Wars 2 expansion "Awakening the Nightmare". The Gravemind's conversations with Cortana after Halo 2 and during Halo 3 are detailed in the Halo Evolutions short story anthology. Reception Critical reception of the leader of the Flood were mixed. In a review of Halo 2, Mike Leonard of the AllXbox community said that the introduction of the Gravemind character had him "rolling my eyes hard enough to get motion sickness from seeing the back of the inside of my skull"; Leonard went on to say that the "Little Shop of Horrors reject" ruined the "cool" of the Halo franchise. Staff from GamesRadar singled out the appearance of the Gravemind as a sign the Halo series had jumped the shark. "Until Gravemind showed up, we were pretty sure we understood the Halo series' story," they wrote, but that the appearance of a Venus Flytrap-like creature with an ego and "a tendency to spout philosophical drivel" was unexpected. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com bemoaned the fact that Gravemind was never explicitly stated to be the Flood leader in either Halo 2 or Halo 3 and was hardly seen in the third installment. Publications also took issue with the fact that the character's motivations were never fully explored; the South Florida Sun-Sentinel said that the "unique and compelling characters" of Halo 3, such as Cortana and the Master Chief, were overwhelmed by Gravemind. More favorably, Aaron Sagers of the newspaper The Morning Call saw Gravemind as a perfect example of a trend in pop culture called a "frenemy". A frenemy, according to Sagers, is a friend or rival "with whom [the protagonist] feuds; an individual who reinvigorates the sense of self-worth and drives up one's visibility in the public's eye." Gravemind, operating as a frenemy, served to personify the Master Chief's otherwise nebulous fight against the Flood. Will Prusik of PlanetXbox360 listed the Flood as one of the great video game aliens, and that the revelation of a central Flood intelligence was a good idea despite the Gravemind's resemblance to Audrey II. See also Collective consciousness Collective intelligence Collective memory References External links The Gravemind's profile at Halowaypoint.com Extraterrestrial characters in video games Fictional parasites and parasitoids Fictional mass murderers Fictional superorganisms Halo (franchise) characters Hive minds in fiction Microsoft antagonists Video game characters introduced in 2004 ja:HALO (ビデオゲームシリーズ)#グレイブマインド