HALO 5, or how I stopped trying to find the point
Perhaps there was a time when I could tell you what was going on in the HALO universe. Perhaps I could, in those halcyon days, differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys and the badder guys and the baddest good guys and the goodest bad guys and could tell you when and where the games took place. Perhaps I could have even included a section on it in my first book. Perhaps – perhaps – I could have once told you the point.
Perhaps.
While undeniably an action-packed and – in spite of its best efforts – fun game that provided some of the best gaming moments (that vertical descent level is INSANE) since the first outing a decade and a half ago, HALO 5 is nonetheless a disappointment, a convoluted mess of promises strung together with a haphazard script that, for some reason, failed to learn the lesson of its spiritual successor, HALO 2, and implemented an ill-conceived multi-protagonist narrative that – for four-fifths of the game – relegated Master Chief to an existence as a passive, grieving plot point going through the motions of processing loss, hunted by his confederates, and haunted by the catastrophic creative choices of those entrusted with keeping the franchise vibrant and innovative. Neither vibrant nor innovative, HALO 5 is yet another piece of collateral damage wrought by the shifting of priorities to multiplayer run-n-gun-fun at the expense of engaging solo campaign storytelling.
While I appreciate the “shades of grey” that have been added to the HALO-verse since the success of its first outing and the development of varying alliances between factions of alien races to make the franchise more than an endless series of a FPS military strikes on alien lifeforms on some floating space ring indistinguishable from the one you destroyed in the last game, there’s simply no heart, nothing to make it worth remembering. If there is heart, it’s lost somewhere amidst an impregnable armor of convolution and the worst practices of fan-service.
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Bethesda’s WOLFENSTEIN series, which, while filled with stereotypical archetypes and more than its fair share of groan-inducing braggadocio, is still an evolutionary exercise in video game character: the writers have taken great pains to make those stereotpyical archetypes into human beings facing the seemingly insurmountable odds of pure evil; they have become more than avatars for our own wish-fulfillment: they are worth remembering.
In its present form, HALO leaves me clueless as to its point beyond nifty maps for multiplayer chaos, a once-revolutionary franchise flailing about on the cusp of irrelevance. Then again, maybe I’m the irrelevant one and I’m just not seeing the appeal of multiplayer online co-op til you drop gaming. Maybe this is how my parents felt when they tried to transform my Transformers.
If so, my apologies.
(TW)
