It's been a very very long time since I've done a blog on Giant Bomb, I think almost five years actually. But since I'm coming back to this community after being away so long I decided to write my first very long blog post about something that is troubling me, and that is the state of Microsoft's flagship Halo franchise.

Let's get it out of the way: Halo 5's story isn't great. It isn't even good either. It is very much the Halo 2 of the Xbox One generation. 343 Industries spent so much of their time working on crafting a great 4v4 arena multiplayer component that they forgot some of the other more important aspects of why Halo is a great franchise: Story.

Halo 4 was phenomenal game in terms of story. It was my favorite campaign of any Halo game since the original, and I loved that they explored more of the human side of Master Chief. And for my first point, the core Halo franchise has always and will always be about the character of Master Chief. That's why games like Halo: Reach, Halo Wars, Halo 3: ODST, and recently, Halo Wars 2 exist. Other games exist in this franchise to tell stories that don't involve Master Chief. However, the core numbered Halo franchise should always involve Master Chief as he is not only the main protagonist of this franchise and has been since day one, but he's also kind of Microsoft's damn mascot. So insert new Halo character Spartan Locke. The problem with Spartan Locke is that he isn't a well rounded character. They didn't do anything to really give us any insight or backstory into his character. Rather, they decided to shove this character down our throats as the new Master Chief, and it failed immensely. And while I do reference Halo 2 as the weakest story of the original trilogy (it is), that game at least had a solid 50/50 split between playing as Master Chief and playing as The Arbiter. Here, the split is 80/20, which is astounding that most of this game is played from the perspective as Spartan Locke and his team. The other sad thing is that the Master Chief levels in this game are great. I enjoyed the dynamic between him and his former colleagues during these 3 missions, but it's 3 missions out of 15. A really bad split for a numbered game in the Halo franchise. Imagine creating a Batman Arkham game where you play 80% as Robin while only briefly playing as Batman. Yet the franchise is called "Batman: Arkham _________". They wouldn't do that, so why are we doing that here?

Now putting aside the issues I have with not playing as Master Chief, exactly what is going on with the story here? I'm going to get into some heavy spoiler territory here, so if you haven't played or finished Halo 5: Guardians, than I advise you to skip ahead. At the end of Halo 4, Cortana's rampancy finally catches up with her, leaving her to essentially die. It's an extremely emotional and heart wrenching scene. It left me wondering what was going to happen in the inevitable sequel. Hell, I still like the idea of Master Chief going rogue, but they squandered it. Locke and Chief reconcile their differences too easily in the game, especially after the marketing for the game pushed it as this edgy confrontation between these two characters. Their confrontation in the actual game? A brief scene where they exchange punches until Chief bests Locke and moves on. Then Locke just kind of realizes that Chief is right and all is forgiven and by the end of the game they are buds. But what about the other odd part of this game? What about evil Cortana? Yeah that's a thing. As a Halo fan, I actually don't have a problem with this idea or concept, but it is poorly utilized here. And by the end of the game it is revealed that yes, she's bad and building another Halo ring.

Alright, let's take a breath and move on. So where do we go from here with Halo? How do we salvage the awful story in Halo 5? What would I do?

Well, it's simple: Halo 6 needs to be the Halo 3 of this generation. We already know that 343 did two things correct with Halo 5, and that was they created some of the best multiplayer Halo has had since 3, and they did an excellent job of going the route of having all of the maps be apart of free updates. In fact the only obvious issue I had with multiplayer in Halo 5 was the big team battle mode was a huge letdown. It just doesn't feel the same as it did in prior Halo games. I'm confident that can be fixed in a sequel though. Also, there is one other glaring issue that Halo 5 had for long-time fans of the franchise, and 343 has already confirmed it won't ever be an issue again with the core franchise: no split-screen play. Removing that did really hinder some of this game. It's the main reason why my girlfriend hasn't experienced this game yet, because she doesn't own an Xbox One (she's a Playstation girl) and with the lack of splitscreen, she hasn't played it yet. We recently sat down and played the first four games split screen in the excellent Halo: Master Chief Collection.

For story? Let's obviously bring back 4-player co-op but I want it to be Chief, Locke, Arby, and Buck. I think that would be an excellent squad that would work wonders. I don't have a problem with the character of Locke, but we need more of a backstory about him. Especially considering we have a better back story of the other three characters, his character just doesn't stand on the same level at all. Halo 6 could rectify this by giving us more of a backstory on Locke. Who is he? Where is he coming from? What are his motivations? I'd like more of a story on him then just "guy who is following orders", and that's all his character was in Halo 5. This story needs to be Chief centered though. I miss Master Chief. I feel like he's was back in cryo-sleep during most of Halo 5, simply because you didn't play as him that much at all. And finally, if we want to make Cortana the true bad guy of this trilogy, that's fine, but we need more backstory on why. They didn't do a good job of explaining this in Halo 5, and while the idea of this is very intriguing, I want more.

Halo 6 has some big shoes to fill. It's no secret that Microsoft's big franchises haven't been selling nearly as well as they did during the Xbox 360 generation, and Halo 5 didn't do nearly as well as the company probably hoped. That's not to say it was a flop either, but it didn't pull in Halo 3 numbers. And while Gears of War 4 seems to have gone a correct direction (I'm still in the process of playing through the campaign), that didn't sell as well as it's predecessors either.

In my next blog post, I'll focus on Microsoft and their 2017. What I feel they need to do and where I feel they stand right now. And while I'm not a fanboy of either console or platform, I mean hell I'm getting Horizon: Zero Dawn tomorrow and the damn Nintendo Switch and Zelda on Friday, I'm making the choice to focus these first few blog posts of 2017 on Microsoft because I feel that they are the most interesting company to talk about right now. They seem to be the ones that stand to have the most to gain in 2017.