Bungies Halo games were narratively sparse and exposition-heavy, but between the thrills remained a lingering sadness.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection celebrated its 10-year anniversary on November 11, 2024.
Below, take a look back at the quiet sense of loss that permeated throughout the main trilogy.
Halo: Combat Evolved opens with waking up.
Halo 3 concludes with falling asleep.
It’s fun, of course.
I don’t want to pretend that Halo is anything other than a blockbuster FPS.
Yet, there is something sad about it, isn’t there?
The Halo rings themselves are all machines of death: tools of mass eradication.
But all have sunrises and sunsets, wildlife, plants, ecosystems, snowy mountains, and rocky deserts.
Master Chief wanders through it all.
One man, no matter how great, enveloped in majesty and terror.
It’s hard to remember that Halo: Combat Evolved was stark and bare.
It is a universe that has been thoroughly elaborated on, with many of its gaps plastered over.
Johnson and 343 Guilty Spark return in sequels).
Master Chief himself is not much of a character.
He is stoic: a halfway point between silent protagonist and fleshed-out hero.
He spits out one-liners and kills bad guys, but not much else.
She acts as a way to give the player context for what is happening.
So, most of Halo’s emotional space is taken up by its still-impressive combat and sometimes-transcendent level design.
That’s not all good.
The Library is still, for my money, one of the most miserable levels in FPS history.
Still, all that non-combat time offers beauty and melancholy.
Drives between mission locations and firefights grant contemplation.
Its level design lets you look up at the sky as much as run down your enemies.
Halo is no nature walk, however.
It is immediately shot down.
The set piece pauses in a strange, grieving breath.
You hear the pilot’s dying words, then an explosion.
But that death hangs in the air.
Master Chief will, once again, escape this alone.
Halo 3 offers a parallel set piece: another driving escape across an exploding spaceship.
This time, most of the Chief’s allies escape, but he stays behind.
He and Cortana float in one half of a spaceship and he goes into cryosleep yet again.
His last words are, “Wake me when you need me.”
What else would you need him for but killing?
It was inevitable that he would wake up again.
But, absent any follow-ups, that fact is more dreadful than inspiring.
The fight finished with nothing to hope for but another one beginning.
Narratively speaking, single-player Halo since Reach has been stuck.
Halo 4, 5: Guardians, and Infinite are all soft franchise reboots.
Ultimately, they have nothing close to the still-satisfying arc of the original games.
In these games, the tragedies are grand and explicit.
Across Infinite’s Halo ring, you’ll find audio logs with the words of the dead.
In the Bungie games, with the exception of Reach, most of the main characters live.
Master Chief carries a grief that is almost absent–historical even.
Reach’s surface was already destroyed, “glassed” as the games put it.
Chief does win the war, but the battle was lost before he could start.
In Infinite, he wins the battle with the promise that he’ll win the war too.
It starts in tragedy, sure.
This is necessarily not bad, but it does illustrate the limits of franchise storytelling.
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