Halo: The Grasp Chief Assortment celebrated its 10-year anniversary on November 11, 2024. Beneath, have a look again on the quiet sense of loss that permeated all through the primary trilogy.
Halo: Fight Advanced opens with waking up. Halo 3 concludes with falling asleep. Between is demise. It’s enjoyable, in fact. It’s in house and exaggerated: a holy struggle between Americanized house marines and zealot aliens who discover a frequent enemy within the zombie “Flood.” I do not need to faux that Halo is something aside from a blockbuster FPS. But, there’s something unhappy about it, is not there? The Halo rings themselves are all machines of demise: instruments of mass eradication. However all have sunrises and sunsets, wildlife, crops, ecosystems, snowy mountains, and rocky deserts. They’ve the feel of life, albeit carved in with historic tech that outlived its creators and resounding with the sound of gunfire. Grasp Chief wanders via all of it. One man, regardless of how nice, enveloped in majesty and terror. The unique trilogy, regardless of its huge scale and gigantic stakes, comes right down to intimate tragedy: only a man and the ghost in his head.
It’s laborious to keep in mind that Halo: Fight Advanced was stark and naked. Since its launch, there have been a number of miniseries, a tv present, an deserted film challenge, dozens of novels, and real-time-strategy spin-offs. It is a downright multimedia phenomenon (although not all of its initiatives have been profitable, when it comes to recognition or high quality). It is a universe that has been totally elaborated on, with a lot of its gaps plastered over.
However, Halo: Fight Advanced itself, regardless of a tie-in novel releasing simply weeks earlier than its launch, is bored with explaining issues to you. You possibly can collect from context clues what the alien “Covenant” is and what makes Grasp Chief “a Spartan,” however it’s laborious when you aren’t paying consideration. Each character you meet, besides Grasp Chief and Cortana, presumably perish within the recreation’s explosive finale (although Sgt. Johnson and 343 Responsible Spark return in sequels). The sport itself is snappy and fast, however the story is ponderous and exposition-heavy, with out a lot alternative for emotional funding.
Grasp Chief himself isn’t a lot of a personality. He’s stoic: a midway level between silent protagonist and fleshed-out hero. He spits out one-liners and kills dangerous guys, however not a lot else. Cortana is flirty and witty, and expressive in a means Grasp Chief isn’t, however there nonetheless is not rather a lot to her. She acts as a method to give the participant context for what is going on. She has character in that expression, however would not actually have a psychology past that (not less than not but).
So, most of Halo’s emotional house is taken up by its still-impressive fight and sometimes-transcendent degree design. It has numerous empty house, supplying you with strolling time, and flying or driving again via locations you’ve got already been. That is not all good. The Library remains to be, for my cash, probably the most depressing ranges in FPS historical past. Nonetheless, all that non-combat time affords magnificence and melancholy. The sport’s finest moments, equivalent to “The Silent Cartographer’s” sprawling set items (which stretch from a seashore assault to underground abysses) and “Halo’s” rambunctious highway journey, provide interludes in Halo’s “pure” world. Drives between mission areas and firefights grant contemplation. Its degree design helps you to lookup on the sky as a lot as run down your enemies.
Halo isn’t any nature stroll, nevertheless. Its closing set piece–an awkward however exhilarating drive throughout the backbone of a capital ship–gets interrupted when Cortana calls in a transport for evac. It is straight away shot down. The set piece pauses in an odd, grieving breath. You hear the pilot’s dying phrases, then an explosion. Cortana says, “She’s gone,” a beat passes, then she provides, “Calculating alternate escape route.” This second is a complication within the escape: a cause to stretch the set piece just a bit additional. However that demise hangs within the air. Grasp Chief will, as soon as once more, escape this alone.
Halo 3 affords a parallel set piece: one other driving escape throughout an exploding spaceship. This time, a lot of the Chief’s allies escape, however he stays behind. He and Cortana float in a single half of a spaceship and he goes into cryosleep but once more. His final phrases are, “Wake me if you want me.” What else would you want him for however killing? It was inevitable that he would get up once more. However, absent any follow-ups, that truth is extra dreadful than inspiring. The struggle completed with nothing to hope for however one other one starting.
Narratively talking, single-player Halo since Attain has been caught. Halo 4, 5: Guardians, and Infinite are all delicate franchise reboots. Finally, they don’t have anything near the still-satisfying arc of the unique video games. Halo 4 picks up a couple of years after the place Halo 3 left off, with Grasp Chief awakening as soon as once more from cryosleep. Guardians holds on to a few of 4’s plot threads, however turns Cortana right into a malevolent AI, setting her as much as be the large dangerous of a sequel that by no means got here. Infinite is a Drive-Awakens-esque run on the unique Halo, ending with the promise that the franchise will proceed kind of the way it started. In these video games, the tragedies are grand and specific. Throughout Infinite’s Halo ring, you may discover audio logs with the phrases of the lifeless. Cortana cries when she dies in Halo 4 and (disturbingly) quotes Virginia Woolf’s precise suicide notice when she dies once more in Infinite. It’s cheap tragedy.
Within the Bungie video games, aside from Attain, a lot of the foremost characters reside. Cortana and the Arbeiter each make it to the tip, although aspect characters like Miranda Keyes and Sergeant Johnson are much less lucky. Most deaths are of generalized populations, just like the Brutes’ bloodbath of the Elites in Halo 2, or offscreen, just like the demise of Spartans. Grasp Chief carries a grief that’s nearly absent–historical even. Attain’s floor was already destroyed, “glassed” because the video games put it. Chief does win the struggle, however the battle was misplaced earlier than he might begin.
In distinction, Infinite wakes up Chief after hope is misplaced after which lets him blaze throughout the battlefield, triumphing over the enemies that each different Spartan couldn’t defeat. In Infinite, he wins the battle with the promise that he’ll win the struggle too. It begins in tragedy, positive. However its ending is hopeful, for maybe the primary time in Halo, rife as it’s with tragic endings and cliffhangers. That is essentially not dangerous, however it does illustrate the boundaries of franchise storytelling. There should all the time be one other struggle and it should nonetheless be empowering and enjoyable, even when Chief is ever extra world-weary. It implies that future Halo video games will probably by no means match Halo 3’s ending notice: sleeping and waking up, with nothing however demise to border your days.