The Halo TV show is the ultimate battle between story and lore

polygon.com:

Here’s a surprisingly loaded question: What is Halo, Microsoft’s hit video game franchise now 21 years running, about? Play the games and you’ll experience a thin but serviceable science-fiction yarn about humanity’s struggle against an advanced alien collective of religious zealots dedicated to wiping them out, and the cyborg supersoldier Master Chief that is our best hope of stopping them. It’s got just enough moments of grandeur, horror, and scale to be memorable, and most games end long before you begin to question their intelligence. They’re pretty good, is what I’m saying, largely because they keep things moving through serene-yet-hostile spaces and hint at a wider conflict in the background.

This is how most people understand Halo: It’s the spine holding up each games’ story campaign, and the loose rationale for the aesthetics of the wildly popular competitive multiplayer portion of the game (arguably where most Halo fans have long set up shop). However, Halo also has a rich tradition of ancillary media: stacks of books and short films and comics that go much deeper than this. There are stories about the nature of artificial intelligence, war crimes committed for the so-called “greater good,” space operas about a precursor alien species that lived before the ones we meet in the games, and stories about the religious hierarchy of the series’ villains. It’s bonkers stuff, some of it surprisingly good, some of it less so.

Halo, the Paramount Plus TV series premiering Thursday, is a continental rift in these two camps — the fans who know all the stuff happening in the greater Halo Universe, and the people who just play the games. It’s disconcerting because, for the first time in 20 years, it’s asking Halo fans to