Nilbog79 wrote...
I'm probably alone on this, but I think the ending makes sense. After setting the Reapers up as being vastly more powerful than all other races combined, any kind of happy end would have been completely ridiculous. So, props to Bioware for taking their own lore seriously and not coming up with some silly deus ex machina.
It's not so impressive though that there is only one ending. There should have been at least a 'you lose'-type ending where the Reapers win and the cycle of destruction continues.
The thing is, the Reapers really weren't set up as some unstoppable threat. Consider:
Sovereign got its own stupid ass killed. Furthermore,
it couldn't directly assault the Citadel itself to begin the new cycle because the Citadel fleet posed a significant threat to it. It needed the Geth and Saren, because it couldn't just sweep one Council fleet aside on its own. The Fifth fleet destroyed Sovereign, even after having an all-out slugfest with the Geth, despite the Alliance being the
weakest in numbers and technology among the major players in Council space. Heck, why even waste its time with the Geth? Just have Saren walk into the Council chambers one fine afternoon, cap the Council and activate the Citadel relay -- no need to worry about the beacons, Cipher, Mu relay, Ilos or the Geth feint at all, because apparently Saren didn't even need the Prothean command program or knowledge of what the Protheans did and how, at all considering Saren didn't even make an attempt to contact Vigil.
That's
before the Council races get their hands on the "super-advanced Geth ship" and reverse engineer it to advance their own military technology god only knows how far. Like, for example, the three plot-critical Normandy upgrades, one of which is explicitly stated to be from reverse-engineered from Reaper tech and the other two heavily implied to be as well -- that came from Turian and Quarian sources and not just Alliance or Cerberus. And the Alliance
got their hands on the SR-2, reverse engineered it and got access to that tech, too. Just in case we want to pick nits about who has access to what tech, when and how.
Harbinger was just smart enough to be genre savvy, but not genre savvy enough to seal the deal by, say...self-destructing the Collector ship while Shepard was aboard and just writing it off as an acceptible loss.
It's firmly established by Vigil the Reapers' primary strengths are surprise and subterfuge. Well, those two elements are pretty well out the window. Outside that, all the Reapers really have going for them is strength in numbers, because they're obviously not remotely as smart or powerful as they're made out to be.
And, how is the Crucible and Guardian in any way not a deus ex machina? Pulling from Wikipedia here out of sheer laziness, a deus ex machina "is a
plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object." That's...pretty much the exact definition of deus ex machina, to the letter.