Toon Zone Talkback - "Halo: Legends": Halo, I Must Be Going

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votethedead

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This is the talkback thread for "Halo: Legends": Halo, I Must Be Going.

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Ouchie.
 
That review is hilarious. I've never owned a Microsoft gaming console to this day, so I would have been just as confused as MZ here.

Halo fans are gonna want to skin him alive, though.
 
I know a thing or 2 about Halo.

But you really wanna know why I wanna see it?

The return of the ADV Films voice actors! :D :D :D

The cast: (yes it's real)

David Wald - Master Chief (The Package, Odd One Out)
Emily Neves - Spartan (The Babysitter) [yes, the same Emily Neves that appeared in American Idol once)
Christopher Ayres - Covenant Commander (The Package)
Blake Shepard - O'Brien (The Babysitter)
Kalob Martinez - Cortez (The Babysitter)
James Faulkner - Oni Officer (The Babysitter)
Andrew Love - Fred (The Package)
Luci Christian - Kelly (The Package), Female Soldier (Prototype)
Josh Grelle - Haka (The Duel)
Shelley Calene-Black - Cortana (Origins) [kinda odd, huh?]
John Gremillion - Fal (The Duel) and Arthur (The Package)
Melissa Davis - Han (The Duel) [I missed Melissa SO MUCH]
Justin Doran - Soldier (Prototype)
Chris Hutchison - ONI Commander (Prototype)
David Matranga - Sarge (Prototype)
Leraldo Anzaldua - Soldier (Prototype) and Ralph (The Babysitter)
Deke Anderson - 1337 (Odd One Out)
Chris Patton - Brother (Odd One Out)
Brittney Karbowski - Sister (Odd One Out)
Andy McAvin - Captain (The Package)
John Swasey - Sergeant (Homecoming)
Carli Mosier - Daisy (Homecoming)
Mark Laskowksi - Marine (The Babysitter), Teenage Boy (Homecoming)
 
Absolutely dreadful review. Let someone who actually knows something about the franchise review the related material next time. =/

The whole review came off as extremely spiteful, almost as if reviewing Halo: Legends hurt him on a personal level. I'm not really sure why he hates Halo so much, but reviews are supposed to fulfill at least some level of objectivity. (i.e., not just "boohoo, it's just aliens and shooting, I don't know any of the backstory, so I'm just going to trash this" - Interesting how I summarized his entire review in so few words, isn't it?) Just thought I'd mention that. I'm not even a big Halo fan, but that review was just insulting to read.
 
I'm sorry, but this review was awful and indicative of a lot of recent reviews on this site.

I've never seen this, and I'm not even a fan of Halo, but it seemed like the reviewer didn't even attempt to review this on its own merits. Most of it was "I hate Halo and its fans and its backstory. How dare a Halo DTV have Halo references in it!". It seemed like the reviewer hated it before he even pushed play, as if he was given some sort of quota to fill. I've been seeing this happen on a lot of TZ's reviews lately, where the review is just a vehicle to make exaggerated jokes about how "bad" something is, instead of provide an insightful, well-researched critique. Save that stuff for a blog post or a Youtube video, not a review on the front page of a professional news site.

If the review isn't willing to take the time to research plot points or even character names, then why should I be willing to read it?
 
As someone who HAS played Halo, I could never get into the video game storylines to save my life, so I'm skeptical that I would feel any differently with Legends. I could be wrong, though. And I do like that it seems to be pulling an Animatrix/Gotham Knight.
 
Yeah, sorry to say it but that was a terrible review. I stopped reading it in the middle but, given the closemindedness, previewing negative bias, derision and unwillingness to try to understand it with which the Halo material was approached, I think my reaction was appropriate.
 
I also have to admit that the review came off as being EXTREMELY full of bias, to me, and that's never a good thing for a reviewer to do, IMO, as it hurts their credibility. At the end of the review it said something along the lines of the shorts only appealing to Halo fans, and to that, I say: Isn't that kind of the whole point in the 1st place? I mean, this isn't some big-budget feature-length movie or something, its just a few short episodes that show different prespectives of the Halo Universe to people who are fans of the story from the games and the books.

Also, let me just say that I am not really much of a Halo fan anymore. I get some enjoyment out of the games, and I certainly wouldn't call any of them bad, but overall I just find them to be decent FPS games that can get me by a few-hours worth of time without making me feel bored. Even so, no matter what anyone else says, I couldn't help but get the feeling that the reviewer was already so antagonistic towards the franchise before even checking it out. I mean, I have no problem that the reviewer just finds Halo to be dreadfully boring, but then I ask this: Why even bother trying to review something that you never had any interest in to begin with? Did someone force that task upon the reviewer and say that he absolutely had to review Halo: Legends no matter what? And even so, does the reviewer expect that anyone will actually find this review helpful in deciding whether they want to watch Halo: Legends or not (seeing as how that's kind of the point of what a review is supposed to do, at least from my POV)?

The bottom line is, even as someone who has never cared much for Halo's story-line, I have to point out an obviously biased review when I see one, and I tried to look past its utter-negativity, but I can't take this review seriously if its going to be that blatantly biased towards the franchise throughout its entirety of text.

That's just my opinion, though. I haven't seen Halo: Legends yet, so I'll see for msyelf whether I enjoy it or not when I finally do get around to picking it up.
 
Disclaimer: I'm a super casual player that hasn't finished any of the Halo games (though I've pretty much seen what happens while watching others). I do think it's pretty damn cool for the most part, though.

Aren't you guys just proving the review's conclusion when you protest that intimate knowledge of Halo is required to coherently comprehend this anthology? Especially when much of this is, as I understand it, not dependent on the events of the games? It isn't as clear cut as hating on Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, for example, without having seen the TV series that preceded it.

As such, when it comes to reviewing on the merits, it seems to me that those are all that's left if you aren't at all familiar with Halo.

Just saying. It also doesn't make sense, in my view, to claim super negative pre-existing bias when it's made pretty obvious that this was written from a newbie's perspective. Now, there is the history lesson of the two shorts, but if the backstory doesn't interest him then it doesn't interest him. If you think it's crazy to not like Halo's story, then say why. But a "how dare you not like it?!" reaction is not very persuasive. Nothing's been said yet that would make me buy instead of rent.



I dissent and I can back that up. Here's a very quick & broad rundown of what's been reviewed since December 2009. Three months ought to qualify as "recent", yes?

Halo Legends: Negative
Justice League CotE: Positive
Blassreiter: Positive
The Life and Times of Tim: Moderate
Sands of Destruction: Positive
Kick Buttowski: Negative
Black Lagoon: Positive
Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne: Positive
Gundam 00: Positive
Last Exile: Positive
Planet Hulk: Positive
Dragonaut part 2: Negative
Bamboo Blade: Positive
Heat Guy J: Moderate
Bakugan: Negative
Claymore: Positive
Jinki Extend: Negative
Something Something Something Dark Side: Positive
Archer: Positive
Black Jack manga: positive
El Cazador De La Bruja: Moderate
Gunslinger Girl OVA: Positive
National Film Board of Canada's Animation Express: One positive (from November), one basically moderate
Winnie the Pooh: A Valentine For You: Positive
Shoujo Art Studio software: Negative
DBZ Dragon Box: Positive
DBZ movies 12 and 13: Positive
DBZ Specials: Moderate
The Flight of Dragons: Positive
Rozen Maiden Traumend: Moderate
School Rumble: Positive
Santa Claus/Nestor: Positive
Jacques Drouin: Complete Pinscreen Works: Positive
The Princess and the Frog: Positive
Mushi-Shi (live action): Negative
Merry Madagascar: Negative
Pumpkin Scissors: Positive
Yogi's First Christmas: Moderate
Charlie Brown Holiday Specials: Moderate (I want a dog for Christmas...) and positive (New Year's)
Outer Space Astronauts: Negative
A Miser Brothers Christmas: Positive
Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation: Positive
Shonen Onmyouji: Negative
Dragonaut part 1: Negative
The Wallflower: Moderate
Secret Saturdays volume 2: Positive

Negative: 11
Moderate: 9
Positive: 28

So, if I counted right, that's only 11 out of 48 that are mostly negative. You can look all this up yourself. I don't know what you've seen or think that you've seen, but I think that any fair-minded observer can also look at most of those negative reviews and find no shortage of reason.
 
I think the problem most people have with this review isn't that the reviewer is a Halo neophyte who's barely played the games, but that the reviewer obviously doesn't care enough about the product to try to learn about it, and shows blatant loathing towards it despite barely knowing anything about it. In other words, the assumption here is that the reviewer is being close-minded towards the product and not even giving the movie a chance to prove itself.

That being said, it doesn't even try to be funny like the recent Bakugan review. That's a tragedy.
 
Based on some of the posts I was disappointed when I read this, because it was no where near as bad as some of you guys made it out to be. It's easy to take a certain part of a review, take it out of context, and blow it out as some big deal when it's not. I mean the guy even played one of the games to get ready for the movie, that's already doing to much when it's a review for a movie.

I thought it was insightful enough, he wasn't spending the whole time tearing it down to little pieces. He saw it, took issues with parts he disliked and that was that. He mentioned some positives but I found that was almost completely ignored in this thread.

I think GWOtaku said it best already about the phantom negative reviews on the site as well.
 
I think he spent more time talking about how he didn't like the movie.

So winning an Eisner makes Benndis a better person than regular people...good to know. Just because he's Benndis doesn't mean his word is gospel, I think he's a hack writer does that make me less classy, no, just means I don't like his work. Should Maxie have said that, probably not, but the quote itself is dumb. Just because you win an award doesn't make you immune from saying inane things.
 
There's nothing wrong with approaching the material from a newbie's perspective or judging things or their own merits, but it seems like he approached the review with a closed, skeptical mind, armoring himself against anything of value instead of curiously and openly trying to evaluate it. He even described the review as an "assignment," as if it was an onerous short straw mission, and his research for the review with the phrase "know thy enemy," that's pretty telling.

He's also clearly derisive of first person shooters, referring to them with several negative terms such as carnival duck hunt games and moving one blob of colored light over the other, and seems to let that sneering sense of disdain color his review of the cartoon. And he went into the review snobbishly disregarding anyone who does find value in the Halo universe, saying that the person who wrote the wikipedia entry "needs to get a girl." By comparing Halo to Pac-Man (judging Pac-Man superior) by oddly and erroneously focusing only on gameplay mechanics he seems to arrive at the idea you can't find storytelling value in video games in general.

Is that the point, that gameplay mechanics are all that they are and they can't rise to the level of something that tells a good story, because that's another terrible bias to bring into a review of a video game spinoff. Is the point that Halo can't tell a good story because it has simple gameplay, because even if that wasn't completely incorrect there are lots of games that tell very moving stories that rely completely on clicking on things for their gameplay.

It might have been better if he had just went into it from a true newbie's perspective, sitting down to watch the cartoon with an open mind instead of forcing himself to play a game he didn't like and read Wikipedia entries he thought were too nerdy and then letting that distaste color his review.

Also, it's silly to complain that there's not enough backstory for newcomers to enjoy it and that it operates too much on the assumption that the people who buy it already know about the Halo universe when there's 20 minutes of such material. He might not have liked it or how it was presented, but that seems to be giving people who just pick up the DVD a fair shake to me. It's also self-contradictory to make these claims of most of the shorts arrogantly expecting too much prior knowledge of the audience but also saying that all you need to understand all of them is grasping "Garr, shoot the aliens."

Edit: I did read the rest, by the way. I was just trying to make a point earlier.
 
Just out of curiosity:

- If not knowing about something before sitting down to review it makes the reviews somehow less worthy, then what to make of Maxie's positive reviews for The Tower of Druaga (a video game spinoff), Ghost Hunt (based on a light novel and manga), and Justice League: The New Frontier (based on the comic book), where he walked into both knowing even less about the source material than he did about Halo?

- For that matter, the two reviews for Crisis on Two Earths (his and mine) were because I'm a comic book nerd who knows about Earth-3 and the older versions of the CSA and Maxie doesn't. So is his review of the title less worthwhile than mine?

- How come people like That Guy With Glasses and the Angry Video Game Nerd and any number of other Internet celebrities can get away with profanity-laden ranting about something and Maxie can't get away with snarky comments about something he perceives to be overblown and overly self-important?


Bendis is also responsible for Avengers: Disassembled and House of M and a whole bunch of other incoherent crap out of Marvel. Not sure I'm going to weigh his opinions about art all that seriously, Eisner award or not.

I thought the review was hilarious, personally, but it also confirmed what I feared was true about the title: it's strictly for pre-existing fans and has nothing to offer someone who isn't already indoctrinated into that world. I contrast that with the aforementioned Druaga or JL titles or my personal experience on getting into Ben 10: Alien Force with volume 4 of the DVDs. Based on those other titles, I say that it is possible to make something based on a lot of backstory but still ensure it's accessible to newcomers, and I think it's a perfectly valid criticism to level against something that it fails to do so.
 
The difference though, is that those are joke reviews by fictional characters not to be taken seriously. This is the equivalent of putting transcripts of The Daily Show onto the front page of the New York Times. Sure, it's still news, but a degree of professionalism should be used on a reputable news source.
 
I hate those Angry-whatever guys. At best they're good for a laugh and usually not even that. The fact that some people take them seriously makes me sad.

Edit: In defense of Bendis, and sorry for going a little off-topic, but the horrible crap that Bendis has done for Marvel is all editorially-driven event garbage. The stuff where he can write what he wants without having to worry about propping up a big event or an editorial change, such as Powers, AKA Goldfish, Alias and early Ultimate Spider-Man, is excellent and proves him to be one of the best writers in comics. Even Grant Morrison did Final Crisis, after all. Those big company-wide crossovers just don't always leave as much room for quality.
 
We're talking about this wiki article about Halo, right? I see the Bendis reference (or in his exact words, "I think Halo is this generation's Star Wars"), and the Aenid comparison. I don't see any Holy Bible/Koran/Annals of Confucious reference; I was probably naive to believe the review wasn't exaggerating this part.
 
It doesn't make him better, but since he has experience in writing decent stories (and some bad ones, but it's still experience) and that makes his opinion more authoritative than some random writer's opinion on an obscure cartoon site. Say you were arguing against someone with a PhD in the relevant field - the person with the PhD would not be a better person, but he would most likely know more about what he's talking about than you do.

In addition, it was a cheap shot by Maxie. My golden rule is that the way you act towards others is the way you deserve to be acted toward. If he wants to make cheapshots, why can't I?
 
One final thing from me. The review takes the makers of this to task for arrogance for their supposed assumption that even if they only target the Halo fanbase the DVD is a paying proposition. I doubt that's what they were trying to do, but even if they were that's not arrogance, it's just true. The Halo games have sold more than 27 million copies worldwide, and if you factor in rentals, lending, used game sales and piracy many more than 27 million people have played them. The Halo haters may not like hearing this, but it's undeniably one of the biggest media franchises out there, certainly bigger than most of the cartoon and comic book properties talked about on this site. That of course is no indicator of it's quality, but it's not ridiculous or arrogant to target that fanbase with an Animatrix or Gotham Knights type release, even if that really is all this amounts to. This is not just some obscure shooty game that only a few drunk jocks play.
 
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