Halo

Specifically Halo Legends.  Has anyone seen this yet?  I got it from Netflix this week.  I would have just bought it due to my love of Halo, but the Animatrix, Batman Gotham Knight, etc... have taught me that my love of various franchises cannot actually weather the Anime treatment.

Overall, I would say it's okay.  There are 8 videos, 4 of which I liked, and 4 of which I didn't.  There is one sooooo laughably bad, you have to take it as a joke.  I think it's meant to be a joke, but who can really tell?

The 4 good ones, according to xhonzi, were:

The Package
The Duel
Origins I
Origins II

Maybe Odd One Out gets an honourable mention for being so terrible to be entertaining.

Not good, according to xhonzi, were:

Homecoming
The Babysitter
Ptotype

Origins I and II were interesting.  In some ways, it's drawing the curtain WAY back on some of what they've been hinting at.  The episode starts 1 kajillions years BC and shows the fall of Forerunner civilization.  It covers the original creation of and firing of the Halo rings.  And then the repopulation of the human and alien races that were saved on the Ark.  It quickly covers Earth history as we know it and then gets into the future UNSC stuff.  It covers some of the human v human stuff occuring at the beginning of the Spartan program and then starts the covenant war.

This is where I get confused.

I can't tell if Cortana is retelling the events of Halo 1-3, but in a very screwed up way...  Or is she is retelling some event prior to Halo 1, but involves the Flood somehow?  I've read most of the books and played all of the games, so I figured I pretty much knew what there was to know... but this scene through the ending really confused me.  I listened to the commentary, and the only help Frank O'Connor was to say that the video was purposefully shown from Cortana's perspective.  And since she is bordering on rampancy, her recounting of events may be inaccurate.  Which sort of gives them a get-out-of-jail-free card for later contradicting anything in the video.

But if anyone else would like to speculate on it, please let me know.

... I love his humor !

Crap.  This thread will never be about Halo, despite the title.

I don't know Halo yet, but Batman Gotham Knight was really boring. The first one only was... original, and nice.

Anyway, the best anime I saw since a long time is called "Abenobashi shopping street". You can buy it with your eyes closed !

Touché.

Okay, this silliness is getting out of hand. Let's at least give threads a chance to get going before mercilessly derailing them. There are plenty of silly threads around, surely we can afford to have a few serious ones, right?

To try to bring this thread back on topic...

I first heard about Halo Legends back when I was going through a big Halo kick, and couldn't wait for it. Now my Halo kick has worn off and... well, I am sure I'll get around to seeing it sometime.

Having never learned to appreciate anime in the slightest, I haven't had very high expectations for it (though I think a Lucas-input free anime remake of the original trilogy would be BEYOND AWESOME!!! Sometimes I even dream of its existence and wake up realizing it was all just a dream and I cry a little bit to myself out of disappointment...). Though it is nice to hear a fellow non-anime-lover mention liking at least 50% percent of it. I'll try to check it out sometime soon.

From what I understand, it is suppose to be Cortana retelling the events of the first three games. So they must have just taken plenty of creative liberties with it all. I remember reading that one of the segments was intended as a parody of the Halo universe, so that must be the one you said has to be taken as a joke. Kind of strange they feel the need to make fun of themselves, when the only people that would even consider this are loyal Halo fans who already appeciate that universe.

As a joke, it's actually pretty funny.  It's also terrible in the sense that it might get carried away with itself and become a big thing.

For an unfollowable plot, I followed the plot of Halo 3 just fine. Sure, I'd definitely call it the Return of the Jedi of the Halo trilogy, wasn't as good or as original as the first two, but also had some of the best moments in the series. And I'd definitely label Halo 2 as my favorite of the trilogy (second favorite Halo game next to the amazingly brilliant ODST), though there seems to be a lot of hate out there for it. The whole alternating Master Chief and Arbiter thing was a big surprise and really mixed things up a lot, and allowed the story to cover a lot more ground.

Halo Reach seemed really cool before the trailer was released... now I think it just looks kind of lame. The whole "Oh yeah, we're total bad asses!" vibe it has going on just doesn't do it for me. This new game seems like it is really catering to the stereotypical Bud Light swilling redneck Halo fan.

That stereotype really annoys me, because I think Halo has a lot more to it than most people see. I usually defend the series from that stereotype, but I think Bungie left me no choice with the upcoming installment, I don't think I'll be able to defend this one, it has just gone too far.

I guess I consider badass characters and lots of explosians to be fairly redneck-esque. Style over substance and all that. Just doesn't do it for me. Maybe I am on the wrong track here, but the Spartans in the trailer were just a bit too over the top for me, reminded me of the ridiculously over the top masculinity of the Gears of War characters. I just can't take that sort of bullshit seriously.

Octorox said:

Also, CE was the best, end of story.

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize that. My mistake.

There is nothing wrong with making tough guy characters, when they have some depth too them. But too often, especially with video games, characters are made out to be "badass" to a level where it is almost impossible to suspend disbelief, and they have very little else going for them. There is nothing wrong with a heartfelt tough guy. I mean, we have loved Superman for all these years, and he is pretty much invicible, but his character has always had a lot of emotion to him and was relatable, he never went around flaunting his toughness like a damn 2D WWF character (i.e. Oh yeah! I am so tough and awesome!). Wrestling (the fake Soap Opera-esque televised kind) is, IMHO, the ultimate redneck sport. You always see guys with freakin' mullets running around in WWF shirts with holes all in them.

Usually I use the term badass with a negative shallow connotation*. I don't see Master Chief and Arbiter, which are actually both relatively heartfelt characters, or what I have seen of the Mass Effect characters, being anything like 2D WWF like characters, but that is exactly how I see the guys from Gears of War and the new Spartans from Reach. Hopefully I will be wrong, because I'd really want to like Reach, it has just failed to impress me so far. I loved ODST, and would love to see Reach be just as impressive.

*growing up I had always been taller and broader shouldered than most of the other guys my age. I'd never really felt the need to prove myself, and had spent a lot of my adolescence shrugging off idiots who wanted to get in my face because they felt they had something to prove, and frankly I never cared who could take who. "No, I don't want to fight you. Yes, I am sure you'd win. You're right, yeah, I'm a total coward." usually became the best way out of those ridiculous situations. So when characters in fiction remind me of these brainless badass machismo types, I just can't relate in the slightest.

Maybe I am jumping to conclusion. It is really hard to tell anything from a short little trailer. Just from what I have seen, it doesn't appeal to me at all. Hasn't done anything to make me excited about the game. If I wasn't a Halo fan or had no idea what Halo was, I would watch this trailer and think it looks kind of lame. I am not trying to be harsh on it, or brush it off without giving it a chance, I'll definitely give it a chance, and it will probably be quite good. I liked the other four Halo FPSs, so no doubt I'll like this one in the end.

It sounds like I'll feel about this like I did about Animatrix and Gotham Knight: mostly meh, but worth watching once.

Wow, C3PX- we're totally on the same page here.  I really liked Halo 2 as well, though I might have preferred 3 overall.  In 2, I liked the alternating Chief/Arby thing and thought the story was a lot more interesting than Halo CE's as well.  It's fairly common for the first part of a story to draw simple white/black lines and then for the 2nd part to bring out the grey or the blurred lines, and I thought Halo 2 did this well.  I thought Halo 3 was really strong in the sense of the scale of the battle.  It was much larger in terms of number of troops and also of combat hardware.  (looks like Reach is going to have even larger scale set pieces).

Likewise, the Spartan design in what I've seen of Reach puts me off in almost the same way.  Spartans are supposed to be 8 or 9 feet tall and it makes them look a little thin... The Reach Spartans totally looked to have that bulked up Gears of War look to me.  Here's hoping that we're both wrong in that regard.

I was watching the Reach ViDoc "Into the Breach" and it had lots of people gushing over Halo CE and how its some kind of highwater mark that they're constantly trying to get back to.  I think the games have only gotten better since CE, but I seem to be in a minority.

Whoa, tried to watch a bit of Halo: Legends a bit ago and found it entirely unwatchable. Must just be my inability to appreciate anime.

xhonzi said:

Likewise, the Spartan design in what I've seen of Reach puts me off in almost the same way.  Spartans are supposed to be 8 or 9 feet tall and it makes them look a little thin... The Reach Spartans totally looked to have that bulked up Gears of War look to me.

Yeah, from Master Chief in the game and the Spartans in the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach (the only of the books I have read), I got the impression Spartans are suppose to be extremely utilitarian, the ultimate boy scouts. Instead, Halo Reach's Spartans seem the opposite of utilitarian, more like frat boys than boy scouts. 

I was watching the Reach ViDoc "Into the Breach" and it had lots of people gushing over Halo CE and how its some kind of highwater mark that they're constantly trying to get back to.  I think the games have only gotten better since CE, but I seem to be in a minority.

Well, I think the significance of Halo:CE was the ground it covered regarding gameplay. It truly was a high water mark for the FPS genre, especially in regards to the console FPS (prior to Halo, the words console and FPS in the same sentence where synonyms for "worthless"). From a story telling standpoint, Halo:CE really has nothing going for it. It didn't have an original idea in it, it was extremely linear, and it lacked any character depth whatsoever.

But one thing that rings true for games and not for many other forms of art, is that developers must always strive to surpass them. Dark Forces was very impressive for its time, great fun, and had advantages over its contemporary FPS games, advantages that other games borrowed and improved on. No one today would say, "Hey, what we really need to do is make a game that plays like Dark Forces!", it is too archaic today. Halo:CE is the same way, it may have been the first to tread certain ground, but in the time since its release that ground has been trampled on by just about every other FPS in some way or another, and some have far surpassed it.  

The Package really was the most watchable to us Westerners.

First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx (also by Nylund) are the other two good novels.  Depending on how much you liked Fall of Reach, you should give them a shot.

Agreed on your comments regarding Halo CE and what it means as an historical landmark in the life of FPSs on consoles. 

http://movies.ign.com/dor/objects/40236/halo/videos/halomovie_trl_040110.html

Enjoy.