By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Posted by: CharlesBrown33
Truth, Tartarus, the Arbiter and even Johnson are far more developed than any new Halo 4 character, and that's in Halo 2 alone.
Do tell me how exactly Truth, Tartarus and Johnson are developed... I'm itching to know, because the only time Truth is developed as a character is in Staten's Contact Harvest. The rest of the time he's just the head of this alien conglomerate who wants to kill humanity for a reason that is only explored in the novels, the only explanation the games give us is "humanity are heretics", while the massive plot twist in Contact harvest where Truth justifies his genocidal campaign against humanity through what he learns from Mendicant Bias on the Keyship.
And Tartarus is just Truth's lap-dog he keeps on a leash, he just follows orders and doesn't like Elites. There's no character growth at all in Halo 2 for him, again his character is only explored in Contact Harvest.
Likewise with Johnson, he just sticks around to make the occasional one-liner and play the role of the badass, loyal soldier - the Sergeant Apone clone. Once again, he's mainly developed in Contact Harvest, but starts to get more development as Halo 3 progresses.
You can't call Palmer's constant complaining and nagging "character development". Del Rio's lines were only there to make him look like an ass. And Lasky falls short for not putting Palmer in her place.
As I said, Del Rio is shaped from the same mould of other terrible characters like Noble Team. Lasky starts shouting at Del Rio and deliberately disobeys orders to help John go after the Didact, before being the one to convey the ultimate message of Halo 4's story that John has been struggling with - man and machine, human and soldier, what are they? Are they the same?
The Prologue starts off with the questioning of whether John was successful because he was, at his core, broken. It's continued throughout the game, Cortana asking John to find out which one of them is really the machine, and culminates in Lasky's dialogue at the end where he states that soldiers and humanity (machine and man) are no different.
John removing his armour in the Epilogue symbolises the exposure of his humanity for what's really the first time in the series - and it took a machine who really was more human than him to make him realise who he is. The conclusion has finally been drawn that he wasn't successful because he was broken at his core, but the "tools" which Halsey supplied (calling Cortana a tool itself being ironic) helped bring out the humanity in John and turned it into his greatest strength.
it's beautifully poetic and shows a level of depth and substance the Halo games have been distinctively lacking over the past 11 years.