Arbiter

The

Arbiter? Also, I guess it was a missed opportunity to call...

Instead of Summer Sky, call it, like, the Artiber.

That's much more of a stretch, I think.

Pickled Gear, we've worked with him before, and his elites are fantastic, so no surprise.

Whoa.

Psyoptima, looking beautiful with this elite here, this Arbiter.

Oh my gosh, Q-Stricker, Q-Striker.

I'm like, you know what? I'm not in the mood to do.

a bunch of these shitty Arbiter missions.

And it's not because the Arbiter, I actually adore the Arbiter and his story, but most of the bad missions in Halo 2 are the Arbiter's missions.

They're dark, dreary missions where all you fight is flood.

You know, they're not well designed.

We can't use Dervish.

I was the one that had to find all the lines that had Dervish in them, cut them, re-record the ones that were important with the name Arbiter now.

And I had to try to match all the recordings, because I couldn't record everything from scratch, just the Dervish lines changing to the Arbiter.

Yeah.

So that was, for me, just a personal nightmare.

Halo 2 has a dual protagonist story, Of course you play as the Chief, but after a few missions in, you get one of the greatest switch-ups in gaming.

You play as the Arbiter, once one of the Covenant's greatest commanders, disgraced after the destruction of Halo, branded with the mark of shame, and forced into the role of Arbiter, a warrior whose life is considered already forfeit, sent on impossible missions in service of the Prophets.

and this feature lends itself to the unforgettable story that Halo 2 provides.

Combat Evolved's story was just what it needed for the time.

We begin to understand more about the ongoing Human Covenant war.

And this time, we are treated with some of the best quad-jawed heroes gaming has to offer.

Bel Vadmi, the Arbiter, voiced by the unshakable Keith David.

And Arthas Vadmi, better known as Half-Jaw.

missions.

I'm skipping the Arbiter ones on purpose because the Arbiter ones aren't ones I consider.

You skipped the Oracle and Delta Halo.

So, Delta Halo is my favorite mission

because i am an extended lore person so i've been listening to the books for years decades and kilo 5 trilogy is my favorite set of the books and they go to sing helios in the kilo 5 trilogy and i had an image in my head of what it looked like and i can still remember that image from high school too um And playing Swords of St. Helios and going to St. Helios for the first time, seeing it for the first time, it was exactly what I imagined.

Everything about it matched.

And I was absolutely in love with the area, seeing where the Arbiter is from.

And all the other elites.

And so I'm going to read Mass's post here that he put in general because it's going along with this.

So because of time, people are forgetting how hated Halo 2 was when it came out for having you play as the Arbiter and also for the cliffhanger ending and its awful development cycle.

Every Halo game has people rooting against it since the dawn of the ring.

I love that.

That funny looking alien man is there and I can't play him yet, I'm guessing, or unless I just stay as-

You mean the Arbiter, or?

That's the one.

Yeah, yeah.

I, I was gonna say the guy sounds like Keith David, which I'm pretty, I'm gonna say probably is Keith David.

Probably is Keith David.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Keith David is the Arbiter actually.

If it's, if it sounds like Keith Dav- David, high chance it is Keith David.

It produced a political emergency.

The Minister of Fortitude, the Vice Minister of Tranquility, and the Philologist understood that the Covenant's central promise was now vulnerable.

Their religion taught that the Forerunners had activated Halo and carried every worthy believer into transcendence.

Humanity's existence, combined with its privileged relationship to Forerunner systems, suggested that the story was incomplete or false.

Their interests aligned because each would be endangered if the revelation from Harvest became public.

They used the apparent relic discovery, political bargaining, and blackmail against the existing leadership to force a new age of reclamation.

The Covenant received new hierarchs at the same moment its rulers decided that an entire species had to disappear.

The first strategic decision of their reign eliminated diplomacy.