#really truly

Disclaimer: If you know or (god forbid, somehow) are Troy Denning, this is not for you.

Disclaimer 2: I'm okay! A part of Halo I am agitated about does not do me actual harm. Treating it like it’s deadly serious and writing a really long dramatic post about it is kind of a bit that I’m doing, and if I am doing a bit it means I’m alright. It’s very kind of you to have wondered, though.

Alright. I’m getting back into character. Hold on…

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See, when I decided to catch up on ALL Halo it was partly a joke, partly an adventure in obtaining a useless form of nerd dominance, and mostly a response to this deep inner fear that I'm not Valid(TM) as a Halo fan unless I'm completely up to snuff […] The actual state of things in Halo, though, is that nobody really gives a shit […] except for people like me, and I've just made myself the King of Clown Mountain.

bloodgulchblog, 10/03/22

I've really honestly had fun with every halo novel since Infinite, I want to believe

bloodgulchblog, 03/22/25

what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately? I do my best to filter things I know I automatically will not enjoy so, for something that didn't drive me off from a tag I knew I didn't want to read: Vision of a major character that clashes too hard with my own for me to sit down and have a good time.

bloodgulchblog, 06/23/26

1 - I Want To Believe

There are some things I enjoy specifically by tearing them apart. It is fascinating to me that there are new Dragonlance novels being released in the 21st century and I will show up with unchecked violence in my heart every time. I have to know whatever nonsense happens in James Cameron’s Avatar because I need the chemical hit of being amazed by the amount of effort and effects artistry going into absolute dogshit. Some friends got me entirely hooked on a mesmerizingly mediocre children’s cartoon called DinoSquad about teens that turn into dinosaurs (naturally) the same summer I went through every stage of grief (and perhaps a few more I invented for myself) about Halo 5.

Halo, you see, is not one of the things I prefer to enjoy by tearing it apart. I will do so if I must. I can extract my money’s worth of fun-blood from any stone. I will play with my toys by tearing chunks off them and throwing them at my friends to make them go “Aah!” if I can’t find the normal, intended fun I was supposed to have. But I would much, much rather be able to just approach Halo productions with good faith and experience fun.

I’m tired, I work full time, sometimes I get a little lazy and just want to enjoy something without having to put on my clown shoes and do a whole Ringling Brothers production about it.

My faith in Halo Studios has been high, perhaps undeservedly so given Halo’s history and the dire state of the rumors surrounding the studio. Perhaps I have been a fool and this is what I get for it, but the situation is honestly very simple: I want to believe. I want to have a good time. I want Halo to succeed and get clean and do something besides show up to piss on my carpet every few years. You show me a run of good Halo novels after a game that tapped at some of the ideas I find most compelling in this story, and I start getting real hopeful. Even Outcasts by Troy Denning was pretty alright, I thought. It didn’t make me all that mad, all things considered.

Speaking of Troy Denning, I should qualify why that’s an achievement for him. Here’s an old joke of mine. It’s kind of evergreen.

2 - Tilting At Windmills

I had hoped my Troy Denning Hater Era (2018-2023 or so) was over. Aside from getting just a little too interested whenever I see a random Star Wars fan who doesn’t like him talking smack in the wild, I liked to think I had mostly gotten over it. This was a relief to me, because I don’t actually enjoy trying to lock myself down like a werewolf on a bad moon every time an author comes up. This is especially the case here because I don’t think Denning’s a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination. He seems to be nice. His Halo writing has never struck me as cynical, it always feels sincerely enthusiastic. He understands the assignment, he wants to write something fun for the Halo fans to enjoy. When he does things like learning the word lechatelierite or lots of facts about rope climbing and he wants to share that with you, I really do find that endearing in the same way I found it endearing to notice that Eric Nylund really truly loved to write space battles. A lot of people like his books. I don’t like getting fired up about something so inconsequential as books I think are mid at best and usually worse.

I am well aware that the aesthetic quality of a person’s artwork (especially commercial popular entertainment work for hire) is not an indicator of the weight of their heart against the feather, and that hating someone’s work in and of itself is not an attack on a person. Therefore, I can have whatever opinons I want without doing harm and it's fine. Regardless: I am still not proud of how Troy Denning's Halo writing turns me into the fucking Joker. It’s embarrassing. It’s like accidentally scaring the shit out of everyone at the function because I got too uncareful about my weird allergy and need an epipen now.

I had known (of course I had known) that he was involved in writing the Operation METEORITE missions that would be included in Campaign Evolved. (From here on, I will use the abbreviation CER for “Combat Evolved Remake” to distinguish the new game from CE, for clarity.) The language used at the time was he had “consulted.” I figured this was a bid for good faith with the part of the fanbase that likes Denning’s Master Chief stories, and I didn’t take it too seriously and didn’t think about it too hard. Halo Infinite’s corpse hadn’t been moved to the morgue yet, and Halo Infinite was pretty okay from a character writing perspective, so the thing I'm a freak about was probably gonna be fine. 

(...As far as Halo games go, anyway. We’re a fandom built around a triple-A FPS series that desperately wants approval from young men that don’t read. We bury the bar here, sir.) 

I just accepted that I probably wouldn’t like “Hungry Buzzards” (the premium edition bonus short story, which I also don’t by the way) but would take my lumps and clench my jaw and get over it. I will know all the Halo. All of it. Always. I am CURATOR or whatever, do not forget.

I figured nothing in here was going to blow my mind, but I was happy to at least have something new to show up for as a lore freak.

I did not genuinely expect all the writing in the three new missions themselves to land fully decked out in just about everything I hate about how Troy Denning writes for Halo.

3 - Historic Beef

If I really am going to get my stupidest sword down off the mantle again, it may help to give you a summary of my longstanding issues with Troy Denning’s Halo work. It’s been a while. Not everyone who’s here now was around for this.

Not all of his hallmarks will come up in the bonus missions for CER, but if I’m going to do this thing at all I’m going to do it completely.

Denning’s protagonists come across as stupid/incurious/non-reactive too often for it to be on purpose, including ones that are supposed to be intelligent and sharp. It’s especially damning with his detective character Veta Lopis. I should honestly consider it most damaging in her stories, but I am biased. I care less about Lopis than I do about legacy characters like Chief and Johnson.

As part of the above, Denning is a sometimes-tolerable handler for young Master Chief. John-117, bless his heart, is not Halo’s cleverest character. Unfortunately, Shadows of Reach showed us that he writes adult Master Chief the exact same way he wrote him as a teenager and it’s maddening. Denning consistently writes Chief in a way that just does not hold up for a 40+ year old person with decades of military leadership experience working with strangers in times of crisis. According to Troy Denning it is in 2559, at age 48, that Chief realizes for the first time that junior officers look up to him/that he has an informal responsibility to help develop them. Denning also frequently has characters address Chief like he’s much younger/less experienced than makes sense, and it is treated as reasonable and not strange. (To be clear, it’s also irritating when Halo is overly reverent and worshipful of the Chief, but we live in a complicated world. Multiple things can be bad at the same time.)

“Everyone stands around the table and argues about how to do a tactics” scenes are a standard trope of milsf, but with Denning even the action scenes tend to bog down hard on something I started calling “tactical walking.” Pacing drops to a crawl for paragraphs at a time about which characters are moving to where, strings of details that aren’t relevant or aren’t happening right now, which gun(s) they are carrying, which gun(s) they wish they had, etc. It’s frequently so overstuffed that moments that should be tense or punchy are plodding and tedious, and this is very much not universally common in milsf in general or Halo specifically.

Denning’s introspection on characters is very thin and generic, their inner lives feel really flat and it’s part of the problem in Point #1. Shadows of Reach, the only Chief book between 5 and Infinite, only really has him think about Cortana for about two paragraphs in the first chapter and it’s mostly used to get the summary of Halo 5 out of the way. Chief has more feelings about the efficacy of MA5B rifles in Shadows of Reach than he has about Halo’s second most important character who is currently leading a galaxy-conquering robot army, and I invite you to count them yourself as a fun little exercise. Infinite and Edge of Dawn, meanwhile, got huge pathos out of Chief’s grief and complicated feelings of guilt/responsibility about Cortana, and it makes him feel much more three dimensional in those stories.

Denning misses established characterization of legacy characters (such as very obvious details Nylund gave to the members of Team Saber to help readers remember them) and adds new surface details that don’t follow (deciding Fred is the “funny” guy of Blue Team, for example), or just are not thought-out. Halo owes me for the dental work I will someday need from all the tooth-grinding I had to do about his decision to have Kelly-087, a character born 519 years after the death of Freddie Mercury, listening to Queen to get pumped up. I need you to understand that William Shakespeare died 410 years ago. The gap between you and Much Ado About Nothing is over a century less than the gap between Kelly and Another One Bites The Dust. The book treats 20th century rock as if it would seem cool and “rebellious” to 26th century characters. (Historian’s Note: Doing this type of thing with scifi characters got you cyberbullied by older kids on fanfiction.net in 2002.)

Denning’s sense of cool is very dated (see Point #5) and, more critically, he isn’t funny. I always feel like an asshole when I point this out, but he's just really unfunny and most of his jokes land in my lap like a dead fish. Halo, this is how you get the hip young audience to think you’re corny and out of touch. Revisit the “Fred-104 has a concussion and hilarity ensues!” sections of Shadows of Reach any time you doubt this.

Denning’s dialogue is frequently… I really, truly hate to use this word these days, but  I have nothing else for it. Cringe. It’s cringe. He just habitually has characters talk in ways that don’t feel natural/like things people would actually say.  It’s really noticeable when you read a better character writer after you’ve gone through a bunch of Denning books. (The “hugging a naked Spartan” conversation in Retribution is like a war flashback in my memory. You couldn’t waterboard character dialogue like that out of me.)

Of these 7 (YOU KNOW, BUNGIE NUMBER?) points, METEORITE displays the tendencies described in 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7. Keen-eyed viewers will notice that’s all of them that are possible to pull off in video game levels where you don’t get internal narration from/about characters. Boy oh boy oh boy. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter exactly how many of these things came directly from Denning or not. I’m here because of bad writing, very familiar bad writing to be sure but it doesn’t truly matter how the bad writing got in there. It’s bad. I was most excited to see the three new missions with a new story in them, even if they were probably just serviceable and not amazing. I was let down. I had worked myself to a place of tolerance and begrudging acceptance about Troy Denning’s Halo writing, and after this it’s gone again. I’m done with him and I’m done with anything he writes for this property.

I think that is the most concise review I could offer of my opinion of Operation METEORITE, and that’s probably the useful takeaway of what I’m trying to express here. But I have to get into the bones of it in order to make my case, there’s no real elegant way for me to do it. Fuck it. Take my hand. We'll dig for bedrock, you and I.

4 - Okay Zita, What Happens in Operation METEORITE?

Halo game plots are never high artistry and that’s literally fine, they are just a reason for you to go shoot stuff. The premise for this in and of itself is mostly pretty okay, with my main standout point of annoyance being Chief and Johnson going on a mission that is (mostly) only the two of them. It’s a weird choice. I understand that it’s just an excuse plot because Halo wanted Johnson to be the feature character here, but it’s not something that follows from the fiction of who Chief and Johnson are and what doing their respective jobs usually looks like.

I would say that last sentence writ large is the core of what I’m so frustrated with here, and that became more and more glaring the longer I looked at this, but I’ll get more into details after I’ve given you a basic rundown.

It is the summer of 2551. The Covenant parked an agricultural support ship, the Triumph of Tolerance, over the recently-glassed planet Promise. Chief and Johnson go onto a Covenant ship to get INTEL MACGUFFIN. (They are going to access the ship’s starholo to get navigation data basically.)

The ship is here because the PROPHET OF HARMONY is doing SCIENCE on COVENANT GUYS to make them WORSE and the first in his exciting new line of products is JIRALHANAE THAT ARE WORSE. There are also some marines here, the face character for them being Lieutenant Williams, that were subect to evil science but they’re fine it’s fine don’t worry about it. Williams is the new Unpopular Mean Woman in Halo because she gets an extremely hamfisted rendition of ye olde “ODSTs hate Spartans and you have to win their respect” trope that this narrative just does not have room to execute. Williams and company help Chief and Johnson do the thing and then uhhhh do a noble sacrifice at the end to lower the ship’s shields for the .02 seconds necessary for the ship to be blown up. 

It is a very profoundly whatever sequence of events. One of the things I found very noticeable is how much of a do-nothing story this was. Again, I honestly didn’t anticipate much more than that and that’s okay. I did not expect good new character work, I thought there were probably gonna be some good new oneliners and hype moments but nothing crazy. Fair enough, Halo. Let me shoot some space aliens and hear some voicelines and look at some bespoke environment assets. I can do that.

I did not expect there to be enough range of motion inside this thing for it to make me mad.

5 - Okay Zita, What Pissed You Off So Bad?

My first experience with the bonus levels for CER was this:

I decided hell, I’ll go on a discord call and stream this in case any of my friends want to hang out and watch while I do this. Unplanned, nobody actually had the time to stop by while I had the game open, but no big deal. 

I loaded it up.

I observed an opening cutscene. I know people are shitting on the animation but I liked it, there are a lot of small details I thought were pretty good.

I shot some aliens.

I got a second cutscene that introduced Johnson’s part in this that was like, just not very good. They have him swagger in listening to some kind of “cool” rock music on his earpiece that expands to the viewer’s audio as it makes a show of Johnson pulling his Stanchion out of a case. (A gun that is one: being showcased to you as a cool thing despite you not being able to play with it and two: not new so I’m not sure why we need to make such a big deal out of it if we’re not allowed to touch it anyway. Also, they decided he has named it for some fucking reason? Why? Do we need to staple “guy who names a rifle” onto Johnson? Are we, the video games public, not tired of this yet?)

I heard some dialogue that was so jarringly bad that I literally could not focus on the gameplay and had to stop. Paused. Closed the stream. Put the controller down. Took my headset off.

I tried. I really, truly tried. I didn’t expect these missions to amaze me, I was on board for something probably pretty basic and maybe kind of cheesy in a classic Halo way. I wanted to like them. I pulled up someone else’s recordings so I could really focus on the writing itself without getting lost because of how bad I am at understanding things while playing a game. (The parts of my brain that process FPS gameplay and story information are not good neighbors unfortunately.) METEORITE has a handful of moments that I thought were alright. There are a couple of lines I liked. But for me, this was a genuinely bad experience.

6 - You Can’t Reheat Leftovers and Pretend You Cooked Again

Let’s talk about irritating self-referential shit.

Chief saying “boo” to a grunt in the opening cutscene is far from the worst line in this script, but it is annoying. I don’t need to be reminded of things Master Chief says in Halo 2 in a prequel level to a remake of Halo CE. “Boo,” however, is at least short and pretty meaningless. Chief telling Johnson that his plan is to “shoot our way out” is incredibly stale but it’s not the worst. It’s nostalgia bait, it’s unoriginal and annoying, but I can get over it. I am aware of my capacity to be unfun and I try to check my tendencies.

The one that truly pisses me off comes much later. When the Chief objects to the marines sacrificing themselves to bring down the ship’s shields, Johnson tells him “The missions change. They always do.”

First of all: Halo, can we please stop taking any good lines Chief had in Infinite and turning them into stuff he’s copying from other people? I was willing to accept this the first time it happened with the Arbiter being a source for his lines about failure (established in “Sunrise on Sanghelios”). If he had to get it from anywhere, the guy whose leitmotif is “Weight of Failure” is the top candidate and the moment in which he says this to the Chief feels appropriate. It’s recontextualizing lines John says in support of a very traumatized survivor in Infinite as something that he took to heart from a friend in a time where he himself was feeling very low, and that works for me. 

But: I don’t think this is a trick that can be played twice without doing damage to Infinite.

For Chief’s interactions with Joyeuse and Esparza in Infinite to have weight, it’s important for Chief to have his own level of insight. Allowing him to have some originality of thought here matters because it’s showing us the Chief stepping up to a plate we rarely get to see him approach, and he is managing to do it pretty well. “Missions change. They always do,” is a line where he is telling Joyeuse that they need to move on from her original instructions while she is upset that she hasn’t been deleted. Joyeuse needs to be told that it’s a good thing that even if they don’t know why her deletion routine didn’t trigger, it is useful that she is still here to help and they shouldn’t just try to delete her again. Chief does not often get these moments where he manages to help other characters through things by talking to them. This isn’t to say that we need him to have them constantly, as that also wouldn’t be true to the character, but their relative rarity gives them weight when he has them. Having the biggest one in Infinite (the one with Esparza) already undermined a bit means that it stings much more when METEORITE pulls this.

Secondly: The use in METEORITE is just really bad.

Johnson is speaking to the Chief like he is some kid fresh out of boot and not a 41 year old adult with almost three decades of Covenant warfighting under his belt. The situation he’s doing it in feels so contrived that I like my odds betting it was engineered top-down specifically to create a moment for this line. And what a line to do this with. It’s honestly such a condescending thing to say here, it is not something I can imagined Johnson would say to Chief and if he did, it would damage their rapport. If Johnson were to be a source for this idea for the Chief to take to heart and restate later, it would’ve only worked if it had happened decades ago.

The use of the line here is also kind of bonkers on a thematic level. In fairness, my standards for what I would have accepted in Operation METEORITE are very low and think this level of scrutiny is beyond what I planned to subject it to, but as a fun bonus: It is fucking wild to retcon the origin of a line Chief uses to tell someone that she should not die into a line that was used to tell Chief that a bunch of people had to die. 

Johnson and the Master Chief don’t talk like this to one another. Speaking of…

7 - The AO3 School of Character Writing

There is a frustrating tendency that many amateur writers have where, when faced with uncertainty about how any two characters would interact with one another, they tend to fall back on just having everyone on the same “side” be friends in pretty generic/bland terms to reduce any friction. It’s really common in fanfiction where the author has no choice but to include these characters, but they’re not the part the author is actually interested in. It’s lazy writing, but it’s forgivable in hobby work. Seeing this in the central character relationship of a professional Halo production allegedly grounded in lore is kind of jawdropping to me.

The Chief and Johnson are not best friends and they don’t play around with one another the way METEORITE has them do. Not only is this just not good writing for these characters, it would also have been extremely easy to avoid because it’s a matter of less being more. 

The premise of METEORITE itself, that Chief has hand-picked Johnson to go onto a Covenant ship as a two-man team, is already troubled to start with. This is probably the most top-down decision in the whole thing, because it does not make any fucking sense. Chief and Johnson have old rapport from decades ago but they are not best buddies, they are not favorite coworkers, and we already know the contents of the Master Chief’s shortlist for deadly mission partners: there are a few dozen of them and their names all end in numbers. Having Chief and Johnson do a buddy mission isn’t a terrible idea for a little bonus like this, it has strong fandom appeal and sounds fun, but I went into this really needing to be sold on why Johnson is here and not another Spartan or (even better) several other Spartans. 

This is not obscure or fringe lore, everyone knows Blue Team exists by now and I figured there would be an acceptable excuse for this team comp. I was astonished to find that the only effort to do so is in a bonus short story from the premium edition of the game and it doesn’t even do it well. 

To summarize “Hungry Buzzards”: Chief is on Reach to help test a variant of exoskeleton related to things we’ve seen before, it’s in the same technological family as the HRUNTING, the Cyclops, and the Mantis.

Ackerson is in charge of these and wants to prove they’re just as effective as a Spartan and apparently Chief is here, on Reach, just to fight these guys. During this, they are told about the suspiciously vulnerable ship over Promise and decide to he can’t have his team is the need to send him out is immediate and they can’t wait for his team and there’s a “cool” stinger at the end where the choice of Chief’s one single ODST he wants to work with is left unstated but obvious… but why is Chief at Reach without his team? The Covenant war would be at its worst the year before Reach falls, why the hell do they need to pull the Master Chief specifically back to Reach just to test Ackerson’s pet project? What are the rest of his team doing right now? Why is he alone and why does it make more sense that they can pull up one specific ODST who also has no reason to be on Reach right now, but not John’s team? I know that this is obviously something contrived, but can’t we contrive just a little harder?

I’m still not over “Chief and Johnson go on a two man mission cause Johnson is Chief’s favorite guy” and will probably reel on that one for a while. Let me refresh you on the state of play prior to this: 

Chief and Johnson met when Chief was 15 years old during the novel Silent Storm. This addition to Halo lore was made in 2018, and the story has Johnson brought on to help teach the young Spartan-IIs about fighting the Covenant (as he’s one of the people with the most experience doing that right after Harvest) in preparation for some missions they’re about to do. They bond a bit and Chief learns some things from him, but there is no indication that they have worked together since.

I am going to assume that with CER fresh in the chamber, you are probably passing familiar with how they interact in CE.

Chief and Johnson’s relationship in First Strike, the novel that comes later between CE and Halo 2, is professional and Chief recognizes Johnson from CE. First Strike is much older, but it doesn’t actually break First Strike for Chief to have met Johnson earlier than that because there’s no reason for it to change his assessment of what’s going on. It’s also a major point in his development in First Strike that he has to very seriously consider whether or not to do something “for the greater good” that will kill Johnson. First Strike is, therefore, a book that will be undermined if they are updated to “wisecracking best buddies” instead of just “guy I have some respect for because we’ve worked together.”

Halo 2 and 3 work perfectly well with these characters being friendly but not that friendly. Johnson likes Chief, him having briefly known Chief as a teenager makes the way Johnson banters with him to help him through the uncomfortable formal stuff at the front of Halo 2 into something better than it already was, but Chief doesn’t play around with Johnson like he does in METEORITE. They are sometimes funny together, but they aren’t personal. 

METEORITE’s tone between these two is very weird and incredibly fanfic-y. Treating them as good pals feels like something I’d expect to see someone pull in a story on AO3 with a disclaimer about how “I don’t really know lore” tacked on in an author’s note at the front. To have this be in a goddamn Halo release that I paid real dollars for and Steve Downes is reading these lines? Hell world. 

It’s fine that Johnson thumps his armor (I actually love that detail) and it’s fine for them to crack a little wise, but there is just too much of it all the time and they especially have Chief make bids and further jokes in too many spots for it to feel correct. A lot of fans are defending this as just being like “Halo 4 Chief” or “Infinite Chief,” but this doesn’t actually gel with either of those versions either. It isn’t good, and it isn’t supported by other things in Halo that are good either.

8 - Halo: Where Everyone Knows Your Dirty Laundry

Why does everyone in Halo know what happened to the Spartan-IIs?

The “history” between Spartans and ODSTs seems to get worse every time we see it. I hate how widespread knowledge that the Spartan-IIs are augmented child soldiers seems to be within the ODSTs now just because of how many times Halo has returned to this well. I understand the desire to show this to the gamer side of Halo’s fandom, but it’s really not something you can do this many times without people starting to assume all ODSTs know. And all ODSTs knowing this would be fucking wild.

It bothers me that they have Lieutenant Williams make cutting remarks about how the Spartans are “built instead of born” in the middle of a high stress mission. It’s true that this doesn’t necessarily point at the deepest level of secrecy around them but it’s still far enough into secret territory to imply more and raise big red flags. Halo has had ODSTs like Silva and Crowther get away with shit like this, but Williams does not have the screentime or importance to merit this.

It’s also just bizarre how the story here seems to feel the need to justify her dislike of Spartans and to have Johnson and especially Chief listen to this, even having Chief respond on the defensive with “We can’t change where we come from, only what we become” which is far more patient than he is with this in other instances where ODSTs have pulled it with him. It is not necessary to have an ODST imply detailed knowledge of the shady side of the Spartan project. Characters who have done it in the past have been higher ranked, older, and either have more access to secrets or personal connection with the ODSTs that were used in Spartan training. Nothing here establishes why Williams should know more than vague rumors and bad vibes. 

It’s also not necessary for Williams to know for this to work. It’s already simple enough for a helljumper to resent Spartans for appearing out of the blue in much more expensive kit to show up the good salt-of-the-earth groundpounders like her. It practically writes itself, and would’ve been a lot more natural and less fraught from a lore perspective. It’s not like Williams’s position here needs to be deeply and rationally entrenched. Her turnaround from resenting to respecting the Chief is also compressed across two missions with not enough character work to earn it, and it feels incredibly flat and sudden at the end for her to so easily be willing to sacrifice herself and her team to complete a suicide mission so Chief and Johnson get away clean with their intel. 

“But Zita,” you may ask, “You said everyone in Halo knows what happened to the Spartan-IIs. You can’t just throw that out there over this one ODST.”

This is true. They also have the fucking Prophet drop a line gesturing at knowing more about Spartans. "I would have thought you of all creatures would appreciate such steadfast dedication to... improvement,” he says to the Master Chief. Excuse me????

Listen, if there had been anything at all compelling about this mission or about this dude in particular maybe that could’ve been an interesting hook, but instead I was just flabbergasted. It didn’t help that it came on the tail end of a really bad monologue.

9 - Boring Cinema Sins Type Criticisms

I actually am not as upset about lore issues and dumb little oddities in a piece if I actually enjoy it and it’s presented well. I can talk as much trash as you please about entries like Halo 2 and 3, but they managed to stick their landings and deliver experiences that felt enjoyable and polished enough to not immediately notice the problems. METEORITE does not, and therefore because METEORITE has no protective layer of goodwill I am inclined to pick at any areas where it feels incompetent. Because I think this will be the most common form of criticism other people on the internet will do without my help, I’m going to stick to just the thing I found the most egregious.

It’s that fucking monologue. The Prophet of Harmony has time to put on this whole song and dance about how cool his work and the Covenant are, and the Master Chief and Johnson just watch him do it instead of engaging. This is probably the most criticized thing I’ve seen online besides Williams (and most people who hate Williams are just mad that a woman is not very nice and also not waifubait) so it’s therefore the worst reviewed section of METEORITE[1]. 

[1] - Trust :) 

Having Johnson say "Okay Mr. Monologue. Sorry to interrupt, but we're on the clock," is just gesturing in the direction that whoever was writing this knew it was going on for too long, but instead of backing up and finding a better way to get this information to the player they just hung a lampshade on it. I don't let Karen Traviss slide for having her alien characters use human phrases and then say "as the humans would say" after it all the time, I am not letting this slide either. It’s bad, and indication that maybe it was known to be bad and not fixed makes it worse.

There’s also a moment later in METEORITE where Chief and Johnson run into a big computer monitor where Harmony starts monologuing at them again, and this time Johnson shoots the monitor pretty early on and says a oneliner about it. I think the intention is for this to be funny this time, but instead it just reminds you of how bad that monologue was earlier and makes you wince again.

10 - Full Circle (Land a Ship on This and Blow it Up)

I still haven’t played the remade original campaign. I haven’t gone hunting for new lines and new terminals. Eventually, I know I will do so. Eventually, I am sure I will find things that I think are good and cool. But for now, I’ve spent the early access week yelling WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??? in exaggerated AVGN-similar tones to my friends on discord and hammering away at a google doc to produce this monstrosity of a post. I'm steadying out now, but I've had such wild swings into tragedy and comedy it's been sometimes a bit tough to keep score of whether I'm actually mad and how mad.

Writing this was a kind of fun to be sure, and it is something I shared with friends, but it’s not the fun I wanted to have this week.

I need to be finished talking about Operation METEORITE. I need to go do my job in the morning. I need to get back to my projects that don't make me stress about whether or not they're fair and whether or not they're unreasonable. I need to put this thing to bed.

That's all I have to say about Operation METEORITE.