many people consider it the worst in the series I think? I haven’t played it but I’ve watched it a bunch of times. it seems really stupid and bad. But it’s hard to top (bottom?) the absolute nonsense of Halo 4
yeah I’ve watched it being played like 5 times and every time the plot points slide off my brain like a greased skillet. It’s practically an antimeme at this point with how little I can remember it.
At one point you go to Sanghelios to help Arbiter put down a coup attempt, I guess that’s something. I would buy it for $2 just to see for myself.
It’s stupid to consider this, but honestly the Halo 4 Spartan Ops cutscenes tell a better and more interesting story than either Halo 4 or Halo 5. Of course they saddled it with terrible gameplay so they killed off that whole storyline at the beginning of 5.
5 is fine. Doing wetworks shit for the Elites, battling it out on a glassed planet and boarding a dead ship make for fine setpieces, the weapon rebalancing after 4 is better, I like the movement mechanics, and the Forerunners are better to fight. Story and script is whatever, it’s there, it’s not like these matter anymore considering how 343i treat them anyway. Music still good, they don’t have Neil Davidge on it, but Kazuma Junnouchi is still onboard.
5 leaves out so much of why anything happening that it’s hilarious. The civil war on sanghelios was literally instigated by the office of naval intelligence lol. I don’t remember it being a particularly interesting level outside “the arbiter is here remember how you like the arbiter.” halo is full of dozens if not hundreds of these ideas now where the little situation they present you with novels of explanation you never see is infinitely more interesting than whatever the game writers want to tell you a story about but you will never know that because who wants to read a vaguely titled halo novel where you could be forgiven for not realizing that it’s about the thing you want to read about. they could have made a whole fucking game about chilling with the elites where you know because of the clandestine human involvement in their politics it would make it quite an interesting situation for our characters who have aligned themselves with the arbiter… I mean I’m wasting my time talking about it. They couldn’t even fucking commit to their own “hunt for the master chief” thing they literally marketed the game with.
I do remember there being a memo or something that said “If you want to use ONI for anything check with the lore team because in the fiction they’ve done Bad Things in the past and we want to make sure that it’s accurate” or something.
genuinely unclear if this directive was supposed to help create nuance or what because I’m pretty sure everything 343 has ever done with them involves them being pure evil lol, at least when they aren’t trying to pretend like dr halsey didn’t have institutional support doing crimes against humanity on 7 year olds
I think i am the only person on earth that likes the Mantis mechsuit. When I worked there I gave it EVA-01 colors, bumped the speed to be 5x as fast, and gave it weapons it really shouldn’t have.
I also remember discovering if a weapon was a child node to a vehicle seat it could be controlled by the driver, which is how I ended up giving every warthog lasers or guns and briefly thought about making a warthog combat arena mode.
You barely get to have fun with the mantis in 4. In campaign it shows up in like linear sections only that feel like you might as well be on a turret. Chief should of got dropped into a combat arena at the start of one of the missions in a Mantis
did they ever fix the space combat section in MCC legendary, iirc that section is nearly impossible because the AI in Reach MCC was bugged to be super aggressive. applies to the whole game but it’s the worst in that section
also, elite AI in reach sucks to fight in general, they just bullrush you constantly
It’s not a bug, that section has always been terrible on legendary and always will be. The Sabre is made of paper and regenerating health mechanics are a choice in a space map with no cover. Blame Bungie! Reach is just not that good.
i mean it was always bad but it was definitely worse on MCC. i remember when MCC launched this was a huge problem with almost every game in the collection, something about the port made AI far more aggressive than on xbox. i was more deeply involved in speedrunning at that point and it was a common complaint
just gonna point at these videos anytime anyone asks me “why is halo bad now.” touches on basically all my points of how halo 4 absolutely destroyed the canon and salted the earth such that nothing good can grow there
i feel like the natural point for retconning all the 343 lore is “let’s assume humans are forerunner as originally intended” and then go from there. almost tempted to start some fanfiction along these lines. hey, if frankie can do it, why not me
obviously none of this is going to be implemented or even dreamt of in CEmake but it’s endearing to see a guy with this much creativity left to waste on headcanoning a creatively dead franchise