Reclaiming Some Sense: A Halo Reclaimer Trilogy Deep Dive Part 1: Halo 4

You know what I like in a story? Consistency. I like when a story makes sense all the way through and doesn’t swerve off in many different directions. I like when a story commits to the story they started and doesn’t suddenly change multiple times to something completely different. What I’m trying to say is that the Halo Reclaimer trilogy, did not do any of that.

What started as a story of a man dealing with his friends impending death while an ancient evil awakens turned into said friend being alive and also evil now and leading AI’s to seize control of the galaxy which then turned into the man fighting against some other alien faction who want to release a different ancient evil on the galaxy and the evil friend being a footnote in the whole thing.

So yeah, the whole thing was incredibly frustrating and so what I’m going to do here is breakdown what happened in each game, how it related (and didn’t relate) to the other games, and everything in between. Oh and I’m going to do it in parts focusing on each game separately to keep this from going super long. Alright let’s go.

So I’m going to start this by saying that I really like Halo 4, it’s my favorite game in the series. It’s pretty much the reason I’m writing this because this game told a very good story and set up some promising hooks for the future. Hooks that they then never followed up on or just brushed aside.

It’s mostly because of the development of Master Chief as a character and his relationship with Cortana. Chief prior to this game had largely been a blank cipher. He had some character beats here and there in the original trilogy but mostly he was just silent and stoic. And yes he got more fleshed out in the expanded universe content at the time but a lot of that didn’t make its way into the games.

A lot of his character beats in original trilogy were based around his interactions and relationship with Cortana, and so it makes sense that this would be the central focus in Halo 4. You see, Cortana is dying. She’s suffering from Rampancy, which is basically when an AI degrades and thinks itself to death. All AI’s suffer this after 7 years and Cortana has been active for 8. The plot then becomes a race against time as Chief tries to get Cortana to Dr. Halsey, their mutual creator, in hopes that she can help save Cortana. Cortana however knows that she’s doomed and spends the game trying to get Chief to accept this.

Yes there’s more to the game then that. Yes there’s a big alien threat hoping to wipe out humanity. But the core of the game, that’s all about Cortana and Chief. It’s about Chief realizing that’s he’s not an unfeeling machine and coming to terms with Cortana’s death. Because ultimately yes, they don’t get to find out if Halsey could have saved Cortana or not because Cortana gets destroyed while fighting The Didact and sacrifices herself to save Chiefs life.

This is why I love this game, it’s a good story about two people and their relationship. I’m a sucker for a story that has a good story arc and this more than delivered. It’s also pretty much the closest thing to a consistent theme throughout the trilogy as Chief and Cortana’s relationship is important to both sequels, albeit in ways that completely trample all over each other, but we’ll get there.

But anyway, let’s talk about that big alien threat, because that more so than Cortana is where the trilogy is going to go off the rails. So the big bad of this game is The Didact, an ancient Forerunner Warrior who despises humanity due to a conflict with the ancient humans and refuses to believe that humanity can inherit the Mantle of Responsibility which was the Forerunner idea of a single species playing the role of moral guardians for the galaxy. Once he gets accidentally freed by Chief and Cortana he sets about acquiring the Composer, which is a super weapon that disintegrates people into data basically. Data that can then be used to make the AI’s of the Prometheans, Forerunner kill bots that serve as half the enemies you face in the game.

So The Didact is not great. He comes across as very generic evil overlord type without any greater characterization. That’s not to say that there’s not potential there, it’s just that Halo 4 doesn’t really tap any of it. Which brings me to problem that plagues the entire trilogy: Lore Overdosing.

Because you see, Didact was not an original character to Halo 4. He had actually been introduced years earlier in the Forerunner Trilogy of books that had come out prior to Halo 4 and had introduced a lot of characters and elements that would appear throughout the Reclaimer Trilogy, including The Librarian, another character that plays an important role in Halo 4. But if you never read the books then you’re missing out on a lot of context.

The game does try though, albeit in a roundabout and convoluted matter. One of the sets of collectables in game are a series of terminals, that when interacted with will unlock short videos that tell an abridged version of what happened during the Forerunner trilogy, mostly just stuff relating to The Didact and The Librarian. However you could only access these videos on Halo Waypoint, an external app that mostly focuses on Halo related news (I don’t even know if the videos are on there anymore). So Halo 4 didn’t expect you to have read the books if you didn’t have access to Waypoint or even found the Terminals you were still going to be lost.

So this is what I mean by Lore Overdosing, having to do homework to understand what’s going on. It’s a problem that started in Halo: Reach with aspects like the Spartan-III program and Dr. Halsey, the Spartan-II’s creator, and it continued on here and will keep going into the next two games. I can’t say that it personally bothered me because at the time I was still up to date on Halo’s Expanded Universe. But I can understand how it can be confusing and frustrating. And honestly compared to the sequels, this ones not that bad as there are some lore aspects that were introduced in prior materials that you are perfectly fine skipping.

For example one of the main supporting characters in this one was Captain Thomas Lasky, the first officer and later captain of the Infinity. Lasky was introduced in a live action web series, Halo 4: Forward Until Dawn that was released prior to Halo 4. It told the story about a time when Lasky was young man whose unit got saved by Chief. Halo 4 does not ask you have seen the web series to know who Lasky as they do a perfectly fine job of introducing him as an officer with a respect for Master Chief.

But anyway, let’s talk about the future, because that’s what this series is about. By the end of Halo 4, Cortana was dead, the Composer had been destroyed but not before a significant portion of Earth’s population had been composed, and The Didact had been dropped through a slip space portal and survived but his current whereabouts were unknown. There wasn’t really a clear direction for where the rest of the trilogy was going to go.

And so that’s where Spartan Ops came in. Spartan Ops was a continuation of the Halo 4’s story, told in episodic format (There were 10 episodes total). Released over the course of a few months with each episode consisting of 5 missions and one or two cutscenes, Spartan Ops revealed what happened in the aftermath of Halo 4. After the attack on Earth, The Infinity returned to Requiem to learn it’s secrets and seize it from the remaining Covenant Remnant forces still there. The story segments were focused on the crew of the Infinity, namely Captain Lasky, Commander Sarah Palmer, the Spartan in charge of Spartan forces on the Infinity, the ships AI Roland, and Fireteam Castle, one of the Spartan teams aboard the ship. The gameplay segments were focused on Fireteam Crimson, another Spartan Team.

We’re introduced to Jul ‘Mdama, the leader of the Covenant Remnant whose already acquired a few of the planets secrets like how to control the Prometheans, as well a tether that he manages to get onto the Infinity that then traps it inside Requiem. Eventually Dr. Halsey who got brought in after the Infinity’s science officer got captured by the Covenant early on, got captured herself by the Covenant and managed to get access to the Janus Key, a well, key that would unlock access to technologies that would advance humanity. ‘Mdama seized the key for himself but Halsey managed to get half the key into Castle Teams hands before she and ‘Mdama were teleported off world. Requiem was then destroyed by ‘Mdama with the Infinity barely escaping.

There was supposed to be more to it then that but Spartan Ops was poorly received so they didn’t end up doing a season 2 and most of the plans got used in a comic book later on. Admittedly it wasn’t the best put together thing, mostly because there was a pretty big gap between what was going on the cutscenes and the gameplay sections. Fireteam Crimson were just blank silent protagonists (Whatever your multiplayer model was was how you looked) and the plots of the missions tended to not really have anything to do with the cutscenes giving them a feeling of just being a series of meanwhiles.

Additionally some of the characters were a mixed bag. Fireteam Castle was a whole lot of meh, and Commander Palmer was a ginormous incompetent asshole. Additionally I guess 343 thought that Palmer would have some legs to her because she was the focus of a spinoff series of games but uh, she was deeply unliked. There’s a lot of negatives things I’m going to say about Halo 5 in part 2, but one of the nice I’ll say is that they toned her down a lot.

But regardless, we had some forward momentum. Both the UNSC and the Covenant Remnant had half of a key to a great technology. Additionally the Remnant had Dr. Halsey who had been marked for execution by the UNSC because they thought she had turned traitor (Palmer had already tried and failed to kill her near the end of Spartan Ops story). Because of this Halsey seemingly turned on the UNSC and agreed to willingly work alongside ‘Mdama. And of course The Didact was still floating around somewhere hoping to continue his plans of reasserting Forerunner dominance.

So there was a clear path forward right? Obviously not, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing whole thing and I wouldn’t have been deeply disappointed in what came afterwards, but that’s for Parts 2 & 3 to discuss. Instead I’m going to leave you with the end speech The Didact makes during the epilogue of Halo 4, promising a future story that would never come.

“In this hour of victory, we taste only defeat. I ask, why? We are Forerunners, guardians of all that exists. The roots of the galaxy have grown deep under our careful tending. Where there is life, the wisdom of our countless generations has saturated the soil. Our strength is a luminous sun, towards which all intelligence blossoms… And the impervious shelter beneath which it has prospered. I stand before you, accused of the sin of ensuring Forerunner ascendancy. Of attempting to save us from this fate where we are forced to… recede. Humanity stands as the greatest threat in the galaxy. Refusing to eradicate them is a fool’s gambit. We squander eons in the darkness, while they seize our triumphs for their own. The Mantle of responsibility for all things belongs to Forerunners alone. Think of my acts as you will. But do not doubt the reality: the Reclamation… has already begun. And we are hopeless to stop it.” -Ur-Didact