In the Terran campaign, the Zerg seemed almost unstoppable.

From this side of things, their ambitions seems a lot more precarious. Many things could go wrong. Clearly, the Overmind studied Sun Tzu and does a great job of hiding its weaknesses.

Still… the Zerg Swarm is formidable. Their soldiers are vicious and seemingly endless. They can’t fail from within, since every Zerg creature is bound to the Overmind. The equivalent of generals – the Cerebrates – are immortal. If they die, they get better.

Also? The Terran and Protoss forces don’t even know the Cerebrates exist.

In the first campaign, you played mostly as a member of a rebel army. Here, you are a prized general among the greatest military the galaxy has seen in millennia.

The laws of narratives demand that the stakes are higher.

It builds to that.

The First Bit: The Overqualified Babysitter

The first thing the Overmind tells you is that your primary purpose is to protect the “chrysalis”. What’s inside? You don’t know – but a player could guess.

Whatever is inside must be important. The Overmind makes it clear that it’ll kill you if you fail to protect it. Various Protoss and Terran factions show up to destroy it. You learn the ropes of how the Zerg work while defending it.

The chrysalis grows larger.

Eventually, it opens to reveal… Sarah Kerrigan, who’s now infested and part of the Swarm.

You can judge a plot development like this on two measures: how surprising it is and how well it was set up. Those two can work against each other – the more you hint at the coming twist, the less surprising it will be. Masterful stories manage both, although this is obviously subjective.

How did this fair?

It’s not the most shocking twist. Sarah Kerrigan was a major character in the first campaign who died an off-screen, you-never-saw-the-body death. It’s a valid trope for her to survive.

Still, when Kerrigan’s base was overrun by the Zerg, there was no reason to assume they’d capture her. That’s not part of their MO. We haven’t seen them take prisoners – they are a tide of death that does not break.

If you’ve read up on the lore, this is less shocking because you’d know the Overmind’s plan: to infest Terrans and use their latent psionic power as a weapon against the Protoss.

Kerrigan’s psionic power was anything but latent.

The story had clearly established that the Zerg can infest Terrans. This tends to result in shambling, mindless monsters. The Zerg went to more effort with Kerrigan’s infestation – plus she was an exceptional Terran to start with.

So is it a surprise? Eh, not so much. They give enough hints as to what’s in the chrysalis that it’s easy to guess.

But I don’t think it was meant to be a surprise. It did a great job at building what came before. The writers set this up nicely, so that Kerrigan was something new but something compatible with what they set up.

Not every plot development needs to be a shocking twist you never saw coming. Some can play out the way you expect and still delight you.

The Second Bit: The Queen Rises

Kerrigan – now reborn as the Queen of Blades – is the strongest warrior in the Swarm. She is fast, vicious and capable of using powerful psionic abilities.

This part is largely about playing with your new toy and making her even more powerful.

As her power grows, she begins to argue with the Cerebrates. She’s bold, abrasive and arrogant – at one stage, she threatens to kill one of them.

The Cerebrates rarely argue with each other. Kerrigan adds some pure drama to the plot – the classic tale of a talented newcomer becoming the golden child, unbalancing the established order. As the Overmind points out, though, she’s all talk – she is incapable of acting against the Overmind’s will. She couldn’t follow through with her threats to kill a cerebrate, and even if she did, it wouldn’t stick.

The Third Bit: Immortal Irony

There’s a rule in fiction: If a character says they’re immortal, they’ll die before the end.

It sometimes comes down to a technicality. If the rules say you can’t be killed by any man or by anyone born of a woman, then watch out for strange exceptions.

Other times, it comes down to the limitations of the immortality. Take Balder – in Norse mythology, every dangerous material on earth vowed never to harm him. So Loki, as a prank, killed him with an arrow made of safe, unimportant mistletoe.

The Cerebrates never brag about their immortality. The Overmind mentions it, though. Growing flesh is easy for the Zerg Swarm. Since they’re all psionically connected to the Overmind, if a Cerebrate’s body is destroyed, it’ll simply move their consciousness to a new body.

Seems foolproof… until it fails. Zasz is killed by a Protoss assassin who used similar psionic powers to the Zerg*. Like a similar frequency jamming a signal, this disrupted the reincarnation process.

* Psionic powers have a bit of a light side / dark side deal. Most Protoss have “light” psionics, where the Zerg use “dark” psionics. This Protoss assassin happened to use “dark” psionics too.

Without its Cerebrate to control it, Zasz’s brood goes feral and it’s up to the player to clean up the mess.

A furious Kerrigan hunts down these Protoss assassins and kills many of them. A few escape.

The Fourth Bit: The Invasion of Aiur

When Zasz died and the psionic signals got all tangled up, the Overmind learned many secrets of the Protoss. I guess that’s the hassle of using one signal to block another – you’re still transmitting a signal.

One of the secrets?

The location of the Protoss homeworld, Aiur.

The Swarm invades. There’s some fantasy-esque mucking about – raiding ancient temples for magic crystals and whatnot.

It ends with the Overmind travelling across hyperspace and materialising on Aiur. From there, the Swarm overruns the Protoss homeworld, leaving the ancient and formidable warriors in disarray.

So that’s the story. It leads us to ask one important question:

Does the narrative fit?

What are some of the things this story is telling us without spelling it out?

The Zerg aren’t just violent – they’re sinister, too

Aesthetically, the Overmind and Cerebrates are horrifying. They look like gooey blobs and giant eyeballs up close. From a distance, they are pulsating mounds of flesh.

Their voices echo and boom, rich with otherworldly distortion.

They could read a menu and sound intimidating.

Instead, they talk of their plans to annihilate their enemies without mercy. They’re inhuman and godlike, controlling their broods with terrifying precision.

Infested Kerrigan is powerful

The characters talk about Kerrigan is being a terrifying force of destruction, with some of the most powerful psionic abilities in the galaxy.

Do the game mechanics back that up?

Mostly, yeah. She suffers from the “SC1 hero” problem, in that you lose if she dies. The thing is, she can handle herself. She has a lot of HP, she does incredible damage and she can turn invisible in a pinch.

She’s not literally a one-woman army, but she can do a lot of damage with very little support.

Infested Kerrigan is a monster to her core

Even after emerging from the chrysalis, Kerrigan still looks humanoid.

Yeah, she has wings made of bone, but at least she had a face. Not all Zerg do.

She used to be human, she looks sort of human, so you might wonder if she’s still good inside. Will there be a scene where she’s standing over Raynor about to kill him, but she looks into her heart and finds her humanity underneath the infestation?

No. Thank goodness, because those stories tend to suck. Kerrigan’s personality has been scrubbed clean and replaced by one created by the Overmind.

She is violent, cruel and merciless now. The old Kerrigan was charming and friendly – the new one leans into the “Queen” part of the Queen of Blades, talking like an arrogant aristocrat*. She doesn’t talk like an angry Sarah would – she’s a new creature now.

* They drop this from her personality later. Again, thank goodness. 

The Protoss are formidable

Yeah.

Especially on Aiur…? Yeah.

You defeat the Protoss on their own turf, but it isn’t easy. They have huge armies of units. Given that the Protoss style is quantity over quality, these armies inflict heavy losses on anyone not using the invulnerability cheat.

They go down swinging, inflicting heavy losses on your forces.

The Zerg are a huge threat to the galaxy

The Zerg were strong at the start of the campaign.

At the end, they’re even stronger.

They have the Queen of Blades, they’ve shattered the Protoss and nothing can stand in their way now.

Even so, it’s abnout to be your job to try.

We’ll talk about the Protoss campaign next week.