I FIND IT REALLY WEIRD how people are saying that the game should have spent more time in cutscenes, or how they didn't understand things, or how you have to read the novels to "get it." Of the Reclaimer Saga, I've read one novel--the first Greg Bear one. I did not get all the terminals, nor did I watch any of them. I had no problems understanding anything. Forerunner planet picks up Chief, Chief is tricked into releasing the Didact, the Librarian saves Chief by making him immune (And who cares HOW it works? It's advanced science by one of the most brilliant minds in the universe--why not just accept that she can do crazy things rather than have a disappointing bullshit explanation?) to the thing that imprisons people in computers and drives them crazy (making them Prometheans), Cortana goes crazy, they stop the bad guy, Chief is alone, the end.
Was any of that really so challenging to understand? The game explained a lot of things with great economy. The main thing is that the game didn't really explain what The Mantle was, which it should have done, since that is the motivation behind The Didact's every action. He's all "AH YOU HAVE NOT ATTAINED THE MANTLE YET" and you're all "the what now?" and he's all "I WILL DESTROY YOUUUUU!" and that's about it.
I feel like the game was missing an entire act somewhere between when they scared the Didact off and the Goliath chapter. It's like "woo, we scared him off, time to go home, I guess!" It really needed something substantial in there. Having the Captain of the Infinity be such an asshole seemed to be utterly pointless, as it offered no tangible dramatic tension.
They did a lot of things right, and it was WAY better than FUD's script, but much like FUD, I feel that I personally could have made some much-needed edits to the script.
That said, I'm not really sure where they are going to go from here. The story wrapped itself up in a little bow. Cortana's gone, Chief's back home, the Didact is presumably dead.
...and yeah, you could say "Well, Cortana isn't really gone--she's just entering rampancy," which would be fun, because rampant AIs are AMAZING (see Durandal, SHODAN). You could also say "we didn't really see Didact die."
But... to me, it would be like if, back in the 1980s, George Lucas had made a sequel to Empire, where it turned out that Darth Vader hadn't
really died and the Emperor totally survived being thrown into a hole.
Halo 4 didn't introduce enough elements to make me go "okay, there is still room to grow here," which means that... if they do something, I'm going to end up feeling as though it was just shoehorned in to have another Halo. I don't feel like they've prepared adequately for another game.
The introduction of the Spartan IVs seemed pointless. I got no sense of whatsherface being a Spartan, other than the fact that she's tall and in special armor. That 'missing act' I mentioned could have benefited from Chief working alongside her and the Spartan IVs, reminding everyone why the IIs are the best.
The intro Halsey Video didn't really seem to connect to anything. They were all "oh, you're trying to replace him, aren't you?" but that plot thread never really happened in the game, and it doesn't seem like much to go on for a future Halo game.
One story bit that confused me was how he was like "hi guys, this is Master Chief, I'm riding an alien vessel and I know you're not expecting me, but..." and yet everyone seemed like they were ready and waiting for him, totally knew he was coming, etc. It would seem to me like the people at Installation 03 wouldn't know to expect Chief, since my understanding is that Infinity didn't leave until after Didact, and we didn't spend much time at Installation 3 (NOT GETTING BOOTS ON GROUND ON INSTALLATION 3 MADE ME SAD), so they must have gone directly to Earth... so, yeah, how did these people know who he was or what he was doing?
This is all mostly nitpick stuff, but for a story so well told, it's frustrating to see little bits and pieces that don't quite work. If the story was
less, I would actually be less inclined to poke at some of the things that bother me.
That said, they did quite a few things EXTREMELY well, particularly in establishing Cortana and Chief's relationship.
As some one that has never read to books and is rusty on the Halo universe (I've never been massively into the games enough to check the backstory) is there a site that sums up the races and what just happen in Halo 4?
I don't need super amounts of information with details going through all the books etc I just want to get a better understanding of what happen in Halo 4, as the bouncing around between Forerunners and Prometheans confused me some what, mainly the relationship between them and the human race.
Were the Prometheans human?
Yes. This is explicitly stated in the cutscene where Chief is talking to The Librarian. The Composer turns things into digital information, but they go crazy when they do. Prometheans are humans given a new form after having been composed.
