CaptainCommander wrote...
DecCylonus wrote...
CaptainCommander wrote...
DecCylonus wrote...
I think an ending without an explanation would have been unsatisfying.Villains with no motivation are the things of children's cartoons. ME deserved better than that. I enjoyed the mystery for two games, but I wouldn't want to win the war and not understand what I had fought.
I don't know a theme that has existed in all ME games is the unknown and it ties with Humans being the newest race to join the Citadel. ME1 is about finding the Prothean's relics and finding out who this giant ship is. ME2 you have these unseen Collectors and you go on a search to find them. ME3 starts out with the unknown Crucible and you continue with an unknown victory type feel (pulling hairs for ME3).
ME is about the unknown. And the Reapers to me symbolised that! They were humanities fears of the unknown galaxy confronting them and we had to defeat them. And you could easily add a conversation with Harbinger in ME3 where you don't get an explanation of motives and creation but rather an understanding of the Reapers. Say Harbinger tells you that they require the technology and resources of the cycles to survive in between the cycles. Or even have Harbinger say we collect the knowledge of the galaxy and preserve it for what ever reason that could be ME4.
But the Reapers should never had been these apex race's answer to trying to stop a conflict. In Leviathan Shepard even says something along the lines of you made the same mistakes as the races you tried to protect and Leviathan just answers "You can't understand us!". Its something you say to an annoying child.
Should of stayed a mystery and you would have positive speculation on this board instead of everyone trying to fix the game with collective head-canon.
I agree that the unknown was a major theme of the trilogy. It was well done and I liked that theme. I disagree that leaving the Reapers as unknown would have been a satisfying conclusion. The biggest reason is that we would not have had closure at the end of the game. Sure, Shepard beat the Reapers, maybe sacrificing himself and / or major parts of the galaxy in the process. But if we don't know where they came from, then there is always a chance there are more out there. So the whole epic end of Shepard's story arc could be for nothing. I don't think such an end for a character so beloved as Shepard would have sat well with the fans.
It also would have locked Mass Effect into forever being about the Reapers, and I don't think Bioware wants that. They created a rich fiction of the galaxy with plenty of interesting things besides the Reapers going on. Those things, and not the Reapers, are the major reasons that the fans love the series. I think Bioware wanted to free the franchise to explore those other things, and they had to bring a final end to the Reapers to do that.
As far as everyone trying to "fix" the game with their collective head cannon, I think the only way to avoid that would have been a conventional victory.
Shepard's whole story is about the Reapers. Its why he becomes a Spectre, its why he collects his teams in ME1 and 2. You can't say that the Reapers are not a big part of ME. The entire universe exists because of their technology. The Reapers are a HUGE part of ME.
And the ending doesn't give you closure at all. The game ME3 doesn't even give itself closure. Stopping Rachni doesn't decrease the Rachni enemies in game, same with Banshee's etc. You don't find out about the Cerberus data, you don't see Emily Wong, Corporal Toombs and so many other things are just left or given 1 or 2 lines. Its amazing that all those elements that need closure never got it but the Reapers who have said SO many times you'll never understand their motives are really just some AI's solution to AI's killing everyone.
As previous posters have said them being an Apex race corrupted or nothing would be better. But the Reapers are basically Leviathan's seeing that races create synthetics that kill organics, so they create a synthetic that basically kills organics (God knows how they made Leviathan in Harbinger when we have seen how easy it is for them to destroy a Reaper with a thought).
They should of stayed the devil in the dark. I would far better have understood how the Relays work, how indoctrination works, how the keepers were built. Reaper aspects and technology explained not the Reapers.
I reread my post and I didn't explain my point well, so let me try again.
Bioware said during the life of ME2 that Shepard's story arc would conclude with ME3. If that is the plan, then it is necessary to have a finality to the end of the Reapers too. If everything about them was still a mystery at the end, it would leave room for speculation that more of them exist out there. Bioware couldn't do that for two reasons.
First because it wouldn't be a satisfying end for Shepard, regardless of whether s/he lived or died. Shepard's victory would not be complete if there was a chance the Reapers could return. It would feel like a hollow victory, or fans would expect a return of both Shepard and the Reapers in ME4.
Second, because Bioware wants to continue the Mass Effect franchise. What the fans really love about ME is the huge and intricate fiction of the galaxy. The Reapers were a component of that, but not the whole of it by any measure. But, they have the power to dominate the franchise if they aren't removed. This is the other reason their end needed to be final, and Bioware could not leave room for speculation. The only way to prevent that speculation is to explain where they came from and have Shepard put an end to it.
There were things that could have been explained better and many plot threads left hanging by the ending we got. However, it did put a finality on the end of the Reapers, and I think that was a good thing. I can't think of a way Bioware could have done that without explaining their origin.
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