It was the tone of ODST that I feel was so successful, the feeling of being an insignificant speck in the ruins of a recently destroyed city avoiding destruction at the hands of a nearly unstoppable force using the cover of night and the guidance of some yet unseen but evidently benevolent force controlling the city. It especially shone on legendary, wherein your best option often times was to avoid combat and utilize the open level design to sneak past your foes. All of this is bolstered with dynamic, sweeping orchestral cues; the 360 was too much of a piece of shit to handle the dynamic weather that had been planned for ODST, but that music did its best (and, in my opinion, totally succeeded) to give you the impression of what that weather would have been like. For instance, light jazz and piano riffs that fall gently like the rain onto your visor to the harsh, swift sounds invoking wind. Even the occasional silence was meant to not only give the impression of weather having cleared, but to instill a sense of malaise into the player; what's coming next, and what am I going to have to do to survive it? Admittedly, that again applies mostly to legendary. The plot was nothing special, but its means of conveyance through film-noire style detective work interspersed with flashbacks which show you how the pieces (literally in the case of most of the clues you found) fit together to form a coherent narrative of what your team has been up to since the mission went tits up went a long way. Contrast that with Reach, wherein we knew the conclusion the whole time and yet the game played it all straight: shock (or lack thereof given the voice acting) at the discovery of covenant on Reach, an attempt to disrupt them, a failure in that regard, and then finishing the game with a clumsy retcon and the conclusion we were expecting the entire time, all shown in standard Halo fare. The most mediocre of stories can be salvaged if told in an interesting way; while ODST took that lesson to heart, Reach failed in part because it did not. I felt no emotion during Reach until the very end. None. Bungie tried so hard to tug at my heartstrings with watching a transport ship of refugees being shot down, and my only thought was "couple hundred down, couple million to go". We'd spent the past decade with the understanding that Reach's destruction was quick, brutal, and nearly total, and I'm supposed to shed tears over the fact that I'm being shown it was evidently none of those prior descriptors? We were meant to be in pain watching people who were given absolutely no characterization being picked off for no better reason than "the game told you to care". Killing the Boss in MGS3 made me hurt. Watching the characters I had spent 4 games getting to know and care for in a fist fight to the death in MGS4 filled me with awe. Reach had none of that going for it. The ending was fantastic, the best the series has ever had, but the rest of it was filler and retcons for the sake of fulfilling a 5 game contract. My only complaint with ODST is that it had no business being 60 dollars, but again, that goes back to Bungie being desperate to break out of their contract with MS. Reach, on the other hand, was so shit that it singlehandedly turned me into a PC gamer.