So this is another topic that I'm a liiittle behind on, but I beat the game before I started the blog, so it didn't occur to me to write about it until now. To be honest I actually liked the story in HotS; it wasn't amazing but being that I am a fan of Zerg and Kerrigan, it appealed to me a lot more than SCII's story. There was one major gripe that I had with it, though, and that's what I want to talk about today. There are major spoilers for both SCII and HotS in here, obviously, so be forewarned.
**SPOILERZ OMG**
So let's start off with the end of SCII: Kerrigan was turned back (mostly) into a human. I actually thought this was a really great plot...thingy, because it raised a lot of questions. Not the least of which was, what the heck was Kerrigan going to do now? The Terrans and Protoss would likely not welcome her back with open arms after what she did, and who knows what the state of the Zerg would be. The idea of Kerrigan having to find her place in the universe after all she's been through struck me as having the potential for being a really cool story.
So, now let's get into HotS. Early on in the game, Kerrigan escapes her Terran 'captors', and retakes control of the swarm. Huh...okay. Well that's not really the story I was hoping for, but it's not that bad. She still wants to get revenge on Mengsk, so she can use the swarm for that, then get back to trying to find a life for herself as a mostly human again. That makes sense.
Except, well...it seems like maybe Blizzard is kind of afraid of that idea, or something. Because of course, part-way through the game, Kerrigan returns to the Zerg homeworld, and basically becomes the Queen of Blades...again. She even looks exactly the same as before, save for the totally rad purple sparks about her. So I thought, hmm this is starting to look a bit same-y...but I'll stick with it and give them the benefit of the doubt.
So we go through the rest of the game, and some neat stuff happens, and, as expected, Kerrigan gets her revenge and kills Mengsk. I was like, okay Blizzard, now's your chance to mix things up! But then...nothing happens. Kerrigan leaves Raynor to go back to the swarm to get ready to fight Amon or whatever the stupid guy's name is. So...we end HotS with things basically exactly the same as they were back in SCII, at least from Kerrigan's perspective. She's the Queen of Blades leading the Zerg and the Terrans and Protoss probably still hate her.
To me, that just seems so weird that they almost pushed the story backwards instead of forwards. After beating the game and thinking about it for a little while, I came up with an ending that still makes sense, I feel, and also ends up with things set up just about in the same way as HotS' real ending. Of course it will have some problems, but they'd be easy enough to solve, and I think this ending would have been a lot more interesting. I'll explain.
So my new ending starts off in Mengsk's throne room. He activates the weird thingy in the middle of his room, but this time it does something different. Instead of weirdly just shocking Kerrigan and knocking her down, it would be a mini version of the Xel'Naga artifact from the last mission in SCII. I feel like that's something Mengsk would do, put an outrageous amount of resources into recreating a mini version of the artifact for his own personal protection. So, the artifact would go off, and Kerrigan would be turned back into a human, again.
Then, the story would play out pretty much the same way, Raynor comes in and saves Kerrigan, and gives her his gun so she can shoot Mengsk in the face. Yeah, she would be naked I guess, but we could figure some way around that, she could cover herself with a flag or something. So then, we've got Mengsk being dead, and Kerrigan being human again (again), having to figure out what the heck she's going to do with her life now.
What about the Zerg, though? WELL, remember when Kerrigan transformed back into the Queen of Blades, how she was unconscious on the Leviathan for a while? Well during that time, it turns out that Abathur did a little research into his Queen, and discovered how she manages to control the swarm. He used that knowledge to create a new Overmind, who was ingrained with the knowledge of Amon. Since the Overmind would obviously want to ensure the survival of the swarm, he would prepare the Zerg for battle against Amon, just like they are in the real story.
But what about Kerrigan, then? I think it would have been cool if, since now she's kind of a Zerg/human without allegiance to either, she joined up with Dehaka and his primal Zerg group. I figure he might have built up some respect for Kerrigan as she helped him collect a lot of strong essences, so he might stay loyal to her. From there she could do pretty much whatever she wanted - Blizzard could come up with a really interesting story for her.
So that's pretty much it, I mean I guess Blizzard could STILL come up with an interesting story for Kerrigan during/after the next game, but still. It just really bothered me how little changed from SCII to HotS in terms of Kerrigan herself, who was by all intents and purposes the main character. I just felt like they could have done pretty much ANYTHING else and have ended up with some thing more interesting. Ah well, here's hoping that the Protoss expansion continues to improve in the story department and gives us something cool and original.
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