I do have to agree the story is total nonsense as far as SC goes, I could never make heads nor tails of it.
I have a love-hate relationship with the story. When I read the SC1 manual two decades ago, and when I reread it today, I find myself hyped and inspired by the world building and plot hooks. Sure, it's fairly shallow, cliche, etc but it's not outright bad. A good writer could tell amazing military scifi stories with that premise.
The story of the first game felt like it was written by a different writer working from a different draft of the story. It did not feel like an organic or satisfying followup to the plot hooks in the manual. It also shredded the world building presented in the manual rather than building on it, which felt like an insulting slap in the face. On its own merits, it was pretty trite. The writing was very shallow, as in it was literally only a few paragraphs of dialogue in missions briefings and players were seemingly expected to fill in the blanks in their head. The alien characters were especially underdeveloped and the writer seemed not to know how to handle them, preferring to focus on the humans even when their presence did not feel organic.
The Brood War expansion story displayed a dramatic drop in quality. The script was full of bad writing: plot holes, macguffins, deus ex machinas, mary sue, blatantly idiotic behavior, interesting story threads that the writer severed carelessly, etc.
SC2 was just as bad or worse than Brood War. The most annoying part was that it had some interesting ideas, like the missions dealing with terran rebellion, zerg evolution, or protoss politics. Unfortunately these were overshadowed by a terrible love story involving space cowboy and bug girl fighting the space devil.
The story is pretty much radioactive as far as fandoms go. Most people who cared for the storytelling jumped ship when it became clear the writing was awful, and those few who remain are either oblivious to the bad writing or unable to do more than nonconstructively complain about it. I had a bunch of flame wars with these sorts of annoying people. Where before I was happy to just dismiss the bad writing and focus on something constructive, the flame wars really soured my relationship with this franchise.
I love StarCraft. Huge fan of getting to play a 40k RTS! Eldar vs. Marines vs. Tyranids? What's not to love?
I don't find that comparison particularly accurate. The SC armies don't neatly map to 40k armies on a 1:1 basis.
The protoss are a mix of eldar, astartes, necrons, and tau. The terrans are based on space westerns and cyberpunk, with no resemblance to 40k. The zerg are a mix of tyranids and nurgle demons.
Well, at least that's the case
circa SC1/BW multiplayer.
In the games' campaigns' story, all that world building is shredded and the politics are replaced by a handful of insane epic fantasy heroes twisting the universe to their deranged whims. The terrans are reduced to a plucky rebel hero fighting a trite evil emperor, the protoss are reduced to damsels in distress constantly needing rescue by deus ex machina, and the zerg are reduced to the pets of a psychotic succubus with daddy/boyfriend issues.
I was okay with the story, but I don't expect much from video games. I liked the character arcs with Kerrigan and Arcturus, but the entire story was just an excuse for team up missions.
I thought the character arcs were pretty bad. You know when people said that the
Star Wars prequels were ruined by, among other things, the Anakin/Padme romance stealing the spotlight from other more interesting plots? SC is even worse about that.
Blizzard introduced a bunch of political actors with interesting backgrounds and plenty of room for exploration, then ignores them or destroys them.
I found Arcturus to be yet another trite and bland evil overlord. I was far more interested in the Confederacy and what their politics were like than I ever was in anything to do with the Dominion.
Same for Kerrigan. I found the Overmind and cerebrates far more interesting.
The protoss suffered a similar problem. We get introduced to this
Star Wars-esque light/dark conflict only for it to be subverted when the dark protoss turn out not to be villains, but then the conflict is quickly resolved and discarded in favor of turning the protoss into damsels in distress that constantly need rescuing.
The manual introduces this whole idea where the terrans are invaded by zerg and protoss, creating a massive clusterf**k war. The games completely botch the execution in favor of absurd soap opera dynamics and lazy space magic.
I'd go with great artwork, good storytelling (on the curve at least, where "abysmal" was slightly above average), and weak gameplay (again, on the curve...most everyone played SC, but it really seemed like nearly every other RTS had more interesting gameplay).
Even in terms of video game storytelling SC was never more than average.
Aside from what I said above about Blizzard introducing interesting ideas and botching the execution, SC also suffers from trying to shoehorn epic fantasy heroes into a military scifi setting.
This article "
Total War: Great Man History" explains the basics of my complaints.
Essentially, I was expecting SC to be a fairly believable take on interstellar warfare, politics, economics, philosophy, etc. Instead I get this absurd soap opera where a handful of lunatics bend the entire universe to their whims regardless of how much sense it would make in a remotely realistic world.