Hello and welcome to Wasted Plotential, where we discuss the wasted potential of our favourite
plotlines.
You might want to sit down because this might come as a shock to you, but I did not care
for Halo 5.
I know, stunning that the guy who did a forty-five minute critique of Halo 4 didn't like Halo
5 either.
What's next, a guy who disliked The Force Awakens also didn't like The Last Jedi?
Madness.
But seriously, Halo 5 was such a poorly-conceived idea.
Supposedly, the team making the game didn't even know the Master Chief, main character
of all numbered entries, was an actual character that fans were attached to, hence centring
most of the experience on a new character who wasn't even that interesting anyway.
Halo 5's story had a ton of issues, but I'm going to focus on five of them here today.
Yes, this is a gimmick, shut up.
The first issue is a fairly small one: the power scaling.
While playable in some missions, Blue Team are antagonists to Locke's team, who are the
playable team for the majority of the game.
As such, it's a weird choice to have Locke be capable of going toe-to-toe with the Chief.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Chief should outmanoeuvre Locke when they clash
to present the former as a real threat that the latter has to work to overcome when next
they meet.
It's like if Dante beat Vergil at the top of the tower in DMC3.
Vergil would be hard to take seriously as an antagonist for the rest of the game.
Unless we're meant to feel concerned for our series-long lead now that the guy hunting
him can go toe-to-toe with him, but I doubt that was the intent.
In my version, Chief dominates because he's got so many more years of experience as a
SPARTAN-II than this fairly new SPARTAN-IV.
They clash again in the endgame, and Locke is more on Chief's level thanks to his experiences
in this adventure.
Alternatively, make it that Locke can only keep up because of SPARTAN-IV armour abilities
that Blue Team lack, but Chief is able to damage Locke's suit, bringing him down to
a much lower level that Chief can easily overpower.
Second, let's address the game's total refusal to explain any of its main cast.
The game has eight main characters, spread across two teams: Blue Team, and Fireteam
Osiris.
Blue Team consists of the Master Chief and Fred, Kelly and Linda, who were characters
in the novels starting with Fall of Reach.
I read the three Eric Nylund novels that featured them, so I know who they are.
But, the thing about a multimedia project is that you will have a central medium that
is the driving force of the franchise.
While the number of books, comics and videos games far outnumber the movies, Star Wars'
story is still primarily told through the movies.
Likewise, Halo's main narrative is told in the games.
You have to design a new main entry on the assumption that most people playing won't
have delved into the side content.
Or that, like me, they may have gone into some of it, but not all, since I was familiar
with Blue Team, but had no idea how they got from being stranded at the end of Ghosts of
Onyx to where they are in 5.
All the game bothers to give us is that Blue Team has completed more missions together
than any other squad in UNSC history.
That tells us nothing.
If you only play the games, as far as you're aware, the only SPARTANs to survive Reach
were the Chief and Jun from Noble Team.
Yes, even though the survival of other SPARTANs has been known by the Chief since The First
Strike, which is set immediately after Halo 1, the games never acknowledged that fact
until now.
This game needed to do more to explain the situation.
As for Osiris, we have Jameson Locke, the lead character of the Nightfall digital series;
Edward Buck from ODST and Reach; and Olympia Vale and Holly Tanaka, who were both new to
the series.
The game does very little to explain who these people are, and their motivations for pursuing
the Chief are all down to them being ordered to.
There's very little to get attached to or care about.
So, with the game's refusal to give them anything but surface-level characterisation, I think
replacing these characters with established ones from past games would help the player
to care about the conflict between the two teams.
Not as much work is needed to reintroduce a character than it is to introduce them for
the first time, after all.
First off, we're keeping Buck.
He's a recognisable character and Nathan Fillion can generally be relied on to make his characters
charming, even if they're underwritten.
Interestingly, before Fillion agreed to return for the game, Gabriel Thorne from Halo 4's
Spartan Ops mode was apparently planned as the fourth member of the team, until scheduling
conflicts with the actor prevented that.
He could be a decent fit for a slot, if our hypothetical version of the game had more
time in development.
Alternatively, Dare from ODST would be a good fit, given her existing relationship with
Buck and potential for conflict among the team.
I'm also going to include Jun from Reach, since he's a surviving SPARTAN III, who can
also have a specific role in the team as the sniper.
And finally, I'm cutting Locke too.
His replacement is a character I've gone on record as not liking, but she'd make so much
more sense as the leader of this team that's going after the Chief: Sarah Palmer from Halo
4.
She's established through 4's campaign and Spartan Ops mode, and starred in a side game,
Spartan Assault.
Plus, she's already met the Chief before, giving her being the one to go after him more
dramatic weight than some guy who has never met him before.
This would also help deal with another issue: Mike Coulter played Locke in Nightfall and
the Master Chief Collection, but then his playing Luke Cage made him unavailable when
his character was taking centre stage in the game his prior appearances were made to set
up, leading to Ike Amadi taking over as his voice actor.
Jennifer Hale did reprise the role of Palmer in Halo 5, so we'd have some consistency there
if she took the lead.
An alternative would be to make the team consist of Spartan Ops characters under Palmer's command,
or the team from ODST under Buck or Dare's command, but a variety of sources makes the
group more dynamic and offers more perspectives on the Chief.
Jun is a SPARTAN-III, trained by former SPARTAN-II Kurt Ambrose, and he worked alongside another
II, Jorge, as part of Noble Team.
How would this affect his views on this legendary team of II's?
Buck entered New Mombasa just as Chief was leaving aboard the In Amber Clad in Halo 2.
What's his take on him?
Would Dare or Thorne's views differ from Buck or Palmer, respectively, leading to inner
conflict among the team?
There's good potential for character development there.
One thing I would do is include a Spartan Ops-like side mode that depicts numerous past
missions for the two teams to flesh them out more, or at least have the Spartan Strike
side game centre on one of the two.
And the arguably most important point I'd like to discuss is the Ruination of Halo 4's
Narrative.
This is the part that will shock those of you who've seen the Halo 4 video from back
in the day.
I didn't like Halo 4's story.
So, why do I care about it being ruined?
Well, since making that video, I learned a bit about why that story was told.
The Didact stuff was awful and I don't care if that part is ruined by a sequel.
However, the real meat of Halo 4's narrative is found in the story of Cortana and the Chief.
Cortana is a smart AI, which have a human-like intellect and sense of self, but at the cost
of only lasting around seven years before their mental state deteriorates and they die.
Cortana is eight.
The mother of creative director Josh Holmes was diagnosed with dementia at the start of
Halo 4's development, which became a driving force in the decision to take the story in
this particular direction.
The parallels between rampancy and dementia are quite apparent, and taking from such a
personal place and putting it into the story you're telling is something I can respect,
even if I didn't personally like the story that was told through it.
Halo 5 then came along and brought Cortana back from the dead without explanation and
set her up as the antagonist in the next game's AI versus organics narrative, which may have
gone somewhere in Infinite, but I haven't played it yet because the FUCKING CO-OP ISN'T
OUT YET!
Whether you like Cortana's death in 4 or not, bringing her back was a mistake.
It would be like bringing back Aerith in an FFVII sequel.
There was artistic vision fuelled by personal loss in those stories, and undoing that in
the name of fanservice feels cheap and disrespectful.
If I was writing Halo 5, I'd probably keep the hints that she might be alive, but instead
make it a ploy used by an antagonist to manipulate the Chief into helping them.
One possibility is that it's the Didact, whose
disintegration was actually some sort of digitisation,
and with Cortana dying in the same place he did, he can call on her likeness to trick
the Chief into helping to advance his goal to set up Halo 6, with 5 remaining focused
on this greyer tale about the two teams clashing with one another.
Through this fake Cortana plot, we can introduce the theme of how harmful refusing to accept
loss can be, serving as a stronger thematic follow-up to 4's narrative, which was mostly
about the Chief being unable to accept the inevitability of Cortana's death right up
until the end.
Hell, we could probably go a step further and have it be Blue Team who are pursuing
John, adding greater significance to the conflict as Chief's refusal to accept Cortana's death
brings harm to not only himself but the people who love him too.
Can you tell I came up with this part at the end of the editing process and couldn't make
it a bigger focus overa-
And yes, the Didact, for as dull as he was, would remain the central threat along with
the Prometheans, just fleshed out more to make him more interesting.
I think setting up an organics vs AI conflict here just felt like an odd direction to go
in, and its so disconnected from the previous story that, even if the central narrative
is focused on the Chief and Cortana's relationship,
this trilogy just ends up feeling like they
had no idea what they wanted to do with it, unlike the original trilogy.
All this just draws comparisons to both the horrendous lack of planning in the Star Wars
sequels, and the sudden organics vs synthetics conflict introduced at the end of Mass Effect
3.
Trust me, if there's any sci-fi blunders you don't want to be compared to, it's them.
Keeping the threat established in Halo 4 and fleshing it out is the better way to go.
So, these alterations address the ruination of the Cortana story from 4, the player's
lack of reason to care about the new and book-only characters, the inability to get the guy whose
face is used for the lead character back to do the voice, the bizarre idea that protagonist
can match the antagonist from the start, and makes the 343 trilogy feel more cohesive and
considered than the random jumping all over the place we actually got.
343 really is the Netherrealm studios of Halo, isn't it?
If you liked this video, why not subscribe and support me on Patreon like these fine
people here?
If not, then make sure to share it with your enemies so they can suffer along with you.
Today's recommended video is HALO 3 CUSTOM GAMES w/ NakobJakob, Edward Burbank, and Friends
by Chris Ray Gun.
The Dobby bit sends me every fucking time, holy shit.
The mother of creative director Josh Holmes
was diagnosed with dementia as part of Halo 4's development-
uh-
As part of it?