Happy new year dear readers! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and that your January is not looking too cold and grey. I myself had an excellent break, in which I managed to squeeze in a play through of Undertale in between family engagements. But the biggest surprise for me was a very generous gift under the Christmas tree; a brand spanking new Xbox One! As you can imagine, I’ve been on a gaming binge with the hulking console and played through the single player of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition in between Forza 6 races. But of course, a new Xbox needs to be accompanied by one series, and I was not about to squander an opportunity to dive back into the ongoing space opera that is Halo 5: Guardians.

Full disclosure, I am a huge fan of the Halo series. Combat Evolved came out when I was 14, and the larger than life setting combined with incredible gameplay hit all the right buttons for my hormone addled brain. In addition to playing endless hours of multiplayer with friends, I became enamored with the fiction and dove into the extended universe of books, comics, and alternate reality games. In the post-Bungie years this enthusiasm for Halo has waned a bit, but I can still recount the events of the series in reasonable detail. I mention all of this to qualify that while Halo 5’s story can get a bit messy at times, I loved the campaign and am more confident than ever that 343 Industries truly understands what makes Halo special.

Halo 5 takes place soon after the events of the uneven Halo 4. While Halo 4 had some intriguing new elements, it can’t be denied that the story was a disappointing follow up to the previous trilogy. Thankfully Halo 5 deftly picks up the pieces and assembles a more straightforward narrative. The story starts several months after the destruction of the Didact and Composer, in which the faithful AI companion Cortana sacrifices herself to save the Master Chief. Of course, all is not what it seems and Cortana has not only survived the events of the last game, but has now assumed control of the Promethean remnant and Forerunner technology to bring the universe under her control. You, as the Master Chief’s Blue Team, or as the newcomer Jameson Locke’s Osiris Team, are tasked with first determining Cortana’s motivation and then putting a stop to her plans. It’s an impressive pivot from Halo 4’s story, which set up the Prometheans as an external menace to humanity not unlike the Covenant, to a more interesting conflict against the AI that has helped you so many times before. I can’t help but wonder if this change happened based on feedback from the previous game or if this was the original plan for the overall plot of the so-called “Forerunner Trilogy”.

It’s been oft mentioned that Halo 5 seems to be following Halo 2’s blueprint in terms of the campaign. Both games are middle chapters in their respective trilogies and both end on cliffhangers that set up their successive installment to “finish the fight” (although thankfully Halo 5’s ending is not as infuriating as 2’s).Structurally, the two games stand out as the only numbered Halo games that cast the player as someone other than the Master Chief. 343 clearly was pushing this in their marketing and design by setting up last year’s Halo 2 Anniversary with cameos from Spartan Locke and by reintroducing the Arbiter into the ongoing story. But Halo 2 is not the only game in the series that Halo 5 takes cues from. The emphasis on the two Spartan squads call back to Halo Reach and, to a lesser extent, Halo 3: ODST. Sure, some of this may be pandering to the Halo faithful that were put off by the changes Halo 4 brought, but it’s simply smart construction to lay out the trilogy such that Halo 5 calls back the most to the series’ history.

The tough part of middle chapters in trilogies is that they inherently don’t stand out. The first chapter sets up the conflict, world and characters, and the final chapter pays off the plot and has the heroes come out victorious in their mission. As such, the middle entry must act as a bridge that thematically holds together the other chapters while also keeping the audience from feeling like the what they’re experiencing is just a prelude to the bigger and better sequel. Successful middle chapters, such as the brilliant Mass Effect 2, work by adding depth to the story and focusing on why we enjoy watching and playing as the characters. Halo 5 goes this route and makes the story about the what we like about the characters that inhabit its universe. By bringing back the Arbiter, Dr. Halsey, and Edward Buck, the cast becomes more interesting due to their previous histories getting carried into the current narrative. But while the developers could have played it safe and focused only on the relationship between the established characters, they decided to gamble on introducing the relatively unknown Osiris Team as well.

Master Chief’s Blue Team, while being a thrill for fans of the novels to see Kelly, Fred and Linda in full polygonal glory, are by their nature not as interesting to present in a visual medium. This is a squad that have known each other for almost their entire lives and have only the most minimal need for verbal communication, which makes it understandable when a casual Halo fan considers their motivations to be murky. To this end, by introducing Osiris Team, composed of post-Covenant War Spartan IV’s, the story adds an audience surrogate that helps voice the player’s internal thoughts on what is happening. This does leave the valid criticism that Osiris seems to be retracing Blue’s steps and have very little plot involvement on their own. But for me it worked, simply because the mission variety was such that you weren’t repeating the exact same scenarios and the conversations between Osiris and the crew of the Infinity were interesting in and of themselves.

Similar to the autumn of 2004, I am now eagerly waiting for the next Halo chapter to pay off the series. I did not expect to be enamored with 343’s output after Bungee jumped ship, but the developers have demonstrated a keen understanding on how to continue the Halo legacy that both pays homage to the landmark titles from the past while also pushing the series into the future. The possibility of where the story goes next in Halo 6, along with the gameplay ramifications to my favorite shooter series, has me back on the Halo hype train and thinking about picking up a novel or checking out the Nightfall series. The industry as a whole may have moved on from when Halo was the biggest franchise of them all, but Halo 5 shows that the series can still thrill and entertain an old fanboy like myself.