If they hadn’t slapped HALO on the show and made it its own IP, it would have worked better, but no, let’s continue the habit of having people that don’t know / despise a particular IP make a show about said IP.
Imagine spending the money to get movie/tv rights for this franchise… And then doing that with it. WTF
It legitimately boggles the mind how out of sync the owners of the Halo IP are with its fans. 343 and Microsoft have had over a decade to figure it out and it’s been a shitshow every time.
Halo 4 was okay, nothing really groundbreaking
Halo CE Anniversary was just Halo 1 with a texture pack
Halo 5 doesn’t interest me at all, it straight up doesn’t feel like a Halo game
MCC was completely broken at launch, and while it’s good today it’s just the original Bungie games with some hacks to get them working on modern PCs
Halo Infinite’s development was a shit show and it seems they’ve forgotten about the campaign cliffhanger as well as a bunch of unanswered questions
And then they put out this TV show with just weird writing even outside the context of the Halo universe. I used to buy Xbox solely because of Halo, but now the franchise just feels like it’s dead in the water.
Shocking…
Few people in my circle even knew it was a show, those that did just called the main character John Halo, the master cheeks (because they thought it was a good idea to have him take off his “helmet” when trying to portray an almost silent protagonist).
It was called Master cheeks because we got to see his ass in the first season
I’m surprised it ever got renewed for season 2 considering everyone’s reaction to season 1
Not a surprise. I didn’t mind the show (I didn’t play the games so I didn’t go into it with any preconceived expectations, and it was a fun enough ‘switch brain off and enjoy’ sci-fi story). But it got so much flack from fans (rightly or wrongly - I’m not making any judgement there), the plot was a bit meandering, and they had sort of boxed themselves in by the end of season two. And it clearly cost a lot. So an imminent death was expected.
I didn’t play the games
And that’s the rub. If this show had been called ‘Space War’ and had no connection to Halo, you’d have been equally happy. A decent number of Halo fans probably would have enjoyed the ‘Space War’ show.
Connecting something to an existing fictional universe creates expectations in the fans that are supposedly being appealed to. This show diverged so hard from the source material that right from the beginning the creators unambiguously called it an alternate timeline (the “Delta timeline”) as a get-out-jail free card from criticism. Except that doing that just validates all the worries by fans that the people making the show don’t care about the franchise.
