User:Lord Hyren

"Oh, you'd like me to connect the dots for you, lead you from A to B to C, so that your puny mind could comprehend. How boring."
 * - Q

The Beginning
My love for Halo first spawned out of hate. This was based on the the fact I was nursed and nurtured with the finest products Nintendo had to offer. Then the Gamecube came. It was great for the first year or so, but then the first signs of decay began to appear. Nintendo had jumped into the next-gen either too-early or too-late; either way the Japanese Titan tripped for the first time during it's near monopolized tenure on gaming since the Virtual Boy. They stopped supporting the system just around when The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was released. I had bought an XBox already, but no games for it. I had played Halo: Combat Evolved over at a friend's house and somewhat enjoyed the story. This lead me to borrow the game and eventually buy it when the price dropped to $29.99, and then I played the campaign. I loved it, I couldn't get enough of the plot. Bungie, to me, released just enough information to get my tongue dry but not enough to spoil it all (see: Halo 2). When I found out about the novels you can only imagine my joy. Then came Halo 2. I was overjoyed; I played through the campaign once and went back to reread the novellas. They aligned in near perfection. Halo 2 answered many of my Halo Universe questions, but it forced me to ask so much more. I never got into i love bees or the iris campaigns, since my background in computer programming and formatting is dim, and I would rather read the summaries here after the effort was done to translate the cryptography of Bungie. Of course I think Halo is better than Halo 2, but that's because as one writer put it (this is not a direct quotation):
 * The first in a series is always the best because that's where peoples' interpretations for the rest of the series begins. That first release is the baby of the original creators; once you move into sequels the creator, in order to be successful, needs to take into account the desires and interpretations of his fans and audience. After you make that first piece of art, the work is no longer yours. Your ideas have been released into the public, and where you take it is just as much what the audience wants as what you want.

Bungie did things in Halo 2 I thought was incredible, and then there were things that were just downright awful. But that's the price of being different; it's part of what make us human. I beleive that if Bungie focused less on telling the Arbiter's side of the story (but not completely cut him out!) and make a few more levels with John-117 in the HUD that more fans would have appreciated playing in "the enemy's encampment." Also a final climactic battle over Earth couldn't have hurt.

Post-Halo 3
The above was written pre-H3, but is still pretty accurate to how I feel today. The main series is over, and ended just as much how I expected. I am not disappointed by any means. Since Halo: Evolutions came out I've been awed and inspired by the Impossible Life and Im-Possible Death of Preston J. Cole. I can only hope in the next few years Bungie, or Nylund, will find a way to expand on the greatest character in Halo history.