So I just finished, finally, my Halo 3 Legendary rerun for MCC. It’s been months since I’ve played the campaign, but I just hopped into Cortana to finisth the fight, and it was just… so, so awesome. Seriously. Challenging, nostalgic, and the music!!! The music is such an essential part of all of the classic Halos, to such an extent that it’s almost silly. It brings so much to gameplay and environments–whatever the visual tech couldn’t deliver because of limitations of the time, the music fills it in in spades!! It feels like that has flip-flopped a little in recent Halo campaigns. I can’t speak for Reach because I haven’t played it in forever, but it feels like in Halo 4 and 5 music takes a back seat (at least a little bit) when it comes to visuals. Halo 4 definitely has some moments–exiting the cliffside path in the second level, the music for the last battle of the seventh level on the ONI station, and basically any moments with music in the last level–but in older Halos it feels like there’s a musical/sound-based texture for every second of every level. The undertones change practically room-to-room, and it adds SO MUCH!!! I hope Kazuma keeps on growing (I’m sure he will), because… there’s just so much the music can and does do for these games!!
Also, it’s nuts how much fuller Halo 3’s ending gets after you’ve read the Forerunner saga. All of Gravemind’s cryptic growls–they have context!! When Gravemind tells you you’re gonna pay for sins of the past… holy -Yoink-, man. That goes back to the times of the Precursors, and what the Forerunners and Humans did hundreds of thousands of years ago!!! There’s so much weight and history backing the battles that take place in Halo 3, and it’s just… so, so awesome. All the confusion and mania of not really what the hell is going on Halo 2 and 3 because really they’re pretty short games and there’s only so much to tell in them–it has gotten fleshed out in the past few years, through ODST and Shadow of Intent and the Forerunner saga and all this material that has come out since way back in 2007. It’s just super, super awesome. I can’t wait to continue on to my rerun through Halo 4’s campaign!! (And eventually ODST’s!!)
Lastly, I gotta say it is really disappointing how much Halo 5 has deviated from all they did with Halo’s 1-4 and the Forerunner saga and the original novels. There’s so much they could’ve done to bring the ONI, Forerunner, and Sangheili stories together, and instead they dropped it all to pivot in a completely… unrelated direction. Chief’s reuniting with Blue Team pretty much did nothing (They literally could have dedicated the next 72 hours to Blue Team catching up with each other, with the CHARACTERS PROCESSING THEIR GODDAMNED EXPERIENCES), and Didact–a brand new, -Yoinking!- awesome toy–got shoved into a box in the attic about 3 seconds of play time with him. And don’t even talk to me about what we’ve lost by essentially erasing, at least for the present, what the Librarian was talking about when she said humanity needed to prepare for something (yeah, how about #theflood and #theprecursors). It’s frustrating, being reminded after just two levels of Halo 3 how much there was, and how much got thrown out by Halo 5.
But I have to relent. Halo Wars 2’s story looks (hopefully) to be shaping up nicely, and seems to be tugging on older strings worth tugging on (Haruspis mentioned in his blog that a bit of precedent for the story they’re telling was hidden way back in 2010 in the original Halo Wars). It’s nice to see that they’re paying homage and once again writing stories like there’s an actual, like, series happening here, instead of treating this like some comic-book universe where any -Yoink- can happen just because, sure, "this particular story is happening in an alternate reality!!!" No. I don’t give a damn if Cortana is Microsoft’s Siri, you don’t bring characters back to advertise your operating system. Tell your stories like they matter, or shut the hell up. But right–relenting. 343 has messed up in the past, and they’ve shown they can bounce back. Halo 4’s multiplayer was eh; Halo 5 happened. (Halo 5’s multiplayer packs a real Halo-feeling punch right to the gut, imo). MCC’s launch was a painful, long, drawn-out affair; Halo 5’s was not. 343 took over the universe way back in 2010 (?) and has expanded it in some seriously awesome ways, despite (yeah) some hiccups. I don’t have a billion examples or anything, but the point is I get the feeling that the people carrying this torch believe in keeping its fire hot, not for the sake of the business enterprise, but for the sake of awesomely continuing an awesome story that has touched a whole lot of lives.
So even now that I’m 20 and have bigger fish to fry (gotta get to Hollywood BABYYYY!!!), Halo still matters to me. It still tickles me. It still brings me joy, and makes me want to discover. I still love the community, as fickle and outrageous and opinionated as we can all be. I still love trawling the forums, and occasionally getting inspired enough to go ahead and post something. So kum bah yah and all that. Halo is awesome. (Even it is sort of a cash cow :P) As long as they keep it quality, I’m on board. Sometimes that quality stutters, but it’s fun to see the series of my childhood trip, and get back up to dust itself off. It’s done it before (how you doin’ Halo Reach story!), and it’ll do it again. A lot, probably, though hopefully less than more. Things are in a bit of a rut right now, but they’ll data drop their way through it, we’ll be exasperated, and they’ll crank out a few more ridiculously awesome stories that make the whole trauma just worth sitting through. So it goes. But the soil sowed by Halo CE way back when is still surprisingly fertile, so long live a Good Halo Universe! We’ll see how our luck goes.
Share your thoughts! On the current state of the universe, on your hopes or doomsaying for the franchise’s future, on your appreciation of the music or the art, on any memories that come to mind. This was an everything blather, so I figure this should be an everything forum : )
