: I was going to post "Cortana comes back, but now she's evil" as a
: fake spoiler, because that always happens, and turns out to just be an
: Evil Twin (see MGS2)... Now it seems that obviously fake spoiler would
: have been a real spoiler. How disappointing. Do they try to reconcile this
: with the fact that her physical chip was destroyed, along with pretty much
: all of her (besides the cheesy final hologram), or do they merely hand
: wave it away?

There's a throwaway line that the remains of the Didact's ship jumped into Slipspace, taking what was left of Cortana with it. Of course none of this is apparent in Halo 4, and with the nice emotional farewell scene she got, it clearly wasn't the plan back then.

: Also, doesn't the EU explain rampancy as the loss of sanity caused by the AI
: thinking itself to death? Where in that does it state "AI becomes
: evil, but still maintains control of themselves".

: Sounds like retcons to me.

It's handwaved so that she's magically "cured" of rampancy by the Domain, which she somehow uploaded herself into.

: As bad as Staten was, at least he didn't go all the way with the groan-worthy
: story. There was consistency, in a way...

At his best Staten was really good by Halo standards. Halo 2 still is my favorite story of all the games.

The problem is that 343's lead writer Brian Reed is still very much a Marvel writer who can't seem to get rid of all the writing tropes that come with comic books, something we've seen over and over again with his work. I kept telling myself that maybe it would get better when he's doing an actual game. Boy, could I have been more wrong.