"It's finished?"
"It's finished."
".. I'll miss you."
"Wake me, when you need me"

Those words fill me with sorrow

29:97 funnily enough, folks from Bungie have talked about Halo 3 being quite soul crushing for a lot of people. Not as bad as H2 but still quite hard on the devs

I never really found the Guilty Spark fight to be a "boss" fight in the traditional sense, it always felt more like a moment of catharsis as you finally get to kill the little bastard.

I was in 5th grade when Halo Reach released and I played it religiously until 9th or 10th grade. One of my top 5 favorite games of all times and genuinely makes me emotional. The other thing about Noble 6 is that in the novelization, I think it is stated that Noble 6 was fighting for 9 straight days in their Lone Wolf Mission. The fact that 6 refused to die for more than a week and just kept taking out the Covenant who felled the rest of Noble team is amazing and so incredibly badass. Truly the only Spartan who can rival Master Chief and 6 is a Spartan 3 so even more impressive

A great thing about ODST was also that the cities AI constantly tried to help the Rookie with Neon signs, engaging police sirens to get the Rookies attention and stuff like that. As far as I remember the cutscenes by the cities surveillence cameras was also the AI monitoring the team. It is essentially one more character with personality established in the story.

That specific Red Elite from the 1st mission is indeed the same Red Elite that shoots Kat and appears several other times in the game. You have the ability to kill every other Red Elite throughout the game EXCEPT him until the end of the game. It was Bungies final Halo boss fight.

Elites taking cover when their shields are down is such a miracle of 2001 AI. So underrated

ODST is just a Chefs Kiss of a video game. One of my favorite Single Player FPS experiences ever.

Fun story from my last reach playthrough. I was doing it with a couple friends, one a Halo veteran and another completely new to the games. When we got to the scene of Kat's death, his words just moments before it happened were "well at least no one died"

I see you made sure to hit the 10 minute mark

1:43:00 that choreography was anything but great 😂

1:12:55 You'll noticed that the one that escaped is wearing Field Marshal armor, which is the same one that shot Kat and the same one you fight at the end of the game when you're about to board the Mass Driver. The rest are just Zealot class, which makes the theory even more credible.

On the map where you find the 2 scarabs, you can drive a tank and a hornet.. not sure why he said "you only have a mongoose"... That mission is awesome...

Oddly enough, in higher difficulties the dynamic of plasma weapons shredding shields and ballistics weapons shredding health becomes much more apparent, and hence brute weapons become the absolute worst weapons in the game.

Halo 3: OSDT is probably my favorite game in the series. The appreciation of the music and the immersion of Mombasa Streets and its relatively short run time make it an easy choice for when I want to play Halo for a night. I like the challenge of the game on Heroic and blowing through uplift reserve on a ghost as fast as possible is always a blast.
I did get play Halo: Reach with my step brother for his first play through a few years ago. We kinda sped through the game but it was tons of fun.

You forgot to mention the hunters’ worst enemy, one CE magnum round to the back

Not getting the fully realized Halo 2 might be one of the biggest losses in gaming history, and I’ll die on that hill.

One of my personal favorite theories is that Jun was assigned to Halsey because he's most likely going to be the one to put a bullet in her to make sure the enemy can't extract information from her.

Some fun things about Noble Six if anyone who hasn't sacrificed hours on top of hours to the extended Halo Lore.

First, there's a decent chunk of people who think Noble Six could have been a headhunter: a member of an elite rank of special ops spartans who preformed assasinations and general top-secret objectives behind enemy lines. Something of note is that headhunters worked in pairs, however Six most likely worked alone even then, furthering his role as a lone wolf.

Second, Noble Six is one of two humans to ever have been granted the rating of "hyper lethal". The other to be given this rating was none other than the Master Chief himself with all of his exploits concerning the halo rings and the Prophets. This means that Six accomplished as the Chief did, but from the shadows. While this is most likely an afterthought unrelated to the original vision of Reach's story and an attempt to relate Six to the Chief, it moreso highlights just how powerful ONI and its operatives are- something that is built up by the extended lore and promotion for Halo 5 but, as we all know, is executed horribly and completely dropped after 343 saw how badly they screwed up the idea. Whether the failure of the exploration of ONI's questionable morals and secrecy can is to be attributed to outside meddling (my personal belief considering the juxtaposition of the promotion and final product for Halo 5) or 343's incompetence, it's sad to see such an interesting idea nearly ret-conned.

Back to Noble Six, he brings up the question of why Noble doesn't try to escape at the end of Reach and explains the futility of attempting to do so. However, I disagree with that being the main idea of Lone Wolf. It's true that Six needed to cover the Pillar of Autumn, leaving him no way of getting off planet, but I think Six would have stayed on Reach regardless. Throughout the game, we are supposed to insert ourselves into the story via Noble Six. However, this isn't completely true, as Six isn't a truly silent protagonist which grants him character and personality for him to call his own. As the game focuses on the members of Noble team, Lone Wolf focuses on Noble Six. The entire mission is the game's way of developing Six as a character as he dies not only buying time for the Pillar of Autumn but dying on Reach as a symbol of humanity's strength. Noble Six dies on Reach because, after everything he's done up until this point, I doubt he would be able to just leave Reach without doing everything physically possible to fight back the covenant. It's nice to see that attatchment between a spartan and their home, and is comparable to halo 4's theme of humanizing the spartans.

Unlike most of Bungie's Halo games, Reach and ODST focus much more on the characters as people, with much more effort being placed on tone and personality.