I first played Halo: Combat Evolved at a friend's house in the spring of 2004 (when I was in middle school) and was intrigued by it. That Christmas (a month after Halo 2 was released), I got my very own Xbox with copies of both games. After playing through the Campaigns, I absolutely fell in love with the series. I read the books (The Fall of Reach, The Flood, and First Strike being the only ones at the time) and listened to the soundtracks constantly. H1 and H2 became my favorite video games up to that point in my life (honorable mention to Resident Evil 4, which released the next month). I made an Xbox Live account in 2005 and used it almost exclusively to play Halo 2 (and Gears of War after it came out in 2006) for the entire period leading up to the next installment. I was obsessed.
Halo 3. Oh man, where do I begin. I was in high school by this point and was hyped out of my mind for the conclusion of the trilogy. I remember eagerly watching Microsoft's 2006 E3 press conference live so I could finally get a glimpse of the announcement trailer as soon as it was revealed. "This is the way the world ends." Cue Marty's incredible score. Hype levels through the roof. I scoured the pages of gaming magazines and the corners of the Internet, searching for any tidbit of news I could find. I tuned into MNF later that year to catch the starry night trailer. "Negative, sir, I think we lost him." "Not yet." Hype levels through the stratosphere. And that's not even accounting for those Believe ads. "A hero need not speak. When he is gone, the world will speak for him." Was Master Chief going to die? I speculated endlessly with other hardcore fans on the IGN message boards. I had never been this excited for a game, and never would be again. Even after becoming quite the Metal Gear fan, my hype for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots did not even come close to the feverish anticipation with which I counted down the days to H3's launch.
September 25, 2007. I can say without hesitation that this was the greatest day of my life up to that point. I was in high school and old enough to attend the midnight launch this time around. I snagged my copy, got home as fast as I could, popped it into my Xbox 360, and fired up the Campaign. "You had something they didn't. Luck." It was finally happening. And to my pure, unbridled delight, the game lived up to every bit of the hype. I was overjoyed to blow up a Scarab during The Storm, only to later hear, "Two Scarabs! I repeat: two Scarabs!" I actually experienced a glitch at that part and had to restart the mission, but I didn't even care because The Covenant is still the greatest mission in Halo history. I knew the Prophet of Truth was behind those doors, but when the Flood joined forces with the Master Chief and the Arbiter, the stakes felt truly epic. Everyone was united to stop this ultimate evil. Of course the Flood betrayed me 15 minutes later, but that was even better because it was an excuse for that cutscene with our two heroes standing back to back and looking like ultimate badasses.
After a showdown with 343 Guilty Spark and the death of my beloved Sergeant Johnson, I was treated to a breathtaking, heartpounding throwback to the end of H1 as the ultimate end to the trilogy. And then, "I'll miss you." "Wake me...when you need me." I witnessed a fitting conclusion to these two characters I had known and loved for years with Marty's emotional score playing over the credits as the rays of the sunrise began shining through my window (me having stayed up all night playing through the Campaign). I was in tears at how beautifully this moment, the end of the Halo trilogy I adored so strongly, had come together.
And then I moved on to the multiplayer. What, you though I was going to sleep? Quite the contrary, I stayed home from school and played the multiplayer nonstop until 10:00 PM that night (for a total of 22 hours of Halo 3 on launch day). And my god, did it live up to the hype. While I won't claim that it was perfect (H1, H2, and H3 all have their pros and cons with regard to multiplayer), the overall experience was refined to near flawlessness. Whether I wanted to test my merit in ranked matches (I was a Brigadier but never could make it to General) or just kick back in relax in social, there was a gametype for everyone. And it was all a blast, from the classic Slayer to the strategic Capture the Flag and Assault to the wacky, unbridled fun of Grifball and Rocket Race (even if those Lone Wolves Achievements were total BS). Bungie supported the game with interesting updates like double EXP weekends, the players with Forge skills kept things interesting by constantly producing new content, and the community was nothing short of spectacular. Seriously, this was the prime years of Xbox Live when you would enter a match with randoms and everyone would actually communicate with one another. The theater feature was a blast to play around with and years ahead of its time. Even the Campaign had a brand new scoring system. The game was truly complete like nothing else I'd ever seen (or have since).
If it's not already obvious, I loved H3. I loved the entire original trilogy. H3 consumed the majority of my gaming for the next three years. Halo Wars didn't really pique my interest, as I had never liked RTS games. Halo 3: ODST was fun for what it was, and I had a great time getting the Endure Achievement in Firefight, but it felt more like a spin-off than a proper Halo game.
Enter Halo: Reach. I was in college by this point, so while I had other things on my mind compared to the months leading up to H3's launch, I was still eagerly awaiting the game. I sat down and played through the Campaign in one sitting, as was tradition, and felt...underwhelmed. It wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't on the level of the original trilogy. The characters were underdeveloped, the art style was bland, and the storyline broke the canon established in the novel. I did enjoy how the end tied directly into H1. It was a flawed game that arguably didn't even need to be made, but it felt like a fitting end for Bungie.
Or at least the Campaign did. After I finished the Campaign, I fired up the multiplayer and was immediately greeted with the worst Halo FPS experience up to that point. Sprint? Armor abilities? Bloom? What was this nonsense? I played a handful of matches and then turned off my console out of disappointment. I still played the game enough to get all the Achievements (as I had done with H3 and ODST), but didn't play it nearly as much as H2 or H3. As an overall package Reach was a tremendous letdown, particularly the multiplayer, and it marked the beginning of the end for the franchise.
I remained confident that a true Halo 4 would eventually be made (people at the time liked to argue that it never would be because H3's ending implied that the Master Chief was the protagonist from Marathon), and eventually I was proven right. Once the game was announced, I tried to remain optimistic, but the writing was on the wall. 343 Industries was an inexperienced studio and was developing a product that did not look or sound faithful to Bungie's games. I still went to the midnight launch and was looking forward to trying out the game, but in my heart I knew it would never be the same as H2 and H3. And sure enough, I was treated to a worse Campaign than Reach, complete with a nonsensical story that you need to have a PhD in Halo lore to understand, not to mention the death of Cortana. And dear god, the multiplayer. Ordnances? Loadouts? And more sprint? The game felt so deflated. I forced myself to play it, but I was in pharmacy school at this point and too busy studying to waste much of my time with a game that didn't live up to the hype.
And then we have Halo 5: Guardians. I was still excited enough about the game to go to the midnight launch yet again (thanks in part to the marketing), and even though I was still busy with pharmacy school, I did my tradition of playing through the Campaign and then heading straight to the multiplayer without sleeping. And let's just say this was the nail in the coffin for me. Another completely unmemorable Campaign in which we only get to play as the Master Chief for like 25% of the missions (the Arbiter in H2 gets a pass because he was actually a compelling character), the utter wasting of Blue Team after they finally get their appearance in the games, and an abomination of a storyline that features Cortana as a villain. It made Reach look good. And multiplayer with even more extra, unnecessary features like juking, climbing up ledges, and slamming into the ground. I gave it a couple more chances later in launch week, but for the first time ever, I sat down a Halo game less than a month after launch and never picked it up again. The series was dead to me.
I never even bothered buying Halo Wars 2, and Halo Infinite already looks like a continuation of 343i's trademark mediocrity (I'm sick of the soft reboot trend that is so prevalent in modern entertainment). I'm actually in medical school now (I worked as a pharmacist for a couple of years and didn't like it, so I decided I wanted to go back to school to be a physician), so my time is very limited, and while I may pick up Halo Infinite from Redbox if I ever have a free weekend, I won't be there on launch night like I have been since the mid 2000s. Reach was strike one, H4 was strike two, and H5 was strike three. I'm not a fan of modern Halo.
So you're probably wondering why I made this post. I was actually inspired to make it when I discovered, purely by chance, that they are making a Halo TV show. And I suddenly realized that I didn't care at all, even less than I do about Infinite, to such an extent that I legitimately have no plans to watch it. This is coming from someone who religiously followed every detail of Peter Jackson's ill-fated Halo movie and would've been thrilled at the prospect of a Halo TV show circa 2004-2010. They say that the opposite of love is not hate; it's apathy. And that's where I am with the Halo series at this point.
And then I wondered is this shift in my perspective really due to Halo not being the same as it used to be? Surely that's a factor, but perhaps it's more due to me not being the same as I used to be. During the days of H2 and H3, I was a middle and high school student with little more on my mind than getting good grades and then consuming all my free time with video games. Now I'm in my late 20s with one doctorate and working toward a second, and I have so little free time that the only video game I've played in months is Pokemon Go because it's easy to open up while walking to and from the hospital.
The original Halo trilogy will probably always be my favorite video games of all time (the only thing that comes close is Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow/Gold/Silver, for which I also have a tremendous amount of nostalgia, albeit from the time in my life preceding my Halo fandom). They'll always have a special place in my heart. But at the end of the day, my time has passed. I'm in my late 20s with a professional career that eats up almost all my free time, so I've largely outgrown video games in general and, by extension, the Halo series. I am not the target audience for Halo Infinite.
The Reclaimer saga is for you guys. It's for all you guys 12-18 years old who view Reach, H4, and H5 the same way I view H1, H2, and H3. And even though I may not like them, I genuinely hope these new games give you guys the same sense of joy and yield the same happy memories that the old ones do for me. I'll always have my copies of the original trilogy to bust out when I need to scratch that itch (though nothing will ever recapture the feeling of logging into XBL when H2 and H3 were in their prime, unfortunately). The golden age has long since ended for me (though I hope my description of the H2/H3 era gave you a taste of what it was like), and even though it seemed foreign to me at first, I now recognize that you guys, modern Halo fans, are living through what you will one day view as the golden age. So I say enjoy it, and look forward to Infinite!
Submitted November 09, 2019 at 07:47AM by AmoxEleven https://ift.tt/2K4FHPU
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