Presumably, the story of Reach has resonance for Halo players. It's their version of the Alamo or Pearl Harbor or Helm's Deep. Humanity gets beat by aliens and the Spartan armor suits all get broken and, uh, some other stuff happens that I won't mention because they might be spoilers. It's hard to tell what stuff in the storyline is new and what's been extracted from the coagulated mass of Halo lore built up over the last ten years. But it's clear the game's campaign mode intends some sort of poignant minor key in between the usual shooty bits that feel exactly like what you were doing in Halos with more triumphant jingoistic storylines.
The cutscenes are so earnest and overwrought and dramatically soggy and oblivious to how tedious they are, like some guy who corners you in the kitchen at a party and insists on telling you about his D&D campaign because he found out you play videogamers. Halo: Reach is a succession of contrived noble sacrifices that are really melancholy because the piano music tells you so. One character has to do a kamikaze because you're facing something terrible and it requires a noble sacrifice to take out that terrible thing, even though you literally darted through the legs of a pair of those terrible things not five minutes ago in the same level. Another character gets headshotted through the helmet by one of the jackals the two of you were just fighting, shrugging off shots by the hundreds. Another character has to face a noble death because, and I quote, "the thruster gimbal is fried". As if this means something other than his turn to exit stage left. It's the most random contrived massacre since Mass Effect 2. LINK
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