- OrderedComa
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- Noble Member
Posted by: ninjakenzen
THANK YOU. I feel as though this is the truest statement to date on the Universe forum about FoR that everybody on this site forgets about or does not even consider.
I share this exact sentiment, it only took a year for someone to call this out. Thank you for saying the words I didn't post.
I partly think the reason why, is because we have a lot of newer members who read the Halo lore recently. They don't understand the time constraints Nylund had to go through with Halo:FoR. The unexpected success that it would be. How it came out 10 years ago! When he was writing FoR the FIRST Halo game hadn't even been out yet! How he only had a few weeks and how little Bungie's overall Halo Bible had been established at that point. Who knew for sure Halo would be Microsoft's flagship game in 2001? All of this etc.
I'll be honest. I don't take people seriously in Bungie Universe on the topic of TFoR because of this exact reason. They just don't understand. You're the first out of the entirety of this site that I've read that has pointed something as simple as this out. But it rings truer when you consider this is 10 Years of established canon and if you followed it year by year and it has been solid. Only for the game to come out which we thought was actually fan service, to destroy the fans completely on just pure potential to what it could have been.
So again thank you. I read a few similar threads which touch upon this. But no-one has actually acknowledged this exact notion.
All of those reasons you just listed are exactly why holding TFoR up to such high standards and proclaiming it as god is pretty damn flawed. Because it's ten years old and wasn't written with a big huge expansive universe in mind, some things are going to have to change for the good of the overall story of the series...like the UNSC only fighting and encountering Grunts and Jackals for 25 years, or the UNSC being actually made competent and their military stronghold what you would actually expect of such a place. Writing a series like you expect it to be a hit and there to be more (that doesn't mean leaving loose ends, but it means leaving things more open and expansive in regards to setting, background, and such stuff like the Battle of Reach) is the way any story should be done...case in point being Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, there is so much mentioned in that movie leaving room for sequels or even the prequels, yet it was easily a stand-alone story, and that's the way any new series should be approached. Which Nylund really didn't do with TFoR...yet Bungie did with Combat Evolved.
Posted by: MongotheRed
Like I said, it was the LARGEST COVENANT FLEET EVER SEEN! Sheer numbers would do it. They would have had enough GRUNTS to take over Reach by themselves. There would just be too many for the marines to do anything. Plus the defense was put under command of a naval admiral, so they wouldn't have been that efficient.
...and yet half of it got wiped out before the battle even really started, leaving the number of ships fighting each other roughly even, and then there are all of the UNSC's orbital defenses and most especially the SMACs. 314 ships, even if it is the biggest collection of Covenant ships the UNSC has ever seen does not mean the Covenant are going to instantly overrun the stronghold of humanity, especially not when, as I already said, half of their fleet is wiped out before they can even engage the UNSC. And hundreds of dropships (not thousands, not millions, just plain old thousands) all splitting up for their various targets, are hardly going to overrun the defenses of those places. They're all military bases that would have fairly large numbers of troops either directly on site or nearby, armor divisions, anti-air units and turrets/defenses...hundreds of dropships are just simply not going to cut it. The account given in the book taken all on its own is retarded in the extreme.
Posted by: the real Janaka
Gah, guys, both Reach and TFoR failed to convinsingly convay the Battle and Fall of Reach, can you at least agree on that?
Which btw is not the point. It does not matter whether one of them is more convincing than the other, the book came first (FIRST!), it established canon, canon that grew profoundly into the minds of its fans for eight-nine years. The game breaks a lot in said canon, and can therefore not be taken seriously. The only way Reach can be taken into concederation is if Bungie (not 343i) openly states that it is a reimagination that describes what actually happened.
So if you want to discuss which of the alternatives is the better one, fine, but that is not the point of this thread (not that I'm particularly good att staying on topic either...).
I can sort of agree with that, I don't think either one is perfect on its own with depicting the battle...though I'd take Reach by itself any day over TFoR. In any case, they're not meant to be taken on their own, they work together, with Reach being factored into the picture, TFoR makes sense and doesn't suck at all with its depiction, the planet had already been at war for a couple weeks, which explains why the Covenant instantly know where to go (because the troops all ready there would have informed them) and why they would be able to overrun them easily (because there are already Covenant forces there and fighting). And with TFoR, you get a bigger picture of what was going on over the whole planet Reach and not just Noble's piece of the picture.
It doesn't matter at all whether the book came first, all of the books are based on the games, and unless one of the writers for the games (like Joe Staten did with Contact Harvest) comes along and puts out their own book(s) based in the series, the games always take precedence over anything else that's only authorized by the main company which in the past would be Bungie and is now 343i. Anything directly created by the people who craft the stories for the games and the overall universe and plot the direction the story is going takes precedence and authority over anything else. And no, the game never broke any canon at all.