TheFriskyIan wrote: Everything lore wise that comes out now is like a generic badly written Sci-Fi novel.
I've never read any of the fluff, besides maybe one or two points I picked up in a wiki article somewhere. So judging the story just as it was depicted in the games...
First though, and as I alluded to in the "playing" thread, I've only played through and completed most of
Halo in the past month. I played it out of order (due to the person I played co-op with wanting to), starting with ODST. Then I played 4, Reach, Halo CE and 2. Currently, I've made it up to the point in 3 where the Flood ship shows up.
My estimation of the story so far (and maybe 3 will change my mind, but I hear it's the most confusing) is that's it's kitsch. Not great, not bad, just... what it is.
TBH, I guess I was disappointed in the story overall, probably because I watched
Halo: Chronicles long before this current playthrough, with a few of the stories there-in setting the bar higher than the story in the game consistently reached.
There are aspects I appreciated though:
The theming and naming conventions that struck me when I played the Halo CE trial 10 years ago are still there, still giving it its own unique identity. I was intrigued by Flood as an enemy, sort of a zombie outbreak but with an insectoid-like twist, and seeing things in the first game fall apart into a four-way fight is certainly something I didn't see coming.
I liked how Halo 2 built upon what Halo: CE left, organically creating the character of the Arbiter out of it, and retconning the "no other survivor" nonsense from the end (c'mon, there were dozens of other Longswords launched from the Autumn, why would the Chief be the only one left?)
The struggle between the Arbiter and the Brutes being one of animosity, but not simply hate.
The audiolog story in ODST. It's quirky, and a little short in hindsight, but the kind of busy work I didn't mind doing.
What I didn't like:
The naming of the game chapters got a little too tongue-in-cheek, to the point where it seemed to break the 4th wall. It took me out of the story when I wanted to be sucked in.
Captain Keyes serving pretty much no point in the story. He gets captured, you rescue him, he gets captured again, you find him absorbed by the Flood and take his neural implants that end up being useless thanks to crazed glowing ball. He died a pointless death. The parting in Halo: Reach is itself soured by that fact.
Foehammer dying in a rather mean-spirited fashion. That just seemed unnecessary, along with, again, the nonsense that no one but the Chief survived.
Humanity planetside seeming to have progressed only about 20-30 years ahead from where we are today, hardly 400.
The writers having the piece of mind to note the Chief is not a Marine and have them jokingly refer to him as a "Swabbie", but NOT enough to know you shouldn't call Sgt. Anderson, or any other NCO "sir". They never fix this error as far as I can tell, in 3 and 4 they were still making this mistake.
Miranda Keyes turning out to be Catherine Halsey's Daughter. Just... why?
The Didect's introduction. It made me think he had appeared before. While I haven't finished 3, I'm pretty certain now that he hasn't.
The final fight with the Didect (anti-climatic to say the least... but then again, he was just a one-off villain.)
Not being able to play Spartan Ops offline. What. The F***.
What I'm looking forward to: Giving the Chief an actual character arc.
Yeah, throughout this entire tale, he's been pretty flat. I finally get why Yahtzee likened him to a stick. I thought the Chief was a practitioner of laconic wit, but some of the more awkwardly worded exchanges in
Halo: CE have since convinced me otherwise.
This isn't to say that there aren't risks involved in doing this, and the
heavy post-series Chirico vibe I'm getting from the Chief are making me anxious. But, given the stuff they're doing with "Hunt the Truth" and all, I'm still interested to see just where they'll take it.