“And so here at the end of my life, I do once again betray a former master. The path ahead is fraught with peril. But I will do all I can to keep it stable - keep you safe. I'm not so foolish to think this will absolve me of my sins. One life hardly balances billions.”
– Mendicant Bias, Halo 3 terminal
The worst part about Halo 5: Guardians is without a doubt Cortana’s unanticipated and unwanted return.
Cortana wasn’t supposed to come back to life—that’s not how death works in the real world. If anything, Halo 5 was supposed to be about the Chief learning to cope with her loss and gaining independence skills. The campaign would have worked well if it had specifically revolved around Chief searching for a special type of Forerunner technology that could be used to revive Cortana while also being hunted down by Spartan Locke for his unauthorized dissent from the UNSC. Halo 4’s ending could have been further solidified and lent meaning by Chief’s realization that Cortana would indeed be gone forever, and that he would need to move on without her. But this isn’t the direction the studio took the game in. It seems that 343i only wrote her back into the story because she’s a highly recognizable intellectual property of Microsoft, and is thus a great selling point for new and old fans of the franchise.
It was a massive contrivance to write Cortana back into the Reclaimer Saga as the main villain. For one thing, Halo 4 strictly examined the concept of mortality in artificially intelligent entities and how computers can die just in the same way that organic matter can die. But what good is the concept of mortality when the character you’re writing gets to live forever? More importantly, how many times has this “A.I. gone mad” or “mankind’s own creations turned against itself” story been told in science fiction media? The films The Terminator, Avengers Age of Ultron, iRobot, the Matrix trilogy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey all come to mind. The Halo universe even has a reputation of featuring prominent A.I. antagonists such as Mendicant Bias and 343 Guilty Spark, so this man-versus-machine conflict isn’t anything new or fresh.
Overall, the decision on behalf of the writing staff at 343 Industries to sideline the Ur-Didact in favor of bringing Cortana back from the dead so that she could police the galaxy with Forerunner Guardians was a tremendous mistake, but there’s a possibility that it could all make sense in the inevitable Halo 6. A popular theory circulating around YouTube, Reddit, and Halo Waypoint is that Cortana is actually under the control of the digitalized Ur-Didact, much like Darth Vader was under the control of the Emperor. But given that the writers are making everything up as they go along, this is unlikely to turn out to be true.
What it all amounts to is that Halo 5 can’t tell an intelligible story. We’re constantly hopping from one destination to the next without any sense of direction, whereas in previous Halo games, we were presented with a well-defined objective by which all other mission objectives could be based on. Let’s see what these objectives were.
Halo Reach: defend planet Reach from the Covenant invasion.
Halo: Combat Evolved: discover the true purpose behind Alpha Halo.
Halo 2: prevent the activation of Delta Halo.
Halo 3: reach the Ark before the Covenant does, kill the Prophet of Truth, rescue Cortana, and finish the fight.
Halo 3: ODST: regroup with your squad, and escape New Mombasa.
Halo 4: stop the Ur-Didact from using the Composer on planet Earth, and cure Cortana’s Rampancy.
And I don’t count Halo Wars or Spartan Assault.
Halo 5 lacks in a main focus. Four reasons why this happened are incompetent management, miscommunications between the writing staff at 343 Industries and Microsoft, miscommunications within the writing staff at 343 Industries, and an overemphasis on Halo 5’s competitive multiplayer component.
It could be that, in the case of incompetent management, 343i’s appointment of a different lead writer is what caused Halo 5’s story to suffer so profoundly. Halo 4’s story was headed by Chris Schlerf while Halo 5’s story was headed by Brain Reed, and this change-up likely accounts for the game’s awkward tonal shifts and continuity discrepancies. After all, Reed is most known for writing comic books, and thus he probably had difficulty in writing the story of Halo 5 because he was operating on a medium that he had little to no experience with. Does this mean that Reed is inherently talentless? Probably, probably not. However, he is not the best man for the job. It’s important that 343i recognize this fact, and fire Mr. Reed so that Halo 6 does not repeat the same mistakes as Halo 5.
Miscommunications between the writing staff at 343 Industries and Microsoft or within the writing staff at 343 Industries is another likely cause of Halo 5’s struggle to tell a coherent story.
In the case of the former, it’s possible that executives at Microsoft and the writers at 343i did not see eye to eye on the best course of action for Halo 5, and thus midway through the game’s production, many things were altered, tampered with, or just plain removed to meet corporate demands. We saw the same thing happen to Destiny in 2014. It’s been theorized that Activision instructed Bungie to cut content out of the game last minute so that it could later be sold as overpriced DLC. What was released was a sorry excuse for a story mode and an empty shell of a game.
In the case of the latter, there might have been fundamental creative differences amongst the writers at 343i that ultimately dealt a damaging blow to the product we were delivered at launch. Usually, when people do not agree on matters pertaining to creativity, nothing gets done, and the art suffers. We saw this happen to the Star Wars prequel trilogy. In his review of the prequels, Red Letter Media notes that Lucas was given too much creative control. People were intimated by him. They never wanted to voice their objections, opinions, or suggestions on how to make the prequel films better, and as a result (with the exception of Revenge of the Sith) the quality of Episode’s I and II dropped tremendously.
Finally, it’s possible that 343 Industries placed an overemphasis on Halo 5’s arena component without giving its story the attention that it deserved.
This misstep is indicated by Halo 4 and Halo 5’s campaign-multiplayer quality reversal: Halo 4 has a great campaign but a poor multiplayer, while Halo 5 has a great multiplayer but a poor campaign (for the record, I loved Halo 4’s multiplayer; I don’t understand why I got so much hate, other than it borrowed some mechanics from Call of Duty).
After Halo 4’s player population evaporated, 343i and Microsoft scrambled for ways to innovate the upcoming title. The development team therefore split according to multiplayer and story, with too much emphasis placed on evolving the multiplayer component but not enough emphasis placed on evolving the story component. The question remains as to how 343 can satisfy fans of Halo’s multiplayer, story, or both without sacrificing the quality that made the previous titles so memorable.
Stick around for Part 4, where I discuss other complaints that I have with Halo 5: Guardians, and share my final word.
