Sorry if you wanted to write this one Kouger, but the word must get out.
As many will know, Halo Legends episode "Duel" was released just a few hours after this is being written. Now when "The Babysitter" was released two weeks ago, many people expressed their annoyance at several obvious and blatant discrepancies, such as certain character's hair and yet another dead Spartan. Overall however, the episode was fairly enjoyable and it was good to see some new Halo content out there. But did the next installment live up to expectations? The answer, my friends, is no.
The Duel is set approximately around 900 BCE, during the beginning of the Covenant and the Sangheili and San 'Shyuum alliance. Just think of the potential, details on the history of the Covenant, what technologies existed then, and, most importantly, a deep look into Sangheili culture. Well, for starters, anyone who has seen the film is probably wondering: "So.. that was an Elite?" Most of the Elites for one, didn't even look like Elites. They just looked like poor crossovers between Brutes and mutant Samurai, most of them didn't even have mandibles - the most distinct features of Elites! Some of them seemed to only have mandibles when they were yelling for some reason.
Second, and most importantly, is the appearance of a certain Female alien. Oh, what? That's an Elite? Wow, because to me it looked like some sick byproduct of an experiment to fuse the genes of the aliens from the movie Avatar with a snake woman! This thing that I must now reluctantly refer to as an Elite, is the wife of Fal, has no mandibles of any kind, has long hair, speaks with a typical human female voice and has a mental illness that results in uncontrollable laughter at the end every damn sentence! How could the artists have done this? This goes past the excuse of "artistic license" and just basically says, "It's anime, we can do whatever we want with the art without consequences!" It frustrates me that such a blatant disregard for cannon could be let done so easily, why not trying actually having imagination when designing female Elites?
The story is incomprehensible. I honestly have only a fraction of a clue what was happening through the whole short. And half the film was some sort of hallucination involving species not even discovered yet! To add to this bag of crap, the animation is awful. I'm all for new art styles, but there's a line for god's sake. What with the frame freezing every few shots to save effort, or the ridiculously blurry image, I don't know. The whole thing is like playing Halo after overdosing on Ecstasy.
This is only about a half of the stuff I could go on about, such as the presence of CCS-class Battle cruisers and Phantoms 2600 years ago, or the fact that by watching this short, you learn nothing new other than mistakes. All in all, the Duel is a no-go. Let's just hope the highly anticipated "The Package" will be better than this sorrowful sight. Good Day.
PS: My longest blog!