Why Halo's biggest problem may be Halo itself

[Administrator]

The original Halo Wars ends by putting itself in stasis, with the human warship Spirit of Fire coasting through void - its crew forced into cryosleep, its ultimate relation to the rest of the saga left open for debate. The in-game explanation for this uncertain denouement is the loss of the vessel's Faster Than Light drive. The creative rationale was perhaps Bungie's intense ambivalence about handing the keys to its universe over to Ensemble, developer of the Age of Empires games. Packed with all the floaty jeeps and energy swords a Halo fan could wish for, the plot of Halo Wars nonetheless sits at a careful remove from the numbered Halos, offering a separate cast and events that, for all their dizzying import, never quite overlap with the antics of Master Chief and co. Fast-forward to 2017, and even as the robust-looking Halo Wars 2 approaches release, there's the sense that the Spirit of Fire's fate has become that of Halo as a whole - a mass of trailing story threads and lost souls, waiting for somebody to give it a heading.
There are still a number of absolutely brilliant video game stories to be told in Halo's universe. Let's talk about the Spartans, to begin with. No, not the more or less interchangeable nickel-plated, bunny-hopping Power Rangers you may be familiar with from recent games. Let's talk about the children the Spartans used to be - stolen from their families at the tender age of five or six, stripped of their identities, force-fed a library of military tactics, hacked open, plied with surgical enhancements, wired back together and stuffed into motorised exoskeletons, just in time do battle with an invading alien armada.
Not that fighting the Covenant is why the Spartans-IIs were created. Like their predecessors, the Project Orion super-soldiers, they were trained to serve as counter-insurgents and assassins, sniffing out malcontents on humanity's colony worlds and nipping revolutions in the bud. But for the timely arrival of billions of fundamentalist space dinosaurs, Master Chief and his fellow Spartan-IIs would have spent their days policing the shadows of Earth's empire, Gestapo agents clad in elephant armour. The Spartan-IIIs had an even rougher career - vengeful orphans pumped full of growth hormones and outfitted on the cheap, this later generation were glorified cannon fodder, their operations officially classified a success regardless of the casualty rate.
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