When I first finished finished playing Halo 3 shortly after release, I was left satisfied but also disappointed. While the gameplay was everything I hoped it would be, the campaign was missing that “epic conclusion” feeling that I was hoping for. After replaying the game again recently, I’ve decide that the reason I was let down by Halo 3 is due to one thing: Halo 2.

Not as fancy as his GTA IV tattoo a few years later.

By now, it’s common knowledge that Halo 2 was rushed, and the end result was disappointing. In addition to a distinct lack of direction after the founders of Bungie, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones, left the team, the game was just too ambitious for an aging platform. Exacerbating the situation was the very public (and permanent) release date for Halo 2 of November 9, 2004, as made famous by Peter Moore's infamous E3 tattoo reveal.

In fact, in one of the Halo: CE Anniversary promotional documentaries by Bungie, writer Joseph Staten revealed that they’d cut off multiple missions from the end of the game -- practically the entire third act of the story. And this is why Halo 3’s campaign felt wanting.

"Before Halo 2, we could fail in silence and in misery but no-one really knew we were failing," writer Joseph Staten added. "But with something like Halo 2, everyone knew we'd cut missions at the end, that we'd lopped off our third act - we failed spectacularly in public as far as the story was concerned."

Everyone remembers Halo 2’s infamously disappointing cliffhanger, with Master Chief promising to “Finish the Fight” as he approaches Earth, stowed away aboard a Covenant ship. Gamers were psyched to get into one massive battle to defend our home planet, like all of the pre-release videos and trailers had promised and instead we were confronted with… credits.

Halo 2 concept art depicting The Ark.

That was never the plan, though. It’s clear from developer comments regarding the game, advertisements, and even concept art that Halo 2 was meant to finish with fending the Covenant off at Earth. Instead, we were forced to play through the last third of Halo 2 in the first half of Halo 3, to the sequel's detriment. You see, not much happens in the beginning of Halo 3: Chief lands in the jungle and he fights off some Covenant; then he arrives at a human base, and he fights off some Covenant; then he heads towards The Ark, and he fights off some Covenant; then he brings down some Covenant AA weapons, and he fights off some Covenant. Four whole missions go by in the “epic conclusion” of gaming’s premier shooter franchise, and the plot stalls.

That’s because those four missions were probably meant to be the final one or two missions (with some editing of course) for Halo 2. We were meant to get our epic battle in a populated city of Earth, we were meant to see what the mysterious “Ark” was (though probably not what it did, exactly), and we were meant to have a proper cliffhanger to get us excited for the next game. I mean, look at this mid-game cutscene from Halo 3’s mission “The Storm” and imagine that this was how Halo 2 ended:

The Covenant activated some mysterious device buried beneath the Earth for centuries, and it did… something. We’ve failed our mission and the Covenant have the advantage, mysterious though it may be. And when things seem their lowest, The Flood have invaded Earth. Shit, we’re screwed. Now that sounds like an epic cliffhanger that would have everyone begging for the third game.

Imagine if Halo 3 began with “Floodgate” -- the level where you’re fighting through the city of Voi as waves of Flood come after you. Our planet is on the brink of destruction, all hope is lost, and you have to fight your through a city of infected soldiers and civilians in the vain hope that Cortana is on the Flood ship. That sounds like a much more exciting intro to Halo’s grand finale than, “I don’t know, you fall in the jungle and just fight some guys until you’re done.” And the first level would end with the sight of the Elites glassing Earth as the Chief goes through the portal to find Cortana, and a secret weapon.

In Halo 3 proper, you really only spend 2 levels on the all-important Ark. There are 5 Earth levels, 2 Ark levels, and 1 level each in a Flood Hive and a reconstructed Delta Halo. With more time to spend on its own story, rather than finishing 2’s, we could have explored more of the Ark, gotten a more in-depth look at the Flood hierarchy (all of them talking in unison with Gravemind’s voice was a cool trick), and even maybe had an entire level on the new Halo to competently manipulate our nostalgia for the first game with more direct references (something Metal Gear Solid 4 did so well a year later). Hell, we barely learn anything about The Forerunner in this final game other than that we “are Forerunner” or that we are their “children”, which had already been heavily implied in the previous games. This would have made the game a better lead in to the sequel trilogy, which deals with The Forerunner more directly and provided more information on the games oft-referenced backstory.

And from a gameplay perspective, more mission slots available could have delivered us a battle on par with the one shown in the "Believe" ads, the lack of which was probably my biggest disappointment with the 3rd game:

To be fair, Bungie eventually tried to give us more of the large-scale epic battles at multiple points in Halo: Reach, but that’s beside the point.

How come you never toss me health or ammo, bro?

Not only did Bungie feel the need to compensate for Halo 2's truncated story at 3's expense, but many aspects of Halo 3 seem to be a result of the negative backlash surrounding Halo 2. From a longview, people now appreciate The Arbiter and like what he added to the series, but when Halo 2 was first released, he was often lumped in as one of the many disappointments in the much-anticipated sequel. As a result, as @gunstarred points out below, this game basically resorts to making the Arbiter a glorified "Player 2" that just gets to show up for the cutscenes. Even if the Arbiter weren't playable in 3, it would have been much more effective if he was given better-than-standard companion AI, and actually felt like he was by your side like an Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite or an Alyx from Half-Life 2.

This is not your grave, but you are welcome in it.

The Gravemind similarly gets the shaft in the trilogy's conclusion. Sure, it was a little ridiculous that the hive mind of The Flood looked like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, but the concept of a hive mind was a strong one, and I still like that he speaks in iambic pentameter. He adds a bit more depth to The Flood than the boring "alien zombies" they were in the first game. Since he was mocked so ruthlessly in Halo 2, though, he becomes a disembodied voice for The Flood and is never seen (though it is implied you go inside him at one point). While the effect is cool, it just feels like Bungie was too self-conscious about fan complaints and had no confidence in their own decisions. At least we got that one badass moment where Chief and Arbiter lead a swarm of Flood towards the Prophet of Truth. But Arbiter and Gravemind, much like the plot of Halo 3, suffered because of the backlash to its predecessor.

Ultimately, while Halo 3 was a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, it wasn’t a fitting one because we were too busy finishing Halo 2’s fight. So fuck you, Halo 2.