Immediately after finishing the previous title, I start on Halo 2. This one I knew I had never played before, as I never owned it as a kid. I was pretty excited to get into this entry as I've heard nothing but positive feedback for it and now I can finally understand where the Arbiter comes from since I've played Halo 3 multiple times (more on that eventually).

Halo 2 is a vast improvement over the first Halo with minor exceptions. There's more guns, cutscenes and gameplay went another step-up in graphic fidelity, and the story is extremely more intriguing and well-written. What really took me back was how phenomenal the cutscenes looked! I had no clue that Halo 2 also received a remaster, basically. The cutscenes were remade from scratch and you can easily tell, being comparable to modern-day releases and their pre-rendered cutscenes. However, you're still able to switch between original graphics and remastered graphics for the gameplay and cutscenes and, once again, I still preferred some areas with the older graphics. This is usually due to how dark the new areas can be, but some instances, I feel the new graphics fumbled the atmosphere the original was going for.

Unsurprisingly, I also recommend anyone interested to play through this as well. It's easy to get into, nice to look at, and you can finish it relatively fast. I also played this on solo heroic and found some parts infuriating, but others extremely easy (as the Arbiter cloak for a few seconds and just straight-up skip sections). I'm ecstatic to finish Halo 3 now that I have all the previous knowledge on the story I was missing when I played through as a kid.