Something I do agree with here.
Earlier in the thread I posted Google Docs in which I retell the story of Halo 4, Spartan-Ops, and Halo 5 to be the same narrative if you summarized it into a Paragraph; but when it comes down to the brass tacks, I believe that THESE scripts should be what is used instead.
Give 100 authors the same writing prompt, and you will get 100 similar stories; one of which being the best and one of which being the worst.
Simply put, 343 has chosen to use the 24th place winner in Halo 4 and the 79th place winner for Halo 5.
1 Like
Yeah, at least 4 had heart if nothing else. It’s a flawed story, but what’s there is still good. The Didact was a very cool, intimidating figure, until he wasn’t and ended miserably in the biggest joke of a boss fight I’ve seen since the MB “fight” in Metroid Other M. The drama with the UNSC was neat and interesting, but the initial portrayal of the Spartan IVs is just… awful. I despise basically all of them except Thorne. The only truly good thing was the story between Chief aand Cortana, which is good since it was basically the heart of the story and felt the most genuine and impactful even with its flaws.
5 is just… WOW. Buck was basically the one good thing in it, and he’s barely allowed to be Buck. Locke is the most boring kind of cool OC character, what Arby sees in him I will never know. I mean it’s cool to know Arbiter’s running Sanghelios now, but otherwise it’s just there to put Locke on an unearned pedestal. Cortana… just, no words. Her turning evil could have been neat, just definitely not like this. And Chief never wears the cloak from the marketing, I wanted that Megaman Zero 2 Opening where he grabs the cloak and throws it off like WOOOOSSSHHHHH and says a one liner. It would have been dumb beyond belief but it would have been cooler than anything else they let him do in the game.
It’s almost like The Star Wars Prequels, but with far less charm in spite of their flaws.
Brian Reed’s depiction of the Spartan-IVs is . . . . something else.
Hoya gets out of cover and starts acting like a big-shot, defying orders, training, and common sense.
DeMarco starts swishing around an Energy Sword, not like he has used them in the multiplayer training sessions (since multiplayer is now 100% canon, which means he should be training with such equipment on the regular)
Thorne and Madsen seem utterly amazed by Active Camouflage, despite oh I dunno; having been shown it multiple times in military service AND ONCE AGAIN; used in training sims.
I know they wanted to drive home the idea that “Spartan-IIs are anti-social and hardly ‘Human’ while Spartan-IVs are actual people who lived actual lives rather than being forced to be soldiers.”
But really?
Having them act like childish rookie marines was the way to go?
Or a better comparison being them acting like Civilians who just killed an Elite and were all like “Ooooohhhh Aawwwwwe. Alien technology so cool.”
It could’ve been executed WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than what we were initially given.
1 Like
One more thing- you know what would have been a really cool direction to go with 5? The Didact coming back and basically becoming a Promethean equivalent to The Gravemnind, effectively doing the same thing The Flood was but with metal and circutry instead of flesh and bile. Without realizing it or caring, he became the thing he made the Prometheans to fight in the first place, making a whole new and unique yet thematically familiar galactic threat bolstered by the zealotry of The Storm Covenant.
1 Like
I like it.
But what I had Ur’Didact doing in my rendition of the script was honestly much better and showed him to be an expert manipulator.
1 Like
As someone whos dad served in the military and who has talked to veterans during her day job, yeah that level of unprofessionalism is pretty unexcusable. Like Spartan IVs are supposedly from other branches right? Then they’re not rookies, even if they’re new to being Spartans they should at least by now understand exactly what is and isn’t considered appropriate in a military setting instead of acting like kids in gym class.
I mean yeah that would have been cool, but I just prefer the whole “Become the thing you hate most” direction for villains since he at least began as a fairly reasonable if way overzealous dude in the 4 Terminals before his conversation with the Ancient Crab Monster.
Man, you just can’t get involved with Ancient Crab Monsters. Always a bad idea.
Apparently not always so.
Spartan IVs can also be volunteer civilians, like Spartan Laurette Agryna.
If they pass selection, they can go from Civilian to Spartan.
Again I like it.
But in my script, his hubris and obsession with Humanity ends up being his downfall.
(seriously, give my plot summary script a read; I guarantee you will like it!)
XD Yeah but Agryana acts mostly like a proper soldier! THE FORMER CIVILIAN KNOWS BETTER MILITARY PROFESSIONALISM THAN THE PEOPLE WHO WERE ALREADY IN THE MILITARY?! Like if she was a bit inexperienced at least she has an excuse. What’s Fireteam Majestic’s excuse?!
XD lol THAT’S A REASON, NOT AN EXCUSE!!!
Or at the very least not a valid in canon excuse.
https://c.tenor.com/ZezsFuiFB48AAAAd/both-is-good-both.gif
X3 Okay I read the one for 5. Honestly I still have issues but it’s far better than the OG story.
One consistent issue I see is there’s just too many missions, like that’s not inherently a bad thing but Bungie’s games were like 10 to 13 missions tops generally. This is both to keep the narrative from dragging on too long as well as to make development time more reasonable.
Each of these is like 2 games worth of story a piece, it just seems like way too much all at once. You madman, I now see your game- You’re gonna turn Halo…
…INTO METAL GEAR!!!
In all seriousness tho, for real it’s just a bit overlong in my opinion.
1 Like
Also you know what’s interesting to me?
Hear me out…
Before The Covenant showed up, before The Flood and The Forerunner Artefacts and The Halo array, what did Halo look like?
You have an Earth Federation that exerts control over its colonies, said colonies don’t like it and are going through extremist measures to rebel against the Earth Government. In response, the Earth Federation develops a new type of weapon (in this case, Spartan IIs and Mjolnir) to better combat this threat and assert battlefield dominance.
Sound familiar yet?
Swap Mjolnir for giant robots, swap super soldiers for psychic powers, and BAM!
Halo has just become Gundam.
1 Like
Eh.
I deem it nessessary for a dual-perspective narrative to give nearly a Halo game’s worth of missions to both sides of the story.
After all, Halo 5 had 15 chapters, but we only played as Blue Team for 3 of those chapters.
1/5 of the screen-time was dedicated to Master Chief and Blue Team.
PLUS it allows for players to learn more about the other members of Blue Team through gameplay actions and dialogue; since it seems that only 10%-20% of the fanbase actually reads the books and thus around 80%-90% of the fans that only play the games have no clue why Chief is suddenly rolling with Fred, Kelly, and Linda.
1 Like
True, but 15 is still a far more reasonable number- plus Halo 2 achieved this same goal but with less missions.
Tho I will agree, more Chief and more importantly a better intro to Blue Team was definitely something it needed
Fun fact, Halo 4’s original final script actually would’ve had more like 20 missions, with Chief and ARbiter returning to Earth and having a few more chapters on the Ark on Earth.
But due to time constraints, they had to scrap the final act and end on a cliffhanger; resulting in Halo 3 being Act 3 of Halo 2, but with edits to make it a full-length feature rather than what would amount to essentially an expansion pack with a new engine.
Here are the final storyboards (though some are out of order)
- https://www.artstation.com/artwork/68xkw5
X3 Even knowing that, 20 missions still seems like too much to me personally
Which considering that by the time Infinite is finished it will probably have more than 20 missions it may be justifiable, but it still feels like too much.
Eh.
That’s like saying an RPG having more than 50 quests is too much IMO.
As long as the narrative isn’t filled with filler content for an FPS game, I am fine with it.
If every chapter is something meaningful and not something that could’ve been simplified into a cutscene
(Like with Halo 5’s Guns-Down Missions that could’ve just been a cutscene group. Or perhaps how in Halo 2 the few cut missions of Act I and Act II were turned into cutscenes that transitioned smoothly to the next mission a-la the space pickle bomb blowing up a Covenant Carrier and leading into the Outskirts mission.)
So long as the story doesn’t just sidetrack for some reason (Like Halo 5 did when they changed scripts and had to reuse areas from the OG script until it caught up with the new final script), I think a 20 mission campaign can be doable.