Mass Effect Thread: Leviathan is out, buy it, it's great

[lestatdark]

Sal.Paradise said:

lestatdark said:

Sal.Paradise said:

lestatdark said:

Sal.Paradise said:

Aldro said:
VGChartz, I has a question:

What is the overall consensus of the community here. Did you guys like the ending or not? I heard from a friend that the ending was bad and then I read around and it seems quite many are angry. So whats the stand here?

(Cant bother to look and I gotta go to bed for now <3 Cya in the mornin').

It's got plotholes bigger than EDI's camel toe (not joking). Any choices you made before are irrelevant, none of th endings make logical sense, the endings only come about by a massive deus ex machina, and yet somehow the difference between the alternate endings is also laughably small. 

So, I guess I don't like it. And neither should any person who cares about a game having a good story. 

I love it when people generalize their opinions and everyone that disagrees with them can't posibly know what a good story is.

Having said that, I haven't seen the endings myself, but unfortunately someone already spoiled me:

That they pull a Deus Ex in the end, and as I said before in this thread, long before know it, that's what I wanted to happen in the end. Heck, that's what I was wanting ever since Shepard got those cerberus implants who made him look a la Saren (especially if you full renegade him during ME2), thus somekind of iteration between the Reapers and Shepard would eventually became possible. 

Maybe I'll like the endings, maybe I won't, that doesn't give me or anyone the right to say who's entitled to say what's a good story or what isn't. So far, ME3 has been a very good follow up to the previous game's stories, so I'm liking it. 

Oh, btw: EDI's camel toe? What camel toe? Even her standard costume is as flat down there as the Light Armours on ME1. I bet you couldn't play ME2 then, since Miranda would then shock your sensibility to death.

I'm gonna have fun with this poooost! Ready for EDI cameltoe? I got it covered! (Or not..if you see what I'm saying, it's quite pathetic)

Also, its a 'deus ex machina' -god in the machine - contrived plot device to solve some sort of problem - not a 'deus ex'. Unless you're talking about how the options for the ending are completely the same as the first Deus Ex game. Funny because it's true. 

Wanna know the reasons why the ending you're talking about doesn't make sense?

In the synthesis ending, you can choose to merge organic and synthetic life with thanks to the energy of the catalyst in an attempt to end the endless cycle and create a race that will not create synthetics that kill organics. Ok, problems:

1.How the hell does that work exactly? Magic? Random energy beam conveniently merges organic dna with electronic programming? There is no precedent for this technology in the known Mass Effect lore. Oh, wait there is one exception, that is...

2. The reapers. They absorb organic life and intelligence into their synthetic body/life whatever. So to stop the endless cycle of the reapers continually destroying advanced organic civilization we're...creating a race of reapers?

3. If the mystical kid that controls the reapers had this bloody device all along that he says will end the cycle (even though I've just shown that's illogical) ...why didn't they just use it already???? I mean come on. Come on. 

4. When this new race of synthetics/organics is created, whats to stop them from advancing technologically and creating syntehtics that want to kill them all over again? Nothing! Not addressed or explained away at all.

5. The funny thing is, every sentient AI up to this point that aren't the reapers can be shown to be 'human'. EDI gains a human attachment to Joker, an organic, and the Geth now live alongside us, and have free will, jsut like a human. (if you chose that path in the story). 

 

Anyway, I don't think it is down to opinion whether the endings have massive plot holes or not, I just think they either have plot holes or they don't. 

Wait, so EDI has one in a costume that it's not even her standard one and that only a person with the DLC: From Ashes can obtain. Yeah...I still don't see why this should even be an issue  

You know, I always hated the Nietschezian way of looking into Deus Ex Machina plots in such an undermined and critical fashion, as I'm not bothered with them at all if they fit into the story's development. Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale" is a prime example of that. Deus Ex (in VGs) is too, and yet I hardly see it critiziced as well (I mean, the Helios AI doesn't really need JC Denton in order to fully understand humans, as both the canonical endings and the events in Hong Kong demostrate, so your choices are really pretty much invalid, which makes sense in the scope of Deus Ex, as Helios was actually the ultimate counter-part of Bob Page).

As for your spoilers tag, i'll only answer to your first and second questions: 

You say there wasn't any kind of precedent between the merging of both Organics and Synthetics, I say to you that you haven't pay any attention to ME lore at all. What are the common links between the Illusive Man, Shepard and Saren? Both are trials of said mergings.
Saren and the Illusive Man got their synthetic components in the same fashion, by indirect exposure to a reaper huskifying machine (see the comics Evolution), which by the exposure to the same procedure of mineralization of the body's water it gradually creates new synthetic facsimiles. The Illusive man used a similar process in the "ressurection" of Shepard, albeit in a much more "purer" form (since as we have seen, Saren could still be controlled by the Reapers, even though the exposure was indirect). You can fully see in a pure Renegade Shepard the same components that were part of Saren and the Illusive man as well.
With Shepard already being a close proxy to a Synthetic/Organic fusion, merging with the Reapers would be actually be facilitated. 

In essence, this is what the Illusive man wants to do for the entire human race, as he sees in it the full scope of human evolution. The problem with the Illusive man's way is that he wants to control that process and he wants to control the evolution itself, thus giving him control over every sapient life form just as he has control over his synthetic merged cerberus soldiers in ME3. 

As for the Reapers themselves, they don't absorb organic life and intelligence, they take the whole essence and culture of the dominat species of each destruction's cycle and use that as a process of "birth" for every new reaper. One could say that any individual reaper contains a whole species in itself, thus each being a nation, independent of one another, just as Sovereign said. The problem with your assumption is that you believe that they merge the organic remnants of the species when creating the Reaper itself, but it's more complex than that, since they use the DNA of an entire species for the original purpouse of capturing the full experience of the species (that plot device is based on the current theories that DNA can be affected by the enviroment and each individual person's memories and experiences).

I didn't read your other questions, since I haven't seen them in game, so I don't want to be spoiled Everything I've answered to you is based on the accounts of my knowledge of ME lore and the way I have figured things in my head as I played and replayed to exhaustion the previous games (and the comics and the books that I've read).

I'll address your spoilers first. Also, you can read all my other spoilered points, they're from the ending you've seen. 

Yeh I admit I forgot to mention  the whole Shepard and Illusive man thing, so you're right about there being a precedent for a synthetic/organic merge. Except for the fact that that took years of intensive care if memory serves, or you had to hang on one of those husk thingies for god knows how long and in this ending the whole thing is done in one massive energy burst. So there is no link to any of the lore you described, as accurate as it may be. The same 'energy burst' takes out the relays as well, so it's not like it will be possible for the whole galaxy to be turned into one of these synthetic/organic hybrids with the Illusive Man's technology either, as there is no way of communicating. It is all just dumped into this idea that a 'massive green coloured explosion' solves everything. The grand explanation from the kid is...'Everything you are will be absorbed, and then sent out'. Great, that clarifies things. 

Your information about the reapers does not contradict what I said. They incorporate organic DNA into whatever their 'hybrid' life form is. Part of the composition fo eahc reaper nation is organic DNA. And yes, their completely alien and transcedant form of life and technique of merging the synthetic and organic only serves to prove my point that this massive 'energy explosion' must be reaper technology, or some screwy solve-all technology that has never been mentioned, as opposed to anything we've seen or had explained to us before.

I don't like endings that use a blatant solve-all deus ex machina that conveniently allows shepard to choose between three endings without a thought, it's just too broken from everything else that has happened in the series. Not ony is the whole explantion that this tech can do basically anything introduced in the very last 20 minutes of the game, they do not explain after your decision how any of it actually works, except for the aforementioned, ridiculously simple, sentence. They just explain what it does. The kid might as well give Shephard a magic wand. I don't think that fits into the universe, at all, or the development of the story.

The EDI thing, it doesn't matter in the long run, just remember that they put more man hours and creative thought into modelling a robot's tits and cameltoe than they did into unveiling the face of one of the universe's major characters, or in the final copy pasted 'winter space' scene of their blockbuster multi million selling sci fi trilogy. 

Well, in the case of TIM and Saren, TIM was only out for a couple of weeks and Saren recovered quite quickly (both had different exposures to that "energy beam" from the husk-ify machine, so that could account for it). In the case of Shepard, indeed it took quite a lot of years of intesive care between rebuilding him and giving him the tech, which could have proved invaluable for the distinctions between himself and Saren (haven't seen the effects on TIM completely yet, so I cannot comment on him).

If somehow the components and the merges that shepard underwent could be amplified and signalled to every organic species using the Mass Relay systems (which we already know that they have various unknown functions, that has been one of the mysteries surrounding them in the whole series) destroying them in the process, then that could explain a bit of that ending. Remember that every species in the galaxy is dependent on Reaper technology (as Sovereign put it "Your society develops along the paths we desire") in one way or another, so it's not as if a galactic wide signal couldn't be sent (something akin to the signals that the keepers receive but on a much more grandiose scale). 

I don't either agree or disagree with the views that you present, as I've yet to see the full scope of the endings myself. I have plenty of questions that I've posed inside my own mind for the reapers (who created them? is it possible that their own technology is based on a blueprint of something before? if so, aren't the reapers just a self-perfecting synthetic life form tasked with a monumental endevour contrary to our belief of total destruction? Was there some truth to the words of Saren, as to the reapers being our only salvation?). I'll develop my thoughts and views on them once I know a bit more.

I wouldn't say that they put more man hours into that aspect than on unveiling the face of said character, given that the base anatomical female model is basically the same for all characters, with a few minor changes here and there. A palette texture swap would have been an easy and rapid thing to do (and I still think that coining EDI as a sexbot is rather silly and rather telling of the current mentality (anything that has even the slightest sexualization must be because of perverted reasons), as that would be the same as calling Maria (metropolis) a sexbot as well). I would have prefered if that character remained a mystery, as no matter what they did, people would have been pissed off, given that they created an expectation that couldn't be matched. It would have either been too alien, too human-alike, they should have made something more unique (which is the case), they should have played it safe, etc, etc.