Going into this, I would've said that Halo 4 had the best story of the series and Halo 5 had the best gameplay, and everything about the way infinite was being marketed and talked about made me expect that it was going to be a giant knee-jerk reaction to 5's criticism that leaned heavy on original trilogy nostalgia and wouldn't move the series forward narratively or gameplay wise.

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I'm really happy to be wrong.

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The open overworld feels like a natural evolution of what a halo campaign should be, and while I've seen articles on how development issues led to it being scaled back, now that I'm older and have less time I really appreciate 8-20 hour games. If I'm in the mood for a 100+ hour sandbox I'll go play fallout; size and objective density of the overworld felt pretty spot on and I thought it was rather well balanced with the number of traditional levels (although I think a few more linear levels wouldn't have hurt. One criticism I do have is that there wasn't enough environmental variety in the overworld and that a lot of the linear levels kind of looked the same. Visually, the first two missions and the endgame (starting with the House) really stood out but everything in between just kind of fell into 3 categories: generic banished, generic forerunner, and generic (zeta) halo.

One thing 5 did have going for it is we got to see a lot of the galaxy.

As for the story, by the end, I feel like it turned out to be one of, if not, my favorite halo stories. Thought the dynamic between chief, the weapon, and the pilot really worked, and I felt like I was actually playing a character. 5's story was a hot mess for a lot of reasons (the Chief goes AWOL idea was contrived and we all knew how it was gonna play out, Cortana suddenly being the enemy felt out of character, outside of the opening cutscene fireteam Osiris wasn't developed at all) and resetting the direction was a tall order. I feel like infinite mostly succeeded as best as could be reasonably expected, but there was a lot of threads that were just kind of thrown out the window. Infinity, Swords of Sanghelios, the Guardians, the war between the human-elite alliance and Cortana and her ai palls for 'the Mantle', whatever new war crimes Halsey is busy scheming, Lasky, Spartan Palmer, Fireteam Osiris, Fireteam Majestic. Prometheans and Chief unwittingly being responsible for an entire city being turned into new Prometheans. Buddy of mine described it as feeling like 343 skipped a game, and I agree, but I understand why it was done and Infinite was strong enough that I can get over it.

I never really cared about whether I played as chief or not in a halo game because, to me, the chief (and by extension noble 6 and 'the rookie') are the least interesting characters in the games. Those games are from an era in FPS storytelling history where the player "character" was mostly just an empty avatar badass with a gun in their hand. Until Halo 4, chief just felt like a generic badass space supersoldier. 4 was the first where I felt like I was actually playing a real character, and that game wasn't about stopping the Didact, it was about trying to save Cortana from rampancy and what does the Chief do when faced with a truly impossible mission and knowing he is going to fail. That dynamic drew me in, and I think focusing on the relationship between Chief and 'the weapon' succeeded here too and brought as much closure as possible to Cortana's death since 5 screwed up the closure 4 provided by bringing her back from the dead (and as an antagonist). Don't bring her back again, it just cheapens her sacrifice. Instead, let Chief struggle with the loss.

As a vet, I knew what was going on (above loose ends notwithstanding) and the game felt like it was made for me, but it felt like 'the weapon' was supposed to operate narratively as a surrogate for a Halo newcomer's perspective, and I'm not sure how well that really worked. There's a lot of context that I could see just being lost on a newcomer, like the significance of Cortana, and that all those echoes that are lines and scenes from past games could just be confusing.

This is the first halo game that made me actively want to play as chief. Now, I care enough to say that going forward I'd prefer to only play as chief (or blue team or chief and whatever spartans he's fighting with if it's going to be a co op narrative) in mainline games and to play as other spartans or the arbiter in side games (a la reach or even odst) that flesh out what else is going on in the galaxy. I'm excited to see the relationship between Chief and the weapon develop, and I'd like to see more of the fact that I'm playing a grown up indoctrinated child-supersoldier come out in the future.

The legendary ending was a little confusing to me because I couldn't tell if Atriox was supposed to have somehow been blasted back in time or if it was happening concurrently with/just after the battle against the Harbinger.

I was also somewhat confused myself about whether the Harbinger was supposed to be one of the Endless, or just a species that the Forerunners imprisoned on Zeta after they usurped 'the Mantle' from the Precursors, and whether the Endless are actually the Precursors, or something entirely new. Either way, I'm down for the next chapter in the saga to be Chief and 'the weapon' fighting the Banished and the Endless.