“Your inability to safeguard Halo… was a colossal failure” – Prophet of Truth, Halo 2
At one point, I was proud to call myself a Halo fan, but now I’m ashamed.
My inspiration for this article was born from a 5-part series on YouTube, which I will provide links to at the end. Entitled “Why is Halo 5’s Campaign SO BAD!?”, this 100-minute long, wonderfully crafted series created by The Act Man dissects everything that’s wrong with Halo 5 Guardians (2015). He discusses the game’s one-dimensional cast of characters, its incoherent storyline, and just about everything else you can think of. There’s not much else I can say here that The Act Man hasn’t covered in depth already, however, I am going to at least attempt to articulate in my own words why Halo 5’s campaign was so spectacularly upsetting for diehard Halo fans like myself.
I have a long history with the Halo games. It’s a franchise that has fostered my love for First Person Shooters and ultimately constructed my personal identity. When I was 6 years old, my brother and I habitually played the Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) campaign on Heroic difficulty. I recall the awe of stepping onto Alpha Halo for the first time, the terror of discovering the Flood, and the urgency of escaping the Pillar of Autumn just minutes before its detonation. I went on to further invest hundreds of hours into the competitive multiplayer modes of Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4, and most notably Halo Reach, a game that I have played for more than 26 days in real time. So, what makes Halo 5 Guardians such a colossal failure with regard to the entries that preceded it?
So many things are wrong with Halo 5 that I don’t think I can cover everything in one post. I’ll begin by addressing Halo 5’s extremely deceptive and dishonest marketing campaign. The game was advertised as a combination of Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive (1993) and the Halo universe, in which our beloved hero John-117 abandoned his military duties in search of a way to bring back Cortana. Commander Locke, formerly known as Agent Locke in all the trailers, was tasked with what was supposed to be a galactic-wide manhunt for the Master Chief. In this manner, we were falsely led to believe that there would be this epic conflict between the Chief and Locke that would span multiple alien worlds and Forerunner installations.
If you still need some perspective, look no further than a Halo 5 Guardians live action trailer. In this trailer, Spartan Locke says, “All hail the conquering hero. Let us remember him as our protector, and not the one who gave us… this. As our savior, and not our betrayer. Let us see him forever as you, and not you. All hail the conquering hero. The one who was supposed to save us all! But now I must save us… from you.”
Where is this epic conflict between Chief and Locke again? They only fistfight each other once in the game, and towards the end, Locke actually teams up with the Chief. How is this anything like what was advertised?
We never even got a compelling reason in the game as to why the Chief went rogue. Instead, what we got to justify his supposed abandonment of the UNSC was this one line of meaningless dialogue: “Negative Infinity. I don’t like it.”
What’s more infuriating is that the trailers and Hunt the Truth episodic podcast suggested that the Master Chief was experiencing a psychotic breakdown, similar to John Rambo in the film First Blood (1982). After all, the Bullet teaser trailer showed a rotating bullet with the letters T-R-A-I-T-O-R engraved onto it. Also, in the live action trailer I just referenced, it’s implied that the Chief caused the surrounding wreckage and debris. In Hunt the Truth, it is revealed by Benjamin Giraud that the Chief, while unprovoked, shot and killed nineteen human security guards at a peace conference. But alas, 343 Industries never delivered on this whole “traitor” premise. The relationship between Chief and the Infinity was never even that strained to begin with.
And herein lies the first tragedy of Halo 5 Guardians: it’s a collection of wasted opportunities.
As The Act Man astutely noted, Halo 5 Guardians was the perfect time to explore complex themes and conflicts never-before-seen in a Halo game. These themes include the tolls that war can take on the human psyche, the effect of grief on the ability to perform military duties, and how PTSD can emerge in even the most calloused soldiers like the Master Chief.
Halo 5 could have especially gone into detail on ONI’s conspiracy to tarnish the heroic image of the Master Chief so that it could advance its own corrupt agenda. For example, in Hunt the Truth, Giraud explains that a leak revealed that the Master Chief murdered nineteen security guards, when in fact the murders were actually committed by the rebel extremist group, Sapien Sunrise. However, 343 Industries never incorporated this narrative thread into the actual game; it was never even once mentioned. What we ended up with was not an engaging expansion of the universe. Rather, what we ended up with was a ploy to market a game that didn’t exist, or to put it bluntly, one of the greatest cases of lying and deception in videogame history.
Stick around for Part 2, where I discuss Halo 5’s startling lack of continuity and misdirected plot.
Watch The Act Man’s “Why is Halo 5’s Campaign SO BAD!?”
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwwyb_5jJHc
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWzBXsiNwsQ
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dKdenOPGjA
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