this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I never really caught much of the lore. It seemed like pretty standard military action stuff.
The music from the original demos was incredible. I'm pretty sure the music was what propelled the original game from meh shooter to a genre favorite.
I won't knock the music, but your assessment of the lore isn't really missing anything.
The lore is pretty vast, but the games don't really explore it all that much. It's more sprinkled in, and mostly told through the books and game extras.
I enjoyed the music and the co-op, but the lore of the game felt very clearly like a "secular US military in space" fighting against inscrutable religious zealots (with an Abrahamic theme) then zombies, which to me feels like Stargate (the show). Idk if that's something that scans, it just popped into my head discussing Stargate and it's cagey relationship with the religious right of the bush era (and some big name culty events like WACO, which I feel like provided some cultural energy to the Brotherhood of Nod)
The game was written in the Post-9/11 USA, so that vibe was absolutely intended. The aliens are a religious caste system that hate Humanity's freedoms, Master Chief is a based Navy Seal, etc. As time went on they started playing with the idea that the human government was really fashy but because they never fully committed to the idea and had Master Chief defect to a Maoist insurgency it comes off like they're endorsing the awful things in the setting rather than condemning them.
Halo had been in development for years and came out two months after 9/11, any relation to post-9/11 politics was just a coincidence.
I have no idea if this will affect your opinion of the series positively or negatively but here's some information that recontextualises the religious themes:
Humanity are actually the descendants of the gods of the Covenant religion, and explicitly hold an honoured place within the philosophy practiced by those gods. The covenant are trying to exterminate humanity because the religious leaders are suppressing this information from the general population and using genocide to keep their secrets.
https://hexbear.net/comment/3881647