Halo TV Show

[Werthead]

Oh yeah, that's a good point.

Regarding the Arbiter:

Spoiler

This is the Arbiter mentioned in the games but never appears; he died in shame after permitting the destruction of Delta Halo.

"Our" Arbiter, voiced by The Actor Keith David, is promoted after that guy's death and first appears in Halo 2. He's yet to appear in the show

The Halo series is weird in being mostly basic space opera guff to excuse lots of shooty shooty bang bang, with far less narrative than say Mass Effect, in which you can at least Talk To The Aliens. But the lore is surprisingly developed. The tie-in novels are above average (mostly) and even Proper SF Author Greg Bear came on board to flesh out a lot of the lore and write a trilogy of novels about the backstory.

As a result, the changes are not going down too well with the fans, even moderate ones who expected fairly significant changes because you can't adapt a first-person shooter faithfully to the screen, there's not much narrative to tell there. The main complaints are too much focus on brand new, fanfic-style characters, with a common argument is that if you can't remain focused on Master Chief constantly, then you can focus on the Keyes, Halsey, Johnson, Cortana, the Reach characters etc, without going down the whole new character route quite so heavily. There's also too much uninteresting bullshit: Soren's family being kidnapped is "Perrin's wife being kidnapped" levels of tedium, though fortunately resolved a tad faster.

Pacing I think is also a complaint. It took one-and-a-half seasons to reach the events of Reach and then undersold them, then another half-season to reach the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, but they've mixed things up by not doing as much as they could with the Forerunners (I don't think the name has even been mentioned) but introducing the Flood too early. The familiar "eight episodes isn't enough" refrain is also there, although I disagree. These are pretty short games and I think you can adapt them in that timeframe, much more easily  than a lot of these other shows which are struggling.

Edited March 23 by Werthead

[Durckad]

On 3/23/2024 at 8:28 AM, Werthead said:

Oh yeah, that's a good point.

Regarding the Arbiter:

  Reveal hidden contents

This is the Arbiter mentioned in the games but never appears; he died in shame after permitting the destruction of Delta Halo.

"Our" Arbiter, voiced by The Actor Keith David, is promoted after that guy's death and first appears in Halo 2. He's yet to appear in the show

Spoiler

Oh really? Was that stated in the games or is that a tie-in novel lore-thing? Maybe I missed something but I got the implication that the Arbiter in Halo 2 and 3 was the Arbiter "responsible" for the destruction of the first Halo and that he was retroactively ret-conned into the narrative. Or maybe I should replay some of the games and catch all of the things I missed.

 

[Mexal]

The finale was pretty good and the Flood was scary as fuck. I'm super curious to see where all this goes. I played the games growing up but only multiplayer. I never had the patience as a kid to play a game all the way through like I do now. I have no real allegiance to the characters/storyline so this totally works.