I read every Halo novel and became the Master Chief of loneliness | Unraveled

halo infinite is coming out it's been nearly five years since the last mainline halo game and boy oh boy have i never played a halo game before i have no clue what is going on in these games but halo is one of the most important video game franchises of all time so i should probably know what it's all about luckily halo infinite is coming out on the next generation of xbox which means i have plenty of time to get caught up there are 15 halo games if you include all the spin-offs but honestly the mainline games are going to give you the story without causing you to miss out on a bunch of lore each mainline game takes 10 hours to complete that's 50 straight hours of gaming today i'm telling you everything you need to know to get up to speed on halo by playing all who put the halo novels here i'm not doing the halo novels who put them here i'm just playing five games okay i put them here today i will be playing all five of the hit what the [ __ ] what why does this keep happening no please get these out of here today july 30th 2019 i'm going to begin reading every halo novel and then i'm going to give you a book report on all of them this isn't even all of the halo novels i'm still waiting on a few to arrive some are digital only and there are a few that haven't been released yet because they are still being written here is a list of every halo novel currently announced depending on how long this reading adventure takes i might have to add to this list every one of these 28 or so novels is considered canon that means there's roughly 10 000 pages of juicy canonical information explosive action sequences and beloved characters that i know nothing about the average american reads about 12 books a year the median is four i am zero books a year but according to the pizza hut bookit program if my school administrator signs up and enrolls me every time i reach my reading goal of one novel i will receive a certificate for a free one topping personal pan pizza from pizza hut pizza hut is not sponsoring this video but if i can find one that is open and will ignore the facts that i am a 25 year old man i'm gonna get a personal pant pizza so i'm gonna read all these books i guess and then i don't know summarize the info for you look honestly most unravels have me biting off more than i can chew but usually i have chewed that bite before i have started filming i am literally starting this process today so even i don't know how this video is gonna turn out my current plan is to film this in slices over the course of however long this takes and then i will do a little wrap up but all that's left to do now is actually start reading with the first novel in the series halo the fall of reach [Music] prologue oh 500 hours february 12 2535 military calendar lambda serpentis and they all lived happily ever after wow folks it's been a year since i started this great journey but i'm happy to say it's done i've read every single halo novel so very much has changed since july 30th 2019. i no longer have a mustache and i'm also filled to the brim with knowledge of the halo universe but before we get to the book report here is the updated list of the 31 halo novels i read these two short stories were eventually collected into the compilation halo fractures so it's really 29 you also may have noticed a halo comic on the table of the original shoot that was just set dressing ignore it in my skyrim book report i read 571 pages for this i read 10 920 which is more if you were to listen to a continual stream of halo audiobooks it would take you almost 13 whole days no sleep just halo but i didn't do that instead i did this here's a timeline of when i finished each halo book before comparison here's a timeline of every other book i read this year i didn't read any other books this year but it was 12 months well spent because it gave me the time to fully digest this information and now i can present to you what you need to know before halo infinite it all starts with the master chief well okay so it doesn't it it technically starts with catherine halsey and the oni i'll explain the insurrection no let's start from the very beginning you know what i uh i could tell you everything you need to know before halo infinite but doing it succinctly would be doing you a disservice you wouldn't want that anyway uh when i scheduled a brief two-hour meeting with my co-workers to do a quick overview of the halo novels they kept getting upset with me because i needed to go off on tangents in order to tell them the juicy stuff only in book seven or eight all of these come from the side of the unsc so the concept of video games as art has like shifted to people he's starting to see what you mean about not being able to talk about this without going on weird yeah the great knowledge bestowed upon me by these books has come at a price i have become so powerful and intelligent that speaking to my co-workers about halo is like trying to explain sha fujikawa drives to an ungoy [Laughter] i have become the master chief of halo novels this might sound like a bold claim if you think the master chief is just a green man who shoots good but thanks to these halo novels i know that the master chief is actually a green man who shoots good because of a tragic backstory and you learn that in the very first halo novel i am finished with the fall of reach i did video check-ins right after finishing each novel to record my gut reactions this one was 30 minutes long i have a feeling that these halo novels are gonna be like a super cheap margarita i'm not going to gain anything from it and in fact i might be worse off after the fact but it's tasty and i can slam it quickly in the year 2517 the united nations space command wanted super soldiers to quell the human insurrection so they turned to the office of naval intelligence and dr catherine halsey who kidnapped six-year-olds flash cloned them and placed the kidnapped kids into a boot camp while the flash clones were returned to the parents and slowly and agonizingly died this fun little summer camp was called the spartan 2 program the kidnapped kids trained until they were teens and as a gift for their 14th birthday they received biological augmentations which killed 30 of them and permanently maimed 12 others it's a hard age to shop for this left them with 33 frighteningly powerful and militarily indoctrinated teenagers ready to go out and kill some humans one of these teens was spartan john 117 who would later be promoted to the rank of master chief but just as these teens start quelling the human insurrection knock knock who's there it's a moral deus ex machina called the covenant they're a group of aliens who want to kill all humans and it's the spartans job to stop them my experience with science fiction has led me to believe that when you start a story this way in the end there'll be a big twist where the humans who abused kidnapped children were the real bad guys but this book subverts my expectations by not doing that it is extremely black and white alien bad unsc good if you were looking for shades of gray you should have checked the romance novels my my biggest emotional response was to the fact that spartan john 117 was so obviously abused into becoming this killing machine and he's just okay with it because that's all he knows he feels happiest when someone has given him an obvious goal an obvious thing that he needs to kill and it just is heartbreaking but i don't think it was meant to be heartbreaking if there's one thing to learn from this book it's the origin story of the master chief he was just some kid in the colonies until circumstances plus several years of military indoctrination and biological modification turned him into a hero it's hard not to draw a parallel between his experiences and my own because i went through a grueling gauntlet of books and emerged stronger than ever i don't think anyone knew that halo would become one of the most important game series of all time and this book reflects that the writing is fine if a little on the nose reach was one of the few places that john considered safe from the covenant his home would not fall uh-oh john and that's all you need to know about the fall of reach [Music] okay just one little tangent i gotta address a thing that comes up whenever you talk about the halo novels so here it is the master chief's suit does not jack him off there is a fake picture of a halo novel and it's based off of a drill tweet but it's not true in fact if you're to read the halo novels you would know that the spartan 2 biological augmentations do something akin to chemical castration which destroys their libidos okay that's it i'm sorry i'm moving on i just spent over 600 words talking about one book i can't do that for all of them if i'm going to reach my goal of telling you what you need to know before halo infinite so i will limit myself to 50 words per synopsis from here on out i love the ocean but i love halo more i read the flood on vacation it follows the first game's plot the master chief blows up a halo after meeting guilty spark and the flood the parts with master chief were boring the other parts were good if you like halo novels that's a little joke about the pina colada song first strike shows that some spartans survived the fall of reach and fills the gaps between halo 1 and 2. not much happens ghosts of onyx follows kurt perhaps the most interesting spartan of all of them he was put in charge of creating the spartan threes which was another terrible military program but they used orphans this time contact harvest rules this book was way more interesting and way better written and also way hornier it shows first contact with the covenant and explains why they're killing all humans and there's a beautiful beast story between a huragok and an ungoy also avery johnson bones down there's something in this book that these other books have not tried to do namely make a more nuanced story in the coal protocol spartan grey team tries to destroy map info that would lead the covenant to earth 5 books and 250 words let's keep this up after one little tangent the first five books were released during the original trilogy but starting with the cole protocol the novels focused on characters that didn't matter that much to the video games from here on out they were no longer just making a game series they were expanding a universe the next novels i was going to read were both trilogies written by well-established science fiction authors if the first six books were first-person shooters then the forerunner saga was a text-based tactical rpg and for that it might be a bit hard to fit each into just 50 words but i'll try halo kryptum everything you thought you knew about halo i want you to throw it in the garbage 100 000 years before halo a forerunner named born stellar makes eternal lasting hires two ancient humans named chakas and rizer for an adventure and they stumble upon a promethean called the didact and that's just the first few chapters this trilogy is like dune level science fiction it is dense as all hell this trilogy sets up the antagonist for halo 4 and it explains the creation of the halos which are those superstructure weapons of mass destruction designed to kill all sentient life in the galaxy just to stop the parasitic alien known as the flood which seems kind of petty and that's all i will say about this trilogy and also these fun little tidbits you know the covenant prophets the sanshiyum they existed alongside the forerunners and they're described in this book as a handsome intelligent race besotted with eternal sexuality and youth the sanshi you used to be [ __ ] hot and 343 guilty spark that shitty orb who shows up in the first game and tries to get the master chief to fire the halo ring that used to be chakas that ancient human i mentioned very quickly some poor dude went on a quest with a forerunner basically as a freelance gig and then he ended up getting his brain stuck in a roomba for a hundred thousand years that is rough my dude okay for real i am done speaking about that trilogy and with that my first nine halo books and my indoctrination into the halo universe were complete [Music] only 20 more to go after reading nine books you might think i finally have enough context to tell you what you need to know before halo infinite but you're wrong the first nine books are just boot camp now that the master chief me has completed his training books it was time for him to drop into the field more books i braced myself for the next trilogy but nothing could prepare me for what happened with karen travis's kilo 5 saga karen travis you freaking did it you made me like a trilogy of halo books i truly 100 enjoyed reading this trilogy and that was hard to come to terms with i did not start this project expecting to enjoy doing it and for that i'm gonna give myself a little more than 50 words to talk about it this trilogy follows an oni team called kilo 5 as they deal with the aftermath of the human covenant war now that the covenant is in shambles kilo 5's job is to arm religious fundamentalist sangili dissidents in order to destabilize their government i will admit in the very beginning i was like hmm a cia style group trying to uh cause some unrest in an enemy nation by funding terrorism i've never heard of that happening in real life uh it's a joke i have heard about that in real life should i have been worried about this plotline given halo's track record with handling morally questionable military missions with nuance and tack absolutely but karen travis knocked it out of the park the leader of kilo 5 sarin osman had a very bad 14th birthday because instead of becoming a spartan 2 she was maimed by the biological augmentations and she despises catherine halsey for that another member of kilo 5 is the full-fledged spartan naomi her father became one of the most important leaders in the colonial insurrection radicalized by the conspiracy that the government kidnapped his daughter and replaced her with a clone they did do that this trilogy finally explores the ramifications of the lore set up in the first novel and it rules i'd say more about this trilogy but if there is one set of books i would suggest you read it's these ones so i'm not gonna spoil them and to make up for that long summary i'll be real short with the next seven books halo evolutions one and two are short story compilations that flesh out the halo universe not much happens in them but these are my favorite ones broken circle bookends the start and end of the covenant from sanshi you and sang healy perspectives which is neat but i read it in one day while stuck in laguardia so i didn't like it that much halo new blood is just a lovely john written from the perspective of edward buck as he becomes a spartan four but here's the twist he's not a child incremental progress halo hunters in the dark is a good book humans in sang healy team up and go to the ark to stop the halo rings from firing it's like halo 3 2. last light starts out as a crime drop it'd be so cool to read a crime drama in this weird sci-fi world and it didn't end up being that i was disappointed but that's a me problem halo fractures was another compilation that included a lot of good short stories and that's another 10 books down i read through these ones in two months i was cutting through these books like the master chief gunning waves of flood in the library i was behind the wheel of the warthog of literature we've only got 10 more books to cover so i think i've earned one little tangent halo is gonna have a tv show very little is known about it right now but there is one tiny little piece of info that piqued my interest baking woodbine is going to play a character named soren066 soren only appears in a short story called pariah he's picked up to be a spartan 2 but like saren osmond is harmed by the biological augmentations and washes out of the program because of this he slowly converts to insurrectionist ideologies and he defects from the military soren's story is incredible but it's buried within a short story collection that i can guarantee very few halo fans have read and yet he's one of the only named characters we know about in this show and that makes me wonder who are they making this show for me this halo show is being made specifically for me i'm gonna watch this show because the universe is incredibly interesting to me and because i'll be able to watch it and say ha i know who sauron is i read a short story about him and that's a great and powerful feeling and it leads me to a second smaller tangent within this larger one let me write for the halo show here's why you should know why you have the obligation to let me write for the halo show number one i already know everything about the universe so i don't have to waste time looking things up two what else am i gonna do with all this information it's gonna stop being useful to me as soon as this video ends three as a real true fan i know more about this universe than you do i have the right to control this story how dare you ignore me a real fan and four i have no one else to talk to about this i have no one to talk to about halo i have no friends who want to hear about how hot the sand triume used to be no one wants to hang out with me anymore because i can't go 20 minutes without explaining how the master chief suit doesn't jack him off it doesn't jack him off these books have turned me into a halo lore machine and in return i am alienated from the people around me i can't even connect with these nerds my closest friend is the halo universe and now i have to say goodbye to it and no one cares [Music] unraveled yes there were unfortunate doors that opened and couldn't be closed again it was best not to open them in the first place that's a quote from halo mortal dictator if this project has turned me into the master chief it's only fitting that it should end this way these books speak of john 1 17 as this legendary savior but in reality he's just a duty-bound automaton who connects better with cortana his vocaloid waifu than with the humans around him and now cortana has turned on all of humanity leaving john desperately alone how does he keep fighting when no one understands him he feels happiest when someone has given him an obvious goal i started this project with the goal of telling you what you need to know before halo infinite but it turns out that goal is not so obvious after finishing these books but we've made it this far so we might as well finish the fight smoke and shadow a salvager named ryan forge tries to find her dad a space adventure whatever envoy is a book about diplomacy and introduces the sharkoi who only existed in concept art because they were cut from the original halo but does anyone care about that except for me retribution vada lopez is back you remember her and her favorite team of spartan 3's from last light and the short story unnecessary truth of course not legacy of onyx is a teen drama and it's fun but they make some weird choices in order to make a kid the protagonist like chief mendes is flippant with confidential info which doesn't make sense for his character and also they aren't even guarding the slip space portal that zulendama used to escape from bad blood sequel to new blood the blood is bad now battleborn and meridian divide are young adult novels that do a good job of characterizing the toll the covenant war had on normal human colonists but if you don't care about that there's also a spartan and if you only care about one spartan then silent storm and oblivion are for you the master chief is the protagonist and boy does he shoot some people and finally halo renegades a sequel to smoke and shadow but it's more a story of guilty sparks redemption arc it's kind of nice to see a human turned robot hall monitor find his humanity again and that's it i read every halo novel and i gave you a book report on all of them what's left for me the master chief of halo novels i know everything there is to know about the halo universe but i'm still so alone i can't even begin to tell you what you need to know for halo infinite because it's at everything it's impossible to compress an ever expanding universe into a few short chapters except i guess that's what these authors did so many of these books especially my favorite ones weren't about events with far-reaching consequences that reverberated out into halo canon in fact you could probably skip most of these books and still understand the video games just fine most people do that and judging by the new halo infinite trailer the game seems to focus a lot on the banished which is a group that's important in halo wars 2 but is never seen and barely mentioned in the novels so [ __ ] me right but that doesn't mean these stories don't matter just because a character doesn't save the entire human race every other day doesn't mean that they don't matter not everyone can be the master chief i certainly can't be but maybe i don't have to be maybe i can just be brian or maybe i could be chakas chakas got pulled into this universe he didn't fully understand just because he thought it would be a fun thing to do for work and then he gets so invested in it that he ends up losing all of his humanity to it and becoming guilty spark and then he destroys all sentient life in the galaxy god am i gonna do that the thing about guilty spark chakas is that he spans the divide between the video games and the rest of the expanded universe he plays a super important role in the video games but he also starts as a barely sentient macguffin and he might have stayed that way for me but then greg bear wrote a trilogy that gave him 100 000 years of backstory which alienated him from his species and then after that kelly gay wrote a novel that allowed him to rediscover his humanity guilty spark might have been forever changed by his experiences but he was able to reconnect with humans and even make new friends this book compressed an eternal being with a universe of lore into a person with a story a universe only matters if it's filled with characters you connect with so if you want to know what's really important before halo infinite forget the forerunners and the 100 000 years of lore all you really need to know is that a kid named john got stolen away from his family and turned into a super soldier and now the one partner who has always been by his side has turned on him it's just a guy fighting for what he believes in against the person who betrayed his trust and that's all you need to know before going into halo infinite and also that his suit doesn't jack him off [Music] my personal pan pizzas hi yes have i reached pizza hut corporate have a quick question about uh your bookit program i'm i'm looking to get uh 29 personal pan pizzas no i'm not enrolled in i'm i'm 26. uh would it change anything if i told you they were halo novels like halo the game yeah halo the game no the suit doesn't jack him off that's a common misconception this makes it all worth it

Channel: Polygon

Views: 2,123,077

Rating: 4.9632778 out of 5

Keywords: halo, halo infinite, unraveled, brian david gilbert, bdg, halo novels, halo books, halo book, halo novel, novel, book, master chief, cortana, spartan, unsc, oni, videogames, video games, polygon, year, a year of halo novels, loneliness, lonely, alone, universe, halo universe, showtime, halo show, halo tv show, lore, elites, sangheili, guilty spark, 343 guilty spark, spartan 2, spartan ii, halo infinite trailer, book review, book reviews, bdg polygon, brian david gilbert polygon, halo gameplay

Id: WEWEdIcx1DI

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/michaelbo44]

I need the full unedited review...take me on that journey BDG

[u/MisterMegatron]

For novels based on a video game, the books are surprisingly well-written. I stumbled upon First Strike at a school library and since have read eight other books in the series.

[u/kyriehartmann]

That guy is the solo reason I follow Poligon on YouTube.

[u/PandemicArise]

I like how he says John 117 instead of John 117.

[u/Big_Lemons_Kill]

Hey its the iona bar guy

[u/LiveFreeFratHard]

The first few books are exactly how he described them: a happy hour margarita. Pretty expected and not very complex, but they’re easy to finish and you enjoyed the experience. I personally really enjoyed the first books of the series.

Also, he’s damn right about Contact Harvest. That book kicks ass.

[u/TheSilasm8]

He should do all the Warhammer books next

[u/Shaake]

I'm pretty sure you're wrong and the suit does jack him off

DO NOT LEND YOUR EARS TO THIS CHARLATAN!

[u/ABCIDFG]

"John One-Seventeen..."

​

Hes doing that on purpose, right??