- OrderedComa
- |
- Noble Member
Posted by: CTN 0452 9
I am not a fan of Reach's story. I have made several posts trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes it lacking. I have blamed NOBLE's colorfulness, bad voice acting and bad characters among other things. You make a very compelling case for the lack of character development, but I am going to disagree with you about that being the true reason that Reach didn't live up to its storytelling potential.
The real reason that Reach's story didn't work is that Bungie didn't use the inevitability to its full potential. The movie that has done this extremely well is United 93. (I know a movie about September 11 will be more emotional than a movie about a fictional planet.) For the sake of this I am going to focus on the ending. The whole movie you know that the movie ends with the plane crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. What Paul Greengrass did, instead of making the situation seem hopeless for the last half of the movie, gave you hope. Once the passengers start planning he makes it seem like they are going to take back the plane and live happily ever after. It's not until the end, when you look out the cockpit windows and see the field growing closer that you are forced to realize that everyone on that plane is going to die.
Reach did something similar to this, with the part of the story that ends in LNoS, where you destroy the supercarrier in the hopes that it will save Reach. The problem was that after the larger fleet showed up the game basically says "you're screwed" and the rest of the game is trying to save some civilians, trying to stop the Covenant from getting some intel (sort of, still adds to the no hope atmostphere) and getting a small part of an AI off of the planet.
What they should have done is something where you feel like you have a chance to save the planet, right up until the very end. At the start of the last mission you should look up to see slipspace ruptures for over 100 ships. Instead of delivering Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn you should have to (insert Reach-saving plot device here). Just as you're about to stop it (not so close that it's overly cliche, but close enough that you feel as though you're going to make it). That new fleet starts glassing Reach.
That isn't what Bungie wanted for the game though, they wanted you to feel like you accomplished something by the end of the game, that's why they had you deliver the fragment of Cortana to the Autumn and why they had you man the gun to save it. And I felt like they could have saved Reach by destroying the LNoS, only to have all hope dashed to pieces when immediately after the first fleet arrives at Reach. And then they had to have some sort of filler to hook you back up with Noble team, which the New Alexandria levels were in a way, and they were to show the despair and hopelessness pervading Reach during the Covenant's attack, so you could be sent to SWORD Base again and then undergo Noble's final mission.