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Notes -
I finished my protracted play through of StarCraft 2. Took me a few months of on again off again play.
The Terran campaign I played on normal, and it was easy to the point of being tedious and boring. I definitely feel like some pussification happened in the difficulty, and "hard" became normal, normal became easy, and easy became "This is mathematically impossible to lose unless you are a game journalist".
The Zerg campaign I played entirely on hard, and that felt about right.
The Protoss campaign I started on hard, but towards the end I caved and had to switch to normal. They just throw too many high level units at you when all you start off with are zealots and stalkers. Also too many obnoxious defense missions where it feels like Protoss are just too squishy on defense. I forget which mission it was that finally broke me and caused me to switch to normal, but it was some defense mission where your allies start off covering your east, west and south entrances, and you get repeatedly hammered from all three directions.
Then I played the epilogue on normal, because I'd already switched, and also the Nova mini campaign. They felt alright on normal. At least not tediously boring like the Terran campaign on normal.
All in all, it was alright I guess. I had to obsessively watch every dialog because I can't help myself. Which really slowed things down because the game feels like 50% dialog and 50% gameplay. The story beats of "Cure Kerrigan of her Zerg infestation, then re-Zerg her, then she saves the universe" was as dumb as it always was. Especially with that being the penultimate climax of the Terran campaign, and then completely undone halfway through the Zerg campaign. It reminds me of all those show runners that end season 1 on this show altering cliff hanger/climax, and then completely chicken out and backtrack in the first episode of season 2. Like in Santa Clarita Diet when the first season builds up towards Drew Barrymore turning into a feral zombie, and then in the first 30 minutes of the next season they cure her and go a completely different direction with the story.
It also got pretty tedious how every campaign is some weird neoliberal fanfiction about all these different peoples coming together in a melting pot where all their differences actually make them strong enough to defeat the big bad. In every single campaign. I don't remember StarCraft 1 being remotely that obnoxious and one note. Oh well.
Preach!
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