Spartan Matters

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: Transmedia is a marketing word. 

(Warning: Plenty of spoilers ahead for Halo 5: Guardians)

The quandry, for those who follow expanded universe stories, becomes how to process this feeling of the cash-grab with genuine earnest for the stories being told. Halo games have never been interested in those side adventures, not even side-stories like Reach or ODST. But in Halo 5: Guardians, a different bargain has been struck. For whatever reason, through design hurdles, cut content, and the normal hectic game development process, 343 has finally decided to acknowledge these stories exist. 

And the results...are a little strange. 

By now, you’ve probably read enough reviews of Halo 5 to know the campaign is a bit polarizing. Cortana’s death in 4 is undermined, Locke doesn’t get the “hunter” narrative so promised in the ad campaign, and the narrative beats go so janky and undercooked that the most speculative science fiction piece of the entire story is relegated to a cutscene at the end of the game. 

If you’re a normal Halo fan, I’m don’t blame you for being disappointed. But with these other stories in your head, parts of this story really work, and they work because they join the books, comics, and animations in reaching out to the edges of the Halo universe and finding solidity there. 

Halo 5’s expanded universe elements pull from such a wide variety of stories it’s hard to explain them all. Master Chief’s Blue Squad is the same team from The Fall of Reach, First Strike, and Ghosts of Onyx, which also catalogued Catherine Halsey’s fall from grace from ONI science chief to war criminal. The direct contrast to these stories though, is that reviewer after reviewer insists the Chief and his team have zero personality.

But that’s strange, to me. When I first saw their opening trailer, I freaked out at the sight of Linda just having a Sniper Rifle, by sheer virtue of her role as the team Sniper in the Nylund-written books. Nylund’s writing used this isolated position to put her in dangerous scenarios that shaped her personality even while isolating her from the rest of Blue Team. So for the two lines where her anger at the Covenant takes over in the mission ”Blue Team”? That felt entirely legitimate.

Or let’s move to the Sanghelli civil war. Taking up 3 whole levels of Locke’s campaign, Halo 5 inundates the player with Sanghelli politics, culture, and a bit of Covenant religion as you blast through temples and ruins that for once don’t belong entirely to the Forerunners. 3 whole levels, though, removes time from Master Chief’s story and fails to directly nudge Cortana’s newfound villainy forward at all. 

But again, there’s huge reward here for people used to thinking of the Sanghelli as more than target practice. When Halo 4 dropped a fleet of Covenant on Master Chief’s head after the peace achieved in Halo 3, it felt depressing on multiple levels. It felt like our science fiction culture still carried this latent loathing of the devoutly religious, an especially depressing connection given the first Halo’s rise to popularity alongside the rising American Islamophobia tied to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

But 5’s trip to Sanghelios isn’t just a chance to reunite players with Halo 2’s Arbiter, it’s actually a solid reconciliation with the excuse 343 previously hid away in Halo: Glasslands; that Jul M’dama, villain of the Halo 4 Spartan Ops campaigns and brief antagonist of Halo 5, had whipped up a Covenant civil war in part due to an encounter with human spies. Though those characters don’t go mentioned in-game, seeing humans fighting alongside the Sanghelli again, cleaning up events started in those books, does finish off the thread of why the Covenant are still somehow a threat in a post Halo 3 universe.

(Screencap above via GameRiot)

But lastly, it’s important to acknowledge how Halo 5’s transmedia weirdly winds up tackling head on with the “lore,” and this, maybe, is where the strangest and most alienating story beats of the game occur. 

“Lore” for the Halo universe has always fallen back to references to the ancient alien species called the Forerunners. In Halo 3, (and revamped levels in the Master Chief Collection), terminals hidden through the game told little bits and pieces of how the Forerunner species destroyed the galaxy. With odd character names like Mendicant Bias, these little echoes of a long-forgotten story felt like lost transmissions picked up on the edge of space. But as the so-called “Reclaimer Trilogy” has peeled back the history on this ancient species----it’s instead felt bland and parallel to other ancient aliens plots in modern video games.  

In theory, the Forerunner actions in this game tie into the saga that began in Halo: Cryptum, and continued through Halo: Silentium, books that that honestly feel as frustratingly empty as their new Forerunner big bads in Halo 4 and 5. Their plans and motivations lack the desperation or mystical power needed to construct giant rings to wipe out an ancient civilization, and frustratingly, their hatred of the new human race comes from encounters with an old human race. This reduces humans from new players on the galactic stage to old enemies circling the drain, with only the AI and Covenant species seeming to be new galactic arrivals.  

All this “lore,” when not used as a marketing buzzword, is the tome of knowledge used to inform developer decisions on architecture and enemy bark threats. In Halo 5, it becomes the greatest enemy to “story,” and sadly, why the dream of that shared, flowing universe may never be fully realized. 

But there are moments... free from these intertanglings. 

The first “new” section in Halo 5 that contains nothing defined in a previous game is the mining colony of Meridian that the Chief and Locke head to in search of answers. In gameplay, this is the first “no combat” zone ever dropped in a Halo game. You cannot shoot, you cannot duck for cover. You can only poke around and listen. 

It’s a bit shallow, admittedly. Wolfenstein: The New Order takes beats like this and plays them like an orchestra, while Halo still clunks around a bit. But wandering through this in a Halo game, hearing colonists express frustrations with the UNSC I read about in Halo: First Strike, felt like the real promise of what those side-stories were supposed to bring us. Stories where the personal drama and petty vendettas act as motivation for a complete story. 

For better and for worse, Halo 5 is the first Halo game to acknowledge those small ways of looking at the Halo universe. It's loaded with meaningful plot points and character beats extracted from context so far away you literally have to spend additional money elsewhere to understand it. This may be the insurmountable challenge that "transmedia" stories like Halo will face in going mainstream. But as someone who already bought in, it's rewarding to play a Halo game that in brief moments, celebrates the small ways of looking at its big galactic war.