Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Halo 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved and minor spoilers for Halo 3.
Spare a thought for the developers of Halo 2. I know, "They created a piece of entertainment that lives on forever in the Video Game Hall of Fame and then they got to do it a second time", but think of it this way: If you've made a groundbreaking video game, you've forced lightning to strike. If you're hammering out a follow-up to that offering, you're trying to get lightning to strike twice. A developer on the sequel of an all-timer video game must put more meat on its bones without leaning on novelties. They must remix mechanics without flattening what made audiences flock to the game in the first place. They must sate the demand for a more graphically lustrous product when they just saw their first kid out the door, and the software and hardware of the industry will only have nominally advanced.
During the tense countdown to Halo 2, there were fewer superstar video games in the sky than there are today. When one hit it big, proportionally more hopes were tacked to its sequel. For Halo 2, the pressures of sequelisation risked not just punching a hole in it but sinking Bungie entirely.[1] For their second movement, Bungie wanted to revamp the engine from Halo: Combat Evolved, so they disassembled it. Yet, after a year, they'd still not put it back together, leaving other software engineers unable to test, bolt in, and burnish features. Slotting in the new physics engine, Havok, also threw the software engineers for a loop. The studio was further sandbagged by overambition and its attempt to incubate games parallel to this operation.[2][3][4]
When Combat Evolved's development rolled to a stop, there were about forty creators working at Bungie, not including testers.[5] And yet, there was a time during the Halo 2 dev cycle when the company was trying to temper four whole games:
- Phoenix, a spiritual successor to their fantasy RTS series, Myth.
- Halo 2.
- Gypsum, a third-person brawler.
- Monster Hunter, an Oni-like. Oni was Bungie's cyberpunk platformer TPS released in 2001. Their Monster Hunter is not associated with the Capcom game of the same name.[2][6]
Bungie was playing Twister. The former project lead on Combat Evolved, Jason Jones, was serving two masters, heading up both Halo 2 and Phoenix.[2][6][7] Jones later left the Halo 2 posse to work full-time on the other project, while Bungie co-founder, Alex Seropian, who'd brought decisive authority to the studio, had walked out the door.[2][4][6] Wanting Halo 2 to be the best it could be, its team had become a high-efficiency idea factory, but the production teams were isolated in their respective monasteries and churned out solitary pieces of a game with no interjambs between them. Everyone had a different idea of what Halo 2 should be, but no leader to put their foot down and tell them what plan would be written in ink.[2][3][4][8] Jaime Griesemer, a designer on Combat Evolved, ended up holding the reins of Halo 2's design, but in his words, he "didn't know anything about leading people or directing progress".[2]
The studio collapsed into a pile of limbs. Phoenix, Gypsum, and Monster Hunter were all cancelled, and it was the best thing that could have happened for Halo 2. The hands consolidated behind one game, and Jones returned as head of project.[2][6][9] But Bungie wasn't out of the woods yet. The campaign they had was unshippable, so they jettisoned it. The Halo 2 levels we know were built after the erasure of the original story mode, in the space of about a year.[2][6][8] The crunch necessary to do that shattered relationships and tested some marriages to the point of divorce. Jones was physically ill from day one, and mission design lead, Paul Bertone, sounded harrowed by the experience:
"It was basically a death march to the end. [...] Just a death march."[2]
Halo 2 head of engineering, Luke Timmins, put it like this:
"The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company. It is the most I've ever seen humans work in a year and a half. It was brutal."[1]
A Bungie almost dissolved doesn't sound in any shape to cast a follow-up to the illustrious Halo. That the game they thrust into orbit is still considered one of the greatest shooters of all time is nothing short of divine intervention. It is twenty years to the day since Halo 2's maiden voyage, and today, we will go level-by-level to reflect on the Xbox shooter in all its glory. This is a Halo 2 retrospective.
The Heretic
If returning pilgrims thought Halo would open on the series' symbol of hope, the Master Chief, they thought wrong. In The Heretic, Halo 2's prologue cutscene, the Chief has a counterweight: the Arbiter. This Elite was the Covenant's commander at the battle of Halo in Combat Evolved. Blame for the sacred ring's destruction falls on his frame. Under this heading, I'll comment on The Heretic, as well as narrative nibbles from the two following missions, The Armory and Cairo Station, as they jigsaw together to be cohesive introductions for the Chief and the Arbiter.
Cairo Station uses back-and-forth cuts between the protagonists to contrast the honouring of Sergeant Johnson and the Chief against the public disgracing of the Covenant's holy warrior. The alien religion we viewed as a clan of barbarous space monsters in Halo 1 slowly opens to give us a glimpse of its hidden complexities. The cross-species "High Council" judges the Arbiter, and the Brutes, the clenched fists of the church, will administer his penance. The Council is steered by three magi from an enfeebled and previously unseen species: the Prophets. Where Combat Evolved was an action mystery, as we did not yet know about the installation's purpose or the Flood's existence, Halo 2 is an action-political thriller, with the politics amounting to a reorganisation of the Covenant. The Heretic imparts sympathy for the devil by introducing more detestable species than the Elites: the Machiavellian Prophets and the bellicose Brutes.
On the UNSC's side of the fence, Sergeant Johnson's witty patter enlivens the celebrations, although audiences are liable to feel confusion over his inclusion. In Combat Evolved, he was dogpiled by Flood Infection Forms and left for dead. The novel Halo: First Strike, released in 2003, claimed Johnson was immunised against Flood infection by a neurological condition called Boren's Syndrome.[10] However, even that explanation is later called into question by the Halo paratexts, and the games do not remark on his invulnerability.[11]
Johnson takes a tram ride with the Master Chief, but the Chief's reticence to speak makes it a little awkward. These cinematics host the first mentions of Reach in the Halo games, the grievously lost creche of the Spartans. The Chief and Johnson's medal ceremony is cut short as the aliens who glassed that world trespass on Earth's orbit. Only the Chief and the UNSC can stop the planet from being reduced to a second Reach. It's often said that Halo is about being a badass unbeatable supersoldier, and that's kinda true, but at the same time, a key theme of Halo is that kicking Covie ass doesn't necessarily mean a future for humanity. As Ed Fries (former VP of game publishing at Microsoft) says, Halo is about winning the battle but losing the war.[2][12] We couldn't stop the Pillar of Autumn from capsizing, we didn't exterminate the Flood at Halo, and we couldn't prevent the Covenant from finding Earth.
The Heretic displays newfound verve in Bungie's cinematography, albeit it with some cheesy snap zooms. What's more, the human models look like they're sculpted from modelling clay. Some of these shots are also too close for comfort, but you have to remember they were composed to appear on CRTs. When screens were smaller and blurrier, having a character's face fill the whole viewport was how you revealed their emotion to an audience. 343 Industries' Halo 2: Anniversary Edition pushes characters back into the stages of our wider LCDs. We're getting a little technical now, and the Chief will need to do the same before he can stand against the combined forces of the Covenant.
The Armory
Let's retreat to back before the Cairo Station cutscenes. One convenience of having your protagonist be an animated suit of armour is that you can redesign them while maintaining narrative continuity. You just dress them in a new set of duds. In The Armory, the Chief visits his tailor and is upgraded from his original MJOLNIR Mark V suit to what would become his iconic look: the MJOLNIR Mark VI. We tend to lock in on faces when looking at people, and we do the same with helmets on suits of armour, making the change to the Master Chief's helmet the most consequential part of this reimaging.
The visor for the Mark VI moves away from the old widescreen style. In doing so, it gives a better sense of a face shape and where the Chief is looking from the outside. The new helmet features more detailing, and the flimsy fins atop the Mark V are replaced by a stocky guard that overhangs the eyeline, giving it an air of impregnability. The amber glass complements the forest green plating of the armour, and the new viewport explains the new HUD.
Cairo Station
Like bloodthirsty buccaneers, the Covenant has boarded Cairo Station, and we are going to clash cutlasses with them. They will slowly burn through a bulkhead before charging in, spewing a hail of plasma. The lull gives new players time to get comfortable with their movement and a UI fresh out of the box. While the Combat Evolved Heads-Up Display only informed us of the armaments in our hands, 2's HUD adds vital data on the items we could switch to. We can review how many of each type of grenade we have in the top left, and in the top right, we can check the gun on our back and how much ammo we're carrying for it. Meanwhile, the shield meter has journeyed south.
The more directly a UI element is linked to our survival, the more critical it is that we can quickly scan it. The designer should also minimise the time it takes our eyes to travel between indicators on the screen. They can do this by placing related features near each other. Combat Evolved situated our shield meter in the top right and our radar in the bottom left, meaning that if we wanted to check how close we were to defeat and where nearby enemies were, we had to move our eyes almost the whole diagonal of the screen. That's the maximum travel time possible on a TV with a width greater than its height.
We often want to inspect our shield after our motion detector (or vice-versa) because our current vulnerability will determine how gung-ho we can be in assaulting the enemy. If we're at full shields, we want to know where the Covenant stand so we can engage, and if we're flashing red and beeping, we want to locate them so we can stay out of their firing cone. Halo 2, unlike Halo 1, places the shield bar above the minimap, allowing you to check the two simultaneously. Although, it does also shrink that meter, meaning we have a less precise idea of our current shield value and cannot make decisions that are as informed when protecting our vital organs.
There is more of an onus on keeping abreast of your shield in 2 as the game has dumped the health system from Combat Evolved. CE wasn't getting much use out of the HP tabs. The line between no shield and no health was as thin as your finger, so it streamlines the play if you can forget about picking up first aid kits altogether. There is still a health variable on the games' backend, but it is recharging, it is hidden, and you can't replenish it with collectable packs. Recharging health on top of a recharging shield might sound redundant, but the extra buffer serves the same function for this FPS that grace frames do in a platformer. Players deserve a little redemption when there are enemies that can tear down shields like cheap curtains and your health tops up slower than your forcefield, so recklessness is still penalised.
The elastic health and the jumbling of the helmet display don't require much correction of your posture, but returning players may find themselves discombobulated by Halo 2's weapon reshuffle. The default loadout from Combat Evolved is not the default for 2. The Assault Rifle, the principal weapon you'd associate with Spartan 117, has been discharged, and in its place, we get the Submachine Gun. You might have thought the Assault Rifle shot wide, but you ain't seen nothing yet. The SMG sneezes bullets, and you must hold it down firmly to compensate for its kickback. I've lifted Jackals off the ground with its force. You can now dual-wield weapons, and if you're brandishing two SMGs at a time, you'll have to think about reloading with a rhythm you didn't have to build up with the Assault Rifle and its capacious clips. The liberal cone of damage on the SMG means that when firing at a distance, you'll crave something with laser precision.
That laser would have previously come in the form of the Magnum, but in the stock loadout, it has been rotated out for the Battle Rifle. Where you can find the Handgun, it is stunted, both to account for the dual-wielding system and for the old M6D being a little too big for its briches. There will be no more felling Hunters with a single shot to the back. You actually have to waltz their waltz now, which provides a more substantial skirmish for the player. The original Pistol sits behind a fence on the multiplayer map Tombstone, the confiscated merchandise taunting the player.
You've not been downgraded, however. The BR55 Battle Rifle overshadows the Magnum as Halo's first scoped precision weapon. The player is both better tested on and rewarded for their exactness with the right stick. The Sniper Rifle is also a high-skill, high-damage precision weapon, but you don't need to have the same steadiness to penetrate skulls with the BR that you do with the Sniper, and the BR55 reloads and fires at a speed fast enough to challenge Elites and Jackals face-to-face. The Sniper, obviously, does not. There's nothing like sweeping your Battle Rifle crosshair across a phalanx of Grunts, popping each of their heads like party balloons. These marksman implements are more the stuff of military shooters than sci-fi shooters, the latter often vying to create more outlandish guns, and the former after the kind of instrument at home in the hands of a tier one operator, but Halo is a military sci-fi.
If you want some target practice with the Battle Rifle, Cairo Station introduces two new cadavers in waiting: the Drones and the Jetpack Elites. They both move on three axes, meaning that just scanning left to right with your weapon won't cut it. There is a new verticality in the gunplay that you might be more familiar with from lightgun games and on-rails shooters. Combat Evolved did have enemies that would shower you with plasma from clifftops, pushing you to look skyward, and Halo 2 does, too, but they aren't nearly as mobile as these airborne menaces.
I think sci-fi could do with more sapients like the Drones who are intelligent without being humanoid. They like to alternate between moving and firing, but you can reduce them to a green stain on the floor with a single headshot, while the Jetpack Elites don't fly as twitchily but also don't stay in one spot nearly as long and like to keep their distance. So, for both, the BR, our long-range headshot machine, works wonders. The Drones are the Grunts of the heavens, dropped with a single headshot, while the airborne Elites are just as shielded while levitating as they were on terra firma. The sound design begs you to raise your volume loud enough to get the full effect of your firearms. The Battle Rifle gives you three shots straight from the devil's throat, the SMGs are handheld rock concerts, and there's a surreal Doppler effect as you move away from alarms on the station.
Cairo Station is Bungie's bid to improve on Combat Evolved's prologue: The Pillar of Autumn. In both missions, the Covenant boards a UNSC craft, and the Chief puts his whole ass into fighting off the invaders, but the battle overflows onto the ground below. The Pillar was an intergalactic submarine, all confining tubes with docking ports siphoning in bestial fanatics. The platform above Egypt has its cold, silver corridors, but it also has launch bays, plazas, and even an interlude on the station's shifting exterior where we try to saddle the bronco.
The extravehicular section has the game's sound team at its highest concept. The vacuum of space muffles all muzzle fire, and as we approach the airlock on the far side, the song Impend debuts. Most personalities on the Halo 2 soundtrack can be sorted into one of two camps: rearrangements of Halo 1 music or original compositions by established bands like Incubus and Breaking Benjamin. Bar its first few bars, taken from the romantic lament of Brothers in Arms, Impend is original incidental music and deserves to share a shelf with A Walk in the Woods or Perilous Journey, having you bob your head as you step into a den of assassins. Choral vocalisations glow softly behind record-scratch electronica and industrial thumps that sound like they're emanating from the structure's hull.
In the relative warmth of the satellite interior, reinforcements arrive through hoses that pierce the windows: parasitic worms on the skin of our ship. The Covenant's arrival is ad hoc and observable, with the level prioritising dynamic environments: The ship's undulating chassis and the lift we ride down a diagonal track. On both, we must roll with the punches of moving enemies and fluid geometry. At the finale of Cairo Station is a tickling clock: a nuke that the zealots have armed. This is not any bomb a human would build: it is a silver sea urchin, a reminder of Artist Shi Kai Wang's oceanic inspiration for the Covenant.[2] The bomb's disarmament begins the coolest cutscene of the trilogy. Fuck it, let's just put an edited version of the script in here:
CORTANA: Me, inside your head, now.
The Master Chief loads Cortana into his neural interface and touches his hand to the bomb. Cortana freezes its countdown.
MASTER CHIEF: How much time was left?
CORTANA: You don't wanna know.
MASTER CHIEF: (To Admiral Hood) Sir, permission to leave the station.
ADMIRAL HOOD: For what purpose, Master Chief?
MASTER CHIEF: To give the Covenant back their bomb.
ADMIRAL HOOD: Permission granted.
The Master Chief grabs the bomb and drags it into a cargo lift, its spines sparking against the floor.
CORTANA: I know what you're thinking, and it's crazy.
MASTER CHIEF: So stay here.
CORTANA: Unfortunately for us both, I like crazy. Just one question: What if you miss?
MASTER CHIEF: I won't.
I'll describe what happens next as it appears in Halo 2: Anniversary Edition. The Chief lets the bomb's mass pull him out of the station's cargo doors and past allied ships, their breached bulkheads belching flame. He becomes caught in the blue flare of Marathon-Class engines. The Chief rearms the urchin inside a Covenant Cruiser with a miniature star for a power source. He pushes off of it and rides the resulting explosion to slam into the roof of the UNSC Frigate Forward Unto Dawn. As always, Johnson has a quip for the occasion:
"For a brick, he flew pretty good".
Bungie may have 343 Industries beat when it comes to single-player design, but at these pre-baked cutscenes, 343 is industry-leading. Scripts for action media get chided as lunkhead filler to go in between car chases and shootouts, but they require a healthy economy of communication. Not just anyone can win over an audience in a line or two, and Halo is full of quotable wisecracks. But while we may have cast a Covenant flagship down and had a witty one-liner to deliver while doing it, the empire still lands on Earth. We'll have to take the fight to shore.
Outskirts
In Combat Evolved, we didn't get a taste of civilian life in the year 2552, but Outskirts takes us to an inhabited planet for the first time: Earth. That's where you live. The promotional material for Halo 2 had been boiling up excitement for the invasion of our home world. The announcement trailer for the game had the Chief falling towards a blue marble shrouded by Covenant destroyers. The I Love Bees ARG confirmed that the Covenant would reach our homeworld, and the Halo 2 demo at E3 2003 mashed together inchoate versions of Outskirts and the second Earth level: Metropolis.
The Halo 2 preview was one of the most vaunted E3 has ever known, but such demos are often speculative, and you'll remember that Halo 2's Campaign coalesced at the eleventh hour, meaning that more than a year before release, there was no true Earth segment to show to fans.[3][4][13][14] Like many E3 demos, this one was a statement of intent rather than a cross-section of the final product.[2][4][15] The announcement trailer and the E3 preview used a graphics engine that included real-time lighting and shadow calculations that didn't graduate development, and there were other discrepancies.[2][3][16][17]
In the E3 quick look, the Master Chief is surrounded by action on all sides. Medics triage bloodied soldiers; marines hunker down behind barricades, giving active sitreps; a Plasma Cannon demolishes the wall of a nearby building. Constraints would conspire to reduce the number of setpieces and actors in the Kenyan city of New Mombasa. All that, I can stomach, but not the loss of the demo's futuristic aesthetic.
When Johnson and the Chief flew into this stack of urbanity in 2003, it was a layered reef of electrical filaments. The New Mombasa we eventually drop into in Outskirts is glum tan parcels as far as the eye can see. It's a missed opportunity to show how architecture might have advanced in the last five centuries. The preview projects a will by Bungie to coat a city in chrome, so the drab haystack Kenya we get is almost certainly a byproduct of Halo 2's head falling off during development. The Anniversary Edition Mombasa, however, is a tourist's paradise, restoring the structurescape to its former brilliance and then some.
But enough graphics. Let's talk level design. Long before Horde Mode was a thing, Outskirts stationed you in a courtyard with sharp-fanged aliens closing in on you from all directions. When you kill one platoon, the next could arrive from any number of alleyways and rooftops. Like a hot pepper, this sequence builds, with the vanguard consisting of the Grunts, Elites, and Drones we fought starside before the stage reintroduces Jackals, and then finally, two Hunters break down the courtyard gates with the strength of mama bears. Instead of having a Fuel Rod Gun for an arm, the Hunters now fire a sizzling green beam, a velvet rope we cannot cross. Some of the troops are glamorous enough to arrive by limousine: the new Phantom dropship tells the old Spirit to take a hike. The Phantom fires three "Shade Turrets" that the resilient player can knock off, reducing the flak flying their way.
During this section, the game elbows you to try out the new stationary Turret and weapon-trading mechanics. The Turret is an obliging comrade when you need to drill through a lot of targets and know you won't be going anywhere anytime soon. Weapon trades with allies let you get your plated mits on UNSC firearms and clips even deep within enemy territory. In the atrium in Outskirts, there's a UNSC soldier with a Sniper Rifle, which some players won't be able to resist.
Halo 2's line of reasoning is that if you can see a character with a tool, you should be able to use it. That applies not just to your compatriots' arms but also to enemy weapons, as we can, for the first time, draw Energy Swords and hijack vehicles. There's a moment in the on-stage E3 demo where a Ghost is speeding towards the Master Chief, and it looks like he's about to be splattered. At the last second, he jumps onto the Ghost's bonnet and kicks the driver out. It sent viewers into a frenzy.
You can get your first taste of hijacking on Outskirt's beaches, and Ghosts are always a choice pick. A Banshee can fly away, a Wraith can't be commandeered, but a Ghost is light and terrestrial, small enough prey to take down with our bare hands. When we can hijack, we no longer have to plink away at hostiles' machines with rifles, and even when our Warthog or Scorpion break down in vehicle country, we can still hitch a ride. It's a mechanic so instrumental and so intimately associated with the series that it's easy to forget there was a time when Halo didn't let you board enemy automobiles.
On the seafront, Covenant drop pods kick up sand, the concept of drop pods having been popularised by Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000. These fast-entry vehicles allow enemies to appear just about anywhere without a roof, and the coronal ejections beneath them underscore their arrival. While Halo fans fondly associate drop pods with the UNSC's Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, we see the Covenant taking the fast way down long before any human.
Between the plaza and your picturesque beach are about five miles of hell. The Covenant bombardment has cracked buildings right down the middle, and crafty Jackal snipers nest in their innards, lying in wait. They blend into the shadows until the instant they take aim, their headpieces gleaming gems among the ruins. Their Beam Rifles are so piercing that I'm scared they might just fire through the TV and kill me in real life. They can clear about half your shield in a single shot on Normal, and it only gets worse from there. Their purple rain does not let up until the end of the following mission, Metropolis, and yet, the Jackal Snipers are only the tip of the difficulty spike.
When I say "difficulty spike", I'm partially referring to Outskirts and Metropolis. They are remarkably steep hills for players to run up in the first act of a shooter. But on the wide vista of the series, all of Halo 2 is also a difficulty spike. Picking over the crime scene, we can tell that when Bungie rushed this campaign onto the Xbox, their priority was ensuring every prop and actor was in place and regulating enemy strength came second. It's made this sequel an antihero among Halo devotees, and the game is nigh impossible on Legendary difficulty. Believe it or not, Bungie was so busy that there's still another couple of legs to Outskirts I've not reviewed yet. The invading fleet has cut the wires of the city, leading to creepy encounters with Elites in unlit interiors. The stage ends with a road trip along a subterranean highway. It's a shot of pure tunnel vision.
The sheer amount of level down here is TARDIS-like for an Xbox game. Really, I'd say the same for all of Halo 2. Console hardware goes further than PC hardware as console developers are able to optimise for one package of parts instead of catering to every kind of consumer computer in common use. Still, older platforms create whole worlds with what we'd think of as a thimble of memory, even for a console. Every city highway and Covenant nave in Halo 2 squeezes into 64MB of RAM and 64MB of graphical memory.[18][19] Sure, you can selectively load and unload environments to push that module to its limits, but only between loading stitches, and even then, keeping your load times down is an art, one that looks effortless under Bungie's hands.
In Outskirts' nearly seamless tunnels, there lurk Shadows. That's a new Covenant vehicle: the Shadow. It gets dumped by the time of Halo 3, so much of a freak that even the Elites weren't allowed to keep it. The transport is a propelled arch, the back of which is its own walkway. It can drop off other vehicles and uses a Plasma Turret for a guard dog. It doesn't add much to have a Ghost laid by a carrier as opposed to just appearing on the map, and the Wraith already has a Plasma Turret on it. However, the Shadow lets you go toe-to-toe with a Plasma Turret gunner without dodging the Wraith's dragon fire, which would be too overwhelming in quarters already rife with enemies. It is also bracing to have moments where you can gradually close the gap between your jeep and a vehicle like this.
Metropolis
To turn up the heat, this sequel increases the percentage of runtime that's spent burning rubber and the amount of carnage during rallies. No sooner have we left the arterial road of Outskirts than we're bottled up in a Scorpion with its booming cannon. Check out how Cortana is able to remain pragmatic and sober while also finding the humour in the Chief's escapades. You got it during that scene where we dive-bombed into the Covenant Cruiser. Here, she waits until our heavy armour is dropped off and then tells Sergeant Johnson, "Thanks for the tank. He never gets me anything".
Where Outskirts starts with us imprisoned in one courtyard and pits us against escalating grades of foot soldiers, Metropolis's introduction has us slowly trundling across a bridge, slugging increasingly vicious Covenant machinery. This chapter is a 3D Galaga that, like the Outskirts courtyard, can teach new players the different enemy types while evoking nostalgia for those returning. The long cooldown on the Scorpion's Turret sets the tempo. You can count it out: One, two, blam. One, two, blam. Because you'll be waiting a couple of seconds for the next round to plonk into the chamber, you can't spam shots and hope to get away with it, especially because the sooner you can get rid of Ghosts or Banshees, the less time they have to eat through your tank. The Wraith blasts are almost enemies in their own right, bullet-time kamikaze pilots that test our skill at plotting the movement of projectiles.
In the original Halo 2, rolling uphill allows us a view of the city burning beneath the gut of the occupying Cruiser. In Anniversary, the obelisks of New Mombasa rise from the stone in the shape of electrical coils and dams. On the far side of the bridge, roadblocks force us out of the Scorpion, and we switch back to the compact Warthog under the most awkward circumstances possible. You need to drive your pickup onto a narrow ramp while fussy marines refuse to climb aboard but are happy to stand right in your headlights as you drive towards them. You can leave them pounding asphalt, but you'll probably want to play taxi with the soldiers because one of them has a Rocket Launcher and can be your missile Turret.
Our transfer onto the A road is a fake out. We will not stick to the motorway for as long as we did in Outskirts, as the game tries on a range of environments with a heavy emphasis on vehicles. There's a stadium where we can selectively kill Elites and Jackals perched on the beams while Warthogs and Ghosts lock horns below. There's another area I've had to restart more times than I care to admit: On roads as wide as Qatar's, we must eradicate two Wraiths, some Jackal snipers, and other incoming troops with nothing more than a Warthog or Ghost. There's a neat loop in this district which lets you disconnect from the conflict for a moment while your shield recharges and then routes you right back to it.
If you're predicting the first act won't get any harder than this, you don't know Halo 2. In the Battle of New Mombasa, the Scarab is the Covenant's ace in the hole. A four-legged walking military base, it was the Scarab that brought down the Chief and Johnson's Pelican dropship. After giving the Wraiths what for, we watch the Scarab crawl up and over a building we're standing on. Seeing a moving character scale the level geometry is a sight to behold, but we're not here to gawk at this insect. We're here to kill it.
We shut down the Scarab by jumping from a bridge onto its back and then descending into its control room. Wriggling about like a smaller bug on its thorax, I feel like a total underdog, but the defence remains fierce on board. Security corners us in a small area where even our own grenades can be a threat to us. Just when you think you might have broken through, you square up to a Sword Elite operating the controls.
But it gets cooler. The Scarab bridge is where the legendary rock cover of the Halo theme, the Mjolnir Mix, kicks in. This is not the first cover of the theme that resounds through an electric guitar; Combat Evolved had Rock Anthem for Saving the World. However, Rock Anthem for Saving the World is a blip of a track that starts off with a distorted axe following the famous Halo orchestral melody but then deviates into a freeform solo backed by a drum loop. The Mjolnir Mix gives the full piece the metal treatment.
Three years ago, I called the Combat Evolved soundtrack exceptional because it was commercially distributed at a time when video game OSTs generally weren't. That album got its wings through Sumthing Else Music Works, a label created by world-class musician and producer Nile Rodgers.[20][21] If the name doesn't ring a bell, Rodgers has put frequencies to tape for the likes of David Bowie, Madonna, and Diana Ross. The guy playing guitar in Daft Punk's Get Lucky teaser? That's Nile Rodgers. A fan of the Halo soundtrack, Rodgers won the Combat Evolved OST the CD it so richly deserved. For Halo 2, he acted as a conduit between Bungie audio lead, Martin O'Donnell, and established artists like Steve Vai, Breaking Benjamin, and Incubus.[6]
The Mjolnir Mix was the product of a studio session involving the Bungie sound team, Rodgers, and Steve Vai. Vai is known for his flashy, freewheeling instrumental performances. During the Mjolnir Mix, his guitar rips away from the rest of the stems, screeching over them with adolescent abandon. The game deserves to fly this flag high, but a consistent failure in Halo 2's sound is that its music is deposited low in the mix. For the Anniversary Edition, 343 rerecorded all tracks and then cranked the volume on them, making gameplay segments like the Scorpion approach and Scarab scintillating, even if the music on the Scorpion drive should kick in sooner.
With the Covenant's walking command post hobbled, the Prophet of Regret, who spearheaded the Earth invasion, makes a hasty retreat. Why the Covenant would try to assail Earth with an undersized force and why their standard bearer scarpers so easily remain mysteries, but the UNSC doesn't intend to let the Prophet get away. With the Chief and Cortana onboard, Commander Miranda Keyes scrambles her Frigate, In Amber Clad. It brings to bear every ounce of acceleration in its engines to pursue the cleric's Cruiser through a Slipspace portal. As the music crescendos, a superheated ball of plasma engulfs the scorched African metropolis.
The Arbiter
When you have a dual narrative, it's textbook to have the events in one character frame build to a climax, leave them unresolved, and then cut to the other perspective. That's how it is in Halo 2. The Covenant's defamed darling, the Arbiter, is brought low: branded a heretic and subjected to unimaginable pain. We cut to the Chief before we can see what the Covenant do with the shell of a man they leave behind. We piggyback on the Spartan until he and the UNSC see off the aliens that invaded the world, and the slipspace rupture rings out. We want to know where it was so important that the Prophet's craft fled to it, but our consciousness is rehoused in the Arbiter before we can get there. This game of tennis will continue until the end of the campaign.
There is a detail I've neglected to mention: the character I've been calling the Arbiter hasn't been referred to by that name up to this mission. In the original and Anniversary Halo 2s, this level is where he is gifted that title, and a bonus video in Halo 2: Anniversary gives his former name as "Thel 'Vadamee". 'Vadamee is brought before the Prophets by their most trusted Brute: Tartarus. Plato wrote in the Gorgias that Tartarus was where the souls of the unjust are punished after they die.[22] Not only has Thel been punished, but in this level, both he and the Prophets refer to him as dead. The scene invites political intrigue as we see how the hierarchs present themselves differently in public than they do in private.
In the council chambers, the leadership ranted about retribution for the officer that had forsaken Halo. Away from prying eyes, they offer him renown. Before the mob, this person was the prime heretic. In the mausoleum, they tell him that the true heretic is another Elite preaching blasphemy from a Forerunner black box. The Arbiters are a line of sacred soldiers that were each immortalised by dying in battle; that is the point of the Arbiter. The Prophets pass the mantle of Arbiter to the disgraced commander in a crafty act of leadership. To discard their most proficient director of troops would be foolish, but the loss of the universe's holiest artefact must be paid for with blood. By knighting 'Vadamee the Arbiter, the Prophets impose the death sentence while keeping him in commission.
"The Arbiter" wasn't Bungie's first choice for this character's name. They wrote him and even recorded lines with his title as "the Dervish".[2] Dervishes are members of Sufi Muslim orders that renounce self-interest and extravagance to close their proximity to God. The Arbiter has some dervish in him, having given up everything to attain divinity, but Bungie thought better of this naming scheme. It had the potential to offend Muslims and Islamophobes alike. Remember, they're figuring this out against the backdrop of post-9/11 US politics. Therefore, the Dervish got a second christening as the Arbiter.[2] Like Dredd, he is judge, jury, and executioner.
The Covenant isn't just a belief system; it is an institution in which powerful leaders wield religion to manipulate the people under them. I am honour-bound to mention the connection between the Prophets and the Catholic Church. Not only has the Catholic Church traditionally exercised despotic control, but within the Arbiter's institution of control, he is a clump of sin and shame. Like a good Catholic, he must practice repentance to wash his soul clean. If Staten seems transfixed by religion, know that his father was a minister and professor of theology.
To engender audience sympathy with this protagonist, the story draws parallels between the Arbiter and a character we're already rooting for: the Master Chief. For both the Arbiter and the Chief, their suit is who they are. We never see the Chief without his; the Earth public knows him as the MJOLNIR, while the Arbiter is a robe that 'Vadamee dons at the behest of the Prophets. This armour is magnetised to his social status and life goals, and has him following in the footsteps of his most venerable ancestors. Ludonarratively, all Halo protagonists need some armour to explain their energy shields. The one thing Bungie can't do is explain why the HUD on the Arbiter's armour is a colour swap of The Chief's. It feels forced.
The Arbiter can prove himself to the Prophets by killing the idolater and his flocking plebs. So, this is a level of Covenant vs. Covenant, which can lead to some friendly fire unless you've played this game a few times before. I'm like a cat seeing a mouse; when a Grunt appears on screen, I shoot it. The Arbiter's garb also doesn't have a flashlight like the Chief's; it has temporary Active Camo. You might see where this is going. If there is an Elite or Grunt in front of you and they're not well-lit, it can be tough to tell whether they're wearing the away team colours or your own.
The Active Camo lets you start a battle from more or less wherever your heart desires, and it pairs beneficially with the Energy Sword, which requires you to get within sniffing distance of enemies without them lacerating you. The invisibility module is even more expedient for getting you out of tight spots. The apostates can't shoot you if they can't see you. If you really want to make short work of them, try dual-wielding Needlers.
Two guns are better than one, but that being the case, the dual-wielding system could invalidate single-weapon engagements. The designers must confound your antics. Bungie drafts a long list of weapons that you can't dual-wield: both the more effectual guns but also some tools that assume duties one-handler weapons can't, like the Sniper, Sword, or Battle Rifle. If you still want a deadly duo in front of you, you must decide if you wish to carry two of the same weapon or two different ones.
Because some weapons have different firing modes, wielding two different models can be rubbing your tummy and patting your head. You may spam presses on one trigger while holding the other down or manually fire each gun at different rates. Weapons also have different magazines and may or may not overheat. So, if the gun in your right hand will need reloading before the one in your left or you have to worry about reloading one firearm but not the other, there's more to track and counter-rhythms in reloading and firing to account for. If the gun in one hand is going to overheat without the other doing the same, you'll have to let off one weapon at boiling point while continuing to fire the other.
At the start of the first playable level, Cairo Station, finding and firing two implements at a time is painless because you can handle a couple of SMGs. Their clips run down at the same rate, and you only have to hold both triggers to get the maximum out of them. The double Needlers in The Arbiter are redoubtable for the same reasons and also for a couple more:
- They're up there with the Halo 1 Magnum in the pantheon of "OP" weapons.
- There are Grunts everywhere, and Grunts drop Needlers. So, even when you're burning through needles like me digging through a bag of pistachios, there are always more to take their place.
Plasma Rifles and Plasma Pistols demand more coordination than SMGs or Needlers as they have individual ammo counts instead of pulling from a shared ammo pool, and you must also keep track of the temperature of each. These and all other gameplay details are consistent between both Bungie's Halo 2 and 343's remake. Although, the Forerunner base is yet another area where their coatings diverge. Bungie uses dirty beige textures to spackle their abandoned building. 343 constructs something cleaner but colder: a light grey matte look with grooves and soft lighting glimmering in select spots.
On this stage's floors, conveyor belts move explosive plasma crates. They're hypnotic to watch, and the combustibles are practical in a pinch. After a few encounters with these, there's a long section where you fight heretics on sloping conveyers. Another room is the standard Forerunner two-storey with walkways around the upper edges, but a flying saucer in the middle allows you to easily transfer from one side of the second storey to the other. In this stage, and its successor, The Oracle, you might double guess which light-up door you're meant to walk through next. Although, you can't get lost in Halo 2 like you could in 1, probably because this time, Bungie knew from the start of development that they wouldn't be smelting an open world. They could design their levels with a linear path through them in mind.
The Arbiter ends in a delirium of aerial combat against a tangerine sky. In the 2014 edition of the game, the track for the Banshee bombing run is Follow in Flight. Again, the guitar becomes the guest of honour on a Halo 2 song, and for Follow in Flight, the soloist is Misha Mansoor, founder of the band Periphery. To the piece, Mansoor brings his band's prog metal stylings, although the track is breezier and more melodic than what you find on a Periphery album. It's like spreading your wings.
Follow in Flight takes the place of the instrumental from Follow by Incubus, used in the 2004 Halo 2. Incubus has always been a flexible band. They can coast from silly nu-metal to ariose emo rock. Sometimes, they sound like Red Hot Chilli Peppers got real into weird time signatures, but just as often, they throw all composure to the wind and perform a song that makes you ask, "Are Incubus okay?". With guitar phrases that interrupt other phrases and despondent chants, Follow captures the maniacal and self-destructive faith of the Covenant. Incubus and Follow in Flight both, at times, line up to the sound from Godspeed You! Black Emperor's 2000 album, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. From this feature rock to the backmasked talking in the Mausoleum Suite and the anxious synths of Ancient Machine, the music in The Arbiter is impressively deranged.
The Oracle
The bodies of those who have defied the Arbiter lie prostrate on the cathedral floors, and we are honing in on the position of their master. But if we weren't knocked off balance by sudden calamity, it wouldn't be Halo. The particular wing of this palace the Heretic Leader has locked himself in was a prison for Flood research specimens, but the Flood didn't much like being cooped up. Now you're fighting two armies instead of one.
In some rooms, the undead leap down towards us from the rafters, and we can only guess which beam they'll land from next. There is a lift ride during which we can't turn to check all possible blind spots around us because the axle that runs down the centre of the elevator blocks our view to the other side. We need our Elite convoy to watch our six. The platform will stop descending every minute or two to reorganise some of the laboratory's capsules, giving the Flood time to pile on before we slowly drop to the next floor. It's fun to set yourself the challenge of headshotting Combat Forms between them jumping and making contact with the glass below.
Luckily, checkpointing happens regularly; Bungie learned their lesson after the shade thrown at The Library from Halo 1. Unluckily, Infection Forms can now peel back the skin of corpses to reanimate the fallen, meaning we need to keep one eye on the floor and another on the ceiling. We must race to stop the blighters from finding new hosts, and the more heretics you kill, the more vessels there are for the parasites to meld with. You can cremate the bodies with your weapons, but that takes ammo. Halo 2 also drops Combat Evolved's chain reaction explosions, meaning that you can't kill multiple of these polyps by popping one. The weapons that acted like bulldozers in the previous level now don't seem so indomitable. With a little patience, Needlers can pump considerable damage into one target, but the Infection Forms are many targets, and we are not blessed with time.
The Covenant Carbine, which was already a true blue ally, only becomes more practicable as you must disintegrate the heads of enemies and ground Forerunner Sentinels that hover high above. On your first shot, the Carbine is coldly exact, even over long ranges. Yet, the faster you feather the trigger, the more bloom it's subject to, so the player is continually negotiating the right balance between accuracy and speed. From the Sentinels, we can liberate the Sentinel Beam. Its loathing of decaying flesh and continuous fire make it the best mop for puddles of Flood.
The sectarian leader locks himself behind the impenetrable defences of the gods, but our handler, Half-Jaw, proves that the Master Chief isn't the only one who can hatch audacious strategies. The Heretic Leader's castle is connected to the rest of the facility by three thick cables; sever the tethers, and he will run for safety as the capsule falls. The Energy Sword makes a great stand-in for cable cutters. Just because you've got engineering to do doesn't mean the Flood or Sentinels are going to stop coming, though. Bungie manages an astonishing feat of level programming. As we slice through each of the cables, the whole environment lists away from the remaining connections.
Once we've snapped all three wires, the station enters freefall. The air outside rushes past, the gravity halves, and the soundtrack tugs on our arm to get the fuck out. This effect could go on for twice as long, and I still wouldn't be bored of it, but to put an end to the Heretic Leader, we need to hotfoot it to his final hiding spot. He's a short Banshee ride away. Games with physics sandboxes usually create interesting collisions of entities eventually, and I once had a playthrough of this chapter where I fired on an enemy Banshee only to have a piece of metal falling from the station slam into it and blow it up before my shot connected. For a second, it appears as though 'Vadamee has also crashed his Spitfire before we see him pull himself up onto the ledge he hit. It's a callback to the same thing happening to the Chief at the start of The Maw in the previous game, another subliminal signal that these gladiators are cut from the same cloth.
The Heretic tells us there is no ascension, no truth in the mouths of the Prophets, no water held in the Covenant. How can he prove he's not making it all up? Because he learned it from a Forerunner AI: 343 Guilty Spark. The infidel's appeal to reason cannot save him. In the ensuing boss fight, he is accompanied by two holograms of himself. If you damage one of the decoys, it will flicker, but with all three targets constantly moving by jetpack, you must keep track of who is who. This fight can end up being cut too short or overstaying its welcome because of its shell game element. Still, trying to find the genuine among the illusions is a clever metaphor for the Arbiter trying to see through the Prophets' lies.
The smoke clears, and like a Dad coming to pick up his kid from football practice, Tartarus arrives to collect us and Guilty Spark: "The Oracle". He does not handle The Oracle with care.
Delta Halo
For us, it's been two levels since we last saw The Prophet of Regret, but his Cruiser didn't ever leave the sight of Commander Keyes. You'll note that Regret had to remote into the High Council chambers as a hologram and did not appear alongside the Prophets Truth and Mercy in the mausoleum as he couldn't be in the Covenant capital and off invading Earth at the same time. The ship In Amber Clad tracks his vessel to Delta Halo: a new sanctuary. We have a second game, a second protagonist, a second hand we can hold weapons in, and with this scene, a second ring. We might fume that writer, Joe Staten, plucked this second Halo out of thin air. If authors are going to arbitrarily invent MacGuffins on the spot, then how can we trust anything we do during the story will leave an imprint?
This is the bit where I put on my insufferable nerd hat and mention that Combat Evolved told you there was a whole array of Halos. During the level Two Betrayals, Guilty Spark says:
"This installation's pulse has a maximum effective radius of 25,000 light years, but once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life".
"Others", as in more than one. It's such a flyby line that you can't expect players to remember it, not three years after Combat Evolved, and whatever way you slice it, Halo 2 makes plenty of players feel that their destruction of the ring in the previous entry is worth next to nothing. They feel this because Bungie has a bunch of these installations stacked up in a store room and isn't afraid to heave another off the shelf when the occasion calls for it. Back to Halo we go.
In chasing the Covenant, the UNSC decides gravity is the best vehicle. The Master Chief joins the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODSTs) as they seal themselves into pods and are thrown out the bottom of the Frigate. You might be picking up that the Arbiter's levels lean towards the dutiful and severe while the Chief's have more of a "Let's fuck shit up with a Rocket Launcher" energy. On Delta Halo, Rockets will be included with the price of entry, and if players haven't already discovered it, Halo 2's Launcher has a trick up its sleeve: it locks onto vehicles.
The homing is highly evident in this mission due to the onslaught of mounted cavalry you face. In Combat Evolved, if you were without a ride during sections of Assault on the Control Room or Two Betrayals, you'd shown up to the derby without a horse. You could scratch the paint on Covenant tech with your Assault Rifle or shimmy around the edges of the canyons, but the game intended for you to be in a vehicle. In this rodeo, the heat-seeking effect of your Launcher means that with the right gun, Ghosts and Wraiths are no longer insurmountable mammoths, even on foot.
After bursting forth from your cocoon like the butterfly you are, you climb a hill and hole up in the Forerunner ruins. They come under attack by Phantoms and the bloodthirsty platoons in their wombs. The UNSC wouldn't have a celebrity like us just hoofing it out of there, however. Standing our ground wins us a Warthog, and a Warthog offensive wins us a Scorpion. The tank operation on Delta Halo is less orderly than in Metropolis. While it was vehicles that dogged us in New Mombasa, on Installation 05, there's a good amount of infantry, too. Imps hide high and low, some nesting in the advent calendar openings of the sandstone ruins. You can't stop moving that reticle until every Grunt is dead.
Knottier than annihilating the Covenant is explaining why there are such technologically basic structures on Halo. The Forerunner architecture up to now has been typified by cathedrals of cold alloys, not the Mesoamerican apartment blocks we see on the Delta ring. The Forerunner must have once built ancient structures, but not after they created space stations. It isn't impossible to imagine a species that would still want to stack stone Lego, even after inventing teleporters, but there's nowhere else in the games that the Forerunner is that species. My main complaint here isn't about lore accuracy; it's about breaking the continuity of Forerunner fashion. Like the skyscrapers of Earth, these abandoned structures are also brown and drab. I can imagine the Covenant liking them, though.
In one forest valley, we can take a Beam Rifle and play zealot sniper. Drones bombard this shooting gallery. As they make for such fun targets, I'm surprised the campaign takes this long to bring them back. As we live post-Halo 3: ODST, it might also come as a surprise that Halo 2 lets the ODSTs fade into the background. There is another hero here who deserves our attention, though, and his anthems from Combat Evolved get a triumphant reprise.
Peril is a rearrangement of the 2001 shooter's Perilous Journey; Heretic, Hero is the new A Walk in the Woods; In Amber Clad is basically Under the Cover of Night. It is not unusual for a video game series to have a theme it customarily returns to. To have multiple tracks it rewrites for every entry in a series, that is strange. But an invigorating composition will endure as well as a nuanced mechanic, and O'Donnell and Salvatori's music more than suffices in that department.
You could do with something to listen to when you spend empty minutes searching for the next checkpoint. A couple of the grassy hill ranges echo the frustration of Half-Life's Surface Tension as the exit is a narrow gap between the rocks that the level doesn't flow into. Then there's the multi-story Grunt park, which is laid out like a multiplayer map, so there's no natural line to follow to the end. The fence around that end is a line of drop pods that elegantly afford new weapons while acting as bollards to keep you from taking the Scorpion past its stopping point. That point is the closest that Delta Halo has to a back wall. Rather than slamming the book shut on a plot beat or a departure from a location, this level courses continuously into the next.
Regret
Nestled among the archaic pillars is a very modern invention: the hologram, one of the Prophet of Regret. He sings a prognostic hymn: the Halo theme itself, which becomes freighted with spiritual importance as we assimilate the meaning behind it. With Cortana's translation, we learn that the Prophet believes that if Halo is lit, the Covenant will ascend to the afterlife. We will later glean from one of the Prophet of Truth's demented sermons that, in their religion, this deliverance is called "The Great Journey". We, enlightened disciples of The Oracle, know that Halo is actually a doomsday machine, a master override to delete all life in the galaxy. However, we can also surmise the Prophets must be earnest in their disagreement with us. While they aren't the most honest bunch, they have nothing to gain from atomising themselves and their empire.
Our guardian angel, Commander Miranda Keyes, floats above listening. She encapsulates our mission in a couple of sentences. If we want to stop Regret, we need to get to the key to Halo before he does: the Index. Anyone who saw Combat Evolved even halfway through will recognise this is quite literally Halo, too. For all the bright ideas that Bungie busts out for this shooter, it feels that they have this militarised force with all these incredible machines that holds the fate of humanity in its palm, and they have no idea what to do with it.
For the UNSC, there is no character development, and there are no original plots or stakes; these are the sole privileges of the Arbiter. You could say the same applied during Combat Evolved. At the end of that game, the Chief and Cortana occupy roughly the same personality and stations they did at the start. However, they underwent development in how they thought about and interacted with their setting. They did this through the knowledge they gained about Halo, and so did we. The Chief and Cortana are relatable because you take that journey with them.
We went from not knowing about the installation to landing on a synthetic nature preserve of concealed origins. Then, we discovered Halo was a WMD built by ancient aliens, and later, a containment facility for an existential threat. Combat Evolved also leaves it an open question whether we can act on any of this knowledge in time to save our asses, tightening our chests. It's a story about meddling with technology we don't understand and how war promotes that rashness.
When we arrive on a second ring, the mysteries are already solved, and consequently, the Chief and Cortana's methods and mental maps aren't going to advance. Nor is there as realistic a possibility that we will let Halo wipe the galaxy barren; we already know we can prevent it. That's not to say there are no perspective skews for the UNSC in the sequel, but never are they as transformative as those in Combat Evolved. However, our crusade as Thel 'Vadamee has brought an aquifer of revelations about Covenant society gushing to the surface. On the shifting sands of faith, allegiances will realign, and leaders will be betrayed.
The Arbiter has been sentenced to death and isn't a secondary logo for one of the world's most valuable tech brands, making him disposable. If Thel doesn't die, he could see the apotheosis of everything his faith has been working towards. Or he could have one wrong conversation and find out that the belief system he's based his life on is a lie told by the hierarchs he so respects. If he is going to deconvert, how many will he kill? How much power will he help the church accumulate before the scales fall from his eyes? It's just a more interesting personal journey.
As he's up against the Chief, 'Vadamee has his work cut out for him. In Regret, there's a lot of the Spartan and the aliens trading bullets on roughly circular platforms. The regular entrance of Marines and weapons during this and the previous level signals that the UNSC are on top of the ground assault, having been to a ring once before. The bulk of this mission is about finding passage through and across bodies of water. The first of these ferries are the gondolas: rooms without exterior walls made to sail the lakes of Delta Halo. On them, you must bat away airborne enemies and troops that arrive uninvited from Phantom dropships. Here, you can see the hole the flying Covenant fill that the others can't.
At the midpoint of your voyage, another gondola of nasty pulls up beside you. You must decide how much you want to fire across at the freebooters and when you want to leap to their galleon for closer shots. The gondola scrimmage would be a 10/10 if the game didn't disassociate for long spells, leaving us with only flat, empty placidity. If you can bait the Banshee pilots and strike when the iron's hot, you can hijack one of their aircraft and fly it to shore instead of riding the gondola to the station. As dry land approaches to meet you, so do Covenant shooters. Because your gondola motors towards them, our adversaries become bigger targets as the seconds tick down, but from the alien perspective, so does the Chief.
Our next mode of transportation is an underwater elevator that can move in three dimensions. Yes, that's an idea from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. No, that does not make me like it any less. In the original Halo 2, the sea is cloudy, leaving us to guess at the secrets beyond our draw distance. In Anniversary, there's some sightseeing to do, with a veritable Atlantis passing by our pod. As we drift along, Cortana decrypts a message from Covenant high command. She and the Chief learn of the three Prophets and the reason behind Regret's snap withdrawal from Earth. Regret had jumped the gun and invaded without the authority of the Prophets of Truth and Mercy. He's landed himself in the doghouse. Allegiances within the Covenant diverge.
We sink in one world and surface in another. Undersea tunnels deliver us to the hallowed ground on which Regret stands. Or floats. One glass-roofed underpass looks like a room you could see in an aquarium. The floor is waterlogged, allowing us an inventive clue about where the invisible Elites tread; water spirits in this shark tunnel. A simple, translucent animated texture gives the illusion of the water's reflection on the ceiling.
Killing a Prophet was originally intended to be the objective of The Silent Cartographer, the first level Bungie developed for Combat Evolved, but the Covenant archpriests were one of many ideas dropped from that game, like conkers from a chestnut tree.[5] Better late than never. We quiet Regret with that most surreptitious of poisoned blades: grabbing onto the side of a hoverchair and punching our target in the head again and again. This is actually an application of the game's hijacking system, but hijacking comes across as a whole other action when applied to an individual person and their seating.
The Covenant aren't going to let you kill one of their religious luminaries without retaliation. When you leave the chapel, a Cruiser floating overhead chases you down with its glassing beam, busting through rock like it's cardboard. With no solid ground left, the Chief falls to the currents, and a tentacle wraps around his waist. A voice booms from behind him as though the whole ocean was speaking at once:
"This is not your grave, but you are welcome in it".
At last, some mystery.
Sacred Icon
When you have two protagonists with interlacing stories, the events in one plotline constitute events in the other. As the Master Chief, our victories are given significance because they upset the delicate equilibrium of the Covenant. The Elite Honor Guard were the sworn protectors of the Prophets, but with Regret dead at the demon's hands, the Elites' lieges deem them incompetent, and the responsibility is passed to the Brutes. The Arbiter isn't the only one who can be dispossessed of his armour, and the Brutes savour these humiliations.
There's not much the ponderous Prophets and the brawny Brutes have in common, but one revolting connection is that they both look like they've been rolled across a barbershop floor. All mammals have hair, but a coat of hair is a lot of tiny polygons to render. More polygons than a 20th-century home computer would process, resulting in the classic "hair helmet" look of characters like Miranda Keyes. Elsewhere, Halo and other military games avoided this problem by hiding their characters' luscious locks under headwear or giving them crew cuts.
Halo 2, which was released during the Xbox's middle ages, can pencil in spindly eyelashes and chin hairs for the Covenant Popes, which it needs for its extreme close-ups. The Brutes, who are walking carpets, have to have their down clumped together to fit within the limits of the Xbox's NVIDIA chip.[19] Conspicuously, the hair on these characters can't sway naturally because what strains a processor more than rendering a bunch of hairs is animating or simulating physics effects on them.
But it's not the hair that makes the Covenant scions important. It's their holiness. If you can't envision yourself falling for the promises of the Arbiter's overlords, the cinematic at the start of Sacred Icon gives you something to mull over. The Covenant's prophecies predicted a second Halo and a second Halo appeared. They believed that if they sought "The Oracle", it would light the path to salvation, and 343 Guilty Spark has told the Prophets about the Index: the "Sacred Icon" that the Arbiter must now retrieve from the subcutaneous tissue of the ring.
While some of the curving corridors inside Installation 05 might bring to mind the array interiors from CE, you rarely have to squeeze through a narrow gap as you did in Assault on the Control Room or find yourself in a desert for cover, as was The Library. However, the cover you do get in Sacred Icon is thin chainmail, as the Flood will follow your scent and try to flay you wherever they find you. The Forerunner immune system is also still in place. The Covenant's cognitive dissonance means that they think they are the inheritors of the Forerunner relics, even as the ancients' robots try to cook them alive. Spawners in this abbey keep the Sentinels coming, but you can destroy them. These catflaps engineer encounters in which players must decide if it's more practical to plug the enemy supply chain or kill the white blood cells, and you haven't even seen the new phagocyte yet: The Enforcer Sentinel.
In a flurry, Enforcer Sentinels can let loose several arcing missiles. These fly like weaker, slightly faster Wraith shots and back up customary weapons like needles and the Sentinel Beam. The bullseye that the Enforcer most readily offers up is its face, but you'll have to smash through at least one of the hardlight screens on the front to hit it. You can also scrub the missile launchers from its roof or blow off its arms to make its body more vulnerable to damage. With the Enforcer, Halo 2 makes use of a design pattern where a game introduces an enemy as a boss, with part of the challenge being that you have to puzzle out how to beat it. After you've overcome it and you've grasped the strategy, the game can present it as a regular enemy.
Around the outset of Sacred Icon, we advance by raising pistons to unblock holes in the floor. Underneath, slides offer a little giddy fun. As we go scooting down the first, we hear ghostly falling vocal tones to match our movement. Soon, we're encircled by prickly synthesisers that sound like they might be played by a Sentinel orchestra. Because the player is aware they need to keep moving downwards, they can know how to navigate without copious signposting from the developer. In the late level, we must rekill the undead in Delta Halo's stultifying tundra before regrouping with other Elites.
Quarantine Zone
There's something right about fighting the Flood in the snow. Cold corpses in the cold wastes. The Forerunner temples in Quarantine Zone have been filthied by the zombies or left as scorched husks. In Bungie's Campaign, the Flood can blend into the remains, which is annoying when they take up Shotguns and Rocket Launchers and have learned to equip Active Camo. It's Two Betrayals all over again. However, the charring of Quarantine Zone is a comment on the escalation of the war, as is our Ghost being able to make scrap metal of the Sentinels.
This is the first level where the Arbiter gets to climb into heavy armour, having previously preferred the honourable art of fighting with just a weapon and his own two claws. He is oriented in the UNSC vehicles and guns, which Flood-infested Marines leave behind, but even killing possessed humans and blowing up Warthogs feels wrong. Maybe that discomfort is symbolic of guilt buried in the Arbiter. We need to be able to drive at least as well as the parasite-addled UNSC because the non-recharging health of vehicles leaves us at the mercy of mechanical problems Halo was designed to solve.
If your Scorpion or Wraith burns up in a jet of flame, the difficulty suddenly goes berserk. On foot, you can be flattened like an ant, and the difference between a Plasma Cannon and a Carbine is the difference between a candle and the sun. When beset upon by Wraiths in the Quarantine Zone, you can shelter in a stone tunnel, but then a Ghost can shoot into any of those tubes. It might be another story if the game gave you a lifetime supply of Rockets or if vehicles couldn't rip you a new one before you'd hijacked them. Alas, we're not afforded that leniency.
One district has you snaking up a mountain path as a Covenant tank hurls down bolts of plasma like Zeus. The clever scheme here is that as you get closer to the vehicle, the less time there is between it firing and its orbs potentially hitting you. Elsewhere, you'll find snowy arch bridges over the game's chasms, or you'll just get lost. As in Delta Halo, you can lose your way because the layout won't motion to the transitory gaps between areas, but it's more often because, on foot, the Flood can sneak up behind you. You wheel around, spend a while twisting and strafing as you fight them, and when the dust settles, you forget which way you were facing to start with.
When you obtain the Scorpion, it's the original visuals rather than the Anniversary touch-up that gives the better feedback on its health, even if visibility is low with the retro goggles on. In the original game, the Scorpion burns incandescently as it takes damage. One utterly bizarre way you can incur damage is finding out, without warning, that the Enforcers can pick up your vehicle, levitate upwards and then drop it. Nothing in Halo, before or since, has known how to attack like this.
Quarantine Zone is at its best when it's playing Reclaimer, an even more improvisational version of the Mjolnir Mix. It's an impetuous fugue that can have only come from Marty telling Steve Vai, "Just go bananas". There's also something to be said for this level's gondola ride. The Flood, unlike most of the Covenant, favour CQC. Therefore, on this sloop, you spend more time repelling boarders than firing off the bow.
We arrive at the Index only to have someone else take credit for our sacrifices. The UNSC has beaten us to the device, but it hardly matters when Tartarus, leader of the Brutes, kidnaps Miranda Keyes, takes the Sacred Icon, and states his intent to assassinate the Arbiter. When the Covenant's holy warrior tells him the Prophets will not stand for his treachery, Tartarus tells us that the Arbiter's execution comes on their orders. It seems that the pontifex's golden boy has gotten too close to the truth. By having the Brute Chieftain step in, the writers can resolve the UNSC and Covenant race for the Index without having to have the Arbiter kill off a human main character or vice-versa.
Tartarus pushes our protagonist down one of Halo's long tracheas. Like the Chief, Thel falls, although in the Arbiter's case, it's germane to the subtext. The opening, where he was stripped of his rank, was not his lowest point, this is, when his religious elders have given up on him. While we're often taught to think about tripping into a pit as a kind of erasure from existence in video games, every drop has to go somewhere. The Chief went somewhere, and with the increasing intelligence of the Flood in Quarantine Zone, it's almost as if...
Gravemind
One of my favourite tropes in media is the Greek God character that comes down from heaven to interrupt and rearrange the story. For example, The Presence in NIN's Year Zero or Neuromancer and Wintermute in Neuromancer. Combat Evolved's story owes a lot to its twists: the fateful breakout of the Flood and the apocalyptic revelation that while Halo might be a weapon, it cannot be aimed in any one direction. Martin O'Donnell thought that Halo 2 needed its own Flood or superweapon moment to get the same astonished response from players. Joseph Staten claimed that the twist was hearing the Covenant's side of the story. O'Donnell wasn't having it and tried, without any luck, to talk Staten around to his way of seeing things.[2] If you sympathise with O'Donnell in that story, you might be comforted by the reminder that there are explicit twists in Halo 2. They happen in the cutscene at the start of this mission.
The first is the Chief's unlikely alliance with the Flood, and the second is the news that an organising intelligence controls the undead. We know that the Master Chief didn't die after falling into the ocean in Regret. The script already told him this:
"This is not your grave".
Where he and the Arbiter reside are in the tendrils of the Gravemind, a sapient mountain of necrotic flesh. 'Vadamee becomes more Christlike by the minute: He absorbed the sins of his compatriots and died to be resurrected. He perishes as Thel to be reborn as the Arbiter. In Quarantine Zone, he was pushed into an open tomb, but the Gravemind can move the boulder.
If you're playing Halo 2, the most visible section of the Gravemind looks like Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. In Halo 2: Anniversary, Gravemind is one of the two characters who has been heavily made over (the other being Cortana) and is now a serpent that segments into three long flaps at the top. It has a mouth inside a mouth inside a mouth. What's left of the Prophet of Regret also lives in one of his tentacles, and Gravemind holds the Monitor/Oracle for Delta Halo: 2401 Penitent Tangent. We have the four factions of the story in one room: the UNSC (Master Chief and Cortana), the Covenant (Regret and the Arbiter), the Forerunner (2401 Penitent Tangent), and the Flood (the Gravemind). The conditions are ripe for an exchange of ideas, not that the Covenant wants to listen.
The Chief and Gravemind endeavour to convince Thel 'Vadamee that Halo is a disinfectant for the galaxy and the Prophets are lying, but the Arbiter's faith is unshakable, even after his pastors have abandoned him. Interestingly, 2401 and Regret both want to fire the ring but still cannot see eye to eye because of differences in what they think activating Halo does. Penitent Tangent knows the array is a containment measure and, therefore, cares about sticking to official protocol. Regret thinks that the ignition would herald judgment day and wants to see his religious rites respected. Gravemind bores down to how religion and rationalism are often trying to explain the same things:
"This one's containment and this one's Great Journey are the same".
The Gravemind, while a column of evil, is also a voice of wisdom. His role as speaker is signified by him being mostly a mouth and by his invocation of poetry. He tells us:
"I will speak and you will listen".
He sometimes says things that don't immediately make sense to us, like:
"I am a monument to all of your sins".
Or:
"I have listened through rock and metal and time".
This suggests he knows things about the universe that we don't. We can safely assume he is primordial in age as the Flood date back to the Forerunner. While the Prophets fancy themselves Nostradamuses, the Gravemind has his own prediction:
"Fate has made us enemies, but this ring will make us brothers".
Twists in stories are all well and good, but there are plenty of high-profile examples of audiences spitting them out like bitter candy. E.g. St. Elsewhere having occurred entirely in the mind of an autistic boy or aliens showing to save humans from the apocalypse at the end of Knowing. What went wrong in these pieces of media is that their perspective shifts conflicted with what we know about their fictional canon and what we could have predicted. When a twist hits, it's like a magic eye poster. All the parts were there in the text, but they are put together in a pattern we didn't notice before. You see this in murder mysteries all the time.
In Halo 2, even though the Flood would wolf down the galaxy, given the chance, there is still a reason for the Chief to form a truce with them. There's even a reason for the Arbiter to. Like Regret and Penitent Tangent, the player and the Gravemind want the same thing: to stop Halo firing. If the Arbiter could see the Covenant for the falsehood it is, he would also understand that Halo is not to be toyed with. This is the unforeseen pattern.
The UNSC's situation, while similar to that in Halo 1, is more desperate, as the Covenant has the Index. However, the Chief has perhaps the smartest mind in the universe on his side, and there's nothing to stop him from taking the key back before Tartarus places it in the ignition. The Gravemind teleports the Chief to the council chambers on the holy city of High Charity, presumably using the transport network on the Halos that Cortana discovered in the last game. The Prophets are expeditiously rushed backstage while their soldiers try to sanctify the space by killing us. Considering we're besmirching the Covenant's inner sanctum, they're a little slow to start their wave-based aggression, but by the time the Brutes get involved, we've got ourselves a ho-down.
The level marginally overstays its welcome, but as a lore nerd, being here for the collapse of the ecclesiastical order has me vibrating. We experience it through the battles, as we should in a shooter. We fight the Honour Guard Brutes early on. The Honour Guard armour, forged for the Elites, is ill-fitting on these ogres. Then we sweat it out with the Elites, but soon, the Prophet of Truth formally announces the succession of the Brutes to the second top spot in the Covenant hierarchy, and you find Brutes and Elites wringing blood from each other as you turn your rattling machine gun against both.
Brutes can bring expeditious deaths. With the atypically high damage from enemies in Halo 2, a melee attack can knock seven bells out of you. While we're never far from an Energy Sword on High Charity, the Brutes' shrugs and charges force us to carefully pick the window in which we slash rather than lunging in randomly. These heavies have also come up with the least creative weapon you'll hold in a Halo: the Brute Plasma Rifle. The developers try to make other guns carve out spaces only they can occupy with unique firing modes or ammo logic, but the Brute Plasma Rifle is simply the Plasma Rifle except better. Where the other tools never obsolete each other, only providing an alternative, you will always take a Brute Plasma Rifle over a Plasma Rifle. Still, the weapon is a lot like the Brutes: a usurper with a more developed capacity for violence. This sidearm is a must-have when Tartarus's legions can choke down full SMG clips and stay kicking.
Sacred Icon found a middle ground between enclosed and open Forerunner environments. Gravemind does the same thing but for Covenant settings. In Combat Evolved's Truth and Reconciliation, you were either folded into a cramped corridor or spread out in a landing bay, but Gravemind shows the Covenant builds spaces of every size. The level also utilises curving corridors, which means you can make progress without knowing what's around the corner. It also fulfils the rounded Covenant aesthetic. As we're in the capital city, the Chief and Cortana take the initiative and break some UNSC soldiers out of its prison.
If those Marines are killed in the line of duty, they die without taps or any solemn comments, which feels a little unceremonious, but it's always a hoot to play the hero. As we try to make a break with the ex-cons, a new type of multi-round combat begins: one where a gravity lift keeps delivering different species of Covenant into their purple Alcatraz. It would be like seeing angels descend from heaven if it weren't for their spiky crests and worm bodies. There is one long bridge in the level which misses the correct tone by using the impish Peril to score a fight with some Hunters, but another has this spirited tug of war where we can push across it, only to find Hunters that force us back in the other direction, the heavy slabs that they call arms sending crates spinning.
In the final arena, the Covenant is doing too much at once to keep track of. Elites who looked like welterweights can suddenly unsheath an Energy Sword for a flash TKO, and you're expected to be able to preempt that while fighting other belligerents like Hunters. Yet, the area is flush with a highlight on the soundtrack: Breaking Benjamin's Blow Me Away. An instrumental of it, anyway. This song would also appear on the band's 2004 EP, So Cold. More than any piece of music, it's probably responsible for people calling the Halo 2 OST a product of its time, consigned to the dustbin of nu-metal. However, if you love the soaring guitars of the Mjolnir Mix or Unyielding, Blow Me Away scratches the same itch. It's lathered with frenzied djent, and the rap verses and mopey lyrics that the genre is often disdained for are nowhere to be found. It's accessible pop metal and save for the guttural screaming breakdown, I wish the lyrics were included.
This isn't one of those cases where you can just switch to the Anniversary mode to crank the volume, however. As 343 did with Follow, they replaced Blow Me Away with another track. In this case, it's Breaking the Covenant. Its title references Ezekiel 17:18, which described the Egyptian Pharaoh, Apries, "breaking the covenant" with the Christian God. This track is actually far more serrated than what the nu-metal band came up with. Although it starts as breezy prog, much like in Follow in Flight, a tormented fuzzy guitar soon fights for control of the song, and the heavenly voice is never able to retake its place. It's another battle between Brutes and Elites.
The Chief ends up one step behind the Index again as the Prophet of Truth takes off with it. The Flood have now permeated the Covenant base, and one chews through the windpipe of The Prophet of Mercy. Just as Tartarus is about to pull the Infection Form off of Mercy, Truth tells him to leave his brother be. Why wouldn't he? Now that Regret and Mercy are dead, Truth is the emperor of the Covenant. With this second death, we can now extract an irony from each of the Prophets' names:
- Regret attacked Earth too soon and was forced into a display of remorse.
- Mercy was shown no clemency.
- Truth will be the loudest liar in the room.
Uprising
The Gravemind promised the Arbiter that if he couldn't be told the Prophets had hoodwinked him, he'd have to be shown. While the Master Chief brings his special brand of mayhem to High Charity, the Dervish walks a trail of his dead brethren. A dying ally spends his last breath to tell him the Brutes have purged the High Council of Elites. The tune you hear in the background is Heavy Price Paid, a choral lament. If the Elites are at war with the Prophets, they are at war with the Covenant, and that means the Elites and the UNSC have a shared interest that can unify them. If the Arbiter allies with the humans, we can see the Chief and him achieve victory without either trampling the successes we've achieved with the other.
Combat Evolved carved a schism between the weapon designs of the UNSC and the Covenant to make a point about how alien the two militaries were to each other. Halo 2 introduces Covenant relatives for some human tools to whisper that maybe the species are more alike than we thought. The UNSC's Battle Rifle is answered by the Covenant's precision rifle, the Carbine. For the Sniper Rifle, there is the Beam Rifle, which is just as deadly but will overheat where the Sniper will run out of ammo. There is an armoured hero for the aliens and an armoured hero for Earth. Now, the game will use the weapons to make the Arbiter an honourary member of our species.
We already saw him dabble with the idea of taking up UNSC arms in Quarantine Zone, but after walking through the Elite graveyard in Uprising, he finds a room where he can scoop up Rockets and a Shotgun before aerating some Covenant bodies. After this tonal palette cleanser is a Ghost obstacle course where guitars yowl from the cliff faces. Starting from Halo 2, the Ghost, Banshee, and Wraith can all dash forward in a straight line until their energy runs dry and they must recharge. The move sacrifices handling for velocity and makes the Covenant vehicles feel very "other" in comparison to ours.
With the boost, we can "Splatter" an attacker even if we haven't gathered speed, pass through non-combat areas in a flash, and skitter away from enemies like a frightened mouse. I won't say "no" to a quick exit when sticky-fingered aliens are now ready to hijack our cars out from under us. With our Ghost, we snake our way through the level, and before you know it, we're reunited with the Covenant general Half-Jaw. We tell him that the Council Chambers have been made an abattoir. If this cable can rattle through the chain of command, a counter-offensive can foment.
Even the casual player can chug Uprising in well under twenty minutes, making it one of the shortest levels in the series. This is almost certainly Bungie suffocating under the notoriously tight time constraints of the late Halo 2 development and wanting to dedicate more resources to the final Chief and Arbiter levels. Some of the geometry from Uprising exists in the later level, The Great Journey, raising the possibility that they were once a single mission but were split into two. The short length of Uprising also increases the pace of the levels as the story breaks from a canter to a gallop. You'll notice that where we once played two levels as one of the protagonists before swapping, we now play one before the switch. It further quickens Halo 2.
High Charity
Back in the Covenant's administrative centre, the Chief's manoeuvres are also hastened with curving hard-light conveyor belts. The travelators are a rousing burst of movement that let the designers advance us to a new city borough without needing to plan out rooms between our current location and our destination. High Charity is a labyrinth of doors, but only a few open. That effect, combined with the bridges on the scale of the Golden Gate, conjures the illusion of a floating metropolis, even when Bungie can't render the whole space, and doing so would be undesirable from a level design perspective.
The Flood have knocked out the power, and in the Bungie version of the mission, that leaves visibility low. If you want to wreck challengers, you have to get close enough to see them. However, when beefy enemies blow through your shields like glass and Elites keep an Energy Sword on their hip, the last thing I want to do is cuddle up to them. Halo 2: Anniversary turns up the lumens at the acceptable cost of making High Charity feel less like a grave. Against type, the Covenant's home also includes a few rocky exteriors. Over the violet and basalt, Truth pumps in his confident propagandising. He tells his people Mercy is still at his side.
The one living Prophet wants to hightail it out of the capital and towards Earth on a Forerunner ship. Our planet is about to withstand the full brunt of a Covenant invasion and needs every hand it can get, but the aliens have split us from Cortana. We must stow away on Truth's Dreadnought, but Tartarus is sprinting to plug the Index into Halo. We already know how to stop Tartarus from firing the array because we were in this position three years ago. In Amber Clad sleeps on Installation 05, and if Cortana detonates her nuclear reactors, she can break the ring.
For the first time since we placed Cortana into our skull slot in Pillar of Autumn, we must leave our AI companion behind so that she and we can finish our respective missions. We are dropping her into the viper pit; Gravemind let us soften up High Charity so that he and his army of revenants could interlope and make it their vacation home. Loosely speaking, High Charity is the mission Gravemind, but with the Flood, a throwback to Combat Evolved's mission, Keyes. At the end of the level, Cortana seems to read my mind, telling me not to bother eradicating the animated dead and to head for the Keyship. As she is outside our neural computer and can appear on the hologram platforms of High Charity, we get to look her in the eye as we say goodbye.
The Great Journey
The Arbiter opened this game, and he will close it. All that remains is one final effort. Our protagonist and Half-Jaw stand before Installation 05's control room, knowing Tartarus and the Index are already inside. This level serves as one last hurrah for all the Covenant's most calamitous combat technologies: the Wraith, the Ghost, the Beam Rifle, the Banshee, and the Brute Shot. Even the Hunters join our side to streak the sky with green lightning. The Brute Shot I mentioned is a muscular grenade launcher with a humble magazine size. The knockback from its explosives can stop enemies in place. For the aerial display with the Banshee, you'll want to make the most out of the new dodges, or it'll come apart at the seams.
We leverage our prowess in flight to protect Sergeant Johnson as he blasts open the ignition room doors with a Scarab. Now, that's a hijack. Behind Halo's pearly gates, Tartarus uses threats, the closest thing he has to diplomacy, to cajole Keyes into firing the ring. It is strongly suggested in Combat Evolved that homo sapiens are the inheritors of the Forerunners' deeds and that those ancestors made it so that only humans can light Halo's divine flame. The Arbiter reveals in a persuasive speech to Tartarus that he understands now that Halo was made to extirpate life; it is not a staircase to eternity. 343 Guilty Spark confirms it, but Tartarus's delusion is less violable than 'Vadamee's. If we want the Index, we'll have to pry it from his cold, dead hands.
This is the one Bungie-made Halo that ends with a boss fight, and it does not let you sit still. The killing of Tartarus happens across three floors that he'll freely move between. You can fall down to lower levels or ride a grav lift to higher ones. When I see the Arbiter riding the light of the grav lift, he seems to have gotten a different kind of ascendance, one based not on immortality but on realisation of the truth. Tartarus wields a crushing Gravity Hammer and has a shield that will recharge if left undisturbed. That means the fight can be wrapped up promptly, or you can spend some time as Tartarus runs from you whenever his life preserver disintegrates and comes back reenergised as though moving back in time.
Stories are often built on ironies. The rookie everyone writes off becomes the champion, the avaricious man takes to acts of charity. In Halo 2, the most decorated warrior of a religion sabotages its consecration. Not that the Chief could have known this, but there was no reason to leave Cortana behind. With Tartarus dead, Thel stops the key from turning, but Guilty Spark rains on our parade. He tells us that as Installation 05 underwent an "unexpected shutdown", the array has entered a stand-by mode that lets all Halos be fired remotely from something called "The Ark". We then cut to the Master Chief inside Truth's transportation and when Admiral Hood asks him, "Do you mind telling me what you're doing on that ship?", he answers with the line that became at once a slogan and badge of shame for Halo 2:
"Sir, finishing this fight".
When I first watched this cutscene in Anniversary, it was even more of a letdown than I remembered. Sure, all cliffhangers leave the audience with a lack of resolution. However, there are three tools with which The Great Journey sharpens its stop into a shiv that really stings:
- We've been trained to expect that when the game shifts perspective to the other protagonist, it means the start of a new level. Therefore, at the end of this stage, when the tape cuts back to the Master Chief, we're promised another mission. Then, the game pulls it away from us like a Turkish ice cream vendor.
- The Chief's line has that action machismo to it, but it doesn't add anything substantive to the story, which you should do in your finale.
- Having failed to produce a sense of conclusion with the animation or script, the game cuts to black and a rearrangement of the intro to Brothers in Arms plays, ending on an up note. This recycled stinger is a tacked-on attempt at a conclusion.
I guess I should come to some kind of conclusion as well.
Conclusion
When I'm tempted to try and reverse-engineer a piece of media's development history, I think of Halo 2, and it gives me caution. I could claim that I know why artists hitch cliffhangers to the back of their sequels: once creators have two items under their belt, a trilogy is presupposed, and they want to keep fans coming back for more. When I first played Halo 2, I assumed that was what had happened to it, and I couldn't have been more wrong. The developers that have discussed the middle child's ending have always maintained they intended this game to be the last. They wanted the thriller to culminate with the Master Chief going head-to-head with Truth on Earth and saving humanity.[2][3][4][17] O'Donnell and Staten have said that The Ark would've been here on our home planet.[6][25]
Artist Lee Wilson shared storyboards for the game that corroborate this vision. The cinematography even suggests Earth as the last battleground in the war. When the Arbiter asks Guilty Spark where "the Ark" is, it cuts to Truth's Keyship hovering over Earth, as if that's the answer, even though in Halo 3, the Ark is a space station far, far away. What happened was that the much-tarried construction of the campaign meant there was no time for a true end to Halo 2, and Bungie had to cobble one together from bits of lint and gum they had lying around.[2][3][4][6]
I would also have assumed from Halo 2's peerless weapons, scintillating action sequences, and continued commitment to the series' visual identity that its development was smooth sailing, but that wasn't true either. Its engineers were scattered across the decks, and the technology that Bungie was looking to encase in the game didn't come to fruition. But by some miracle, the studio was able to rise above their close call with destruction and make possibly the best original Xbox game there was: a gold standard for the first-person shooter. And you know what? It says everything that even the stammering and famished ending of this story could not eclipse the experimentation, refinement, and unmitigated extravaganza of the rest of the campaign. Like the Arbiter, Bungie may have strained under the weight of failure, but they were more than redeemed. Thanks for reading.
Notes
- Bungie's 13-year battle with crunch culture by Matthew Handrahan (August 4, 2017), GamesIndustry.biz.
- The Complete, Untold History of Halo by Steve Haske (May 30, 2017), Vice.
- Better Than Halo: The Making of Halo 2 by Rob Fahey (April 11, 2010), Eurogamer.
- O Brave New World by Bungie Studios (August 4, 2011), YouTube.
- Halo: Combat Evolved Developer Commentary by Bungie Studios (September 25, 2007), Halo 3 Legendary Edition.
- IGN Unfiltered Interview: Halo and Destiny Composer Marty O'Donnell by Ryan McCaffrey (March 24, 2016), IGN.
- Bungie Studios (2001). Halo: Combat Evolved Credits. Microsoft Game Studios.
- The History of Halo by Rus McLaughlin (August 16, 2019), IGN.
- Bungie Studios (2004). Halo 2 Credits. Microsoft Game Studios.
- Nylund, E. (2005). Halo: First Strike. Orbit (p. 243-245).
- The Halo Graphic Novel mentions a "Paris/BS spoof" when referring to the files of an "alpha juliett juliett". The same page mentions Avery J. Johnson, whose files would have been tampered with to cover up his involvement in the original Spartan program.[24] In Halo: First Strike, Catherine Halsey tells the Master Chief that Johnson contracted Boren's Syndrome at the Battle of Paris IV.[10] Therefore, fans haveinterpreted that the "Paris/BF spoof" was an Office of Naval Intelligence hoax that Johnson suffered from Boren's Syndrome disseminated to obscure that he is a Spartan I.
- Ed Fries Resigns by David Jenkins (January 14, 2004), Game Developer.
- Halo 2's legendary E3 demo is finally playable, 20 years later by Ari Notis (November 4, 2024), Polygon.
- Celebrate Halo 2's 20th Anniversary By Playing Its Iconic E3 2003 Demo Very Soon by Cameron Koch (November 4, 2024), Gamespot.
- Behind the Scenes: The Making of Halo 2 by Bungie Studios (November 9, 2004), Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition.
- DF Retro Extra: Halo 2 - Revisiting E3 2003's Impossible Xbox Demo! by Digital Foundry (June 6, 2018), YouTube.
- Halo 2 Developer Commentary by Bungie Studios (September 25, 2007), Halo 3 Legendary Edition.
- Microsoft Xbox at 20: Looking back at the original 2001 review by Dan Ackerman and Darren Gladstone (November 15, 2021), CNET.
- NVIDIA NV2A by TechPowerUp Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed November 8, 2024), TechPowerUp.
- Sumthing Else Music Works by Nile Rodgers (Date Unknown, Accessed November 8, 2024), NileRodgers.com.
- Bungie, Microsoft, Sumthing Else Music Works (2002). Halo: Combat Evolved Original Soundtrack Back Cover. Sumthing Else Music Works.
- Plato, Translated by: Cope, E.M. (1864). Plato's Gorgias, Literally Translated, With an Introductory Essay, Containing a Summary of the Argument. Deighton, Bell, and co. (p. 125).
- Halo Director Discusses Extra Year of Development, the Bungie Days, and More! - IGN Unfiltered #62 by Ryan McCaffrey (November 23, 2021), IGN.
- Marvel Publishing, Bungie Studios (2006). Halo Graphic Novel. Marvel Publishing (p. 122).
All other sources linked at relevant points in article.
