I have a love/hate relationship with Halo. Halo: CE is horrible, Halo 2 fixed all the problems that I had with CE,  Halo 3, ODST and Reach were just too much of the same to feel special. I will acknowledge that every Halo game is an improvement over the previous ones, but I think that the series has been getting steadily worse since Halo 2. The reason for this, I think is that Halo suffers from a sever identity crisis, and needs to shut it's damn face and focus on the killing.
 
This is on my mind because I played through Reach last night, and could not get over the compromises that fill that game, or perhaps how often they were unwilling to compromise. Bungee cannot decide if the story or the standard shooty gameplay are most important, and both suffer for it. I could cite several examples, but let's go straight for the ending. Yo, spoilers.

Quick recap: The ending of Halo Reach is you fighting alone (or in my case with an online buddy) against a never-ending horde. It is a "supposed-to-lose" fight that is designed to give the player the feeling that they are heroically fighting a battle that they will lose. When you take damage, cracks appear in your visor to indicate some kind of attrition. The problem is that you still have a big fancy regenerating shield and an infinite supply of bullets, so the player is destined to die from a burst of damage, not at the end of a slow siege. I love this idea for an ending, but Bungee simply would not compromise their gameplay to make it work. Even worse, they added a bunch of stuff AFTER this sequence (an animation of the the Noble 6 fighting some more and then dying, then somebody talking to the DEAD player), removing the feeling that you were living through your last moments.
 
I actually think that this was a great IDEA about how to end the game, but Bungie failed on execution by refusing to alter their gameplay for that sequence. There are other examples that I could explain in detail, but I think my point is made. Bungie really needs to either focus on the gameplay (the part of Halo that is really genuinely good) and stop clinging to this notion that they know how to tell a story through gameplay, or start designing their games to actually BE the telling of a story, instead of a series of battles with some kind of (actually ok in spots) plot that randomly interrupts the shooting.