Jk, I liked the Spear of Adun. For some reason I thought protoss would never construct something of that scale. It’s big enough to house multiple motherships and an entire civilization, yet agile enough to dodge misiles with evasive warp.
The Gunblade! I suspected there should be a secret weapon, but I was quite surprised on how it is acquired.
I also like how Warfield was murdered. And that Kerrigan decide to honor his last wish. Yeah, you guys think she only did it because ‘Raynor’ word was mention, but I view it much differently. I think it makes her a bit complex character.
I believe that the incident on Char belongs to the “current day” legends of Koprulu together with stuff like “what the actual hell happened in the Void” and New Folsom breakout.
Alarak. The character has surprising depth, and I was pleasantly surprised to see an evil-good team up done correctly for a change instead of the evil character just being the psychopath that everybody ignored out of hand.
The aftermath of the first Slayn mission is kind of hillarious.
“We didn’t need to kill those. You wanted us to to give you a lift.”
“Yeah, but it makes our overall goal easier anyway. Want 'da Death Fleet? Better kill those anyway” evil cackle
…
Thing I also liked is that Alarak’s evil proposal on Aiur is not actually insane, crazy or outlandishly evil.
It was the easier way out, but it was definitely worth consideration.
I always wondered how Raynor’s Raiders felt about fighting with the swarm against Mengsk at the end of HoTS.
Imagine you are a veteran raider going back to the SC1 days that has fought the zerg countless of times, now you are about to be gun down by a dominion squadron, and an ultralisk comes barreling out of nowhere to save you.
Still had to be an awkward confusing situation for your rank and file Raynors Raider. You teamed up with the Dominion to fight the Swarm, and now you are teaming up with the Swarm to fight the Dominion. I wonder what the conversation of the Hyperion was like before the last mission in HoTS.
Being fair, for many it wouldn’t be the first time fighting alongside the zerg, though I’m sure many remember the betrayal from that era. Flashpoint does go into how many people were super not thrilled with the idea of keeping Kerrigan alive but stayed because Raynor got them that far. Also at least in that mission, they’re working alongside the zerg to accomplish the ultimate goal of their revolution: finally overthrowing Mengsk.
Also the zerg were explicitly avoiding civilian sectors while the Raiders/Valerian’s forces were evacuating the city, so I assume while many were still convinced a betrayal was coming, it at least showed some element of “ok maybe they won’t just straight kill us.”
But for me, I really liked the smaller details SCII managed to pick up/continue. It did show it was a labor of love. Side characters and conversations were also very fun in all campaigns, I especially thought Raynor and Swann had great banter.
Kachinsky: you signed us up to work with a mass murderer worse than Mengsk, Commander! The raiders are about saving lives. You betrayed everything we stood for!
Raynor: no I didn’t.
*leaves
Kachinsky: now that’s the Commander I’ve been waiting on.
I pretty much liked all the new characters introduced in SC2 not around in BW (okay I didn’t like Isha) .
I found Tychus, Horner, Tosh, Nova, Valarian, Zaggara, Dehaka, Vorazun, and Alarack to be good characters.
I found the writing of the old characters to be a mixed bag but generally not as good. SC2 Artanis was probably the only character I preferred over his BW version.
Artanis, Kerrigan, Duran, Zeratul, Stukov, Overmind, Tassadar and pretty much everyone else look, act and sound nothing like their SC1 counterparts. Might as well be completely different characters.
The only characters that make me think “hm, yes this is a sequel with the same characters as before” is the adjutant, Mengsk, and maybe Raynor and maybe Fenix.
Kind of irrelevant to my joke but sure.
Tbh I don’t think Matt is going to get flak for teaming up with the swarm to break Raynor out of space jail. On the other hand, using the swarm to attack a populated planet was actually Raynor’s call (Matt only wanted to evacuate civilians), and the very reason they’re supposed to hate Mengsk. Raynor’s no better and it’d have been cool if the other raiders called him out on his hypocrisy.