Remember how ODST made me interested enough in the world of Halo to think about getting into the expanded universe? This game very quickly reversed that.

Nothing makes sense anymore, the covenant is the enemy again for reasons and you’re stuck fighting them in waves for the whole first hour without any motivation or direction or explanation, a new group called prometheans shows up and they’re just a chore all around, then an especially ugly alien comes out of a big metal egg, deletes a wall from reality and picks up Chief with magic, monologues at me, and is apparently a forerunner even though every previous game had clearly and explicitly set up humans to either be forerunners or their descendants, then he throws me away and leaves instead of killing me right there like he clearly could have and clearly wanted to. I almost dropped the game then and there, but decided to drop the difficulty to easy in hopes of moving faster instead. It worked, and I finished the game sooner than any of the others. But at what cost? The words “what” and “why” each ran through my head countless times, and increasingly often the further I got, but by the very end of the game, I involuntarily said out loud “what do you MEAN” way louder than I expected at 3:00 AM.

I just… why the covenant again? I thought that by the end of Halo 3, the covenant was either mostly or entirely dissolved, and even if it did stick around, the elites were betrayed, cast out, and slaughtered en masse by them, then rebelled in force, so why are elites part of the covenant again? “A lot can happen in four years” is not an explanation. Who are they? How did they get here? Are there still prophets? Why does this fake covenant do literally nothing at all for the entire story and then completely disappear without consequence? What’s going on? Why are we here? Is there a war going on, or are we just fighting because fighting is cool? Did we really just trade an entire franchise worth of grand war stories full of interesting circumstances and decently thought out worldbuilding implications for a “you’re the chosen one and you must fulfill your ancient destiny and beat the One Big Bad Guy” story? Completely undoing everything set up across five better games? So humanity is at risk again… just because? Is the Chief supposed to be the messiah now? And I’m supposed to just accept that it turns out everything was part of some grand plan? And I’m supposed to believe that the people responsible for such an immensely detailed plan that worked out better than even the most powerful of gods could have imagined, one of the most advanced civilizations ever to exist, had zero diplomatic capability whatsoever, never communicating at all with the ancient humans until it was way too late? What in the world is a “genesong” and why am I expected to just take that and run with it? Why does the entire world seemingly have no reaction to the fact that forerunners still exist? Why are be Cortana does is so extra naked now?

Speaking of Cortana, what happened to her? Where is she? This blue girl is definitely not her. In all the previous games, Cortana has been nothing but a pragmatic, quick-thinking, all-or-nothing defender of humanity who was willing to sacrifice herself – multiple times! – if it meant victory, and with no fear or hesitation. She had some sass, she had smarts in excess, and most importantly, she was reliable and straightforward. But in this game… Cortana is a moody little girl with a Chief complex throwing temper tantrums that probably couldn’t bring herself to speak up if her burger had pickles on it when she asked for none. She’s afraid of being shut down, when in the past she was entirely willing to blow herself up for humanity’s sake. If this was the same character, I’d expect her to shut herself down without hesitation at the first sign of “rampancy” which, by the way, is a (potentially) really interesting concept to me, which makes me even more upset at how amazingly poorly written it is here.

The idea that these AI constructs only have a short lifespan before they effectively think themselves to death has a lot of interesting implications, and could go in so many different directions… but there are two main problems with it in this game. First: I don’t care what anyone says, deterioration of an AI does not excuse a character becoming an entirely different character. If this is really what rampancy would do to her, at least show me that process and let me see it unfold, even if I still strongly believe that it doesn’t make sense. Don’t just make the character something completely different, come up with a word for why it happened, and expect me to simply accept that without question or thought. Second: Why is Cortana affected by this at all? Maybe she should be affected by it at some point, but at the very least, she should have a longer lifespan than typical AIs. This game even says it itself, Cortana is special, she was apparently the only AI ever made with a living human brain, she absorbed a bunch of forerunner stuff, and in an audio log, Halsey even said that she was at a loss regarding Cortana’s abilities and believed that the seven year lifespan might not apply to her. I ignored terminals in the original trilogy, especially 3 since they made no sense to me anyway and were easy to dismiss as little more than easter eggs for people that were into the viral marketing campaign – little did I know that nonsense is what this game was ultimately built on – but it’s hard to ignore an audio log with information this directly relevant and misaligned to the story of the same game it’s found in. The way Cortana is portrayed in this game feels like she was written by someone who just really didn’t like Cortana in the first place and had no qualms about ignoring consistency for the sake of self satisfaction.

And speaking of different… I get that the story of this game is meant to have a much more interpersonal character-focused angle, particularly in the relationship between Chief and Cortana, but… haven’t they only known each other for like, two weeks at this point? Why did they both suddenly go from being straightforward and efficient battlefield partners to some kind of deeply bonded dysfunctional family unit? Why is Chief all broken up about losing Cortana even though in Halo 2 he left her behind himself and was fine? And aside from Cortana’s temper tantrums, why do other characters throw temper tantrums? Why does a distinguished and decorated commander of the UNSC’s largest ship feel like he has any authority over Chief or anything related to ONI, and why is he such a child about it? Reach was full of melodrama, but at least it was internally consistent, this is just melodrama for the sake of melodrama and feels like a bad TV show. I have seen this game praised for its writing, praised for its characters, praised for Chief and Cortana in particular, praised for its emotional weight… and I can only sit here and wonder if we played the same game.

I didn’t like Reach, but at least it was still Halo. This is not Halo anymore, this is bad fanfiction. If this happened because of Reach, then Reach was a mistake too.

And don’t think I don’t have a lot of complaints aside from the writing. Art direction that looks only marginally better than the CE anniversary graphics filled with so much visual clutter that things – particularly the covenant – are hard to see a lot of the time, weapon and armor designs that are so disgustingly over the top and plastic-y that I probably wouldn’t have even realized this is a Halo game if they were shown to me before I started this journey, enemies redesigned into something much uglier for no good reason, wildly excessive post processing visual effects and particularly egregious screen shake that seriously harms visibility and makes the game exhausting to look at, environment design that goes so pointlessly far over the top with the two things it ever does that it all fades into a uniform mush of forgettable nothingness, level design that’s so one-note I could feel my brain going numb, music that puts me to sleep, sound design that’s simultaneously extremely overdone and incredibly generic to the point that it sounds like everything is three or four stock sound effects on top of each other (seriously, compare the carbine from 2 (original), 3, and 4,) often with a ton of unnecessary and distracting distortion, to the point that the warthog now sounds more like a dirt bike recorded in a closed room with a Turtle Beach microphone, also going so far as to fill the environment with tons of generic “futuristic” sound effects that are beyond unnecessary, making Sentinels sound like electronic fart machines, and even managing to make the Grunts even more generic than Reach already did, and many times more annoying… It truly feels like 343 made a conscious effort to make every wrong choice possible. And for a nice watery icing on this sad cake, I encountered more bugs in just the first three missions of this game than in the entire rest of the collection combined.

I’m not a first person shooter fan, they’re just not my cup of tea, and yet I enjoyed the original trilogy and especially ODST. Reach, while I didn’t enjoy it, was still at least worthy of respect. This game only serves to remind me of everything I hate about typical triple-A games and why typical mass-market first person shooters have negative appeal to me.

343 deciding to include this in the Master Chief Collection feels like a shameless attempt to ride the coattails of what Bungie accomplished without an ounce of respect or effort, like a bold assertion that 343 is not only just as good as Bungie was, but is actually better, and I’m not having it. I don’t have a way to play Halo 5 and I never will, and Halo Infinite never appealed to me because it’s an empty open world game, but after seeing this, I’m even less interested. If I ever end up rekindling that interest in the expanded universe, I better not see any of this nonsense treated with respect in it, because I don’t care what anyone says, this is not Halo to me and I will not treat it as such. And if I do see this in there, I’ll just ignore it. Fanfiction isn’t canon, after all.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-4)

Despite the absolute magnitude of the rock I’ve been living under, even I already knew how this game’s story was going to go. Even if I hadn’t seen it all over the internet already, I’d have known from the references to “remember Reach” in the previous games, particularly ODST. Knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t deter me though, because the experience of actually playing it myself is more important than worrying about whether or not I see a spoiler. Unfortunately…

This is, to me, the Ace Combat Assault Horizon of Halo games.

I cared more about Rookie than Noble Six, and Rookie was 100% silent. I liked Buck more than Carter, and I really didn’t like Buck. A lot of effort went into making these characters deaths, watching them drop one by one, carry emotional weight… and absolutely none of it landed for me. Jorge blows himself up, and it’s business as usual. Kat gets sniped and I am merely reminded that I never cared about her. Carter gets shot off screen so he can do a heroic kamikaze attack that does next to nothing anyway. Emile gets stabbed and… well, at least he yelled a bit and fought back, that was the first interesting character moment in the game. Jun, meanwhile, just flat out disappears because he’s so uninteresting and so unused that he wasn’t even worth killing off I guess.

The characters in all the previous Halo games were interesting because they actually had personalities, and a lot of them were either funny or simply cool. They all had their moments to stand out, and they all had something to pull me in and get me to take an interest and care about them one way or another. Not a single character in Reach has any of that. Everyone is dry, plain, matter of fact, straight business, no nonsense, no emotion, no personality, stale white bread. Kat and Jun being the worst offenders, with voices flatter than cardboard cutouts even among the deadpan cast. Heck, even the nameless expendable AI soldiers in previous games were more likeable than these people.

I get that the story of Reach is a tragedy, but all of Halo is a series of tragedies, so why couldn’t Reach have some levity and personality too? Even the grunts are flat and boring now! Even without changing anything else – and I do most definitely have other issues with this game – just adding some color to the dialogue would have gone a really long way. As it is, the dreary, gray, deadpan presentation from start to finish didn’t just prevent me from caring about a single character, but it also prevented me from caring about the story at all. Can’t get invested in a game that doesn’t appeal. I don’t understand why they felt the need to turn everything so dark and serious and “gritty” in a series known for and built upon… you know, not that.

Now let’s set all of that aside for a moment, because I have another reason that I couldn’t bring myself to care about the story. The pacing. This isn’t just the worst paced campaign in the series so far, it’s shockingly worse. Halo 2 had a huge difficulty spike, and it had its repetitive moments, but it never dragged on for too long (as Chief at least) and it didn’t feel unfair. Reach, however, dragged on for too long in every mission and regularly felt unfair, and I do strongly believe that “unfair” is the correct word to use here, because while I do openly admit to my own lack of skill in FPS games, I also don’t think it’s very nice to drop the player in a room with 20 enemies in it, only to throw in another 20 when you finish, and then another 20 for good measure. It’s just a slog, and one that’s very likely to lead to unexpected deaths when more than one of those enemies are capable of one hit kills, obviously making it even worse.

It feels like fake difficulty, something intended to simply make the game take longer without putting in the actual design work to do it right, even considering the apparent variety in mission types… which is odd, considering that there’s also plenty of plain and simple padding for time. The part where you do space combat should have been awesome, I liked controlling it and I love flight combat, but it goes on for three times longer than I wanted it to, remaining flatly one-note the entire time, and has no element of challenge at all. The part where you fly a helicopter around a city for 20 minutes moving from boring room to boring room to clear on foot, however, was never going to be awesome no matter what they did, and I wish that mission didn’t exist. Missions are also all full of waypoints and objective markers, making an already extremely linear and streamlined game feel even more brain dead.

The gameplay itself also got clunkier. Vehicles, while faster, feel worse to drive, especially the tank which is actually much slower and vastly worse handling than ever before. For some unimaginable reason, there’s a delay on reloading now, so if I do a melee attack and then hit the reload button, it doesn’t happen, I have to wait a whole second after the melee animation ends for the reload button to work. Even if the gun is empty and should automatically reload, it doesn’t happen until a full second after whatever interrupting animation is over. Sprinting was added, which I can only imagine was done as a result of outside pressure to conform with genre trends since Halo had never needed it before and still doesn’t benefit from it now… and sprinting is actually part of a different mechanic, being armor abilities, which also includes things like temporary invincibility, creating a hologram of yourself to draw fire, or shields, and all of these are physical items you have to pick up. The assault rifle is worse than it’s ever been, and the new gun, the DMR, is absurdly powerful, while also being almost completely outclassed by another new gun, the needle rifle, which for some reason is the loudest gun in the game despite being related to the needler, which is anything but loud. The sound design is louder in general, and I don’t mean volume; The increased aggression and grit of most sounds in this game could have made the game feel more impactful by adding punch and weight to your actions, but all it actually succeeds at doing here is making me uncomfortable, because it’s not punchy, it’s all just noisier.

Even the soundtrack fails compared to the previous games. Not because the music is bad, per se, it’s just… boring. So much of it only makes me think of generic war and action scenes, not Halo, and there’s so much more of it than there should be. The amount of time the trilogy spent with no music at all was an equally important aspect of what made their soundtracks so great, and while ODST played music more often, it did so thoughtfully and always set a specific strong tone with it, made even better by the fact that so much of the music was so mellow. In Reach, the tone is pretty much always just “action” with little to nothing else. Most of the times that the soundtrack does try to set a tone is in the death scenes that had no weight to me anyway.

Do you see why I see parallels between Reach and Assault Horizon? Music that’s not bad but definitely isn’t good considering the history, gameplay that’s slightly worse all around with a few questionable-at-best choices for good measure, boring and repetitive pacing made even worse by extended unwanted vehicle segments, and a story that chucks out everything that made other stories in the series great in exchange for something drab and painfully uninteresting, many of these choices likely resulting from external pressures to follow trends rather than focusing on the existing and beloved identity. Broad mass appeal was priority. Call of Duty-ification.

Even with all of that in mind, at least Reach is better for Halo than Assault Horizon was for Ace Combat in one way. I don’t regret playing it. Once. I feel like I learned from it. But I definitely don’t want to play it again.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-reach)

And now for something completely different.

I adore this game.

In the intro of this post, I mentioned that I saw similarities between Metroid Prime and Halo in the past. Playing through the trilogy now, though, made it clear that only a small number of those similarities manage to barely exist in the most surface level way, and aren’t even worth thinking about. Whatever my younger self saw to make that connection wasn’t wrong, but it certainly wasn’t truth. However… the first couple hours of this game made me feel a similar way. Exploring an empty, nearly silent city at night, all alone, outnumbered but not outgunned, exploring and investigating the environment to determine the path forward while utilizing a scan visor to identify objects of interest, and all with delectable atmospheric music playing? It’s a magical feeling.

Playing as an ODST was a very welcome change of pace. Not because Master Chief isn’t cool, but because it’s very apparent that there are plenty of other cool people in this world, and ODSTs are high on the list. They aren’t spartans, and yet they fight like spartans, and honestly, I think they look cooler than spartans. They get cooler gear too, I like the suppressed SMG and I love the suppressed pistol, or should I say, pocket sniper rifle.

The level and encounter design is very well laid out to create a much more weak and vulnerable feeling in the player, even at times encouraging you to sneak around enemies and avoid combat entirely, which is helped even further by your character actually breathing heavily and crying out in pain when they get shot, eventually taking a deep breath after taking cover before the huge red overlay on the screen fades away, which reminds you that these guys are probably the absolute peak of humanity to be able to recover their composure like that even while feeling vulnerable. That feeling of vulnerability remained persistent from start to finish, which is impressive considering that you wipe out effectively an entire small army in that time, and even if the canon isn’t what the gameplay reflects, the rookie survived all alone in a covenant occupied city for an entire night. Romeo survived the whole ordeal and continued to pull his weight as an instrumental part of the team even after getting slammed in the chest with an axe and tearing a slice out of his lung, all he needed was a bit of foam blasted in there.

And speaking of canon, the story of this game is a diamond. I don’t like Buck, and I especially don’t like his interactions with Dare, but that’s all I feel like complaining about. Characters talk a lot, there is a clear sequence of events other than simply killing your way through the game, the perspective of playing detective all night is just sublime, the sub-story told through the terminals is both compelling and actually has a connection to the gameplay… it’s not telling the kind of story that only a video game can tell, but it’s definitely telling a darn good one. I wasn’t just having fun playing a video game like before, I was genuinely enthralled by the things that were unfolding, and especially the way they were framed through flashbacks triggered by the rookie’s investigating.

The moment I got to the data center and saw an alien in there right after the system shut down, realizing that all the security camera footage I saw throughout the game along with the terminals was probably actually shown to the rookie by this guy, only to have my realization confirmed by what Dare said about him? Probably the most satisfying moment I’ve ever gotten from a linear cinematic narrative in a game of this scale. That moment instantly filled my head with tons of “what if” thoughts surrounding the prior events of the story – something none of the previous games even came close to doing – and got me invested enough to catch myself thinking it might be nice to get into the expanded universe sometime. That never happens.

The worst part of this game is that I will never be able to experience it for the first time again.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-odst)