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Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-Reach
Posted By: General Battuta <seth.dickinson@gmail.com>Date: 10/26/10 9:51 a.m.


for teh lulz let's look at how gloomy, grim, futile and desperate our Halo games have been. I was surprised by how much the level of grimliness has (or hasn't) changed, and not in the direction I'd expected.

Halo 3 was marketed as a darker, more mature sequel to Halo 2's intergalactic romp, featuring Black Hawk Down-style shorts and interviews with PTSD'd veterans. Reach, of course, was branded as a boots-in-the-mud meditation on futility and the sacrifices of war, the tale of a doomed world. The marketing was oddly subdued, but there it was.

Weirdly enough, the arc of the series seems to have gone in the opposite direction compared to the marketing. Each successive game has toned down the level of narrative brutality and grimness, although Reach arguably remains on par with Halo 3 if you pay close attention to both titles.

Let's look at each game!

Halo CE opens with your flamingly shot-to-hell ship crash-landing onto an alien artifact of awesome proportions. You bail out, try to reassure a few marines on the way down, and then wake up from impact to find them all dead. After helping gather your fellow survivors and strike a few blows against the Covenant, every single character you have met so far is devoured by an alien parasite. You try to stop the parasite only to find that you're about to kill every living thing in the galaxy, so to fix this you try to rescue your captain again. He dies in screaming agony just seconds away from your rescue, so you punch his face in and pull his implants out of his brain. Poor Keyes. The remainder of the game is a nihilistically desperate quest to blow up the entire setting, friend and foe alike. Foehammer, who's been apparently waiting around in the desperate hope of helping anyone, tries her darndest to pull you out and dies screaming too.

So, in summary: the entire cast dies, most of the named characters in screaming despair, and you blow everything up. Close on the suggestion that well, we're just getting started.

Now I bet this didn't _feel_ grim to many of you. You won, right? You took out the Flood, and an armada of Covenant! You stopped Halo! The music was pulse-pounding, it was just all so awesome.

Sure. But. You punched your captain's skull open, quite graphically. I give it a Halo Grimdark Score of 10.

Halo 2 is weirdly cheerful by comparison. The marines are wise-cracking jokesters now and even though the Covenant is on Earth it's not a big deal; the Corps just blew up your raggedy-ass fleet, he knows what the ladies like, we're going to give the Covenant back their bomb, and at the end of it all the Chief is not wearily just getting started, he's UNGH FINISHING THIS FIGHT.

But the narrative itself is...fairly grim. Sort of. Thousands, probably tens of thousands of UNSC servicefolk die in the opening level alone, but as Stalin said, they're just background bitmaps. New Mombasa doesn't have any civilians at all, so it's pretty sterile, and we spend our time there kicking ass. On the other hand, the Arbiter provides us a sympathetic look at the consequences of our actions in the first game, and after being betrayed twice over by the society he gave his life to, he finally throws it all away and abandons his religion. That's sort of dark, but it's not really grim, per se, especially because the Covenant is never sympathetic in the beginning.

Meanwhile, the Chief hitches a ride to Delta Halo, where Miranda Keyes flies her crew into the Library and almost instantly loses her ship to the Flood. (She and Johnson survive, though, so this is unquestionably not as bad as Halo 1, and it happens offscreen anyway so...laaame.) We close on the billions-strong city-ship of High Charity being devoured by the Flood, a Covenant fleet bombarding Earth, and Cortana lost. It's not as dark as Halo 1, partly because the narrative tone is so much lighter - the Chief whooshes through a tunnel made of green electricity and banters with a giant necromantic plant thing - and partly because the ending is a high-tension cliffhanger instead of a somber pan to galaxy.

I'll give it an 8. Halo 2 was where big grim things started happening offscreen and we didn't care, because even if the Councilors were muuuurdered by the Brutes, we'd never met them.

Halo 3 is where things get really weird. The buildup to the game was all about the end of the world, the Jesus-like stature of the Chief in the end days, and the grim grittiness of the Landfall shorts. But what we got was choppy, to say the best. It had grim things that happened but it was rarely grim or biblical.

We open on the Chief. He's dead! No, he's cool. Brutes in the jungle, Johnson's captured, Johnson's saved, we're off TO WAR, the base is evacuated a la the Autumn but pretty much everybody makes it out okay. There's hints of cannibalism in the barracks, but nothing gory actually happens. The Covenant aren't destroying the lifepods this time around; instead we're blowing the heck out of them with our left-behind bomb that for some reason makes the entire base shudder and shake even before it goes off. What's up with that?

Then we spend a few levels on a beautiful highway safari into a crazy hurricane, kicking Brute ass. It's all for nothing, though, the Ark opens - which could have happened after the first level, nothing up until this point in the story matters in the slightest. We charge off to the Ark.

Hang on a second. What up with Earth? The Covenant just glassed half a continent to contain the Flood, right? And before that, terrestrial casualties from the subsequent bombardment were...extreme?

So billions of people are dead and we got a line about it. Huh. Halo 3, you am disappoint. Keyes-brainpunch this ain't.

Off to the Ark. It's pretty! We get there, we find the Cartographer, we take down the Covenant. Shit, guys, Flood's here. Every time the Flood has turned up previously, the entire crew of [SHIP COMMANDED BY PERSON NAMED KEYES] has died. But it's cool. We got this Halo right here, we got Cortana back, and even though she's been suffering tentacle abuse for many days, she's magically okay afterwards; it just takes some Chief wisecracks to cheer her up, cause she does know how to pick 'em.

We fire Halo, we lose Johnson, we lose Keyes (those two had it coming after ditching In Amber Clad's crew back on Delta Halo), this is pretty grim. But the rest of the Ark Expeditionary Force, i.e. Halfjaw and the Elites and the rest of the crew of the Dawn, make it home okay, and so does the Arbiter. The Chief and Cortana drift off into space, semi-grimly, but it's more of a bedtime than a tragedy; their job is done and they're soaring off to further adventure.

Inevitably Halo 3's levels of grimdark are compromised by the fact that it's an ending, and a happy one at that. The closing cutscene tips the hat to everyone they lost, but fails to point out that Earth's population is now a fraction of its previous state, and most of the colonies are gone. Somehow the genocide of the human species goes down offscreen. It's hard to believe the Chief's dead, it's hard to shake hands with an Elite, but it's not hard to handle a holocaust of unprecedented proportions; we just need a montage of Africa's unscarred vistas.

Reach is the grimliest of the grimly in its marketing. FROM THE BEGINNING YOU KNOW YOU'RE SCREWED. Well, debate on this one is still fresh, and there's plenty of tl;dr here already, so I'll leave it open to you - where does it fall? There certainly aren't any Keyes brainpunch moments, nobody dies in shrieking agony moments away from your help (or trying to help you), but it turns its eye on the plight of civilians in a way Halo 3 didn't.

Thoughts?

Message Index



Replies:

Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 9:51 a.m.
     Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachLouis Wu 10/26/10 10:38 a.m.
           Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 10:41 a.m.
                 Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachStephen L. (SoundEffect) 10/26/10 10:57 a.m.
           Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-Reachbluerunner 10/26/10 10:49 a.m.
                 Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachMazz 10/26/10 11:06 a.m.
                       Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachStephen L. (SoundEffect) 10/26/10 11:12 a.m.
                             Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-Reachbluerunner 10/26/10 11:19 a.m.
                             Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachArchilen 10/26/10 11:38 a.m.
                                   Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachStephen L. (SoundEffect) 10/26/10 12:46 p.m.
                                         Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachBry 10/26/10 1:35 p.m.
                                               Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachStephen L. (SoundEffect) 10/26/10 2:06 p.m.
                                                     Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachBry 10/26/10 2:13 p.m.
                                                           Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachStephen L. (SoundEffect) 10/26/10 5:56 p.m.
                       Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-Reachtucsonbatman 10/26/10 3:06 p.m.
     agh frontpagedGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 10:50 a.m.
           Hey what the hell?!GrimBrother One 10/26/10 10:55 a.m.
                 Re: Hey what the hell?!General Battuta 10/26/10 10:56 a.m.
                       Yeeeaaahhh. THAT'S what I'm talking about. ;-) *NM*GrimBrother One 10/26/10 10:57 a.m.
                       that's better, we forgive you. *NM*GrimBrother IV 10/26/10 11:43 a.m.
     Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.uberfoop 10/26/10 11:38 a.m.
           like this pointGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 11:39 a.m.
                 Re: like this pointbluerunner 10/26/10 11:42 a.m.
                       Re: like this pointGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 11:44 a.m.
                             Re: like this pointManKitten 10/26/10 11:57 a.m.
                                   Re: like this pointGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 12:01 p.m.
                                         cannot spellGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 12:02 p.m.
                                         Re: like this pointLeisandir 10/28/10 9:34 a.m.
                                   Re: like this pointDruke 10/26/10 12:08 p.m.
                                         This, very much :) *NM*thebruce0 10/26/10 1:12 p.m.
                                         Ah, indeed.ZackDark 10/26/10 5:08 p.m.
                                               *pictures home alone moment* *NM*thebruce0 10/27/10 8:33 a.m.
                 Alien vs AliensWayward Spleen™ 10/26/10 1:24 p.m.
                       Re: Alien vs AliensGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 1:33 p.m.
                             Re: Alien vs AliensTex 10/26/10 1:44 p.m.
                                   Re: Alien vs AliensGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 1:51 p.m.
                                         Re: Alien vs AliensWayward Spleen™ 10/26/10 1:56 p.m.
                                               Re: Alien vs AliensGeneral Battuta 10/26/10 2:06 p.m.
                                         Re: Alien vs AliensTex 10/26/10 1:58 p.m.
                                               Re: Alien vs AliensBeckx 10/26/10 2:14 p.m.
                                                     Re: Alien vs AliensTex 10/26/10 2:53 p.m.
           Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.Druke 10/26/10 12:18 p.m.
                 Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.Druke 10/26/10 12:20 p.m.
                 Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.General Battuta 10/26/10 12:20 p.m.
                       Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.Druke 10/26/10 12:29 p.m.
                 Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.thebruce0 10/26/10 1:14 p.m.
                       Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.Stephen L. (SoundEffect) 10/26/10 1:18 p.m.
                             Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.General Battuta 10/26/10 1:22 p.m.
                             Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.Archilen 10/26/10 1:27 p.m.
                 Re: Halo 1 is more suggestive, too.uberfoop 10/26/10 3:45 p.m.
     Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-Reach0postmortem0 10/26/10 12:05 p.m.
     You know what I'd love? Covenant Commando.RyanTheHeretic 10/26/10 12:14 p.m.
           Re: You know what I'd love? Covenant Commando.General Battuta 10/26/10 12:17 p.m.
           Re: You know what I'd love? Covenant Commando.GrimBrother One 10/26/10 1:53 p.m.
                 Re: You know what I'd love? Covenant Commando.Bry 10/26/10 2:08 p.m.
           Re: You know what I'd love? Covenant Commando.topleybird 10/26/10 1:54 p.m.
           I think I love you.padraig08 10/26/10 5:08 p.m.
     My Views...Leviathan 10/26/10 12:21 p.m.
           Re: My Views...General Battuta 10/26/10 12:41 p.m.
           Re: My Views...mattroe 10/27/10 4:27 a.m.
           Re: My Views...Bry 10/27/10 7:04 a.m.
                 Re: My Views...thebruce0 10/27/10 8:32 a.m.
                       Re: My Views...General Battuta 10/27/10 8:45 a.m.
                       Re: My Views...Bry 10/27/10 9:03 a.m.
                             Re: My Views...SonofMacPhisto 10/27/10 1:32 p.m.
                                   Re: My Views...Bry 10/27/10 1:40 p.m.
                 Re: My Views...JDQuackers 10/27/10 12:53 p.m.
                       Re: My Views...Bry 10/27/10 1:10 p.m.
     Re: Comparative Grimdark Levels, H1-ReachArchilen 10/26/10 12:39 p.m.
     Halo as a whole lacks grim darkHikaru-119 10/27/10 3:12 p.m.
           Re: Halo as a whole lacks grim darkGeneral Battuta 10/27/10 7:01 p.m.
                 Re: Halo as a whole lacks grim darkHikaru-119 10/27/10 7:50 p.m.



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