Epique Phael767 wrote...
It feels like they didn't try very hard. The only thing headscratching to me is why they tried to make the game for as wide of an audience as possible and then gave it an "artistic" interperative ending most people wouldn't understand. For the audience they aimed for (Which I do not agree with making the target audience wider) they should have gone for the simplistic "everyone dies" or "happy " ending. doing what they did makes no sense.
Now, I must admit I'm no professional writer. I'm completely self-taught. I have problems with characterization, plotting, pacing and just about everything. I can recognize a well-written story but it's a lot harder to write one.
BioWare ended up with the same problem that I'm learning about and running into with the main antagonist of the main plot from my story. The main villian is powerful enough to the point of being unbeatable. Nearly every antagonist has a weakness, as does the protagonist. Shepard has a weakness: he's just a human and he can easily be killed. The reapers are billions of years old and, as told to us by Sovereign, are nigh omnipotent and have no weaknesses. As is drilled into our heads throughout the games, they present such a strong threat that you have no idea how to beat them up until the last 5 minutes of the last game.
This is where I think the crux of the problem with Mass Effect comes from. Someone, anyone, stop me if you think I'm wrong.
BioWare wanted to present the strongest antagonist in literature, something billions of years old, so old that mere mortals cannot comprehend their strength and existence. Here's Sovereign's entire exchange from Mass Effect 1, and please read all of it because it sets up the tone of how terrible a threat the reapers are:
"Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding.
There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own. You cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Sovereign.
Reaper, a label created by the Protheans to give voice to their destruction. In the end, what they choose to call us is irrelevant. We simply are.
Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything.
Confidence born of ignorance. The cycle cannot be broken.
The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished. The Protheans were not the first. They did not create the citadel. They did not forge the mass relays. They merely found them, the legacy of my kind.
Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.
We have no beginning, we have no end. We are infinite. Millions of years after your civilization has been eradicated and forgotten, we will endure.
My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation, independent, free of all weakness. You cannot even grasp the nature of our existence.
We are legion. The time of our return is coming. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You cannot escape your doom.
Your words are as empty as your future. I am the vanguard of your destruction. This exchange is over."
Do you remember what you felt the first time you heard this? Honestly, blood rushed to my head. You had no clue how to kill Sovereign and end the reaper threat, especially after you heard that Sovereign was just one of millions, if not billions. All you knew is that you really wanted to beat the ever loving crap out of Sovereign and watch his corpse burn. From a story standpoint, the reapers obviously stood for something. There was symbolism here, it was just that the game purposefully wasn't letting on yet. From experience in other stories where the threat is so high, I had a strong feeling that there was going to be some sort of philosophical solution, or something else slightly mind-bending.
Take Matrix: Revolutions. To end the Matrix itself, the machines are their own undoing. Their weakness is that they want to be free. Agent Smith grew sick of the prison and wanted out. The machines themselves are too numerous and powerful to fight conventionally. The machines' weakness is the same freedom that humans want and rather than having to pull a deus ex machina like Mass Effect, the ending to the Matrix grew rather organically (pun intended) around the events throughout the series.
The reapers contained no weaknesses, claimed to be superior in every facet to every race alive today, refused to listen to us in any capacity and wanted nothing but to destroy us. The game did not even pretend to explore ways in which to kill reapers until pulling a deus ex right at the beginning of the third game. You can argue that the reapers and the Catalyst stand for humanity's (real humanity, not in-game humanity) follies. We will be our own destruction if we don't put aside our differences and stand together.
And then how do you beat the reapers? I can't think of a way without it feeling cheesy. Beating the reapers required a philosophical conclusion, which the game lacked and never explored. My quick answer? You had to unite the entire galaxy, no questions asked, get nearly a perfect score and then you could win conventionally. Instead, the game chose to make very literal points instead of exploring the themes opened up by Sovereign in the first game.
"You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it." It's safe to say that this is the most iconic line in the game and ignored at every turn since being said. The end of this game should have come full circle and swung back around to what Sovereign said. In retrospect, nothing any reaper said or anything we've learned since has proven anything of what Sovereign said about "fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding; There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own. You cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension."
Did Leviathan need to exist? It might have worked. Did the reapers need a reason to do what they did? This is likely what soured the game's plot. Instead of focusing on the philosophical nature of Sovereign's conversation, the game went on to make literal answers.
Of course, we realize what I just said is all garbage by beating the game because obviously it is about sacrifice. We must sacrifice people for the greater good or space monsters will harvest us until they can figure out how to stop us from destroying ourselves.
BioWare probably had the same thought I'm having with my antagonist. I want to create the ultimate evil. What makes an evil ultimate? There is nothing stronger. How do you make nothing stronger than it? Make it unbeatable. Problem is, it has to be beatable unless it is a tragedy. Mass Effect and my story are not tragedies. BioWare resolved it with a deus ex. By making Sovereign as he was, expectations were set up that the reapers were the ultimate evil (as well as the expectation that some kind of philosophical question and answer was forthcoming). The second or third game should have at least had a sub plot of the reapers' weakness. Leviathan, if introduced in the second game, could have served that purpose.
We're all much more critical of the game than we need to be for many reasons. Most of them to do with the anticlimactic ending and the lack of fulfillment with "Sovereign's Promise", as it were, and the deus ex machina to beat the reapers. I still feel like the game handed me an "I Win" button. All that hard work to get to that point, only to be told that I cannot win without basically accept the white flag of surrender from the guy I'm trying to beat.
The reapers' real weakness is that they're a bunch of dumbasses and couldn't clean the galaxy of all traces of anything in 50,000 years, which allowed the Crucible to survive for millions of years.
Modifié par Mystiq6, 04 septembre 2012 - 02:34 .
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