Yeah, I’ve just finished watching a stream of the campaign from start to finish, including the legendary ending. Aside from the non-memorable missions with reused bosses (warden eternal) ,and a disappointing non-memorable final mission (felt like looking at any other halo mission), I have to say with all the build up from the marketing, and all the build up of the lore we’ve had after halo 4 with the terminals and whatnot, the end result is seriously disappointing and cliche.
Cortana is alive, as expected, and falls into the overused, generic “AI must control humans because they cause chaos” cliche. This isn’t realized by the player (or viewer in my case) until blue team first lands on genesis, then you realize cortana has been controlling the guardians, and the forerunners did the same to regulate “lesser colonies”. From there on, its just a chase for osiris to save blue team, which ends with the suggestion of stopping cortana via the halo rings. Before chief met cortana in person, I thought “maybe she might be holding out on something”, but no, when they met, it was essentially the same arguement used by all generic AIs in all the possible generic sci-fis everyone and their moms have experienced.
I get some fans might say “it fits cause see now assumes the responsibilty of the mantle like the didact did”, but at least the didact had personality (though only really understood from the terminals), and the player could somewhat understand his suffering with his hatred towards humans, his love of the librarian, and his desparation of converting humans to prometheans to save his civilization from extinction. Cortana never has this kind of complexity. She never showed this kind of logic anywhere from halo 1-3, and only a little bit in 4 is she mad about hasley controlling her in her early years, but that’s just because of her rampancy (which also falls under a lot of AIs in a lot of sci-fis).
Its part of the reason why a lot of fans hated the ending in mass effect 3. We get all the build up of reapers dominating the galaxy, and the goal to destroy them, but at the very end we get some AI that gives a similar excuse of using the reapers to prevent chaos and bring order to the galaxy. Its tired, and boring.
That’s not to include the extremely misleading marketing this game had. Any person you may ask would probably have the impression that they would play as locke and hunt the chief down for his crimes. Or they may think that chief is right. The buildup of “hunting the truth” ended up with just one short (but -Yoink-) fight at the beginning, and then having locke wanting to save chief nearly midway through the game. Hunt the truth my -Yoink-. They even team up together in the end.
Halo games have never really had a well written story (save the 1st one because it introduced the universe). A lot of cheesy lines, and stories that gave little to no exposition (covenant in halo 2, purpose of the ark in halo 3). One of the major complaints people had about the story was that chief was largley a mute. That changed with halo 4, and it seemed to be promising for future iterations, but now we’re left with this, and essentially a story that revolves around stopping a generic antagonist.
TL;DR Cortana is a generic sci-fi villain