Halo 4: How Not to Write a Sequel
Halo 4: How Not to Write a Sequel
Halo 4 ruined my childhood.
A SYSTEM SHOCK (but not the good kind)
Due to all of the internet bitching and whining and complaining about Halo 4 and its multiplayer over the years, I had always thought my opinion on its campaign--that it was one of the most disappointing stories ever told--was the mainstream one. It wasn’t until after Halo 5: Guardians came out that I realized how fucking wrong I was. That there are people out there who actually like Halo 4’s take on Master Chief and Cortana. Even worse, as time went on, it seemed like it wasn’t only the crazy fanboys who defended the new writers’ choices…it was everyone!
Everyone except me.
Halo 4's narrative is even worse than Halo 5's. As a sequel, it fails utterly. It has some of the worst dialogue and most offensive storytelling ever put to fiction. What’s so bad, you ask? Well, the answer is very simple: literally everything.
In fact, there’s so much wrong that it’s almost impossible to fit it all into a single cohesive argument. Rather than narrative structure, my grievances are with content and context, and as the title of this essay implies, continuity with the rest of the series--particularly Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, which 4 treats despicably.
THE WORST SEQUEL EVER
The stories in the original Halo trilogy are fondly remembered today, but they were always the least important part of the games. It’s especially evident in replaying Halo: Combat Evolved that the narrative was nearly an afterthought. It provides context to action adventure. That context matters much less than the level design and the mechanics. The story is there to help keep you engaged, nothing more.
This is why Master Chief and Cortana are so simple. This is why I’m so ready to forgive plot holes and conveniences like teleportation in the original trilogy, because that shit didn’t matter. Halo's setting and its stories are not great art. They're not intellectual sci-fi. They are companion pieces to the gameplay. They take us from point A to point B and give a loose justification for blasting the shit out of aliens. Nothing more. That is the framework 343I inherited when taking Halo's reins.
GAMES ARE GAMES
Games aren’t like movies. Reboots and remakes are a lot more interesting in interactive media, because you can always update or reimagine or put some new twist on an old mechanic.
This is a point I find myself regularly coming back to, but it's important enough to be worthy of the words. Games are about things. Games can be about any things they want to be. Crusader Kings is about being a feudal overlord in the Middle Ages. Darkest Dungeon is about adventurers who go into dungeons to get loot. Halo is about being a badass supersoldier in power armor in the far future. That is the series' core premise.
Around the core premise is every system constructed. The first two Halo games do an excellent job of capturing this both mechanistically and narratively. 3 and Reach deliver on the promise of that premise but stumble a bit when it comes to story—that’s a topic for another day. ODST ditched the supersoldier aspect and ruined the conceit of the franchise; this is why no one likes it.
The point is that even though the Master Chief’s story was pretty much done after Halo 3’s ending, we weren’t necessarily done with the franchise’s gameplay. There was still a niche out there for feeling like a badass supersoldier in power armor amidst all of the other cover shooters and Call of Duties and Battlefields and Medals of Honor and FarCries. It was an excellent time to double down on this niche and go in a totally new direction with the series. In some sense, Halo 4 tried to do this. It aimed to take the series away from epic galaxy saving adventures and toward something more personal. At this they utterly failed. That failure is at the root of this analysis.
UNSC Master Chief Spartan John-117
The only characters who consistently appear across all of the installments of the numbered trilogy are Master Chief and Cortana, which means any attempt at telling a “personal story” will have to be between these two people.
Except Master Chief and Cortana aren’t people. They’re sapient sci-fi weapons platforms who have slaughtered millions of aliens together. That is not inherently a problem: it would be interesting to explore the psychology of a character like the Chief, someone whose entire existence is death and war. What’s his human side like? How does he think? What’s it like for Cortana to be so near human, yet still always treated like a machine?
Halo 1-3 were never really about those things. Some of the books touch on that stuff, but no one fucking cares about the books. Forget about them. Bungie never worried about book canon and neither will I.
I want to make it clear here and now that I do think there might be something to the framework 4's writers tried to adopt. But they forgot who the Master Chief and Cortana were in the process. Much like with a number of other disappointing video game sequels, the continuity of character depiction is, quite frankly, pitiful.
You'll often encounter the sentiment online from 343 apologists that the departures from the OT in terms of Chief and Cortana are justifiable, because Chief and Cortana were hardly characters to begin with. This sentiment couldn't be more wrong.
It's true that Master Chief is not a particularly deep character. He has a lot of personality, as does Cortana, but there isn't very much to him. Do you know why he's depicted that way? Do you know why Cortana doesn't have deep psychological trauma and why we never hear about her feelings?
BECAUSE THEY ARE MACHINERY.
The Master Chief and his AI brain are embodiments of the UNSC war machine in the fight against the Covenant. Because of the nature of the Halo franchise--that is to say, because Halo is an FPS--we need to have some kind of avatar, and Joe Staten (among the rest of Bungie's original team) made an extremely intelligent choice in having Chief be a character with no agency in the narrative. He's an avatar that is entirely ludonarratively justified.
You will note that Halo as a series if FULL of great characters in the OT. Sgt. Johnson, Captain Keyes, Lord Hood, the Arbiter, the Shipmaster, Truth and the rest of the prophets. These characters are no deeper than they need to be for an action game, but they are well-realized and compelling.
So do you think they just forgot to give that to the Chief? That it was an accident he didn't say much?
His depiction is intentional. The Master Chief is supposed to be the way he is in the original Halo games. And it's not true that he's all that shallow. I think there's a lot more to him than he's given credit for. I want to take a moment to identify his core character traits. Let’s examine what the OT tells us about Master Chief:
THE MASTER CHIEF IS:
a cyborg or supersoldier or something in power armor
laconic
a man of few words
not verbose
darkly comedic and a little bit sassy
willing to do whatever anyone tells him to no matter the situation time after time
lucky?
I’m going to go out there and say it right now: “luck” is not a character trait. The fact that the writers of Halo 3 and maybe also Eric Nylund seem to think it is reflects not at all on Halo: CE's and Halo 2’s stories. This idiotic “trait” continues into 4, and it’s just as stupid there as it is in 3. It’s so obviously stupid that I won’t even bother mentioning it again, other than to say it reflects poorly on the judgement of 4’s writers that it wasn’t ditched ASAP.
The rest of these points will be important for understanding what Halo 4 fails so miserably, so let’s go through them one-by-one.
1. Robot or superhuman, who the fuck cares?
Everyone who calls themselves a Halo fan knows that the Master Chief is a SPARTAN II supersoldier wearing Mk. 6 MJOLNIR power armor who has been raised since he was 6 to be a killing machine and who follows orders and never asks questions. All of these things are reflected in the OT’s mechanics and story.
But here's the thing: none of these details ever mattered to the games. Maybe Master Chief is a robot, or maybe he’s a cyborg, or some kind of superhuman. They call him a Spartan and he’s super tough, and also he seems like he’s probably a human deep down. We don’t need to know anything else about who or what he is in the games. The games are about murdering aliens. Anything that isn't related to murdering aliens is best left to the books.
Yet the new games want to shoehorn this info in everywhere, along with any other extended universe garbage the can fit. Have you ever noticed how the level description for Two Betrayals says, “Stage a one-cyborg assault on the control room?” Even as a kid I knew that was wrong. Master Chief isn’t a cyborg! He’s a SPARTAN! Haven’t the people writing these things even read the books??
Now that I’m older, I understand that they wrote this that way because it doesn’t matter. The Master Chief is the least important thing about Halo—one of the reasons why Bungie ditched him after 3 came out. Playing a Spartan is important, but the Chief himself is one of many possible avatars. Clarity is more important than pointless story details. The Master Chief is a tough guy wearing power armor, move on. We're never even told his real name in the first three games. We do not need to focus on his backstory.
2-4. Spartan
The Master Chief doesn’t say dumb shit all the time. He only speaks in cutscenes, and even then, rarely. The word “laconic” is very important here. Its etymology is a callback to the Spartans of Ancient Greece. You know, the real ones, from that movie 300.
The word comes from the place that Spartans came from—no, not the city of Sparta, but from the region of Laconia. Even though Spartans had a weird religious devotion to the idea of killing shit and being tough and waging war, they were also renowned for their discipline and sense of humor. They believed in only using words when absolutely necessary, so much so that they drilled the notion into their children's heads from childbirth.
Here’s a famous example of “laconic wit:”
When Alexander the Great’s dad was threatening Spartan sovereignty, he sent Sparta this message:
“You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”
The Spartans received this letter. They replied with only a single word:
“If.”
If you just got chills from how badass that is, good. That's the point. This manner of talking is more important to the Spartan identity than even their extreme fixation on war. It's how a Spartan character should act in a story.
This thematic point is vital. Like a real Spartan, the Master Chief’s entire existence is war. He knows nothing else. He’s a legendary soldier. They literally call him a SPARTAN. His laconic wit is what ties the reference together. It is what makes the Master Chief really, and not just superficially, Spartan.
If you’re still too dumb to understand what I mean, here’s an example from one of the good Halo games:
CORTANA: Just one question. What if you miss?
MASTER CHIEF: I won’t.
And because I love Halo so much here’s another:
RON PERLMAN: Master Chief, you mind telling me what you’re doing on that ship?
MASTER CHIEF: Sir. Finishing this fight.
Laconic wit is funny. It speaks little while saying much. It’s pithy. It doesn’t always have to be some one-word response to a query, but it should always be badass. Your mind should be blown by how awesome it is. But even more importantly, a laconic character should only speak when words are necessary. So when the Chief has an idea at the end of the original Halo campaign, all he has to do is put it out there:
MASTER CHIEF: How much firepower would you need to crack one of the engine's shields?
CORTANA: Not much. A well-placed grenade, perhaps, but why—
MASTER CHIEF:
Using words to express ideas is fine, when the ideas are complicated--like in the Control Room during Two Betrayals. But when a grenade in the hand says just as much, opt for that instead. No need to get verbose. It’s the fundamental idea that actions speak louder than words—and it’s what makes Master Chief a Spartan. Keep this in mind as we move forward.
5. The Master Chief has a sense of humor
Much like Ellie in the transition from The Last of Us to The Last of Us: Part II, the writers who took over for Joe Staten & Co. at 343I have completely neglected a vital component in making Chief a charismatic character:
HE HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR.
Little touches everywhere remind you that the Master Chief is actually human after all. He hits Cortana (AKA his own helmet) playfully when she teleports him to Truth and Reconciliation upside down. He intentionally crashes his banshee on approach to the Pillar of Autumn. He whispers "boo" to a grunt. When Cortana asks, "Could we possibly make any more noise?" he pulls out a rocket launcher. He's FUNNY.
Being FUNNY is what makes a character FUN to be around. Even if it's not laugh-out-loud hilarious, an element of playfulness helps keep things light and makes the world of the story more compelling for the player.
Chief does nothing fun or funny at any point in Halo 4.
6. A Monument to All Your Sins
The Master Chief is a killing machine who does whatever anyone tells him to. He doesn’t think critically about anything. He’s an enormous idiot. He has absolutely no agency whatsoever.
We can presume this is because of the character’s past, but we all know the real reason is simply because he’s the player’s avatar. Halo is an FPS, and so we follow the arbitrary parameters set by the level designers. Someone tells us to go do something, we go do it. This blends mechanics together with the narrative. It’s great game design!
This is an important point to stress while explaining why Halo 4 is so fucking awful and I don’t want to rush past it. So let’s examine Bungie’s good Halo games through this lens:
Halo: Combat Evolved
Captain Keyes sends Master Chief along with Cortana down to the Halo ring so he can prevent her from falling into Covenant hands. The Master Chief is a soldier so he follows these orders.
Then, once on the Halo ring, he loses contact with Keyes for a little bit. During this period he begins to do whatever Cortana—the sexy sci-fi equivalent of Siri—tells him to do. In subsequent missions he continues to do whatever Captain Keyes tells him to do.
When he loses contact with both Keyes and Cortana, Chief makes friends with a floating lightbulb. Rather than question this lightbulb’s motivations, or why it can speak English, the Master Chief opts to instead immediately start doing whatever the lightbulb tells him to do. It’s only through Cortana’s sage intervention that the Master Chief doesn’t destroy the entire galaxy because he was too stupid to think critically for just one second.
Now we have Cortana back, so what does Chief do? Whatever Cortana tells him to. Then the game ends.
Halo 2
Master Chief does whatever his commanding officers tell him to do throughout the entire game. When he loses contact with his commanding officer, he decides to start listening to the orders of a giant evil disgusting tentacle monster that has a face like a flower’s vagina.
Once again, he fails to even momentarily question whether or not the Gravemind can be believed—he just listens to it. And when Cortana tells Chief she needs to stay behind, he lets her stay behind. Everything Chief does is someone else’s idea.
Halo 3
Halo 3 does a lot of dumb stuff with its story and, overall, is not the primary topic of this analysis. However, even it gets this right.
Chief trusts Cortana and wants to rescue her—partially because he promised he would. Ron Perlman tells him that’s stupid, which it is, and the Chief makes probably his first decision ever: he respectfully tells his CO that he disagrees. Nowhere in this exchange do you get the impression that not-rescuing Cortana will lead Chief to going rogue. After all, she’s a piece of software.
You get the impression from this scene that Chief really does respect his superiors, and, if following orders meant abandoning Cortana, he would have done it. I would like to remind you here that the entire point of leaving Cortana behind in the first place was so that SHE COULD BLOW HERSELF UP TO DESTROY HIGH CHARITY.
Note
Halo isn’t about player agency in the way that BioShock is. That’s because BioShock is less action shooter and more actual piece of art. As I’ve already established, Halo is not. Halo is dumb scifi action shlock. The Master Chief is our avatar as the player, and Halo is a linear action game. We don’t get to make decisions about the plot in linear action adventure games. As a consequence, the Chief doesn’t get to make any decisions either. This ties into a number of different elements, all of which combine to make Halo more interesting from a storytelling perspective than similarly dumb action games like Crisis and Call of Duty.
Now throw all of that shit out the window
So here comes Halo 4. We’re told over and over and over again that the Master Chief is a Spartan II supersoldier whose real name is actually John and he’s the most important person ever, of all time. Meanwhile, everything about his character from the last three numbered games is put into the dumpster.
Halo 4 is the first game in the series to feature a true “voiced” protagonist. By this I mean that the Master Chief now uses his sexy, sexy voice even when the player has control of his actions. FPS protagonists only speaking in cutscenes is one of the fundamental rules of game design. You’ll find it observed in most—not all, but most—successful shooters. Even in Wolfenstein: The New Order, a game with an extremely memorable protagonist filled with angst and personality, BJ never actually talks to other people in gameplay sections. He only ever monologues.
I’m just bringing this point up to show how no one writing Halo 4 knew what they were doing.
Anyway, the Chief of 4 never shuts the fuck up. He’s always talking, even when a normal person wouldn’t. He doesn’t say anything cool or badass or memorable or funny, probably because those things are hard to write, and instead talks and talks and talks and talks endlessly.
Fans for some reason tend to think that, because Master Chief won’t close his visor hole for three seconds, he's a better written character than he is in the earlier games. You will often encounter the sentiment that Halo 4 took Chief and Cortana’s relationship to the next level.
It didn’t. It just shoved a bunch of words into their mouths in an attempt to trick the player into thinking that there was a new level of depth. That’s not how it works. Halo 4’s characters, especially Master Chief, are hideously overwritten. There are no “nice dialogues” anywhere in the campaign, to quote a poster on the 343 forums. It's all terrible.
This is the time to bring up the game’s dialogue in general. It SUCKS. All of it is bad. The characters talk a lot, yes, but that doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is interesting. More than character or story or plot, Halo's biggest strength during the Staten years was its snappy, witty, and distinctive dialogue. Writing good dialogue is hard, but the original trilogy is filled to the brim with badass quotes and memorable one liners, especially from Master Chief. This is where his true laconic quality shines through.
HERE ARE SOME CHERRY-PICKED EXAMPLES:
“I need a weapon.”
“I am a monument to all your sins.”
“This one is machine and nerve, and has its mind concluded; this one is but flesh and faith, and is the more deluded.”
“Were it so easy.”
“Don’t make a girl a promise if you know you can’t keep it.”
“Dear humanity: we regret being alien bastards, we regret coming to Earth, and we most definitely regret the corps just blew up our raggedy-ass fleet!”
"Oh, I know what the ladies like."
“Then it is an even fight.”
“Sorry, were you trying to kill something?”
“If I were a megalomaniac, and I’m not, that’s where I’d be.”
“If they came to hear me beg, they will be disappointed.”
I bet you, the reader, can tell me who said which of these lines and where in which games these lines are said. All of Bungie’s games are filled to the brim with these memorable lines. Practically everything anyone says is quotable.
I won’t go so far as to say that there are no memorable exchanges in Halo 4; my only point is that, if there are, I can’t remember them.
Instead, we get lines like:
MASTER CHIEF: These Covenant seem more fanatical than the ones we fought before.
Uh, they do? They seem the same to me. How does someone “seem more fanatical” anyway? Is it because they blow themselves up? If so, they did that in the other games, too. Also, remember when the Prophets were going to destroy all life in the galaxy, including themselves, for some crazy religious reasons? That was pretty fanatical. If anything, these guys seem LESS fanatical. At worse they’re about the same.
But I guess we learn later that they are actually super fanatics or whatever. How did you know these were super zealots from some grunts, Master Chief? Did you read the script, too?
Here are some more of my favorite lines from Halo 4’s campaign:
CORTANA: They’re not gonna make this easy!
Uh, no, I guess they aren’t.
CORTANA: Not like I can get out and push (the ghost)!
Uh, no, I guess you can’t.
CHIEF: Asking’s not my strong suit.
This line is especially ironic. More on that later.
CORTANA: Whoa, cowboy!
Cortana apparently watched a lot of cowboy movies shortly after being cloned from Halsey's brain.
CORTANA: [of the Didact] Well he’s just a ray of sunshine, isn’t he?
...
But maybe good dialogue was just Bungie’s thing. And like the change in art style, we should have expected some degree of new artistic direction with 343’s new trilogy. Well, ok, but if that’s true, surely the Master Chief should retain his laconic character? He didn’t get a hit on the head while he was in hypersleep, right?
So why does he KEEP TALKING?
I did some math to help prove my point. Throughout the entirety of the original Halo trilogy, Master Chief speaks a grand total of 81 lines. Many of those are only one word long. Within the first two missions of Halo 4 he’s already up to fifty, and the vast majority are pointless questions posed to Cortana and Solid Snakeisms wherein he repeats the last word said by a character like my deaf grandma. By the end of Mission 6, the Chief had said a total of 121 lines, and I stopped counting.
Was this really a necessary change in his character?
Remember when Echo 419 is shot down at the end of The Maw? Cortana tells Chief where to go and then readjusts his destination marker. She does this on her own. At no point in this mission, as Foehammer crashed and screamed and died, did Master Chief have to say, “Well, Cortana—is there any other way off this ship?” He very easily could have, but the writers of that game opted for something less idiotic. In 4, I can guarantee you that is what they would have done.
I’m not saying that all FPS PCs need to be monastically silent. And, at least at Halo 4’s beginning, having a more talkative Chief does help. But people often say that Halo 4 expanded on the Chief’s character in compelling ways, and it simply doesn't. It shoves countless words down his throat and then turns him into an entirely different person in order to cultivate more melodrama. In fact 4 detracts from his character, because he's no longer, in any way, laconic. He talks like any other normal person. He's no longer a real Spartan.
All I need to know is does Chief need to be constantly asking Cortana pointless questions?
I think we both know the answers to that.
Something I hadn’t thought about until my latest playthrough of the first three games is how little chatter there really is. Music was always more foregrounded. Cortana will chime in when something important needs to be discussed, or if she has a funny line to say (“You always bring me to such nice places”), but mostly remains quiet.
Meanwhile, due to the tremendously convoluted plot and the desperate need to shoehorn in expanded universe information, the writers in 4 are reduced to constant question asking in order to deliver exposition.
In screenwriting this is called “ping-ponging”—setting something up with a character and then hitting it back with another, this time toward the audience.
It’s not a nice term.
Ping ponging is rightfully derided as bad exposition writing in film. A small amount of question asking is okay, but any more than that is lazy infodumping. It bypasses conflict in order to instill information. It’s bad dramatic writing. Good writers turn questions into positive statements and find ways to deliver exposition naturally, through gameplay or visuals or real dynamic conflict. When two characters keep asking questions at each other there's no conflict and there are no stakes. It's like reading a Wikipedia entry on the story. It isn't a story itself.
Most AAA games have bad character writing. Only a few really shine. Halo is one of them. I could cope with the poor dialogue in 4 were it any other game, but it's unignorable here. The characters feel so wrong. Cortana doesn’t feel like Cortana—the cadence of her voice, even though still well-acted by Jen Taylor, is off. Cortana was sarcastic and witty—“If I were a megalomaniac, and I’m not, that’s where I’d be”—and yet in Halo 4 she’s boring and whiney, and all of her attempts at wit are cringey and awful.
I guess that’s because of the rampancy or whatever though so I can’t say for sure. By the way, that brings me to the story, and…
The Worst Plot Point Ever
Rampancy is so dumb for a whole bunch of reasons.
#1. This is fucking stupid
The fact that AI only have 7-year life spans is so important to the Halo setting, which stars an AI, that it has never once been mentioned before in any of the games. Cortana tells Chief at the end of Halo 3 that it might be years before they’re picked up—wouldn’t that be a good time to mention that whole, “and if it does take years, I’ll go crazy for some reason and probably kill you?”
I’m not opposed to introducing new plot points to spice up the storyline, but rampancy comes out of nowhere. I can’t even remember reading about it in one of the shitty expanded universe books. And if AI have a 7 year lifespan, why don’t Forerunner AI? I guess they’re different? Or maybe they do, and that’s why Guilty Spark is such an asshole?
I’m so confused…
Rampancy reads like something that was included solely for the sake of more character drama. It doesn’t gel with anything established in the previous games. Good sequels don’t do that.
Moreover, it just doesn’t make any sense. You’re telling me that a military AI with complete control over battleships armed to the brim with nuclear weapons can randomly start to go crazy? It’s ok if you stay on top of turning them off in time—except apparently their aging can be accelerated, as hand-waived in Halo 4 supplements, which state that the reason Cortana goes rampant after only five years is because she downloaded a lot of data or something. Seems like a liability to me!
Besides, Cortana says she’s the “only AI she knows of” that was cloned from a human brain right at the start of the campaign, so how does she even know she will go rampant? Shouldn't she be different?
#2. This is even worse
Consider: we, as the player, lose Cortana at the end of Halo 2. We like Cortana. She’s fun and useful to have around. So we spend all of Halo 3 waiting to get her back. We do this at the end of Halo 3 and have one mission with her, just like old times. Then, at the start of Halo 4, they immediately start to take her away from us again.
WHAT? WE JUST GOT HER BACK!
It’s clear that “Cortana is dying! Try and save her!” is the only way the writers could think to cause some conflict and drama. 3's writers suffered from this same problem. Anyone who’s paid attention to the writing they consume will know that dumb, boring, idiotic character drama is one of the easiest, and laziest, ways to get audiences engaged—just look at smash hit cable television series A Game of Thrones or brilliantly written teen pregnancy drama The Last of Us: Part II for examples on that front.
If Cortana’s death was an important plot point in the series, it would have happened at the end of Halo 3. It didn’t. They missed their chance. Come up with something new.
#3. Cortana is a robot
We all love Cortana.
She’s a fucking robot.
All this talk about getting back to Earth to reclone Halsey’s brain or whatever and no one once points out that, hey…we can just make another one of you!
Cortana is valuable, but she’s also expendable. That’s why she’s willing to blow herself up at the end of Halo 2. She doesn’t fucking cry over it. It’s her job. She is military equipment. Military equipment, not to mention military personnel, are explicitly expendable. It's why they exist.
Now, talking about Cortana as a character gets us into some tricky situations: she acts human, is she actually human? She has personality, memory—but she was designed to be a piece of software for use in a war. She seems to like her job, which is good, because she’s basically a slave.
I know that this shit is all explained in the books. I don’t give a fuck. The games need to stand alone, and there are a lot of inconsistencies between Halo: CE, Reach, The Fall of Reach, and all of that other shit I never bothered to read.
No one ever treats Cortana as anything other than a fancy piece of sassy software in the games. They boss her around and she happily complies. The fact that she acts like a human is just something to make her easier to interact with for human crew.
Also, it’s more interesting for the game.
The only time anyone gives a fuck about Cortana is in Halo 3 ending, and Halo 3’s ending is stupid and incoherent and makes no sense. We should strive to be better than Halo 3’s ending.
Then, suddenly, in 4, she’s crying over the fact she’s going to die soon. If I were creating a military AI with power over weapons systems, I definitely wouldn’t make it fear decommissioning. This seems like an invitation for trouble once year eight comes around.
And why seven years? Why isn’t there some sort of failsafe in their holocards? Why does every setting detail in Halo 4 seem to be contrived without any thought for the implications pertaining to the original games?
#4. Themes are for high schoolers
AI in Halo aren’t bad. Yes, Guilty Spark was bad, but he was just doing his job. It’s one of the few sci-fi series to feature AI extensively without relying on some trite plot about how they always go rogue. This is because Halo isn’t about AI. It features them for gameplay reasons. I always liked this—it made Halo unique, and it presented a future that was a little bit more original.
But now AI are bad. Now Halo is just like every other sci-fi setting. Bon voyage to that thematic poinSt!
I’m not saying this is bad in 4 just because it’s different; what I am saying is that it’s bad because it’s cliché, overdone, boring, uninteresting, and lame, and sucks. And also different.
As an aside, Reach makes the distinction between VI and AI. I recall it being suggested in the books that true AIs, like Cortana, who are basically just people living inside of a computer, are very rare and maybe illegal, which dialogue from 4 confirms. However, at the start of Halo: CE we have explained to us how capture of a shipboard AI is unacceptable according to the Cole Protocol. This would imply that every ship has an AI—unless Captain Keyes meant to say VI, which he didn’t. And Cortana runs the MAC guns at Cairo station, which suggests that an AI is always in command of the Orbital Defense Grid around Earth. And because Cortana is generally traipsing around inside of Chief’s head and not on Earth, there must surely be some other AI running the show.
So what gives? Is the franchise really this incosistent?
Yes. The answer is yes. We never get the answers we need in the games to make sense of all of this. Bungie just did whatever seemed like fun. 343 takes the opposite approach. They are slaves to the…
EXPANDED UNIVERSE
We learn a lot of cool stuff from the books in Halo 4. At least, I presume it’s all from the books. The game never bothers to explain any of it to us.
As a nerd, you may have known pre-2012 that the elites are actually a race called the Sangheili, and that grunts are actually called Ungorcock, and that brutes are Japanese. Notice how none of these dumbass sounding made up names ever featured anywhere in the first three Halo games. This is because they sound ridiculous and are hard to remember and keep straight, and if you go around saying, “Yo, I need some help over here, I got a Sangheili Ultra over here!” in Firefight mode, you’ll sound like someone who needs to be institutionalized. And you'll feel like a dirty nerd.
But in Halo 4, everyone starts using these fake names! It’s horribly jarring and utterly pointless and it forces you to realize that Bungie, very wisely, never indulged in Expanded Universe Pornography, as I like to call it. Reach makes it very clear that books are #2, games are #1—even if The Fall of Reach has a better story than Halo: Reach, kind of. Leaving the expanded universe out of the games makes them more accessible to a general audience and helps keep things internally coherent, not that Bungie was ever very good about that anyway. But above all, so much more importantly than anything else, it means the writers can’t get lazy and start including setting information with no exposition.
In Halo 4, there’s no exposition...until there’s too much. We’ve all heard about Metal Gear Syndrome, where hours of boring and poorly written exposition gets shoved down the player’s throat. It’s ironic that Halo 4 doesn’t do this since the characters are so awful and overwritten and the general style of the dialogue is absurdly expository, but it doesn’t. The problem is that nothing makes sense in this game unless you’ve read the Forerunner novels (on sale now at www.amazon.com!). This is why Halo 4 fails even to stand alone as a story.
THE DIDACT
But hold on. One of the reasons why I hate this game so much ties into the most confusing storytelling decision of all time.
THE FORERUNNERS
It is firmly established in the original trilogy that the Forerunners ARE HUMANS. This was clearly always the intention of the writers. Let me offer some evidence:
HALO
Guilty Spark says “our lost time” when referring to human history. He calls Master Chief a “reclaimer”—as in, someone who has come back to take what’s rightfully his. He gets confused when Master Chief doesn’t know about Forerunner stuff.
HALO 2
Covenant need humanity to activate Forerunner stuff. The Arc is on Earth.
HALO 3
I guess the Arc wasn’t on Earth after all. But Guilty Spark tells Master Chief to his face, “you are Forerunner.”
There is no ambiguity here.
Humanity = Forerunner.
...except not.
At some point around Halo 3’s release, it was decided that Forerunners were actually some other race or something, even though humanity was around at the time of the first Halo rings firing. None of this is ever explained in the games, although apparently there’s a series of books which make it all clear.
I don’t. Care. About. The books.
The choice to make Forerunners into their own species is bafflingly terrible. It’s a huge retcon which contradicts everything established in the first three games and it misses the point of the series entirely:
FORERUNNERS DO NOT MATTER
They aren’t what’s interesting about Halo.
Of course, Microsoft knew that a book answering questions about them would interest fans (and make ) and so, of course, a series on this topic was released. This is commercial motivation for storytelling and it blows. It never mattered in Halo and Halo 2 who the Forerunners were. What mattered was that they were gone and that humanity seemed to have some sort of special link with them.
And, of course, 343 opted to continue down this path.
It’s very hard for me to fairly analyze the ensuing plot points relating the Forerunners in Halo 4. I think the entire idea is so stupid and in such direct contradiction with the first two games that I cannot give it a fair shake. I look at it once and think, wow, this is fucking awful. I don’t understand how anyone else can look at it and not think the same.
So bear in mind as we continue that the plot points about Forerunners and humanity aren’t necessarily bad. I’ll explain why the execution sucks, but realize that I’m coming from a place where the very idea of this direction for Halo’s plot is laughable, idiotic, stupid, pointless, dumb, and frustrating.
NOW: THE DIDACT (for real)
Forward Unto Dawn gets dragged into the gravity well of a giant Forerunner planet. Coincidentally, this happens at the same time that a Covenant fleet and a bunch of Spartans have also shown up near this Forerunner planet. Ok.
Then, for no reason, THE DIDACT wakes up.
This is where the entire lore of Halo is officially ruined. It had already been molested in the books, but now its sweet virginal innocent has been officially stolen away forever.
Within this scene, we learn that Forerunners are actually:
Ugly big people with fangs?
Not human
Know how to speak English
Want to destroy humanity for no reason
Have psychic powers?
Call themselves Forerunner
Cortana then immediately begins calling this big ugly fang man THE DIDACT. To quote her directly: “That…Didact!”
You may be asking yourself around this point: what the fuck is a Didact? Why are you calling him that, Cortana? Who is he? Why is he here? What does he want?
I suspect that whatever a Didact is is something explained in the Forerunner novels. I haven’t read that shit so I wouldn’t know. Some of my above points are addressed later in a boring exposition dump, but it never really is addressed who or what THE DIDACT is. Why does he have telekinetic powers? That isn’t something in any of the other Halo games. Why does he call himself Forerunner? Shouldn’t he have a different name for his own species? Like, you know, a name? Did they really call themselves Forerunner back when this guy went into hypersleep or whatever? Why did they do that?
But on a storytelling level, the reason why this scene is so horrible is that Cortana seems to magically know what a Didact is, without any explanation, despite the fact she knows nothing more than we do. It makes no sense. In a well-written piece of fiction, we would learn this through exposition carefully woven into the narrative at large, deftly delivered to the audience in scenes full of related conflict and drama.
We don’t.
We’re expected to know what this guy is, who he is, what he wants, and all because we’ve read the expanded universe products. Obviously Cortana and the Master Chief have—otherwise, they’d be just as confused as me!
To be entirely honest, this entire section of the game is so poorly written that it’s barely worth discussing. Everything is wrong. But I’m going to try, because it offends me that there are people online who think it's good.
Motivation
Later on in the game we learn a bunch of horribly stupid things, including the Didact’s motivation. He wants to destroy humanity because of something to do with the Flood, I guess. He does have some motivation, but it’s confusing and hard to understand. The best villains are the ones who make the most sense. You know, guys who might be evil in their methodology, but who are fundamentally right about some kind of issue. The Didact just wants to kill everyone and turn them into digital robot people. He doesn’t seem to care that it’s been 65,000 years since he last interacted with humanity, he just wants to blow up the Earth because of something that happened a long time ago which we don’t get to see or really know about. Great! How exciting!
Truth might have been a dick, but at least we understood what he was doing. This is just a huge indecipherable mess. Remember how the stories of these games are supposed to provide a loose justification for the gameplay? I do. I miss the early 2000s philosophy of narrative design.
After a convenient exposition lady—whose appearance is merciful, if terribly written—we then learn what is the final nail in the Halo narrative coffin. This is the equivalent of midichlorians. Maybe even worse.
Master Chief is the Supermassive Black Hole Around Which the Entire Galaxy Revolves—and No, I’m Not Exaggerating, That’s Actually a Plot Point in Halo 4
One of my favorite things about the Halo games on the OG XBOX is that they’re so entirely not about the Master Chief. He’s our PoV character, yes, but it always feels like so much more is going on in the world. In the first game, Captain Keyes and Sgt. Johnson go out on their own adventures without you. They get stuff done. Chief is like their attack dog they send out for the most important missions, but he’s barely a character in the story. Even his robot friend is more important than him.
If I were writing a TV series about Halo: CE, Chief would be a side character. Keyes would be the protagonist. We wouldn’t swap to Chief’s POV until after everyone else was dead, a little bit like the original Alien. Halo 2’s structure is more complicated, but it follows the same principle. Master Chief is an important cog in a huge machine—he is not the center of the universe. How can he be? He’s a supersoldier. His sexuality is magnum pistol. He’s barely human at all.
I find Halo 4 so offensive because of how it violates the above principle. Ok, I’ll just say it now:
We meet the Librarian, who is someone. She tells us about how all of human history, stretching back tens of thousands of years, has been orchestrated by her in order to create the Master Chief just so he can fight the Didact and…save humanity.
Wait, wasn’t the Didact asleep until Master Chief showed up? That doesn’t make much sense!
Well, anyway, she planted “seeds’ or something which would eventually lead to the Chief, thus making him the literal center of human existence.
This is the worst thing ever written by any human who has ever lived. It’s actually worse than Twilight. Retroactively, Halo 4’s writers have made their piece of shit story more important than all of the other games. That’s awesome. She then explains that she has to do…something…to the Master Chief, saying, and I quote literally,
“The genesong I planted within you contains many important gifts.”
What the fuck is a genesong? How did she do this? Why is no one asking questions about the implications of some random Forerunner chick possessing such immense power over human history? Why Master Chief? This is like something out of Star Wars—it doesn’t mesh thematically with Halo at all. THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION, REMEMBER? REMEMBER SCIENCE?
After this point, Halo can no longer call itself sci-fi. It’s not like the original Halo games are super hard sci-fi, but they at least do make some attempt. Within a single game we’ve introduced psychic powers, destiny-weaving supermagic, flying saucers, and physically manifested “data.” This is pure fantasy.
Allegedly, in the Forerunner books, it’s explained that the Librarian's monologue isn’t meant to refer directly to the Master Chief, but to humanity—and the Spartan program in particular—as a whole. That is literally not what she says. That isn’t in this game. If that IS the intention then it’s still retarded, but this example would serve instead as another demonstration of my previous point: THIS GAME MAKES NO SENSE UNLESS YOU’VE READ THE BOOKS.
Now, via the "genesong," we have been magically imprinted with a convenient way to deal with the Didact, thus eliminating all tension in the narrative and giving Chief the tool he needs to overcome the antagonist without him actually having done anything to earn it.
If you look up the word “hand waive” in the dictionary, this is the example.
Also, if you would like to use the excuse that Halo 4 is trying to tell a personal story of character conflict, now is your last chance. Please. Try to explain to me how the threat of total annihilation of the human race, a threat which is introduced and then executed upon within like three hours of gameplay, is somehow more personal than the other games. I’ll wait.
In the meantime, let me ask you another question...
Is the Master Chief really that important anyway?
Why did Bungie stop making games with Master Chief in them after Halo 3? The answer is that Master Chief isn’t very important to Halo. He’s the protagonist, but he’s just some soldier on the macro level. There are other soldiers who were also important. Some were ODSTs, some were Spartan IIIs during the fall of Reach. Reach feels just as much like Halo to me as any of the other Halo games, and much more so than Halo 4. This is because Bungie understood their own franchise in a way that 343 clearly does not.
The Master Chief isn’t the center of the universe in the OT because he doesn’t need to be. That isn’t what Halo is. Halo is about war and sacrifice and death and genocide and tragedy and being misled by religious authority. It is a series about the macro, which is what justifies its gameplay being so combat focused. That doesn’t mean we can’t do a character study within the Halo setting, but rather that, if we do, we need to be aware of what the franchise is at its core. Everything about the Didact and the Forerunners demonstrates that 343 simply didn’t get it. They missed the point. The fact that the game itself is horribly written, although the primary topic of this ‘essay,’ is honestly beside the point.
Back to the ‘plot’
Some stuff happens and we meet Captain Del Rio, which leads to the clearest example that 343 has no idea who Master Chief is or how to write him. We’re introduced to Del Rio acting like a retard. Nothing he says makes any sense. He doubts Master Chief’s judgement for no reason at all and dismisses his concerns about the random genocidal maniac monsterman who has just woken up.
Note
Doesn’t Master Chief have a helmet camera? You know, like the ones the marines in the first game all have? Remember that? Can’t we just look at Chief’s helmet camera to see if he’s telling the truth? Does anyone remember the other games except for me???
Back to the story
The central issue to this scene is that the threat is so improbable and absrud that Del Rio seems to be actually in the right. Like, what did you just try to tell me, Master Chief? There’s no possible way that’s true, right?
…but it is.
The writers establish Del Rio as an incompetent captain in the laziest and most obvious way possible. He tells Chief that “sending a recon team would be a waste of time,” which is something a Captain of the UNSC (“captain” in Halo, and the Navy, is a rank equivalent to a GENERAL, by the way) would never say. Del Rio should be smart, but we’re going to make him dumb just so Chief’s later betrayal seems justified. This is the kind of thing I expect when reading a story by a teenager. It’s obvious, it’s unrealistic, it isn’t truthful, and it’s unbelievable.
This leads us to the point in the story where Master Chief, a killing machine with no agency, decides to commit mutiny.
I’ve spoken so much about why this is stupid that I don’t feel the need to repeat myself. If this were the same character from the last three games, he would simply do what he was told. Maybe he wouldn’t like it, maybe he'd bitch about it to Lasky, but he’d still do it.
So then Cortana does a crazy thing and Del Rio quite sensibly decides to have her decommissioned. Chief finds this unacceptable. Never mind the fact that a rampant Cortana could go Hal 9000 on Infinity and ruin everyone’s day—which she does in Halo 5—or that she’s just a computer program, or any of the other countless reasons why this scene makes no sense. This is where Chief draws the line. “I know I did whatever that flower vagina monster told me to do, but sir, this is the cross I’ll die upon!”
Note
I guess it’s good they didn’t decommission Cortana after all, since she was the only character who possessed the magical powers that would conveniently defeat the Didact in a way that makes no sense. Thank God for that. Can you imagine how awkward it would have been otherwise?
Chief and Cortana: A Love Story
Something I’ve wondered about ever since I first played Halo 4 is how long Chief and Cortana have actually known each other. My answer is: a little more than half of Halo: CE, most of Halo 2, almost none of Halo 3, and most of Halo 4. This translates to approximately no time at all in the grand scheme of the war, which has been going on for like 30 years BTW.
Reach tells us that these two characters had no relationship prior to landing on Halo—which is actually a retcon of dialogue from the first Halo game, but ok—but consider: Halo: CE lasts for, what, a few days? Halo 2 is a few weeks, but Cortana spends most of that time outside of Chief’s armor. Halo 3 barely counts. These characters haven’t really known each other for that long. Yeah, they’ve been through shit together. They’ve certainly bonded. But Chief has been at war for his entire life. You’d think a few weeks toward the end of a war would be of only moderate importance to him.
NOPE. HE LOVES CORTANA.
So Cortana sacrifices herself somehow to stop the Didact as he's about to blow up Earth in a way that makes no sense, and the rest of the game is spent moping over how tragic that is. There's some really weird sex stuff between Cortana and Chief, and then the credits roll.
The writers attach a huge amount of tragedy and melodrama to this sequence, but it makes no sense in a military context. Master Chief lost his best friend--Sgt. Johnson--at the end of 3, and he was a real person who could not be replaced. Do you know how much time he spent crying over Johnson's body?
Zero. Zero time. He seems confused for a few seconds and then he moves on. Because he is a soldier, and soldiers are prepared to accept sacrifices. Only civilians could be stupid enough to write a Spartan in this way. Death is part of the job.
Here’s the angle to explore Chief and Cortana’s relationship, without the need for Freudan symbology: both characters were created in a time of war for the purpose of mass slaughter. Neither are truly human. This is what they have in common. They can relate to each other on a level which they can’t relate to anyone else.
While doing this, preserve who the characters actually are. Simultaneously expand upon them.
A lot of people praise 4’s ending scene in which Chief and Lanky look somberly out at the Earth, lamenting the death of Siri. I can only presume they do this because they were dropped on their heads as children. What if, instead of being sad, the Chief didn’t even care? That he’d been through this before? That losing someone close to him, closer than anyone else, didn’t even matter anymore? Now that would be sad. Not for him, of course, but for us. That would really spell out his tragedy. It would really make us think: was it worth it?
Or, to take another angle: what if Chief and Cortana now had to live in a peaceful galaxy? What if they no longer had any purpose due to the war's end? Now that would be a compelling character narrative for a story about a cyborg attack dog and his iPhone.
But I guess that’s too subtle for mass media commercial diarrhea.
The Covenant
The Human-Covenant War ended in Halo 3 with the death of Truth. It was really cathartic to see the elites standing side-by-side with Lord Hood. It felt like we had accomplished something in the game.
But in Halo 4, we’re back to fighting Covenant, business as usual. I find this impossibly frustrating.
Yes, I know they’re actually a splinter group or something. No, I don’t care. At no point is this fact actually told to us in Halo 4.
The fact of the matter is that the gameplay of fighting Covenant from the original series has been preserved in its entirety. There’s nothing new on that front. This means that even though they have a new art design, the fact that these aren’t technically Covenant isn’t reflected at all in game mechanics.
So remember the catharsis you felt at the end of Halo 3? DO YOU REMEMBER THAT? DO YOU?
FUCK YOU.
What I Would Have Done
Halo 4 is beyond fixing in its current state, but it could have been good. 343’s writers had a lot to live up to, and even talented people like Joe Staten probably would have had trouble coming up with a satisfying follow-up to Halo 3. Here are some of my own ideas as to what should have been done instead of the shitshow we were given.
Rampancy Be-Gone
Just ditch it. No more explanation needed.
Everybody’s Dead, Dave
Five years in the future? How about five MILLION years instead? Hear me out:
This was 343’s opportunity to keep Halo’s gameplay loop while ditching everything else. No more UNSC, no more covenant. Cortana and Chief have been drifting through space for millions of years, and when they finally wake up, everything has changed. We still have power armor and energy shields, but every enemy is totally redesigned. The plot is something new.
It sucks for fans of the series that 343 wanted to depart so much from Bungie’s style, both aesthetically and narratively. I’m not opposed to this in principle, but it has to be done with tact. If you want to redesign the Chief’s iconic Mk. 6 armor, at least provide some sort of justification for it in the fiction. If you want to fundamentally change the characters, maybe just make new characters. Halo 4 isn’t Halo 1: 2, it’s Halo 4. It has to actually follow up on Halo 3.
Nothing
But here’s the best idea of all: don’t make a Halo 4. Continue making prequels. Make a new trilogy starring Master Chief set during the early years of the war. Literally anything but dragging out the main conflict of the series. We’ve already saved the galaxy three times. DO SOMETHING NEW.
Oh, here's an obvious angle...
Actually Explore the Forerunners
The compulsion to include Forerunner saga trash in 4 is confounding, because 343 had an opportunity to do this without fucking up Master Chief and Cortana in the process. Although I still don't think they should have gone this direction, if they really wanted to explore the firing of the original Halo rings, why not set the games DURING the first outbreak of the Flood?
Halo is a game about playing a supersoldier, after all. Chief's technology is, in a way, Forerunner to begin with. So why not play as an ancient Forerunner supersoldier, maybe even with his own AI, battling the Flood, all leading up to the end of the Forerunner race? Tell a story about the destruction of the world rather than its saving? That would have been way more interesting!
I realize there were commercial motivations for returning to the Master Chief, but there was a good opportunity here to do something new with Halo, and it was totally passed up for something terrible instead. That's why 4 is so tragic. 5, meanwhile, is just terrible all around, with very little wasted potential.
And So
I've finally cleared the air. There's more, too, like how 4 uses naughty words when it shouldn't and how that deeply offends my sensibilities, but this essay is long enough. This should finally put 4 to rest. I'll write a review for Infinite when it comes out, and perhaps a retrospective on the Halo games that I actually like, but this is mostly it for the series' story. 5's isn't worth analyzing.