Critique: Halo Reach

*Spoilers ahead!* Since I am talking about how the story works, I obviously have to talk about specific things that happen. Also keep in mind that I am only talking about the story as it is presented in game, outside fiction beyond the previous games does not apply here.

The story narrative behind the various Halo games has always been a strange, mysterious creature. In fact, if I had to be specific I would refer to it as a kind of giant squid. It’s large, more complex than you would give it credit for, and has lots of twists and turns if sometimes becoming overly convoluted. Also like a giant squid, you know that it exists but if you exclusively play the games you never really get to see the whole thing.

Character Rundown:

–     Carter (Noble One): The leader, mostly just gives out and receives orders. Seems to enjoy military protocol and idly threatening Halsey with it.

–     Kat (Noble Two): Second in command, the tech person. Has a robot arm and might be a bit of an information kleptomaniac. Only one to show some form of fear, dies moments later.

–     Jun (Noble Three): Sniper, outside sources mention that he’s a talker but I think he has fewer lines in game than Carter. Only one to survive, maybe.

–     Emile (Noble Four): Has a cool helmet and a big knife. That’s about it.

–     Jorge (Noble Five): A really big Spartan, my favorite of the group. Speaks a foreign language and seems to actually care about the civilians on the planet.

–     Dr. Halsey: Scientist, doesn’t seem to give a damn about much beyond her work. Likes talking about her ‘latchkey’ discovery.

The basic premise behind Halo Reach is that you are a Spartan, a super soldier for the UNSC (the human army essentially), who has graduated super soldier school and is now assigned to Noble team, a squad of six Spartan super soldiers who had an opening due to budget cutbacks. Actually the previous member of Noble died in combat, but this never really comes up in the story beyond the squad not trusting you for about 5 minutes in the first cut scene. I guess the Spartan you replaced was some kill stealing jerk because the team certainly doesn’t act like they miss him/her.

Sucks for him/her, but also sucks for you because a conglomerate of murderous alien species called the Covenant shows up on planet Reach and decides to wreck up the place. And so starts what should be a tragic tale of how your team attempts to defend the planet against an entire armada of enemies who have never been truly defeated before. Trouble is, the plot doesn’t care much about the viewer and the characters don’t care about much in general.

Halo has always had a bad habit of leaving out important details within its games, relying on the books to fill in the gaps. Reach goes one step further and assumes that you have read all of the books already and perhaps the comics and watched the anime series. The appearance of Dr. Halsey in the second mission is a really good example of this.  It’s the end of a mission and you get a cut scene where the player walks in on the rest of Noble team talking to Halsey and one of your Spartan buddies named Jorge refers to her as ‘mom’. She then pretty much ignores him except to make a note of his equipment before going back to talking about her research and what she wants you to do for her. Had I not read the first Halo book “Fall of Reach” years ago I would have walked away at the end of the cut scene thinking, “Man, who was that uppity scientist? And why is she more interested in her son’s armor rather than his health?” But since I have read the book, I know that she isn’t literally Jorge’s mother and that Halsey is supposed to be a super genius, ultra important person.

Since you are supposed to know everything, there are no real mysteries in Reach. People generally like having mysteries to solve and questions to be answered. It’s why we have scientists and explorers, and why reality TV is so popular. We like asking ourselves “why does this happen?” “what else is out there?” “is he going to punch that guy in the face?”

But in Reach we already know what is going to happen. We have known since Halo CE that the Covenant boot the humans off of Reach and melt everything like an angry sun in an ice cream shop. Someone/something is attacking villagers in the first mission? Covenant of course, there isn’t anybody else it could be. Halsey finds some ancient technology that might turn the tide of the war? Boring, we know that its information about the Forerunner’s Halo devices, which we have already activated in a previous game. Since there are no real mysteries there’s nothing to learn. Without anything to learn, people can lose interest. The other Halo games did a good job of getting around this by either throwing you onto strange new worlds (Halo CE and Halo 3) or by revealing new information about your enemies (Halo 2). The previous games always kept something in the dark. Like; what is Halo, how many more of them are there, what’s the Ark and how do I get there? Heck, I even liked the arbiter missions in Halo 2 because I got to learn about how the Covenant view things and revealed that they are just as petty and prone to infighting as humanity is. They had flaws and that made them much more interesting compared to ‘unified evil invading alien group X’ that is typically used for video game villains. Reach unfortunately has relegated the Covenant to mere gun toting obstacles. Unlike in previous games, you can’t understand or communicate with them. This distances the player from them. This alone is not an issue however, the fact that most players have grown very accustomed to seeing and fighting the covenant by this point makes it so that they lack an aura of mystery to draw players back in.

But you know, you don’t really need a hardcore mystery plot to keep things interesting. Just having solid, developed characters in general can make for a great story. Yet Reach stumbles here too.

There’s a reason that most military dramas focus on a ragtag group of misfits, arrogant aces, or shady covert ops people. This way you can have characters that are amusing and unprofessional enough to act like humans (with emotions!) or at least have interesting/creepy perspectives on how war functions and what it takes to get things done. In Reach, Noble team accepts their orders without question and hardly ever comments on them once the radios are off. They are just a bunch of professional soldiers acting professionally and that’s very dull to watch as they give off the distinct air of not having any personal interest in what is going on. Noble team never gets scared, they never have families or friends at risk, they have no interests or hobbies. They don’t even seem to particularly want to survive.

OK, Kat does mention at one point that she is worried that they are losing, but none of the other characters pursue this. Plus, she gets killed off a few minutes later to fulfill the role of ‘pointless war death’ which permanently squashes any discussion about it. As it stands, they are a bunch of shallow death seekers and this trivializes their deaths. Death all by itself is usually not tragic; the tragic part is what that death leaves behind. Perhaps there’s important work left unfinished, maybe the character is leaving behind a lover or children or maybe just a loyal dog who will wait forever for its master to come home. It’s not tragic when a soldier purposefully goes on a suicide run and everyone else shrugs their shoulders and goes ‘yup they died, oh well’.

Looking back over my critique it seems like I’m being a little overly harsh. I should point out that Halo Reach’s story is not terrible, I would say its fine but not memorable. The voice acting is good, the setting is fine, I enjoyed the gameplay, but I had higher hopes. Reach should have been a tragic, emotionally tugging story evoking the phrase ‘losing the battle but winning the war’ where you get to experience the former half of the phrase. I’m fairly certain this is what they were going for as well. Yet, the Lone Wolf mission (the last one) was the only one where the game made me feel like I was experiencing a real tragedy.

My Creative Changes

As pointed out by some actual video game critics, Halo Reach badly needed an audience stand in. If the game is going to star professional soldiers who understand everything, then we need someone unprofessional to ask questions and be all emotional. The first 3 Halo games had Cortana and Sgt Johnson to fill this role. So first things first, cut Emile. Other than having a cool helmet and manning a turret before getting killed, he contributes nothing to the narrative that a gun on a stick couldn’t do.

Now replace him with a marine, who are seemingly the only people in Haloverse capable of having emotions. Maybe UNSC command decided that as a nice propaganda piece they would assign a marine to a team of Spartans and video tape it to show just how heroic and yet down to earth these super soldiers can be. Keep in mind that UNSC isn’t stupid; they don’t want their Spartans to be held back by some random soldier. So, they plan on assigning someone so well trained, so loyal and so tactically smart that he’s basically a Spartan without the armor. Too bad some low level clerk screws up somewhere and assigns the amusingly mediocre marine, Private Mandal to the team instead of hard as nails Private Mandol. A cut scene showing Mandal reporting for duty and Carter deducing that this isn’t the marine they were looking for could pretty much sum all of this up in a few sentences. But Noble team doesn’t care about the administrative screw up; they have the game’s first mission to do and decide to take the marine along anyway since it shouldn’t be very difficult. Then the Covenant show up and UNSC command has far more important things to deal with than reassigning their propaganda piece so they just leave Mandal in the group figuring that if he survives, propaganda! If he dies, oh well, no big loss.

Presto! You have an inexperienced, wide eyed idealistic soldier operating with the Spartans who can question what is going on and make little jokes at times. This would keep the game from being drama drama drama all the time. Constant humorless drama tends to fatigue audiences (or at least me) which can make the work feel like it’s taking forever to finish up. I’ll tackle this in detail in some other post.

Also as a device he could help the player feel sympathy for the Noble team, as UNSC command doesn’t care about their deaths, and Noble team itself is far too professional to show much emotion when their buddies get blown to bits. But for Mandal this is his first squad, he doesn’t know what losing your friends/squad mates in battle is like, but he will by the end of this story. In fact, he could be the last one (besides the player) to die, slowly getting less and less funny and more bitter as each member of the team gets picked off. Culminating in Mandal becoming very somber and intensely focused at the start of the last mission, letting the player know just how serious things have gotten without having to slow down the story with long cut scenes detailing this change. Then you get killed by a bunch of squid faced aliens. Oh well.