Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Let's Play (and discuss) the Killzone Quadrilogy thread, wherein nine-gear crow and myself needlessly complicate a series of shooty-man games.

Specifically, we will be playing through the PS2's Killzone, the PSP's Killzone: Liberation, and the PS3's Killzone 2 & 3, in that order. To do this, we'll be using the PS3's Killzone Trilogy which includes an updated Killzone with improved graphics and bug fixes. For the PSP game, we will be playing through the free Act 5 DLC as well as the original campaign. For the multiplayer modes, we will be giving the barest of demonstrations, as we'd prefer to focus on the singleplayer camapigns.

With regards to the other games, crow and I won't be playing them for this LP. Neither of us (currently) have a equipment needed to do a Vita or PS4 LP, so there are no plans to go through either Killzone: Mercenary or Killzone: Shadow Fall.

: : :S P O I L E R · P O L I C Y : : :

I don't really care. The surface plot of the games is so shallow that spoilers are kind of moot anyways. The meat of the LP will be figuring out the subtext for each scene. So treat it like people treat Shakespeare: so many people know that the ending of Hamlet involves everyone dying that it's not really a spoiler anymore. The discussion and interpretation of performances are more important than the actual events. So if you find an interesting connection to a later game, don't be afraid to point it out. That said, unlike Shakespeare, most people haven't played Killzone, so don't be rude about spoilers. I also don't want pages to turn into redacted CIA documents, but hey, let's see how it goes.

There have been a couple of really good threads in Cinema Discusso over the years that utilized a running commentary style of reviewing--specifically, Kyle Hyde's American Psycho thread and Terry van Feleday's Transformers threads. In the spirit of those threads, I want to give a similar treatment to the Killzone franchise.

Let's Needlessly Complicate The Killzone Quadrilogy

On the surface, Killzone and its sequels appear to be nothing more than Sony and Guerrilla's benchmark mindless action-packed FPS series meant to serve as glorified tech demos. Certainly, they do a solid job at demonstrating the power of the PlayStation brand, complete with gun porn, Michael Bay-esque visual effects, and threadbare plots. There are countless allusions to real-world historical and political events--most notably, World War II and Nazism. Unfortunately, nothing substantial ever seems to come of any of this and the plot and characters wind up being simple, shallow, and forgettable. Oh, and did I mention the games suffer from a serious case of tokenism and that you could count the female characters across the trilogy on one hand?

Clear signs of a half-baked game, right? Open and shut case.

Only, I don't think it's as simple as that. It seems to me that Guerrilla Games is trying to say something with the Killzone series. Something intelligent. Something clever. Something subtle. See, I feel that the wrong people over-hype Killzone as the premier PlayStation FPS series for the wrong reasons, while the right people under-hype the games as mindless drivel for the wrong reasons. It's a simple formula, but like Spec Ops: The Line, I feel Killzone is trying to make a critical statement through it. (Though I think it's doing it a lot more subtly than Spec Ops, which is probably why the series doesn't get the attention I think it should.)

Like Terry van Feleday with Transformers, I can't summarize my appreciation for this franchise in a simple essay. There seems to be a lot of topics being touched on, such as:

criticism of war fiction in general
criticism of testosterone-laden machismo
recurring themes regarding the entropy of war and fears of homogeneity
deconstruction of modern and traditional action hero tropes
colour-theory
notions of good and evil
et cetera

It's hard to parse out exactly what Guerrilla's end-goal might be, but I want to take a stab at it. nine-gear crow and I might be pulling out sub-text from nothing, but I think there's enough of it there that the Killzone games start to look downright Shakespearean in comparison to other sci-fi military shooters.

That said--

--while we turn a critical lens to the games, we will also be recreating them as if they were literal works of Shakespeare. Now, before you ask "what the fuck is a Shakespeare?", let me assure you that he was a very talented fellow. A poet, playwright, and actor, among other things, Shakespeare has long been considered one of the best of English literature's canon. It's too early to tell how well Killzone will react to being adapted to a Shakespearean style, but we'll be damned if we aren't going to try!

Blind Sally, nine-gear crow, please just Let's Play some Killzone, okay?

If you're here for a Killzone LP, you'll get a Killzone LP. With every update of critical analysis and Shakespearean dialogue, there will be a proper LP video where crow and I commentate over and discuss gameplay. We'll talk about weapons, characters, secrets, and all that good stuff. It's all part of the package.

And please take part in the discussion. I don't want to only stick to the broad themes mentioned earlier, and I will make a concerted effort to drag into the spotlight any meaning, intentional or unintentional, that I can find. However, any help from other posters would be great, as I want to encourage discussion. So if you feel something relevant has been missed, do bring it up!

So without much ado about nothing, I give you The Tragedy Of Rico Velasquez, The Moor Of Vekta:

While recording with Gildiss, the subject of Luger's disproportionately large head is brought up. nine-gear crow is persuaded to bring Photoshop into the equation: