Retronic Gamer

For my review of Parasites Wake, I’m gonna start with the pro’s. @Rythayze did an absolutely excellent job on the artwork as always. Throughout the book there’s mentions of cut content from Combat Evolved that rightfully should’ve been in the “Devolved” Remake. Such as wildlife like Blindwolves and Thorn Beasts, and the diamond energy shield wielding elite’s. Marvin Mobuto is a decent character and his death at the end is rather tragic. And there are some decent concepts that could’ve been written a bit better. Sadly, those are all the pro’s I could mention. The cons are widespread and downright baffling. You are lead to believe the Marvin Mobuto is the main character of the book. However it is a 16 year old boy named Charlie that was smuggled onto the Pillar of Autumn by a field medic and handed off by his mother to prisoners from the Autumn’s never before mentioned brig that just so happened to be in a singular escape pod. Marvin ends up coming across this group and leading them through less than half of the story until Spark ships him alone to The Library where he inevitably dies. And while some of the Prisoners are interesting as characters, their plotlines fall short and are fairly mediocre. With the plotline of Halo CE, you expect them all to die including Charlie. And of course, this does happen. Charlie is a rather interesting case though and I’ll get back to that soon. Anyways, there are litters of lore references shoved in here. Many of them retconning Bungie’s renowned Halo Combat Evolved that everyone knows and loves. But many of which simply feel like jingling keys for 343 shills that view Halo as a book series with some additional games on the side. Many of these references will not be understood to a first time reader of Halo novels unless you have read a variety of others such as Greg Bears retconned Forerunner trilogy, Halo Evolutions The Mona Lisa, and Halo Waypoint Chronicles. Even the Halo CE Terminals are referenced here. I was rather skeptical about Sparks addition in the story of course. And in typical 343i fashion, Sparks identity is absolutely disgraced. Spark is retconned once again to be a lonely human-in-a-shell lunatic and is purposefully claimed to be unreliable or untrustworthy in writing through the characters to purposely tick off Halo fans. The only reason Spark takes Marvin to the library is because he has a gesh, aka genetic bullshit rather than the simplicity of just being human. There’s also an Elite thrown in the story that ends up befriending the group out of sheer chance. The Elite is part of an underground lowkey group in the Covenant called the Truthseekers that remain skeptical about the Great Journey and the human/covenant war. After Mobuto dips, he pretty much leads the group from there despite being a prisoner that they hardly trust. Eventually they make it to a mausoleum, and this section has to be the biggest offense of all the retcons in the story. They basically threw in the cut Halo 2 storyboards where the Arbiter/Dervish discovers a coffin with a human skeleton aka Forerunner inside. But instead of it being a human like it should be, it’s just a retconned 343 era forerunner. They attempt to justify it by claiming it LOOKS human, therefore humans and forerunners must be genetically related. Regardless it’s still a massive middle finger towards any Halo fan that still respects Bungies games and lore. The Elite has a marine record it all through a helmet cam, that way he could pass the data over to the Prophets to end the war with the evidence. Later on after the Autumn is minutes to detonation, the remainder of the group makes it to an area with a teleporter. They end up getting overwhelmed by the flood and the same marine gives the helmet over to the Elite. The marine and Charlie’s mom stay behind while The Elite and Charlie escape to the furthest part of the ring. The ring explodes, however- The fragment of that part of the ring breaks off and instead of that section(cont):