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 Mark ye! The old dynasty of Killzones hath been swept away! Killzone the First, its reign inept and fraught, died ignobly. Killzone the Liberator marched valiantly, though none flocked to its cause because it was on the PlayStation Portable. Killzone the Second brought about the golden age, but its reign came crashing down once its successor, Killzone the Third assumed the throne. With the fall of the PlayStation 3 dynasty, a new order has risen to take its place as ruler over yonder realm: The PlayStation 4 dynasty and the first monarch of our grand new age, Killzone the Fallen Shadow, and its servant Killzone the Mercenary!  Oh my god, we’re back again!   The earlier LPs are as follows:   S P O I L E R ! P O L I C Y ! I know Blind Sally doesn't believe in spoiler policies, but I'm not like that. I'm not going to be heavily enforcing a no spoiler rule on everyone, but that doesn't give you free reign to just casually drop poo poo that just breaks the game open and ruins what meager mystery there might be going on here. So, perhaps maybe just try to avoid talking about any of the really big reveals that might be coming in either game until the appropriate time to do so. I mean, we got through the entirety of Killzone 3 without anyone spoiling that Sev and Rico literally blow up Helghan at the end of the game, I'd like to at least get through Shadow Fall without anyone letting slip that Lucas Kellan is actually just a gun on a stick. gently caress. NOTE: This edict applies to Shadow Fall only. Feel free to spoil the poo poo out of Mercenary as per Sally’s directive, because we’ve basically already jumped over it by like 30 years as far as the series’ timeline is concerned, so literally everything it brings to the table is a retcon of some sort.  As mentioned before, the LP style was influenced by a couple of enjoyable Cinema Discusso threads that utilized a running commentary style of reviewing. Specifically, Kyle Hyde's American Psycho thread and Terry van Feleday's Transformers threads. It's in that vein that Blind Sally, CJacobs, SubponticatePoster, and myself have decided to Continue To Needlessly Complicate The Killzone Franchise. To quote earlier threads:  I pray we never truly find out.                  
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Mar 27, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2018 10:16
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Somebody fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Aug 5, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2018 10:17
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At last, the end begins. As is tradition for the Killzone LPs, we’re starting things off with a quick intro and no gameplay. It’s a little harder to justify this time around, because Guerrilla Games did its best to try and make Shadow Fall a mostly seamless experience from start to finish, so bear with us. The intro is covered in the video for Chapter 1 in the post directly below, so if you just want the video experience and don’t care about all the heady analysis we’re doing, just scroll down to the next post or click the Next Update button if you’re reading this on the LP Archive.   Shadow Fall begins in the literal closing seconds of Killzone 3. While we don’t ever see Sev or Rico or any of their surviving cohorts from the PS3 era in Shadow Fall, we do open with their climactic, history-altering final act: the Helghan Terracide. In lieu of Brian Cox as Visari, Shadow Fall’s opening is narrated by Jamie Gray Hyder as Echo. Unlike Scolar Visari, whose game-opening speeches were bombastic propaganda screeds about how loving great it was to be a Helghast, Echo's monologue is a sombre low-key exposition dump meant to catch up anyone who has never played a Killzone game with what is happening at the start of Shadow Fall and to lament about how lovely everyone in this series—Helghast and Vektans alike—generally is. In the music department, our perennial maestro Joris de Man and his orchestral score are tagged out for a more synth and bass guitar-centered one helmed jointly by indie musician Lorn (Marcos Ortega) and Hollywood film composer Tyler Bates. Bates scores the missions which take place on Vekta, while Lorn scores the missions set in Helghast territory. Shadow Fall has a wonderfully rich soundtrack befitting an 80s cyberpunk odyssey like Blade Runner (which the game draws HEAVY influence from in some areas), but it is a wild departure from Joe The Man’s iconic work. de Man was hard at work composing the soundtrack for Horizon: Zero Dawn while work was under way on Shadow Fall, so if you’re jonesing for more of his work, go and check out Horizon and its Frozen Wilds DLC.  So the narrative starts us off in high orbit over Helghan, placing us as a distant outside observer to the final seconds of Killzone 3. By the time we realize what’s happening, the tiny pinprick of green light that is the nuke from Sev and Rico’s fighter hitting Stahl’s flagship expands into an all-encompassing flash as the petrusite in Helghan’s atmosphere and beneath its surface ignites and rips across the planet, killing, according to Echo, a billion people at least.    Coming out of the production credits, we see the full extent of our former “heroes” handiwork. Helghan literally sports a giant scar across a quarter of the planet where the pretrusite beneath the surface burst upwards. While Helghan is still nominally capable of supporting life at this point, its days as a functional viable colony are over.  So if you’re wondering whether Shadow Fall would continue its predecessors’ trend of winking cynicism towards the standard action movie tropes of Good Guy Heroes and Bad Guy Villains, here is your answer. Tomas Sevchenko and Rico Velasquez murdered an entire planet’s worth of people trying to be the Big drat Heroes and trying to stop Stahl in the most Hero way possible. Only their Big Heroic Explosion Finale is played straight and ends with history-altering consequences. There are few developers out there like Guerrilla Games who are willing to put the exclamation point on a story to such an extent where after the player and main character spend multiple games brutally murdering thousands of people as they progress through the game to not only give them no reward or fanfare for their violence, but to also throw it all back in their face and casually turn them into the worst mass murderer in human history by a factor of 100. And yet do so in a way that’s not overly explicit or lampshade hanging or overtly judgmental either. But the message is still there. For as good a person as Sev was, he willingly murdered a fuckton of people because other people ordered him to, and that ultimately leads him to the ultimate Bad End. In explaining why his games like Drakengard and NieR have such brutally unpleasant endings, Yoko Taro was quoted once as saying that he didn’t believe that any story that focuses around a character who goes about slaughtering other people (as is the given convention of most video games) should end happily for that character. Because killing others is not worthy of any true reward. Guerrilla seems to share that philosophy.  We had a brief debate and discussion about this bit in the previous thread, but Echo glosses over some key details here with regard to the Helghast exodus and resettlement. “A truce was negotiated and a settlement was reached,” is a very diplomatic way of saying EarthGov swooped in once news spread across the galaxy that Helghan had turned into a nuclear fireball and strongarmed the Alpha Centauri colonies into a forced peace agreement, coming down on both Vekta and Helghan with its full authoritative might. Earth learned its lesson form its mistake at the end of Killzone 1. It clapped its hands and whistled idly past the graveyard after the Helghast were forced off of Vekta and left the Centauri binary worlds to their own devices because it had a measure of faith that Vekta wasn’t stupid enough to turn around and launch a counterstrike on Helghan, especially after ordering them not to. Shame then that Vekta was stupid enough to… So EarthGov comes trudging back in like the exasperated deadbeat parent it is and now has to dole out some punishment because the kids’ roughhousing in the living room ended with one of them mauling the other with a blow torch somehow. Earth tells Vekta in no uncertain terms “you broke it, you bought it,” and mandates that a whole half of Vekta be given over to the influx of Helghast survivors to make their home on. Of course, this is insane and stupid and petty and 100% guaranteed to end horribly for both aggrieved parties, but this actually might have been the plan all along. I once described EarthGov as something akin to the Capitol from The Hunger Games while the UCN colonies were the Districts. Earth keeps trying to pull various stunts to keep itself at the top of the galactic food chain, despite its viability as a planet having long-since evaporated. Earth also has a history of being somewhat brutally cruel to its more disruptive colonies, and Vekta just scramjetted to the top of their shitlist. So forcing Vekta to take in the Helghast kills a whole flock of birds with one stone as far as Earth is concerned. Vekta suffers a significant material and cultural loss for defying Earth, its status as a potential usurper state to Earth’s crown is kneecapped because now they have to focus on keeping their own house secure rather than expanding their influence across the galaxy, AND if another war were to erupt between the two states, at least it will be confined to just one planet this time. And if the Vektans and the Helghast wind up wiping each other out once and for all because of this? To quote the immortal words of Jorhan Stahl: gently caress ‘em. Earth. Don’t. Give. No. Shits.  The key thing to know about Shadow Fall before we even hit the ground is that while it tries to present itself as a completely alien game to its predecessors in order to entice a new generation of players into its world, it’s actually anything but. Shadow Fall could not exist without its preceding games. There are countless signs pointing back to signifiers in past Killzone games that give a broader context what happens here and now. Shadow Fall at the very least expects you to have played Killzone 3 and Mercenary (and to a lesser extent, Killzones 1, Libreation, and 2) and will not hold your hand or give you you even a second to catch up because it’s already done 90% of its worldbuilding in prior games. Luckily though, we’ve already done the homework for you. We’re also going to be LP’ing Mercenary in tandem with Shadow Fall, so by the time we’re done this little adventure you’ll hopefully have the clearest understanding as to what is going on in this universe possible. Though if there’s anything you feel you need a refresher on or want explained a little clearer in the thread, by all means don’t be afraid to ask.  So yeah, the Helghast arrival has an immediate terrifying effect on the Vektan population, and the worst is still yet to come. The last time a Helghast fleet descended on Vekta like this, it was during the invasion that kicked off the Second Extra-Solar War, the event that began the death spiral that led to this moment right here. The only consolation is that at least the Helghast aren’t shooting indiscriminately… yet.   The Helghast waste little time in asserting their dominion over their new half of a planet. The Vektan citizens of “New Helghan” are promptly evicted by force. Or, we’ll assume eventually by force. The game cuts right to the Vektan diaspora in progress, skipping over a decade in the span of a scene transition. (Killzone 3 ends in May of 2360, while the first date given in Shadow Fall is December of 2370—meaning Lucas Kellan wasn’t even alive at the time of the Terracide itself. The main plot of Shadow Fall after the intro is set in 2390, 30 years after the Terracide, for reference.) Presumably the Vektan government facilitated as much of an evacuation effort as it could in the early days, though a lot of people clearly were either left behind or stayed behind until the last possible second.  As the Vektans pulled back, the Helghast began to Helghanize their half of the planet, fortifying it in accordance with their old brutalistic military-driven society back on Old Helghan. The old Vektan architecture was uprooted and demolished, and in their place, Helghast constructs began to rise, the largest of which being the Wall.  In order to keep the peace between the two civilizations, a demilitarized no-man’s land was established and a massive insurmountable wall was built between Vekta and New Helghan. The terms of the truce were simple: each state would keep to its own side of the Wall, and neither would interfere in the business of the other. In theory. Again, this plays to the ongoing theme of “Helghast as every major dictatorship in history.” Now more than ever we see North Korea reflected in the Helghast, with a full on armed DMZ and an oppressive regime and a shining modern democracy on either side of it, and a widely mocked crackpot leader who landed their job purely because everyone else in front of them died, to boot. We can see the major themes of Shadow Fall emerging already just with the Wall itself and everything it represents. Culturally ingrained racism, the cycle of violence and hatred, class warfare, society’s treatment of its “undesirables,” and just how insurmountably hosed everything is by the weight of history.  Killzone 1 ended on the word “hope.” ...Where the gently caress is any of that now?  And that’s basically where we start this shitshow. With the stage fully set, the camera trucks in on a boy looking out at the Vektan resettlement from his apartment window. He’s completely framed in shadow as a way of prefiguring both his future career as a Shadow Marshal and so that we get no discernible clue to his appearance, because, as it turns out, this is our player character and protagonist, Lucas Kellan. The intro is the first and last time we see events in Shadow Fall from outside Kellan’s point of view (barring one or two events that we’re not going to talk about yet). Kellan is our handoff from the cast of the PS2/PS3-era of Killzones. By this point, Sev, Rico, and Narville have been in hiding (or dead) for 10 years since the Terracide. Templar, Evelyn, and Garza have also been dead for a decade at this point. And Luger and Hakha officially disappear from history at the end of Liberation, so they’re not coming back either. And who gives a gently caress where Natko is? Again,  would be… I dunno, what’s the rear end in a top hat troll equivalent to “feeling proud”? None of the cogs in the ISA war machine are rewarded, celebrated, or even really mattered in their sacrifices. Templar gets a lovely park named after him, a lovely reward for a man who ultimately died for nothing.Also for those of you wondering why I keep bringing up Yoko Taro, there actually is a brief bit of overlap here between him and Killzone. In a blog post on PlayStation.com, Taro revealed his favorite PS4 games, and among them was Horizon: Zero Dawn, which he said he admired the art style of. He also said that Guerrilla’s art direction had been impressive since back to the old Killzone games, implying he might have also played them. Yoko Taro posted:Horizon Zero Dawn But then again, this is Yoko Taro we’re talking about. He was probably just talking out of his rear end to fill out some bullet point contract clause with Sony. Anyway, my point here is that we’re wiping the slate clean to start a new era with… while still being saddled with all the baggage of the past anyway. With Lucas Kellan, we have a tabula rasa to work with to either help us move on from what happened in the last few games… or contrast our thoughts with as he learns things and develops his own opinions on matters.  Because once the camera flies into Lucas’s head, we’re locked in on things and set loose upon the world of Shadow Fall. We’ll see where we go from here… nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Dec 27, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2018 10:17
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Enough with the preamble, let’s get on with it.  Coming out of the intro, we are thrown immediately into to the body of Lucas Kellan, a 7 year-old Vektan boy forced to flee his home on the New Helghan side of the Wall with his father, Michael. Lucas is overlooking Vektan citizens being shunted through a checkpoint by Helghast soldiers. Some people are being let through by the Helghast with only minor harassment, while others are being pulled aside and thrust up against the walls. So it’s clear from the get-go that getting out of New Helghan through “official” channels is perhaps even more fraught with peril than just making a run for it in the shadows.  Michael Kellan is the primary focus of this chapter. He is the first real civilian we’ve encountered in a Killzone game in a long while, and the first 100% non-military (or military-adjacent) character we’ve seen since the start of the franchise. He’s just a normal man who’s had his life upended through no fault of his own. He’s dressed like a refugee and armed with nothing but an almost charmingly safety-yellow coloured stun pistol.  Even people who’ve never played a Killzone game before should feel a pang of dread for Michael’s safety. He is woefully unprepared for what he’s about to head out into with his son, and it’s not entirely clear if he actually believes what he’s saying, or if he’s just putting on a brave face for Lucas. The stun gun, more specifically the protection it provides, is an illusion. It’s not gonna do poo poo against your average Helgoon if a couple of them corner the Kellans. And yet it also exists as a symbol of Michael’s hope and outlook for a brighter future eventually. He doesn’t want to kill anyone, and doesn’t think anyone needs to be killed either. He just wants to get over the Wall and out to the Vektan side of the planet, and then things will just sort themselves out from there. Michael believes that, at the very least, co-existence should be possible with the Helghast. We’ll see how the game treats his faith.  Before we really get going, you’re permitted a moment to look around Lucas’s room and see all the little easter eggs Guerrilla scattered about it. The first one that appears is a hologram showing one of the mechanical beasts from Horizon: Zero Dawn. Development on Horizon was well underway by the time Shadow Fall went to print, and Shadow Fall was actually used as a testbed to refine the Decima engine which Horizon runs on. The Decima engine would also go on to power Until Dawn, RIGS: Mechanized Combat League for PlayStation VR, Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding, and the sequel to Horizon, Forbidden West. Hermen Hulst, the managing director of Guerrilla Games even hand delivered Kojima a Decima dev kit in a pine box adorned with the logos of Guerrilla Games and Kojima Productions when Death Stranding went into production. Hulst has a cameo in the game alongside the likes of Conan O'Brien and other Friends of Kojima.  On Lucas’s bookshelf are little toys of a Helghast sniper and and ISA soldier. These are models of both classes in multiplayer and enemies/allies we’ll be encountering later in the game. While they’re just a cute dumb reference on the surface, with their plastic spoons for weapons, they also say a little something about the world Shadow Fall is expanding on. For a culture that’s been at war for practically a full generation now like Vekta has, it’s not surprising that the war has been commercialized and comoditized to the extend that some Vektan version of Hasbro or Mattel are selling GI JAN action figures. Because remember, Vekta was founded by a corporation, the Helghan Corporation, specifically. It bought its nebulous semblance of autonomy from Earth in order to keep the UNC afloat financially, and in many ways it never really did escape the yoke of the old corporate days. Vekta is a capitalist-as-gently caress economic state existing in a post-scarcity universe (or something that likes to imagine itself as post-scarcity), and for every high top there’s an equally low bottom, but we’ll get to that eventually. Suffice to say, Shadow Fall has some Things to say about the wealth gap, among other things, just like the last few games did.  One of the posters on Lucas’ wall is one for Dark Trolls, a nod to FROM SOFTWARE’s Dark Souls franchise. It’s not that big of a leap to assume that a lot of the folks at Guerrilla have played quite a bit of Souls games, especially since Guerrilla’s managing director Hermen Hulst has said that Bloodborne (FROM’s unofficial fifth Souls game) is one of his favourite PS4 games.  Curiously, Lucas has a textbook on his couch written in Helghan. While on it’s head, this is just Guerrilla getting its mileage out of the Helghast colang alphabet they created for the series, it also seems to suggest that there was at some point on some level an attempt at bridging the divide between the nations through education. Lucas was learning how to read the Helghan alphabet at one point before everything went predictably to poo poo. For those of you coming in new to Shadow Fall, a refresher: as a part of his new regime on Helghan, Scolar Visari mandated that since the Helghast now considered themselves an entirely separate species from humanity, they should have their own written alphabet and language that was distinctly Helghast in nature as a means of bolstering national and racial pride. In reality, it was just another means by which his regime could control the population, by filtering the entire canon of human literature through the new Helghan language and excising whole words and ideas that posed a threat to state from public consumption. Still, the book on Lucas’s shelf at least suggests that initially the Vektans tried to meet the Helghast half way and play ball with their wacky brutalist Newspeak Space Nazi code language.  We also see a recruitment poster for the ISA military on the wall in Kellan’s room featuring a vaguely Sevchenko-like grunt in a heroic pose. It’s not Sev himself, of course, because there’s no way in hell the ISA would ever celebrate their single largest war criminal in their history as a hero or inspirational figure, even if that war crime in question was 1) an accident, and 2) entirely unforeseeable. Still, it’s nice to know that the ISA has limits on its gaucheness. No, instead we get this odd composite of several former Alpha Squadies, most notable Sev, Garza, and Kowalski aka Prototype Garza—a literal everyman soldier—beckoning the next generation of Vektan youth to join up and fight the good fight. Funny then how Shadow Fall is all about the next generation picking up their parents’ fight right where they left off? It all leads one to the conclusion that even if things had done perfectly for him, perhaps Lucas Kellan was destined to become a Shadow Marshal all along, or at least an active part of the ISA military. Who knows.  One brief thing before we move on to the plot. Since we’re back on Vekta for the first time since Killzone: Liberation, we also see the return of an old favorite piece of flair from Killzone 1: Vektan advertisements! The ads aren’t as prominent as they were in the original Vekta City level of Killzone 1, but they’re no less perplexing. While the first game was smattered with fake ads and then ads for the real world Nixon watch brand, Shadow Fall’s ads border more on parody. In descending order, we’ve got DR.NUKE Original Lager (a reference to Dr. Evelyn Batton and her Red Dust nuke), MASSMEDS (a reference to a character we will be meeting later on, Dr. Hillary Massar), and RALPH VON VEKTA (a parody of the real world clothing brand Ralph Lauren). A fourth ad for a drink called FATSHAKE is seen later on in the video and laughed at by CJacobs.  Michael assures his son that them having to flee is only temporary, and that they’ll be back one day. Either when both sides establish a lasting, livable peace, or, more likely, when the Vektans drive the Helghast off the planet completely. There’s a little bit of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in this set up (both the book and the movie). A father and son alone on a journey to a seemingly impossible place with a virtual zero chance of success in getting there.  And yet, maybe not all is lost. In their escape, Michael and Lucas cross paths with an ISA Shadow Marshal, Thomas Sinclair. The familiar green, orange, and blue of his ISA military uniform should put longtime fans of the series at ease upon seeing him—one of the good guys is here, a spot of hope in this sea of bad guys. Though this being Killzone, things aren’t always as cut and dry…  Shadow Fall wastes little time in establishing the contrast between Michael and Sinclair. Civilian and military. Avoidant and confrontational. Idealism and cynicism. Compromise and pragmatism. Faith and doubt. Hope and fear. We joke about the whole “My Two Dads” thing that Shadow Fall sets up in its opening minutes, but it’s gonna come up a lot in regard to Lucas. In Michael, Lucas sees the man he thinks he should be, while in Sinclair, there’s the man he thinks he has to be because of what’s demanded of him by the world.  While the Kellans are grateful for Sinclair’s help in getting them towards the Wall, tensions start to rise fairly quick as each party learns a little more about who they’ve fallen in with. It’s not Sinclair’s priority to get Lucas and Michael to the Wall, but he’ll do it if he can—on his own terms. Michael, meanwhile, is suddenly questioning the hardline attitude of the man who’s promised to get him out of this mess. There’s some disquieting shades of Rico in Sinclair’s attitude towards the Helghast. Not just as a military opponent, but as a people in and of themselves. At least Sinclair doesn’t seem as unhinged as Rico does…  That said, Shadow Fall goes out of its way initially to make Sinclair’s point for him. He is presented as right here, while Michael is, on the face of it, wrong. The Helghast are sweeping across the planet. They are removing the Vektans with brutal efficiency and no care for anyone’s basic rights or humanity. One look out at the skyline of Vekta City shows that well enough. Buildings are burning, gunfire and screaming are echoing up from the lower levels, battleships are prowling overhead, and Helgoons are shooting anyone found outside of their tightly controlled evacuation zones on sight—even if they’re just a kid. The cycle of violence rolls on, crushing a new generation under its weight. It’s been a decade since the Terracide and the Helghast are still out for petty sweet revenge against the Vektans for it. Even though the primary schoolers they’re gunning down in the streets weren’t even alive when it happened. And guess what they’re still going to be doing 30 years on from the Terracide? Nobody holds a grudge like the Helghast do.  Along the way, the trio encounter a few obstacles that only Lucas is able to help them overcome, such as this door that’s been barricaded from the inside.  So Lucas has to step up and be a functional member of this team in order to help all three of them get through this safely. He volunteers to climb up through the rubble and into the building to get the door open for Michael and Sinclair. This shows that he’s willing to take initiative and not afraid to put himself at risk to help others, and sets him apart from literally every other Killzone player character in that he actually talks during gameplay. Actually, that’s not entirely true, Templar talks during gameplay in Liberation occasionally, but whichever one of the four companions you play as in Killzone 1 remains silent when you’re playing as them, as does Sev during the gameplay sections of 2 and 3. Arran Danner from Killzone: Mercenary never talks period, meanwhile. He’s just a dangerous mute lunatic.  Thanks in large part to Lucas being able to sneak around and open up alternate routes for them, Team Sinclair is able to avoid direct encounters with any Helghast troops until now.  Sinclair prepares to make the kill shot, but Michael steps up and takes charge of the situation.   He puts his Chekov’s Stun Gun to in his moment to shine in this chapter, neutralizing the Helgoon with a non-lethal shock. With the trooper incapacitated, the way is clear and they’re safe to proceed for the moment.  But that’s not good enough for Sinclair. He shoots the trooper point blank in the head with his sidearm. Michael is horrified at Sinclair’s brutality, but Sinclair does not give a solid poo poo. A neutralized threat is still a threat. Once the shock wears off and his nerve endings stop feeling like they’re on fire, that Helgoon is just gonna pop back up, grab his gun from the ground and go shoot another seven year-old in the face a few blocks away from here to make up for the one he wasn’t able to shoot just now. They will never change. Then can only end. An eliminated threat is no longer a threat—nothing else is acceptable when your survival is on the line. Morality is for peacetime. ...Funny then that Vekta never seems to really be at peace, huh?  After Michael’s protest, Sinclair basically washes his hands of him. He goes on ahead to secure the route to the Wall (through killing every last Helghast he runs into) and will be back for Michael and Lucas when it’s clear. He’s done letting hold him back from doing his job, especially if Michael is just gonna complain every time he shoots a Space Nazi in the face. And that’s kind of the understated morality play that’s going on here. Both Michael and Sinclair are equally right and equally wrong here. Michael is right that killing other people is wrong and that people should live for the future instead of re-litigating the past to destructive degrees, but that all flies out the window when it comes to the Space Nazis, who are an unrelenting threat to everything and everyone decent in the universe and need to be dealt with in the only medium they understand: with force. And that’s where Sinclair is right, because they’re loving Space Nazis and their dead ideology needs to go into the dustbin of history alongside Visari and all the other dead assholes who followed him to the grave. Sinclair’s problem though is that he sees Space Nazis everywhere, and can’t differentiate between a monster like Jorhan Stahl, and someone like Valeria Harkin, who’s just trying to live her bald, pallid, slightly irradiated life without hurting or imposing on anyone. To Sinclair, every Helghan citizen is a monster. And there’s only one thing you do with monsters: slay them.  Sinclair abandoning the Kellans produces its predictable result. A trio of Helghast troopers happen upon Michael and Lucas, and Michael is shot. His plea for mercy and understanding falls on deaf ears as the Helgoons riddle him with bullets while Lucas watches, turning Michael Kellan into Killzone: Shadow Fall’s first martyr and ensuring that his spectre is going to loom over the remainder of the game from here to the credits.   This is a formative moment for Lucas Kellan as a person, watching helplessly as his father is murdered in front of him by a squad of Helghast soldiers.  Sinclair arrives from the shadows and dispatches the three Helghast with frightening ease before they can finish the job and kill Lucas as well.  With Michael dead, Lucas is effectively an orphan now. Rather than leave the boy at the mercy of the Helghast, Sinclair scoops up Lucas and makes a run for the Wall, promising he’ll protect him and effectively adopting the boy as a surrogate son. Now there’s some vague element of conspiracy here that people have no doubt argued that Sinclair actually planned this whole thing out as a means to get his hands on Lucas and indoctrinate him into the Shadow Marshal program after he was impressed with Lucas’ talent and potential in helping them get as far as he did. When Michael proves himself to be roadblock to this aim, he has him eliminated in the most plausibly deniable way—letting the Helghast kill him—so that he can look like a hero to Lucas. I’ll leave that to you to decide whether this was premeditated or not, but I’m not going down this rabbit hole. Thomas Sinclair is a very smart man who’s capable of thinking many steps ahead and making very sharp spur-of-the-moment calls, but to suggest that he engineered a man’s death just to functionally kidnap and brainwash his son is a bridge too far.  ...And yet, that’s kind of what happens. Lucas joins the Shadow Marshal program under Sinclair’s guidence and is very quickly molded in Sinclair’s image by Sinclair directly and by the organization he now heads structurally. When the game jumps ahead in time 8 years, Sinclair proudly notes that at 15 years old, Lucas Kellan has become the youngest inductee to the Shadow Marshal program. The kid doesn’t even have his driver’s license yet, and he’s already joined a black-ops super-spy program—no doubt thanks to Sinclair pulling a fuckton of strings.  The timestamps here are quite confusing and make it seem like even more time is passing than it otherwise is. These XX Years Later cards aren’t cumulative, they’re denotative—it’s how many years it’s been since Michael Kellan’s death. So this vignette is actually 2 years later from the last one. Sinclair pulls Kellan, now well into his Shadow Marshal training, aside in his office to briefly motive rant to him about how his goal is to keep Vekta safe from the wolf across the Wall. And we can see that looming threat very clearly now. It’s been 20 years now since the Helghast arrived on Vekta, and New Helghan is now firmly established on Vektan soil. Helghast skyscrapers loom above the Wall, cannibalized and re-purposed from the old Vektan buildings and presenting a surprisingly modernized Helghast front to the world. And above all that, you can see clearly in the background is a massive gently caress off iron statue of Scolar Visari on the mountaintop, watching over New Helghan like the god the Helghast believe he is. To the Vektans, it is the ultimate insult and eyesore. Like if someone built a giant statue of Osama Bin Laden on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River in direct line of sight of One World Trade Center across the water. This is Rico’s ultimate reward for his sins. He shot and killed Visari in a fit of rage, single-highhandedly accelerating the death spiral towards the Terracide, and while he fought like a mad dog to try and redeem himself for his failure and make Templar, Evelyn, and Garza’s deaths count for something, he ultimately became a shunned world killer for his troubles. Visari gets a massive statue of himself built on Vektan soil overlooking Rico’s hometown no less. Rico gets erased from history. At this point in the Killzone timeline, I am 100% certain that Rico is dead, because if he wasn’t already, then by the time that statue was finished I’m positive that Rico reached a level of rage so intense that he literally melted through the surface and into the molten core of whatever planet he was on when he heard the news. There’s an old proverb that states something to the effect of “You meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.” And in a lot of ways, that is one of the major thesis statements of Shadow Fall from a storytelling perspective. So keep that in mind as we go forward. Karma’s a bitch… and it’s also heat-seeking.  We flash forward another four years. Lucas is now 21 years old and a full Shadow Marshal in his own right. Sinclair is now the director of the VSA, the Vektan-specific intelligence arm of the ISA. The Vektan Security Agency is dedicated to the security of the Vektan side of the planet specifically from the Helghast across the Wall in New Helghan. While the ISA still exists and has a role on Vekta, the VSA has superseded as much of it as it possibly can. This just goes further to show how insular and isolated Vekta has become from the galactic community since the Terracide, now creeping up on it’s 30th anniversary. Willingly or otherwise, Vekta has severed itself more and more from Earth’s thrall, especially in light of Earth forcing it to take in the Helghast survivors. Sinclair takes a moment to remind Lucas the peril he faces while operating as a Shadow Marhsal in New Helghan territory, the fate that awaits him if he’s ever captured.  All the while as these XX Years Later blips have been rolling, they’ve been interspersed with brief flashes of the now-adult Lucas Kellan with a bag over his head, like Sinclair foretold, being tortured by an unseen, yet clearly Helghast captor.   Coming out of the time skips, we arrive in the present day of Killzone: Shadow Fall, June of 2390. It’s been 30 years since Rico and Sev blew up Helghan. If Tomas Sevchenko is still alive out there somewhere, he’s on the doorstep of 60 years old now. A now-27 year-old Lucas Kellan has been a VSA Shadow Marshal for 6 years now, and after getting captured, he’s paraded out on the Wall by this motherfucker, the man we now realize was his torturer, Helghast Security High Commander Anton Saric—New Helghan’s very own Thomas Sinclair.  However, Kellan isn’t here to be executed for the sport of the Helghast goons manning the Wall. No, this is a prisoner exchange. The woman in the orange VSA prison jumpsuit and out of place black hood is Echo. While not readily apparent because she doesn’t say anything here, she was the narrator of the opening cinematic of the game.  An important name is dropped by Saric as he reads the formalities of the exchange agreement to both parties: Hera Visari. Y’all remember Hera, right?  Well, for those who don’t, she is Scolar Visari’s daughter. We saw her INCREDIBLY briefly at the start of Killzone 3, where she basically acts as a prop for Visari’s final propaganda rant before he sets off the Red Dust nuke over Pyrrhus City and then Rico murders him. She then gets booted off-world to Gyre for the remainder of the war, so she’s one of the lucky few Helghast who survive the Terracide by dint of not being on Helghan when it actually happened. In the 30 years since then, Hera has become the Chancellor of New Helghan and the leader of the Helghast people. Whether by choice or not is up for debate. Because what little we saw of her the last time around strongly hinted that she was utterly repulsed by her father and his regime, despite reaping all the benefits from it that no single other Helghast did. So she would seem to be among the last people who would want to step in and take the reigns of her father’s waning empire after Orlock and Stahl trampled it to death in their civil war. But who knows, time changes people, and Hera’s had 30 years to become a radically different person from the young woman most people didn’t even see in Killzone 3 because they blinked at the wrong second during the intro. Either way, this is being treated as a particularly rare and unusual event. The Helghast NEVER exchange prisoners. They disavow their agents caught in Vektan territory, and the VSA burns theirs right back in response. Sinclair made it clear to Kellan that if he ever gets caught—which he did—that he was hosed and there was nothing Sinclair could or would do to help him. So this is another subtle point that should be kept in mind. This is happening because Hera wants it to happen. Hera wants Echo back. This is probably the closest the Vektans and the Helghast have come to a complete diplomatic exchange in nearly 20 years.  Echo and Kellan stare at each other across the no-man’s land. Each wondering just who this other person staring back at them is and why were they deemed of equal worth to be returned (relatively) unharmed. And they truly are, don’t get that wrong. Echo’s place on the cover of the game is not deceptive marketing. Killzone: Shadow Fall is as much her game as it is Kellan’s.  Either way, the distrust between the two states rears its head again as the Helghast attack the exchange. The guard escorting Echo is cut down by sniper fire, and then Kellan is almost fragged by an RPG shot from the New Helghan side of the Wall.   This one clearly has Kellan’s name on it, but the Helgoon escorting him across the wall takes the brunt of the explosion instead. Okay, so 30 years later and the Helghast are still idiots who can’t aim for poo poo. Check.   But it’ll take more than an RPG to the back of the head to keep a good Helgoon down, and the trooper and Kellan both make a leap for his dropped rifle. This introduces us to the first of Killzone: Shadow Fall’s quick-time events. Yes, it took Guerrilla five games, but they finally, grudgingly, added QTEs to Killzone. But thankfully, because Guerrilla doesn’t have its head up its rear end like a lot of other developers do, there is zero real penalty for failing a QTE in Shadow Fall. You just get another dumb death to add to your highlight reel and then it respawns you right back to the start of the QTE segment. It just fucks you out of getting the Shadows Can’t Be Killed trophy for completing single player without dying, because QTE deaths count as real deaths as far as the game is concerned.   Anyway, Lucas passives his Initiative Roll and guns the Helgoon down with his own rifle and prepares to make a run for home soil.  Only he runs face-first into Echo and we get our first clear glimpse as to who’s under that odd hood there.  Echo hauls off and clocks Kellan in the head, laying him out on the ground and at her mercy, confirming that she is indeed a match and then-some for Kellan.  She has Kellan dead to rights, and yet for some reason, she hesitates to pull the trigger. A flurry of emotions fly across her face in the seconds she stands there with the rifle over him. Hatred. Fear. Confusion. Contempt. Pity. ...Empathy? Surely she sees something of herself in Kellan. You’d have to be a brick not. And for Kellan, the moment is equally powerful. The last time a Helghast pointed a weapon at him, they shot his father and were 100% about to shoot him too with no hesitation had Sinclair not intervened. So why didn’t this one? Was he just not worth it? Or was this a moment where one human being recognized the humanity in another human being and decided it just wasn’t their right to snuff that out? The world may never know…  Echo books it into the smoke towards the New Helghan side, never to be seen again, buh-lieve me, folks.  And Kellan is promptly scooped by by an ISA regular and rushed back toward the Vektan side while the two nations exchange skirmish fire. Thus Romeo is escorted back to the Montagues, while Juliet skulks back to the Capulets, and as the cutscene fades to white our tale so full of woe begins in earnest. Coming up next is the title card and our first real chapter of Killzone: Shadow Fall.    In terms of gameplay, there’s not too much to talk about here. This is the training wheels course to teach you how to play Killzone: Shadow Fall before the game actually goes and hands you a gun for real. One of the two background tracks for this chapter on the Shadow Fall soundtrack is cleverly titled “Shadow Marshal Academy,” just to hammer the point home even more. The only actual controls you have for this chapter are walking, looking around, and crouching. This level is just a walking simulator because it’s all about Michael and Sinclair. All the actual controls of the game are introduced in the next chapter with Adult Kellan.  That said, Guerrilla has a nice little reminder queued up for you if you think you can screw around in this chapter just because it’s the plot prologue. This is a live fire exercise, even if you don’t get a gun.  You can totally die if you screw up the scripted stealth sections or linger too long in certain areas or wander off or don’t listen to Michael’s instructions (you know, like an actual kid). If any Helghast troopers spot you, they will shoot and kill you dead and it doesn’t matter that you’re playing as an unarmed 7 year old. They will shoot you and Michael cannot protect you from them. Hence why I said the stun gun he carries in this level is an illusion. It’s no real match against the Helghast and even with it, Michael can’t save Lucas from them if the Helghast actually get ahold of him. The only thing that can actually keep Lucas Kellan safe in this chapter is Lucas Kellan aka YOU!  Beyond that, the stealth sections in this chapter are deceptively tightly scripted. Once you make it to Sinclair you basically can’t fail the level. The only time I’ve ever died in this chapter was that one instance above because the game blindsides you with those two Helgoons dropping down on you if you linger too long in the starting area outside the apartment. Beyond that I’ve played this chapter multiple times and never once otherwise died in it and I absolutely suck at playing Killzone, trust me. No, this chapter is designed to roadmap you into thinking stealthily and strategically in the levels to come. Shadow Fall is not a game that you have to stealth through to complete it. You can go through guns blazing just as easily. Even on Normal difficulty, Kellan can tank about as many hits as Sev could in the PS3 games, and with OWL at your back and stocked with adrenaline packs, things will have to have gone off the rails spectacularly for you to actually die die in a run through the early game of Shadow Fall. Playing stealthy just makes things easier for you, even though it’s the more involved of the two styles. But we’ll cover that in the next update.  And to round out our first real update for Shadow Fall, here’s a look at our principle cast thus far (and Michael).  A young Vektan native and elite Shadow Marshal for the VSA under the callsign 1-8. Lucas Kellan wasn’t even born yet when the Second Extra-Solar War came to its abrupt and cataclysmic end with the Terracide of Helghan. Yet his life was uprooted after that following the EarthGov-negotiated (some even say strongarmed) resettlement of the Helghast survivors on Vektan soil. Kellan and his father were one of millions of unfortunate Vektan citizens who happened to live in the quarter of Vekta City that was relinquished to Helghast control by Earth. Rather than be trapped in Helghan territory and forced under Helghast rule, Kellan’s father attempted to sneak them across the Vekta-New Helghan border wall before the ISA fully locked down the settlement. Though Kellan’s father was killed in the crossing, Lucas himself was rescued and informally adopted by VSA Shadow Marshal Thomas Sinclair, who then raised Kellan through his teenage and young adult years, encouraging him to follow his footsteps and join the Shadow Marshal program himself. Intentionally or not, the protagonists of the last two Killzone games (Shadow Fall and Mercenary, which came out at roughly the same time) are effectively mirror images of one another. Mercenary’s player character, Arran Danner, is Earthborn, a man with a face but no voice, a silent and—if you’re playing him the right way—brutal sociopath with little sense of honor or restraint. Lucas Kellan, inversely, is a man with a voice, but no face, a Vektan patriot by birth and upbringing, and a man driven by duty and loyalty. Unlike in past Killzone games, the camera rarely leaves Kellan’s POV, usually to establish location and that’s it. Roughly 99% of Shadow Fall is seen through the eyes of Lucas Kellan alone. That’s not to say that Kellan is a cipher like say Gordon Freeman, he is as fully fleshed out as any other character in Shadow Fall, and he does indeed have a canon face. While his official character model shows him masked behind his Shadow Marshal balaclava, his face is seen in the live action trailers and adverts for the game, where he is portrayed by Gene Farber, known for roles on General Hospital, Elementary, Person of Interest, 24, and Virtuality among others, who also voices Kellan in the game. What little we see of Kellan’s face in-game is also modeled after Farber. Kellan is also pictured on the PS4 trophy awarded for clearing “The Shadow” chapter of the game.  The dearly departed Michael Kellan is the father of our protagonist Lucas Kellan. Oh yeah, spoilers, he doesn’t survive the intro. Though the game telegraphs it so hard it’s barely a spoiler. Come on. Michael is the titular Father of Chapter 1 – The Father of the game. Unlike the previous Killzones which featured slightly more thematic chapter titles, Shadow Fall bases its chapter names around specific people who are at the heart of that particular chapter. Chapter 1 is centered around Michael, though the case could be argued that the chapter title refers equally to Sinclair and his role as Lucas’s surrogate father as it does to Michael. That’s the wonderful thing about Guerrilla Games, they love their ambiguity. (For what it’s worth though, the PS4 Trophy icon for this chapter is Michael Kellan.) Michael is something of a rarity in that he’s one of the few non-soldier characters whom the games stop to focus on, albeit briefly. People like Evelyn Batton aren’t soldiers themselves, but are still working for the military in some capacity. Michael is the first real straight civilian we encounter in a Killzone game, and we see through him just what happens to “ordinary” people caught in the midst of the ongoing war between Vekta and Helghan—they are chewed up and spat out without a second thought. Michael is sacrificed to prove Sinclair’s point that no one on Vekta is truly safe from the Helghast because the Helghast themselves seem only capable of destruction. Beyond that, what little we see of Michael in the game shows that he’s a dedicated and loving father, willing to go above and beyond to ensure his son’s safety and survival in the face of the Helghast threat. His death also gives Lucas his inciting motivation to despise the Helghast and fall in line with Sinclair’s line of thinking more easily. Because while he might not have a face and he might not speak very often, Lucas Kellan is still very much his own person separate from the player with his own arc of development across the game, despite it seeming otherwise at the outset. Suffice to say, the shadow (hurr) of Michael Kellan is going to loom large across much of Killzone: Shadow Fall. Michael is voiced by Jeff Branson, who has appeared in several daytime soap operas, as well as in recurring roles in TV series like Ten Days In the Valley, the Closer spin-off Major Crimes, and the DC/CW series Supergirl (though it was on CBS at the time).  Thomas Sinclair is the head of the VSA’s Shadow Marshal black ops program, and one of the highest ranking and most respected servicemen in the VSA, period. Sinclair himself was once a Shadow Marshal field operative operating under the codename “Pulsar” and a contemporary of the “famous” Shadow Marshal known only by the codename “Luger.” Some sources even claim he graduated from the Shadow Marshal Academy in the same class as Luger. He was stationed on Vekta for the majority of the Second Extra-Solar War, and was later tasked with covertly overseeing evacuation efforts from the districts of Vekta City which the Vektan government agreed to turn over to the Helghast refugee population to build New Helghan on. It was there that he encountered young Lucas Kellan and his father Michael as they attempted to slip past the Helghast blockade of the city. When Michael was killed by the Helghast, Sinclair took in Lucas and raised him, first as a surrogate son, and then as a Shadow Marshal trainee after Kellan joined the Shadow Marshal program… under Sinclair’s heavy insistence, of course. Now Kellan reports directly to Sinclair. Yes, folks, we work for the Martian Manhunter. Again, there is a subtle commentary going on with regard to levels of power and access and insight exemplified by Sinclair’s character, especially in the prologue. By the time Shadow Fall’s narrative arrives at its proper time period, nigh on 30 years post-Terracide, you quickly realize that the “heroes” like Templar, Luger, Hakha, Batton, Sevchenko, Narville We catch a few glimpses of it over the course of Chapter 1, but it becomes more apparent as the game goes on that Sinclair is quite a hard-line “Vekta First” kind of guy. It’s something then of an amusing irony that in the post-Trump era in a game centered around a wall built to keep the undesirables out, that it’s the black dude who’s the one most likely to be seen wearing a “Make Vekta Great Again” cap. And yet, because this is Killzone after all, things aren’t as cut and dry and they first appear, and maybe Sinclair might actually have a point or two... Sinclair is voiced by and face modeled after David Harewood, who comic book fans might recognize for his portrayal of J'onn J'onzz aka the Martian Manhunter on the CW’s Supergirl and other Arrowverse TV series, namely Arrow, The Flash, and DC's Legends of Tomorrow. He has a small voice cameo in Horizon: Zero Dawn, and has appeared in TV shows like The Man in the High Castle, Doctor Who, Robin Hood (as Friar Tuck), and Strike Back. Sinclair is pictured on the PS4 trophy for clearing the chapter “The Handler.”  A mysterious Helghast operative of some major renown. The Helghast appear to hold her in as high an esteem as the VSA holds Kellan and deemed her a suitable match for a prisoner exchange across the Wall. At present, the VSA and the Shadow Marshals have virtually no intel on her beyond her codename, “Echo,” and the fact that she’s half-Vektan. The VSA suspects she is critically important to the New Helghan government in some fashion, as Chancellor Hera Visari exerted considerable effort to secure her release from VSA custody after she was captured on the Vektan side of the Wall. While not readily apparent at the outset, Echo is the narrator of the game’s intro which bridges the gap between the end of Killzone 3 and the beginning of Killzone: Shadow Fall. That’s also her face on the cover of the game box, looming over Kellan and OWL with one of her eyes illuminated by the iconic orange Helghast helmet lights. As you can no doubt guess, we’ll have more to say about Echo as the game progresses... Echo is voiced by and modeled after Jamie Gray Hyder, who is known for roles on The Last Ship, True Blood, Graceland, Marvel’s Inhumans (oh. Oooooh.), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender. She also appears in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (aka “Let’s Kill The gently caress Out Of Space Jon Snow: The Game”) as Lt. Nora Satler, whom she also face models for (also alongside David Harewood!). Our good LP friend Lazyfire LP’d Infinite Warfare earlier on right here! Echo is also pictured on the PS4 trophy for clearing the chapter of the game “The Agent.”  The brutal and ruthless High Commander of Helghast Security. Anton Saric is effectively Hera’s analog to Sinclair in terms of the Helghan power structure. His key area of expertise is as a torturer, however. He’s glimpsed in brief flashes in the timeskip vignette at the end of Chapter 1 as ruthlessly beating the poo poo out of Kellan before he’s taken to the Wall for the prisoner exchange with Echo. Saric is said to have been a child at the time of the Helghan Terracide, and one of the miraculous few survivors of the ordeal. It fostered within him an intense hatred of the Vektan people for what they did to his home, his family, and his people, and that hatred continues to burn to this day. He is one of the key components of Hera Visari’s government on New Helghan, not unlike what Mael Radec was to her father 30 years ago. Saric was named after No Country For Old Men’s antagonist Anton Chigurh, whom he shares many personality traits with, and his mask and coat were molded after Bane’s from The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films. Saric is the announcer for the Helghast side in the Warzone multiplayer of Shadow Fall, and his player icon in multiplayer is titled “The Torturer”. Anton Saric is voiced by Andreas Beckett, who has done voice roles for games like Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, and Titanfall 2. He's also appeared on TV shows such as NCIS: Los Angeles, Newton's Cradle, Storm of Love, and Marvel's What If...?. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Mar 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2018 10:18
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Obligatory ground floor post. Xenophobia has never been so fun!
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Jan 26, 2018 10:24
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Is it sad to say that I've been looking forward to this? 'Cause I've been looking forward to this. I very nearly picked this up a few months ago on account of how drat pretty it is, but I then remembered how I played and wasn't quite thrilled with how KZ3 played. Something about coming basically hot off the heels of one CoD game or another and not being prepared for how clunky and slow Killzone games were apparently designed to be. After the original trilogy LPs, I gave it another look and then promptly... forgot about it? I'm not sure, but either way, can't wait to see what shenanigans Kellan gets up to here.
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Jan 26, 2018 15:14
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They managed to make the ISA regulars look even dumber in this game, somehow. Also, lets finish this series with a loving bang.
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Jan 26, 2018 16:48
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Woo! I am super stoked for this. It looks like it's gonna be a sweet game, and I'm genuinely happy with how Guerrilla's handled the narrative thusfar. Perhaps in this instalment we will finally learn the mysterious truth, and find out what the gently caress is a Shakespeare.
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Jan 26, 2018 18:21
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I still love how Earth was just like, "the Helghast built a bomb capable of destroying worlds, and accidentally blew up their own during a fight in space? Don't care, they own half your planet now!"
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Jan 26, 2018 19:53
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I loved the look of Shadow Fall when it came out even if I couldn't play it due to never getting a PS 4 and I look forward to watching you all play it. Also thank you for all the background info and such, I never looked into the background of Shadow Fall for some reason and just thought the Vektan's felt bad after the end of 3 and made a very stupid decision. Now that I know Earth made it for them I see it actually makes sense.
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Jan 26, 2018 20:29
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I'm going to miss you old spoiler rule. You were my favourite. can't say exactly when Mercenary stuff emwill be up but as it becomes relevant to Shadow Fall i will be doing lore dumps of the amazing Aaron Danner, Earthman Supreme.
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Jan 27, 2018 01:05
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I hope we'll get to find out more about why the Helghast tried to integrate some Vektans for the first decade, then changed policy and went full space-racist. Spacist. Also did anyone else see the part of the Fatshake add where it says it's for people with coughs?
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Jan 27, 2018 03:54
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White Coke posted:I hope we'll get to find out more about why the Helghast tried to integrate some Vektans for the first decade, then changed policy and went full space-racist. Spacist. Close, it's actually a C, not a G. "The #1 instant shake for real couching." It's a real weird term, and I've never heard it used to describe, I'm assuming, just laying about on the couch all day, but then again, Dutch developer, they probably don't care too much if their graphics department doesn't get the English 100% perfect. I mean, look at all the weirdass ads in Killzone 1. There's full-rez versions of all the ads in Chapter 1 that I spotted from the raw footage. I didn't include the N-Work One ads because we're going to be seeing it a lot anyway because it's Vekta's CNN. There's one that's cut off and I never got a good angle on it, so you can't see the front half of the logo, and the last one is for a puzzling company Robionica.    
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Jan 27, 2018 04:37
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Wow. Lots of reading, I see. Don't know anything about Killzone, so I'm going to have to go back and check out the other LPs. I'm so happy. I have something to keep me busy online that doesn't involve just watching videos.
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Jan 27, 2018 04:52
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I love the hybrid model LP for these games. For the videos, it's nice to be able just chat over and discuss what's going on. However, Guerrilla Games packed so much of the lore off-screen that there winds up being loads to discuss that wouldn't possibly fit in each video--not without making the commentary drat near unlistenable. The Killzone 1 LP is a bit rough. crow and I were still experimenting with our video LPs and it shows early on, but I felt we found our feet near the end of it. I feel the Killzone 2 LP is one of the best we've ever done as a group (Dead Space 3 is also up there). Not only is a great game, but we somehow worked up the energy and motivation to do a bunch of weird extras as well as jam in an LP of the PSP Killzone. I enjoyed Killzone 3 as well, but it was a more inconsistent game and I think the LP reflected that. Some great moments, but just not as tight as the second one. This one's going to be really weird for me, to be honest. For the first game, I kinda roped crow into doing it by promising him that we'd have the whole trilogy done and forgotten within a summer, even though he wasn't even that into the games. (It wound up taking us two years to do the whole trilogy). We recorded the first game in a single hellish night, with me just trying to blast through the levels as quickly as possible. Same for Killzone 2--though that game was more fun to play. With Liberation, we played the entire campaign co-op, and we did partial co-op for Killzone 3. This is going to be the first Killzone LP where I'm not doing ANY of the gameplay at all. I'm still not entirely sure if crow is a fan of the series or if it's just Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I mean, we didn't start out with plans to do Killzone: Shadow Fall, but dammit, here we are and I'm not sure how we got here.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:22
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Blind Sally posted:but dammit, here we are and I'm not sure how we got here.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:26
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Blind Sally posted:I'm still not entirely sure if crow is a fan of the series or if it's just Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I mean, we didn't start out with plans to do Killzone: Shadow Fall, but dammit, here we are and I'm not sure how we got here. I wanted to like Killzone 1 when I first played it, but I wound up hating it because it was just a bad game, at least to play. LPing it did not turn my opinion around on it one bit, and in fact made me hate it all the more. A lot of things kind of fell apart for me personally and professionally around the time we were LPing it too, especially with experimenting with guest commentators to see who worked and who didn't. There was a time there were I legitimately did not know if we were even going to finish the first game, let alone the whole trilogy. Killzone 2 and Liberation turned me around on the series. I really enjoyed both those games, both watching them and playing them, and I actually started paying attention to and caring about what was happening instead of just purely mocking it. Helming the Liberation LP myself actually made me give a drat about the series in all honesty. So when I bought a PS4 the other year, one of the first games I picked up for it was Shadow Fall in large part because I actually wanted to play it as a game in and of itself as much as because I was going to LP it eventually. Shadow Fall has its flaws, I'm not going to lie, but over all I really enjoyed it and I'm kind of distressed how it kind of flew under the radar and quickly became a $20 bargain bin game compared to other PS4 titles.
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Jan 27, 2018 05:53
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Shadow Fall has its flaws, specifically in the 'number of dads' category where it seemed promising at the start of this video but then failed harder than Rico at the end of Killzone 2.
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Jan 27, 2018 07:02
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nine-gear crow posted:Close, it's actually a C, not a G. "The #1 instant shake for real couching." It's a real weird term, and I've never heard it used to describe, I'm assuming, just laying about on the couch all day, but then again, Dutch developer, they probably don't care too much if their graphics department doesn't get the English 100% perfect. I mean, look at all the weirdass ads in Killzone 1. Maybe the G I saw was a C and the C a G, which would make it say "The #1 instant shake for real gouching" which is an actual thing, but rather odd for a food product to advertise, although it proves Guerrilla were also prescient about the opioid epidemic.
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Jan 27, 2018 08:27
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I legitimately wonder how Killzone 1 got a sequel. I mean, I'm glad it did because I like the dumb series (somehow I even liked the first game some; you can see just enough flashes of good ideas for it to be interesting even though it's a terrible game) but I have no idea how Guerilla got a second chance.
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Jan 27, 2018 16:47
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Well, it DID sell well. It was a PS2 greatest hits and everything. For the time, it was also ridiculously cinematic and it looked great graphically--on of the beat looking games on the console (well still shots looked good... it didnt look so hot in motion). It also got a ton of hype and advertising about being "The Halo Killer". (It was not the Halo Killer). I remember follow game magazines and getting sucked right inot the hype. if anyone plans to play, for the love of Rico, make sure you play the PS3 trilogy version. It's the most stable. The graphics are uncompressed and the game runs with stuttering and draw distabce issues.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:46
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Well I’m going to engage in some serious couching while I catch up on this. Also, Mercenary is far and away the best FPS to come out for mobile anything and will probably stay that way until something serious comes out for the Switch.
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Jan 27, 2018 18:00
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Woo! Ground floor! Haven’t actually seen any of the killzone games actually and it turns out that it’s a shame. The writing and worldbuilding sound really spectacular. Gonna have to go watch the other LPs now. I have a PSP, so maybe I should try to pick up the other killzone game for a song. I still don’t have a PS4 (or xbox one, aka the 3rd xbox or xbox 3 (not the 360, which I have)) so it feels like it was released yesterday and thus it is mind boggling that it has AAA games for $20. Fish Noise posted:I mean, that's rather appropriate, if you think about it. hahahaha Cathode Raymond posted:Well I’m going to engage in some serious couching while I catch up on this. 
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Jan 27, 2018 18:43
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Just gonna drag this out from my memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEIwnEXI9JQ Seems like it would fit in with the analysis.
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Jan 27, 2018 18:54
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el dorito posted:Woo! Ground floor! Haven’t actually seen any of the killzone games actually and it turns out that it’s a shame. The writing and worldbuilding sound really spectacular. Gonna have to go watch the other LPs now. I have a PSP, so maybe I should try to pick up the other killzone game for a song. El Dorito Seal of LP Quality
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Jan 27, 2018 19:11
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Calax posted:Just gonna drag this out from my memories. Ooh. Nice. I’ll add that to the Chapter 1 post and maybe throw in a few lines near the end too. Thanks.
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Jan 27, 2018 20:59
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I just want to say right now that after having gone through and read all the old LPs, I really appreciate your write-ups for each video. It helps me get a better idea as to how the dynamics of a scene are playing out, and this series does an excellent (or at least fun) job of playing with them, I think.
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Jan 27, 2018 21:25
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drat, this is still a thing. I thought you guys had finished the series already.
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Jan 29, 2018 04:02
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it's a big killzone.
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Jan 29, 2018 04:29
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I don't get why anyone says the Helghan are evil. Sure, they have a very dark and menacing look, but that's just Bugo Hoss' fashion style showing.
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Jan 29, 2018 19:32
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I don't get why anyone says the Helghan are evil. Sure, they have a very dark and menacing look, but that's just Bugo Hoss' fashion style showing. Strong avatar post combo.
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Jan 29, 2018 22:48
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I don't get why anyone says the Helghan are evil. Sure, they have a very dark and menacing look, but that's just Bugo Hoss' fashion style showing. If anything they're the victims, just imagine how tight and uncomfortable those suits are.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:19
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Remember, this was Helghan's top fashion trend setter pre-Terracide: A man who thought an all-leather business suit was a good idea.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:55
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You're saying that's a bad idea? 
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Jan 30, 2018 03:19
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So, I'm about halfway through the Killzone 2 LP. I'm watching some of the videos, and skipping over some, but I'm taking my time with it. And I've realized something. Nine-Gear Crow and Blind Sally need to have CJacobs in their videos. It's true, it's true. Crow is all cynical and angry. Blind Sally is sardonic and sarcastic. But CJacobs is a loveable ball of goofy fun. And that works. Crow gets to point out the absurdity of the gameworld. Blind Sally pokes fun at it. But CJacobs shows how absurd everything really is. And then Blind Sally escalates it, and Crow (being the straight man) shouts at them for being utter goofballs. It's brilliant. You realize that I have no interest in Killzone (it being a console FPS), but I have a massive interest in what you three are going to get up to next. I'd say that y'all are better than cable TV, but that's sortof a low bar to clear. So I'll stick with, "Y'all are a damned good LP team".
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Jan 30, 2018 04:18
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painedforever posted:I'd say that y'all are better than cable TV, but that's sortof a low bar to clear. So I'll stick with, "Y'all are a damned good LP team". Truly they are the HBO of LP.
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Jan 30, 2018 04:57
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Excessive sex, nudity and violence masquerading as entertainment?
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Jan 30, 2018 06:27
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I do record my commentary naked, after all.
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Jan 30, 2018 09:50
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And just like Game of Thrones, Ian McShane was also quoted as summing up the entirety of my work as “tits and dragons”*. *This probably didn’t happen. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 09:54
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Cathode Raymond posted:Well I’m going to engage in some serious couching while I catch up on this. DOOM is on Switch. I think it probably just handled Mercenary like the Doomslayer handles every other problem.
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Jan 30, 2018 14:04
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