Halo 2

Halo 2 Campaign spoilers, including the Arbiter's story and the ending. Halo 2 has so much going on. The first game leaves you with Chief and Cortana escaping the destruction of the ring, and then the sequel takes that situation and opens up an enormous amount of the world around it. It came out on the original Xbox in November 2004. Chief comes back to Earth, but there isn’t much time to celebrate. The Covenant arrive, the fighting reaches Earth, and before long you’re following them to another Halo. That alone would have given the game plenty to work with. But then there’s the Arbiter. I think that’s one of the most interesting things to talk about with Halo 2. You’ve spent the first game fighting the Covenant. Now you’re seeing what happens inside it. The rank, the religion, the punishment, the politics. You get to see what the people leading it are asking their followers to believe, and what happens when that belief starts coming apart. The Arbiter begins from such a difficult position. He’s blamed for losing the first Halo ring, stripped of his status, and given a role that sends him into situations he isn’t expected to survive. The player already knows something he doesn’t fully understand about Halo. Watching him get closer to the truth gives his side of the campaign a very different tension. And you actually play as him. That matters. You spend time moving through these places from his perspective, with Covenant allies around you, instead of only seeing their society when Chief is shooting his way through it. It gives the sequel a much larger story without needing to abandon the people you already know. Chief and Cortana still have their own fight going on. The two sides keep getting pulled toward the same disaster, even while the characters understand it differently. The weapons give us plenty to discuss too. The battle rifle becomes a major part of the game. Dual-wielding lets you combine certain weapons, but it also changes what you can do while holding both. Taking a second gun has a cost when you want to throw a grenade. There are choices to make beyond just picking up everything that looks useful. Then you have the energy sword, vehicle boarding, and all these encounters that give you different ways to get into trouble. Taking a vehicle away from an enemy changes the fight considerably. It can also go very badly if you mistime the attempt. The game gives you an opportunity, but you still have to get close enough to use it. And yes, Chief returning the Covenant’s bomb belongs in the conversation. Of course it does. Halo 2 gets that scene out early and sets a pretty high expectation for the kinds of things you’re about to see. The campaign keeps escalating after that. Earth, another ring, High Charity, the Flood, and the Covenant breaking apart. By the time the Arbiter faces Tartarus, the argument about what Halo actually does is right in the middle of the fight. Believing the wrong thing has consequences for everyone in the room, and potentially everyone outside it. Then the game ends with Chief still heading toward the next fight. It leaves a lot unresolved. That ending needs to be discussed honestly when we get into the full story, because Halo 3 is carrying forward a situation Halo 2 deliberately leaves open. There’s also an entire multiplayer conversation here. Halo 2 brought the series onto Xbox Live, and its matchmaking, parties and maps became an enormous part of what people associated with Halo. The campaign and the multiplayer both deserve space. You could spend ages on the map design alone. If you’re playing today through The Master Chief Collection, you’ll also have Halo 2 Anniversary to consider. The campaign lets you switch between its classic and remastered presentation, and the Anniversary cinematics were made by Blur. MCC includes both classic Halo 2 multiplayer and the separately remastered Anniversary multiplayer, so those shouldn’t get mixed together in a guide either. I want to cover the campaign, the skulls and terminals where they apply, the tougher encounters, and the different achievement requirements. Halo 2 is one where the edition needs to be clearly marked before anybody starts following instructions. But first, the game itself deserves the attention. There’s so much added here: a much closer look at the Covenant, an entire second protagonist, more ways to approach the fighting, and a story that gets increasingly messy for almost everyone involved. There’s a lot of good stuff to get into with this one.