Okay, I’ve been a big fan of Halo ever since Combat Evolved was released when I was a kid. Ever since 343i took over, I’ve been getting disappointed over and over. Halo 4, the multiplayer was unbalanced, a lot of the multiplayer maps weren’t very fun or memorable, they completely changed what type of ship the Forward Unto Dawn was, the main story made Cortana seem like an idiot and pushed the whole Chief and Cortana romance crap, and they changed Chief’s Mjolnir armor and tried to explain it by saying that Cortana used nano-bots, despite the fact that there’s not only no reason at all for there to be nano-bots on the ship, but Chief was in cryo-sleep. I’m pretty sure there’s no way that the nano-bots could get inside Chief’s cryo tube or work on his armor inside of it without waking him up.
So despite all of those failures, I figured that it was 343’s first Halo, and that the next one will probably be really good.
Nope
For starters, we had no idea what was happening when we started the campaign because 343 decided to either try to make fans branch out and buy more Halo media or attempt to give lore fans (of which I count myself among them) “a better pay-off” by putting what happens in between Halo 4 and 5 into what it is probably the least popular form of Halo media: comics. Even if you did decide to buy the comics, they hadn’t finished them all by the time the game came out. I read a synopsis online when the final comic came out, and it was basically just like the end of the first mission of Halo 5: an unsatisfying way to end a story arc.
As for Halo 5, 343 screwed up in many ways.
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The Hunt for Truth audio logs which didn’t matter at all and made the UNSC’s handling of Chief leaving make no sense. The public thinks Chief is dead, based on a photo from that one trailer where a colony is being destroyed by a Guardian rising and Chief got buried under some rubble for a moment. That couldn’t have happened because we followed Chief from the beginning of his search. He went straight to Meridian, came in contact with his first Guardian, and went with it to Genesis. He didn’t go to some random planet.
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While the Storm Covenant story arc wasn’t that great, they should’ve at least given it a proper ending. They basically trashed Jul Mdama throughout the first two missions and made him seem like a joke, despite the fact that he had to be some form of threat due to all of the traps and ambushes he had set up that resulted in the deaths of Fireteam Castle and the capture of Fireteam Switchback (minus their leader, she was killed), not to mention the fact that he was able to use the Prometheans to invade the Infinity, which he very nearly blew up with stolen warheads (although that “cloaking remote” explanation wasn’t very good in my opinion.)
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The Absolute Record
This plot line actually could have gone somewhere and extended the life of Halo by giving us a decent story for a game. Instead, they had the entire thing done in comics and finished it with a lame ending where the Janus Key and Absolute Record basically disappear, no one gets anything from the Absolute Record, and neither side has a clue where the key or record went.
I could go on about the lack of maps and gametypes, story mistakes, and terrible spawns, but I can only deal with this frustration for awhile before I get tired of typing.