Halo: Infinite and Character Connections

I warn you now, we are about to embark upon a story critique of the new Halo game that involves at least a passing understanding of the series history and lore.  If you have no interest in genetically modified super soldiers, giant floating rings in space, or a stumbling appraisal of such things, this is your stop.

Still with me?  Grand, let’s push on.  I finished Halo’s most recent installment “Infinite” earlier this week, and it left me both satisfied and disappointed—satisfied because I enjoy punching aliens in the face as much as the next guy or gal, but disappointed because it could have been something more.  Tomes of reviews already exist for the game, so I’ll focus on one small area: the game designers should have let the Master Chief lead.

First, some background.  Halo: Infinite takes place an unspecified time in the future past the events of Halo 5 and Halo Wars 2, thrusting you right into a cut scene where the big baddie Atriox wipes the floor with the Master Chief and tosses him into space.  It’s an ignoble start, one we don’t often see.  Right from the start, we have a crisis of competence for the character.  While we don’t know much of the context yet, we at least understand that things, in the parlance of the day, be jacked.

From there, we get a little exposition on a new character—the Pilot.  This man serves as a counter to what the series usually presents.  Instead of super soldier demi-gods, the Pilot is just a normal, scared man who tried to run away until Master Chief conscripted him as a convenient taxi service.  This is a nice touch, as it grounds our experience playing as the Master Chief against something tangible.  It provides a lens to view all the insanity the Master Chief gets into as what it is—impossible behavior for any normal human being.  Adding the Pilot helped round out one of the most famously iconic characters in video games.  

The addition of Cortana-lite also worked, in its own way.  But while I can respect the decision the game designers made given the backlash to Halo 5, I would not have played it the same way.  The strong callbacks to Halo: Combat Evolved evoked nostalgia, even outright laughs at a few moments.  Unfortunately, it brushed the previous game’s story under the rug in a haphazard way.  For what they tried to do, however, it hit most of its marks.  The relationship between Cortana-lite and the Master Chief—like his relationship with the Pilot—helped give a few rounded edges to an otherwise monolithic character.  The scenes of distrust between the Master Chief and Cortana-lite help show that while the Master Chief can brush off any physical harm, he carries plenty of emotional scars.

This is where I break for a moment to confess something to you—I am a heretic.  You see, I enjoyed the stories in Halo 4 and 5.  Sure, they weren’t perfect, but the vast majority of games aren’t.  What those games did was take Halo in a new direction. They took the Master Chief from the first three games—iconic, monolithic, unchanging—and tried to put something deeper behind the expressionless faceplate.  This, as one might imagine, ruffled feathers. 

People don’t like having their escapist fantasy vessel tarnished by pesky things like PTSD or heartbreak.  I acknowledge that how they handled it came across heavy-handed, but it still worked for me.  Take the ending of Halo 4.  When the Master Chief stares at Cortana fading away as the virtual world she created around them falls apart (again, not subtle storytellers), I felt something.  The game designers made the bold choice to disrupt the successful flow established by the first three games, and paid the price when the nerd hordes bayed for their blood.  But to their credit, they kept trying with Halo 5.  That story didn’t land for me as well as 4’s, but I still enjoyed it as a decent space opera. 

This leads us to Halo: Infinite.  It’s a compromise between what the game designers have tried to do with 4 and 5 and what the long-term fans of the series loved about the first three.  We have Master Chief and his plucky AI sidekick wreaking havoc on a reskinned Covenant across a beautiful ring world, but we also have the Pilot expressing how psychotic the whole endeavor is and showing the mental and emotional impacts so often ignored in the first three games.  It was a tricky path to walk, but I think they managed it with only a few stumbles. 

That brings me back around to my original point—the game designers didn’t let the Master Chief lead.  This is a man humanity built literal monuments to after he almost single-handedly saved the human race, for crying out loud.  In Halo 4, he completely ignores the orders of the captain of the UNSC’s most powerful ship and not only gets away with it, but has people help him commit mutiny because why wouldn’t they?  He’s the Master Chief. 

So we get dropped onto this new Halo ring in Infinite, only to discover that the Banished wiped out the UNSC forces six months prior.  Ok, you think, guess I have to do this myself with one pilot who managed to hide on a shuttle that whole time (can you imagine the smell?).  But wait!  One of the first things you do upon ringfall is claim a forward operating base (FOB) for the UNSC!  Heck, your new AI buddy even manages to scrub its location from the Banished’s systems so you have a secure base to operate from.  Then she tells you it’s time to rebuild the UNSC and highlights a few FOBs for you to liberate, along with some Marines that need your help.  If it sounds familiar, it’s because it has strong echoes of one of the best levels of the original Halo where you scoot around in a Warthog blasting baddies and saving Marines.  But this time, you’re rebuilding the scattered forces to take back the ring!

Except you’re not.  Oh, you can rescue Marines and reclaim FOBs, sure.  The problem is none of it matters.  You could go through the entire game without rescuing a single Marine or taking a single FOB past the few required to advance the story, and it would change literally nothing.  Yes, I get that the more FOBs you liberate, the more weapon and vehicle options you have to play with and more Marines will wander aimlessly around said FOBs, but that is all cosmetic.  It doesn’t impact the story at all, which is where the game designers missed their biggest opportunity.  They do a decent job with the tactical story telling (Cortana-lite, the Pilot) and the strategic (stopping the Banished, preventing the Harbinger from…doing whatever she does), but they completely miss the operational level linking the two.  What they needed was a Sergeant Major Avery Junior Johnson.

In the first three games, Sergeant Johnson provides a tangible link to all the UNSC forces Chief sometimes fights alongside.  A brash, quippy, over-the-top character, he is a caricature of what pop culture makes Marines out to be, and is all the better for it.  He gives the UNSC a face and some otherwise lacking life.  When played off other characters like Captain Keyes (both of them) or Admiral Hood, you got the sense that there was an entire organization out there you stood with and in defense of. 

Halo: Infinite has no Sergeant Johnson.  Its links to the UNSC are the Pilot (a contractor and admitted coward who ran away) and Cortana-lite (referred to as The Weapon and never given an actual name until the very end where one assumes she takes on the name Cortana). The nameless and often faceless Marines have no link to you, the player.  They repeat the same lines over and over when you rescue them from increasingly identical scenarios with identical results.  After rescuing my second batch of Marines, I lost any desire to rescue another unless it had a direct benefit on the immediate situation I faced.  And why not?  Usually they were out of the way, and I didn’t have to worry about a Sergeant Johnson yelling at me for leaving his men behind.

This is why I think the game designers failed to let the Master Chief lead.  He leads on an individual basis—his interactions with the Pilot establish real character growth—but does not do a thing to lead the rest of the UNSC forces.  Considering he likely outranks almost everyone else still living, this is a huge abdication of responsibility.  To be fair, though, he also doesn’t do much leading of UNSC forces in previous games aside from leading Blue Team in Halo 5.  If that precedent has to hold, then there should have been another character to take on Sergeant Johnson’s role.  The Master Chief needed someone to organize the disparate forces and FOBs he liberates on his merry way chewing up the Banished.  A few cutscene conversations with that character across the game would allow the Master Chief to lead the UNSC forces without new game mechanics, giving the player a solid connection to the Marines around them.

The Master Chief has always suffered from a lack of connection as a character.  That’s why the super soldier without facial expressions needs others to shore up connections to the game’s world.  Losing Captain Keyes in the original was painful, because he had established himself as your commander and you thought you could save him.  Losing Sergeant Johnson in Halo 3 was worse, because he treated you as a human being and tied you into the otherwise faceless mass of the UNSC across three games.  There’s no similar loss in Infinite with any of the Marines, so they exist only as a map icon for completionism purists.  Give me a reason to care and I will, but leave it at the mercy of checking a box and I’m going to ignore it.

I recognize I just spent 1700 words to bash a game I said I enjoyed, so please don’t take this the wrong way.  It’s a fun game!  The gameplay is snappy, I enjoyed the relationship between the Master Chief and his small cohort, and I’m a sucker for mysterious alien threats that threaten humanity.  Heck, I even enjoyed all the villainous monologuing from the arch-baddie given exclusively in two forms: sinister growling or thunderous yelling (BAAARE YOUR FANGS, SPARTAN!).  This entire piece is less a spear thrown at the game designers and more an attempt to recognize potential story pitfalls to improve my own writing.  I am grateful for that lesson, just as I am grateful for the example they set with their willingness to try something new.  Here’s hoping they continue to do so.