Halo Reach's Campaign Issues (and How To Fix Them)

Halo Reach is one of the most divisive entries in the Halo franchise. People either love it with all their heart, seeing it as the pinnacle of the franchise; or hate it with every fiber of their being, seeing it as the beginning of the end for the Halo series. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle, it just has too many problems and while I could rant about how dumb the armor lock ability is and how it ruins the balance of the game I’m more of a lore guy and for me this is where the biggest problem is. The game tells you from the beginning that everyone is gonna die and that the Planet of Reach will be burned to the ground, but it doesn’t go anywhere with it like it should, it’s very scatterbrained.

First thing’s first we need a basic recap to the plot, Halo Reach is set in 2552, where humanity is at war with a extra-terrestrial threat called the Covenant, and it is losing. But there are secret weapons helping tip the scales, the Spartan super soldiers, soldiers trained from childhood to combat the various threats to humanity’s main government, the United Nations Space Command. Reach follows NOBLE Team, almost all orphans who serve in the SPARTAN Corps seeking vengeance against the Covenant. 

And this is the first missed opportunity of the story, they don’t go more into any detail about these war orphans, you only figure out they’re orphans if you bothered reading up on the expanded lore with the book Ghosts of Onyx; which is a great book but also a major problem in that we need to do more reading in order to get more lore. Instead we only see basic personalities where there was a great chance to examine what having your entire family killed and being left with nothing but vengeance in your heart can do to a person. But nope, they all just have very base personalities, Carter is the gruff commander, Kat is the technician faster with her words than wits, Jun is the silent sniper, Emile is the jerk ass explosives guy, Jorge is the lovable heavy, and then there is the blank slate that is the protagonist, Noble 6; who they try to make like the Master Chief but Noble 6 doesn’t have that cool factor no matter the gender you play. 6 has no smooth sexy voice or slight hint of wit that was in some of the Chiefs dialogue. Six is what non-fans claim the Master Chief is, a blank slate with no personality to speak of and a unintentionally forgettable protagonist.

Now this bare scraping of motivations and forgettable protagonist was also a thing in the previous game, Halo 3: ODST where we didn’t learn much about what motivates the main cast, it was more about how they interact off each other. But there the interweaving narrative was trying to figure out where these characters went, it made sense for the main lead in that to be a blank slate as there wasn’t much for him to say for most of the tale. Also, the point of ODST’s story wasn’t tragedy, it was a detective story where the mystery was more important than the characters but the characters were enough to keep you invested with how they bounced off each other. Reach on the other hand is billed as a tragedy, the Covenant found humanity’s fortress, it will burn, it will fall. The story therefore has to be less what happened and more about the characters and their struggles, and I think it’s failure to focus on that is what destroys the story and makes it so when the characters start dying I just don’t really care. 

Bungie once posted towards the release of Reach about avoiding spoilers and gave an example of some idiot stating NOBLE escaped Reach on a captured starship and I have to ask... what would be different if everyone but 6 escaped? Kat's death means nothing, Carter's death has some emotion but not enough for me to care, and Emile's death while cool still feels pointless and has very little emotion to it. Jorge and 6 are the only one's whose deaths I cared about. Jorge's because there is a nobility and heroism to it that ultimately fades into tragic futility; and 6's because of how well they set it up.

The other problem that sticks out is poor pacing of the actual plot itself, the game starts promising, Noble Team goes to investigate some disturbances, finds the Covenant, and the main plot begins. And it almost immediately kinda fragments, you go to a Intelligence base under attack and then meet with a scientist and then that goes nowhere so you go to a series of valley’s to force the Covenant out and that goes, well actually into space but then goes nowhere again, Then you wind up in a city in a plot point that goes nowhere again as your teammates keep dying.

But then the plot remembers that Intelligence base and the scientist and that’s the entire focus of the rest story leading to the final part of the game. You see the problem, everything after Mission 2 could have been cut and nothing would have been lost till Mission 8. You could just say “Noble 2 and 5 died off screen” and boom, nothing of value is lost.
 
That said there is some solid stuff to this story that does work, it captures the desperation of trying to stop the Covenant great in the level Exodus. Jorge, the teams lovable heavy with a heart of gold, is the most fleshed out as they hint a bit on his history and it makes him probably the best character in the game. Plus, when NOBLE is onscreen together I think the chemistry is great, but it’s a shame that’s only twice in the whole game.

The scientist who aids NOBLE at the end, Dr. Halsey, is great to see on screen in a way I don’t absolutely hate (*cough* Legends *cough*) she was a big player in the books and this is pretty much how I saw her in terms of design and attitude. The stuff in the last few levels is great with Composer Marty O'Donnell doing a great bow out of the franchise to accompany it, and that post-credits scene is the stuff of legends. And all in all, I think the gunplay and level design, at least from a single player perspective, is very solid and A+ material, shame about the rest of the game.

So enough bitching, how would I fix it? How would I make Reach better? For a start I would make it so that NOBLE is together more often than apart, like I said the two times they’re together are great little moments and more of them would make me like this team more. Then I would centralize the plot, towards the end of the game Halsey gives Noble a piece of Cortana to take to the Pillar of Autumn in order to set off the events of Halo 1. I would make that happen after the second level and have NOBLE try to reach the other side of the planet while it burns, a desperate race against time that encompasses the entire game. It keeps NOBLE Team together and allows us to take a world tour, charging through Covies alongside marines in Warthogs, sneaking through cities while debating whether to help people or not, you could have great moments and yes, still kill off NOBLE one by one.

The only thing truly lost is the Long Night of Solace Mission but maybe that could take the place of the MAC Gun sequence, with 6 left behind as the Autumn jumps away from Reach, forcing him to return to the planet and face his ultimate fate. If you really want the the MAC Gun stuff then put it in Exodus instead of having you press a button to activate some missiles, it would be a lot more thrilling with the same basic result.

Now I don't believe that the characters themselves should be changed, they're archetypes yes, but in Reach's defense the 2010 reboot of My Little Pony (yes I watched that, only till Season 4) proved that you can work with archetypes. I just think that more scenes with NOBLE together is what the game needed, give us a better look at what goes on in their heads. Therefore when we start killing them off, it has more feeling and emotion to it as opposed to marking off a checklist.  And ultimately outside of a very small set of tiny moments, that's the thing missing from what is meant to be a tragic tale, emotion. Something I think Halo 4 nailed better.

At the end of the day Halo Reach is still a decent game, with some good campaign levels and the second best Forge mode in the franchise, and with it's 10th Anniversary coming up next year, it's worth looking at it's story to see how it could have been better and could have been created better.

P.S. No, seriously, fuck Armor Lock.