It’s mediocre. This should be obvious.
I’ve actually explained why I think Starcraft is bad many, many times. Every single time I was dismissed in bad faith.
I’ll tell you if you promise to accept my points in good faith, rather than arbitrarily dismissing me as stupid garbage like everyone has so far.
Where to begin with SC1’s storytelling problems?
Firstly, it’s an inchoate mess of random cool ideas. The lore/story is meandering, inconsistent, full of plot devices, characters that come out of nowhere, poor or absent explanation, bad structure, bad world building, general silliness…
It was written by a young adult (at the time) author with no prior experience. It’s on the same level as typical trashy wattpad fiction. If you can’t already see these flaws for yourself then nothing I saw will convince you it has them.
Moving to specific plot points…
The overall plot trajectory of the three episodes is a mess of convolution. Plot points and characters come out of nowhere with little explanation. The first episode is about terran rebellion, then the next two episodes are zerg/protoss war. It should really have been a simple “humans and good aliens team up against bad aliens,” since that’s clearly what the author wanted all along. It’s way too ambitious and squeezes too much into its limited runtime. Interesting ideas are introduced then immediately discarded.
In episode 1, you basically rebel and overthrow a government. The story doesn’t establish the stakes involved or the motivations in depth so it’s difficult to care or get invested. The characters are cardboard cutouts. The manual backstory only vaguely explains any of the background and is largely superfluous anyway since its lore is just meaningless flavor text. The zerg and protoss are just background plot devices without any real agency. The zerg are just a plot device strung along by the psi-emitter plot device to fulfill the rebellion with little effort, then magically go away when their usefulness is ended.
The following two episodes are largely detached and don’t make a lot of sense even after reading the manual. They’re largely forgettable. Even Blizzard summarizes the events of SC1 with a few lines in SC2, showing how little it matters. That time Blizzard says Kerry was a Dominion ghost suggests they’re prone to forgetting those events happened or retconned the Dominion as always existing. If you watch the recap in LotV, the summary of SC1 is phrased in such a way that it sounds like Raynor was rebelling against the Dominion.
But I digress.
I have great difficulty articulating my points and it doesn’t help that my audience doesn’t care to listen to begin with.
I’m going to stop here because I don’t know how to continue. I also fully expect that my criticism will be dismissed as usual, so I can’t really muster the effort when I know it won’t matter.