Part 31: Chapter 11, Stage 4 & Epilogue & Credits
11.4
Aboard the SD Platform, at the command centre, General Adams waits inside of see-through geodesic sphere. Enter Templar.
ADAMS
Ah. Tis to be expected, I suppose.
Thou would hath never been content
With the death of Lente, that fool of a general.
Doth thou not see it? The war is over!
The attack will wither and die without Lente,
Like an early blossom killed by a late frost.
They shalt return, though. The Helghast endure.
Vekta remains the apple of Visari's eye.
Thou doth not comprehend, dost thou?
It is we who are the enemy.
It is we who are the villains.
They fight to reclaim that which belongs to them,
To reclaim that which was stolen.
They fight to secure their future from
Further imperialist ISA actions!
The Earth Fleet cannot be stopped,
Not by me. Without their leader,
The Helghast aboard ignore my presence.
There is never any pity for the traitor,
Woe be unto them.
TEMPLAR
Thou art a murderer, Adams!
Nay, not only a murder,
But a traitor and a coward!
ADAMS
Thou makest me laugh!
And what wilt thou do?
Kill me? I shall achieve nothing.
Thou slew Lente, and yet it was for naught.
Though bloodthirst yet grows.
You and yours had to come here,
To become heroes, saviours.
If thou could but see what I have seen.
Visari has shown me visions of what could be.
The Helghast cannot be stopped.
They cannot be reasoned with.
They are endless. They are Legion.
Your victory is that of a mosquito,
Suckling from a slumbering bear.
When you have their attention,
Thou shalt be smote down.
You continue to fight,
Yet your friends have been captured.
You continue to fight,
Yet the platform crumbles at your feet.
Thou lackest the comprehension
To see that thou do not standeth
A fucking chance.
Helghast troopers enter. Exit Adams.
My goodness. General Adams is an anime supervillain. Listen to that monologue!
It's beautiful.
We also come to learn a little about the Helghast and their motivations. Now, we have the benefit of having read and researched the lore and history for this game (remember, way back in the first few updates?). For most players, the idea that the Vektan ISA are the baddies should be relatively novel. There you have it, though, the Helghast view Vekta as the enemy. They fight to prevent another imperialist attack on their homeland. This invasion is a counterattack on a more powerful aggressor. Is that all true? Well, partly, but not entirely. Visari has obscured history to suit his purposes and spur his followers to action. Followers such as Lente and our very own General Adams, who seems to fight out of a sense of--what, guilt? Does Adams seek restitution for the injustices his Vektan forefathers committed against the early Helghans?
Eh, whatever, he goes down like a chump.
Oh, the trophy for killing Adams with a grenade in Killzone HD? It's called "Orbital Strike".
- Chapter 11, Epilogue, Blind Sally, nine-gear crow, and chitoryu12
- Chapter 11, All Cutscenes, without commentary
4.5
The SD Platform is crumbling, as our heroes make a desperate escape attempt.
Enter Luger, Hakha, Velasquez, and Templar.
STATION AI
Preflight system failure.
Yonder fuel lost is obstructed.
LUGER
The fuel line! Tis obstructed!
VELASQUEZ
I got it.
HAKHA
Do not make me laugh.
What could thou possibly about
The specifications of spacecraft?
VELASQUEZ
Under fire!
STATION AI
Launch sequence hath commenced.
VELASQUEZ
Hakha!
STATION AI
Half of one minute to launch.
A third of one minute to launch.
LUGER
We have not any other chances, we must flee!
TEMPLAR
Hakha!!
VELASQUEZ
Fuck this!
STATION AI
One sixth of a minute to launch.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
HAKHA
Rico, I thank thee.
VELASQUEZ
Welcome.
LUGER
Communications return.
TEMPLAR
Contact command, request a sitrep.
Inform them of Adams.
LUGER
I will.
It appears though most of Earth Fleet survived.
They shalt return, no? The Helghast?
TEMPLAR
They shall.
And we will meet them.
Fin
And so our story concludes. Our Reverse-Heart Of Darkness has seen us crawl out of the mud of the trenches, work our way up the river, not to madness and suffering, but to clarity and liberation. It's fitting that the last chapter is entitled "Hope". Lente's Third Army has been struck a crippling blow, the traitor Adams has been identified and defeated, the Earth Fleet has arrived on time to provide much needed relief, and the SD Platform, an ominous symbol of the Helghast's brief reign over Vekta's skies, has been shattered. Our notions of good and evil have remained mostly intact. That is to say, despite Adams' last minute monologue, we still see the Vektans as the heroes, and the Helghast as the villains. Our cliched action heroes managed to pull a win, despite being tired video game tropes. The commentary on colour-theory has been shallow at best, thanks to this being one of Guerrilla Game's earlier efforts, but the seeds have been planted.
We end, ultimately, on a high note, with a story that is perhaps not entirely satisfying. You could be forgiven for thinking Killzone was not a very good series if you stopped here, but you would be making a grave mistake. Shakespeare's earlier plays were not his strongest either, yet they showed promise. Here, too, Guerrilla shows promise with what's to come. The stage has been set, really. The game board is unpacked and the pieces are in play. Guerrilla is waiting for the right moment to flip the table on the player, and when it happens it's going to be great.
There remains some busy-work left on Vekta, some cleaning up to be done. When we get to Helghan, the nature of the war is going to change drastically.
Courtesy of nine-gear crow, we have a final write-up on the voice talents that elevated Killzone above mere sci-fi shooter into something--uh, something else?
One more thing before we go; a note on Killzone’s voice cast. I figure it’s only natural for our cast to come out and take a bow on stage as per Shakespearean theatre tradition, so I’ll just highlight who each main actor is and what you might know them from, if they have anything noteworthy to their names.
The Killzone franchise has sort of made “undersold stunt casting” its thing, and that starts right here with KZ1. Each game would usually hire one or two if not “big” names, then at least decently known actors to fulfill key roles. The headliner for Killzone 1—and dare I say the entire series—is of course Brian Cox as Scolar Visari.
Cox is probably best known to North American audiences as Col. William Stryker, the antagonist for X2: X-Men United, or as Jack Langrishe on Deadwood, and has had numerous staring or co-starring roles in television series and films great and small like Kings, Troy, RED, Super Troopers, and Braveheart. And though Visari is ultimately a minor part of the first Killzone, never appearing again in-game after his opening monologue, it is that very monologue that is the tone-setter for both the Helghast as an entity and for the series itself. And we have Brian Cox to thank for that. This is not a man who half-asses any role he plays, even if it’s just a paragraph’s worth of dialog for a PlayStation2 first-person shooter. We’ll be seeing and hearing much more of Brian Cox as Scolar Visari in Killzone 2.
The other power player in the cast is Ronny Cox (no relation to Brian Cox) as General Stuart Adams, our deuterotagonist. Because we don’t get to go after Visari directly in this game, we need a suitable local stand in to direct our vengeance against, and, as much as we sort of make fun of him for it over the course of the game, Adams fits the bill perfectly, thanks in large part to Ronny Cox’s performance of his slow burn unhinging as things turn further away from his favor. Cox himself is a veteran of several science fiction franchises, usually playing senators, presidents, generals, or other miscellaneous authority figures (like General Adams!). He’s probably best known for his roles as Dick Jones from Robocop (OCP’s corrupt vice-president who gets “fired” in the most satisfying way possible), Captain Edward Jellico from Star Trek: The Next Generation (the guy who tore such a strip off Counselor Troi about her stupid dresses that she put on an actual Starfleet uniform for the rest of the franchise), and as the morally bankrupt turncoat Senator/Vice President Richard Kinsey from Stargate SG-1.
Our third heavy in the cast lands a little closer to home, and that of course is Sean Pertwee as Gregor Hakha, our fourth squad member and ISA Helghast mole. Pertwee was already a prolific actor on British television series prior to Killzone, though he’s only become known to US audiences in the last few years with roles such as Inspector Lestrade on CBS’s Sherlock Holmes procedural Elementary, and as Alfred Pennyworth on FOX’s Gotham. Though this is technically Hakha’s last appearance in the Killzone franchise as a speaking entity, Pertwee will be returning to the series in another role late in Killzone 2. Beyond that, he also has the distinction of being a part of what is essentially the Pertwee acting family, which includes his father, brother, grandfather, cousins, and nephew. His father, by the way, is legendary British TV actor Jon Pertwee, who played the Third Doctor on the long-running British megaseries Doctor Who.
In Killzone: Liberation, Hakha’s co-op combat walla is provided by Robbie Stevens. Though why they didn’t just reuse the stuff Sean Pertwee already recorded for Killzone 1 is beyond me.
Beyond that, there isn’t that much to say about the cast of Killzone 1, expect that most of them are hardworking character actors, the most prolific of them being Tom Clarke Hill, who plays Rico, who has also voiced characters in the Witcher, Crysis, X, and Driver franchises. He also returns to play Rico in Killzone: Liberation, but is replaced by Charles Everett in Killzone 2 and 3. For all the crap we also give Rico over the course of the series, Clarke Hill does a great job of showing us this man winnowed away into a raw nerve of anger and volatility by personal and professional tragedies, who shouldn’t be promoted or trusted with anything approaching authority over others and yet still is, and helps set the stage everything Rico will end up doing in the subsequent games.
Jennifer Taylor Lawerence, who voices Luger in Killzone 1 also stays on into Liberation, but that’s the extent of her involvement with the franchise as well. She has the shortest IMDB filmography of our main actors for the game, mostly appearing on camera in short films.
And then we have our hero, Jan Templar. Templar has the odd distinction of being voiced by a new actor in each subsequent game he appears in. So this is actor Kal Webber’s first and last entry in the Killzone franchise. Like Taylor Lawrence, Webber’s IMDB page is rather sparse, with few notable roles to highlight outside of guest appearances on shows like NCIS, Hell on Wheels, Murdoch Mysteries, and the 2009 failed V reboot. …Something Awful still goes apeshit over V 2009, right? No? Damn. From here, the role of Jan Templar is taken over by Nigel Whitmey in Killzone: Liberation, and then by Qarie Marshall in Killzone 2.
The other two key actors who appear in the game are Bob Sherman as ISA General Bradley Vaughton, and Steven Berkoff as Helghast General Joseph Lente. Both Sherman and Berkoff are (or were, I’ll get to that in a minute) character actors who have appeared in numerous TV series, miniseries, and movies in incidental roles going back to the 60s and 70s. Among Sherman’s credits are roles in Hellboy, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Pink Panther Returns and Little Shop of Horrors, though Vaughton was pretty much his final acting role, as he passed away in August 2004, three months prior to Killzone’s release in November 2004.
Steven Berkoff’s credits include roles in the English version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Clockwork Orange (which features fellow Killzone alum Malcolm McDowell), and Rambo II: First Blood, though his most recent and well known roles have been as the mad monk Girolamo Savonarola on Showtime’s The Borgias, and as King Nikolaus on Lifetime’s The Witches of East End. He also appeared in RED 2 with fellow Killzone 1 voice actor Brian Cox, but RED 2 kind of sucked compared to the first one, so whatevs.
And that’s it for Killzone 1’s principle voice cast. Cheers all around for our actors. I’ll do a similar write up for the casts of the following games once we clear each of them too. But that’s a while in coming still.