I've been a fan of Zero: Punctuation for many years, and a fan of Halo games for the same time. Now I understand why anyone would hate them, and when it comes to gameplay being at the least uncreative and at the most utterly broken (especially with the goddamn insta-kills between antagonistically infrequent check-points), I completely agree with everything you say Yahtzee. But what I cannot understand is how, as you say, all the characters in Halo: Reach are cliched.
To say that Master Chief or any other character from any other Halo game *isn't* a cliche would be a bad joke - they are archetypes wrapped in cliches in the most formulaic way possible. But in this game only, I found at least one character that could not be *less* of a cliche - Kat. While I found it disappointing that, because she's a woman, she automatically has to have pencil-thin arms, every other element of her character is like they took the standard, horrible cliche of a female soldier in games, and then went as far away from that model as they physically could, to the point that she is actually the first central, single, young female character in any game I can think of that *isn't* a romantic interest, for once! She isn't even the standard hyper-masculine over-compensatory female soldier cliche, and she most certainly isn't the delicate stay at home and let the men do the fighting cliche - how exactly *is* she a cliche then?
Amidst fiction like Twilight telling all young girls they should be utterly subservient in abusive relationships, I could not have more welcomed a decent female character in a game, one whose gender, I thought, was merely a part of her character, and not the other way round. And yes I am focusing exclusively on one mid-sentence comment amidst a whole review, but this is a comment I can't help but see as a rather large oversight in this case, one I am eager to hear explained. To other commentors who hate Halo - before responding with an all-caps rant about my idiocy, at least have the decency to consider my argument, which can be found here: http://eternallydisputed.com/site/index.php?page=news&type=view&id=omniroths_blog/halo_reach_and_martin_3
