well I"ll be goddamned. if you go into character customization in Halo Master Chief, they put the femme option for Reach in there. I can finally play Reach again without hauling out my 360.
what it comes down to is that Reach is the only Halo game I need. Maybe ODST. In both cases, this is, canon plot, a team mission with no heroes that has a diverse cast. Shit, in Reach, in the first five minutes you know you're gonna die and not make it off planet. You're playing to your own death. We know this is the prequel to Halo 1 and we know that millions of people die by the end of this. It is a _rough_ game that way.
The Master Chief games give little fucks for civilian casualties or effects other than Mission Accomplished. And that's kinda why I dislike them all. My universe doesn't have much room for superheroes, particularly yet another male lone-wolf who Doesn't Play By The Rules.
And on top of it all, Reach was Bungie's last Halo game. their love letter to the game and the fans before handing it off to 343 to fuck up. And they went out on top.
I was playing through Halo and Halo 2 and it's just... a thing how casually those games shrug off military casualties. you're driving along on your tank with all kinds of marines hanging on it shooting stuff. But, they get shot and killed and fall off and no one says anything. Some other grunt will run up and take their place. Eventually, everyone dies and again, no one says anything. Sometimes Cortana calls for backup and they're all "sure, there are 10 more marines for you to casually walk to their deaths and use as bait! 
"
