Death of a Planet: But where was the emotion? WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!
One of the main reasons for the success of Bungie's multi-million dollar Halo franchise was strong story telling. The main trilogy saw SPARTAN II supersoldier Master Chief discover ominous ringworlds, unlock ancient secrets and fight against some of the oldest and most powerful enemies the galaxy has ever faced. Over the space of three games, we controlled the Chief and fought our way across space itself, aided by a host of characters; many of whom we came to love, most of which we lost along the way.
Indeed, by the time we lost Sergeant Johnson in Halo 3, I don't think there was one true fan of the franchise that could face anymore loss - even though it was just a video game filled with fictional characters, we had invested in them. Over nearly a decade, we had come to care about the characters of Halo. Even Halo 3: ODST invested time in storytelling - everything felt like a desperate bid to escape and learn at the same time. It was different; a human perspective adding a new fear to an old war. It wasn't brilliant, but there was time invested in the characters. It worked. This is where the campaign of Halo: Reach was doomed to fail.
Aside from breaching long-established canon, Reach tried to do the impossible: make us invest in a small group of characters over a series of ten levels, set over the period of a month. It was never going to happen. Worse, perhaps, is the fact that the one character who showed any signs of being truly interesting (Jorge) was killed off first in possibly the most ridiculous chain of events plausible. Quite aside from the whole "Jargon Jargon is fried, I'm gonna have to fire her manually" cliche hitting the gamer like a carp to the face, there is no logical reason that Jorge would have to stay behind to fire it. Let me explain:
Jorge, a SPARTAN II, was more expensive, better equipped and more extensively combat-experienced than Noble Six, an expendable SPARTAN III. Logic dictates that Six would be the one to remain behind, but of course gameplay reasons make this impossible. I digress.
So other than poor Jorge, the hero who proved that the pen really is mightier than the sword upon falling victim to cliche story telling, there was no emotional investment in any of the characters. Why? They were all stereotypes; one dimensional stereotypes designed to be killed off. From the first mission, there was little conversation between the characters that revealed any extra dimension to them. It was all objective based, which is all good when you're trying to direct a player towards the mission goal, but not when the aim of the story is to invest players in a group of characters. None of the death's were hard-hitting, except perhaps Kat's, and even that was more of a "Woah, where the...oh, you sneaky elite!" than anything. I didn't care about her.
Perhaps half of the issue is that the game tried to invest you over so few levels, set over such a long time - it felt like the story was spread too thin. Reach was simply too rushed, too one-dimensional and too cliche to care about.
