With tons of games vying for your attention nowadays, taking a trip down memory lane might be a tough thing to schedule for. Despite how vividly you remember something, your mind has a funny way of forgetting the exact length or something as the years go by. Halo 2 might have seemed like the absolute largest game you’ve ever played when you were 15, but now it’s kind of quaint compared to open-world fodder.
Still, we all have busy lives and it’s nice to know how long one can expect to take finishing a game. Despite being “unfinished,” Halo 2 is still the longest game in Microsoft’s premier shooter series. Bungie packed this title full of 13 campaign levels and a couple of bonus filler missions that are just longer cutscenes. It’s a lot of stuff to play through.
In the case of Halo 2: Anniversary, you’re looking at roughly between 12-15 hours for a campaign playthrough. There are some small ties to Halo 5: Guardians with a new intro cutscene, but the extra six minutes it adds to the runtime is hardly noticeable. This is basically the same campaign it was back in 2004, just with a new coat of paint.
If you’re a real masochist, you can double Halo 2’s runtime by playing on Legendary. The development history of this game was a fairly troubled one, so Bungie didn’t really have the time to playtest its difficulty balancing. Starting off on Legendary, you’ll likely die upwards of 25 times in the first level alone. I’ve even beaten this game on the famed difficulty before and it still took me 15 hours to get through.
Anniversary also adds a bunch of new collectibles in the form of terminals and Master Chief dolls. The Legendary skulls from the original Halo 2 make a comeback, so that’s another thing you can search for. This isn’t even factoring in some new campaign-specific achievements that The Master Chief Collection contains. There’s a lot to keep you occupied if you’re looking for it.
But to broadly sum this up, Halo 2: Anniversary is roughly 12-15 hours long. It can get tiresome by the end, but at least it sets the stage for the far better Halo 3 well.
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