I'm not thrilled about how they ended the Rookie (I think so anyway, going by the descriptions), but I really appreciate that 343i finally let a player shell character actually mostly be a player shell character. Not every character has to have a big backstory, or indeed any backstory, or indeed any story, sometimes they can just be, and that's not just an artifact of gaming's

Maybe the rest of the book works better with existing stuff, but a lot of the non-dialogue text seemed too poetic and flowery for Buck, some of it way too flowery. I get that it mixes things up a bit and it's probably hard to break the habit of trying to be elegant and sophisticated in your descriptions as an author, but this is supposed to be 100% Buck's words, with no editing except maybe his own, they even went to the trouble of putting something at the front making that clear, so not nailing the character's voice 100% is a very real flaw, and one that broke my immersion.

Of course they're making the ODSTs Spartans, the ODSTs are like 80% about how they get from A to B, with the rest being better armor and weapons than regular troops and different tactics from regular troops. Spartans have been known to survive orbital drops with backpack-sized kit or even nothing but their armor. Being effective in combat is another thing, and a harder thing, but Mjolnir plus drop pod equals guaranteed survival without significant injury, I would think. If you're going to have a whole bunch of Spartans, even if they're at a level a little below S-IIIs, it would be dumb not to move all the orbital drops onto that group, which is why I'm disheartened to hear they're apparently continuing to send regular old marines down in those screaming metal death-traps.

If we're being realistic, Microsoft wasn't going to make Noble Six (Lutsy, as I called them once or twice) trans-anything, and they probably weren't going to make him female-- that wouldn't have made them more money, and any good will it would've earned if Lt. Six was trans would've been counterbalanced by backward people and people assuming they did it to generate good will, especially since he's already dead. As for leaving it ambiguous, that should've been possible, and that's what I figured they would do, but I guess they gave in to people asking "no but really, which one is it?", because looking for dumb little details is after all what fans do (myself included). That said, I don't agree that no one in the games industry should try a serious trans character, for reasons of seriousness or any other reason. Someone has to break that ground, and Halo would be a fine place to do it too, I just doubt it'll happen in in Halo or any existing franchise until there are more examples of it floating around.