Halo: Reborn

FORE WORLD

Hello there. (This is when you respond with "General Kenobi" and we engage in extremely acrobatic lightsaber combat) 'Tis I, The Nerdy Kid. If you're looking to jump right into the story, feel free to skip this chapter entirely. But for those of you who would like a little more intel with your intel, enjoy some Halo music for a few minutes as you read through my blabber. I'm glad that Zootopia - The Visitor was a hit, and I'll be posting one last "behind the scenes" chapter there soon, so stay tuned for that. However, it has been a hot minute now since I have done anything substantial here on Wattpad, and I was getting the itch to start something new. Something a bit different. So, I have returned to do just that, and if you couldn't tell from the little number reference in my username (2552), I am a HUGE Halo fan. I love the games, the books, the universe, pretty much everything about it. So much so that I have been thinking about how to put a fingerprint (however small) of my own on it for some time now. This story idea has been on my mind off-and-on for the last six years or so, and only just recently did I feel like I was in a good enough spot to begin writing it.

I also felt like there was no better time to do so, what with all of the excitement (including my own) surrounding Halo Infinite (which comes out in about a week! Holy crap!). I played Halo for the first time at 13 years old back in 2011, when I was at a friend's house, and I immediately had to know more about it. "Hold on. A dude named John Halo dresses up in a cool green suit and shoots aliens on a giant space donut of death?! That's the coolest frickin' thing ever!" I begged my parents to help me buy an Xbox 360 along with a copy of Halo 3, and when they finally did, I played through the campaign in one day. Shortly thereafter, I bought Halo: Reach, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 2 (in that order, for some reason), and I loved them all, playing through them over and over again. (If you're curious as to which multiplayer I was into, I put the most hours into Halo: Reach, specifically custom games)

Then, in 2012, and on my birthday, no less, Halo 4 was released, and I could not wait to play it. As soon as school was out that day, I rushed home and popped that sucker into my Xbox, and it was... fine. Halo 4 was a good game for sure, but I couldn't help but feel a bit underwhelmed by it, like a vast amount of potential had been squandered. The premise was awesome. Master Chief gets sucked into a metal planet and has to fight a bunch of prehistoric robots? Sick. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the campaign was short, the gameplay was... questionable, and above all else, the story felt underdeveloped. There are plenty of people who love Halo 4's story. Some even like it more than all the others, which I can totally respect. It just wasn't really for me, seeing as how it felt a little bit more like a soap opera than the epic sci-fi adventure Halo is known for being. The whole thing was passable for me, but the worst offense by far was Spartan Ops. If you know or remember what Spartan Ops is, then you know how much of a disappointment it was. I won't get myself started since I could rant for hours about it, but needless to say, it missed the mark.

So why am I revisiting Halo 4, specifically the Spartan Ops storyline, you ask? Great question. It all goes back to the topic of squandered potential and missed opportunities. I think that somewhere underneath that big mess is a great idea that was never fully realized. That's what I hope to at least try to do here. It's a story of what could have been, or perhaps was, and we were just never told. This is Halo: Reborn.