The Story of Starcraft Part 13: The Protoss Campaign

Like the earlier two campaigns, I don’t have to talk this through mission-by-mission. That’s great, since most of the missions are boring and not worth discussing.

Sorry, Starcraft. I love you and you were ahead of the times, but it’s true.

The overall story for the Protoss campaign breaks down nicely into three smaller pieces. Together, they tell how the Protoss react when facing the biggest crisis in their history.

The First Bit: Futile Fighting

Before the game started, Executor Tassadar was one of the heroes of the Protoss society. An executor is a high rank – a general or admiral. Even by that lofty standard, he stood out.

Then he had a few falls from grace. First, he disobeyed orders. Instead of taking extreme measures to contain the Zerg threat, as ordered, he instead refused to sterilise the Terran capital Tarsonis of its infestation. He didn’t want to kill billions of innocent people in his efforts against the Zerg.

Not long after, the Protoss homeworld of Aiur fell to Zerg invasion. It’s easy to blame Tassadar for that. If only he had made the hard choice…!

To make it worse, he refused his summons to return home. After the fall of the Terran capital to the Zerg, he disappeared.

You play as the new executor – his replacement.

Your job? Defend as much of Aiur – the Protoss homeworld and the sacred centre of their empire – from the Zerg as you can. The Overmind is on the planet and its Swarm ravages its people.

You score some trivial victories, with high losses.

Among those who fall is Fenix – a legendary warrior with a lust for battle. He’s the archetypical Protoss warrior - like I said last time.

How he dies is weird. It happens during a cutscene, while the player is off doing other things. It’s a bonkers bit of cinema – an egregious case of cutscene incompetence. You commanded Fenix in a few missions. Unlike most hero units, you don’t need to coddle him – he’s tough. He’s almost half an army by himself.

Then, in this cutscene, he faces a single hydralisk. After killing dozens of them in the game.

His psiblade flickers and dissipates.

Cut to black.

Someone like him needed to die in a glorious fight against overwhelming odds. That could happen in a cutscene or it could happen in-game, like how Kerrigan’s base is overrun near the end of the terran campaign.

Instead, he dies, off-screen, to a single, ordinary enemy.

Was his blade failing like that relevant? Is it a setup for later, where it shows he was sabotaged or something? No. There’s no payoff late. He just… dies.

The Zerg killing Fenix should establish them as a threat. It doesn’t. This cutscene makes Fenix look like an idiot. How’s he been fighting for centuries if this is how he dies?

It’s a weird, bad choice. A text scrawl telling us Fenix fell in battle would have been better. That would violate the “show, don’t tell” rule of storytelling but the showing here is really bad.

I don’t get it at all. Blizzard is famous for great cutscenes – everything from the catapult-zeppelin cutscene from Warcraft 2 to the Heart of the Swarm intro cinematic, this is where they usually shine.

Of course, Fenix comes back later. Yeah, he died, but they salvaged enough of his remains to stick in a robot suit. I’m not sure if that makes this weird death better or worse.

Let’s move on. I have no answers here, only confusion and disappointment.

The Second Bit: Traitors, Terrans and Turmoil

The Protoss forces killed a cerebrate, hoping that would disrupt their forces, but it got better. So they decide to fight the Zerg armies directly, rather than striking their command structures.

They’re good at this. It’s a shame that it doesn’t matter. Zerg like to fight by attrition – they can grow new warriors faster than the Protoss can train them.

The Conclave, led by the conservative, reactionary people like Aldaris, decides the Zerg aren’t a real threat. The Protoss armies will kill them all soon. No, the real danger is Tassadar.

The ex-executor (the ecutor?) has been hiding out with the Dark Templar. He’s been learning their ways, since dark psionics are the only thing that can kill cerebrates.

Aldaris hates the Dark Templar, calling them heretics. He sees this “corruption” of Tassadar as the bigger threat. Your job is to go to Char to arrest him.

Char is a bit of a mess. It used to be the home of the Overmind, before he invaded Aiur. It’s also part of the Terran Dominion’s space. So the Zerg occupy it, while the Terrans pretend it’s theirs.

When Kerrigan awoke as the Queen of Blades, it sent a psionic pulse out. It attracted Dark Prelate Zeratul to Char, because he saw the danger she posed. It attracted Tassadar there too, for similar reasons.

Jim Raynor also got the call, presumably because of his connection to Kerrigan before her infestation.

So you show up to arrest Tassadar, who’s hanging out with Jimmy and pinned down by the Zerg. He calls Aldaris an idiot for focusing on the wrong thing. He then promises to surrender to face trial after the Zerg are defeated.

They’re in a fight for survival – charges of heresy and desertion can wait.

You, the player, side with him. You gather Tassadar, Jim Raynor and Zeratul, then return to Aiur.

Aldaris still sees the dark psionics as the real danger. He tries to arrest you all, leading to a huge battle.

You’re on the verge of winning when Tassadar surrenders, because he can’t stand the sight of Protoss killing each other.

This forces you to launch a rescue mission, which involves… uh… killing even more Protoss than if he hadn’t surrendered.

This bugs me. I mean, you fight a battle to keep Tassadar out of gaol, then he surrenders anyway. Winning has the same consequences as losing would. Your victory is undone in a cutscene.

Then you have to bust him out of gaol, which he clearly doesn’t want but it works anyway.

If this were a novel or a movie, you’d call it sloppy writing. In a game, it’s even more frustrating. You’re the one doing all the work here, but it’s all pointless.

The Third Bit: The Overmind Offensive

With Tassadar, Zeratul and Jim Raynor together, you take the fight to the Overmind.

You march through its forces, killing a few cerebrates for real this time. With dark psionics, you kill them and they stay dead.

This sets up the climax of the entire game. Controlling two allied bases – one Terran, one Protoss – you have to destroy the Overmind itself. The Overmind is in the middle of an epic Zerg base. It has more hitpoints than the planet itself and has rapid regeneration. You can’t sneak a dude in to assassinate him – this takes overwhelming firepower.

Did I mention you command both Terran and Protoss forces? Firepower, you have.

Inflicting damage on the Overmind doesn’t kill it – not permanently. In a cutscene, it’s up to Tassadar to finish off the weakened creature. He channels both light and dark psionics into the hull of his ship, then flies it on a kamikaze run into the Overmind’s body.

The immortal, ancient mind controlling the Zerg Swarm dies. Tassadar dies along with him.

It’s suitably epic. Before this, Aldaris admitted he was wrong about everything. You win the argument, then win the war, at huge cost.

I like it.

Does it work as a game and a story?

Overall, yeah.

The Protoss feel like powerful, capable warriors, facing a dangerous threat. Zerg bases fall easily to concentrated attacks, but Protoss armies can easily fall to huge attack waves from the Zerg.

It’s tough. The Protoss feel formidable, facing a worthy foe. You win, but not easily.

The civil war is clumsy in parts, but it generally fits. I can see a society that old and powerful feeling the tension between the conservatives and the radicals. Aldaris wants to preserve his traditions – and so he should. Those traditions are the foundation of the Protoss Empire. Tassadar, Zeratul and Raynor want to win at all costs, choosing whatever weapons work – even ”heretical” ones.

You can see a proud, noble, ancient society fracturing like this under real pressure. Fighting a civil war while your species is under attack is stupid, but it’s believable stupid. I like it. Tassadar surrendering makes him look weak and short-sighted, but it was a contrivance to force an extra mission onto the roster, so whatever.

And that’s it for Starcraft. We’ll talk about Brood War soon. Before then, though, there’s something else I want to talk about. Stay tuned for the next article.