Beaten: Feb 02 2022
Time: 8 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X (via MCC)
There was a tweet, a few days ago, that said something like “Halo’s whole thing is that it’s got the best gunplay and then every few minutes someone says something that doesn’t make sense but sounds like it came out of the Bible”. I read it on Monday, and it got stuck in my brain as I finished FF8 and An Outcry. This morning, I booted up a playthrough of Halo 3 I’d started at the beginning of the month but dropped when I got way too into FFXIV, and now I can in fact confirm: That is Halo’s whole thing.
It also struck me that the second part of that tweet, the way that the original Halo trilogy is written, might’ve impacted me more than I ever thought? I mean, “someone says something that doesn’t make sense but sounds like it came out of the Bible” is kind of my whole thing with games these days. What that means, at least to me, is specific kind of grandiosity to dialogue. In my favorite games, this serves the tone of the game, adding a sense of poetic uncertainty to every word as it drips out of a character’s mouth. In Halo I’m pretty sure the idea was “how can we make this feel more epic”. This isn’t unique to 3 by the way, but 2 and 3 are the games with the largest focus on your enemies, the Covenant and the Flood, which gives them the most speaking roles. The humans in Halo don’t talk this way. Just the biblically-referenced Covenant and the just, large and ancient and near-all knowing Flood.
This “epicness” feels like the base idea behind the game. The music sounds lush and large and rich, the sound effects echo off canyon walls like they’re too big to crack, like the explosions just can’t be contained by your speakers. The levels are generally large too, leaning on battles in open valleys and absurd, outsized scale. Rather than trying to be cinematic in a grounded way, an Oscar-ey way like loads of modern triple A games aim for, Halo just wanted to be big. That’s most of what I wanted to say I think. I wouldn’t call the writing here great or even all that good in places, but I just don’t care. It works tonally and atmospherically, and the more games I play, the more I realize those are what’s most important to me. I will say that I uh, haven’t loved any of the post-Bungie Halo games. As to why, it’s kinda weird to put my finger on. I think the gunplay is just a bit off-feeling? Bungie’s gunplay has this thickness, this heaviness to it, and that heaviness gives me just loads of tactile satisfaction? The Destiny games also have fantastic gunplay imo, though the business aspect of those games makes it tough for me to get into them (I’d love to start Destiny 2 from, like, the beginning? Not allowed tho lmao).
Anyways that’s my disorganized set of Halo thoughts. Halo 3 is loads of fun, just like it was when I was a kid, but now I’m also just in awe of the theming and presentation
Time: 8 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X (via MCC)
There was a tweet, a few days ago, that said something like “Halo’s whole thing is that it’s got the best gunplay and then every few minutes someone says something that doesn’t make sense but sounds like it came out of the Bible”. I read it on Monday, and it got stuck in my brain as I finished FF8 and An Outcry. This morning, I booted up a playthrough of Halo 3 I’d started at the beginning of the month but dropped when I got way too into FFXIV, and now I can in fact confirm: That is Halo’s whole thing.
It also struck me that the second part of that tweet, the way that the original Halo trilogy is written, might’ve impacted me more than I ever thought? I mean, “someone says something that doesn’t make sense but sounds like it came out of the Bible” is kind of my whole thing with games these days. What that means, at least to me, is specific kind of grandiosity to dialogue. In my favorite games, this serves the tone of the game, adding a sense of poetic uncertainty to every word as it drips out of a character’s mouth. In Halo I’m pretty sure the idea was “how can we make this feel more epic”. This isn’t unique to 3 by the way, but 2 and 3 are the games with the largest focus on your enemies, the Covenant and the Flood, which gives them the most speaking roles. The humans in Halo don’t talk this way. Just the biblically-referenced Covenant and the just, large and ancient and near-all knowing Flood.
This “epicness” feels like the base idea behind the game. The music sounds lush and large and rich, the sound effects echo off canyon walls like they’re too big to crack, like the explosions just can’t be contained by your speakers. The levels are generally large too, leaning on battles in open valleys and absurd, outsized scale. Rather than trying to be cinematic in a grounded way, an Oscar-ey way like loads of modern triple A games aim for, Halo just wanted to be big. That’s most of what I wanted to say I think. I wouldn’t call the writing here great or even all that good in places, but I just don’t care. It works tonally and atmospherically, and the more games I play, the more I realize those are what’s most important to me. I will say that I uh, haven’t loved any of the post-Bungie Halo games. As to why, it’s kinda weird to put my finger on. I think the gunplay is just a bit off-feeling? Bungie’s gunplay has this thickness, this heaviness to it, and that heaviness gives me just loads of tactile satisfaction? The Destiny games also have fantastic gunplay imo, though the business aspect of those games makes it tough for me to get into them (I’d love to start Destiny 2 from, like, the beginning? Not allowed tho lmao).
Anyways that’s my disorganized set of Halo thoughts. Halo 3 is loads of fun, just like it was when I was a kid, but now I’m also just in awe of the theming and presentation