F4H bandicoot wrote...
The Reaper Leader should have been Harbinger. Much more consistent.
Why? Just because he's the oldest and probably most powerful? There's really no reason why the Reapers, that super-advanced all-powerful race of machines, should choose their leader like a stone age tribe. Even more so, his name is "Harbinger" – which is a messenger that signals the arrival of *another*. It would have made absolutely no sense for the writers to choose that name if it was not to hint at someone else being there.
Also, Harbinger's role (or the role of the Reapers in general) in relation to the catalyst is entirely open at the moment: There has been no hinting at how "absolute" its control over the Reapers is. What we know for certain is that the Reapers are not mindless machines: They have "personalities" (e.g. compare Harbinger & Sovereign), they interact with each other ("Harbinger speaks of you"), etc... We also know (from the EC) that the catalyst is just the combined consciousness of the Reapers, which makes its existence as a separate, sovereign entity questionable.This may very well be something that future content could explore (and I have a feeling that "Leviathan" will do just that).
Finally, the Thessia VI and Javik also mention things about the cycle that seem to be beyound mere Reaper control, like every cycle having the same types of races (a warrior race – the Krogan in the current cycle, etc...), so there is still plenty of room for the writers to go in future installments. Also, we still don't really know why organic life is so important to the catalyst in the first place. There's still – at least in my head canon – quite a chance that the whole Reaper cycle is actually an attempt to interfere with an even larger, more epic type of cycle engineered by an agent we don't even know about yet. Maybe that helps you understand why I could immediately identify with Hulk's claim that "Mass Effect is about cycles" (and I see a lot of other cyclic events and relationships in the storytelling: as an example, the typical cycle of the oppressed uprising against the oppressors is symptomatic of Mass Effect's universe: the Krogan vs. the Salarians/Turians, the Geth vs. the Quarians, the Humans vs. the Council (if you play that way), the Yagh Shadow Broker vs. the original Shadow Broker, the Ardat-Yakshi (with Morinth as their avatar) against the asari, etc...).
Isichar wrote...
Argue all you want, the ending is basically the definition of deus ex machina.
No. Again, the catalyst as a plot device, the crucible and its function, the idea of fusing organic and synthetic life have all been central themes of the story right from the beginning (in case of the catalyst and the crucible the beginning of ME3, even though fusing synthetics and organics has even been a topic since ME1).
The catalyst turning out to be a sentient being is a plot twist, not a deus ex machina. You can argue that a plot twist so late in the game is not a good thing to do (I, in fact, like surprising endings, but that is a personal opinion). What you can't do, however, is argue that it was a deus ex machina ending, which you only do because deus ex machina endings are pretty much a sign of really bad writing in modern style, even though plenty of older works feature them, which doesn't diminish their value at all.
For a good example of a deus ex machina, look at "War of the Worlds" – either the movie with Tom Cruise, or the original novel by H.G. Wells, which I highly recommend. I loved it when I read it as a kid. There are many similarities to the Reaper plot: The gigantic, indestructible walker wreaking havoc on Earth, as an example: That book was actually the first thing I was thinking of when I saw how the Sovereign-class Reapers walked on planets, vaporizing things with their funky death beams.
Anyway, that story ends with the Martians suddenly dying from bacteria native to Earth, pretty much out of nowhere. That's a deus ex machina.
The writers had so many opportunities to end with a deus ex machina: Well, even if the combined fleet at the end suddenly turned out to be able to defeat the Reapers by itself, that would have been deus ex machina, since we got so much evidence before that this is impossible ("oh, look, turns out that when we all fire our Thanix cannons at once, we actually can oneshot the Reapers. Glad we suddenly figured that out.").
BringBackNihlus wrote...
film critic =/= game critic.
Absolutely. That was actually one of Hulk's main points in the orginal piece. He argued that on one hand, people want games to be taken seriously as a medium (I certainly do), but on the other, they rebel if a game story sacrifices pushing the gamers' buttons in all the right places (spectacular heroic victory against all odds, happy ending with blue babies, you – the player – are the most awesome, unstoppable force in the galaxy, and whatnot) for a nuanced, though-provoking and, there, I said it, mature resolution. There's a double-standard there, or would you argue that the latest Michael Bay flicks are actually artistically interesting?
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