#rihon writes

The story is vast. The story could probably be broken up into a book series.

Folks who are familiar with Square Enix will be able to tell that this is a Square Enix game. Has I was playing FF14, I found myself making Kingdom Hearts references. It doesn’t help that certain plot elements and wardrobe pieces found their way in both games.

Being a game that incorporates a player character leveling system, the story tends to strive to raise the stakes. However, the story began with the threat of legendary Pokemon running amok until the evil empire decides to catch them to do evil empire things. So the story will fluctuate between nation level threat to world ending threat, with End Walker delving in universal threat.

Everyone says that the story doesn’t get good until some point. I have thoughts on this:

The theme of the game shifted in maturity. A Realm Reborn kept things simplistic with its black and white presentation on the morality of certain factions. Players may say that’s the story only gets good because they appreciate when the game begins to present more complex themes rather than a good versus evil narrative.

Players perceive this because empathy to the supporting cast of characters takes a while to develop. Later DLC tend to be praised because players have built attachments to the cast of NPCs. However the earlier storyline tend to be viewed as weaker because players were still developing those connections.

A Realm Reborn had the lowest stakes in the series. Furthermore, while the steaks are still on a national level, those that are suffering tend to be unnamed unfamiliar bystanders. Players might say that the story doesn’t get good until the story actually begins to inflict suffering upon characters that we have grown accustomed to.

After writing those bullet points there was something that struck my memory. At one point in the plot of End Walker, the player’s character is subjected to non-consensual body swapping. Neither my Girlfriend nor I enjoyed this segment because it felt wrong. It felt forced as a game mechanic, yet when the game righted it’s wrong, the narrative didn’t offer a logical explanation. Dragon Ball Z handled the trope better in the confrontation with Ginyu. I think that the plot point exists to invoke a strong emotional response.

The other plot point that could be comparable was during Shadowbringers when the player character gets brought to another realm. However that form didn’t evoke such a negative reaction because it was presented differently. The body snatcher seemed benevolent and there was a feeling of hope that things would eventually work out.

Despite all my criticism I do appreciate the story line as a whole. End Walker seems to be the strongest chapter because its conclusion is the most conclusive. All previous chapters tended to end their stories fairly well, yet there was always some element of cliffhanger present. There’s still a piece of content that hints at the continuation of the story, but it’s something that is yet to come. All the pressing issues of the past and present have been resolved.

While the plot and themes evolved, they always tended to gear towards a common thread.

Halo 2

At the very end of Halo 2, Cortana stays behind on the Covenant flagship that gets over run by the flood. The last scene depicts The Gravemind interrogating her.

Glancing at this paragraph, you probably think that I’ve lost my mind. Yet we can only understand the significance of this moment by looking at the next game.

Halo 3

As players direct Master Chief to finish the fight, they wind up on Installation 0: The Ark. This forerunner construct holds many secrets, with the one that we’ll be delving into lock under the legendary difficulty setting. In order to find this secret, players must read the terminal logs to learn of the plight of Mendicant Bias.

Lore Time: Before Human Civilization began keeping records of themselves for the current go around, the Forerunners were running the galaxy until they encountered the flood. Now we all know how this story ends; the Forerunners ignited the Halo Ring and destroyed all sentient life forms in hopes to kill the flood through starvation. Yet there were other plans before drinking the kool-aid. One Forerunner General who wanted to save his wife developed an AI to analyze the flood in the hopes of developing a strategy to defeat them. He named this AI Mendicant Bias.

Somehow, Mendicant Bias find its way to an audience with The Grave-mind. Now rather than being an epic battle of super advanced technology versus zombie overlord Cthulhu, the two begin their interaction through conversation. This conversation becomes significant due to the participants unique standings in the galaxy.

On one hand, we have Mendicant Bias, one the most advanced AI in the know galaxy. In Halo’s Lore, AI generation tends to follow a process that requires mind mapping a subject to base the AI around. In order to make the most efficient AI, the sentient race tends to choose their best and brightest minds as templates for the AIs. Halo’s depictions of the Forerunners being an advanced version of humans offers the suggestion that Mendicant Bias might have had more mental processing capabilities than Cortana, and definitely more than any human or forerunner.

On the other hand, Gravemind acts as a collective mind for all flood. Its ability to increase its mental capacity by drawing off of the knowledge of the sentient life forms that it indoctrinates means that it could take mind after mind, overlap the mind maps, and compress them to a more advanced version.

In this conversation being possibly the two best minds of the Halo galaxy, Gravemind argues that he should not be seen as unnatural, but rather the next step in sentient evolution. The forerunners are instead preventing the natural forces of the galaxy and are therefore the unnatural forces. Mendicant Bias see how Gravemind can provide immortality to the indoctrinated and galactic peace, then joins its side.

The last terminal in Halo 3 Legendary Campaign reveals that Mendicant Bias has survived all these years and repents for his decision. It vows to Master Chief that it will aid him.

The plight of Mendicant Bias demonstrates that the Grave-mind has an ability that transcends other zombie bosses. Through either decent persuasion or logic viruses, the Grave-mind can influence the highest quality AI to see its side.

Nice story and all, but what does this have to do with Cortana?

Let me answer your question with another question: where did we leave Cortana in my essay?

In Halo 2 with the Grave-mi- oh.

Cortana has been in the tentacle grasp of the Grave-mind for about an entire campaign. I’ll admit that I don’t know enough about the series to say for sure the in-game time that she spent, but even if it was only for a couple of hours, Halo 3 shows that enough time had past for Grave-mind to negatively affect her. When chief recovers her on the second to last mission, she lies in the fetal position asking herself if she’s too broken. While her mind remains stable enough to see through the end of the game, it was a relatively short time before she ends up in self isolation until

Halo 4

So after spending a whole game with the Grave-mind, going on a gauntlet run to save the galaxy, then being confined to self isolation for an amount of time that I’m not a big enough nerd to know, Cortana has entered her rampancy stage. In the Halo universe, AI can only operate for a couple of years before they reach a limit on how much information they can collect.

“We literally think ourselves to death.” -Cortana

Chief refuses to accept that Cortana would no longer exist and resigns to get back to Dr. Halsey. Yet Cortana still has internal conflict about her demise. Because the video has to be a video game, Cortana ends up tearing herself apart to save Chief and humanity once more before seemingly departing into nonexistence.

Conclusion:

No one could have seen Cortana return, even with hints of the teaser trailers. 343 seemed to write themselves into a pickle, then Emperor Palpatined that shit like it was Rise of the Skywalkers. Still I can’t help but feel that 343 was trying to pull from existing lore. Cortana mirrors Mendicant Bias as a powerful AI who both had a run in with the Gravemind and turned against her creators. Given her life of trauma, part of me thinks that she turned into Dictator Fembot because humanity would always need her to solve their problems. Perhaps the influence of the gravemind carried on through her existence and finally got to her after she ripped herself apart.

I truly think that 343 was trying to pull from Bungie’s prior work…