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Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/13/11 2:16 a.m.
: I would say that's ODST actually. No matter what you do, there's no way for : the mission data Dare got for the engineer to be put to good use, because : they just flat up never need it. They have different kinds of weaknesses. At the start, ODST is just the story of a single unit regrouping. Dare's data attempts to give additional significance to that group, and explain some of the actions they take. If you can ignore that, the characters and their interactions are interesting enough, and each squadmate's path towards the end is interesting in and of itself. In a big picture sense, Reach has a similar problem. We don't clearly know what data Cortana was given, or if it is significant in any way. Those who know the novels can explain most of what Cortana knows about Forerunners and the Halo installations without the data Halsey gives her here. (Although my position has been that the end of Reach retcons what the novels tell us about the Sigma Octanus artifact-- however if I was wrong about that, then Reach's ultimate objective would be about as meaningless as ODST's, leaving only the question of whether or not the player likes these characters and cares if they live or die. I prefer ODST's abandoned urban setting to Reach's sparsely populated rural colony/deserted city one. I prefer the Custodian to Dot. I prefer Buck and Dare to Carter and Kat. Jorge is a good character, but there's not much of him there, and he can't make up for the fact that Carter seems to me even blanker than the Master Chief. Once the novelty wears off I can easily see myself getting more campaign replay out of ODST than Reach. I can easily see Reach, once all is said and done, getting the fewest total campaign playthroughs of all the games.

Death by intelligence

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