A) There's one thing in saying "Okay Shepard, we'll go hunt your theory" and Liara saying she's in physical shock from discovering the answer to her studies for the last 50 years. After hearing a half-crazed story from a military man who she met ten minutes prior. About death robots.It's been a while since I've played, but she did bond with him after Eden Prime, so she would have seen the same vision as him.
Okay...? Just because Shepard provides a theory doesn't mean it is the only theory. If I said that the colonists on Roanoke Island were devoured by jaguars because I saw drawings of cats on one of the walls, would that hold up? (Granted, that island isn't much of a mystery anymore. They all went and had native babies.)
My point here was that a super-advanced race of aliens mysteriously disappeared from the galaxy without any clue as to why. You must admit that it presents a much different mystery than that of the Roanoke Island colonists. As you alluded to, their fate was understandable, as they sought food and comfort with the natives, and it had already been guessed at by historians over the years. The fate of a galaxy-spanning alien race is not so easily explained away. It is true though that this alone does not prove anything, rather it gives a good indication that something beyond the ordinary happened (like an invasion by evil cuttlefish from hell).
C) He doesn't see some massive tell-all vision. He sees tiny, split-second fragments of pictures of machinery. The images aren't even intended for his mind, but a Prothean's.My view on this is highly debateable for sure, but I always took it, especially from conversations with Liara, that we (ie the players) didn't see the full vision but only snippets so as to preserve the mystery behind the Reapers and the Protheans (this is possible from a development perspective in that Bioware clearly didn't have an idea on what a Reaper invasion would look like. It's always been my theory that they never originally intended for the Reapers to ever reach our galaxy during the course of the series and that we would defeat them before they ever invaded simply because they are set up as such a huge enemy).
D) I'm not sure if it happens in other cases, but if you pick Liara up first then she just takes his word on the galaxy's greatest mystery.
Going back to my last answer, I always assumed, mostly from her exclamation after bonding with Shepard, that she had seen the same, full-length vision as Shepard. Once again, I know this is highly debateable.
E?) First of all, nobody knows what Reapers look like. For all we know, he could just have some proto-type Geth capital ship. They haven't been seen in years, after all. Secondly, he hates humans. What's to say he hasn't just snapped and tagged along with the Geth promising them to return their so-called gods in return for killing humanity. Not only could he be delusional, he honestly would seem so were it not for BioWare blatantly telling us the Reapers are real.
Again, the existence of this new ship (Sovereign) isn't proof enough, but it's just more evidence, not to mention that the Geth haven't left their sector of space for centuries, and yet now they are following an organic for unkown reasons. While Saren is anti-human, he early on kills a fellow Turian SPECTRE in cold blood for no real reason, but that really should be metagaming to an extent. We weren't there after all and only hear of it afterwards from a witness. All of this circumstantial evidence comes together to give a lot of validity to the Reaper threat IMO, perhaps not quite as much as Bioware put out early on in the game, but that is where I will agree that it was somewhat forced. That in no way though makes it a plot hole by any means, more of a stretch of the plot to cicumvent the relatively unfleshed-out vision that we (the players) saw.
ME3's two best story arcs, Rannoch and Tuchanka, were both packed full of emotion and plot twists. They had difficult choices and great writing. The Citadel invasion was a bit forced, but not all-together awful. You had great bits like EDI and Joker, Liara and her capsule, and that last chat with Anderson. The ending wasn't fantastic even after the EC, but I think the story - though perhaps not "better" than ME1, was more stable.I wholeheartedly agree that Palaven's moon, Rannoch and Tuchanka were both some of the best story arcs in the entire series, without a doubt. I don't agree so much with the Citadel invasion as I feel that it was forcefully pushed on us, even generating plot holes on its own that the game points out yet does't answer (Where was the citadel defense fleet? Someone in C-Sec mentions this but AFAIK no one gives an answer). There were definitely other good parts of ME3, but what really killed it before I even got to the endings was how Bioware destroyed the Rachni story arc from the first game. I mean outright destroyed it.
What I really miss about Mass Effect 1 is two things; the emphasis on discovery and exploration (yes, including the fridge-on-wheels planet exploration), and the omnipotent, unknowable Reapers.
Totally agree with you 100%. I even think that the so called out of place exploration can be explained away by the idea that evidence about Saren doesn't all come in at once. Shepard, in the meantime, performs side quests as the new SPECTRE.
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