- Plasma Prestige
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- Intrepid Legendary Member
Expressing my strong liberal views without shame. Favorite quotes below:
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
"One starts to live when he can live outside himself."
- Albert Einstein
While I'm aware of some of Halo 3's weaknesses, I'd like to hear your take on it.
Halo 3's campaign existed for the sole purpose of ending a trilogy. There was nothing meaningful or interesting embedded within the story. In CE, we were introduced to this mysterious new Universe through the environments we wandered and enemies we fought; in Halo 2, we were shown the other side of the coin neglected in Halo CE--the Covenant. While both CE and Halo 2 advanced the plot of the trilogy, they also did something more that added flesh to the bones of the Halo Universe. Halo 3 did no such thing.
While Halo 4 also advances the plot, it also develops the interesting theme of man vs. machine, something that has been touched on previously in the Halo franchise through the Spartan program and the emergence of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence. Halo 4 was the culmination of the relationship between John and Cortana and begged the question of who was more machine than man: the 7 feet tall super-soldier who displays minimal emotion, or the deteriorating AI whose every line of code insists that she is human?
I know it was built for colonization/ONI propagonda/whatever you want it to be built for, and it was being built prior to the war ending. But to pull a plot device as big as that out of thin air is bold in a bad way, and so "conveniently" fits right into the plot. Besides, I mentioned it was being built before the war.
To be fair, it wasn't pulled out of thin air. Halo Glasslands (as flawed as the book is) introduced it briefly and The Thursday War elaborated. It isn't difficult to believe that ONI had sanctioned its development some years before the war ended. Besides being a cool setpiece, though, the Infinity was not an integral part of Halo 4's campaign anyway.