HALO... I'd be hard pressed to remember the story at all. :sly:
*sigh* That's because all the frat boys and emo teens played it with their friends and always skipped the cutscenes. No one apparently played the first Halo.
Let me try to explain it to those who feel left out.
In
Halo: Combat Evolved, the
Master Chief is taken out of cyrosleep to defend the
Pillar of Autumn from an invasion from the
Covenant, an alien race we don't know too much about. Your superior is
Captain Keyes, who's basically the head of Pillar of Autumn, and the chick that talks to you is an AI called
Cortana. During an attack from the Covenant, you find one of the rings called
Halo, and its a mysterious planet which you basically crash into.
To compress the story even more, you encounter a parasitic race called
The Flood, which is Bungie's lame attempt at horror. What they basically do is they infect any sentient being (alien, human, Centauri, Narn, Asari, Turian, etc. etc.) and use them as a puppet.
After fighting
The Flood a couple more times, you learn of a race called
The Forerunners. We do not know what they look like or anything, but all we know is that the Forerunners fought the Flood in a war that basically wiped out their population. Before they became extinct, however, the Forerunners created seven planet rings called Halo. Halo's purpose? Destroy all sentient life in the galaxy. Why did they do this?
The only way to destroy the Flood is to starve them to death. If they don't have a sentient host, they will not continue to live. The Forerunners were sentient. I'm sentient. You're sentient. Humans are sentient. The Covenant is sentient. We are vulnerable to the Flood infestation and we cannot escape it. The only way to avoid it is if we reset the clock back on evolution and destroy
all life as we know it.
You end up learning this after encountering
The Librarian, aka 343 Guilty Spark. He is basically the database of all knowledge about Forerunner... stuff, and he needs you to basically destroy any Flood in his path so he can activate the ring. But you, the Master Chief, didn't know what he was planning until Cortana found out and told you the above paragraph.
What does the Chief do? He does something somewhat clever. The entire, if not most of the Flood infestation is on that one ring. So after activating the ring's detonation sequence, the Master Chief escapes and the ring explodes. No Flood infestation. Guilty Spark, the traitor, is destroyed. And one part of the biggest weapon of mass destruction is destroyed.
Or so we thought.
Halo 2 is still fuzzy to me, but you basically learn more about the Covenant.
The Covenant forces that you fought in Halo? It was led by an unknown but prolific Elite. You actually learn that the Covenant isn't just a race, but a unified government based upon a religion called "The Great Journey", which is started by the madman known as
The Prophet of Truth, basically the "king" of the Covenant. There are other Prophets, but they either stepped down before Halo 2, or died. In fact you kill one of them in the game, remember?
"The Great Journey" is unknown, but it involves the same rings created by the Forerunners.
The Prophets come first in the hierarchy, then Elites, then Brutes, and it continues down to I don't fucking know. Basically other aliens that you fight.
Anyway, the guy who led that attack on Halo? Yeah, since the ring exploded, he FAILED MISERABLY, He is then branded as a failure in front of everyone and is thrown in imprisonment. Back to square one for the entire Covenant.
However, the Prophet of Truth still has use for this soldier. Instead of wasting him away forever, he gets a chance to redeem himself. Wearing ancient armor, he is then hired by the Prophets to fight alongside his brothers as an assassin for the Covenant, known to many as
The Arbiter.
That is the whole point to The Arbiter. I was once great, but I am now shamed, and I'm a failure. This is my redemption. The Arbiter in the Halo series has no name, at least to our knowledge. The Arbiter is an occupation of sorts, and it soon becomes his name.
Back on Earth, people are celebrating and mourning. Captain Keyes, your captain from the first game, has died. He died after being infected by the Flood (I think). He... basically died a tragic and terrible and I don't want that to fucking happen to me death. So his duties continues in his daughter,
Miranda Keyes.
And
Mastery Sgt. Johnson is alive and still fucking awesome. He's underrated, IMO. But whatever.
Halo 2, as I've stated, is a little confusing for me and very fuzzy. But what basically happens is that you find out that "The Great Journey" is one big suicide planned by The Prophet of Truth. He has blinded and lead billions and billions of aliens to their own death, as he wants to activate the rings' true purpose (which is to wipe out the galaxy clean of sentient beings, are you listening?). He thinks he'll become a God of sorts by doing this. Clearly, he's a madman. Think Hitler.
You, as The Arbiter, find out, and you convince your brother Elites to temporarily join forces with the human race to fight against the Covenant.
The Covenant is obviously not happy that the Elites have rebelled, and thus they promote the Brutes as their main supply of soldiers, and their right-hand tool of destruction.
That's the end of Halo 2, and the set up for Halo 3... sort of. The Elites, who now know the true purpose of the rings, rebel against their former leaders and join the human race in a fragile alliance. The humans now know the rings' true purpose. The Flood is alive (somehow... plothole) and their infestation continues everywhere. The Covenant is led by a madman who is about to destroy all life as we know it. And as for the Master Chief, the one girl he loves, Cortana, stayed behind to detonate.... something. And she is now in the hands of
The Gravemind, the central governing body of the Flood. He's their king, basically.
That's the set up for Halo 3, and it basically wraps up everything from Halo 1 and 2. That's why it's "finish the fight", not just because Master Chief said it at the end of Halo 2. It truly is the end of the world, and you truly have to finish the fight.
I
hope that helped, but maybe I confused you even more. Sorry if it did, but you're welcome if Halo is clearer to you know.
Oh, and did I mention that Guilty Spark was also alive from the first Halo's explosion? You probably knew that but I just thought I'd clear that up for you. He was shown after the credits in Halo: Combat Evolved as flying in space, still alive.
