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| Re: Reach will have a great legacy. | |
| Posted By: uberfoop <atkinso2@seattleu.edu> | Date: 9/3/11 1:19 p.m. |
In Response To: Reach will have a great legacy. (Leviathan) I don't see it as going down in my eyes as an interestingly dark part of the Haloverse, because I don't see it as having been very successful in being as dark as it wants to be. It throws loads and loads of overt "dark" content at me, but drives relatively little of it home. I still think of Keyes as being the height of darkness in the series. Perhaps its impact has been blunted by Halo 3's decision to suck away the fear of the unknown and replace it with a ridiculous cartoony infection animation*, but it's execution in its own game makes it just plain work. It's even got perfect narrative placement**. But Reach? It's got a brief period of legitimate darkness and hopelessness, but it quickly shifts back into "blaze of glory and lots of hopefulness" mode. You want to do terrifying futility, give me The Great Silence, not The Magnificent Seven. Reach refuses to take on an actual dark narrative with actually dark implications. Instead, it chose to become causation for a separate story that never needed or wanted any, and in doing so it sacrificed its ability to punctuate itself***. //================ *Perhaps one of my largest complaints about Halo 3's campaign. **HCE's acts 2 and 3 follow a stylistic time-of-day scheme to connect aesthetic design and narrative flow. SC, with the sun low in the sky, opens a campaign with a fresh day, followed by AotCR's more focused midday linear battle of awesome. 343GS is the transition, and the dusk. After a long night of Library and TB, the night really is darkest before the dawn in Keyes. And that goes to make The Maw's opening cutscene, that soaring into a new morning over an apocalyptic wasteland of epic climaxishness, that much more beautiful.
***Also, I get that I'm in a minority here, but I think it sacrificed some of its ability to jive nicely with Halo 1 here as well. I think it would have been great if Reach had been strictly about the collapse of much of the UNSC's conventional war hopes**** and left all the Forerunner-mystery to Halo 1. All this crap about "a birthright from an ancient civilization" and whatnot is a massive symbolic intrusion on some of the biggest and most iconic moments in HCE, moments like the Two Betrayals opening cutscene which are executed with ridiculous brilliance. ****It also would have allowed Reach to actually be dark. Let the player take Noble Six through an epic campaign of awesome, trying save as much as possible, and then sadistically rip it all to shreds, leaving the Spartan to die in battle for nothing. //================ And if you'll excuse me, I need to go refill my asterisks container.
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