What I would have written (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, February 11, 2016, 00:49 (2996 days ago) @ Ragashingo

I don't have an exact ending in mind, but I wouldn't have taken the series anywhere near where it ended up. A few things bugged me about how everything played out and wrapped up:

- The full sized Reapers were shown to be effectively completely invincible in Mass Effect 3. Yes, we killed a couple of the little ones in unique ways but in all the glorious fleet battle cutscenes I don't think we were ever shown anyone so much as damaging a Reaper.

...and?

- I really hated the Crucible. Over and over and over we are told that we don't know what it will do yet we pour every resource we have into building it. How do you even build something without an end goal in mind?!

- While its a game and I'm the hero, I didn't really like how it came down to one choice by one person at the end. I would rather have had victory depend on the galaxy fighting back as a unified force or fail because of cracks or gaps in that unity.

Those are two really valid points. The Crucible struck me as a really obvious MacGuffin, and the way it was handled felt wrong to me in a similar way.

On the second point... yes, the distinction between the Reaper solution and the Synthesis ending is basically really small-- synthesis is voluntary in the sense that Shepard, standing in for all of humanity, chooses it. Our right to do so was apparently earned by shooting lots of aliens in the face. Sometimes.

So for my endings, there would still be a "you lose" ending where the cycle continues. There would be variations of partial wins where some races came through the war intact and others were completely defeated and scattered based upon your choices throughout the series. And finally, the solution to the Reapers would have been some sort of inversion of Sovereign's revelation that they continued beating the galaxy because it evolved according to their design. We'd beat them because we would know their expectations and act contrary to them. And hopefully that solution would involve, you know, the mass effect.

I honestly think that the entire point of ME's story to that point is the idea that there is no such easy solution to this problem. There's no clever trick, no simple ruse, no device-- even the Crucible turns out to be nothing like what anyone expects, and instead of enabling a shortcut past tough choices, just forced you into making one.

You want a way out of a choice that the makers of the game wanted you to make. It wasn't an oversight by BioWare that they didn't leave that opening there, the point of the story was to close it. The Reapers are invincible and have imposed their solution to the problem. The answer is either defeating them or destroying them or becoming like them in some way or other. Having some trick or a super secret weapon is just a narrative crutch, and I appreciated the ending tremendously for not allowing the player a cheap out like that.

A couple possible solutions that make sense in universe:

- Investing everything in laser technology. Mass effect fields don't do anything to lasers and even ships with the most powerful mass effect shields are vulnerable to them. Maybe the galaxy could invest in a fleet of fast agile Normandys that defied the status quo of deflecting small, heavy, fast moving kinetic projectiles and instead dodged them and tore through the "superior" reapers with short range lasers.

That again is just a cheap plot device. It's different than the crucible, but not better. The primary problem in ME is not fighting the Reapers. They are incidental. They are the visual manifestation of the larger problem, which is about the coexistence of different life forms. They are a force that have imposed their solution, and the challenge is not to overthrow or become them (although it could be if you want) but to choose a different solution (synthesis).

-Do something with the static charge buildup that comes along with using element zero mass effect drives. As I recall, the fiction was if a starship continued using its mass effect core the electrical charge imbalance would eventually be unmanageable and the core would discharge into its host ship badly damaging it or outright destroying it. And the established ways to discharge a ship were to interact with the atmosphere or magnetic field of a planet or other large object. Well, who has the biggest, most power mass effect cores? The Reapers! Sure, make them invincible and unstoppable but with a weakness that nobody ever had the smarts or guts or forces to exploit. Maybe the big plan would be to have enough forces and tactics to keep the Reapers fighting and using their mass effect shields and drives while somehow denying them the ability to discharge their static buildup. This could be a galaxy wide hold the line scenario where not having gotten a race's or group's support would cause massive losses, especially for that race, and allow for everything from a total loss to various partial wins to an outright win depending on your success throughout the entire series. To keep the player involved in gameplay, maybe it's your fleets that keep each Reaper occupied and away from planets while ground teams have to go in and destroy critical discharge hardware or something...

I don't know... maybe combine the two... maybe something else. Like I said, I don't have a clear idea of exactly what should have been done. But, in the end, the way we delayed the Reapers in ME1 was great because it exploited a small flaw in their plans. The way we stopped the Collectors in ME2 was great because it put the emphasis heavily on teamwork and good team choices while still letting the player's moment to moment actions matter. Mass Effect 3? It pretty much did neither. It didn't utilize its own fiction effectively and as much as I love ME3's core gameplay loop, the ending wasn't even close to as effective exploiting and building off of gameplay as ME2's was.

ME3 used its fiction amazingly; just the parts of it that many people ignored in favor of clever ways of, well, shooting aliens in the face.