Introduction

Alarum! The old threads are dead! Thread Killzone the First tis naught but a long distant memory. Tragedy befell Thread Killzone the Liberator, who tried to free us from the tyranny imposed by their predecessor—for no one cared to support their claim to the throne. Be ye thankful for the true ruler, Thread Killzone the Second, who brought about the golden age. It yet remains to be seen what sort of ruler Thread Killzone the Third will be...

Hey team, we're back. Second verse, same as the first. We're playing the Killzone Trilogy and Liberation and we've finally made it dto the final game in this particular series. We're gonna try not to do too much with MLG multiplayer videos or fighting game fever dream hallucinations and stick to a straight up LP of Killzone 3. The operative word here is "try".

The earlier LPs are as follows:

With regards to later games in the Killzone franchise, I stand firmly on my "definitely maybe" stance. Though crow and I both have the means to LP Mercenary and Shadow Fall, I don't want to make any promises.

S P O I L E R

! P O L I C Y !

There isn't one! I don't like spoiler policies—don't believe in'em. Besides, Killzone is the gaming equivalent of Shakespeare, so I expect everyone to be familiar with the story line so we can focus more on the performance. After all everyone's played the Killzone series, right? (Right???)

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 we've decided to Continue To Needlessly Complicate The Killzone Quadrilogy.

To quote earlier threads:

Blind Sally posted:

At first glance, the Killzone games are nothing more than pretty, shallow sci-fi FPSes meant to act as glorified tech demos. While that's not entirely false, there's a bit more to the games than just that. Much like Spec Ops: The Line, the Killzone games have a deeper, more challenging, story to tell. Although while Spec Ops is akin to someone shouting in your face with a megaphone, Killzone is often more like someone whispering to you while you sleep—with earplugs. The ideas are subtle, but they're there, and while they're often drowned out by the in-your-face allusions to WW2 and facism, there's plenty of fun stuff to pick out between the lines, including:

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

That list isn't exhaustive, but it's what I'll be focussing on. Please, feel free to add more to the conversation as it comes up.

If you've watched all of the previous Killzone LPs up to this point and don't know the answer to this question, then nine-gear crow and I have failed.