I'm still digesting the reviews of others, here and elsewhere, but I'm seeing a lot of references to "twists and turns" in the story, and false advertising. Can someone explain this to me? I wasn't terribly invested, but I didn't notice any significant plot twists (Lasky was the bad guy all along!) and I'm not sure how the story was anything other than what was advertised. Were people expecting Cortana to stay dead?

I'd really appreciate it if someone compiled a very simple dossier on the major elements of the story (and Halo 4 for that matter). It'd be nice to know the pertinent points about The Mantle, Didact, Librarian, etc, and their place in the narrative without also having to read through Zham Sh'bth'anamee's exploits in some piece of EU literature. Basically something like the manuals that used to come with video games (Didact. Blood Type: A. Likes: Scientology. Hates: Video games)

While playing the campaign, the phrase "joyless slog" kept popping into my head. Prometheans are (still) an unsatisfying chore to fight. Having one gimmicky boss fight was a poor decision. Having the exact same boss fight three more times, against successively larger numbers of bosses, is criminal. I can't wrap my head around the person who conceived that, the person who approved it, and the sheer odds of those two people existing at the same company.

The environments are expansive and beautiful, but that actually hurts the game at a certain point. Looking back, you get the feeling the campaign design meeting went something like "Which campaign level do fans like the most? Assault on the Control Room. Cool, let's make every level like that."

Here's the problem. One of the things that made the Halo 1 campaign so satisfying was the character of your enemies. It made engagements interesting. You began to learn that idle Grunts behaved like this, alert Grunts behaved like that. Elites move like this, and the whole cohort behaves like that when you kill the Elite first. But all these little character-building subtleties only come out in close, intimate settings. People liked AotCR for the large-scale combat and expansive environments, but it was the interior corridor hustling in Pillar of Autumn, T&R, etc that gave the enemies this depth. There's something to be said for patiently crouching behind a storage crate with a company of Covenant on the other side, plotting how to kill them with a plasma grenade and a half-empty Needler.

Halo 5 plays with this idea for a bit (the first mission with Blue Team) but then promptly abandons it. Every level after is either a vehicle run or an expansive canyon where the only way to win is to sit 400 meters away and slowly pick off enemies with rifles. Getting close gets you killed. None of the subtleties or nuances of the enemies matter when you're shelling them with a Scorpion. Was that a regular Grunt or a Spec Ops Grunt? Who cares?

Though I'm fairly convinced that no amount of close quarter action can make Prometheans fun to fight in any circumstance. Boring, unsatisfying churn.

Exuberant Witness is by sparkfu. Need more.