Anyone familiar with the lore should be able to recognize the specific strengths and weaknesses of each generation.
If you’re familiar with Warhammer 40k at all, a Spartan II and a Spartan III are equivalent to a Custodes and a Space Marine. Head to head, the Custode will come out on top but there is a reason that Space Marines come in chapters of a thousand strong.
It makes sense in retrospect because they had to make it work.
The reason Cortana is the villain is because Microsoft thought people wouldn’t recognize Halsey.
031 exuberant witness was a better monitor than 343 guilty spark
There is also much, much more to be said on what actually matters for being a Spartan.
Spartan IIs focused on individual skills and dynamics to craft effective fighting teams. The later Headhunter program adopted the same mentality for the companies of the Spartan IIIs, taking promising examples for further training, setting them up with resonant partners, and giving them access to gear that brought them in line with a II’s loadout.
Spartan IIIs focused on establishing a process and working with a vastly larger fighting force. As Ackerson put it, “Make the units better with new technology. Make more of them. And make them cheaper.” The program is a distillation and refinement of what worked with the Spartan II program and what was needed in the current era. Make physically stronger humans to run fancier gear and train them to kill.
The IIs were made to quell insurrections in the outer colonies. They had the luxury of time to form teams of soldiers to shuffle around from planet to planet cutting down small forces of enemies. They were never meant to be a force to wage a war.
The IIIs were made to buy time for the survival of the human species. I don’t say this to fault them, I say this as a recognition of how their situation was different. The UNSC didn’t need olympic warrior poets, they needed a lethal force to accomplish a goal and run out the clock. So they got the IIIs up to code, trained them for brutal combat, and gave them gear that suited that purpose.
The IIs were the Spartans that were wanted of that era. The IIIs were the spartans required of their own. And now, with the universe at a relative time of piece, the IVs are picking up the mantle and taking the lessons learned from all the prior generations. The investment required to produce spartan IIs is frivolous and irrational when you can field a battalion of IIIs or IVs in essentially the same gear.
The Store is bad.
Unpopular opinion
It is really bad.
The lore starts breaking if you think about it too much. Like how they say chief loves the egirl even though its Hasly’s brain which is his mother figure sooooo there go those fans. Halo wars 1 story was bad, and characters were too. Abrys new armor from 5 looked good. Boss fights should be in halo but halo 2 boss fights tho. They should have let Jun die in Reach or not idk which, I think.
Jun escorted Halsey off of Reach.
I know that but he wasn’t with her in first strike. Also, this is unpopular halo opinions which mine was Jun should have died.