Leaving Hope Station: Halo 3: ODST The Game That Made My Year

With all the talk going on about the “greatest games of 2009″ a small bug has been squirming around in my ear, and he incessantly tells me that I need to add my two cents to the discussion.  I’m not one to do this, because the indie games jounalist inside me keeps yelling,

“Don’t give in to those petty fan-boy discussions; besides, you’re too busy playing indie games that nobody covers with this really absurd thought that somebody may someday give a shit”

After knocking back a bottle and a half of really bad Merlot, I have finally silenced that pretentious “New Games Journalism” prick, and I’m finally able to indulge that other side of me.  That side of me wants to talk about Halo 3: ODST, and you are probably wanting to tab on over to another website.  I can relate with you, because I am considering the same action myself right now.  All self-deprecation aside, this game has put me through a roller coaster of emotions, from pure nostalgia, fear, joy, anger, relief, and empathy towards the characters that make up the team of ODSTs.

Dr. Jeff Howard, a man whom I have the sincere joy of studying under, has allowed me to put my finger on what I enjoy most about Halo 3: ODST.  In his reflection of Atlus’ Demon’s Souls, he explains that it, “strikes me as operatic both in its overarching structure and its minute details”  This was actually explained to me in a conversation about a week ago, in which I was inquiring him about a facebook status that described Demon’s Souls as a dark opera.  He explanation:

By opera I refer not just to the game’s occasional bursts of swelling sound, or even to solely to its understated yet epic narrative. Rather, I use the term in the same way that Richard Wagner envisioned an ideal future form of opera as “gesamkundstwerk” or “total artwork,” in which every aspect of music, libretto, costuming, and set design fused together to create an interactive, participatory mythology.

That, more or less, describes my experience with Halo 3: ODST.  I feel as though I am worth maybe a few grains of salt as an English major, and I can usually draw classic literary references from most forms of entertainment; but, Halo 3: ODST escaped me in a way that had me cringing at my ineptitude.  My initial run of the single-player campaign had me thinking that this was a rather typical Halo experience, and I was deeply let down by a story that I truly wanted to immerse myself into.

You see, at one point I hated all things Halo.  I thought the third game had a single-player campaign that lacked any kind of drive or cohesion that made me feel as though I was part of something epic.  When you are already the most epic hero in the mythology of the Halo franchise, it makes everything else feel rather inconsequential.  How could it not, the entire time you play as a dual-wielding walking battle mech in a moto-cross helmet.  Not only that, your best friend is called an elite.  No matter what’s at stake, the trump card lies in the trigger fingers of two protagonists that carry the titles of Elite and Master Chief.  It doesn’t matter what’s going on; I am the Juggernaut and you are Ellen Paige (actually I’ve never seen that fight play out, so I have no idea who wins.  Does the Juggernaut send her to an early grave? Probably not, it’s Ellen Paige and apparently everything she does is spectacular, except for Juno; oh, snap!).  And so it happens that I feel no need to “finish the fight” and an intense need to give that game disc the finger.

When I first heard of Halo 3: ODST, I simply did not care for it.  My thoughts were that this game would be a simple rehash of the Halo formula, and that it was a simple cash-in for Bungie.  Well, those were my thoughts until I heard about the unique approach to story telling.  The Tarantino-esque approach intrigued me with the scenes of The Rookie taking place during the night; where the player must find artifacts to uncover the mystery of his team’s disappearance, and the day scenes that explain what exactly happened after the drop.

I have to admit that I’m a sucker for the narrative, and the ludic side can serve its purpose as long as it doesn’t impede on my narrative.  I couldn’t help but to fall in love with the frailty of the ODSTs.  Here I am playing as a soft, spongy, fleshy mortal, and all of a sudden I am Ellen Paige.  I welcome the sight of health bars and medpacks, and suddenly I’m transported to the basement of my friend in high school playing massive 16-player Halo multi-player matches, or taking on the campaign on Legendary difficulty.  My God I couldn’t help myself from feeling giddy that I was playing as someone who was not god-like in any way! The night-time segments as The Rookie were absolutely splendid for me.  I had a map, that operated like the one on Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, where I could scout out enemy placement and map-out the best route for sneaking past the enemies.   When I approach shooters I like to take my time and figure out the best way to survive any kind of situation, and this game allows me to do so.

The loneliness of The Rookie’s plight is staggering.  The look and feel of New Mombasa during the night is lucid with softly lit streets, and a night sky that sits ominously, scorched by what has transpired during the day’s battles.  The only comfort that is allotted to you is the dim glow of your visor, and the city’s Superintendent, Virgil.  The contrast between the day and night segments is so wide in that the game conveys an unbearable heat during the day, and a soft-focus effect during the night.  The city is abstract, almost organic looking, with buildings that tower like enormous mountains, and roads and causeways that bend like cypress trees.  During the day fear exists as a constant battering ram of short skirmishes that force the player to think intuitively, employing every weapon at their disposal, and making every single shot count.  When you are Ellen Page, you can’t afford to waste shots or go into mobs of baddies with guns blazing.  You have to possess a sense of tact with this game, because wasting shots ultimately brings you that much closer to death and restarting that particular skirmish all over again.  What I love most about playing as the ODSTs is that I get a real sense of what they are going through.  Their wimpers from getting shot, or their small situational quips gives me that sense of mortality.  I may advocate the importance of the silent protagonist, but Bungie proved to me that it is possible to have characters that I can empathize with.  An operatic experience must evoke a sense of empathy from the audience, like King Lear makes you dread for the fate of the king and the other characters, so do you dread for the lives of the ODSTs.

I didn’t quite pick up on the nuances of Halo 3: ODST on my initial play-through.  I thought it was quite average where I came for the night fights and stayed for the day fights.  The game seemed lackluster to me yet I wasn’t satisfied.  Somehow there had to be something under the surface.  Something I was not seeing.  I knew from the moment the campaign ended that something was eluding me, and I couldn’t stand to just sit and let it be.  Like a scab, I had to pick at this game, because I knew that there had to be something there thematically.  I had to find out what was escaping me for I knew that there was something special with this story, but I could not put my finger on it.  The next day I feverishly researched the Halo franchise, like Gandalf the Grey, I pored over details and more details to find what I was looking for.  I needed to look at the themes within the whole Halo franchise to find what I was looking for.  And one line hit me like bullets to my eye sockets when I was researching the engineers that inhabit New Mombasa.  The Superintendent is named Virgil, which could be an allusion to the roman poet.  Good Lord, I thought to myself.  Not only am I the frail Ellen Paige, I’m the frail Dante Alighieri!  Not only was I relieved that I had figured this out like when you can’t think of the name of the artist that performs a song, I was relieved to know that my English education hasn’t completely gone to waste!  Believe me, there’s no better validation than that!  From the moment I discovered the connection to Dante’s Inferno, I went back to the story and tried to find all the different connections.  I would love to list them all, but that would require me to go back and do massive research again, and that may have to be saved for a future blog post.  I’d love to do about six more blog posts on this game.  I could go on forever in a Tim Rogers inspired blog post covering the music, gameplay, retrospective, themes, connections to other games, connections to literature, and one just completely based on the Inferno connection.  That is what makes this “game of the year” in my book in that Bungie expertly crafted a single-player experience that gives most people what they expect from a Halo game, and gives just a little bit more to those that go searching for it (i.e. the non-frat-boy-lowest-common-denominator)

Halo 3: ODST makes a seamless bond between the ludic (gameplay) experience and the narrative experience.  This game trumps all others candidates because the team associated with this project had only a year to do so.  (and I’m going to go a bit off topic here, but the ODST Bungie team officially has the right, in my book at least, to say “fuck you” to Ubisoft, Bioware and Atlus/From.)  What Halo 3: ODST does is incredible to me, and this is a game I see myself playing over and over again to find some new wrinkle that I had missed before.  Halo 3: ODST has everything that I consider operatic, from the music, the setting, the colors, and the theme.  Everything clashes together, yet it melds to create an experience that stays fresh.  First-Person Shooters have the trouble of being really boring, yet Halo 3: ODST does everything right for the player.