My ME Rankings *Spoilers* (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, February 02, 2017, 20:55 (2647 days ago) @ marmot 1333

The spoiler tags are getting cumbersome. Just gonna go full open spoilers below this point.

On Shepard Dying: It was a major part of the game's marketing push. The teaser trailer listed out Shepard's accomplishment then put on screen front and center "Status: Killed In Action" while panning over badly damaged N7 armor. That you missed that is actually kinda neat. That opening must have been pretty awesome. But it wasn't intended to be a secret or anything.

Overall, I think it was a good opening, except it ties into so many other parts of the plot I hated. Mainly Separating me from my crew and Cerberus being a seemingly infinitely powerful organization that can even cure death. And not just any death. You didn't just freeze temporarily in space, you burnt up entering an atmosphere!

The point wasn't to give a good reason to switch up classes (didn't have to die in ME3 to do that) it was to separate Shepard from the Alliance and the Council because the story they wanted to tell was about Shepard again having no support. But that wasn't the story I wanted to hear.

The Council: I sacrificed the Shenyang, Emden, Jakarta, Cairo, Seoul, Cape Town, Warsaw, and Madrid to save them and that Turian councilor had the nerve to do his air quotes while talking about the Reapers. It was a complete switch from how grateful they were at the end of ME1. And it was, in my opinion, an insulting failure to base the story around the players' actions.

I was very much looking forward to having at least some official support in ME2. I'd been proven right about Saren and the Reapers and I did everything possible to uphold the council's philosophy of looking out for all the races instead of just looking out for humanity only to be told off, to have the entire Reaper attack disavowed, and to be ordered to do nothing but hunt down remaining Geth.

If they had kept the Reaper attack quiet but sent Shepard out in secret to try and figure out how to stop everyone in the galaxy from being killed I'd have loved it. I didn't expect to be leading a fleet. I did expect them to be nice about the whole thing. That they were written so dismissive and so naive was one of ME2's biggest sins. Everyone hates the ME3 endings, but I probably hate that first meeting with the Council in ME2 more.

The Collectors: I'm not really opposed to them. The Reapers keeping a few servants around in case something went wrong would have been fine. But what they were doing didn't make any sense. They were collecting specimens of other races in exchange for a bit of their technology? They were going to harvest Earth? In a ship that could be taken down by the tiny Normandy? Plus their end goal of building a new Reaper (shaped like a terminator??) was just very strange on so many levels.

Cerberus: Where they got their money was never explained. Who would actually invest so much in a anti-alien / Humans only group was never explained. But the money aspect is kinda beside the point. The thing that felt so wrong about them was that they were seemingly infinitely smart, infinitely informed, and infinitely capable. ME2 kicks off with nothing less than Cerberus curing death. It moves on to them somehow duplicating and enlarging the most advanced starship in the galaxy. The ship whose Mass Effect core alone could have paid for (was it 1,000 or 10,000?) Alliance fighters? They built a loyal, non-evil fully functioning AI. They alone knew what the Collectors were up to. They'd broken Turian military encryption. They had a standing army and navy capable of putting up a major fight against literally everyone from the Alliance to the Salarians and Turians. And, without outside help, they figured out how to control the Reapers.

I've always resisted labeling characters as Mary Sue's because people jump to that conclusion way too quickly, but Cerberus really was a Mary Sue. Or was close to it. Yeah, Shepard can kill their mooks one on one all day long, but the massive scope of capabilities and knowledge that Cerberus had so completely dwarfed that of all the other players in the galaxy that it was just crazy.

My Squad: I liked most of the new ME2 characters. I really liked Jack and Mordin and EDI and Samara (and Morinth). I liked Garrus becoming Archangel a lot because it fit with his ME1 personality of wanting to have the power to do things without C-SEC regulations getting in his way.

Miranda though... meh. Her "I'm so sad that I'm sooo pretty and powerful and perfect" thing got old fast. ME3 made it better by her dad being super evil but she never really stated that as a reason for wanting to get away from him. I just never found her compelling.

Now Liara... what they did to her was another thing I absolutely hated. The entire galaxy is one step away from being mind controlled and then murdered and she's too busy to get up out of her chair. Unless it's for a (legitimately awesome) side quest. Keep in mind I'm perfectly fine with what they did with Tali. Tali went back to the Quarian Fleet like we'd been told Quarians did after their pilgrimage. She'd gained a lot of respect and experience working with Shepard and was allowed to make use of that while working for (and with the support of) her people. She was still herself doing basically the things she had talked about wanting to do all along. But Liara? She went from being an archaeologist and researcher to being an information broker all justified with a single throw away line about something like: "digging up artifacts is a lot like digging up secrets." She was a core team member and they completely sidelined her. I think it was a terrible decision.

There was Wrex getting sidelined too, but again he went on to do what he had said he wanted to do. And he had an entire race to look after. And I cut the writers a little slack because you had to work really hard to save him in ME1 so they were in a tough spot having him be a part of ME2 or 3.

Conclusion: Ultimately though, I had wanted to go back out with the crew I'd fought for and bonded with and search for some crazy way to beat the Reapers with the support of a something resembling a united galaxy behind me. Instead I got killed. Then time skipped forward a couple of years. Then had several people from the Council to some of my closest friends refuse to help me. And then... fought a building sized terminator. Oh, and they introduced the dumb concept of Thermal Clips. ME2 had much better gameplay and some great writing and character moments and one of the best final missions of any game ever, but it also got so so much wrong, in my opinion. And the things it got wrong, it got wrong at the expense of my choices and decisions all so it could railroad me in a direction I didn't want to go.