as a Halo Fan my only need is that they show more armor permutations
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ok almost caught up, got to the fall of reach, wow Joseph Morgan is really putting his whole pussy into playing Ackerson. They really nailed his character in season 2, loved the scenes with his father, very compelling arc overall. loved the Spartan training scenes where it becomes clear John Halo is genuinely unhinged in the “pain is weakness leaving the body” way. low points: Perez’s actress looks like she has -5 skill points in Military and has never worn BDUs before, but that’s fine, i’m glad we brought her arc to a seeming conclusion anyway.
bonus: there’s gay people! really enjoyed that. even if they die because it’s Reach, everyone dies.
Skepticism retracted, i’m genuinely on board with this as both good TV and good Halo story. they gave me what i was asking for! more military plotlines, more stuff blowing up, more aliens. And we are definitely getting a lot of foreshadowing for Ackerson’s Spartan-III program so I’m hoping we see more Guys You May Know From The Lore.
sidenote about reach, how many of yall remember cody miller https://haloreach.isnotcanon.net/
lol. halo nerds been mad about canon forever
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ok i’m all the way caught up to s2e7 and man, the writing for parangosky and ackerson really nosedived the last few episodes. and dont get me started on makee, the writers cant seem to decide what her deal actually is. i’ve never seen a tv show that has the ability to go from amazing TV to shlock in the span of a few episodes like this.
i think one of their issues is so many disparate plot threads that they struggle to tie together outside of major Season Events like Reach.
still holding out hope we’ll get to see some of our favorite Halo Reach cyborgs. the timeline seems to be all compressed - assuming reach happens in 2552, per canon the Spartan-III program has been going for 20 years at that point, but the show is clearly operating with different timeframes and their whole introduction to training to deployment was compressed into like, a few episodes. gonna have to do a deep dive on halopedia’s Silver Timeline articles and figure out what’s going on here
it feels like they do better when they’re taking obvious cues from established canon as far as structure, and less good when they’re just completely freestyling - with some counterexamples, e.g. Ackerson is definitely better in the TV series than the usual canon
Shoutout to SPI armor btw, I was definitely like this when I saw that
also this feels like a nitpick but i really don’t like the conlang they chose for the covenant, every time i hear it, it feels like something that was particularly suited for human mouth anatomy? like from a linguistics perspective i’m not sure how you make click consonants* with a mouth that doesn’t close fully and a tongue that is stored in the throat. doesn’t feel very alien. then again maybe i’m just speaking from nostalgia
(*may or may not be actual click consonants)
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Season 2 finished, man as a whole this show is such a melange of great ideas, old ideas with good execution, melodramatic nonsense, and plain rubbish
The war scenes are fantastic, they really made the helmetcam work in the season finale. I can see how an everyday non Halo person would be drawn into the narrative here. Good job to them
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I also really liked the war scenes, a lot of the time it was pretty inglorious and violent, which was nice to see in something with as much hero-worship potential as Halo has to fall into. The siege of the covenant ship in particular was great.
For as much as my brain turns off whenever John Halo swordfights twenty elites at once, I did like his line at the end of his Arbiter fight, that was pretty cool.
I wish this show was like, you follow a squad of spartans, you follow a squad of ODSTs, and you follow some random shitty infantry guys. Just keeping it all ground-level, sorta Starship Troopers-like, from the perspective of the grunts. When that sort of stuff pops up in the show, it tends to be what works for me.
Halo gripes
So many of these storylines are god-awful, hoping we jettison a good number of them with where the finale left us:
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Kwan’s story continues to stagger around, I don’t know why. She just soaks up 20 minute in an ep to be told a series of vague statements she does not understand. I think there’s potential with her as a refugee, and telling that story, but they’re not really interested in that.
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God, please, either conclude or do something with Soren and his family. It’s wild that they have Soren’s kid involved here, so he can’t really do any action movie stuff. He doesn’t want to either, so I just don’t really have a ton to grab onto here. I do really like the actor though? If they got his wife and kid off the show he could maybe be some kind of outsider investigator role? I dunno.
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Halsey has settled into this role where she’s not driving anything now, she’s just reacting, or trying to stop losing things. I get there’s catharsis from seeing John Halo and Soren tell her off for abusing them, but I want her to do big manipulative “needs of the species” shit and be a force to reckon with. There should be some kind of tension where she is actively using soldiers, and the soldiers can see that she considers them disposable, and I guess the moment she was removed from authority we stopped being able to get that, because why would anyone follow her if they weren’t forced to do so by the military?
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In the games, The Flood is sort of a boring villain, I don’t think giving it a voice and a character with the Gravemind was a good idea. There’s potential here if they treat the Flood like a force of nature that has no will, I think, that has no wants, and is just a hunger. Hopefully that’s what they’re doing here.
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Reeeeally not super nuts about the entire human fleet being there at the Halo, it feels like we’re now going to go right back to meetings in human ships, rather than the exploration adventure of Halo 1, with John and Cortana and nobody else.
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halsey getting owned the way she did in the finale for consistently not giving a fuck about human life or this weird little thing called “ethics” was good
the problem with kwan is she’s got some Reclaimer shit going on so until they start getting more into the mantle of responsibility she is mostly going to hang out with soren, who I adore because bokeem woodbine trying to sound tough and mugging for the camera is god tier TV, and at least they resolved the shit with his family more or less in the finale
When perez said I’m an idiot with two needlers I felt that, even though Kai called it a “plasma rifle”, picked up a covenant carbine??? and handed her a needler which she has identified by name in the past so I have no fucking idea what was going on there
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eff that, CANNON MATTERS
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Was kinda curious about this bit in Halo Infinite’s campaign.
Now, the campaign is not great, but one thing I did like was the AI story with the Weapon. I think that’s one of the best elements of Halo Lore™, the fact that humanity has just barely achieved true AIs, and they are doomed to go insane due to how inelegant their design is. There is a parallel there with the Spartans, which were also created quickly, only unfortunately the Spartans have no actual flaw or whatever that would make them interesting from that perspective. One thing that does come across in the games is how they know they are both tools to be used and discarded by humanity, and both are essentially machines. The fact that John Halo will never really go against his fascistic and cruel creators is pretty unsatisfying, but, whatever.
In the campaign, when John Halo attempts to kill the Weapon, he inputs “034” and “Samuel” as the passcodes to terminator her. I googled it and came up with:
Has this character ever showed up in anything mainline? It might just be this “Halo: The Fall of Reach - The Animated Series” thing but it just seems strange to have a reference to that in a main-series game.
omg NU METAL AGENDA
LOOK AT THEIR OTHER SHIRTS!!!
OMG I NEED THIS
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they make a lot of reference to Sam in the books, as the first spartan to die in the line of service etc
20 YEARS OF HALO 2
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Digsite dropped the E3 demo as a playable map on Steam Workshop, with a GitHub drop to follow later this month.
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I think I remember at the time being so disappointed in the Halo 2 ending that I completely forgot the E3 demo wasn’t anywhere in the game. It’s only after I watched the making-of DVD that I learned that the whole demo was all smoke-and-mirrors that Bungie had to crunch to finish in time for E3. I think the Mombasa levels that were in the retail game were more interesting, anyway. So yeah, never had any real desire to play this.
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I remember being disappointed that the New Mombasa levels weren’t open-ish like they were portrayed in the demo and that they apparently weren’t able to get the lighting model from the demo to work in the final version. That legit looked a lot better.
Halo 2’s campaign wasn’t bad but I wish it were longer and more wide open like the original. Halo 1 was still linear but the levels were big enough to feel more open ended than they were. Halo 2 didn’t have the replayability factor for me like the first game did but I guess they were expecting me to play the multiplayer (which to be fair was and still is extremely good).
All of the sequels for me, while being good games more or less in their own right, just really kind of serve to emphasize how much of a flash in the pan the first game really was. It was cooking in development for what back then was considered a really long time and went through several iterations and genres before becoming an FPS. It’s interesting that they were able to make a successful franchise out of it at all.
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At this point theyve had to do so much work to get any of this shit working it’s not even really the stuff people were excited about back then. The e3 demo is basically a cutscene the modders had to add actual gameplay to.
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