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| Re: My H4 review - Campaign (Gameplay and Story) | |
| Posted By: Avateur <avateur@gmail.com> | Date: 1/5/13 2:31 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: My H4 review - Campaign (Gameplay and Story) (Cody Miller) I like that take in how you're going about doing it, amd I can even agree with it. It is simple, and the story progresses quite well from one event to another. I just feel like, unlike in H1, H4 doesn't do anything. Nothing happens. What's really at stake, whether due to simplicity or complex storytelling and writing? There is this awesome build up, much like in H1, where you arrive at this huge mysterious planet, and similarly to H1, there are Covenant already there. They attack. Things get a bit crazy, and you crash land. New world, roll out into awesome looking environment. It's fresh. The tone has been set just right, give or take a nonsense Halsey cinematic. In H1, the entire situation is tense because there is no help. There won't be any backup arriving. We need to round up whatever survives we can and try and get off of this ring. Or use said ring as our ultimate weapon to defeat the Covenant. Time to go to work. H4? Lucky for us, humanity happens to arrive right as we find ourselves in trouble. We need to get to the big communication dish underground, that the Covenant also happen to have interest in, and put a stop to it. Gotta get back to Halsey. Gotta warn off our convenient rescue from being sucked into the planet. Now by this point in H1, it's becoming quite clear that Chief and Cortana aren't just characters, but the ring itself is. Is it a weapon? What's it do? How's it do it? Humanity as a whole will be saved, and this is where the world where turn. In H4, what's Requiem's purpose? Well, yeah, to hold the Didact, but Requiem itself even by the end of H4 has shown no other real importance or purpose. Promethean staging ground? Does that actually matter if they can't leave Requiem? Sure, sequels and all, but I'm comparing H1 as a stand alone without an expanded universe to H4 as a stand alone without an expanded universe. So by now we're at the second act of our stories. In H1 it's the realization that we're on a weapon that can turn the tide. In H4 it's a threatening twist with the release of the Didact. He uses telekinesis, grabs you, throws you, floats off into Giant Sphere of Doom, nothing happens. H1, we find location of the control room, get there, and something so screwed up is going on that Cortana doesn't even have time to warn you before sending you off to stop Keyes. There's some sort of imminent threat, there's foreshadowing, the entire situation is tense, and whatever's going on, we have to stop it. Third acts. Just when things looked like they might be going right, or when they're already bad, they're about to get much, much worse. H4, Librarian and Del Rio and all that aside, we go off to stop the Didact. This might mean we miss our chance to get to Halsey. The emotional conflict you've spoken of is now absolutely in peril because we have a larger duty to humanity and the galaxy. We have to stop Didact. Well, Cortana has to. But she can't control the floating buildings. We're still removed from the process both as gamers and viewers. Didact floats off and leaves, we hitch a ride. H1, the Flood. Everyone and everything is being killed, we find out that the ring is actually meant to destroy Flood food, and not even the mighty Forerunners could stop the Flood from spreading across the galaxy without using these rings. We have to destroy Halo and somehow escape. And we thought the Covenant were bad. Galactic annihilation. H4, we have the Composer. Didact gets it and is going to Earth. So, Earth is in danger, right? Sort of. Like I replied to bryan newman, we're so far removed from it that it has almost no impact other than, "OH NO THAT'S EARTH! NOT EARTH! WE HAVE TO STOP IT!" Did Didact fire at any place in particular? Did he even hit a populated area? Humanity's population as a whole is around 300 million at the end of H3, and there's no indication given that the only planet left was Earth. And even then, there's no indication that wherever just got blasted happened to have a very large population anyway. How big is that beam? Did he just take out the Rocky Mountains? Who knows? There's nothing felt by it. And the final battle with Didact was a joke, what with Cortana doing all the wrangling and us doing the quick time event. Didn't do anything there. H1? Get to the Maw, fight our way through to the core room, go about blowing that core up all by ourselves, and getting the hell out of there before the thing blows. We are fully, 100% involved and invested in the story and actually have an impact on it. You know how it goes. Dust and echoes. We're all that's left. We did what we had to do. It's finished. Sure, we're just getting started, but this game had a real conclusion. Flood, stopped. Galaxy, saved. Covenant armada, defeated. Huge win for humanity. Real emotional satisfaction, great gameplay, and a story that ebbs, flows, builds, and then concludes in both a simplicistic but gripping manner. H4's story, aside from the first third of the game, largely feels like nothing is ever at stake, the player is largely indirectly involved in events, Halsey was never intended to be in the game and the opening cinematic almost implied she would be (thus setting the game off on the completely wrong tone), and Didact literally never did anything as a villain until the end when he fired his Doom Blast that, for all we knew, did nothing until that very last cinematic showing troops rolling into a blasted city (that we're still so far removed from, have no idea why that city, how many, etc). At least we know that in H2 there was a reason the Covenant landed in New Mombasa. I still can't tell you what the point of blasting New Phoenix was. Simplicity can be a good thing, as H1 has shown. But in H4 the problem may be that it's too simple. Events just sort of happen, we know we need to find Halsey, but there was never going to be a pay off because they don't even so much as recognize or affirm to the character that Halsey is nearby, or maybe she's on that station, or maybe she's on such and such ship. She was never a reality, and never even a plot device. Didact was a paper tiger who was never, ever a real threat without the Composer, and even then the execution of the Composer had me shaking my head. As seems the case with everyone else, the only emotional payoff and care of this story had to do with Chief and Cortana after the end, give or take suspension of disbelief being utterly destroyed via nuke and life-sized Cortana in a box. If H1 is the model by which we're comparing, expanded universes entirely removed, H4 falls short by a lot, and never even comes close. I know I don't have to tell you "in my opinion" but I'm sure others will read this and, well, we both know where that goes. :P
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