Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

3 lacks a traditional starting squad, and is rather built upon having Liara, Vega and EDI, or rather, pure Adept, Soldier and Engineer, no matter what.

What's with the meme that "nothing happens in ME 2?"

Because it's been weaponized to defend ME 3's plot. It's all 2's fault that 3 has a garbage story that makes no sense! If 2 had advanced things instead of...advancing things, then 3 would be a masterpiece.

As my sarcasm noted, plenty of important things happen in the plot of 2. These Cerberus guys are pretty significant in ME 3 I dare say. And the Reapers? It's a good thing 2 actaully gave them motivations and a goal, something 1 decidedly did not.

Just because ME 2 is more about the characters doesn't mean nothing of consequence happens in the story.

Also talking about ME 2 characters and neglecting to mention Morinth? Tsk tsk. Good thing 3 totally followed up on that choice in 2, right? I guess it's all 2's fault again, somehow.

Nothing happens in 2 in the regard that shepard is no closer to his goal of defeating the reapers or advancing the overall plot, and kicks all of those duties back to 3, who no longer has the space to actually conclusively end that plot thread.

This doesn't mean that nothing happens in 2, period. Or that what happens in it is bad. But the fact that it doesn't advance the main plot thread (no, fleshing out the reapers isn't that, it's worldbuilding. It's good, we need that, but we also needed a significant progress to make against the reapers).

Cerberus being relevant starting from 2 is also generally regarded as a mistake and a massive Plot Tumor that took away even more focus from the reapers so it's not really a point in 2's favor.

Take the second book of the lord of the rings. Imagine that you get all of the worlbuilding, cool character moments in it, but at the end of it, frodo and sam are still at the same place they were at the end of the first book. They are no closer from their stated goal in the sotry, and as a result, return of the king no longer has the time to properly conclude the plotline. it's not that literally nothing happened, but it did nothing to advance the main plotline, which gets shortened into "nothing happens in the second book" sometimes.

3 wouldn't be a masterpiece without 2's flaws, that's strawmanning, but 3's problems are magnified by the fact that it has to pull double duty for advancing the main plot.

I don't know what to tell you about morinth aside a variation of "didn't care yesterday, doesn't give a fuck today, probably won't give a shit tomorrow." It's a cool bit of lore, but no more important than a ton of things that happen in both of those games.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 10th 2019 at 6:40:08 PM

In fairness to 2, it DID plant the seeds for explaining the Reapers. Those seeds were then ignored in favour of something entirely different. That’s on the people who wrote 3.

The Cerberus thing is precisely the issue for a lot of fans. Because the Reapers are a weirdly abstract threat (Big ships... shit how do we fight THOSE in a 3rd person shooter?!)

Cerberus going from essentially DS 9 Section 31 to basically a massive conspiracy that can pull whole divisions and picket fleets out of Hammerspace.

The point is that whilst Mass Effect 2 may have been a good story in itself, it didn't actually advance the Reaper plot all that much, in terms of taking action against them (Arrival was the only real step that way and that was DLC! And a DLC that missed out on the opportunity to be a weird inversion of Bring Down the Sky from ME 1)

So we get a lot of time but no real development of Cerberus, a cool heist-style story. But it opens up a lot more questions, a LOT more characters to juggle with, doesn't follow up on others...

And basically leaves ME 3 to do all the heavy lifting by itself. Which, given ME 3's development time, it tries to do, but doesn't quite manage.

ME 2 has some great ideas, setpieces and worldbuilding. But it doesn't resolve or challenge the bigger arcs of the Universe - the status quo remains. The main plot is essentially you taking on a side boss in a larger RPG. What threat could the human reaper have posed when we already have ALL THE OTHER REAPERS INBOUND.

So the ultimate payoff of ME 2 is quite small and then NOT followed up in ME 3 - you have a squad of badasses. The end scene shows you prepping, ready to go and... nothing. Bam. Done.

Edited by JerekLaz on Apr 10th 2019 at 9:39:34 AM

The dark energy thing, yeah.Ultimatley, none of the plot that were outlined to us by the developer about where that plotline could have gone is any better than the thing we got in ME 3. The only nice thing that could have come out of it would have been proper foreshadowing in 2, but in the end it falls to the same pitfalls as the crucible.

It's also extremely debatable whether the reapers needed a motivation or not. Explaining ctuhullu is by default a contradiction that makes him less than what he was before, but most importantly, you didn't needed an answer to "why" to kill the reaper armada. It's a cool thing to get, but it wasn't that needed, because we needed a "how" much more than a "why".

Edited by Yumil on Apr 10th 2019 at 6:43:44 PM

x3

That's my similar thoughts. It's not exactly the sequel's fault if the finale doesn't do anything with its build up. That's one of the many many sequel problems; The follow through. If you don't, you've wasted screen time and fans won't be happy all across the board either because the sequel wasted time or the third didn't follow up.

Similar to Inquisition, ME 3 is far more a follow up to ME 1. Unlike Dragon Age though, ME 2 was an intended part of the story rather than a corperate forced installment.

Edited by InkDagger on Apr 10th 2019 at 9:38:19 AM

As a propagator of that meme, 2 begins and ends with Shepard in the same place, having made no progress in their quest to stop the Reapers save for just waiting around for them to show up.

It's just that the character writing is so dang good it's hard to hold it against the game, to the point where I almost wish the more focused character narrative was also what Mass Effect would be about rather than galactic space opera like in ME 1.

ME 2 is good on its own merits but falters as a sequel.

this. ME 2 is still the best mass effect game to me, but it should never have been the part 2 of a trilogy. It should have been an interquel between 1 and the actual mass effect 2.

Either that or mass effect shouldn't have been a trilogy, but much more games than that.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 10th 2019 at 6:42:07 PM

I think it falls into a trap of trying to be Mass Effect’s Empire Strikes Back without really getting what it is about Empire that works.

Empire is the darker, cooler, more character-focused sequel, and Mass Effect 2 gets that. But Empire also raises the stakes and left the characters in radically different places than they started, which is what ME2 arguably failed to accomplish.

Oh yeah, that's another good example ! Mass effect 2 is the Empire where luke didn't trained with yoda, just hung around with him and chilled, didn't lost an arm to dark vador, Han solo didn't introduced lando to the team, and didn't get cryogenized.

when ROTJ rolls around, luke is still not in any capacity capable of standing up to vador.

More importantly, in my mind, it’s Empire without “I am your father.”

Raising the stakes in a story is so, so important. Mass Effect sets the bar too high for the Reapers and leaves them nowhere to go from there. Star Wars raises the stakes by going smaller; more personal. Luke’s training is incomplete, he couldn’t save his friends, he got his ass handed to him by Vader, and to top it all off if he has any hope of defeating the Empire he’ll have to kill his own father. Mass Effect 2 is too much of a power fantasy to do that.

Yeah the vader encounter doesn't happen at all in the sceario I imagine. At best, yoda actually tells him that vader is his fathe,r which while keeping the same plot development, removes a lot of the elements that make the scene so pivotal -because luke didn't tried and failed to save his friends, he didn't learned it from his nemesis who claimed his mentor figure lied to him, and so on.

If I had my way there'd be no Reapers and instead the Protheans would have been the main villains, or maybe only a handful of Reapers who controlled the galaxy in secret and couldn't actively war against every race.

Mass Effect 2 would have been about Shepard exploring the Terminus systems in the hopes of finding a secret to beating the villains, but because it's outside Council space they're on their own and have to basically start from scratch and grow a new crew. Cerberus proceeds to secretly help Shepard explore the lawless part of the galaxy in an uneasy alliance. Nothing about missing colonies or anything, just that Cerberus wants in on whatever they can get out of learning about the Reapers/Protheans/Whatever which will set them up as a major antagonistic force in a hypothetical ME 3 where shit hits the fan and the whole galaxy is on fire in a three way war between the Council races, Cerberus and the Reapers/Protheans/Whatever.

So because you're own your own and life goes on without Shepard you have your justification for picking up whoever you want (like why you need a stealthy assassin and a jewel thief to run around in open warfare). The galaxy isn't doomed yet and there's still this sense that you can take your time exploring every planet you find in the hopes of learning something new like in ME 1.

It's not just the dark matter subplot that ME 3 drops, it's also the team you built up, the state of the various planets and cultures, and your complicated relationship with Cerberus — and I think the latter, combined with that final shot of the Reapers amassing in force, does serve as a decent cliffhanger. It's just that ME 3 immediately raises the stakes to apocalyptic levels.

ESB doesn't act like it's Movie 2 of a trilogy, either. It's episode V, of an ongoing series, and Empire and ROTJ both leave a lot of dangling threads, which is how it led to such a vast Expanded Universe. The death of the Emperor in Return, the destruction of the Second Death Star, was a good start, a big win, and that was enough. For that matter, the compartmentalized structure of a Bioware-style RPG lends itself better to comparisons with an ongoing TV series, so more so late-season Star Trek/Stargate/Farscape/Babylon 5. ME 3 could've really benefited from a time skip or two.

I mean, 3 raising the stakes to apocalyptic level isn't exactly on him either, it's on arrival - it's explicitly stated that the destruction of the mass relays gives you something like months, not years of setback for the reapers. Arrival was a mistake because it rushes the timeframe way too much. And the apocalytptic context is the reason the planet cultures get dropped.

You relatio nwith cerberus can already be severed by the end of 2 if you go paragon so m'eh, and while I do agree that dropping your squad was questionnable, ultimately, you were never going to do anything significant against the reapers with just of squad of badasses.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 10th 2019 at 7:44:31 PM

I don't think 2's overall quality as a game is enough to deflect the criticism against it's place in the Reaper narrative. It was the wrong way to handle the second entry in a trilogy.

And if you think 3 wasted most of two's characters, blame that on two making many of them determinant characters to begin with. We wouldn't know how bad it could get until Telltale became popular, but Bioware was the first to demonstrate its issues.

Eh. I don't think the Reapers' quality as villains made the arc ME 1 presented worth following through to completion. They were massively cliched. Better to background them and eventually subvert the cliche, rather than playing it deathly straight.

And a severed relationship is still a relationship. There's a difference between having personally rejected the Illusive Man for his politics and having him reject his own politics to become Saren MKII and his zombie horde.

Eh, agree to disagree there. Our preference the games as a trilogy or not aren't worth going over again.

I just learned that there is a cruise ship called the MS Sovereign, and it is now my quest to go on that ship at some point in my life.

...oh dear, I'm indocrinated, aren't I?

Well, with ME 2 I didn't feel like it followed up on ME 1 that much; most of what you accomplished in ME 1 is taken away from you. The Council still denies Reapers, you lose your Spectre status, etc. And by the end of the game you've basically returned to where you are at the end of ME 1. It doesn't seem to follow the typical trilogy structure that I call a "Construction Cycle". Having said that, it is still a good game, even though it feels like a side-adventure of some sort.

It did introduce Cerberus, who prove important, though I'm unsure how I feel about them. In all honesty they strike me as what I call a "Human Face Villain": an antagonist put into a work to add human-human conflict that would normally focus on a different type of conflict. IE, a human bad guy in a zombie apocalypse story, the corrupt executive in a disaster movie, that sort of thing. Personally, I'm really not fond of this type of character. To be fair, the Illusive Man is one of the better examples of it.

ME 3 is likewise a pretty good game. Honestly, I think it's mostly just disliked for the ending. I do agree the ending could be better, though I disagree with most on what it's flaws are. I'm not overly fond of the Reaper's motives-the relationship between organic and synthetic life never felt like that big a focus. It feels more like a Deus Ex plot. I would have preferred that they stuck with the Mass Effect dark matter plot personally.

Dark matter "The stars are going out" plot all the way for me.

^^ I would totally play a Theme Hospital-style cruise ship sim set in the Mass Effect universe.

Shepard destroys 2 Reapers, discovers their origins, destroys a client race, and gets some awesome new weapons.

Mind you, I think a decent climax for three would have been blowing up the Relay in Arrival. Trap the Reapers in Dark Space or destroy them as they come through.

He kills a proto reaper, The other Reaper was already dead they just destablized the orbit so its corpse could fall into the gravity well

The derelict was a great level in how it showed that the Reapers are still dangerous even when half alive - made them proper unsettling.

But I do think having the Reapers actually attack was a mistake - have them still coming and three being tat culmination of getting everyone ready - maybe have some advanced scouts. Perhaps Shepard SHOULD die in the narrative - it makes it stronger. But tbh the whole golden ending thing is something expected and yearned for by a lot of gamers - so why not make it an option - hard to do but still doable.

Having the final boss be more of a conversation battle - overloading Harbinger with logic, provided you made some choices, undermine it, make it divide by zero.. and then fight TIM as a Saren-esque puppet. That'd be a good book end.