I played a crapton of Halo 2 in its day. I’ve got such vivid memories of Halo 2 multiplayer. A good friend of mine shared a network with his neighbour which had the amazing benefit of being able to play Halo 2 on networked Xboxes, a team in each house.
I think I played the campaign once on the Xbox I owned for a few months, but it’s been a very long time and my memory is super foggy - so it was exciting to jump into Halo 2 again.
What a rollercoaster of cool ideas and weird executions, especially when playing the Anniversary edition.
Fairly early into the game you discover the first major twist, and very cool reveal. You won’t be playing as Master Chief the entire time like before. Instead you’ll play a good portion of the campaign as The Arbiter. A Covenant Elite with the dulcet voice talents of Keith David, is blamed for the Covenant’s losses in the events of the first Halo and as penance is given the role of The Arbiter - a religious saviour sent to do the dirty work of the Covenant’s religious puppeteers.
Not only do you get to play as a new character, you also get to pilot a bunch of vehicles and wield weapons that were off-limits in the last game. It’s incredibly cool to go from wondering how it must be to pilot a Wraith tank or slice through enemies with the same Energy Sword that carved you up in the hands of your enemies previously - to then get given those toys to play with. If memory services, Halo 3 pulls this same trick with the Gravity Hammer that you’ll inevitably be smashed with countless times in the final encounter of Halo 2.
Anniversary on the left looks like an entirely different time of day compared to Classic on the right!
I initially opted to play in the classic visual style, as in the first game I found the new coat of paint very technically impressive but completely missing the mood in a lot of situations. Halo 2 Anniversary commits the same sin. One late game area in particular demonstrates it clearly. It’s a moment of darkness in both the literal and emotional sense. Things are going badly, the building you’re in is failing and along with it the power. In the original this created a tense sequence where you’re walking around by torchlight, haunted by grotesque creatures lurking in the shadows. In Anniversary though, you barely need to turn on the flashlight. Everything is well lit, nothing is hidden, and it felt like a slightly dimmed version of any other inside section of the game. It’s a genuine shame the mood and seeming intent of the original game was paved over in pursuit of Better Graphics with More Detail and Realistic Lighting. Ah well, at least there’s the classic visual mode for freaks like me who want to play it that way.
Except, that’s also kind of broken in its own way! The audio mix in either mode is totally all over the place in a way that had me checking my audio channel settings to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up. In Classic mode, the music is extremely quiet. With all my settings at default, music was barely audible. Moments of triumph or intense action normally accompanied by orchestras and butt-rock guitar are instead met with muted guitary ambience. It was bad enough that I switched the game to Anniversary mode, because for whatever reason the audio mix for music is better in this mode. It still had some glaring issues like radio chatter being almost too quiet to hear over game action while at the same time characters in universe being ultra loud - but I’ll accept that over losing the music.
For all its promise at the outset, Halo 2 ends on a bit of a downer. Even knowing it was coming, it was hard not to feel disappointed with how things finish here. Being the second in a trilogy it has to set up the next game, but there’s no moment of victory or catharsis at the end of this. There’s a really annoying boss encounter and then things just kind of end. Chief talks about how he’s going to Finish The Fight and then credits appear.
I’ll have to see whether Halo 3 is able to cash the cheques Halo 2 writes, because I genuinely remember nothing of it’s campaign at this point - but man what a spot to leave people on when they had to wait for the next generation of consoles to continue the story.
At least they had some of the best multiplayer experiences available at the time to pass the time, I suppose.