Halo Had Emotional Punch Because It Underlined Quiet Tragedy

Halo: The Master Chief Collection celebrated its 10-year anniversary on November 11, 2024. Below, take a look back at the quiet sense of loss that permeated throughout the main trilogy.

Halo: Combat Evolved opens with waking up. Halo 3 concludes with falling asleep. Between is death. It’s fun, of course. It’s in space and exaggerated: a holy war between Americanized space marines and zealot aliens who find a common enemy in the zombie “Flood.” I don’t want to pretend that Halo is anything other than a blockbuster FPS. Yet, there is something sad about it, isn’t there? The Halo rings themselves are all machines of death: tools of mass eradication. But all have sunrises and sunsets, wildlife, plants, ecosystems, snowy mountains, and rocky deserts. They have the texture of life, albeit carved in with ancient tech that outlived its creators and resounding with the sound of gunfire. Master Chief wanders through it all. One man, no matter how great, enveloped in majesty and terror. The original trilogy, despite its massive scale and gigantic stakes, comes down to intimate tragedy: just a man and the ghost in his head.

It’s hard to remember that Halo: Combat Evolved was stark and bare. Since its release, there have been multiple miniseries, a television show, an abandoned movie project, dozens of novels, and real-time-strategy spin-offs. It is a downright multimedia phenomenon (though not all of its projects have been successful, in terms of popularity or quality). It is a universe that has been thoroughly elaborated on, with many of its gaps plastered over.

Nevertheless, Halo: Combat Evolved itself, despite a tie-in novel releasing just weeks before its launch, is uninterested in explaining things to you. You can gather from context clues what the alien “Covenant” is and what makes Master Chief “a Spartan,” but it’s hard if you aren’t paying attention. Every character you meet, except Master Chief and Cortana, presumably perish in the game’s explosive finale (though Sgt. Johnson and 343 Guilty Spark return in sequels). The game itself is snappy and quick, but the story is ponderous and exposition-heavy, without much opportunity for emotional investment.

Master Chief himself is not much of a character. He is stoic: a halfway point between silent protagonist and fleshed-out hero. He spits out one-liners and kills bad guys, but not much else. Cortana is flirty and witty, and expressive in a way Master Chief is not, but there still isn’t a lot to her. She acts as a way to give the player context for what is happening. She has character in that expression, but doesn’t really have a psychology beyond that (at least not yet).

So, most of Halo’s emotional space is taken up by its still-impressive combat and sometimes-transcendent level design. It has a lot of empty space, giving you walking time, and flying or driving back through places you’ve already been. That’s not all good. The Library is still, for my money, one of the most miserable levels in FPS history. Still, all that non-combat time offers beauty and melancholy. The game’s best moments, such as “The Silent Cartographer’s” sprawling set pieces (which stretch from a beach assault to underground abysses) and “Halo’s” rambunctious road trip, offer interludes in Halo’s “natural” world. Drives between mission locations and firefights grant contemplation. Its level design lets you look up at the sky as much as run down your enemies.

Halo is no nature walk, however. Its final set piece–an awkward but exhilarating drive across the spine of a capital ship–gets interrupted when Cortana calls in a transport for evac. It is immediately shot down. The set piece pauses in a strange, grieving breath. You hear the pilot’s dying words, then an explosion. Cortana says, “She’s gone,” a beat passes, then she adds, “Calculating alternate escape route.” This moment is a complication in the escape: a reason to stretch the set piece just a little further. But that death hangs in the air. Master Chief will, once again, escape this alone.

Halo 3 offers a parallel set piece: another driving escape across an exploding spaceship. This time, most of the Chief’s allies escape, but he stays behind. He and Cortana float in one half of a spaceship and he goes into cryosleep yet again. His last words are, “Wake me when you need me.” What else would you need him for but killing? It was inevitable that he would wake up again. But, absent any follow-ups, that fact is more dreadful than inspiring. The fight finished with nothing to hope for but another one beginning.

Narratively speaking, single-player Halo since Reach has been stuck. Halo 4, 5: Guardians, and Infinite are all soft franchise reboots. Ultimately, they have nothing close to the still-satisfying arc of the original games. Halo 4 picks up a few years after where Halo 3 left off, with Master Chief awakening once again from cryosleep. Guardians holds on to some of 4’s plot threads, but turns Cortana into a malevolent AI, setting her up to be the big bad of a sequel that never came. Infinite is a Force-Awakens-esque run at the original Halo, ending with the promise that the franchise will continue more or less how it began. In these games, the tragedies are grand and explicit. Across Infinite’s Halo ring, you’ll find audio logs with the words of the dead. Cortana cries when she dies in Halo 4 and (disturbingly) quotes Virginia Woolf’s actual suicide note when she dies again in Infinite. It’s cheap tragedy.

In the Bungie games, with the exception of Reach, most of the main characters live. Cortana and the Arbeiter both make it to the end, though side characters like Miranda Keyes and Sergeant Johnson are less fortunate. Most deaths are of generalized populations, like the Brutes’ massacre of the Elites in Halo 2, or offscreen, like the death of Spartans. Master Chief carries a grief that is almost absent–historical even. Reach’s surface was already destroyed, “glassed” as the games put it. Chief does win the war, but the battle was lost before he could start.

In contrast, Infinite wakes up Chief after hope is lost and then lets him blaze across the battlefield, triumphing over the enemies that every other Spartan could not defeat. In Infinite, he wins the battle with the promise that he’ll win the war too. It starts in tragedy, sure. But its ending is hopeful, for perhaps the first time in Halo, rife as it is with tragic endings and cliffhangers. This is necessarily not bad, but it does illustrate the limits of franchise storytelling. There must always be another fight and it must still be empowering and fun, even if Chief is ever more world-weary. It means that future Halo games will likely never match Halo 3’s ending note: sleeping and waking up, with nothing but death to frame your days.