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| Master Chief as a character *Long* | |
| Posted By: Ibeechu | Date: 12/22/11 7:40 p.m. |
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This post might be kind of disjointed and incoherent but I want to write down some thoughts I've been having about Halo's story and characters. You guys probably know this series, Extra Credits, on Penny Arcade but I only just discovered it the other day when SonGoharotto made this post. Now I've been watching it all back to back and I just now watched the Learning From Other M episode, about how poorly characterizing Samus worked out ( http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/learning-from-other-m ). It got me thinking about how 343 has said that the Reclaimer trilogy is going to explore the Chief more as character and less as a blank slate. First of all, it was refreshing to see other people had the same feelings I do about games as art. I've written huge treatises on this forum about that in the past so I won't go into depth here. But I completely agree with these guys that games have barely scratched the surface of their full potential. In one post a while ago I said how when someone makes a version of Tetris that can make me depressed and introspective, it'll be the greatest artistic discovery in maybe the last several centuries. One of these Extra Credits episodes talks about something similar, how the old arcade game Missile Command deeply affected its creator, who had based the 6 cities in it on the 6 cities around where he lived. According to that episode, he would wake up in the middle of the night from nuclear-war related nightmares for years after developing the game. THAT is the potential of games. It seemed silly to me when I watched that episode but the idea is rock solid; missile command forces you to balance your resources in a way where you have to choose who lives or dies, and there's no winning. There's certainly not a "correct" answer. Games often force the player to make a choice, but rarely do they make the player question why he or she made that choice. Anyway, if you haven't heard of Extra Credits, check it out. Ok, back on topic. The episode I linked talks about how Team Ninja/D-Rockets/Nintendo gave Samus a backstory and a personality in Metroid: Other M, and how much it sucked. Not necessarily the backstory, but the way they told it fell flat. They told it through monologues in cutscenes which might have worked in a film, but Other M is a game. And this is what I'm hoping 343 DOESN'T do to the Master Chief. I don't want to learn who he is through flashbacks or an inner monologue. I want to experience, first hand, who he is, by seeing what how he handles situations that are more complex than "shooting his way out." We know he was kidnapped when he was 6 and forced into the Spartan program. But even Fall of Reach hasn't really explored how this has affected his mentality. We know that the Chief is great at killing things. But even after Halo 2 when the Elites became sympathetic characters, the Chief didn't really show any kind of remorse or anything. Is that part of his character? I don't think so. Halo 2, at least for me and I know at least for some other people here, did a great job at making you feel BAD for what you did in Halo 1. It gave you a new context for your actions. The Elites weren't calling the Chief "demon" to be cute or even because he was an asshole. To them, he was actively trying to destroy their religion. After the Elite uprising, he's now redeemed and respected for making the Elites realize that they had in fact been tricked and lied to and were wrong about their religion. That has really, really interesting implications for both the Chief and the Anti-Covenant that hasn't been explored. I'm not saying they should necessarily be explored in Halo 4; just that they're interesting and I'd hate to see never explored at all. At the end of the Extra Credits video, they mention how a common argument FOR Other M is that a backstory in any form is inherently better than a blank slate, and how they disagree with that. I guess I agree with them, because if a backstory is told poorly, or is less interesting than what the audience had in their own minds, it will fall flat (they specifically mention Anakin Skywalker and the Clone Wars as an example). And that's what made me think of how this applies to the Chief. So far we DO have a canonical and well-defined backstory. But it's always been very observatorial. There are a few times, especially in The Flood, where we get to see what the Chief is thinking. But it's hardly ever more than him just trying to figure out what's going on. So this is where I see an untapped area of the Chief as a character that 343 could exploit. And if they do it well, it'll be amazing. The Chief, for one reason or another, has never seemed to think about what he's doing or why; he just does it. There are times when his humanity comes through, especially when he interacts with Cortana. He doesn't do it through words, but he does through his actions. The Arrival cutscene in Halo 3 gets me every single time, when he looks at her empty data chip and remembers her. That shit is powerful and I feel it's constantly been underexplored. Saying that the Chief is a man of few words isn't a good excuse. Wall-E is also a "man" of few words, and we still know exactly what he's thinking and feeling simply because of his choices, actions, and reactions. Up until now, the Chief hasn't really had to make any tough choices. There's always a most strategic or logical choice that he can make, or he gets orders from higher up which makes a choice for him. The last line of the ending cutscene of the last mission in Halo 3, when Cortana says, "It's been an honor serving with you, John," that's always been probably my favorite moment in the entire series. Prior to the announcement of Halo 4, I had always hated the notion that there could be more sequels involving the Chief and Cortana. Their story was done as far as I was concerned. Their arc was over and whatever happened to them, whether the Chief died in cryo, or whether Cortana eventually went Rampant and stopped functioning, that was all completely unimportant to me. And then, when Halo 4 was announced, at first I was pissed. But then I started to change my mind, and suddenly I was excited to know what was going to happen. It took me a while to figure out how I had changed my mind from my completely adamant stance in just a few short weeks. The way I'm looking at this trilogy, and the way I hope 343 will be treating it, is as a reboot of the Chief's character. Well, not necessarily a reboot, but as a starting point to show off a new version of the Chief. In fact, in my mind, after Cortana delivered that line, he ceased to be the Chief. He was now John; a human who is going to have the opportunity to make his own choices and hopefully even reflect on them. He's going to encounter situations, morally or strategically, where there isn't a right answer. He's not going to be able to make his decisions based on orders from higher up. As strange as it sounds, I see the original trilogy now as the Chief as a toddler. Why I'm excited about the Reclaimer Trilogy is because he's going to get to mature. He's going to have to start choosing on his own and, for the first time, he's going to have to take responsibility for those choices. This is exciting. 343, pretty please don't fuck it up. Cliffs:
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| Replies: |
| Master Chief as a character *Long* | Ibeechu | 12/22/11 7:40 p.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | SonGoharotto | 12/22/11 8:07 p.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | padraig08 | 12/23/11 3:00 a.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | Louis Wu | 12/23/11 5:17 a.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | padraig08 | 12/23/11 7:01 p.m. |
| Grade-A post right here *NM* | ZackDark | 12/23/11 11:37 p.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | Joony Joon | 12/23/11 3:51 a.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | Flynn J Taggart | 12/23/11 4:30 a.m. |
| Re: Master Chief as a character *Long* | Quirel | 12/23/11 1:07 p.m. |
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