through the game, then disappears for the final zone, as if that's not the note they want to end on. The complete lack of any tracks by Tee Lopes in the back half. The focus on the Mania-style tracks in the bonus "mini soundtrack." And most perplexing of all, the fact that three of the first tracks you hear in the game were Senoue compositions that were given extra attention with arrangements from Tee Lopes.

This is pure speculation on my part, but it almost seems like they straight up ran out of time.

Perhaps Jun wanted more of his tracks to get full arrangements from Tee, or for Tee to contribute more songs, but things were down to the wire and they chose to leave in some of the raw Sonic 4 style demos. The soundtrack being crunched out in a matter of months at the end of development would certainly explain why Speed Jungle had to be demoed without its music a mere four months ago. It'd also explain why a game that's only a few hours long needs NINETEEN composers listed in the credits. And also the fact that multiple zones just have completely different, unrelated music by different artists across their acts. Did they need multiple artists working on different acts simultaneously, completely independent from each other with no time to cross reference each others' work, due to extreme time constraints? I'd buy it.

Ah well. It's not the end of the world. I've heard worse Sonic music. But I'll always think of what could have been...

At least the final battle with Eggman at the end of Story Mode has a pretty kickass boss theme, which ALMOST makes up for how bad most of the preceding boss music is (and the fact that that very difficult fight doesn't have a checkpoint between phases and took me like an hour to beat lmao). It even seems like it might be written by longtime Phantasy Star Online composer and recurring Sonic contributor Hideaki Kobayashi. That's the guy who wrote NONAGRESSION!!!!!!!

The postgame

Speaking of beating Eggman! It turns out Superstars has a good deal of postgame content, as merely beating the last zone with all the Chaos Emeralds doesn't take you to the true final boss. In order to do that, you'll need to do something else.

Before we hit the big spoiler warning, I'm going to give any future players who are still reading a warning. If you value your sanity... don't force yourself to do all the postgame stuff. Don't make the mistakes I did. It's not worth it, and it may very well knock your personal score for the game down a couple points.

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SPOILERS FOR THE STORY, UNLOCKABLES, AND THE POSTGAME BELOW THIS POINT

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

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The bonus scenario

Sonic Superstars has a big surprise in store for anyone who beats the main story. For the first time since... what, Silver? In 2006? We finally have a brand new playable character in a new Sonic platformer! (I wouldn't count the player avatar in Forces as a full-fledged New Character.) Yes, after the credits roll, you unlock Trip as the super-secret fifth playable character. I was really excited to see this. Trip is cute, even if her masked appearance from early in the game is perhaps a more unique design than a Sonic-ified lizard girl who can only vaguely look like a real sungazer lizard. She IS the first new Sonic character Ohshima has designed since the '90s, though, so she gets points for that - and she gets even more points for literally turning into a dragon when she goes Super. We love a girl who can turn into a dragon, don't we folks? And her playstyle is fun, too, with a double jump and the ability to roll along walls and ceilings.

But Trip isn't just playable. Like Knuckles before her, she gets an entire alternate story mode of her own, which somewhat remixes the level layouts, generally makes things more challenging, and swaps out Eggman for Egg Robo. I was so excited to see this! It really felt like the game had so much more in store for me than I'd anticipated.

...Then I spent probably around three hours attempting to beat the new final battle with Fang at the end of Trip's Story. And it made me regret doing Trip's Story at all.

Once you learn the patterns, a lot of them are actually piss easy. But the difficulty comes down to a few misguided factors:

The fight is LOOOONG. On a successful attempt the whole thing will probably take the average player about, like... seven or eight minutes? Maybe longer? This is where I really started to get pissed at the game for making me wait through these stupid attack patterns before I could attempt to hit the boss once.

The fight is divided between two phases, one with Fang in a vehicle and another with him in a giant robot, with no checkpoint between them. Dying to one of Fang's bullshit attacks on the second phase means having to redo the ~5 minute first phase all over again. And, worst of all...

Fang has multiple projectile attacks that are guaranteed instant kills, even if you have rings.

Also there's a stupid desperation headbutt attack that can really easily catch you off guard and kill you, but I only got that far in the fight once.

It's the instant kills that got me. If those fucking immobilizing net attacks just made you drop your rings, or you could at least wiggle out of them by mashing buttons (EDIT: apparently you CAN do this but you literally have to button mash so rapidly that it's a crapshoot whether or not you'll physically be able to do it), it would have been totally doable! Kinda fun, even! Slow, but pretty cool in terms of spectacle. But nope! Three hours! Three hours on this! This is, without a doubt, the hardest boss I have ever faced in any Sonic game, period, and one of the hardest bosses I've ever seen in ANY game. All because of one attack pattern where making a tiny mistake means starting over.

The glitches didn't help, either. Something about the way the circular boss arena was set up in both stories' final battles seems to make the floor intangible sometimes for non-player objects. Occasionally my dropped rings, enemies I was supposed to knock towards Fang, or one of Fang's insta-kill projectiles would just fall through the floor randomly. This definitely wasn't my main problem, but it helped drive home the idea that this fight just wasn't worth my time.

After three hours of attempts, I gave up. I just went and looked up the ending of Trip's story, as well as the contents of the Final Story, on YouTube. Turns out I made the right call, because boy, that true final boss looks like dogshit. It's just a very dull fight against a big generic cartoon dragon. Apparently this is the thing Eggman was looking for. It appears and is defeated with little fanfare. I think I liked it better when I assumed the scary dragon being foreshadowed was just Super Trip.

...Also, hey, what's up with The End being very conspicuously visible in the background of the last zone?? I know it's just a cheeky cameo, but, like... isn't it supposed to be sealed away in Cyber Space right now? Should I be taking this literally? Does this have lore implications? This is one hell of a way to remind people that the timeline's been reunified, I guess

Closing thoughts

I really hate to part ways with Superstars on a sour note like this, because like I said up top, I mostly enjoyed my time with it! It's really just a small handful of particularly frustrating bosses and the inconsistent soundtrack that drag it down. Other than that, it's solid as a rock. Maybe wait for sales if you're not dying to play it, but it's definitely worth playing for any Sonic fan. Just... skip the true ending. I would have stepped away MUCH happier with this game if I'd done that.

I wanna try to end this on a more positive note but I'm tired, so, uhhhh... look, you can unlock a Metal Nights skin for your Battle Mode bot!!

Anyway back to jamming to about half the soundtrack on loop while pretending the other half doesn't exist, and looking forward to the continued Fang Renaissance with his upcoming IDW miniseries

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rjmhereunderprotest · 7 months ago

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The Kerrigan Dilema: The Challenges of Writing from a Monster’s Perspective

I’ve always been a lover of the monster side of any story. Not just the sympathetic ones mind you, but all kinds of monsters. I know it’s cliché to say you identified with the monster in a horror movie, but for me it’s been very true for a long time. It started when I gave voices in my head to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and has continued to the present day where I’ve probably given Godzilla more personality in my headcanon than Toho wants him to have.

There is just something about the monster that appeals to me, regardless of how sapient they are. It’s not the same as thinking the villain is the best character. I don’t always sympathize with villains, but I do sympathize with monsters more often than not. Preferably the more reptilian-like the more likely I’ll find a reason to side with them. I think it has to do with my empathy for creatures that cannot voice their own side or simply view matters differently. I look at the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and I see a link to our past who has harmed no one outside his territory and only desires love and respect. I look at dinosaurs in the finale to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, watch them struggle and suffocate, and am overcome with relief when they are allowed to escape. I see the dragon in any given fantasy story and I ask why it has to be slayed for merely abiding by its nature?

Perhaps it’s my sympathy for animals, maybe it’s connected to things more personal to me that I’ll probably get into later. Whatever the reason, the concept of the monster character is intriguing to me, captivating even. And I’m honestly disappointed how little it is often given the perspective it deserves. The monster generally remains the obstacle to be defeated or destroyed in any story, it is rarely the hero of the work. When the monster is allowed to be the hero it is sometimes compromised by it simply being so humanized that it might as well be a human. There are very few true monster centric narratives in this vein. Nature POV Narratives where an inhuman creature or animal is allowed to be themselves.

For the life of me though, I cannot understand why video games have rarely taken the opportunity up themselves. I have longed for a chance to play a true dragon video game in the modern era for a long time. I’ll even settle for a Dragon Rider game, but the few I’ve played have been underwhelming. I’m starting to get trickles of kaiju games where I can play as the kaiju, “Dawn of the Monsters” being a superb example. One of the best monster games where I am very clearly a vicious killing machine is “ManEater”, the game where you get to play a killer shark ala Jaws. Games like Evolve died on the vine while a few isometric horror games are trying to fill its void. But they’re all multiplayer and I’ve always leaned more towards single player games.

The point is, the list of truly great games that allow you to be the monster is rather low. Not many people have honestly tried to replicate the “Rampage” formula sadly. And every dinosaur game that doesn’t stick you in the shoes of a human that hunts them is basically just a simulator where you’re less monster chowing on people and more realistic animal. And while those games certainly have a place, allowing people to experience animals as what they truly are, I still feel bereft of my boyhood dinosaur fantasy that allows me to be the velociraptor from Jurassic Park. Something that was only allowed in the SEGA Genesis Jurassic Park game and never really again.

I’ve never understood why people haven’t tried to present the typical video game story in reverse. Allowing you to be the fire-breathing monster who battles the fabled hero. Games in general are usually supposed to evoke some kind of progressive power fantasy. Growing as a dragon or dinosaur in ability and power would fill that niche. “ManEater” did it perfectly well, as did “Dawn of the Monsters” itself. It’s probably because of our innate human nature to fear the monster honestly, to want it to be conquered. And sympathizing with it or placing ourselves in its claws so to speak is antithetical to that. It’s just easier to attach ourselves to and humanize… well, a human protagonist. Or at least humanoid one.

There is, however, one genre of games that enables this a bit more. The realm of Strategy Games, which usually have campaigns that feature fairly non-human factions depending on their setting. Some are evil, some are good, some are a mix, but generally all of them allow you to inhabit a less human role and more alien mind set. And if there is one franchise that has zeroed in on doing just that, it is “Starcraft”, most specifically with its vicious alien race faction, the Zerg. Xenomorph Homages on the outside, but far more strange and bizarre in a wider context. The Zerg are generally the primary antagonists of the first Starcraft game and it’s expansion, Brood War. As a result of their terrifying conceptual design and unique mode of gameplay, the Zerg have become iconic in their own right as a dominant monstrous faction.

While their self-proclaimed leader, the Overmind, and its Cerebrates held sway as the face of the Zerg for the first game, they were both soon overshadowed by the REAL star of the campaign, Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades. Sarah was a Terran Ghost Operative, but after being betrayed by her leader, Arcturus Mengsk and captured by the Zerg, she was mutated into a monstrous psionic being. Half human, half zerg, Sarah became a vicious, conniving and brutal servant of the Overmind. That was until it died at the hands of the heroes at the end of the first game. When she returned in the Brood War expansion, there was a brief moment where it seemed like Sarah had been freed from the Overmind’s influence and had turned over a new leaf. She was now helping our heroes to resist the brutal imperial dictatorship of an expeditionary force from the United Earth Directorate. And while her methods were still brutal, she still appeared to be back on the good guy side.

She wasn’t, she was decieving all her allies. Luring them into a sense of false security before utterly compromising them and decimating their forces. The UED were driven from the system, but many Protoss and Terran inhabitants of the Korpulu Sector were massacred. Including Fenix, the beloved fan-favorite Dragoon Hero and friend to Sarah’s one time love interest, James Raynor. In response, Raynor promised to kill her someday, while Sarah mocked Fenix’s death before letting him and her other enemies slink off to lick their wounds. Kerrigan left her enemies weakened but alive, the message sent. The Zerg were hers and she’d be waiting in the dark of space for them to test her dominance once again.

That was how Brood War ended, with Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, victorious. A monstrous villain ending that left fans reeling. The Zerg cemented as the dominant force of the Starcraft universe, even if they didn’t kill everyone off at the end of the story. It’s fairly easy of course to write a monster centric campaign like the Zerg from the position of the villain though. Brood War is a good example of writing a villain winning and showing the perspective of a monster faction with relatively simplistic depictions.

Why is Kerrigan doing this? Why are any of the Zerg doing this? Simple, they’re just evil. They’re voracious, murderous, little better than rabid animals who spread and kill and rip apart their enemies because they can. And they’re all controlled by basically a mutated psionic commando who has gone mad with power. It’s simple, but it works as a story and people can easily accept it. Kerrigan is a monster, the Zerg are evil. There is no way to really say otherwise.

And Blizzard never challenged that clear obvious reading. Mostly because for several years, Starcraft remained pretty much on the backburner of Blizzard’s many projects. Warcraft became their primary franchise, mainly through the MMO they launched, World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, Starcraft floundered in forgotten obscurity, a low priority, even as fans clamored for a sequel.

Eventually, it arrived. Although not all at once. Due to the game ballooning in size and scope, Blizzard opted to essentially split one game into three. The result was that each “Starcraft 2” Campaign was turned into a separate expansion. “Wings of Liberty” would hit first, reuniting fans with Jim Raynor, as he led a rebellion against Arcturus Mengsk and his Terran Dominion, while trying to deal with a resurgent Zerg Invasion led by Kerrigan herself. Jim’s presumption as to why she was back, “She’s come to finish the job.”

For most of “Wings of Liberty”, that assumption appears correct. As Kerrigan is still a cackling, genocidal maniac who seems to have even adopted a fatalistic doomsday mindset. Apparently she suspects the return of a long forgotten evil that even she fears her Zerg cannot stop. Heavy foreshadowing no doubt. Made more clear by the return of Zeratul, the Dark Templar Protoss hero from the original game. He too has terrible visions of this evil and he warns Jim that the only person who can stop it… is Kerrigan.

Fans consider “Wings of Liberty” a fairly good game in general, but there is one hang up for many. That being Raynor’s Vengeful Declaration he will kill the Queen of Blades for all she’s done being seeimingly forgotten. In its place is a new mission, one he’s given by Mengsk’s son and prodded further by Zeratul’s prophecies. He’s going to save Sarah, not kill her. Fans were perturbed, feeling rather annoyed that Jim would so easily go back on his vow of revenge given what had happened to Fenix. Although the general consensus appeared to be that fans really didn’t like the prospect of letting Sarah off easy for everything she had done by saving her from her infection.

One can argue about the trope of putting down former love interests because they’ve gone evil or been horribly mutated or whatever have you. It’s been a major point of contension and subject of debate about how often it seems in fiction that the hero has to kill their female love interest. A prime example is the first film version of the Dark Pheonix Saga, where Wolverine has to kill Jean. Kerrigan’s situation is somewhat similar, only Jim is being offered an out so he doesn’t have to kill her.

While this topic hits on a lot of subjects that are important to discuss, (abuse, victimization, blaming victims for the harm done to them, etc.) they are probably best saved for a different essay. Right now, it’s just important to understand this mindset going in. People were very skeptical about the idea of giving Kerrigan an easy out redemption and it sorta soured them on the campaign, despite it being overall enjoyable.

For my part, I felt, given that Sarah’s infection had clearly altered her personality and mind, it was worth trying to cure her over outright killing her. And even if Raynor had once promised to end her, it had been several years since that initial declaration. Tempers had likely cooled and it was clear Jim was in a vulnerable regretful state of mind at the start of the campaign.

While the addition of Zeratul declaring that they need Kerrigan to defeat a worse threat feels a bit like its being shoved into the story to justify enabling this change of mindset for Raynor further, it still fulfills its function. As far back as Brood War, there were indications there was more at work than just Kerrigan’s ambitions and that it would probably require more than any one faction’s forces to defeat it. So in my opinion, it just made sense as set up to the eventual final confrontation with this great coming darkness that had been long gestating within the story.

Regardless, I was willing to give the next chapter of the story, “Heart of the Swarm”, a chance to tell the story it was aiming for. At the time I enjoyed it as it was a whole different playstyle to adjust to and an intriguing story that drew me further into the characters and lore of the Starcraft Universe. However, even I had to acknowledge some of the problems encountered while playing it narrative wise.

Upon watching a good deal of the campaign on YouTube in an attempt to revisit it some, I was struck a lot by those problems again. Those issues stemming from the challenges of depicting a race of monsters like the Zerg and, instead of making them outright villains, attempting to give them more depth and nuance while still retaining what they are. And frankly, it was clear it was a hard assignment for Blizzard to pull off.

So here I am to confront the challenges head-on in hopes of better learning from both Blizzard’s mistakes and successes in writing the Zerg with this new direction in mind, Kerrigan especially. “Heart of the Swarm” probably best represents why it’s so hard to make a monster in a video game, or really in any medium, a hero. As well as probably a good explanation as to why, despite those challenges, I think it’s an admirable narrative perspective to attempt regardless. One I wish more game developers and story-tellers in general tried to attempt more often.

So let’s discuss Sarah Kerrigan and her Zerg, where we will try and figure out if her swarm of monsterous alien bugs can ever truly be considered heroic. Or if monsters are better left off just being villains.

Vengeance Shall be Mine

I think it’s important to set up Sarah’s mindset for this chapter of the story, because it presents both the promise and crux of the issue overall. Sarah is very dead set on revenge from the word go in “Heart of the Swarm.” Revenge against Arcturus Mengsk, the one guy in all of Starcraft no one will EVER defend because he is just objectively evil and the worst.

Let’s keep this in mind going forward, Mengsk is the reason everything went wrong for a lot of people. He set up Psi-Emmiters around New Gettysburg on Tarsonis to destroy the Confederacy homeworld, using Sarah to do it. The results of which killed millions of innocent Terrans. He then left Sarah to die, because she had voiced criticism of the plan and Mengsk needed to tie up any loose ends. As a direct result, Raynor split from Mengsk and started a resistance group, Raynor’s Raiders, Mengsk formed the Terran Dominion to fill the power vaccum, and Kerrigan was mutated into the Queen of Blades who would then go on to kill millions more lives and destroy many more worlds.

At the end of “Wings of Liberty”, Jim Raynor has seemingly cured Kerrigan of her Zerg infection and killed his former friend, Tycus Findley, to protect her. Tycus was actually a sleeper agent for Mengsk, forced to carry out Sarah’s assassination, lest a killswitch implanted into the power armor he was trapped inside be triggered.Tycus didn’t seem to want to betray Raynor in the end, but he had no real choice and Raynor, ultimately, didn’t either.

When we catch up with Sarah and Jim, they are with Mengsk’s son, Valerian Mengsk, who is assisting the Raiders in evaluating Sarah’s condition. By this point, Sarah is fed up with being here and wants to leave because she has bigger fish to fry. Mainly Mengsk and taking everything into account it makes sense why. Arcturus is responsible for a ton of suffering and one can’t really argue that he doesn’t deserves the payback coming to him.

For Sarah though it is a very singular focus and Raynor is the one who seems to be willing to just run off with her outright. Telling her to forget Mengsk. The reasoning seems to be the same for why she’s here doing these tests. There is concern she might slip off the wagon and become the Queen of Blades again. Her desire for revenge might actually facilitate this return as it seems almost animalistic in its simplistic viewpoint.

When she talks about killing Mengsk, both now and later in the story, it feels less and less like a desire for justice and more out of pure personal rage. A vendetta that is no doubt understandable, even sympathetic given what she suffered, but still selfish. Mengsk betrayed her and as a result turned her into something horrible. She lost years of her life, became a hated monster and, seemingly at the forefront in her mind, denied her a future with Jim.

That seems to be the driving force for Sarah, the anger she feels at being separated from Jim. In all honesty, while the romantic moments between the two in the prior game before her transformation were sparse, it was clear there was a genuine shared attraction. Jim clearly seeing her as a person and not just a weapon, like everyone else had apparently treated her, no doubt endeared him to her. The fact that Jim risked everything to bring her back has only solidified that it seems.

Without that wider context in mind though, Sarah’s motivation feels rather lacking and simplistic. In the prior game, Raynor as a human had more complex emotions surrounding his choices and actions. There were a lot of factors pushing him to make the final decision to save Sarah. Not just his feelings for her, or Zeratul’s vision, but also the fact he was trying to lead a rebellion and more importantly find a greater sense of purpose instead of drowning himself in beer after beer. Raynor needed to find hope again and that story is universal. Saving Sarah and thus stopping her mad rampage without killing her, like she’s the Dark Phoenix, is his redemption for failing her.

Sarah’s goals are highly insular in contrast, she’s already fitting a more monster motivation angle even now. How do I survive? Kill the thing threatening me. What matters to me? This person I care about. Kerrigan’s thoughts revolve around her hatred for Mengsk and her desire to be with Jim. That’s at the very least how she starts out and frankly she doesn’t really move the needle too much. There is very little struggle in Kerrigan’s mind concerning what needs to be done. Mengsk must die and she must be with Jim. Her desire to get out of her containment, out of the lab, is motivated more out of the hope of being with Jim and killing Mengsk than it is with anything else.

Sure, she wants to teach Valerian a lesson about thinking he can use her to control the Zerg and does so effectively. But she very clearly takes a little pleasure in sicking her Zerglings on the sublevel of the lab and destroying his robots. She doesn’t kill anyone of course, but she still makes her point. “You can’t control the Zerg and you can’t control ME.” So Valerian might as well stop trying, let her out and let her pursue what she wants rather than remain an obstacle. She can leave anytime she wants, as she deftly demonstrates. She’s being polite by not doing so.

Monster goals follow this sort of logic, a personal primal motivation and a refusal to be confined by artificial means. These are the motivating factors for many monsters, whether hero or villain. They’re animalistic drives, far simpler in their context, more direct thinking than complex. We can see it in many a creature feature.

Godzilla isn’t stupid, he just has a very particular goal in mind and will smash through any obstacle in his way to do it. Whether it is a building or an army. Same as Kong, the shark from Jaws, the Xenomorph, the Predator or any variety of movie monsters you can name. Kerrigan’s closest cinematic equivalent is probably Jason Voorhees, a slasher villain who is basically a monstrous entity with no real greater goal than revenge for what happened to his mother and himself. There are key differences, rational thinking, the ability to talk, the overall goal in both scope and motivation, but the parallels are there.

So even saved, Sarah still seems to be thinking like her old self or at least like a Zerg. Find the enemy, kill the enemy, protect only what interests you, refuse confinement. She might have justifiable reasons to feel that way, but it can be fairly alienating if your lead character comes across as fairly selfish and single-minded.

The concerns of her slipping back into her old persona aren’t unfounded either. When Arcturus Mengsk’s forces attack the facility Kerrigan is in, it becomes clear that the Dominion Marines have been instructed with pretty much killing everyone in there if it means taking down Kerrigan. This sorta justifies Sarah’s position, that Mengsk won’t let her live and he needs be taken down. Given the lengths he went to kill her, it’s naïve to assume he’d just give up honestly.

Implanting Tycus within Raynor’s Raiders simply to kill Kerrigan was rather insane. He had the potential to destroy the Rebels from the inside, but there was never any indication that Mengsk used this to his advantage in “Wings of Liberty.” Tycus was just there to be in the right place at the right time to kill Sarah and Arcturus was willing to let Raynor disrupt his empire to maintain Tycus’ cover the whole time. Mengsk will even potentially kill his own son if it means destroying Kerrigan. This is emphasized by the fact the Dominion Fleet keeps shooting the Hyperion, despite Valerian being aboard, because Kerrigan is also aboard. Even Valerian knows this, saying his father will “sacrifice any piece on the board to take the queen.”

At the same time however, Sarah has her own one-track mindset. When she first gets aboard the Hyperion she has been separated from Jim during the escape from the facility. Instantly upon seeing him, she psychically attacks Valerian. She blames him for leaving Jim behind, it’s only that very Dominion Fleet firing on them that even gets her to stop. She makes it very clear despite pleas to the contrary, there is no US as far as Sarah is concerned. The Raiders aren’t her allies, Jim is and she won’t leave without him.

This all denotes that Sarah is acting very much still like her old persona. While she may not remember what she did as the Queen of Blades, she isn’t really that far off from being her again. Her motivations may have changed, but she’s not truly back to her old self. The trauma and length of time as the Queen has clearly altered that.

With the Hyperion unable to stay, Kerrigan leaves for a nearby planet’s surface, hoping to wait for Jim there. Instead she finds a Dominion Outpost and a massive orbital gun. She needs it gone or else Raynor will be blown out of the sky. She can’t do it alone, so she connects to the nearby Zerg colony and its Swarm Queen. These are new units for the game, created by Kerrigan herself to replace the Cerebrates of the Overmind. They now oversee the larger Swarm for her as lieutenants.

This Swarm Queen, Naktul, dutifully obeys Sarah’s commands and assists her in destroying the Dominion Forces on the planet as well as taking out the gun. While successful, Sarah realizes that she’s slipping back into her Queen of Blades persona. She’s even starting to talk like them, separating herself from the other Terrans. With this knowledge, Kerrigan retreats to her dropship and tries to sort things out. It’s very clear that without Raynor’s support structure, she is very quickly slipping back into darkness inside her. A fact that she freely admits to. She keeps trying to contact Jim, but he’s not answering her. She’s alone, save for a single Zergling that snuck aboard creeping up to her. It doesn’t seem to be all that threatening to her, even as she points a gun at it.

Then she gets the news that Raynor has seemingly been captured and executed. Mengsk then comes on next, celebrating Jim’s death as Sarah breaks down in the dropship, unable to cope with the fact that Jim has died and she couldn’t save him. All while Mengsk gloats at the prospect of his absolute victoty and unopposed rule.

"Proud Dominion citizens, at long last our nightmare is over. The lawless terrorist James Raynor is dead. With his death comes a new era of peace. The protoss have retreated from our Dominion, and the zerg threat has been removed. Their Swarm is shattered and leaderless. Soon we will eradicate every last zerg on Char. In short, we have won.”

And all this time, the zergling stays at Sarah’s side, offering her the only support she has left to lean on it seems, her Swarm. With Raynor dead and the Protoss backing off to deal with their own problems, Sarah is all that remains to potentially challenge Mengsk and defeat him. Despite whatever reservations she had, the one person who believed, supported and trusted her is gone. With no one else, of course she returns to the Zerg and the only people that she has left. She embraces the monster within and the power it holds.

It’s obvious the scene is meant to make us side with and agree with Kerrigan’s decision to simply go full Zerg. After all, we like Jim and the prospect of him being dead at Mengsk’s hands is not going to sit well with us. We’d likely want revenge just as much as Sarah does and frankly, whatever reservations one might have about Kerrigan right now, the scene IS effective. Partially because of the high quality cinematics, the voice acting, and the direction. But generally I think it has to come back to Mengsk. His gloating, his self-assurance that he has won, that he’s the hero of humanity while Sarah mourns the loss of the one person she ever truly loved. Who wouldn’t agree with her in this moment that retaking the mantle of Queen of Blades is her best and only option?

This is the monster mindset, the subversion of the typical storyline. No longer is the human knight the savior of humanity, but a villain that needs to be destroyed. Because it has taken something from the monster, something that it felt it deserved or earned. Something that belonged to it alone. In his efforts to be the conquering hero, Mengsk has incured the wrath of a force greater than himself, more primal and ancient. This is what the Zerg represent, the scorned and wronged dragon who will burn the castle to the ground as punishment for the kingdom’s arrogance.

When we played as Raynor, we inhabited very human concepts of conflict. “Wings of Liberty” had us fighting for ideals like freedom, justice, hope among others. Kerrigan and her Swarm are now fighting in this moment for survival and retribution, distinctly more primal concepts. You can’t really spin these in good ways, there’s always a negative association with something so innately thematically insular. We might agree with Sarah, but her actions aren’t really for the greater good, they’re for herself. And that inherently makes her struggle and us connecting with her an uphill battle. Because, as we’ve established by now, she’s no longer really human anymore. Maybe in appearence she is, but not in mindset.

Summon the Swarm

At this point the game opens up to give you more choice in which missions you do, but unlike the previous game you will be locked onto that set pack of missions on which ever planet you decide to pick. Whether you go to Char or Kaldir, you’ll remain there until every mission there is completed. It’s again showing more a direct single minded nature with the Zerg and Kerrigan, they’ll keep fighting until they’ve claimed all territory as their own and every threat eliminated, or they die. So even the mission structure of the game is based around a more monster-oriented mindset.

Whichever planet you pick, you end up finding a vacant Zerg Leviathan, essentially a biological spaceship, that Sarah quickly seizes control of. It’s here we meet Izsha, a strange Zerg creature that acts as Kerrigan’s advisor and eventually Abathur, an even stranger Zerg creature who is basically an alien mad scientist obsessed with constantly evolving the Zerg.

Like “Wings of Liberty” these are the first two NPC characters you can interact with in your hub aboard the Leviathan between missions. However, while some may occupy similar positions to previous characters, Izsha is basically Sarah’s Matt Horner and Abathur is essentially Swann, that is where the similarities end.

And this holds true for all of Kerrigan’s lieutenants within her Swarm, which this section will discuss in detail. Although it might not be terribly long because of one specific problem they all have.

They are all incredibly flat static characters. And this isn’t a flaw, it’s by design.

Izsha is probably the greatest offender. She has no real personality, she’s basically an emotionless bug creature with no real opinions or thoughts of her own. She essentially exists as another extension of Sarah, functionally keeping her updated on incoming threats and providing her intel before and during missions. She is functionally just a palette swap replacement of the Adjutant that’s been talking to you for a while. Sometimes Izsha will ask questions, she might make a seemingly snide or rye comment here and there, but ultimately it reads like she just doesn’t understand the wider context of Kerrigan’s thoughts and statements.

She’s a lot like Data from Star Trek: TNG in this regard, but Izsha doesn’t want to be more human nor does she really want to understand how to be human. In fact, she doesn’t really have any desires, as she’s a creation of Kerrigan’s meant to hold all her relevant thoughts and plans. Like the Cerebrates of past Starcraft games, but with no real control over the Swarm. She simply wishes to know how best she can serve her queen. She is devotely loyal, to a fault and never once seems to doubt this.

The closest she gets is after the end of a particular mission where Sarah won’t speak with anyone and she shows concern for that. As soon as that’s over though, Izsha never brings it up again and Sarah never really confides in Izsha in any case. All she’s there to do is sift through additional plans and stray thoughts that might be relevant to the Swarm’s survival. Metatextually, this serves the purpose of giving Kerrigan someone to talk to aboard the Leviathan before more show up later.

However, she’s not a friend or even a confidant, she’s basically a sounding board for Sarah to mouth off to. Even that has its limits. Whenever Izsha’s questions hit too close to home for Sarah, particularly where it may raise some doubts, fears or problems with Kerrigan’s motivations and goals, that is when she silences her creepy advisor. Sarah snaps at Izsha to drop the subject and Izsha does so without another word. Her deference to Kerrigan’s commands and refusal to ever challenge her on anything make Izsha functionally a beta to Kerrigan’s alpha. She is in no position to make demands, her council is only needed up to a point and barely at all. She is purely a subordinate lackey, not a friend or comrade.

Abathur is at least a bit more interesting, as his character doesn’t speak nearly as monotone and has far more personality to it even if he’s ultimately just as flat as Izsha narratively. Abathur exists purely to evolve the swarm, toiling away in the Leviathan’s Evolution Pit crafting new upgrades for your various units. His nightmarish visage, gruff but direct voice and matter of fact sentence structure basically makes him seem like a less friendly, more sinister version of Mordin Solus from the Mass Effect games. They’re both mad scientists to a degree, so the comparison is apt.

However, Abathur has even fewer moral scruples and hang ups than Mordin ever did. He is not above killing living test subjects he deems failures. He will rip off limbs, he we tear through skin, break bones, lacerate organs, pull out brains, and ultimately eviscerate his experiments to achieve his ends. Those ends always being make the Swarm Stronger, more adaptable, more evolved. And if a few experiments die or are tossed aside, oh well. Just how it goes.

Kerrigan finds his rather brutal form of enforced natural selection rather displeasing, mainly because she thinks Abathur is familiar to her. Not long after meeting and conversing with him, Sarah learns the truth. Abathur isn’t a new creation of the Zerg like Izsha or her Swarm Queens. He was the one who put her in the crysallis that turned her into the Queen of Blades in the first place.

While he clearly didn’t have many options, given that the Overmind likely made him do it regardless of anything else, Abathur is unapologetic. In fact he’s proud of his work and a bit disappointed that Sarah undid it all. Not mad, just confused as to why she didn’t appreciate what he did for her. Naturally, Kerrigan is not happy with this knowledge and only restrains herself from killing Abathur outright because she understands she needs him. Mengsk is still the person who got her captured and while he’s probably more directly responsible, Abathur again had no real choice in the matter. For his part though, Abathur just doesn’t understand Sarah’s anger.

To be honest, he doesn’t understand many human emotions, seeing them as distractions to his work. It’s really all he lives for, his one prime function as set forth by the Overmind. However, while a lot of his experiments are done for the Swarm, he’s fundamentally useless without someone to oversee and guide his work. When the Overmind died, Abathur wandered feral through the tunnels of Char, until he was given purpose again through Kerrigan’s hivemind connection.

As far as Abathur is concerned, you’re not a Zerg unless someone is controlling you, you’re just another animal otherwise. This suggests that the Zerg as a species requires a leader, a controller, to be whole and functional. Even if it is ultimately to fulfill Kerrigan’s revenge, that’s purpose enough. A Zerg without purpose is just an animal and not a sapient cognitive being. To backslide along the evolutionary path is unacceptable to Abathur. So he follows Sarah, not because he has no choice, but because she offers purpose ultimately. If Sarah were to die and someone else gave him sufficient purpose, he would follow them instead.

For Abathur, the Swarm and the Evolution of it is everything, but it only works if someone else is making the decisions and calling the shots on how to direct his focus and work. That’s what gives it purpose. Which is his primary mechanic and position within the game. Abathur is the one who directs the Evolution Missions, various little side quests that unlock throughout the game that enable you to unlock more abilities for your Zerg units in battle. However, you can only pick one of two options each mission, for balancing purposes within the campaign mostly, but in-universe its because the strains will cancel each other out otherwise. As a result, you probably spend the more time with Abathur over the course of the game than anyone else and get to know the Zerg most through him.

Abathur’s obsession with evolution and his position within the Swarm gives a greater insight into how the Zerg function as a species. Essentially, besides his belief that the hivemind gives them purpose, he functionally doesn’t understand anything beyond evolutionary terms and the constant struggle for survival.

To him, the cruelty and brutal lifestyle of the Zerg is natural and simply a net positive. So long as the Swarm evolves, it endures and improves repeatedly. He doesn’t believe in perfection, because that would require stagnation. Perfection in his mind is unobtainable, always out of reach. It is a goal to strive towards, but never truly attain. There is no end state to the Zerg in this sense. No final form, no pinnacle apex adaptation, simply a constant push to survive whatever the universe might throw at you. He thus treats every experiment as vital to that continued plan of survival.

As for the other races in their way, simply bio-matter and he finds them loathsomely inefficient, Terrans especially. He even remarks on how Sarah has been “infected” with more Terran bio-matter upon her return. It’s not so much racism, as he sees human functionality woefully inadequate towards his standards of survival. Conflict with the other factions is seemingly inevitable in his mind as well, in order to keep chasing the efficiency and unobtainable perfection. While he’ll never reach it, stagnation is unaffordable, making the Swarm stronger requires it to be tested constantly. To him, the Zerg as a society is one long ongoing experiment. It’s nothing personal when the Zerg attack and assimilate a Terran colony, it’s just science.

In these terms, Abathur probably presents the first real substantial motivation for the Zerg. To evolve and seek conflict in order to do so. Their choice of conflict, however, depends on who is in charge and is entirely dependent on their whims. As long as Kerrigan holds sway over them all through her hivemind connection, they will obey. Abathur will follow her so long as she maintains the conflict neccessary for his experiments to continue. Purpose is dervied for the Zerg by a single master who controls them. Their motivations are tied to them. If Kerrigan wants revenge on Mengsk, Abathur will help her do so. For without Kerrigan he has no purpose, no drive, no means to carry on what he is.

Clearly Abathur and Sarah have different priorities. In Sarah’s case, she does terrible things because she believes she has to in order to get to her end goal. The ends justify the means. Abathur doesn’t really care about the ends, there is no end. The means aren’t important either. All that matters is evolving and improving. Morality isn’t important to Abathur, let alone the Zerg at large, it barely figures into their thought process. It might with Sarah, but not them. And without her, they have no will or drive of their own beyond basic instinct. This is important to remember for later.

For now, the thing to take away from this is that as monsters, the Zerg’s understanding of themselves runs purely on basic innate understanding of controlling their own evolution to best survive, thrive and continue to do so. If it requires other species to be consumed to achieve that, then they will. This is just how nature is. The Zerg in this sense are nature and so long as the Zerg survive, it matters little who doesn’t. Again, just like Kerrigan’s need for revenge, the basic motivations of the Zerg as innately self-serving it seems.

Speaking of Self-Serving, that brings us to the next member of Kerrigan’s crew, Zagara. A Swarm Queen that has decided she can lead the Swarm better than Kerrigan and has taken over her old roost on Char. She’s now fighting a desperate and losing battle against General Warfield who the player helped conquer Char to begin with in “Wings of Liberty.”

After a direct confrontation that sees Kerrigan out hatch Baneling eggs and nearly literally roll over her forces with them, Zagara submits. There’s no sense in dying here, Zagara seemingly knows she can’t beat Kerrigan at this point and promises to serve her as a loyal lieutenant. Kerrigan accepts, but she decides that Zagara needs to be more than just the average Swarm Queen. She needs to evolve, to understand, to be taught.

Zagara probably has the most personality of any of Kerrigan’s followers. Not depth of character, she’s hardly any better than Abathur there, but she certainly has a better grasp on emotions than he does. Abathur doesn’t really get angry, there’s a moment where he seems jealous over another faction of Zerg for how they “stole” his evolutionary designs, but it passes fairly soon. Zagara has more emotional range, even if it fluctuates between various shades of scheming, derisive commentary and bloodlusting battlerage.

Zagara also actually has the closest thing to an arc character wise, but only because Kerrigan imposes it on her as she needs what is clearly going to be one of her chief battlefield lieutenants to actually think. She determines she can’t treat them like pawns, not entirely. They need to be independent enough to be able to do things without her direct involvement.

When she first comes aboard the Leviathan, Zagara does not seem to understand much in terms of overall strategy. She functions on very basic Zerg instinct, if slightly more advanced. Build up a lot of soldiers, make your numbers big enough to absorb any hits, rush the enemy and overwhelm them through sheer numerical advantage. Quantity over quality, essentially she’s stuck using Zerg Rush as her only real trick. Emphasized in how she’s tried to defeat Warfield by constantly attacking him head-on over and over, and failing every time. But insistent that THIS time it will work.

That won’t do for Kerrigan. Zagara, as she claims, needs vision. Besides sending her to Abathur to increase her intelligence capacity, enabling her to better strategize and understand various tactical concepts, Kerrigan speaks to Zagara one on one, to try and see how she’s improving. Not that she doesn’t just understand the concepts, but can learn from them. In this sense, Kerrigan tries to lead by example, more than just show of force or strength of will. She is directly trying to pass on knowledge to Zagara to make her better.

Strangely enough, despite fitting the motif of a Starscream character in near everyway, Zagara is grateful for this opportunity. She irks at going under the knife so often, but she sees the benefits. She then reasons at one point that she’s strong enough to actually challenge Kerrigan. However, she declines, she does intend to lead the Swarm, but not until she has learned everything from Kerrigan that is worth learning. Specifically, vision and what it means.

In Kerrigan’s terms, as she explains to Zagara, vision means seeing beyond the most obvious. Looking at a different angle, taking in the whole picture and beyond it. She does this with Warfield, by thinking around his various strategies, rather than just trying to outmuscle him through numbers or power alone. Zagara watches as Kerrigan takes apart her enemies, piece by piece, instead of going directly for the killing blow. And the Swarm Queen sees the value in this form of patience easily, as Sarah accomplishes what she failed to do.

Throughout the game, Zagara and Kerrigan’s conversations continue much in this way. Zagara will put forth a very blunt direct attitude as to how the Zerg deal with things. She presumes superiority and power are inherent to their species, that nothing can crush them. While Kerrigan continues to warn her of how confidence can lead to arrogance and that learning from your enemies is as important as defeating them. I think of them as master and student in this regard, Kerrigan teaching Zagara how to be like the Queen of Blades, but free of the same traps. Zagara is taught to see beyond the limited view of the Swarm’s biological instinct and think for herself instead. Not so much in a selfish way, but in a grander idea than pure survival.

As she grows more intelligent though, Zagara gains a sense of curiosity, a desire to understand. She continues to ask questions to Kerrigan, about the various races they encounter, the places they visit and why things are the way they are. Zagara doesn’t understand all of it and everything is filtered through her Zerg mindset, but her desire to know is self-evident. More than just lusting for the blood of her enemies, although that never really goes away, Zagara does start to form a sense of empathy this way, more than Abathur ever could.

For example, she comes to view the Terrans with pity more than just enemies or fuel to evolve the swarm. They have no hivemind, no direction, no purpose given to them. They’re lost in her mind, confused and bereft of function. That they’re all so alone in the end, without the comfort of other likeminded individuals within the Swarm. She wishes to help them in the end… by killing them and assimilating them into the Swarm. Yes, it’s very alien morality logic, but she is a monster. Her values are inherently different from ours, the fact she can form any sense of empathy is a remarkable change for her.

Zagara’s loyalty to Kerrigan develops into true admiration in time, but she can never fully understand her queen though. While Kerrigan is Zerg, she’s still very much human with human concerns. Some of the things Sarah does Zagara cannot truly grasp because they are so alien to her. When Kerrigan briefly teams up with some old Terran friends, which we will talk about later, Zagara thinks it has to be because she’s tricking them. This is a long term goal, a plan of some sort, like the Queen of Blades of old. It’s not though and Kerrigan remarks that Zagara will not understand why she is doing this. No matter how hard she tries.

But Zagara wants to understand, she wants to know. She doesn’t want to become more human, but she does want to understand them and comprehend vision. If only as a means of surviving and thriving at first, but eventually to become truly worthy of being the leader of the Swarm. In this sense, Zagara comes the closest to truly transcending from pure monster to actual monster hero within the confines of ”Heart of the Swarm’s” story.

She is still beholden to Kerrigan’s whims, her morality is fairly warped and alien, she works on survival instinct and filters everything through those instincts, but she wants more. She is not nearly so self-serving in the end as she could be and her efforts start to lead her to a more aspirational desire. It’s not anything truely heroic or idealistic yet, but Zagara wants to grow and move beyond what the Zerg are as vicious bloodthirsty monsters. She’ll never be human, she doesn’t want to be, but her sincere curiosity and growing sense of empathy is far closer to a heroic template than any of the other Lieutenants in the swarm we’ve discussed thus far.

This brings us to Dehaka, a different kind of Zerg with a different personal creed. For the most part, a lot of the Zerg we’ve talked about have determined their worth in becoming more powerful in one way or another. Abathur believes in power through evolution, Zagara revolves around power through strength and later the mind, Kerrigan sees power as a means to an end more than anything. Dehaka doesn’t care about power. He only cares about change.

As discussed, Abathur looks at Evolution’s power as striving towards an ideal. While he can never reach perfection, he’ll keep moving towards it all the same. He finds purpose in trying to obtain a goal, targeting evolution and making it work to his specific calibrations. Dehaka prefers to not focus too much on the power acquired, he just prefers to change. He prefers to alter himself as a means of survival, but never as a means of gaining power. Collecting “Essence” as he says is how he improves himself and stays alive. But he never seeks direct power or control, as he views it as a trap.

This attitude comes from his origins, Dehaka is not a normal Zerg, he’s a Primal Zerg. Born on Zerus, the planet where the Zerg truly originated, Dehaka had a very different upbringing. The Primal Zerg have no hivemind, they run on pack mentality. The strongest rules and weaker bend the knee and serve. Dehaka has a pack because he is strong, but he’s unlike other Primal Pack leaders who are self-assured in their status to the point of arrogance. A Primal Pack Leader generally beats their chest, tries to kill other pack leaders who are strong themselves, seize their territory and become more powerful. They either die in the attempt or succeed.

Dehaka does not do that, he sees the accumulation of power as simply a means of getting a target on your back. He’s nowhere near the same level as other pack leaders on Zerus, he doesn’t care. He’d rather NOT become someone else’s dinner. He prefers to flow. He’ll collect essence, he’ll evolve, he’ll change, he’ll grow stronger, but he will not challenge. He will join with those he feels are strongest and lend himself to their efforts. This is how he survives, through pragmatic evolution, not via a directive towards more power as Abathur feels.

As a result, conflict is to be avoided in Dehaka’s mind. A lust for power for it’s own sake only makes you easier to destroy in the end because someone will just see it as something they want to take from you. He doesn’t even try to obtain the psionic connection most normal Zerg have, preferring to rely on his own inherent evolved abilities rather than truly join the Swarm in every aspect. Something Kerrigan allows because she herself sees the inherent advantage of using a Zerg that doesn’t have something most Zerg have that has been used against them.

The Hivemind is a great strength for the Zerg, enabling them to move and act as one unit with the same directive and goal. Dehaka not having one should be seen as a weakness, but as we find later in the game it is a trump card that Kerrigan has in her arsenal. It’s something that forces a change within the Zerg, to accept something outside their direct control, an independent ally and operator. One that will act in their interest but not be a slave to it.

Dehaka himself follows Kerrigan, not out of instinct or a desire for purpose or even because he submits to her. He follows her because where she goes new essence can be found. Dehaka describes his “loyalty” to Kerrigan fairly simply. He is not a rock or a wind, he will not stand against nor fight against Kerrigan. He will flow with her, like a river. Despite being a primitive dinosaur, in both looks and mindset, Dehaka is actually fairly intelligent in this respect. Not a slave to Zerg instincts but upholding them all the same.

He’s the one lieutenant that can disagree with Kerrigan because she holds no psionic power over his mind. He is the leader of a separate pack, not a tied to Kerrigan’s mission in anyway. He is here for his own purposes but will assist Kerrigan in a mutual partnership. Sarah recognizes and accepts this, although she constantly wonders if Dehaka will abandon her for someone stronger. Dehaka admits he would, but he doesn’t think anyone is stronger than her. He’s certainly not impressed with Terran technology, believing evolution will enable him a way around such things. For him, change is constant and neccessary. To stand still is to die. Dehaka is therefore always moving, going where the essence takes him, but never becoming obsessed with the power it grants.

In this sense, Dehaka is more of a true force of nature than even the Zerg are. He is not beholden to any illusions of power that his abilities give him. The essence grants him power, but he knows that it can also make him a target should he abuse it. He prefer the balancing act rather than forcing the change and sees no real goal beyond survival. Adapting to the change, moving with it, rather than making it what you desire, is preferable. And without a psi-connection, he remains free of Kerrigan’s true hold unlike the rest of her subordinates.

Does this make Dehaka more heroic because of his free-will? Does his willingness to help Kerrigan of his own volition make him more selfless? Yes and no. Dehaka has free will and will do what he feels is neccessary to survive. He will assist others in their plans to forward his own aims. In this sense he has more aspirational values and is not beholden entirely to self-interest. If he was, he’d be no better than the power drunk pack leaders he avoids becoming.

However, he’s still very much a monster. He’s not arrogant and he lacks any true malice, he’s even fairly intelligent. But his goals are ultimately self-serving even when he’s serving others. While he has an interesting take on Zerg philosophy, he is still very much driven by primal instinct. Being, well, a primal zerg this probably should not be surprising. He is essentially a big killer dinosaur after all, you probably shouldn’t expect any greater level of nuance beyond his pack mentality and desire to improve himself through the collection of essence. He is the Zerg in their natural state, but he’s still very much Zerg.

Perhaps then we need someone more like Kerrigan, who actually has a semi-understanding of heroic values built in. It takes a while to find him, but we do come across one lieutenant that shares more in common with Kerrigan than anyone else. An old friend, or in Kerrigan’s case, an old enemy.

Alexei Stukov, once a commander within the UED Expeditionary Force, betrayed by an infested Terran operative who called himself Duran. The truth of Duran is a discussion for later, but for now, Stukov’s death was not all it appeared to be. He was resurrected and turned into an infested Terran, now more Zerg than human. Kerrigan even notes the similarities in their backstory. And while Stukov is himself calling on Sarah’s aid now to get revenge on the people who did this to him, his reasoning is not entirely self-serving as he knows the greater stakes at hand. While he has lost his humanity, he is not completely bereft of what once made him human. And that is probably his best asset in regards to his status as a potential heroic monster.

When Stukov was human, his position within the UED was one of tempered professionalism and reasonable authority. He might have been antagonistic towards a lot of the characters we loved in the Korpulu sector, but he seemed to talk the most sense. When that one mission forced us to kill him, everyone already knew it felt like a mistake. But we had no real choice but to go along with it. Seeing him again is a bit of obvious fan service, but it’s a chance for him to be on the right side for once, and in this case he very much is.

Stukov hates what has been done to him, but he still intends to use his new power against those who tortured and turned him into the monster he is now. He reaches out to Kerrigan to help him achieve these ends, knowing he can’t do it on his own. Like Sarah he has recognized the need to form allies out of those who are probably less than savory and embrace what he ultimately is by aligning with the Zerg outright. However, he doesn’t try to take control of the Swarm, nor does he seem to have an delusions of grandeur concerning this partnership.

Stukov is still clearly out for revenge, but he also recognizes the greater evil at play within the facility he is asking Kerrigan’s help with destroying. For it is producing a threat that endangers more than just him or even the Zerg. Taking it down is about avenging the wrongs done to him, but it’s also about making sure it cannot continue further. In this sense Stukov is not running on total animal instinct. He is thinking in terms of the greater whole beyond his own personal gain. And this is true especially concerning his interactions with Kerrigan.

Iszha, Dehaka, Zagara and Abathur can’t really offer proper council to their queen. They can present other perspectives, even ask prying questions, but Kerrigan doesn’t really allow them to question her. Stukov may not question Sarah’s motives much either, probably because he doesn’t really have much of a greater moral high ground, but he does routinely warn her of potential risks with her plans. As a result, his conversations are a lot less one-sided in this regard. They’re almost equals, or they at least respect one another enough that Kerrigan will defer to his advice as often as Stukov will give it.

Despite his mutation into a Zerg, Stukov has retained his humanity better than Kerrigan ever did. He’s of course not much better concerning his methods, as he primarily turns humans into Infested Terrans to bolster his forces. However, he mostly chooses who he infects and for the most part its people who are themselves doing worse things. This doesn’t really make him a hero, but Stukov is under no delusions about what and who he is, unlike the old Queen of Blades was. You can tell he regrets a lot of the decisions he made that led to this path, he even mourns the death of his friend Gerard DuGalle. Despite the fact Kerrigan killed him, he doesn’t seem to hold any ill-will towards her. In general, Stukov seems to have accepted that he is a monster now and is mainly concerned in trying to make the most of it.

The question ultimately is, how much of Stukov’s motivation is purely out of a desire for revenge or truly altruistic? It’s hard to say, even Stukov doesn’t seem to know. However his apparent concern for Kerrigan’s life and state of mind goes a bit beyond self-interest and it certainly has nothing to do with her control of the swarm. While Stukov needs Kerrigan to get his revenge, his lack of animosity towards her suggests he’s not really being forced to make this choice. Yes, he doesn’t have many options, but he never tries to assert his dominance and doesn’t really try to make any deal towards his advantage alone. Unlike the other Lieutenants, Stukov has no truly selfish ambition beyond getting back at the people who wronged him. He also understands that there is more going on here than what immediately benefits himself.

The final piece to understanding Stukov in “Heart of the Swarm” is how his mission chain ends. With things concluded more or less, his revenge achieved and the place that mutated him in ruins, Stukov makes the assumption that he has now outlived his usefulness. Knowing Kerrigan is used to cleaning up loose ends at this point, he fully expects her to turn on him. It’s clear he suspected this would happen from the moment he reached out to her and he still asked for her help. His lack of self-preservation is uncharacteristic of the Zerg, who are about survival above all else. He knows that the threat he’s facing is too great and that his life matters little in the grand scheme of stopping it. Maybe he’s that desperate for revenge, but it honestly seems like he’s accepted this outcome if it means ending a dangerous foe who threatens all life.

Sarah, however, has changed greatly over her journey at this point. She is nothing like the old Queen of Blades now and accepts Stukov into her swarm with open arms. Although she will let him leave if he so desires. With no real other prospects and no greater purpose, Stukov chooses to stay, not as a minion or exactly a friend, but clearly the closest thing Kerrigan has to an equal aboard her Leviathan. And as Kerrigan’s designs shift away from her personal vendetta and towards a more all encompassing threat to the races of the galaxy at large, she offers Stukov a part in thos designs. Noting that the odds are likely against them and they will probably die, Kerrigan states it’s better to fight for something than lay down and die. Which Stukov readily agrees with.

Taking all of this into account, Stukov is the closest to a heroic monster among Kerrigan’s lieutenants. While his morals may not be an absolute, he does have values beyond pure instinct or survival and is willing to lay down his life for them. He is willing to forgive former enemies, with little advantage to himself. He is, for all intents and purposes, the most human of Sarah’s companions. Perhaps the closest to actually being a friend of hers among the swarm, at least at this point. And it is ultimately through him that Kerrigan finally finds a greater purpose beyond her selfish desire for revenge that could potentially make her a hero as well. He is not perfect, his methods are still monstrous and it’s hard to judge how truly noble he is in the pursuit of his goals, but he fits the hero category better than most of the other lieutenants, if only by default.

However, this brings up the issue of how heroic a monster can truly be. Stukov is the exception among the lieutenants because, like Sarah, he used to be human, and none of the other Zerg Leaders ever were. Does this mean a monster can only be a hero if they have some already existing human values? Does that undercut their monstrous nature if their sense of morality is more in line with humanity’s and not something more alien? Because those questions are ultimately a part of the wider issue here. The more human a monster is, the more in line with our sense of right and wrong they are. It’s the difference between survival instinct and intentional altruism. How much of what the Zerg do is because they wish to act on it or because either their instinct or someone else, like Sarah, is controlling them?

“Heart of the Swarm” is fairly invested in asking this question over and over again, seeking an answer. Is Kerrigan more monster than human? Is her position and function as the leader of the Zerg enable her to be anything other than a force of destruction? Can she be seen a redeemed, heroic figureor is she doomed to forever be the monster as a result of her nature? Given what she does over the course of the campaign, that question is very hard to answer definitively. Which is why we need to discuss what Kerrigan does as she returns to her old title and ask if she has truly changed.

New Reasons to be Afraid

As stated before, once players have cleared the initial prologue stages, the game opens up and allows you to pick which missions you go on. But you’re locked on a single mission set once you pick it. This choice is perhaps done to retain narrative flow, it also makes more sense for the Zerg. Why would they leave a planet if they have not yet secured it? However, both worlds you can travel to initially inevitably force you to confront the problems of trying to make Kerrigan a hero. Namely, she’s killing people who do not really deserve it. And that is emphasized with the two primary antagonist characters for the initial missions, General Warfield and Lassara.

Most players seem to go to Kaldir first, as it allows them to unlock the Hydralisk early. However, it honestly makes more sense that Kerrigan would go to Char first, as the news about the impending extermination of all Zerg there, as well as its familiarity and importance to the Swarm, would draw Kerrigan towards it. This also seems to be the canon of the actual story, for whatever that is worth. So we’re starting with Warfield first in our discussion.

Warfield is technically not presented entirely sympathetically during these missions. He’s still loyal to the Dominion and ultimately Mengsk. He’s very open in his intentions and desire to essentially wipe out the Zerg entirely on Char and he is fairly open in his disdain for Kerrigan. He’s more of a traditional opponent, so technically we shouldn’t be too concerned with killing him.

Or we would be, if we did not know him. After all, we fought alongside Warfield in “Wings of Liberty” and while he wasn’t exactly a friend, we earned his respect and admiration. His personality was also endearing, as while he was working for the Dominion, he showed true courage, resilence and cared about his men. He didn’t fight from the safety of a ship in orbit, nor did he place himself above his lesser ranked soldiers. He fought with them and for them. He had come out of retirement in fact to help fight back the Swarm when the Queen of Blades returned. He even forced the medics to cut off his damaged arm and replace it with a cybernetic prosthetic, just so he could return to active duty and fight beside his men again. He might work for a bad government, but he’s clearly not like Mengsk. And because of his actions, Raynor was able to save to Sarah in the first. In a way, Kerrigan owes her life, her freedom from the toxic personality of the Queen of Blades, to Warfield.

And now she’s come to kill him. Regardless of any of his other traits, Warfield is still a Dominion General, he’s still loyal to Mengsk and Kerrigan doesn’t really care beyond that. He’s in the way of her revenge, he intends to destroy her Swarm. That means he’s a threat and the animalistic nature of the Zerg means that there can be no negotiation or diplomacy here. Kill or be killed, that’s all that matters.

All the same, for people who played “Wings of Liberty” their actions in “Heart of the Swarm” effectively undo a lot of the work from the previous campaign. You saved these Dominion Soldiers before, they helped you. Now you’re killing them all. This was easy to stomach when the point of the Zerg was them being evil, not so easy when you’re supposed to be the good guy in this campaign. If not the good guy than at least sympathetic.

If Kerrigan has any thoughts on Warfield and his soldiers that isn’t directly seeing them as a threat to her Swarm and an obstacle to her revenge, she does not share them. Partially because her minions do not care about those nuances ultimately, mostly because she has to play the role it seems. The Zerg will not respect her or follow her if she shows weakness or empathy. So she hides whatever thoughts she might have that may betray those compassionate human aspects.

For most of the missions on Char, Kerrigan systematically dismantles the Dominion operation. Taking out Warfield’s many containment and offensive capabilities. Warfield rants and raves about the inevitable destruction of the Swarm. Kerrigan simply shrugs the threats off, mingling better tactics with the Swarm’s numerical advantage to achieve victory. Before long, Warfield is lying wounded, a steel beam through his chest, as surviving Dominion soldiers try to flee to shuttles off world.

Even now, all Warfield cares about is getting them out. So when Sarah arrives, he tries to plead with her to let them go, citing that they’re no threat to her. Kerrigan doesn’t seem to respond, enraging Warfield as it seems she’s going to let her Zerg kill his men. Warfield at this point calls her a traitor, to both humanity and the memory of Jim Raynor. The use of his name is enough for Sarah to just outright finish Warfield off. But after the rage passes… Kerrigan calls of the Swarm and lets the Dominion survivors go. She decides to show compassion, more than the old Queen of Blades ever did. She doesn’t gloat over Warfield, she doesn’t cackle, she doesn’t even seem proud of her victory here.

Mostly Kerrigan just seems rather resigned to the reality that she’s just Zerg now, that she’s a monster. It seems she only let the Dominion soldiers go, perhaps, as a way to prove to herself she is still a little human. Revenge, however, still matters more. But she won’t kill everyone off out of cruelty, she can stop herself, she can decide when enough is enough. She might be a monster, but she does not have to be a villain as well. It’s a moment that shows Kerrigan isn’t the same as she was when she was previously infested.

But while Warfield might be easier to justify as an enemy, especially given that he still works for the Dominion, and Kerrigan’s bit of mercy softens the blow somewhat, this isn’t the case for Lassara. A Protoss scientist, not even a warrior, that Kerrigan essentially dooms to a terrible fate alongside all of her people on Kaldir. More so than even Warfield, what happens to Lassara is far less easy to justify, which even Kerrigan admits. As a result, it is a lot less easy to still see Sarah’s actions as heroic while taking the entirety of Kaldir into account.

When Kerrigan arrives on Kaldir, it to try to get another Swarm Queen that controls a great deal of Zerg to submit to her. However, she’s already dead and the Protoss are on Kaldir in force. As soon as they see Kerrigan though, they are very quick to decide its time to pack up and leave. They’re not trying to fight Kerrigan for most of the campaign on the planet, they’re just trying to get away.

Kerrigan knows that this is just so they can warn the Golden Armada, the main bulk of the Protoss military force. If they learn of her return at this stage of things, the Zerg Swarm broken and Kerrigan herself still not strong enough, the Protoss will destroy her. With revenge on her mind, Sarah can’t afford to fight another war against the Protoss to defeat her real enemy, Mengsk. So she makes the call that the Protoss on Kaldir must be exterminated to the last before they can warn of the Golden Armada.

This where Lassara comes in, she’s captured at the end of the first mission on Kaldir and forcibly held on the Leviathan where she reveals that these Protoss are not primarily warriors. They are simply colonists, searching for a place to live. Something Kerrigan forced upon them on when she helped the Overmind essentially conquer their homeworld of Aiur. She tells Kerrigan very bluntly that her people are colonists, scientists, civilians… and she’s killing them. Sarah doesn’t sound very sorry where she offers her rather weak response to this charge. That the Protoss have slaughtered countless Zerg themselves. This is just about survival, nothing personal.

Except, the Zerg are largely mindless without a leader, as even the various Zerg among Sarah’s circle of advisors have admitted. Overall, many Zerg are but feral animals, who will attack and kill whatever catches their attention. Killing them is not really the same as killing free-thinking sapient beings, especially when the Zerg have been traditionally the aggressor in every conflict. This isn’t a war between typical competing ideologies or cultures. The Zerg go to a planet and murder everything in sight and all the Protoss do is trying to contain and stop them when they do. Sarah’s accusation of the Protoss’ kill count to her own is not comparable in the slightest. It’s essentially a poor attempt at whataboutism by both-siding the issue. When you’re one of the chief reasons the Protoss are in the bad place they are, that takes away any semblance of moral high ground.

Kerrigan acts like she has no choice, even as Lassara tells her she could just leave. Flee Kaldir long before the Golden Armada even arrives. Perhaps even letting them leave would convince the Protoss that she is not interested in fighting them or has changed. She could try talking to the Protoss Colonists, telling them she is not a threat and simply desires revenge against someone else entirely unrelated to them. She does none of this, doesn’t even think of diplomacy, not even a token attempt at dialogue. She sees a threat, the Protoss, and attacks, like a scared animal. Except she can actually reason, she is capable of doing so, but falls back on basic pure survival instincts.

This is a by product of the game losing features. Lassara was supposed to be another advisor, a conscience among the many other Zerg who all obediently defer to her power. Lassara in this could be the only member of the Leviathan who could actually challenge Kerrigan’s actions. Perhaps even make her take different paths during certain missions. However, this was taken out, along with a lot of other ideas for the game, to streamline it. Otherwise, it would not have come out on time.

Sometimes you do need to do this with any creative endeavor as not all ideas pan out the way want. But losing Lassara as a legitimate advisor, and not a hostage, completely ruins the best chance for Kerrigan to be truly challenged directly on her Leviathan. To really have someone to discern the line between Zerg and human, between the monster and the hero. Without Lassara acting as the angel on Sarah’s shoulder there is no voice that criticizes her more extreme actions.

It’s a loss to the story and as a result makes it harder to understand Sarah’s ultimate motivations, making her seem more cruel and heartless than the game wants her to appear. If Kerrigan was supposed to be a straight up villain, this wouldn’t matter, just like the last game. But remember, Heart of the Swarm is depicting Kerrigan as a hero still, even if she is flawed. We’re meant to want her to succeed, but on Kaldir she’s behaving more like the old Queen of Blades than at any other point in the story.

On Char she let the Dominion soldiers go, the Protoss Colonists don’t get that luxury. The fate of Lassara is worse. Kerrigan infects her with a parasite, allows one of the only Protoss ships that escaped to detect her. They beam her back onto their ship… and moments later Lassara dies as the parasite Kerrigan infected her with bursts out of her. It then proceeds to grow into a Swarm Queen that massacres the last of the Protoss survivors of Kaldir.

Sarah remarks how she thinks Lassara was very brave and admirable. But its very moot, she still killed her in a way that was incredibly unecessary. It is remarkable cruel and aids in the completion of a massacre that Sarah did not seemingly need to commit. At this point, her excuses ring hollow and it is incredibly hard to justify any of these actions.

In one way, it sort of makes more sense for Kerrigan to start on Kaldir in this way. By allowing her to make up for this senseless act of mass murder by actually allowing the Dominion soldiers a chance to survive. It denotes a degree of character growth and change. But even still, that hardly makes up for the fact she still does this horribly cruel thing to a group of people who have done nothing to her to deserve this. Mengsk is the enemy we want to see Sarah get revenge on, not a bunch of Protoss who have probably suffered enough because of her.

Is there honestly anyway Sarah at this point can be redeemed now? The excuse before was her mind was corrupted by the Zerg. That’s gone now, every action she takes is of her own mind, will and personal decision making. She doesn’t get to use the evil personality card to get out of this one. It would seem at this point, the idea that a monster could still be a hero is completely off the table.

Is there still hope for Sarah Kerrigan to be redeemed? Maybe, but it requires change.

Evolve. Transform. Transcend.

Before long, Kerrigan will be visited by Zeratul. While he is no ally, he is not her enemy, a distinction he sorta forces on her when he reveals that he has found the birthplace of the Zerg. The planet Zerus, located far outside the Korpulu sector, is their true homeworld, although they are now unrecognizable to the Zerg that remain there. These are the Primals we discussed before and its clear moment one of landing they are happy to see their spaceward bug brethren return. They respond in an animalistic fashion, treating Kerrigan’s Zerg like a threat to their territory and packs.

The reaction is not unprecedented, as we find out when we accomplish our first mission on the planet and awaken an Ancient Primal known as Zurvan. The creature is intelligent and informs Kerrigan that what she knows as Zerg were taken from Zerus a long time ago by a being known as Amon. He altered the Zerg, changed them into what they are and corrupted them with something of his own design, the Hivemind. No Primal has this, they remain individuals. They are all still as hungry for power and evolution as any Zerg, however. And through this, Zurvan has something he can give Kerrigan.

Leading her to the first spawning pool, Kerrigan is able to undergo and tremendous change, reverting back to her classic Queen of Blades form, but different. She’s more powerful now and, more importantly, no longer corrupted by Amon’s designs. While Sarah was never controlled by him, she did feel his influence and dark presence guiding her actions. Amon was dead before she was turned, allowing her a degree of freedom when the Overmind died no doubt. Now however she is completely free of Amon’s taint, as her transformation within the Primal Spawning Pool has essentially purified her Zerg strain. Everything she lost as a result of Raynor expunging the Zerg Persona has been regained, but now has more in common with the Primal Zerg. The Hivemind remains of course, but now it is her own it seems, along with all her new powers.

Of course, in testing these powers by defeating the other ancient pack leaders and taking their essence for herself, Zurvan turns on her. Declaring that one of them must consume the other and become something greater, the way of all Zerg. Kerrigan of course wins, her power doubling even more as a result and a contingent of Primals under Dehakka now follow her.

Zerus is more than just a means of Kerrigan unlocking more powers on her personal skill tree though, or permanently altering her sprite and rendering for the rest of the game. It also shows a different faction and side to the Zerg. That in a way, they are victims. The Zerg were never meant to harm anyone but perhaps each other. For most of their existence on Zerus, all they did was kill and consume each other, evolving constantly as they did. Then Amon arrived and in a clear bit of colonization, forcibly assimilated the species in his grand design. He corrupted them and turned them into a menace that would go on to harm the wider galaxy. Perpetuating a chain of abusive forced assimilation that tracks all the way to Sarah Kerrigan herself.

We might be quick to suggest Sarah is doing the same as Amon to a degree now. She has come to this planet and enforced her will on it. However, one could also make the claim this is the Zerg finally getting in touch with their true nature, what they used to be and were. Sarah does not forcibly pluck and change the Primal Zerg, if anything she plays by their rules as soon as she lands. They’re brutal rules, dependent on survival of the fittest but they are THEIR rules. The Primals might not be the most complex faction of Zerg out there, but their culture is wholly separate from the Zerg and their drive to conquer. Primals have a desire to evolve more than anything, conquering is secondary and not as big a drive for them. They desire change first and foremost.

While Sarah is willing to go along with this, purely for her revenge, it is apparent the message she keeps learning as she participates in Zerus’ trials. She has a choice, evolve or die, to remain stagnant is death. This doesn’t only hold true for her body but also her mentality. A strict focus on her revenge and nothing else will simply make her like the old Queen of Blades, which she herself is forced to acknowledge was weaker as a result of this. That version of her did not really think for herself, as she was being influenced by a corruption tainting her mind. Now if she wishes to truly change, she must stop thinking in terms of revenge only.

However, this evolution facilitates, essentially, undoing Raynor’s work. This isn’t new in Starcraft. Many campaigns can seemingly undo the progress of your prior work. Resulting in the previous set of missions to feel hollow and pointless. Like you didn’t accomplish anything. Seeing Sarah freed of her Zerg bits suddenly deciding to regrow them hits a bit hard. You sacrificed a lot in “Wings of Liberty” to save her and now she’s gone right on back to the Zerg. Sure, she’s not corrupted anymore, she’s more powerful and obviously they were always going to bring back her classic Zergified look because it’s goddamn iconic and we can’t lose that, but it still hurts.

At the very least, Sarah has changed in some aspect. She has learned what the Zerg used to be and in a sense can be again if they embrace a more individualistic culture. The Hivemind will remain, but Kerrigan holds sway now and is free from all the corrupting influence of the entity that colonized them. They won’t ever stop being the swarm, its too engrained in them now, but they are less compelled by the whims of a terrible, powerful god that desires them only as a weapon. Now, like Sarah, they can potentially choose their own path. But Mengsk still must die first before anything beyond that can be accomplished.

At least now, Sarah has a sense of the bigger picture, the greater role the Zerg must play in things. It is not complete though, she only knows that the Zerg were not always what they are now. That there is a path forward for them and that the Swarm itself must evolve if it is to survive. That means it cannot be slave to conquest or obsession. It must change or die, like the primals believe so fervently. The question, what to change into? An answer is soon provided.

Born of the Void

Mengsk at this point contacts Kerrigan, revealing what we all likely suspected. Raynor is alive, being used as a final contingency plan against Sarah’s revenge. If she tries to move on Korhal, he’ll kill him. While the swarm is returning to her and she is growing stronger herself, Sarah cannot hope to invade Korhal just yet knowing that Jim will die as a result. The old Queen of Blades wouldn’t have cared, but Sarah no longer possesses her cold unfeeling malice. It’s a weakness Mengsk thinks he can exploit. That and the fact Sarah has altered herself back to her infested form which Arcturus knows Jim would hate to see as much as Sarah suspects he would.

Simultaneously relieved to know Jim is alive, but also paralyzed by the fact he is beyond her reach, Kerrigan has to rethink her strategy for Korhal. Freeing Jim is one thing, but compromising its strength also takes precedent. This is where Stukov comes in, revealing the location of a secret Dominion Lab that is breeding Hybrid Zerg/Protoss creatures. Mengsk controlling Hybrid can’t be allowed to stand, so its best to destroy these.

However, over the course of systematically wiping out the lab, Sarah learns there is far more to this fight than just her desire for revenge. By the time she is through with the station and its leader, Dr. Narud, she learns the horrible truth… Amon is alive and it is possible her reversion to human assisted in giving him new life. Amon presents a catastrophic threat to the Zerg and galaxy at large. She can’t let him go unchallenged.

The existence of Amon gives Kerrigan a goal beyond her own petty grievances, even if its about personal survival more lives are at stake beyond just the Zerg. The knowledge that, unless she uses her power against him, Amon will likely retake the Swarm and use it to its original, terrible purpose is unacceptable. She’s seen what the Zerg used to be, what they could be, she’s been purified of the corruption that clouded her mind and has seen the change taking hold of the Zerg as a result of her lessons.

After she is incapacitated following her defeat of Narud, Zagara has the opportunity to take the Swarm, but doesn’t. She heals her instead, insisting she has more to learn. If Zagara can understand the value of knowledge before personal gain, the rest of the Zerg have a chance as well. This isn’t to say the Zerg are suddenly heroic, their primary goal reminds survival, but their capacity to change is self-evident and has taken precedence over the conquest side of their nature. Maybe not completely, but enough that is can foster loyalty in a species that prides itself on its brutality.

Later on, Kerrigan also acknowledges that fighting Amon may be fruitless, even suicidal. That’s there’s simply no way the Zerg, even with Sarah as powerful as she is now, can probably stop him. Her reason for choosing to do so anyway is because the only other alternative is to lay down and die. She has abandoned any semblance of survival over all at this point or even revenge. Amon is a threat to more than just her and seeing the bigger picture at last has finally gotten through to her. However, Mengsk still must die, not just for what he’s done but because he is a part of Amon’s plan. He cannot be allowed to live.

However, to take out Mengsk, Jim Raynor must be freed and that means a reunion that Kerrigan is not looking forward to. She contacts the Hyperion to help her find Raynor and after a bit of a misadventure she accomplishes this task, tracking Jim to a prison ship that is constantly on the move save for when it needs supplies. This is when Sarah moves and begin taking the ship apart from the inside out. It’s here where Mengsk shows his truly evil side, as he decides to destory the ship, along with his many loyal soldiers, calling them heroes as he sacrifices their lives for himself. Very Zerg-like behavior from a so-called protector of humanity.

Kerrigan of course stops the self-destruct and finds Jim. He is not happy to see her in her current form. He recalls Fenix and the many lives of others she’s ended, how he sacrificed everything to bring her back, and now she’s essentially spat in his face. For what it is worth, Sarah doesn’t really offer much in the way of excuses, only that she accepts that he is beyond angry with her. She even gives him a gun and lets him point it at her head. If he wants to kill the Queen of Blades like he promised so long ago, he should do it now.

Jim does not though, he merely fires off into the wall and walks away. Kerrigan has saved the man she loved, but at the same time lost him. Jim simply can’t accept that there was any good reason to throw away her humanity again and this time be completely willing to do so. It just doesn’t fly with him, there’s always another way. For Sarah, there never was. He was always the one who thought things could be better, that they could try to find a different solution. Kerrigan generally accepted that they couldn’t always choose the good option. It was why she went along with the plan that would see an entire planet consumed and herself captured by the Zerg.

As a result, Jim leaves Sarah, unwilling to speak to her further, while Kerrigan looks out at the cold vacuum of space, accepting that she has quite possibly lost the man she loved forever. Revenge has it prices and this was the biggest one of them all. Perhaps in a small way, it would’ve been better for Jim to be dead. At least for Sarah anyway. That would mean she’d never have think about how he’d feel about her choices. Now, she can’t pretend for even a second that he’d feel differently. He just flat out told her his thoughts, he feels betrayed. And Kerrigan honestly can’t blame him for feeling like that. Because she kinda did.

If these is one aspect of Sarah Kerrigan that can be granted to her as a heroic sentiment, it’s her willingness to accept a loss, a failure and the rejection of her choices by others. Many villains would rant or find excuses or blame it on someone else or something else. Sarah accepts that all her choices did this, that she’s the one to blame and she’s the one who has to live with herself for the rest of her life knowing she broke the heart of the only man she ever loved. A reality that very well could mean he will never be able to be with her ever again.

But at least he’s alive’s and that is better than when he was dead. So she’ll swallow her pride, accept her failure, be grateful the hard part is over, and move on to finishing what she started. The end of Arcturus Mengsk.

Trapped like a Rat in a Cage

So the final campaign commences as the Zerg Swarm blots out the skies of Korhal. Kerrigan is ready to finish what she started and get her revenge. However, her human allies have made only one request. Kerrigan tells them of her forthcoming assault in the hopes that Valerian will be able to prevent further chaos in the aftermath. To do that, he wants her to land her forces outside the city instead of on top of it.

This will lead to fewer civilian causalities, but it will make fighting into the city that much harder. Kerrigan accepts though, possibly noting how Valerian isn’t seeking to use the chaos to his advantage like his father once did. He’s instead asking for restraint from Kerrigan, who has no reason to give it to him, so he can help save lives and give innocents time to evacuate. She accepts this, amazingly. Sarah is showing the ability to empathize and reason, to not place all those on Korhal as part of her revenge.

All the same, the planet is still well defended and lives will be lost no matter what Kerrigan does to restrain herself. Mengsk doesn’t care even a remote bit, as he calls on every able bodied citizen to return to Korhal to defend it. Or more accurately, himself, as he knows Sarah is really only after him. He has no choice, it’s either fight Kerrigan to the death here or surrender. Mengsk is many things, but he does not cower in the face of his end. Mostly because he has plenty of other people to die for him, but generally because he refuses to admit he can be defeated.

Kerrigan’s tactics for the assault are much different, as despite numbers being on her side, she seeks to preserve her units and swarms’ numbers for as long as possible. She could just use brute force tactics, but that means getting thousands of zerg and innocent people killed. So she opts for more surgical landfall. Where she sends massive bio-launchers to the surface and uses them to take out the planet’s orbital defenses so the rest of the swarm can get through. In the process, she opens the way for her other lieutenants to storm into and secure the landing zone.

Kerrigan’s opening mission is to protect the lives of her forces, even as she sacrifices many to get planetside. There is a limit to how many Bio-Launchers she can send down, implying that she can’t expend more resources than necessary. The whole of the swarm is hers, but she’s opted for a strategy that is about preserving lives. She could just send everyone right in the capital from on high and obliterate it, but this enables far more Zerg to survive what would be a needless slaughter while also not catching innocents in the crossfire.

Meanwhile Mengsk’s true colors continue to shine through. He drops experimental nuclear warheads on his own troops to stop rampaging Ultralisks in an evolution mission and continues to push his experiments on Zerg in the middle of the siege. Despite knowing how dangerous this is given what happened to his last batch of guinea pigs. Mengsk clearly doesn’t care for the lives under his command, which he really should since he doesn’t have infinite numbers like Kerrigan does.

It’s a sharp contrast between the usual set up in these sorts of stories. The monsters besieging the humans are more directed in their targets. They swarm but do not sacrifice needlessly. Kerrigan cares about the lives of her forces more than the Terrans seem to, or at least their leader. The Zerg rage a less catastrophic war that emphasizes calculation and tactics. While Mengsk throws lives away in a last stand that is more about preserving himself than anyone else. There’s no illusion of glory here, Mengsk isn’t doing to save the Dominion, he’s doing it for himself alone.

But despite this, the game doesn’t exactly let Kerrigan off easily, not even here. Regardless of her discretion, she still is ultimately leading this war out of a desire for revenge. Raynor is alive, sure, but Mengsk is still the reason she became what she is and that is still the clear reason behind this assault. As Mengsk will point out himself as he confronts Kerrigan through a message. He calls her out for her motivations, how many thousands are dead now because of her vengeance quest. Kerrigan doesn’t have much of an answer for his claims, simply pointing out that he made this all possible. Mengsk is adamant, that for all the terrible things he’s done, he did them to protect humanity from monsters like her.

I guess he’s ignoring that he’s part of the reason monsters like Kerrigan exist.

To be honest though, he still has a point and Kerrigan is not denying anything he’s saying about what is motivating her and what she is. Sarah’s goals aren’t much more noble than Mengsk, but he has the excuse that he’s earnestly deluded himself into the role of savior. Kerrigan doesn’t have such luxury it seems, she’s accepted she’s the monster and is done apologizing or rationalizing it. She is holding back her nature, yes, but it doesn’t really absolve her of the wrong she has done to get here, nor the deaths she’s causing even now. Mengsk might have brought this on himself, but Sarah is still the instrument leading this march on his palace.

Perhaps that is the point though, the acceptance on Kerrigan’s part that she is, in all respects, the monster of this story. She’s not the hero, she’s not the good guy, she’s not the shining knight here to slay the mad king. She’s just the angry wronged creature of the land that just so happens to be pointed towards the right target for once. And woe to those in her way. Does that make her better or worse? Mengsk is still making excuses for himself, even if he truly believes them, they are still excuses for terrible crimes. Kerrigan has no such delusions, no such absolution on her part. She knows what she’s here for, she knows she won’t be called a hero after this, and she’s fine with that.

Does knowing you’re the monster of the story make you more heroic if you are still doing monstrous things? Even if it is against someone who is probably just as bad if not worse than you? Where’s the line? Who gets to write the final line of the story and determine which roles belong to who? While Heart of the Swarm seems to ask this question at this point, the debate is quickly done away with, as Mengsk activates his secret weapon, a psi-disruptor that intends to break the swarm’s hivemind and turn it against them, killing any Zerg caught in its range.

But Kerrigan planned for this. The Zerg is no longer so singular in its makeup, the swarm no longer so stringent along genetic lines. Dehaka is the much needed diversity the Zerg have lacked. The Primal Zerg have no such psi-connection, and thus are immune from the disruptor. Through a series of lighting commando raids and full frontal assaults on the orbital platform where the disruptor resides, Kerrigan and Dehaka bring ruin to Mengsk’s final defense against the invasion.

In this instant, Kerrigan embraces the outsiders of her swarm, the ones that aren’t truly a part of it, to assist her in this critical hour. The old Kerrigan would’ve used Dehaka and tossed him aside when he was no longer needed, but Dehaka remains loyal and so does Sarah to her Primal lieutenant. Kerrigan has done what so few monsters can do, embrace something it cannot truly control to help it. The Primal Zerg only follow Kerrigan because of her strength and power, they are not connected to her in any other way. Pawns that cannot be controlled should be a liability to the Queen of Blades. But not so here.

And this won’t be the last time Kerrigan accepts outside assistance, as her final push to Mengsk begins.

You Turned us ALL into Monsters

As Kerrigan prepares for her final assault on Mengsk, her lieutenants all have their own takes on thing. Izsha is only considerate of what matters to the Swarm, Dehaka is content with collecting essence, Zagara has fully embraced Kerrigan’s vision, Stukov is prepared to continue the fight against Amon after Mengsk is dead and Abathur has decreed that Kerrigan’s achievements are the greatest among the Swarm. When Sarah points out, acknowledging once more, that all of this is about her revenge, Abathur’s reply is succinct and consistent with his philosophy. The Swarm’s purpose changes with its leader, as long as it is fulfilling that purpose, that is what matters.

Kerrigan herself gives the greatest thought to what happens after this, even if she dies. She’s shattered Mengsk’s power structure. He won’t recover from this, even if he breaks the Swarm and her. What the Terrans do after his death or the death of this new Queen of Blades will best determine their future. And while that might not matter to the Swarm itself, Sarah clearly gives more thought to it. And, as Abathur has pointed out, if it matters to Kerrigan, it matters to the Swarm at large. As pointed out when the time for the battle comes and Valerian once more requests Kerrigan avoid civilian sectors. Doing so would put her assault at risk, as Mengsk would clearly see her pattern and exploit it. But she accepts the conditions, even though Valerian has no power to enforce them.

This is significant in terms that Kerrigan is fully anticipating she very well might die here and doing so would doom the Swarm later in its fight against Amon. Making this last battle all the harder is not conducive to either her revenge or her set path against the real villain of this story. But it is the right thing to do, the heroic thing to do and she decides to head down that path. Kerrigan has accepted she is a monster by this point, but she can choose what kind of monster she wants to be.

Mengsk’s last stand at the steps of his palace throws everything at the player. Every special weapon variant, every veteran unit, everything in the Terran Arsenal that Mengsk has left. And as powerful as Kerrigan is, the defenses arrayed against her are intimidating. But not long into the battle, someone else enters the fray. Jim Raynor, flying in with the Hyperion to destroy and take over a Dominion to Kerrigan’s flank. He’s come to help finish this with Sarah.

It was hinted at that Jim had seen that, despite her change, despite what she had done in the name of revenge, Sarah was not the same Queen of Blades he swore to kill so long ago. That Kerrigan is dead and while his Sarah is not truly back, perhaps she never could be, a part of her remains. Jim has also sworn to take Arcturus Mengsk down, and on the eve of the tyrant’s end, he won’t miss out on taking part in ending his regime. Raynor’s Raiders formed to take down the oppression of Mengsk and his government, it makes sense they would be here now even if their allies in this assault are Zerg.

Many players might question how quickly Jim comes around on this, but it’s very clear he was conflicted about helping Kerrigan until she made it clear she was not going to be indiscriminate in her ire. This is just about Mengsk, and while that’s not perfect, for Raynor it has always been about Arcturus in the end. He’s the one who caused Kerrigan’s death and rebirth into the Swarm. He’s as much to blame as anyone for what happened. I wouldn’t expect Raynor to sit out on taking down Arcturus at last. That would be far more out of character.

It also of course introduces a wrinkle into the final fight. While it’s nice to have Raynor here, Kerrigan can’t let anything happen to him. So she also needs to protect his base while pushing her assault. It drains some of Mengsk’s resources clearly to have to divert to attack Raynor, but it also distracts Kerrigan. So it makes the mission just a bit harder as a result. However, this again speaks to the duality of Kerrigan’s nature itself. She is risking her life and her revenge to save Raynor and his fellow Raiders. It’s mostly out of a selfish desire, but it is against her monstrous instincts ultimately as her need to protect Jim is clearly an emotional one rather than an instinctual one.

Jim isn’t the only one helping out of course, the whole Swarm is here. Simply destroying the defenses to the Imperial Sector will enable Kerrigan’s lieutenants to send their forces in and back up her assaults on the many Dominion bases that line the streets up to the palace proper. It shows the sense of unity and camaraderie built up among this new Swarm. Still tied to Kerrigan’s will, but still independent enough that their choice to be here is largely their own. As Abathur has pointed out, Kerrigan gives the Swarm purpose and they are ultimately willing to follow to the bitter end, achieving victory for her and themselves.

Strangely enough, because of Kerrigan’s actions and Raynor’s presence here, the Swarm itself has ultimately changed in its goals. Even if they won’t acknowledge it, the Zerg are essentially liberators for once. They are ending the reign of a mad tyrant, freeing his subjects from his oppression, all with the backing of a proper freedom fighting force in the form of the Raiders. With each street cleared of Dominion Forces, Korhal grows closer to abolishing the true monster in all of this. While Mengsk continues to rant, rave, demand Raynor’s head, and insist that he is the savior of humanity as his empire crumbles around him.

Combining her assaults between Raynor’s and her own forces that she helps break through into the city, Kerrigan can easily annihilate much of what’s left of the Dominion in her path. Occasionally taking moments out of the assault to defend Jim’s own forces and the Hyperion itself. Before long, the path of the palace is clear and only the final elite forces of Korhal stand in her way.

It’s interesting to note, that because of his actions here and Kerrigan protecting him, Jim has become an unofficial part of her Swarm. Wholly independent of course, but no less aligned with its interests. Raynor’s Raiders can be see pusing up with the Zerg, united in the same cause of taking Mengsk down. As times goes on and Jim builds up his units, we’ll see the full might of the Raiders alongside that of the Zerg. Kerrigan remains the focal point of the battle, but Raynor is clearly as important to this assault in the form of his support. Finally, at last, they are together in purpose… if only for now.

As you approach the final gate to the palace, decimating its defenses, Mengsk sends everything he had at Kerrigan in the form of drop pods to the surface. But between the mass of Zerg and Raynor’s own freedom fighters pushing up from behind, they are not much of a match for the Swarm. Once the gates fall, Kerrigan strides into the Palace itself, taking the fight to Mengsk directly as the Swarm holds outside. She cuts through what’s left of his bodyguard and then finally corners him in his office.

This is where Mengsk plays his final trump card, the Xelnaga Relic he had taken from Char and reassembled here. Knowing Kerrigan herself would come for him and that this artifact was his best bet at defeating her. It completely debilitates Kerrigan, forcing her to the ground in pain upon its activation. After coming so far, it almost seems like Sarah will die here at Mengsk’s hands.

If not for Raynor coming in to punch out Arcturus and take his hand off the activation button, of course. Because Raynor IS the hero of this story, that much isn't in doubt.

With the Xelnaga Artifact neutralized for now, Kerrigan is allowed to attack Mengsk with her full fury and she does not hold back. At last, with nothing left to use against her, Arcturus admits the truth, that HE turned Kerrigan into this monster. But Sarah disagrees, stating “You turned us ALL into Monsters,” before finally killing him.

It’s an acknowledgement of a terrible truth. That all the terrible things Arcturus had done had forced everyone involved here, Raynor included, to do terrible things, compromise valuable principles, just to take him down. Kerrigan has accepted what she is at this point, Mengsk dies refusing to believe he’s a monster himself.

But despite being a monster, acknowledging she is one, Kerrigan’s bloodlust is sated. She is not consumed by her hatred and finally ends her campaign against the Dominion. The Swarm will leave Korhal now, in its entirety. No occupation, no more spreading the creep, no consumption and mass slaughter of Terrans. Sarah’s goals are ended here and she will not continue butchering people when it is no longer necessary.

However, this ultimately means one final sacrifice, Jim. Kerrigan had said there can be no her and Raynor while Mengsk lived. But the truth is, they can’t be together even then. The Zerg need a leader to keep them in check and to fight Amon. More importantly, even if her actions ended a tyrant, she is still the monster that Terrans fear, and rightfully so. None of this has undone that. So she says goodbye to the only man she’s ever loved, leaving Raynor to pick up the pieces of the revolution he started and she helped complete. Where she goes now, Jim cannot follow, yet again.

Sarah gives up a life with the man she loves in this moment, understanding she is needed elsewhere and that it wouldn’t help anyone if she stuck around on Korhal. So she does the selfless thing in this moment, perhaps the most selfless she’s done in the entire game. Something no monster would be capable of. Letting go of something she so desperately wants, even more than revenge.

The question is though… is that enough to redeem her?

I Am The Swarm

At the end of the campaign, Sarah has renounced everything, her humanity, her identity, even the man she loves. All in the name of fighting a greater evil, for a purpose even higher than her own revenge. She no longer considers herself truly human. But she is no longer the villain either. She is still a monster, but is she a heroic one? It’s hard to say and I don’t even think Sarah herself would try to claim she is a hero. Not even at the end of the Starcraft II storyline where she admits that nothing will really make her hands clean. Her atonement is ultimately Amon’s destruction, to make all the lives she ruined count for something in the end.

As a narrative, the idea of turning Sarah Kerrigan from the Queen Bitch of the Universe into its savior is rocky. Even when the story acknowledges its pitfalls, it never does much to correct to them. Kerrigan still does horrible things in her pursuit of revenge and does little in her attempt to absolve or justify her actions. Perhaps that isn’t the point though as in the end, Kerrigan doesn’t seek absolution or a justification for her actions. She merely accepts her role as the monsters, but chooses how to act it out.

There were likely ways to better fix the issues that arise as a result of the story choices made in Heart of the Swarm. Giving Kerrigan other options besides killing the Protoss for example, or enabling players to make choices at certain points in the campaign to steer her arc in their direction. Another option, more missions in certain sections of the story that would show a more heroic side to Kerrigan or at least the Zerg. Perhaps even just better arcs for her lieutenants would be enough, letting her call her out on her bullshit or for her to better defend her decisions.

However, any of those choices could’ve easily made the Zerg less than what they were and what fans expect of them. The more you change a monster into a hero, the less they are what people love about monsters. An obstacle, a force of nature, a nightmare to conquer, confront or acknowledge, any number of allegories or metaphors is lost the moment a monster becomes more of a hero.

A clear example of this Godzilla, who started out as allegory for Japan’s darkest fears and national trauma, but just as quickly turned into a kid friendly superhero defender of Japan. Many have derided this change, many others have tried to defend it, but quite a few of them miss the point of that change. Godzilla was not entirely popular outside his singular appearence as a metaphor for the atomic bomb. In order to survive, he had to change. And he changed excessively over the years, from villain, to hero, back to villain, to anti-hero, then villain and hero at the same time. Godzilla survived into the modern day and cultural relevance by never remaining stagnant. He represents whatever the filmmaker in the moments wants him to. From atomic destruction, to Kaiju Superhero Wrestler. Then from Rage Incarnate, to angry but protective father. From a satirical stand-in for Ecological Disaster to a Defender of the Natural World before back to being a metaphor for the trauma of war. Godzilla has survived by evolving, just like the Zerg.

I monsters are meant to represent our fears, and our fears change over time, so must they. The Zerg are the ultimate expression of this. They evolve to fit the needs of whoever is in charge of them. To remain stagnant is extinction. So they change, they become what is needed to survive. As does Kerrigan ultimately. She starts as a loyal friend and love interest to a hero, before being corrupted into the weapon of a malevolent creature by betrayal. She then becomes the greatest monster in history, before her humanity is returned to her by said hero. But then, she takes up the mantle of the monster once more, but this time of her own accord for her own goals and not the corrupted mission of another. At the end of it she is neither fully monster nor fully hero, but somewhere between.

The challenge of writing any monster it seems is finding that balance, between how they evolve with each subsequent return to them. Kerrigan is never absolved of her actions, but she is never full condemned by them either. A monster can be both a source of fear and a form of liberation. Kerrigan proves this. The question is ultimately how you walk the line between hero and monster. If we can learn from what Heart of the Swarm attempted to accomplish here, perhaps all our monsters can evolve themselves.

And they need too. Not just because monsters exist to tell us how to defeat evil, but also how to empathize with what creates them, what fashions them, what drives them. A monster can be many things. A source of one’s nightmares as well as an expression of one’s inner self. The truth of Kerrigan’s final words to Mengsk can be felt in this. In someways, we are all monsters. How we write ours into being on the page is an expression of how we deal with the monster in life.

It’s something I’ve struggled with myself. How do I look at the darker aspects or myself, the things I’m not happy with. How do I reconcile this with who I want to be? Am I doomed? Am I able to overcome my limitations? Am I a good person in the end? There isn’t an easy answer and I suppose that’s why I like “Heart of the Swarm”, because it admits self-actualization is not easy. That sometimes there’s no way to fully absolve one self. And that the best you can do is own up to your failings and try to choose the best path open to you.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, let it be this. Kerrigan recognized the monster inside and ultimately embraced it, but in the end, she was not consumed by its power. She owned what she was. Accepting the monster made her a better person. Maybe not a hero, not fully, but ultimately it was the change she needed. We all have a choice in the end, how selfless and selfish we wish to be. It’s up to you to walk the line between both your way. And perhaps understanding what the monster wants, like Kerrigan, can help you find your path through it.

#Video Games #Monsters #StarCraft II #Heart of the Swarm #Sarah Kerrigan #Queen of Blades #Zerg #Jim Raynor #Essay #Sorry there's just a ton of text in some spots #but Tumblr is stupid about picture limits.

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popculturebuffet · 2 months ago

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Sonic The Hedgehog: Scrapnik Island Review (Patreon Review/Comission for Brotoman.EXE)

Happy halloween all you happy badniks! It's almost halloween and while that means spooky season comes to it's sad end soon it also means there's still time for a few tricks and treats. Today we've got both as we look at the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog series Scrapnik Island.

Before I can get into what this series is a brief history of IDW Sonic as this is my first time covering the Blue Blur's IDW adventures and some of you may be coming in from the games or only passingly familiar with the comics.

IDW picked up the license after Archie callously threw it into a ravine after breaking it's back, due to a combination of the reboot NOT quite getting numbers and Archie's restructruing. While I love Archie Comics i'm still livid with how they treated one of their longest running titles. And Ken Penders for making things bad in the first place but not everything with Archie Sonic is Ken Penders fault. More about.. half.

IDW and Archie Vetran and Sonic Expert and super fan Ian Flynn faced an uphill battle with tons of dumb regulations from no romantic relationships to "Shadow's vegeta now we guess" to one relevant to this comic: The Classic and Modern continuities were sepreate realities. Now if you ask questions like "Wait then how did sonic meet knuckles?" , "Isn't sonic generations about time travel?", "Why would you do this?", "Who asked for this?" or "Seriously SEGA get your finger out of your ass" you put more thought into this than SEGA did, and I still hate the draconian regulations they've put on the comic.

Despite these the comic was a massive success, still runs today, and rather than do a full on ongoing with rotating plots like Archie, IDW instead does mini series. Granted i'd prefer a succesor to sonic universe, but publishing times change and the minis mean they don't HAVE to do another story and leaves room for things like the various holiday specials, anniversary specials or to do a classic era mini starring Fang the Hunter... will NEVER be used to that name but it's awesome he got a spotlight after all this time.

These two things intersect here: Scrapnik Island is one of these minis and tells a contained story that so far hasn't been picked up by current writer Evan Stanley but hopefully will one of these days as the characters it introduces are great.

The big thing though is that Scrapnik was the first IDW comic to get to refrence events from teh classic games. The Scrapniks, who you'll meet soon enough, are all classic era badniks, and one of the main characters is Mecha Sonic from Sonic 3 and Knuckles, while it's implied the Death Egg from that pair of games is the one used in this comic. They don't refrence a ton outright, probably still on a tightrope, but it's clear by now Sega's walked back the alternate dimension thing for Classic Sonic. They still seem to keep the two time periods seperate, with Fang probably still confined to classic model stories sadly, as I'd love to see him and the other hooligans interact with Tangle, but it's more resonable than "Their not the same sonic because shut up" so i'll take it. It allows sonic's whole history in the games to be accessed both on page and screen, and means the scrapniks could even show up in the games one day. I have doubts but i'd love that. It's a milestone in the sonic comics and a great story on it's own merit

So who are the scrapniks? What pieces of the past will haunt Sonic on a dark and stormy night? and will this involve a weird brain machine Robotnik just had? All this and more can be found under the cut if you dare

Scrapnik Island comes to us from Writer Daniel Barnes, who published the graphic novel black mage, and did a spec pitch bible for a sonic animated series, which likely caught IDW's attention. Especially since Ian Flynn, Sonic's Real Dad, got started with a fan comic before saving the archie unverse, creatd a new archie universe, creating a new universe fit inside the games universe, and now writing the games themselves. While Barnes hasn't blown up that much, it's clear form his writing the man loves sonic deeply and snuck in a few easter eggs.

Artist Jack Lawrence is a vet at IDW, having drawn more than meet's the eye's final act, Lost LIght, something I hadn't realized but means we'll be seeing him again in a few years. He's also drawn Transformers/MLP, a wreckers mini for the second idw continuity, and a few issues of sonic including a previous Mini, Bad Guys. Also he drew some Jackie Chan Adventures comics, something i'm somehow JUST NOW finding out exists.

Both do a top notch job here, with Lawrence in paticular matching the horror vibe of the first issue and certain other parts of the comic very well while keeping it sonic.

So kicking off the comic proper..

And Sonic and Tails are rolling around at the speed of sound, got places to go gotta follow their rainbow. It's a simple setup that works: the guys are just on their plane when adventure happens. Pretty standard sonic setup and one that allows the series to be as standalone as it is: Unlike the previous two, which gave everyones faviorite couple the spotlight and focused on the big bad of the series forming his own suicide squad, respectively, this is just a fun side adventure. It's one I WISH would come back as it introduced an intresting concept in the scrapniks, and it'd be neat to see how other characters react to them, paticuarlly Belle. Belle is a puppet like robot made of wood that Dr Eggman built while he had amnesia and became a kindhearted toymaker before his obessive fanboy kidnapped him to snap him back to his awful usual self, then realized he made a huge mistake. It's a long story I may get into one of these days. But given the cast here are reformed badniks, more ont hat in a bit, it'd be intresting for Belle to meet other eggman creations who aren't evil.

At any rate our heroes soon crash into the death egg, what's strongly implied to be the FIRST death egg from sonic 2 through knuckles. Which is neat to see. One dramatic crash later and Sonic wakes up alone, in a creepy unlit hallway on a table with Tails missing and surrounded by badnik corpses.

He also finds a weird metal club on his foot and can't move it without pain.. which I like as a tension device. It's hard to have a horror premise when your hero has super speed and has kicked ass since he was 12, so this helps level things. Sonic faces things brave as he can, noting how much the Death Egg has degraded. Which at first I thought wa sweird considering this was the first model but I mean.. how many could eggman have built?

The answer.. is 5 total. 6 if you count sonic drift. There was the original, the death egg II from sonic the fighters, the death egg from sonic battle he somehow had, the death egg mk 2 from sonic 4 which I know I know but it sadly is still canon, and the death egg from sonic forces that makes the most sense out of any of these for him to pull out of his ass as he at least had an illusion magic thingy. So the bigger question is why isn't mobius littered with these. And yup still calling it mobius. If Sega wants me to not call it that, then come up with a better name than "Sonic's World".

I love the atmosphere here thougH: Sonic's forced to slow it down so we get him wandinerg around, finding a single flower. This is one of the ones from sonic CD it seems. Why it's here... is easily handwaved: this island seems to be a dumping ground for all of Eggman's old inventions, and thus him leaving this here makes sense. It's also canon for IDW/Games eggman to move from projects way too fast. Can relate.

Eventually sonic finds a bunch of badniks... who are a bit.. diffrent than normal

I love the designs here and recognize some of these, the bulk coming from sonic 2: we've got that octopus from oil ocean, a buzz bomber with one eye from a crab meat and a claw from one, one of those mole things from sonci 3, the dragon fly from sonic and knuckles also given crameat claws, and one of the stinger enemies from sonci 21 grafted to that fucking spider asshole from checmial plant zone. And leading them all.. is Mecha Sonic, a neat return after far too long. I'm baffled why sega defaults to metal sonci more, as I love mecah sonic's bigger design, cool visor and use of the master emerald in his boss fight with knuckles.

He gives chase and Sonic super fucking runs away, not helped by his leg. While the sequence is tense we do get a really great joke as Sonic hides in one of the capusles from sonic 1

It's a nice tense sequence.. and hilarous once you know these guys.. aren't trying to harm him. In fact they were helping and their leader apologizes for spooking him. Their leader is E-117 Sigma, one of the e-series robots and apparently either made after gamma or somehow missing out on adventure and thus getting to live. Either way he's the only one that can speak and helps bring Sonic up to speed: He's sorry abotu spooking them and also sorry about the crash and offers to help repair the plane while they wait. Turns out the weather disruptor, because of course Eggman had a weather machine on his doomsday device, on the death egg is glitching. While tails geeks out sonic TRIES to apologize to mecha.. who brushes him off and struggles with their body. And I like the tonal contrast... the island itself.. is warm, full of rusted tech but safe and welcmoing.. yet still contrasted with a danger lurking on the death egg: mecha knuckles.

Specifically, and this is a deep cut I love, this is the Mecha Knuckles from sonic advance.. possibly the same one from Sonic R too bu the has the eyes of the advance one. Mecha Knuckles was my faviorit eboss fight of the game, starting as an off color knuckles before his skin exploded revealing a silver knuckles who had missles. He wasn't super hard but he's so far one of the best attempts at making a boss the same size as sonic ans friends. He's also wearing Knuckles hat from the OVA which i'm pleased is making a comeback: first this then the Knuckles mini series. Knuckles in a hat is dope and i'm glad it's getting more traction.

So issue 2. We begin with a flashback to Sigma and the Scrapnik's as a whole's origin story: he woke up on the shores of scrapnik island and is shown slowly repairing the bots best he can, hence their whole sid from toy store deal minus the need for therapy from their creator. It's a heartwarming sequence I wish I could show in full

You see the pure joy sigma has for his "creations", how much he cares.. and see Mecha wash up.

In present day Sonic's taking a nap when he wakes up to the scrapniks.. talking. Turns out Tails can translates though it's mostly "HELLO"... and is at least adorable. Sigma has good news and bad news. Good news they can mostly fix the plane bad news.. i'ts power source is cracked, and isn't easy to replace. Sigma thinks the death egg might ahve one and SOnic being sonic agrees to go get it, with Sigma and Mecha accompanying him.

The trip mostly goes well with it being revealed what the egg carrier is for: To get them off the island. The Egg Carrier comes from sonic adventure, being one of the games main settings and eggman's lair, and having sunk by the end of it, last seen being the spot for Amy's final boss fight with Zero shortly after Gamma's final battle. It's a smart pull as it makes sense it washed up here: it was in the ocean last we saw it and likely drifted to the island same as a lot of Eggman's creations. They plan to use it to leave someday, though it still needs work.

WE also get ane xplination for the sunflower: it washed up here and Mecha is carring for it, planning on taking it with them when they go. Sonic tries to offer his new friend a hand, bigones be bigones.. but while Mecha TRIES to accept it... they get attacked. Mecha Knuckles has made his move

We get some good action, solid stuff though I wish this four parter leaned more into the horror. Once we find out the scrapniks are goodniks... it's mostly a standard sonic story with a tinge of horror elements. It's a GOOD sonic story and the horror dosen't ever fully leave, but The MEtal Virus saga proved sonic can pull off horror well so I wish they'd went all in. That being said while I do hope for a story that does that, I get not doing it with these characters: they coudl've started with a horror story in mind.. but pivoted as the characters became more sympathetic.

Sigma explains the issue: he did rewawaken knux, who also has stretchy limbs, but eggman's programming was too deep to overwrite like he did for the others. He was designed to guard the master emerald shrine so the best Sig could do is retask him with guarding the death egg... problem is.. he can't convince him Sonic's a friend so a fight breaks out.. and we get the comics best sequence as poor Mecha has flashes of ptsd

It's a great horrifying sequence and not a stretch to see why the very being that destroyed him gives him nightmare or WHY it's been hard being around sonic: Mecha was made to destroy him.. and failed at it.. and Eggman simply.. forgot about him. He brought metal back, perfected him, made him better, something that other writers could explore, but he forgot Mecha. Assumed he was dead and moved on.

Mecha wakes up and easily finished Mecha Knuckles.. but then throat grabs Sonic. It's clear SOMETHING has gone wrong.

So we open issue 3.. with the goofy part. While the horror in this comic is mostly effective.. Mecha's Plan, while tragic and fitting.. is also.. pretty goofy.. see he has sonic hooked up to a brain machine Eggman abandoned for you see..

So yeah Mecha plans to put himself in sonics body and one of the scrapniks sees this and horrifdly runs off. Look sonic is a campy franchise. You know it, I know and I love it for that. It embraces coming from the video game and each of the comics does some fun weird shit with the lore given. The scrapniks themselves are a brilliant example of this.. but Mecah's endgame being "Put my brain in a non robot body" is just kinda silly. It fits and it's tragic, it's lack of sense makes all the sense with the state Mecha's in, but it's kinda goofy for what' sa pretty dark story abotu ptsd, self worth and abandonment. Sonic can do camp, but it has to fit the tone well and this story just isn't built for Robotnik's Mean Brain Machine.

We then get another flashback this time showing Mecha waking up.. with Sigma telling him his days as a tool of conquest is over. He's free now, finally free and we evne see a really great panel of Mecha.. happy

Sadly in the present Sigma wakes up to see his surrogate child.. has broken Mecha Knuckles and gone rogue. Thankfully the Badnik that saw all this got to tails, who quickly evil deads himself a scouter and some weapons

In the dark coridors they run into Sigma who explains waht the problem might be: He did his best to help mecha.. but like with Knux, his systems are way more advanced than sigma's used to, and figures the damage with Mecha Knux restored his old programming blaming himself. Sigma is a truly wonderful character, one of the best IDW has made and one I hope to see in the games or comics again. There's a LOT of potetial for this cast and i've been saying that a lot.. but it's true. It's weird to me two years out from this awesome mini no one's thought to bring these guys back. Maybe there's plans down the road for after Evan Stanley's run, we'll just have to see.

At any rate our heroes are at a horrifying disadvantage: While Tails, and presumibly thea udience, assumed Mecha would be slower and weaker due to his rust.. that's not the case. He easily floors the search party and gives a fairly chilling monologue as to why he's doing all of this

The lighting in the last panel is perfect. I said the series went light on the horror elemetns and I stand by it, even by kids media standards.. but it keeps enough. But what makes the series stand out so well.. is it's characters. Sigma the father the badinks never truly had and Mecha, tossed aside, broken and wondeirng WHY it's parent never came for him.. and ready to tear him apart.

He's also ready to make tails go down the hole after a decent fight scene.. though it does feel like tails gets jobbed out slightly. I mean.. he's on par with sonic and knuckles. He can't FLY which may be part of the problem, butit's wrong to bend him to being this much weaker just to make the story work. I didn't like it when the games did this for a while I sure as hell don't like it now.

So Tails goes down the garbage chute, at least Veruca Salt the little brute can keep him company, and prepares to do operation put my brain in sonic's body to make daddy love me again as we end issue 3

So as we begin the finale, Mecha Sonci explains how the brain drain works: eggman made it, got bored and since Mecha has doubts they'll ever escape, he can use sonic's ability to run across water... which begs the question why he can't, but I assume i'ts because , as we've seen a few times, his limbs seize up. He claims the scrapniks were never his friends, etc etc, which sonic dosen't buy. Thankfully said scrapniks beg him to stop.. and thus stop the machine mid transfer. Which does the only think I like about this thing.. it gives them a psychic link.

This also leads to a damn good fight as Mecha Sonic taunts sonic who is slowed down.. but powers through the pain. This is something that COULD have come up in a later arc but given the big finale to the starline saga was going on at the time, I understand. And it's again where the horror feels undermined: when it counted.. .sonic's injury didn't really matter and we get a big gorgeous fight. My issue is less that it's not full horror as the story told is gorgeously drawn and compelling and more it was marketed as a hroror book.. when aside from the first issue and a few scenes in the second it really isn't. It's not bad, and horror can be a lot of things. I'm ont a snob who say s"Well this can't be horror" This is horror adjacent, but you shoudln't market something based only on it's first issue and it left a bad taste in my mouth reading it the first time... but reading it this time.. that taste's washed out.

The truth.. is that the main story is really that good, with the fight crescendoing in Mecha Sonic holding on.. and planning to just die. He's given up, having failed to be what robotnik wanted.. and failed his friends, having come to his senses on his return to villiany, Eggman never loved him and wouldn't care if he came back as he has metal now.. but hating himself so deeply he alomst well. .unalives himself feeling he has no purpose. Thankfully sonic has some words on that

It's an ending I Love and as someone whose struggled myself, words you need to hear; live for you, not selfishly.. but simply how you want to. Just living itself is purpose... and thus Mecha does take his hand He can't actually lift him because super strength isn't a thing sonic has and the foot thing did tire him out a bit... something I forgot in that rant earlier but still stand by shoudl've had more consequences. STill everyone else shows up, willing to forgive their brother.. and also tails is here. Because despite everything.. their family. And family forgives when you deserve it.

So now Mecha Sonic's lost that self loathin, excused himself and let hoppe in. He's also been cleared of any egg data which wasn't easy, but is something Tails has done before. Gemerl should really hang with these guys. Mecha Knux is also both fixed and freed, and is standing all abdass in the corner, so he too can come back. We end on a heartwarming speech, as Mecha has accepted himself, that the future is uncertain and scary.. but it's his.. and he'll face it.

God this ending makes me tear up. Scrapnik Island. is excellent.. even more so on re-read and in sitting with it for this review. Mecha's arc is heartbreaking, well paced and the action and little dabs of horror are brilliant. I do think the horror parts of it were overblown.. but the genius concept of an island full of old badniks and giving Metal a new personality and character arc was genius, and it ends on a massive high that makes me want to see these characters again yesterday. There is a LOT of potetial in these character sand IDW is foolish to not tap into it yet and will be damn idiotic if they never do. It's a wonderful character piece that despite it's flaws, moves mountains and is one of the best sonic comics period.

#sonic the hedgehog #miles tails prower #mecha sonic #sigma #scrapnik island #sonic the hedgehog idw #daniel barnes #jack lawrence #sonic 3 and knuckles #sonic and knuckles #sonic 3 #comics #idw #halloween

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