I feel like the grunt dialogue in Infinite makes them much more actively participate as comic relief, there’s a lot of speech they have, not to mention their role in the uh, propaganda towers, which all feels kind of weird to me
(I guess to be fair I don’t know how 343 handled them in 4 and 5?)
It’s got that feeling of a sitcom handed off by the showrunners. Characters fall into a stereotype of themselves, their most notable traits exaggerated into parody.
I feel similar about the environment art. On the one hand, they’re finally pointed in the right direction towards capturing the monoliths and managed-garden feel of the Bungie games, but getting closer only shows how far away they are. The outdoor spaces feel like piles of assets and are always claustrophobically zoned with honeycombs, they never cohere into a real sense of place.
that said, the grunt lines designed to play when the spot you and get cut off when they’re killed can be really funny. Timing jokes is so hard in games and they found a good one.
Thinking about how the series kicks off as part of a protocol to safeguard information about the location of Earth, how there are two sequels partially about defending Earth, and how the fourth game ends with you managing to turn off a death ray hanging over Earth, all to blow it up offscreen in Infinite.
Oh my god that rules
Is this another audio log? As far as I know, Cortana is responsible for wiping out Sydney, yes, but the planet she atomises is the Brute homeworld. The Banished are trying to weaponise the ring to do the same to Earth in retaliation.
Oh, I thought Chief cagedly saying “all of it” referred to the whole planet, and that Escharum’s planet was shown as another in a series, and that the loss of their species’ respective homeworlds binded them in a kind of frustrated impotent quarrel between parent-battered siblings, complicating Chief’s reaction to Escharum’s death, etc.
Both the Pilot and Escharum are always trying to impress upon the Chief how pointless everything is, and the audio logs are like a slowly escalating reckoning with the extent of the damage. Not just a few dead Spartans, not just some lost territory on a forerunner construct, the scope of loss keeps growing, as if seeping out from amnesia, but all kept optional and fragmented. Learning about Earth, I thought, was to serve as the climax of that throughline, the understanding only made explicit and complete by pairing it with the gutpunch of seeing an old friend for who they are, like accidentally stumbling upon the worst voicemail they’ve ever sent and it explaining the last five years. Both the threads of wargamey macro-conflict and the emotional stakes intersect here (“I’m not like her!”), seemingly deliberately.
Cortana-Halsey destroying Erde-Tyrene makes her the anti-Librarian, and also buries all the weird things Greg Bear did there, so we never have to think about that again.
It also pushes the whole story into like a very post-Third Impact Evangelion 3.0 quantum realm. The Chief has entered new phase. The worst has already happened, the conflict over the ring is just about a cold throne in space to rule from. And to also have fun new adventures on every Season!
You’re selling this really well to me what with the curdled sentimentality and pyrrhic victories.
lol king shit
it’s sort of funny reading all the comments that ‘disagree with me’ and the vision of the author they’ve constructed in their heads
but the nice comments have been really nice!!
i hope it resonates with some folks
10 posts were merged into an existing topic: faceless characters in games (my polygon piece got published)
Oh yeah I beat this game. When it was over I felt nothing, which might have been due to not really caring about the story and not having played the previous two games idk. Or maybe that the last quarter of the campaign just felt like one really long The Library level. The ending needed a Warthog Run or something. And a snow level.
Some of it was pretty good, though!!
Gave up on this game, and 343 forever. Tired of Halo throwing proper nouns at me and expecting me to O-Face out of a eukaryotic instinct for cross media brand recognition. Tired of meeting sentient chunks of Bismuth and Cortana’s younger sister shrieks It’s Darth Rinkus! He was one of the original Jedi Warriors. Eyes up Chief!!
This makes it sound cooler than it is lol
owen wilson smile
I misread this as “Halo Master Chief, I’m Cortana” lol