On my 9th playthrough of the Campaign, I realized exactly why this campaign did not impact me as the ones before it.
Cutscenes.
343 in the past struggled with stories and with writing but very much succeeded with the Visuals of Cinematic Cutscenes. I replay H2A and HW2 simply to see the Blur Cutscenes. I even replay Halo 5 for the beautiful fights.
But Halo Infinite all takes place in one single cut, and honestly a boring one. Most of the In-Game cutscenes were simply Chief and “Weapon” talking. Or they were Chief and Fernando. Or Escharum and Jega. This repeats infinitely.
I miss these cutscenes, I miss the action. Many a time the pilot says “Wow there are so many Banished how will we ever survive” Yet we never know how many there are as we stay staring at the Weapon and Chief.
Lemme know if I’m delusional or sumn.
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This is a case of people not knowing what the normal for Halo actually is. The very reason you listed for liking Halo Wars and Halo 5’s approach to cut scenes is part of the problem. 343 changed how they did cut scenes in those games away from the old in engine cutacenes of most of the original games. Ow that we ha e go e back to in engine cut scenes it’s jarring to those who weren’t already accustomed to this style.
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The cutscenes of Halo Infinite are fine.
The issues with 343’s cutscenes are that they show your Spartans doing stuff that you cannot do in gameplay. And they were done just to show off flair. The cutscenes of Halo Infinite are more subtle and touching in Part 1.
Part 2 will probably have more cutscenes that are more bombastic like the opening cutscene.
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Halo 2 vet here. Halo 5 was good for it’s action and set pieces. It may have not told the story that well but it was gorgeous to look at. This argument about new players not knowing what Halo was is a weak one. New players can have opinions
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The opening cut scene for fire team Osiris gives me chills to this day. It felt like I was watching a movie
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I prefer the in game cutscene look, but they need to take the camera away from chief more and have cuts rather than these long one-shots. One of my favourite cutscenes in Halo is the warthog charge in Halo Reach. That’s an epic in game cutscene.
MGSV & God of war made good use of the one take camera system, MGSV especially with threats such as the SKULLS, Man on Fire & Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, while God of War used for scale of beings, locations and fight establishments.
Infinite’s are mainly just intimate back and fourths between characters with occasional action happening.
To me, the Halo Infinite campaign was really a huge disappointment all around, not just because of the boring cutscenes, but especially because of the lack of returning characters, which alone made me remove a LOT of review points for the game.
When it comes to story, the Halo games actually have never really been good at that regardless of who the developer is - once you break each game down, it all becomes a generic mess.
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Cutscenes in Infinite are fine, but they could use more cinematography.
Too many reused scenes, just with different context.
Examples:
Literally every Chief-Weapon dialouge scene and every single Esherum self stroking scene.
I’d rather they don’t randomly bring in past characters for no reason. That’s what they did with H5, trying to shoe horn Arbiter into the story when his and the Swords entire reason for being there was ended in the first mission when Jul was killed.
Now if we’re talking about missing characters that are IMPORTANT to the story (Palmer, Osiris, Lasky), then yes, their absence is very uncomfortable, considering they are very crucial to the UNSC presence.
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I actually prefer that we are supposed to play the cool bits of the story instead of watching them happen. Though I do think we should have triggered the tower escape sequence by actually jumping off to trigger the cutsene of us falling to the pelican. They did one like that in Halo 4 when we jumped to the Lich and it was one of the more memorable scenes in the game.
That moment you realise 343’s biggest strength were outsourced cutscenes. 
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