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: Personally? Things that make great use of the world, and do it amazingly.
: Back in the day, I praised Human Weakness as a spectacular tale of the
: lore, as it analyzed AIs, Cortana, and her relationship with the Master
: Chief, in a heart-wenching story. Then, Karen Traviss got a contract for
: the trilogy, and she threw the entire thing through the window in the
: basis of "not wanting to write fanfiction", and to be honest,
: the more I read about her, the more I dislike her as a writer and a
: person.
: The Forerunner Trilogy, in my opinion, was absolutely mind-blowing and
: amazing because not only did it use the lore in an amazing way and neatly
: tied many things together, Greg Bear studied not just Halo canon, but
: entire books on physics, anthropology, religion, and military tactics, and
: it is a book I recommend to everyone.
Well said.
I don't think I could even begin to understand every facet of what makes something work, let alone create a magic winning formula that always works (I don't think this is even possible without making the franchise grow stale). However, thinking about some of my favorite Halo media vs. my least favorite ones there are certain patterns to be seen.
One thing that comes to mind is memorability. Something that occurred to me a while ago is that The Fall of Reach alone has more memorable and iconic scenes than the Kilo-Five trilogy combined. The coin. The Spartan induction in the amphitheater. First day of boot camp and Ring the Bell. No one gets left behind. The Spartans utterly destroying marines in power armor. The Spartans' mission to capture Colonel Watts. The battle over Chi Ceti and Sam's sacrifice. The Keyes Loop. And so on and so on. What about Kilo-Five? Well, there was that one time Mal and Vaz were talking about how horrible Halsey is. Or the fifth time Kilo-Five was dealing weapons on that one glassed planet. Or the umpteenth time an Elite used a human idiom. Truly legendary stuff right there.
Having sympathetic main characters is always a good thing, or if you're going to have them be unlikable at least acknowledge this in the narrative. Hunt the Truth worked for me because I cared about Ben. He's a flawed character but his flaws were acknowledged and he faced actual challenges he had to overcome. In Nightfall, Locke isn't actively annoying like Palmer or most of Kilo-Five, but he's also kind of boring. And his squad were so hilariously unprofessional it was hard to take them seriously. In contrast, Forward Unto Dawn took its time to set up the characters and the world and even the side characters had more depth than a good chunk of Nightfall's cast.
One good rule is to avoid introducing ridiculous and contrived shit for no reason. Nightfall had three of these things: the magic human-killing element, the slipspaced Halo ring fragment, and the never-before-seen super-powerful Hunter worms. The Initiation comic books added the idiotic "Spartan is your rank" crap and quite possibly the stupidest character in the franchise, that one "prototype" Spartan-IV who could go toe to toe against a Spartan in MJOLNIR armor and survive in the vacuum of space. Escalation's Blue Team reunion/Didact story arc was an unmitigated disaster of contrivance like slipspace-capable Longswords, people teleporting from planet to planet, and yet more never-before-heard Forerunner artifacts of the week, not to mention making the Didact even more of a joke than Halo 4 did.
What makes HtT work and Nightfall fail? | Postmortem | 6/15/15 12:13 pm |
Re: What makes HtT work and Nightfall fail? | Jaydee | 6/15/15 12:46 pm |
Re: What makes HtT work and Nightfall fail? | Archilen | 6/16/15 11:39 am |
Re: What makes HtT work and Nightfall fail? | General Vagueness | 6/15/15 5:38 pm |