paxxton wrote...
Davik Kang wrote...
plfranke wrote...
Omega and Leviathan - If it doesn't bother you that the only hard foreshadowing of the Catalyst is charged $10 and a dlc that Bioware has admitted they they wanted to put on a disk is being charged for half the price of the current game then that's just being a bad consumer.
You don't need an exposition for the Catalyst to make the story good. It's additional content for those who want it.
I've said it a few times but I'll repeat it again. Vendetta foreshadows the Catalyst on Thessia in the main game.
And yet this is foreshadowed near the
end of the campaign, when it should have been done much, much sooner. And although the characters did seek the Catalyst throughout ME3, that wasn't the primary focus of the plot (uniting the galaxy was). So the foreshadowing, and the twist afterward, fell flat. I haven't played Leviathan yet, but the point stands that without that optional content, the Catalyst character is an apropos of nothing without its scene being some sort of battle between an antagonist (Caty) and protagonist (Shep).
Except in the literal interpretations there is no battle, Shepard has effectively won already. Ergo the Catalyst is a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, and therefore a problem.
The whole problem with ME3’s ending and what the Catalyst’s place in it is story structure. Let me explain
See Sovereign's reveal to see how it's supposed to be done. Throughout ME1, Saren was played to be the Big Bad of the plot. While he serves higher masters, they're not present in the plot and therefore not relevant yet. Sovereign was just a flagship, an object with no central importance to the plot. Except, just
before the final act begins (Illos, Citadel), we get the twist and revelation that Sovereign was actually the Big Bad of this plot, not Saren (the Dragon). This revelation sets the stage and stakes for the final act: Stop Sovereign, stop the invasion.
So when you race to Illos, there's that sense of urgency to the proceedings. You're playing through the climax of the story, and when you achieve your goal there's a sense of accomplishment. The reveal wasn't confusing, and it didn't feel out of place, as the Catalyst is. The plot made its turns in the right places. ME3's finale, however, runs into dead ends.
See, at the end of Cronos, we get the revelation that *gasp* the Citadel is the Catalyst. Fair enough. We know the stage for the final battle, we know the stakes. Plug the Crucible, turn it on, save the universe. Great. We're on our way to the final showdown, where the primary conflict of the setting (Shep vs. Reapers) will be resolved.
The act plays out, Priority: Earth, the Beam Run, the Beam Shuffle, etc. Then we get a final showdown: Shepard vs Tim. Now, this could have been great. TIM was a major antagonist and was effectively the face of everything Shepard was fighting against, even more so than Harbinger. So what can we do with TIM? Have a big dialogue piece in front of the Crucible's/Citadel's controls to decide the fate of humanity, and the galaxy in general? Great! Let's go for it!
TIM dies, the Crucible docks, but... nothing happens. It was a false climax. Fair enough, a climax can still happen. There's still a Crucible, there are still reapers. The conflict still exists as does the means to resolve it. Let's get to the final fight. But there isn't one.
In the eyes of the plot Shepard
has won, somehow. There is no final conflict against the source of conflict. There is no failure state. There is only a confusing, meaningless choice of victory conditions. But this choice follows
new revelations, courtesy of the Catalyst. Now revelations at the end of the story can be effective. See: The Usual Suspects. But such revelations still set the stage of the plot, and set the stakes, just retroactively.
However, there's still the choice after ME3's last revelation. So it's not supposed to be a retroactive device. You're supposed to take these revelations and move forward with them. But there's no possible fail state. New stakes, but no new climax to go with. The story just ends. And thus, no sense of achievement, resolution, or closure. We get an anticlimax. A non-ending.
Hell, if the game ended with Shepard passing out next to Anderson, that would have made more sense. It would be infuriating and nihilistic, but it would have been a finale. A bold one that demanded respect. But the Catalyst bungles everything up by literally stopping the plot, confusing it, and leaving it hanging.
That the Catalyst doesn’t make any lick of sense considering what’s been established in the series is just icing on the cake. So yeah, the Catalyst was foreshadowed. Doesn’t mean it didn’t screw up the game.
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