It’s been a week since I finished the campaign. I wanted to give myself some time to digest my experience and think everything over before jumping to conclusions. So today, I finally sat down and typed something up that expresses my feelings about the game’s campaign, and the story of Halo going forward. Keep in mind that you are going to find some strong opinions below, and I’m sure that some of you will vehemently disagree with me. That’s fine, but please, post why you disagree (in a constructive manner preferably), so that I can at least get an idea of some viewpoints that may be different than mine. And if you agree with me, I’d of course like to hear from you as well. Also, just as a side note, please know that I absolutely love the multiplayer suite of this game. I just want to get that out of the way because I don’t want it to seem like I’m just looking to be a hater of everything 343i does. I also don’t think everything Bungie did was perfect either. Anyway, here we go.
In my opinion, the campaign is abysmal both as a Halo game and as an FPS in general. Every level is the exact same formula: a linear hallway with wave after wave of enemies to slog through. The game in almost every sequence forces you to kill every last enemy before you can progress. Not only is this clearly lazy design that is used to artificially inflate the length of the game (just as it was in Halo 4), it’s flat out boring and tedious because the Prometheans (which are involved in the majority of battles) are simply not fun to fight. The player is constantly facing sensory overload as a seemingly unending amount of Prometheans dash and dart around the playspace, and at some points I almost quit playing entirely because I was so sick of the grind. It’s not that they are too hard to fight; it’s that they are bullet sponges with no real interactive value. The Covenant is so much more unique and interesting to deal with. In contrast, fighting every type of Promethean ends the same way: spew enough lead into their heads until they go down. The Knights are the only class that has any sort of unique mechanic, but getting behind them is a chore and the time it takes to do so often makes emptying clips into their heads more efficient than actually shooting the weak spot in their backs. The Soldiers compound the frustration with their constant teleporting. Since there is no way to stop them from doing it (and thus no counterplay), it feels frustrating and annoying, just like it did in Halo 4 when the Knights would do it.
Unfortunately, the game’s story is the rotten cherry on the melted sundae. It’s more of the same high-school level writing from Halo 4: overdramatic bad guys, a bunch of sci-fantasy drivel that has no logic or grounding in anything remotely believable, poor representations of well-established characters, and the list goes on. The Locke versus Chief fight is a good example that demonstrates this kind of lazy and cliché plot development. The only reason Locke did not throw his little magic armor-lock disk in the beginning of the fight was because the fight needed to be dramatic. Logically, there was no reason for Locke to wait to use the disk until he already was getting his -Yoink- kicked, and there was especially no reason for him to be so blatantly obvious about getting it out of his pocket. That is compounded by the absurd fact the Osiris didn’t even help him. They literally stood there and just watched. Why did these things happen? The writing team was either too lazy or too unimaginative to come up with a narrative reason for why Chief and Locke would have a dramatic fist-fight, and instead just stuck it in with no logic or context simply to create a “dramatic moment,” which because of the absurd inconsistencies, just falls flat. And that doesn’t even take into account that the fight choreography was absurd as well. It was straight out of an 80s action flick, with stuff like Chief getting hit in the chest and flailing his arms and stumbling backwards for 3 seconds to give Locke enough time to finish his combo.
Another example is the Warden Eternal’s magic force choke technique that unfortunately returns from Halo 4’s Didact cinematics. Once again, the player is given no context about its power. One second the Warden Eternal is getting killed by Osiris, and then in the next the Warden Eternal is shown to have the power to effortlessly incapacitate Spartans during cinematics with it. This is yet another case of what I call “DBZ syndrome,” where characters seemingly hold back for no other reason than dramatic effort while droning on about what they are going to do next, just to give the hero a chance to kill them before they go through with it. This works well in Dragon Ball, but it doesn’t in Halo. Overall, the campaign was another disaster, just like Halo 4. Speaking of Dragon Ball, since when can Spartans literally smash through solid rocks unharmed? Queue the Avengers music on that opening cinematic. It’s amazing to me how the writers expected to create any tension at all for the Spartan teams during the rest of the story when they are shown blowing through a battlefield filled with Covenant and Prometheans as if it’s completely effortless. It’s made clear from that ridiculous opening that the Spartans are like an NFL team beating up on pee-wee leaguers. So it certainly feels odd after watching that to get splattered by a Ghost.
It’s a shame that at this point, everything that Joseph Staten masterfully crafted in terms of the original trilogy is being trashed by the incredibly awful plot and writing of most of the stuff that’s post-Bungie. Mr. Staten’s universe felt real, immersive, believable, logical, and incredibly detail-oriented. His characters were relatable and unique. Frankly, this “new” universe of Halo 4 and Halo 5 is downright disrespectful to Mr. Staten’s original vision. And that’s not even taking into account the absurd obsession that 343i has with changing the visual art style of the game into something that is almost unrecognizable as “Halo.” Did the way the Plasma Pistol looks really have to change? Seriously, was it necessary to make the Wraith look like an off-balance whale? The answer is no, of course not. It simply comes across as insecurity that 343i is so worried about making everything distinctly theirs, that they will change absolutely anything and everything in order to prove it. And again, it’s simply disrespectful to the original writers’ and artists’ visions. I almost get emotional thinking about what could have been, because Halo used to be my favorite fictional universe to immerse myself in. It even provided the first books I actually wanted to read as a young kid. I quite literally grew up with the universe, and I have so many great memories of what is used to be. And now, all of that has been ruined beyond repair in favor of flashy cutscenes and cheap plotlines.
Please let me know what you guys think about the subject.