Gradius Mass Recall Playthrough 2019

Campaign Discussion
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I just replayed Mass Recall. Super impressed with some of the things they’ve done with the mod since I’ve worked on it (like the animated briefings, or the 2d animated portraits from Remastered; didn’t know such a thing was possible).

Some of my thoughts on the story:

  • I want future SC installments to have more of the redneck racist vibe conveyed by Duke in the terran campaigns or at least the professionalism of the UED campaign.
  • I feel like people never understood the power of the Sons of Korhal. Unlike the Raiders they have access to many more resources, battlecruisers and can field much larger armies than the Raiders. The paramilitary groups in this setting are far more powerful than those in the real world.
  • Same goes for the protoss. You can assume they have colony worlds, but they never get shown.
  • Biting the bullet should be canon.
  • The “9 of the 13 terran core worlds have been destroyed” text is laughable now that dozens more industrial planets have been retconned into existence.
  • Zerg campaign was great, but I want more cerebrates and Kerrigan shouldn’t be some kind of psionic powerhouse.
  • I wonder what Tassadar meant by “The Judicator have long since steered the actions of the Templar to their own ends”.
  • I’ve always said that Fenix is the reason that Tassadar and co. had any chance against the Conclave. All their armies were decimated by the time they returned to Aiur. The Conclave should have crushed them. My theory is that Fenix had a lot of clout among the Protoss and provided a huge amount of backup/reinforcements.
  • General Duke vs. Tassadar is one of my favorite interactions. I still hate the way Liberty’s Crusade and Queen of Blades portrayed Duke. He’s not an idiot or a coward, he just lacks a moral compass.
  • Tassadar surrendering himself to the Conclave should have been thought through better. It was completely pointless since they have to break him out later anyway.
  • Woulda been cool if the Conclave actually sent us backup in the final mission.
  • I don’t get why Zeratul has to “search” for the dark templar when they get to Shakuras. Do they not have cities? Does Zeratul not remember where Talematros is?
  • The Artanis retcon is still super jarring. “You give me too much credit, noble Zeratul. I am not worthy enough to even speak ‘His’ name.”
  • Dugalle considering Duran a turncoat never made sense. Duran was loyal to the Confederacy his whole life as far as Dugalle knows. The Dominion are the usurpers in Koprulu and he’s fighting against them. How does that make him a turncoat?
  • Stukov and Aldaris taking matters into their own hands and getting themselves killed because of their inability to communicate is one of the most infuriating aspects of BW’s plot.
  • The UED should have abandoned Braxis and moved the Disruptor to Augustgrad. Their forces were way too divided.
  • Shut up, Arcturus. If I wanted your damn opinion, I would’ve beaten it out of ya’! :laughing:
  • Kerrigan mind controlling Raszagal is stupid and lame, but I wonder how it was done in the first place. I think there’s a biological element to it, but other people say Kerrigan mind controlled her when she wasn’t even on the same planet.
  • The Reckoning had so many flaws. First Duran says that “Somehow, Zeratul and his brethren were able to bypass our defenses and steal their Matriarch away from us.” No, we literally saw him grab her in the previous mission when they warped away. I think Mass Recall should have fixed this. Secondly, it was completely pointless. Kerrigan doesn’t need Raszagal anymore because the Overmind is already dead. This was just pure pettiness.
  • Had to use so many game saves to beat Omega, and that was only on hard. ;p

The only thing that was disappointing were the choices for the models/skins. The team was always particular about what gets put into the mod because fan-made mods are usually lacking in quality, but some of the replacements are worse and make no sense. My retro mod was kinda gutted and incorporated into the main mod, which is good, but it’s missing some sweet models like the SC1 archon portrait. However:

  • The LoTV dragoon for example looks way better than the old fan made model still being used for the dragoon. Artanis’s retro model is pretty low quality; it really doesn’t need to be there.
  • The BW sounds are missing for some units even when you check the BW clickboxes, like the dark archon.
  • Some of the skins really didn’t need to be made. The SoK using Mira’s troops and the Overmind/Renegades using the primal skins and zagara’s webby skins is just kinda jarring and doesn’t make sense from a lore perspective, though I suppose it adds some variety for future playthroughs. Maybe it’s cuz I play co-op but I look at those and I think Mira/Dehaka/Zagara, not SoK/Overmind.
  • The dragoon nerazim skin is so annoying because it has twin phase cannons that it doesn’t use, but it inexplicably launches the normal dragoon phase disruptor out of the middle of its body. Plus it’s a type of immortal that hasn’t been invented yet. There’s a perfectly good Nerazim Dragoon up on mapster right now.
  • Raszagal looking to the wrong side during briefings bothers me more than it should.
  • The nerazim carrier is a nerazim recolor, but the wireframe and portrait are for a tal’darim carrier. There’s random spots where Tal’Darim models are used.
  • Why use the dark zealot that has nerve cords instead of the centurion?
  • The oracle being the arbiter just makes absolutely no sense on the nerazim skin. At least recolor the normal arbiter.
  • The khalai skin makes no sense. Half the units use the golden age skin as they rightly should be, but half are purifier recolors. You’re using the solarite dragoon for the normal dragoon, and everything else including buildings has been recolored to that specification. When has khalai tech ever been white?
  • There’s a much better looking version of the UED skins up right now on mapster (Nova’s black covert ops unit don’t fit the UED aesthetic whatsoever, which has usually been white, kinda like Umojan).
  • The maps where the skins are used are kinda random and don’t make much sense. The Overmind’s zerg for example is used when we play as them but almost never when we’re fighting them. The khalai skin is only used for a couple missions where we’re the player.
  • Blizzard released classic skins that need to be used i.e. zealot, ultralisk, etc.

Kinda wish I fixed some of this stuff before I started my playthrough, but otherwise not really a big deal.

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I thought it was the weakest of the campaigns. It’s mostly about Kerry who is hardly representative of the zerg prior to Metzen making her queen of everything. It consists of just steamrolling all opposition from a place of strength rather than planning complex tactics in pursuit of whatever objective brought the zerg to Koprulu in the first place. We don’t receive any backstory on the zerg or characterization of the brain bugs to make us care about the zerg as entities or understand what motives them in the short term. Basically, they just play third fiddle to the terrans and protoss. The campaigns really should have had wholly independent plots so that the races could be explored in the depth they deserve.

You shouldn’t expect competent world building from Blizzard. They simply can’t deliver.

The lore states they have a massive galactic empire with numerous member states of their own as well alien civilizations as clients and allies. None of this is ever shown in the games, where they hold Aiur and almost nothing else.

Again, Blizz sucks at world building. What a surprise.

How else is Metzen going to make her the main character of the franchise? It’s not like Blizz can do anything sensible like have the zerg campaign center around harvesting terrans and experimenting with psychic powers to create new weapons against the protoss galactic empire.

This may be a reference to a forgotten plot point from the manual where the akilae templar and ara judicators would have fought a schism over whether or not to exterminate the terrans. We never saw this in canon since Metzen breezed through any potentially interesting plots so he could focus on his self-insert Raynor and Kerry’s twu wuv.

I want a lot of nice shiny things too. Blizzard clearly can’t deliver, and I really doubt any modders left care about telling the interesting stories Blizzard never told. The story is lackluster and thus doesn’t attract much interest.

Maybe SC3 will revitalize interest. I’d certainly be happy to see fans stop worshiping Kerry and Raynor because I despise them as bland caricatures who sucked the life out of this franchise.

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The two things that always impressed me about Mass Recall was how they did the cutscenes between missions (like actually getting to see Zeratul assassinate Zasz), as well as whatever doodads they implemented to each mission to up the world-building (like whatever those UED structures were that made it look like they were pumping the Second Overmind with drugs). Kinda made me wish that Starcraft Remastered did additions like that.

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That’s what I liked about it.

They want to assimilate everything into the swarm. You’re not going to get much drama out of that, but this is why I want a SC reboot. I think a zerg campaign should be closer to what I had in my Origins campaign.

Uh…that’s not my point. I’m saying the paramilitary groups in this setting are actually powerful and not really analogous to the real world. They have planets, production facilities, fleets and even a Confederate squadron towards the end of Rebel Yell. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m saying it’s not comparable to the Raiders or real life. ISIS will never take down the United States.

Umoja and Moria were also listed as “pirate militias” section in the manual along with the SoK, yet they’re descendants of the supercarriers just like Tarsonis.

Yes, that’s what I said. Doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Yep.

I don’t see how that’s related to that quote at all.

I’ve been wanting to make a map about the Purifier rebellion. I need help with tedious terraining & trigger work though.

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I can agree on that.

I just don’t think the zerg shouldn’t be presented as overpowered. That’s a key reason why Episode 2 is so boring. The zerg should have to overcome difficult obstacles because meaningful conflict is the soul of drama. They also need actual characters with interesting personalities and drama potential, which would need some radical rewriting. Otherwise people are going to find them boring and uninteresting… just like the current zerg and protoss characters.

Overpowered zerg also introduces a plot hole because the lore says contradictory things like them being in Koprulu for decades before the game yet didn’t kill all the terrans immediately and wanted to assimilate the entire terran species for psychic combat against the protoss. How would your reboot handle that? Would the terrans all die in the first campaign, then all the protoss die in the second?

As much I disagreed on the finer details, ToxicDefiler’s reboot pitch is… well, it’s the only reboot pitch I’ve seen on the internet and it’s full of interesting ideas like the zerg actually having complex objectives because darn was their campaign boring.

Then they’re rogue states? Honestly, canon doesn’t have logistics so we cannot have reasonable arguments about them anyway.

It’s written from a Confederate POV. I think, since the narrator is omniscient.

ToxicDefiler’s reboot pitch is a good reference point here. He suggested that the war occur across those worlds. A galactic war. Precisely what canon never gave us. It’s more interesting than the protoss being wimps IMO. Unfortunately that makes the terrans worthless… unless you make them bigger and badder and a competitor with the protoss like in the ‘97 website preview where the terrans and protoss had a galactic cold war. Or introduce other alien races the protoss spend more effort on (similar to the Asgard in Stargate maybe?) to explain why they don’t immediately devote resources to curbstomp the terrans and zerg with their fleets of solid gold death stars. I don’t know, it’s anything possible when fiction is concerned

I guess not. In any case, I really wish the protoss political schisms were given actual depth. I would’ve loved to see Tassadar, I don’t know, vow to stop glassing planets and instead team up with Magistrate to fight oppression. And the adventures of all the other executors in the sector. (Tass being protoss commander-in-chief is a retcon, in the manual he was just an explorer.)

Fascinating. I personally think the fiasco is a massive case of idiot ball on the part of the protoss, since they’re more advanced than humans yet they never developed the extensive theory of robotic ethics we have in real life despite complex AI not existing yet.

For that matter, the protoss should logically be able to resurrect their dead cylon-style but don’t because Blizz be dumb as usual. The Ihan-rii can apparently reanimate their dead to pilot dragoons, another nail in the coffin of sanity.

I’d prefer to see stories like the Confederacy, Overmind, and Conclave playing major roles in the first contact war. Like they were originally advertised before Metzen killed them to prop his poorly written characters.