Halo Legends

I´m here again!!! [Crowd cheers] Its a quick and relatively-short update. I´m on full maintenance in my two PCs and still sick of all that JavaScript nuisance, but I´m here to rant about something that has made me even more sick.

Halo Legends
Honestly, I was very excited with this idea, although I was afraid of some of the short movies to look blunt, or too Anime-like, or some of them transforming and deforming the Halo storyline to add Xplosioms and BLAST!´s. I wanted to give some credit to the guys of Microsoft and 343 Industries.

You know what? I was right....

Let me get this straight, Halo Legends its OK, but it could have been soooo much better. But saying that is not fair, in fact, "Halo Legends" its just the name for a collection of 7 animated shorts produced by different Japanese animation companies. So, its necessary to analyze them one by one

Origins I & II: (9/10)
Origins spans two animated shorts, but a single story. Origins is the tale of the Forerunners war against the Floood, the activacion of the Halo Arrays, the Human history and the battle of the Ark. Basically, we have the 100.000 years of history of the Halo Universe. Incredibily well told, and (IMHO) incredibily well drawn. Origins is a great contribution to the Halo franchise and universe, and stands true to the series.

The Duel: (6/10)
This one its tricky, tells the story of a Sangheili Arbiter in times before the Human-Covenant War. Its a good tale and with interesting visuals but its just too "japanesse" I mean. Suddently the Sangheili civilization becames Feudal Japan, and with no reason Elites are no longer those fearsome warriors, but neraly human-looking lizards. (Female Elites don´t have four jaws? Honestly!!)And the battle, excelent action but, an entire legion against a lone warrior? And he wins? Feudal-Japan-Anime all the way...

Homecoming: (9/10)
Maybe the first interesting short I came across in Halo Legends. It tells the story of a female Spartan and how she remembers escaping from Reach and trying to come back home only to find she´s been replaced by a clone. (Don´t forget kids, Spartans were kidnapped and conscripted into the military by force and stealth) The visuals are not specially good for me, but the overall feeling works pretty good.

Odd One Out: (1/10)
This one its supposed to be a Halo parody. But let me tell you what, it just sucks. The jokes aren´t Halo-related at all, and aren´t funny at all. You wanna se a good Halo parody? See It´s a Halo Thing. Thats a funny parody....

Protoype: (5/10)
I don´t like the story, and I´m not much into mecha battles, and also, if UNSCDF hasn´t adopted freaky-transformer-like mechs into its main arsenal, it must be because they really, really aren´t viable??. Maybe because scorpions are more effective as tanks??? I don´t know, the only decent thing about this one are the visuals

The Babysitter: (2/10)
This one sucks hard. The story its simplistic, the visuals are terrible (with no sense of scale at all) and the fidelity to the Halo franchise incredibly low. Boy, and when I read the synopsis of this one I tough "ODSTs and a Spartan? Its gonna be cool!"

The Package: (6/10)
Ahh, the most interesting short-movie. We have a terrible done space-battle. I know anime artist love a lot of lights dancing around, specially with missiles, but the battle looks just ridiculous. First of all, "booster frames"... let me scream loudly: WTF??? 4 little tiny spacecraft are able to annihilate waves of Seraphs? And whats with all those lights in the Covenant ships? Did they send "disco fleet"?

But after that terrible battle we get a few minutes of true spartan action, perhaps too matrix-like, but really good. The story its odd, and (again IMHO) a complete nonsense, but The Package has managed to achieve what the other bad shorts couldn´t, its visual an action compensate the silly story.

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That´s it, enough ranting for today. All in all, Halo Legends offers a good bunch of different views and approachs to the Halo universe, like the famed Halo Graphic Novel. Unlike the Halo Graphic Novel, it fails to deliver a complete, true to the story, product.

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Sierra-Kilo-Zero-Four-Two Out
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