By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Posted by: DarkAero Trooper
Posted by: MrR46
Reach's campaign is awful. It's only awful when you play it as it should be played.
Nope, it's awful. Period.
Reach is just a convoluted attempt to rehash previous moments that made the other Halo games amazing but falls on its face every time. Nightfall is a complete joke compared to The Truth and Reconciliation, the fact that that mission can be done SLASO in less than 5 minutes just shows that something's wrong - that's 1/10th of the campaign and what can be laughably called "the story".
Which brings me to my next point - the plot. There wasn't one, not until New Alexandria at least, the rest was just moving from farmland to some small bases to fight Covenant just because they were there. Then when we finally did get a 'plot', it was so contrived and horribly done it just came off as Bungie further trying to inject the 'nostalgia factor' into the minds of the players by shoehorning in Captain Keyes, Halsey and Cortana.
This brings me to my next point - the characters. There weren't any. The only one who was even remotely interesting was Kat, Jorge had potential but he was just a copypasta of Kurt from Ghosts of Onyx and he died like half way into the game. Everyone else was bland, sterile and one-dimensional. I never felt anything for Noble Team, there was no history explored. Bungie said that they wanted to deliver a "human story" (Marcus Lehto's EXACT words) with this game... SO WHY DID YOU MAKE THE PROTAGONISTS SPARTANS? They're about the most inhuman humans in the series, an extremely prevalent theme throughout the novels is that Spartans are seen as 'freaks' by most of ONI and the ODSTs, you cannot tell a "human story" with these kinds of characters.
Did Bungie not pay any attention to what they did best in ODST? Their narrative method in that game was flawless, absolutely masterful in the way they drew direct inspiration from classical literature like Dante's Divine Comedy and film noir movies. The characterisation was told through the music and the atmosphere for the Rookie, we heard what he felt which allowed the player to project themselves into him by drawing on our emotions as we played through the game. The rest was done well with the squad banter, cheesy as -blam!- at times but still there and it showed a lot about the characters we were dealing with. Seeing things from THEIR perspective for half the game was a major way of developing them each and ultimately made me care about them.
So why didn't they do this in Reach? Why weren't Six and Kat friends? They were both from S-III Beta Company, why wasn't there any meaningful interaction between these two characters who would have grown up together? How about a scene where Kat is torn between going to save Six or Carter and throughout the game we see flashbacks to both her time on Onyx with Six and her time in Noble Team with Carter. This kind of thing would show a great deal of character development, as well as getting the player emotionally involved and wondering what happens next.
I'd also like to bring up the fact that there are 6 main characters in this game, only 2 of them are actually relevant to what can laughably be called the story - Six and Kat. Jorge, Emile, Carter and Jun could have not been there and there would be no difference to the ultimate climax of this abomination.
I could go on here, but from the reasons above this game was nothing more than a conglomeration of missed opportunities because the writers were either too lazy or too stupid to make a meaningful story with detailed characters in order to tell this "human story".
[Edited on 07.04.2012 8:37 AM PDT]