BringBackNihlus wrote...
What about the concept or ideas do you like? I feel like everything is completely derailed by the inclusion of the Catalyst. All they had built up about the Reapers being "a nation, independent, free of all weakness," which is directly pulled from the Reaper God himself, Sovereign, for two full games was run off the tracks in ME3.
That's POV information, what Sovereign - who wasn't the Reaper God but the sentinel they left behind to watch civilizations advance - believed the Reapers to be. Turns out Sovereign was wrong about themselves being independent, but how independent is anyone, really? Your will is alway shaped by the forces that made you, be it random chance or deliberate design.
You come to find out that the Reapers are not a nation, independent ("independent" being the operative word in my argument) and free of all weakness, they are captors of some sort of higher power that orders them to destroy all organic life (that can threaten them) to save us from our own creations. You find out that the antagonists for the entire series aren't there to conquer the galaxy just to destroy us or to sustain themselves and increase their numbers, and something that simple would have sufficed for me. They are now there to save you from yourselves. Nothing about that I like.
Would you really have liked a "conquer the galaxy" or "Reaperduction" scenario better? It would have been boring, simplistic, a plot we've seen a million times before, and it would have told us nothing new about the ME universe. I've always suspected there was more to it than that, with the Reapers' claim to "ascension", Harbinger's "We are Harbinger" and the plausible speculation we've had since ME2 that they're avatars of civilizations of past cycles. To see those suspicions come to nothing would have been an epic disappointment.
Even the Catalyst was mostly invalidated by its presentation and narrative inconsistencies. As a concept it made perfect sense. What power could shape the will of something like the Reapers but an "AI god"? What other explanation for the unified purpose of the Reapers - who were made from diverse species but mysteriously follow the same directive - could there be? Granted, even disregarding the presentation and narrative inconsistencies, it takes a great deal of emotional detachment to come to terms with it, but in cases like this, where human standards clearly don't apply, that should be obvious to anyone. IMO the greatest mistake people make is treating the Catalyst as your run-of-the-mill antagonist blown up to a galactic scale. It isn't that. It is not human, and approaching it with the mindset you bring to standard video game villains is inappropriate.
When I said I like the concepts that went into the ending, I mostly meant the final choice. But as you see, that also applies to the other elements. As I see it, the flaws lie only in the execution - from Shepard's space-magicky sacrifice in Synthesis and the presentation of the Catalyst as some sort of pseudo-divinity to the narrative inconsistency with the Rannoch plot if you made peace.
Edit: Also, a reunion scene could have been done in a completely tasteful way without making it cheesy and over-the-top. I don't see why a reunion scene = sunshine and rainbows. It can be done in a bittersweet way.
It could. Still it would have given you a personal stake in one of the ending scenarios, which would've been absent in the others. The writers clearly wanted to minimize the personal stake in favor of the big picture, and I'm totally fine with that.
Edit:
I'm also perfectly fine with having to headcanon things. The problem with the original endings was that they didn't provide ground solid enough to reasonably speculate from, so that it felt like you're speculating in a vacuum. Not fun. Now with the EC, I'm fine with the way things are.
Modifié par Ieldra2, 21 août 2012 - 08:16 .
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