GAME CLEAR No. 49 -- Halo: Reach

Halo: Reach (2010, Microsoft platforms)

Original Developer: Bungie
Original Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Master Chief Collection Version Developer: 343 Industries
Master Chief Collection Version Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Clear Date: 8/27/2021
Clear Version: Halo: The Master Chief Collection DLC
Clear Platform: Xbox Series X via Backwards Compatibility

With Halo Infinite coming out in a couple months, I decided I should probably go back and clean up the Halo games I never beat: Halo: Reach and Halo 5: Guardians, the bookends of the series as it exists today.

As a series prequel, Reach seemed like the place to start. It also supports local co-op, so I played through the whole thing with a friend.

My relationship with Halo started out as an academic one, in a manner of speaking. Growing up, I considered Halo “beneath” me. It was the big, popular FPS, and I was just one of those kinds of people wired to instinctually turn my nose up at that sort of thing. I even had an Xbox and a 360! But I never got their flagship games. Anyway, then I got to college, and a friend of mine was into Halo big time, and I was less insufferable about my gaming tastes. When the Master Chief Collection came out, I figured it would be a great, cheap way to give such an influential and popular series a shot. But again, there’s still some snobbishness there. That’s why I said “academic” above. My goal was to just gain a greater knowledge of Halo because of its significance in popular culture and the medium of video games. I didn’t expect to like it. This was just a fun way to hang out with a friend and see how the other half lived.

Anyway, we played through the four games on disc as well as Halo: ODST over a period of several months, and I had a great time! They’re damned fun co-op, and I even polished the occasional mission off here or there solo when my friend wasn’t available (again, he’s a big Halo fan, so he’s played through them all countless times; no big loss to him). They’re super competent shooters that feel pretty good and take place in a reasonably compelling sci-fi world. I’m not the biggest fan of Master Chief (my favorite of those ended up being ODST for this reason), but I get that he’s supposed to basically be a self-insert vector. That’s fine.

Alas, Reach did not finally make it to the Master Chief Collection until years after I graduated college. I’d lost most of my momentum and interest in Halo, and I never managed to finish Halo 5 either. But with my new Xbox Series X, a renewed interest in Halo, and perhaps most importantly, a renewed appreciation for playing games with a friend in person, I decided to play Reach (albeit with a different friend this time, as it happens).

Just like all the other Halo games I played, it was plenty of fun to cruise through with a friend. Like ODST, this game did not involve Master Chief. It features Noble Team, a UNSC unit of Spartans that aren’t John-117. One of these Spartans is the player character Noble Six, who is largely a silent self-insert protagonist like Chief. The game in most ways is about the other Spartans, which is why it works. I wish Chief’s adventures worked in a similar way, but they’re generally just about what a badass he is. Ugh. I believe it’s an unpopular opinion, but that’s why I liked Halo 4 perhaps most of the first four games. It’s mostly about Cortana!

But I digress. The story of Reach, in brief, is about the alien Covenant’s invasion of the human-colonized eponymous planet Reach. It is mostly a tale of desperation and slim odds as the Noble team does everything they can to salvage a sliver of hope for their own survival and ultimately humanity’s. As with all my GAMEs CLEAR, I won’t get too deep into the story, but I found it to be at least as good as any of the other Halos. The nice thing about being a casual Halo fan is that nothing the stories do can really annoy me too much, and that’s only compounded by the fact that I’ve played all of them co-op. Who cares if the story’s kinda bad? I’m shooting bad guys with a friend. It’s fun regardless. For what it’s worth, I didn’t find it particularly bad, but I could see some spots where maybe some folks would. It’s fine.

I think that’s just sorta where I stand in general after my “academic” venture into Halo. At this point, I’d call myself a fan rather than a mere curious observer of the series. After all, I’m going back to beat old games to get caught up for Infinite, am I not? But that’s where I am: it’s fine!

But that may not even be fair. I might even have to call it “fun” and “pretty good.” It’s not a favorite series of mine for which I have the endless nostalgia that many do. But it never can be. I got to it too late! I’ll never have the countless hours on Xbox Live parties with friends playing Halo 3 online or whatever. But as a snob who once considered himself too good for Halo, the series has at least humbled me enough to say I like it. It did not grant me the satisfaction of being a bad series I was right to ignore growing up, and that’s probably something worth keeping in mind in life in general.

At this point, this GAME CLEAR post is obviously more about Halo as a series and my experience with it than it is about Reach specifically, but this blog did not exist when I played through the bulk of the series. It’s been fun to think about Halo again and how it was something that made me reflect on media consecration in general.

As a final note, I think it’ll be interesting to play Halo 5: Guardians, which I may not do immediately but will do before Infinite arrives. Since it doesn’t feature local co-op, I think it will be the first Halo I’ll play solo. This should make the story easier to follow and just be a more immersive, personal experience in general, for better or worse. I’m curious to see how it goes.