Zodi Plays: Custom Robo (Redesign Your Robo, We Know What We're Doing)

[DataNinja]

Yeah, it's definitely true that Keyes is not a particularly well-developed character. You did get it right with "military", because his whole thing is... basically being a standard, exemplary representative of the UNSC. You go into Halo not knowing anything about the conflict or whatever, and you spend the game separated from people... so, you really need the character distilled into one, specific, strong image. And Keyes does, at least, do that well. He's willing to do what it takes to protect his people, to defeat the Covenant. IT gets the important atmosphere of this military body across. It just means that he's never expanded on outside of the novels, because there's no real time to dedicate to it.

RE: Johnson - fun fact, apparently his lines are different on Legendary, and there's a humorous (non-canon) cutscene with him if you beat the game on Legendary. I feel safe in saying this due to the fact that I assume you are not going to be playing this on Legendary.
But, yeah. He and Foehammer are fan favorites for this game. Which is especially impressive with the latter, given she's literally just a radio voice, and never appears in person in any cutscene.

All this dying and death and backtracking.... yeeeeeah, wasn't super fun. The beginning of the game is definitely a lot more fun, to me at least. Up to about the Jungle level where the flood's released. And playing on anything harder than Normal is brutal.