Halo 5 Reboot

         After uploading my last post I remember a game that really brought this whole “bad writing” thing to a new level; Halo 5. Ahhh, I don’t know how to start this. Halo 4 had the/a Forerunner show up for the first time and their robot soldiers. Master Chief meets new Spartans, defeats the Didact and continues to look for Halsey to fix Cortana but the story continues in Spartan Ops. Spartan Ops was a very weird game type; if I remember right it started as like four or five groups of four doing PvE objectives but also competing at the same time, who can get the most kills and whatever. It was hectic but I think as time went on the missions became more of just four player coop. The missions were introduced slowly, every few months you’d get a new mission or something. The story was basically Halsey was captured by a radical Elite who did not agree with the Arbiter named Jul’mdama and the new batch of Spartans were supposed to rescue her. So it goes and goes and goes and your at the last mission, you’re trying to save Halsey but this other Spartan, Queen Spartan Bitch got orders to kill Halsey because her knowledge is too dangerous to be in theeeeee, I don’t remember what they’re calling themselves at this point, the bad guys’ hands. You do the mission, cutscene, (Palmer! That’s Queen Spartan Bitch’s name, Palmer. Sorry, continue.) your group is getting close to Halsey, Palmer shows up, takes some shots at Halsey, hitting her in the arm, you lose Halsey and Jul’mdama. The end cutscene shows Halsey and Jul talking and she’s very mad, says something about them sending a “hit squad after her” and so she decides she’s done with the UNSC, she’s going to work with Jul and they’re going to find Forerunner artifacts. It was such a good hook! Halsey for years has been challenged and belittled by the UNSC and now she survived an attempted murder (lost an arm btw, forgot to say that) and now has finally broke, has finally snapped and humanity is going to see how wrong it was to make her the enemy. So. Fucking. Good.

            I have quite a few of the Halo books. I really enjoyed the world of Halo and after Halo 4 there was a trilogy that I think took place between Halo 3 and 4 and followed a group of Marines who were looking for insurrectionists, I think, and it was also about Jul’mdama and his rise to power. I enjoyed getting to know these characters more, get some more insight into what Jul was like and if there were certain references in the next game I would understand them buuuuut, all that was for nothing after the first mission of Halo 5. The opening cinematic is great. Your new Spartan team just tears through a whole army of Covenant and Forerunners but then when you take control it’s still, shoot, shoot, shoot, oup, I got hit, hide behind this rock, let my shield regen, okay, shoot, shoot, shoot. But I could forgive that for the most part but at the end of the mission, you reach Jul’mdama and Halsey and in a cutscene Jul is taken out with the lowest amount of effort and Halsey openly rejoins the UNSC. After all the build up from Halo 4, after these books painted Jul to be a formidable foe, both tactically and physically, after the UNSC tried to murder Halsey, it is all forgiven and swept aside like it didn’t even matter. Fuck. Off. It’s like they had a story planned out then they got a new writer or something and they were just like “no this is stupid.” Like, I don’t get it. The story could’ve been so much better. This is when I started losing interest in Halo.

            I remember seeing on YouTube years ago, I won’t be able to find the actual video now but there was a guy talking about why the story was so bad, he seemed to be “in the industry” in some way shape or form and he was talking to a friend, colleague, whoever about it and the writer for the game and this person asked who the writer was and he told him. The other guy visibly winced or cringed and the first guy asked what that was for? Did he know the name? And the other guy said “yes” and that he was kind of infamous amongst to comic scene for, I guess in general, being a bad writer. So, that’s always great to hear. I used to love Halo and I played the multiplayer so much back during Halo 2 and 3. When 5 was out there was a guy I worked with who played a ton of multiplayer and I was like “you know, even though the story turned me off I really haven’t checked out the multiplayer.” It’s a shame cause I probably would’ve liked it but I just never got around to trying it, there was probably some other crap I was playing.

            In my opinion, they should remake Halo 5. I think too many times we get reboots or whatever because companies decide to go in a different direction and in doing so feel they need to start over from the beginning and in some cases that may be fine but for others I don’t think that it’s necessary. Again, in my opinion, there is so much potential left at the end of Halo 4. If it were me; I’d have part of the story revolve around Master Chief and part revolve around Locke with or without his team, like Halo 5 does but it would be a contrast. You’d have Master Chief gone AWOL, looking for Halsey himself so she can fix Cortana. Maybe he was fed up with the way the UNSC was doing things, or they didn’t care that Cortana was gone, or they were just moving too slowly, in any case, Chief is on his own. No back up, no UNSC support, just him trying to piece together clues and using his own intuition to find Halsey and Jul’mdama. Then you cut to Locke who is tasked with both finding Master Chief and you know, doing whatever the hell else the UNSC wants him to do. Fight Forerunners, chase the Covenant (I guess TECHNICALLY the “Hand of the Didact”), end Halsey, whatever. Halsey would be SUCH a dangerous threat for humanity and the UNIVERSE. Her knowledge of the Forerunners topped with knowing how the UNSC works and her anger that they started a Spartan program without her, it’d be absolutely diabolical. So the game goes on, the story unfolds and at the end Master Chief finds Halsey and she tells him there is a way for her to fix Cortana but he’s going to have to help her. BOOM! Evil Master Chief. Then Halo 6 would center around Master Chief going to different UNSC faculties to get things for Halsey or whatever to fix Cortana and Locke chasing him around. Potential, so much potential that the Halo 5 plot we got trampled on. And it would be so cool to see since it’d be such a huge conflict of interest for Master Chief. That he is so lost in his grief for this AI, his attachment to a program that he can’t even think straight anymore, that the promise of Cortana coming back has made him do things he never ever would have done before. One thing I did like in Halo 5, after seeing Locke and his team, I was reminded of a line from Cortana in Halo 4 where she’s glitching out and she says “They’re trying to replace you!” At the time you think she’s talking about all theseee Spartan 6’s? Nope, they’re Spartan-IVs, so you think she’s talking about all these new bargain bin Spartans but she was really talking about Locke. That’s how I’d do it myself. I haven’t played Infinity either and from what I’ve heard they did the same exact thing with the story. They took the ending of 5 and just “resolved it” in between games. So dumb.

            I haven’t gotten around to watching the Xbox direct or whatever they had for the summer but @NEETproxy did and he said that Halo wasn’t shown at all and he thought it was very weird. You’d think they’d’ve shown something about the multiplayer or whatever, a new season, some new microtransaction you can take part in but nothing. (Edit: Oh would you look at that, they just released a trailer for the new season.) How the mighty have fallen. So that’s my opinion? What do YOUUU think? Think Halo 5 could use a retelling? Do you think it’s fine the way it is? Do you not care either way casue you just like making the gun go *bang bang*? Let me know what you think and I might be around sooner rather than later, bye bye!

        @AztecSauce