Halo 3 Made Me Believe

before we begin today's video i'd like to verbally thank my patrons especially those donating ten dollars or more monthly such as ceelo andrew melnick wolfe hd young master pig anatoly vollmov colin gagic jano duncan bristow cooper sutton foxhead and money and muses this video quickly turned into a massive undertaking so every bit of support really did help to keep me pushing forward a couple of days ago i didn't believe that halo 3 could possibly live up to the hype many of you guys know how much i love the halo series growing up i firmly believe that halo 1 utterly changed my life and halo 2 enabled me to ride that high for a while longer i occasionally got to play halo 3 and reach at sleepovers but i never got very far in either of them since short bursts of multiplayer fun were so much better a fit for the looser connection you have with a game you don't actually own what bits of the single player i do remember are all fogged up in a haze of sugar high and young excitement well eventually i got too old for sleepovers but i never got too old for halo so over the years i kept on replaying halo 1 and 2 on my pc dealing with these janky and inauthentic pc ports while halo 3 just sat there in the back of my mind this elusive thing that i didn't think i would ever get the chance to play again especially considering that i really can't go back to anything lower than 50 fps or a controller for fast-paced fps games nowadays i'd never get to experience the end of the story i'd never get to use a bubble shield or ride around in a brute chopper i'd never fight the enemy team from aboard an elephant mobile base i'd never bored an enemy scarab take it down and jump off of it i'd never get to watch a flood infection form convert a character in real time i'd never reconnect chief with cortana or finish off the profit of truth or destroy the grave mind and its flood i'd never finished the fight i know i'm not alone here there have absolutely been tons and tons of pc players who like me have had this burning desire to play the conclusion to halo for almost a decade and a half if you need any evidence just take a little dive into the halo modding community people are still making content for the original pz releases of these two games to this day because we'd essentially been left on red by this series that really does have the power to shape a young mind in some subtle but powerful ways this is all made so much worse by that insane cliffhanger ending to halo 2 where chief simply says sir finishing this fight and even more so by the marketing for halo 3. i know it's not exactly suave to gush over a series of advertisements but wow halo 3 had the greatest marketing campaign ever created i'm literally getting chills all through my body just from thinking about it believe this was a phrase that marked the end of these advertisements they all took place in the museum of humanity and they were primarily focused on interviews with veterans who fought alongside the chief in which they recounted the war against the covenant and how chief gave them hope time and time again when all seemed lost how did you manage to keep it together we knew master chief was still in the fight he gave us hope these are genuinely beautiful pieces of film they started with this in-depth look at how a diorama of a particularly important battle was being crafted each model being handmade without the use of machines each marine's face being recreated based off the facial scans taken at the recruitment topographical data and city planning documents being used to ensure complete accuracy in every detail of the environment it's incredibly interesting and when that last trailer hits in which this super emotional music plays over slowly panning close-up shots of the diorama all leading up to master chief lighting this plasma grenade which according to some of the interviews is what turned the tides of this battle with that one simple word believe well as you can see i'm getting excited just talking about this ad campaign had i seen these when they originally aired i probably would have run to my parents crying what's more they hinted that master chief would be killed by the end of halo 3. this ad campaign shows absolutely everything i love about halo i think you'd be hard pressed to find a player who can look at these shots and not think i want to play that but on top of that they hit some incredibly heavy emotional chords you're the hero in these games the covenant treat you as this impossible to defeat warrior the marines can barely keep their jaws from hanging open when they see you you control the pace and the flow of every enemy encounter in this series these trailers not only promise you these hectic incredibly exciting firefights they also promise that you'll live up to that legacy that your actions over the course of this game are going to inspire generations that kids and adults alike will look at the stars and think about you but above all else these trailers promise that those emotional stakes won't be lost amidst the excitement of the gameplay this hype is goddamn insane practically untouchable even death stranding and half-life alex are the only games i've ever been more excited to play than halo 3 but there was one problem bungie's halo series had for me always been a series that was teetering on the edge of perfection but not quite hitting the mark halo 1 had incredibly nuanced and engaging gameplay fantastic visuals a really entertaining story and just the perfect tone but the level design was at times so repetitive that it'll occasionally make you roll your eyes an annoyance and the magnum was so overpowered that you didn't really get to use more interesting guns all that often on legendary halo 2 had a fantastic and genuinely bold story loads of exciting gameplay additions and absolutely jaw-dropping visuals that like halo 1 still hold up today but the gameplay was so freaking jaded and difficult that playing on legendary was just a pain in the ass whereas halo 1 felt like a game that was balanced around a skilled player taking on legendary mode halo 2's legendary to me feels like a joke at the player's expense i get that this is because the game had to be rushed out the door to some degree and they didn't have time to fine tune the balance after some adjustments in the design document but i played through halo 1 about 10 times and i've played through halo 2 like four times because in spite of awesome stuff like boarding vehicles duel wielding weapons using the energy sword and all of that the gameplay just isn't as refined and considered as that of halo 1. so the question around halo 3 that i didn't want to ask myself was simply how will bungie avoid perfection this time around the work that these guys did on the halo series will forever cement them as some of my all-time favorite game developers in spite of whatever controversies are going on with destiny this week but the fact that these games had everything they needed to be perfect but were never quite there will always bug me to no end while i know that some of you are rolling your eyes at me using the word perfect to describe something entirely subjective i can say without flinching that halo 3 is perfect at least to me you can talk to me all day about how the battle rifle encourages a less aggressive playstyle and multiplayer or that the bubble shield just raises the skill floor by letting a player survive some bad positioning or whatever i don't really care about the fine details of the multiplayer meta all i know is that what i played that being the campaign on legendary was utterly jaw droppingly perfect call it me being romantic or nostalgic or whatever you want but people like me who had been waiting for over a decade to play halo 3 are the exact audience of this release of the game and my god did it fit us like a glove i literally didn't think it was possible to live up to hype like this but i'm happy to say that halo 3 surpassed that hype in every way more chills down my spine as i prepare to talk about the game itself halo 3 starts with a clear indication that it's going for a more fantastical almost fairy tale-esque tone we watch chief plummet from the sky landing on his battlefield while hearing a flashback of cortana as she talks about why she chose john 117 to be the master chief simply because he was lucky suddenly that advertising campaign starts to make a little bit more sense believe these trailers are prompting us to believe the legends about master chief because we're about to watch those legends form this sort of epic fairy tale tone is in my opinion the basis for practically every decision in halo 3's campaign but we'll get to that maybe i just suck but this first level is honestly pretty cruel the grunts have replaced the elites seeing as the elites are now our allies and they're way beefier than the simple two headshots it took to bring them down in halo 2. the broodshot grenade launcher is about as common as the plasma rifle was for the elites in the previous game there are snipers everywhere who can take you down in just one shot if you aren't careful you've got a lot of close range weapons while the combat gets more and more long ranged i'm not the best at halo but i can definitely clear both of the previous games and reach on legendary without too much trouble but i was dying a lot here at the beginning the odds are stacked heavily against chief here after watching a youtuber play this level and one life on legendary i think that part of my struggle came from me wanting to try out every new weapon i could and not placing as much faith in the pistol after halo 2 demoted it so much i'd definitely do better now that i know to stick with my assault rifle more than i was in the beginning either way it's a lot tougher than the first mission of halo 1. however once you've fought through these woods and past this beach something happens suddenly you're allowed to use more power weapons sniper rifles beam rifles plenty of brood shot and battle rifle ammo a gravity hammer that sort of stuff i just figured that this was simply the climax to the level but when the next level gave me tons of grenades detachable turrets gravity hammers some fuel rod guns and tons of brood shots in the first few minutes i figured something out this game unlike the previous two was going to get more and more balanced around the power weapons master chief isn't really a guy with a battle rifle and an assault rifle who occasionally brings out a plasma sword or rocket launcher in this game and he isn't carrying around a plasma pistol on a magnum everywhere he goes instead he's a monolithic cyborg wielding ridiculously overpowered weapons because that's just what it's going to take to deal with an enemy like this just hopping in your car with some marines on the gunner's seat and rushing through the enemy isn't going to cut it this time around going invisible and rushing past undetected won't act as the master key it was in halo 2. instead you're going to need to dig your heels in the dirt and lay down everything you've got against your enemy if you want to win this you're going to need to rush your enemies with a gravity hammer utterly annihilate them with the downright kingly spartan laser pound them into submission with a volley from the brood shot destroy every vehicle they send your way with a fuel rod gun or rocket launcher you're gonna need to run up to a wraith that's firing at you jump on it punch the gunner in the face rip that hatch open and yank the driver out just so that you'll have the firepower you need to handle the enemies around the next corner now i do get what's really happening here lots of classic weapons were nerfed either in their actual usefulness or just in their commonness i mean think about it how many times did you actually use the magnum the needle or the plasma rifle or the smg and halo 3. sure they'll occasionally help get you out of a sticky situation but when i think halo 3 i think gigantic weapons in fact everything in halo 3 is bigger than ever before massive fights take place in massive canyons gigantic scarabs are taken down by huge squads of marines on mon gooses ridiculously powerful spartan lasers take down banshees faster than a plasma pistol can take down a drone gravity hammers can tear through an entire horde of flood combat forms faster than you could take down a single one in previous games the stakes have been upped in every possible way it's well larger than life it's fantasy it's mythical it's a fairy tale but it's real and we're watching it unfold halo 1 and 2 were games about a really tough badass guy going up against swarms of enemies halo 3 is about that same guy going up against an army and having the firepower to do it the game takes a little bit of time to ease you into this new slightly altered playstyle but it becomes impossible for me to ignore by mission 4 the storm right off the bat you're in a convoy with enough firepower to get through the first two missions of halo 1 and the dialogue playing explains why you need that much firepower you need to make a hole in the covenant's aerial defense well you go inside this small building fight some covenant and that's when it becomes clear that your squad is going to roll a freaking warthog through this narrow space and if that wasn't crazy enough you soon see enemy ghosts inside with you in any other halo game these areas would be fought through using assault rifles and plasma pistols here it's a job for the 50 cal well after a bit of that you eventually get outside and well this happens [Music] [Music] jeep [Music] [Applause] now [Music] well done chief i'm sending in a few pelicans sheep we're on mission four and for context this is the biggest fight in halo one and this is the biggest fight in halo 2. this might just be the most bombastic awe-inspiring game i've ever played now is as good a time as any dimension that i'm using theater mode to get most of these shots it's a really fantastic feature the game records demos of basically everything you do and you can watch them back and move the camera around as you watch them in order to get awesome shots that show off the action if you have a fantastically cool or funny moment in gameplay you don't need to worry it's already saved even if you game over it separates the clips by level not life although it would be nice if there was a way to jump from checkpoint to checkpoint so that i don't have to sit through dozens of failed attempts to get to the one where the really cool thing happened either way it's super useful as a youtuber if it wasn't obvious the only reason i'm talking about this right now is to squeeze in a bit more footage of badass stuff that happened over my playthroughs anyways while there's a lot to dissect about this and every halo games combat i just want to drive home how the gameplay has subtly shifted to something much bigger than that of the previous two games this wasn't just a change in design priority either as things cooled right back down to how they used to feel for odst in reach this was a deliberate choice by the developers and the consequence of that choice is that master chief is painted as something so much more powerful than is logical so all we can do is believe that he's powerful again i could compare halo 3's gameplay to that of the others for hours but at some point we have to move on to the story the first thing that i have to say about this game's story is just how cohesive it feels i've always hated when a sequel was clearly not part of the original works plan so they just pull characters out of retirement for one last mission when a character gets their happy ending they should be able to enjoy it damn it well i can happily say that halo 3 is no unplanned sequel it's no secret that halo 2 was basically supposed to contain the entirety of halo 3's plot but all of that had to be cut due to the same time and hardware constraints that plagued the rest of halo 2's development the result of this is that famous phrase finish the fight the fact that halo 2 ended at what was essentially the low point of the story is all part of why halo 3 was so hyped it was the return of the jedi to halo 2's empire strikes back truth's plan to betray the other two prophets had gone off without a hitch the elites had been forcibly removed from the covenant cortana was abandoned with the grave mind and the ruins of high charity sure we killed tartarus but there was a lot of work to do for both chief and the arbiter that was sort of the meta goal in halo 3. we were trying to earn master chief his happy ending where he rode off into the sunset we all know how that turned out but we'll get there so i'm going to skip past a couple of story beats here because i really just want to touch on the important parts of the story where that whole believe thing comes into play because that is if you ask me the whole point of halo 3 story first off the forerunners left a device on earth which opens up a portal to the ark the device which actually activates the halo rings this can only mean one thing humanity are the direct ancestors of the forerunners to touch on the religious symbolism that the series is filled with we were created in god's image that is to say humans are the only ones who can activate the ark we're the only ones who can fire the halo array without needing an index this whole idea was alluded to as far back as halo 1 with 343 guilty spark assuming that chief already knew what the halo rings did anyways the other main story point that's relevant to my intentions here is that ending we find ourselves on the far far edge of the milky way galaxy and on this planet is the ark using the arc we're able to activate a single incomplete halo ring which will exclusively affect this corner of the galaxy destroying the flood but sparing earth and covenant seeing as it's called the ark it also opens a portal back to earth well with sergeant johnson killed in a final fight against guilty spark chief in the orbiter rush back to his ship the forward unto dawn and fly it into that portal however seeing as the orbiter doesn't have a suit that can survive the vacuum of space like chiefs he's on the front of the ship while chief remains in the back half the forward unto dawn only gets halfway through the portal before the ark is completely destroyed and the portal closes the orbiter makes it back to earth but chief and cortana are left floating in this distant arm of the galaxy missing in action as it were this is where we get to the single greatest scene in the halo trilogy it's obvious that it'll be decades at the very least before earth finds chief and cortana so chief goes into cryosleep perfectly mirroring his introduction in the first halo game he simply says wake me when you need me this touches on an aspect of certain video game protagonists that i've always loved cosmic edu solid snake doom guy gordon freeman and indeed master chief they all more or less lie dormant between games just waiting until their world needs a hero again through this they become legends gordon freeman doesn't just write a book about the black mesa incident he doesn't appear on tv for interviews he isn't in the news or anything he's just gone quiet nobody knows where he is or what he's doing so all that he really leaves behind is a legend then when earth needs him again he appears back in the public eye and with that comes the hope that you see so many rebels expressing in half-life 2. this is how a character becomes legendary it's the exact same story with all the protagonists i listed above back to master chief with him gone just vanished into the void not to be found again for years and years and years all that he leaves behind is what we see in those interviews with the veterans who fought alongside him we only hear the stories of how he was a legendary hero going to cryosleep here cements permanently master chief's role as a mythic figure in halo that line wake you up when you need me to me all it says is that the master chief knows that he won't be relevant again until something even worse than the covenant or the flood comes along he assumes that he won't be awoken from cryosleep until the world needs a second coming of the chief this to me is the other thing that halo 3's favorite word believe is really all about it's about believing that master chief can do all of these fantastic things sure but it's also about believing that master chief is still out there alive somewhere at the edge of the galaxy and that he'll be there to save us again the next time we need him the ship that master chief sleeps in is called the forward unto dawn master chief isn't riding off into the sunset he's just sleeping until his day comes again one of these days master chief will be awoken from cryosleep get a quick tutorial about looking up and down and then whatever ship his cryopod is on will be attacked by something prompting some epic series of events it's just the nature of an action protagonist really i'm not a big fan of religious symbolism so often it's just used as writing shorthand for this is deep but it lacks any depth it's basically just telling various religious stories but with the character switched around halo however always used its classic religious symbolism with the intent of social commentary so i can get behind it a bit more however being an atheist i don't really think it's my place to talk about the times when halo is being a bit more critical of religion basically all we need to cover to get through the rest of this video smoothly is just jesus is awesome i know that sounds silly but i'm not really here to talk about that other stuff about misinterpreting god's will and all of that other stuff that's prominent in the series because at the end of the day in a video game as in a film or a book or whatever the main purpose of the story is to serve the piece as a whole halo at its most spartan is a series about being a badass dude that kills aliens and who everybody looks up to you might stay for the story but the promise of getting to be a badass is what you came for so how does all of this religious symbolism serve that end well like everything else in halo 3 all of this religious symbolism is there to elevate something from the previous games to an even higher level in halo 1 the marines looked up to you furthering that feeling of being a hero you calmed them down in hectic situations you rescued them from the covenant time and time again you fired the first and last shot of so many of their battles they'd happily hop out of the car and let you get in the gunner's seat you really felt like the most important person on the battlefield then in halo 2 they just furthered this marines would happily lay down their lives for you they'd take your crappy weapons if you wanted to trade for their awesome ones they'd drive you around and practically blush just because they got the opportunity to again you felt like a hero well in halo 3 master chief is jesus there's basically no getting around that he says wake me up when you need me he's dead but he might return to save us again someday he saves humanity from their own creators he proves to false prophets that he and his people are the chosen ones i don't like to say this is what the creator intended but i think it's pretty hard to deny that this is what they were going for with master chief in this game now what's so cool about this is that it's a perfectly natural evolution of how chief was portrayed in the previous games when those marines got so excited to see you when they happily gave you their weapons and their driver's seat on the warhog when you saved them all from the covenant when those grunts fled from you and when you saved the galaxy you were the king man all of that is there in the previous game solely to make you feel like even more of a badass by showing how impressed everyone is with your actions well what's bigger and greater than a king a messiah and halo 1 and 2 you're a hero in halo 3 you're a legend you're something that people will just have to put faith in you're something that people will tell stories about and get emotional over picture that we've done so many incredibly badass and heroic things that creating a jesus allegory doesn't seem out of place that's how badass halo 3 makes you feel that's what it means to finish the fight this is the reason why i had such an insane chill going down my spine for so much of the final act of this game in the earlier games that amazing soundtrack is basically just about a badass dude kicking ass on this alien world the mysterious choir being met with the power chord heavy electric guitar however in the final hours of halo 3 for the first time that soundtrack has nothing to do with the forerunners or the halo rings or the ark or the covenant or any of that this mystical music is all about you you've become this thing that's as mysterious mind-blowing and philosophically shocking as the halo range that the music first sang for as i went through halo 3 i watched unfold the events that philosophers would be arguing about for centuries to come you thought the halo rings were crazy mind-blowing inspiring and mysterious you thought that finding out that we're the direct descendants of the forerunners prove that we have a place in this universe you thought that the flood were the greatest most existentially devastating power in the galaxy just wait until you hear the stories about master chief [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 225,385

Keywords: Halo, Halo 3, master, chief, collection, windows, 10, PC, steam, analysis, discussion, review, port, essay, ending, explained, Cortana, forward, unto, dawn, arbiter, Sierra, 117, finish, the, fight, believe, ad, campaign, commercial, legendary, museum, of, humanity, scarab

Id: POfmQ3FPLyI

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020