Over at Game Watch there’s an interesting piece about the upcoming anime series Halo Legends, apart from having a nice trailer there’s also a breakdown on each of the episodes and their directors. A few people have already noticed the presence of Shinji Aramaki (seen above) but few probably appreciate the fact that Aramaki is more renowned for his mecha design prowess, as he made a name for himself during the 80’s creating things like the Garland from Megazone 23 and the Madox-01. His work is very much on the real end of the mecha design spectrum.

In any case, Aramaki is a big bike nut (he also designed the transforming ride armors in Mospeada in case you’re wondering and supervised the designs in the recent Viper’s Creed) and in his Halo Legends episode “The Package” it looks like the Master Chief is effectively sitting on a “space bike” (seen here). That said, the design for this does look awfully reminiscent of the shoulder section of White Glint from Armored Core For Answer. Anyway, considering the powered armor focus of the Spartans it’s nice to see that someone who effectively helmed that part of Japanese mecha design is now finally making his mark on something originally birthed in the West (though if you ask me the the Master Chief does look an awful lot like Yutaka Izubuchi’s work, namely the ARL-99 Helldiver as well as the GM Sniper II and GM Command).