- Tupolev
- |
- Honorable Member
Easily Halo CE.
Aside from ODST, it's the only Halo game that has an overarching narrative flow that's both well-shaped and well-paced. The cutscenes are beautifully edited, the gameplay is absolutely top-notch and coherent with the storytelling tone, everything is wrapped together and paced perfectly, and it is a work of aesthetic genius. There is no dissonance in what it offers.
A lot of people are saying Halo 2. And while I'll admit that H2 has phenomenal cutscene writing and some nice set pieces (though I still like HCE's more), aside from that I still, to this day, consider it something of a dissapointment. The truncation of the story turned it into a bit of an episodic scramble; they tried to salvage the pacing and flow as best they could, but it's still disjointed and floppy. It had enormous potential to be epic, but I find it very hard to look at something that lacks a fluid narrative and call it "epic".
Aside from that, I also agree with most of what Rockslider has to say about it.
Halo 2 is, at some level, superficially stylistically coherent enough that I do occasionally feel drawn to play it. But whenever I do, I am quickly reminded why, six years ago, I was playing mostly HCE again within weeks of H2's release.
[Edited on 02.12.2011 11:06 PM PST]