When I invoked the trope, I was not referencing these politics or attitudes, just the Collectors specifically targeting humans to the exception of other races due to plot mcguffins.

I wasn't even thinking about that.

I actually didn't mean to invoke that particular trope, the idea that humans are better, but more the tendency of many works to make humans somehow special-- to make the works about humanity, and to make a universe in which humans are somehow special. The way Halo eventually did, first by hinting that Humans were the same as, or descendants of, the Forerunners, and then by turning them into something even better than that in the distant past. Or the way ME sort of does, by virtue of the fact that even though the Reapers are eventually foiled by a coalition of all races, the one person who gets to make the call about how things end is a human, and there's no option to play a non-Human Shepard.

I'd say it's a variation on the trope, where although humans are clearly not in a superior position in ME's status quo, there are those who believe that it is OK to put the good of your race above the good of all others, or above the need to adhere to certain standards of behavior.

One can argue that the humans are no more racist than some of the non-human races are. It just seems to me that some of the aliens you meet dislike humans, and some don't, but nearly all the humans except Shepard and Anderson are either suspicious of other races (Alenko) or downright xenophobic (Williams).

Humans appear to be the last spacefaring race to the party, and yet many (Udina, Illusive Man) feel they deserve better treatment for some indeterminate reason, despite the fact that other races that are presumably more advanced and have been spacefaring for longer also don't have seats on the council (Volus, Hanar, Batarian, Elcor).

That those exact same three turn on you in public and private so dramatically feels completely wrong in a series who's stated goal was to respect player choice across games.

I took "those three" to mean the council. The way I interpreted your statement, you said, the player chose to save the council, then the council turned on the player, so that isn't respecting the player's choice. But that's fallacious. You don't control the choices of the council, only Shepard.

The humans are superior trope is that humans are objectively better then aliens in the factors that matter. Not that they have racist attitudes against non-humans, although that tends to be present to some degree.

You seem to conflate the distrust and dislike of humans with the trope. Bioware looks at the politics of the universe at large, where humans are not special or superior, and other aliens reactions to humans are explored.

Saren hating humans is a big point of ME1. The earth first groups and attitudes are a foil to that. Is there a difference between him and Ashley/Kaiden? Why? Given how manipulative and disrespectful the Asari, Turians and Salarians are, is some suspicion of their motives justified? We see several instances of racism against humans from other aliens throughout the series.

When I invoked the trope, I was not referencing these politics or attitudes, just the Collectors specifically targeting humans to the exception of other races due to plot mcguffins.

Yup. You wanted it to be something different than its creators intended.

Indeed. Because sometimes the creators get it wrong. I firmly believe that Mass Effect is one of those cases because the ending completely and utterly failed to live up to the rest of the series.

I think it did. Do you happen to think this is some kind of objective fact that can be determined?

Saving both the Geth and Quarians is the hardest thing in the game. I believe it requires having taken the correct actions in Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, and holding out when hope of ending the conflict between the two fleets seems lost, and finally using a reputation interrupt in the final seconds of the upload countdown. It is the best example of the player's choices mattering and an example of organics and synthetics coexisting which is why it is such a travesty that your actions get completely wiped out roughly an hour later by the ending.

Indeed. A very satisfying mission. If your criticism is that the finale fails to live up to that, then I'd concede the point, but sometimes that is just how things turn out, especially in a complex work.

How does static buildup explore the theme of race relations? You're dealing with this on the level of plot devices, and I don't care about that because I'm discussing the themes.

Wrong. My example solutions are only viable if you spent the three games of the series confronting those themes.

The games do. If you, as a player, did not, then that was your choice, but it seems to me that the creators of the game wanted you to.

A victory wouldn't be achieved is spite of or by ignoring those themes, it would be the reward for interacting with them and addressing them over and over and over again.

Throughout Mass Effect you are constantly dealing with races who at a minimum don't like each other (Humans vs Turians), who are locked in an eternal stalemate (Quarians vs Geth), and at worst who, if given the chance, would commit xenocide on a galaxy wide scale (Krogran vs everyone). Ultimately, any victory vs the Reapers in my examples requires three games worth of caring about and dealing with those themes. If you don't save every race and have the correct leadership in charge of every race then my solutions result in either a total fail or a devastating partial fail.

Rewarding the player with a partial or total victory based on them interacting with the theme of race relations and coexistance seems a lot better to me than wiping all the player's choices out at the very very very end of the series. Remember, the four potential endings were: Destroy (Reapers & Geth & EDI all die), Synthesis (Geth no longer exist as a distinct race after the player spent three games working to save them), Everyone dies (all the player's work is undone) or Control (a solution that was extremely heavily implied to be both morally wrong and not actually possible).

To meet the work on its own level you'd have to accept its premises but desire a different conclusion. The relevant characters, and the framework of the fiction itself, indicates that all other things being equal, conflict between organic and synthetic lifeforms is inevitable. Since Bioware defines and controls the universe, I think it's necessary to accept that premise, and once accepted, I think the possible endings, as outlined above, necessarily follows.

To wish for some other victory condition, to ask that everyone "just get along" is naive. It is wanting something for nothing. And again, look at the race relations metaphor, these are exactly the outcomes we see: destruction, assimilation, subversion, revolution. As cultures coexist and commingle (as intermarriage is made legal, becomes acceptable, and perhaps even desirable) cultures become less distinct from one another. Sure, I'll grant that the Synthesis ending is both an extreme and literal example of that, but there you have it.

Sorry, I don't think I'm required to meet your arbitrary standard for reductionism. All of the above reads to me like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle" and that, to me, sounds cheap and silly.

Your idea that Bioware always intended the series to end badly

Who said it ends badly? The Synthesis ending, to me, is not "badly". What I think Bioware intended was that positive resolution would not come without perceived cost, because there's no magical doohicky that's going to let you issue a monologue and go kick Reaper ass and then chew bubble gum.

ignores that the player spent the series interacting with and potentially resolving several major race relation based conflicts, could save several races from extinction, and can prove the Reapers' entire grand idea about synthetics always destroying organics wrong. If all you see is a McGuffin in suggested solutions that reward the player for engaging with the philosophical and technological themes present in the games then you clearly aren't putting effort into looking.

All you suggested was static buildup. All the other stuff you mentioned is already in the game, it just comes before the final conversation.

As for "proving that the Reaper's grand idea about synthetics always destroying organics wrong" you can't prove that wrong outside of Synthesis because in that universe it is not wrong. You can say you don't like that, you can say it's not an accurate reflection of the world or the universe we live in, but that's established as a fact in the canonical universe by the only relevant authority-- that all other things being equal, this is what happens. and Synthesis is presented as the only remedy with the potential to work because it is the only thing that changes the fundamental reasons for the conflict-- membership in exclusive groups. People being both Geth and Quarian is looked upon by the game's fiction as superior and preferable to continued coexistence of forever separate Geth and Quarian for those reasons. It is necessary to bring the organic-synthetic conflict down to the level of race relations as we know them, because despite every other difference they might have, members of different races in the world we know are members of the same species, can intermarry, can interbreed, can blend the social groups they are in in a real and primal way that is not possible for the different species we meet; it is an intellectual and philosophical process only. I might also imagine a world where organic and synthetic life need not ever come into conflict. If I were to predict the future of our own world, I might also be so idealistic as to say such conflict need not arise, or that should it arise, it could be remedied by measures far less drastic as presented.

But that is not the universe of Mass Effect as presented by the creators of the Mass Effect universe.

I think you're far too busy reducing others' ideas into insultingly simple statements like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle."

I wasn't reducing anything. You literally had no other suggestion. You said it yourself, you defeat the Reapers through a technical process. That was it. As for the answer to the central conflict-- how is the inevitable conflict between organic and synthetic life resolved, I see your solution now is a non-solution, since you don't accept the premise, but I think that's a poor interpretation unsupported by the primary work.

And you know what? You do have to meet my standards if you want to talk to me.

In that case you better be sure not to reply, because this is me, not meeting your standards.

You haven't, so this is the last time I engage you on anything.

Okey dokey.

Worse, you have now shown repeatedly that you are incapable of having a discussion without reducing other's arguments until they are completely unrecognizable and completely different from their intent.

Stop, don't, come back.

It's not my job here or anywhere else to attempt to tease your intent out of your argument. I asked for what you would write, and you literally suggested static electricity. Before that, the thread's suggestion was space battles. I don't need to reduce these ideas, they came that way. You've literally suggested that the alternative to an (admittedly forced) racial combination of synthetic and organic life was STATIC ELECTRICITY to basically do something that defeats the Reapers. I wasn't asking for the mechanism, because one is as good as the other for the purpose at hand.

The work says organic-synthetic conflict is inevitable. Your answer is to say "no it isn't" which isn't an answer. The answer has to be in the form of what, on a fundamental level, you would change about the reality of this universe to make that not true. The game has a very strong suggestion. You've offered criticism of that suggestion with no credible alternative.

This thread is just one of the milder examples of you doing so and I see now that I should have never responded to you based on your past history alone, much less on your conduct in this thread.

My conduct in this thread? Are you joking, or are your feelings hurt? I'm sorry man, I'll go easy next time.

In the immortal words of Willy Wonka:

"You lose! Good day, sir!"

Whatever, man. I never addressed anything to you whatsoever, I was suggesting to Quirel to the effect that the ending of ME3 can be accurately predicted from just paying attention to Sovereign-- and it absolutely can. You chose to write that monologue off as standard villainous puffery, but it wasn't. It was the author speaking to the audience about what the theme of the work is-- what the essential conflict that needed to be resolved was going to be, and that such resolution was going to come at great cost.

Static electricity indeed.

Yup. You wanted it to be something different than its creators intended.

Indeed. Because sometimes the creators get it wrong. I firmly believe that Mass Effect is one of those cases because the ending completely and utterly failed to live up to the rest of the series.

ME2's mission could end up costing the lives of part of your crew, depending on how you play it. You spend most of the game working for a human supremacist group that you either hate or probably SHOULD hate. If you do a certain DLC mission, you end up causing the deaths of 300,000 aliens, supposedly justified by saving millions or billions more. Necessary, perhaps yes. True victory of a hero? Very debatable.

I played Mass Effect 2 taking command of Cerberus' resources, turning its people to my side, and ultimately defying its leader and stealing its most advanced starship. I never, ever, worked for them. And those 300,000 Batarians? I seem to recall a Codex entry in Mass Effect 3 that states that an Alliance team undertakes the same mission if you don't but does not warn the nearby colony and results in millions of additional deaths and the complete loss of that commando team. So yeah, I was a hero.

I'll refresh my memory when we reach the last game in our LP series, but if I recall, achieving that was not one of the easier things in the game, on a par with saving Wrex in the first one, and I seem to remember it being underscored at the time that the peace was not a permanent solution.

I'm working my way there myself so I'll have exact quotes in a few days, but from what I recall, you are absolutely wrong. The Geth were extremely conciliatory. They didn't just end their blockade of the Quarian homeworld, they actively suggested the best places for the Quarians to resettle, they helped build infrastructure for the Quarians, and had already begun to play an active role in helping to repair the Quarian's atrophied immune systems with the result that the Quarians alive at that moment would have a chance to live without their suits instead of the acclamation process taking generations.

Saving both the Geth and Quarians is the hardest thing in the game. I believe it requires having taken the correct actions in Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, and holding out when hope of ending the conflict between the two fleets seems lost, and finally using a reputation interrupt in the final seconds of the upload countdown. It is the best example of the player's choices mattering and an example of organics and synthetics coexisting which is why it is such a travesty that your actions get completely wiped out roughly an hour later by the ending.

How does static buildup explore the theme of race relations? You're dealing with this on the level of plot devices, and I don't care about that because I'm discussing the themes.

Wrong. My example solutions are only viable if you spent the three games of the series confronting those themes. A victory wouldn't be achieved is spite of or by ignoring those themes, it would be the reward for interacting with them and addressing them over and over and over again.

Throughout Mass Effect you are constantly dealing with races who at a minimum don't like each other (Humans vs Turians), who are locked in an eternal stalemate (Quarians vs Geth), and at worst who, if given the chance, would commit xenocide on a galaxy wide scale (Krogran vs everyone). Ultimately, any victory vs the Reapers in my examples requires three games worth of caring about and dealing with those themes. If you don't save every race and have the correct leadership in charge of every race then my solutions result in either a total fail or a devastating partial fail.

Rewarding the player with a partial or total victory based on them interacting with the theme of race relations and coexistance seems a lot better to me than wiping all the player's choices out at the very very very end of the series. Remember, the four potential endings were: Destroy (Reapers & Geth & EDI all die), Synthesis (Geth no longer exist as a distinct race after the player spent three games working to save them), Everyone dies (all the player's work is undone) or Control (a solution that was extremely heavily implied to be both morally wrong and not actually possible).

Sorry, I don't think I'm required to meet your arbitrary standard for reductionism. All of the above reads to me like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle" and that, to me, sounds cheap and silly.

Your idea that Bioware always intended the series to end badly ignores that the player spent the series interacting with and potentially resolving several major race relation based conflicts, could save several races from extinction, and can prove the Reapers' entire grand idea about synthetics always destroying organics wrong. If all you see is a McGuffin in suggested solutions that reward the player for engaging with the philosophical and technological themes present in the games then you clearly aren't putting effort into looking. I think you're far too busy reducing others' ideas into insultingly simple statements like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle."

And you know what? You do have to meet my standards if you want to talk to me. You haven't, so this is the last time I engage you on anything. Worse, you have now shown repeatedly that you are incapable of having a discussion without reducing other's arguments until they are completely unrecognizable and completely different from their intent. This thread is just one of the milder examples of you doing so and I see now that I should have never responded to you based on your past history alone, much less on your conduct in this thread.

In the immortal words of Willy Wonka:

"You lose! Good day, sir!"

While I like the "humans are superior" trope, that isn't the central theme of the ME universe.

Really? I'd have argued that it absolutely is. You play a human character and are given two human crewmembers who are suspicious to the point of xenophobia about aliens. Your military commander points out that he believes you about Saren being the bad guy because he's known to hate humans. The ambassador's primary thought and motivation is that humans don't get the respect they deserve.

You'll soon encounter a shadowy group of "humans first" activists with flexible morals, and they'll become much more important in the next game, essentially becoming the real antagonist by the third.

I think it's pointed out fairly commonly that humans are not superior. Wrex's comments about being spaced aside, Asari live for thousands of years, are tougher and are born with space magic. Krogan are nearly impossible to kill. Turians have metal laced skin. Even Quarians are hinted to be physically tougher but have their immunity issues. So at best humans have parity with Baterians and Salarians and some advantage over the Volus.

Mostly the human government has an attitude because despite being the third largest military power and significant economic might they get treated as a 2nd tier race like the subservient Volus, to the point of having to share an Embassy rather then get one of their own. Top it off with the first major alien encounter being an assault by the Turians on a human colony and of course you are going to have a bunch of ill will from humans to the rest of the galaxy. Of course the Council is full of morons who can't lead there way out of a wet paper bag, and is revealed to be full of Orwellian Big Brother types who hide the true history of the galaxy for their own benefit, so humanity's distrust is somewhat justified.

the only real "humans are special/superior" comments I saw where naval tactics, where the human fleets use a different strategy from everyone else (and far more carriers), and ME2 with them being chosen to make a new reaper, which is in part because Shepard defeated Sovereign in ME1.

Perhaps I've not been clear. I'm arguing against the idea that the game pushes the idea of humans as superior. It exposes that theme for the lie it is. It puts those words in some of your allies and many more of your enemies. The game is there to explore and debunk that idea, not glorify it-- which the many things you point about above demonstrate.

It's also worth noting that if you sympathize with Cerberus and spend the series hanging out with Kaidan and Ashley, you're going to get an earful about Those Damn Aliens, and you may well discount what the others say. After all, the game does let you kill the council, replace them with humans, and put Udina in charge. I forget to what extent it lets you side with Illusive Man through 2 and 3 because it never, ever occurred to me to do it, but he ends up being the primary source for the "humans first" viewpoint.

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?

Do you really not understand or are you just being ultra reductionist?

I'm not, particularly-- at least, no more than the game is. ME has two (three if you count deus ex cutscene) ways of resolving conflict: action scenes and conversations. If the conversation is insufficiently heroic compared to previous resolutions, then mostly what you're suggesting is that you either wanted it replaced with an action sequence, supplanted WITH an action sequence, or solved by some clever rabbit being pulled out of a hat (cutscene).

I wanted Mass Effect to be a series where playing the hero and uniting the galaxy allowed much more of a true victory.

Yup. You wanted it to be something different than its creators intended. I think the way the game ended in all of its permutations was far more than adequately foreshadowed from the start of the series, but you obviously feel differently. So what you're really faulting the game for is allowing you the freedom to fight the direction it was moving in, but not at the very end. But if you'll allow that as the maker of the game and its story, how it ends, or at least the boundaries of how it ends, should be properly within Bioware's control, then what you'd be arguing for is not more freedom in the ending, but less freedom everywhere else.

Even then I'd argue that many of the ways you resolve problems are inelegant, forced compromises. Often you're forced to kill people you might actually sympathize with a little bit (until you've maxed out persuasion and intimidation and/or paragon/renegade options) or else accept a less than ideal resolution.

For instance, I just finished off an ME1 sidequest that started out with you confronting (that is, shooting) some criminals, only to find out that the person who hired you is also a criminal.

If you attempt to arrest them, it starts a firefight where either you die (and reload) or they die, and that's it. So you were duped into killing some people and then ended up making up for it.. by killing more people. Hurray, you're a multiple murdering vigilante!

You can also converse your way out of it, convincing the criminal to give up the life of crime, which she will do-- but only if you agree not to arrest her! Try that, and it's back to square one with the gunfight.

So you either let a known criminal who tricked you into murder get away, or you commit another murder. Which of those resolutions was "playing the hero and uniting the galaxy" or a "true victory"? I'd say this sidequest is much more typical of how events go in the series than anything like what you say you want.

ME1 ends with the defeat of Saren and a single reaper, but at the cost of massive loss of life and serious damage to the Citadel.

ME2's mission could end up costing the lives of part of your crew, depending on how you play it. You spend most of the game working for a human supremacist group that you either hate or probably SHOULD hate. If you do a certain DLC mission, you end up causing the deaths of 300,000 aliens, supposedly justified by saving millions or billions more. Necessary, perhaps yes. True victory of a hero? Very debatable.

Sure, there's a certain neatness to a series that commit totally to an inevitable bad ending, see Life Is Strange for a very recent example, but I don't think Mass Effect as a series made that commitment. Instead it lead players on to believing that their choices mattered then abruptly those choices didn't.

ME1 was showing you that some choices you made didn't stick right from the start. Save the council or kill them? Doesn't really matter, at least not in a gameplay sense. Stack the council with humans? Again, doesn't affect a thing, gameplay-wise. Udina or Anderson? Ditto. Those choices, like the one at the end of the series, are less about what actually happens and more about how your character feels about what happens. It's not about how or to what degree your Shepard saves the universe, but what kind of Shepard your Shepard is.

- 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.

Well, it does, but only up to a point. You can't get anything but the bad ending if you fail to achieve that by doing the readiness missions and/or playing the multiplayer. What we're talking about is success (or failure, depending) over and above that. Given the credible and near-invincible threat posed by the Reapers, I never-- not for a second-- supposed a military victory was possible, so I was not surprised when things did not end that way. Given the massive effort required to bring down, what, a total of 3 Reapers in the series-- one of which was unfinished, and one of which required the efforts of an entire fleet to dispatch-- the idea that the Reapers, once they arrived, could be defeated even by the unified military efforts of all factions was not believable to me. So when that turns out just to be to gain time and access for Shepard to seek out what was really behind it all, I was not unsurprised, nor was I disappointed.

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.

One, each ending was shown to affect all races. So, if anything, Shepard was standing in for the entire galaxy.

Yes, that's true. I suppose it's just a necessary compromise with the nature of being a video game. You could have called the star child into a council meeting, and had everybody vote, although we've already sort of gotten that kind of scene on the Flotilla, so it'd be repetitive. The difference between this cycle and all the others is you-- Shepard-- so the thing that breaks the cycle has to be a thing the Shepard can do. And while Shepard is a very, very good soldier, that's not what is special about them, and it's not what makes them the protagonist.

Two. I am very very much not interested in continuing this if you're going to reduce it down to "shooting aliens in the face." Yes, that was the primary gameplay loop, but it was not the point of the game's story. Reducing it down that far feels like you are ignoring very present themes within the game, as well as other poster's arguments. It kinda feels insulting and like you don't care to have an actual discussion, you know? I think the Mass Effect series was about a lot more than simply shooting aliens in the face and there's not much more to be said if you are going to return to that no matter what...

By that I meant what I said at the top-- resolutions are either conversations or combat, of which there is already plenty and to spare in the game. That's the very real binary the game presents, and the source of much dissatisfaction by fans and detractors alike, despite the games complex treatment of a lot of themes. For myself, I fully expected the final resolution of the game to be a conversation, as it was in the previous two games. All the games have a climactic action sequence, but that's not really the resolution of those games. ME1 leads up to and ends with your decisions about what to do about the Council; in ME2 its mostly about determining what your relationship is to Cerberus and its goals.

So what I'm saying by harping on "shooting aliens" is saying that I not only expected, but wanted, ME3 to end with a conversation and not a fight. Once that's agreed upon, the question is, who should the conversation be with, and what should it be about? I think Bioware decided, and correctly, that the conversation could not be with the Reapers themselves, but a force that could potentially mediate between the approach to the conflict represented by the Reapers and some possible alternatives. I think it's also necessary to recognize that some solutions are not permanent-- brokering peace between the Quarians and the Geth, for instance, is difficult, but possible, but the game underscores the idea that the balance is unstable.

So the fact that the conversation ended up being about what those big picture alternatives might be is fitting-- do you usurp the reapers, destroy them, or unify them with you and everyone else, removing the underlying reason for the conflict?

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.

But remember, I already consider the Crucible to be a horribly flawed plot device that itself introduced new characters and dumped out new backstory within the last fifteen minutes of gameplay. The "starchild"and the Reaper's true purpose to name two of the big ones. I really don't mind unhappy endings but I do think that games need to commit to them and embrace them and support them, and I don't feel as if Mass Effect as a series did any of those things.

Remember, my favorite ending of Mass Effect 3 is the everybody loses ending because it is the most strongly supported... of the four. But that it is the most strongly supported is a travesty to me because all three games spend the whole time telling you that you can make a difference.

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.

Except you're reducing my ending to a cheap out when I adamantly do not want it to be.

I know you don't want it to be, but I think it is, and I think the authors of the scenario considered it to be, and I think that's demonstrated by the way they hierarchically structured them. The "lose to the reapers" ending you can get by simply charging into the final battle and losing, sort of like botching the Omega relay mission in ME2. I think the message there is clearly that a military-only solution is doomed to failure. For Shepard to have lived through the scenario to that point and still think enough violence would solve everything I think is naive. That ending is the one that least explores the themes the game has brought up, and I think that's why you like it. What you don't like is the result; it's the only ending that is military only in its nature, but it's a loss, not a win, because within the structure of the fiction there is no credible military victory possible. In fact, there are conversations where Shepard addresses this very point, and I always saw the responses to those as ranging from an admission that the situation was impossible, to false bravado. Nothing about how hard it was to kill a couple of Reapers suggested that anything the combined fleets were actually going to be able to win, and they aren't.

I do find it interesting that within the context of war stories people are more than willing to accept an implacable enemy, but rarely willing to accept an invincible one. I suppose that is a healthy viewpoint for a culture to have, from one perspective, but that doesn't necessarily make it accurate.

I would want any such winning solution to be foreshadowed at from very early on. To have it demonstrated in a small scale as the series moved forward. Have it become important enough to be noted on more as things really heated up. And have it been a solution that could work but at great cost perhaps of sacrificing entire worlds or sections of the galaxy. To put it simply, I want any such solution to be very strongly supported both in subtle ways and direct ways as the series progressed. At that point it no longer would be the crutch you are making it out to be and would instead be the plot of the game.

You wanted an entirely different game. Not a different ending. Not a different sequence. You want a fundamentally different game, and for me, one that would have been philosophically unsatisfying because it would allow you to "win" without addressing the fundamental questions that the final sequence poses.

Does that mean I wanted a different game? Sure. Like I said up top, I would not have taken the series anywhere near where it ended up. Because I didn't like where it went. But not only did I not like where it went, I do not think the did a good enough job to support the "all choices had to be bad" ending that we got, if that was actually the intention along.

I think it was, and I think you ignored the parts of the series that presaged that, either because you were constantly fighting or ignoring those choices, or because you avoided thinking about them, or because you didn't like where the game was going and so you blocked those portions out.

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).

No. It is very much a better solution than "pour all our resources into a device who's end goal literally nobody understands."

You're conflating in-world with out-of-world. I'm not saying that making some super-mega-weapon thingy would, in the context of the gameworld, for the characters making that decision, would be a worse solution.

What I am saying is that for Bioware to allow such a solution would be an even worse Deus Ex Machina than the one they used, because it specifically allows for a resolution that I think Bioware made clear was not going to be possible: conventional military victory.

If I'm going to stand behind any point in this discussion it's that the Crucible was the absolute stupidest part of the entire Mass Effect series. We spent all of Mass Effect 3 searching for "the catalysts" but that didn't turn out to be an exotic gas or material or type of energy... it turned out to be the freaking huge space station that the Crucible docked with, a station that every race working on the Crucible knew about. It was facepalm your head into a bloody pulp against the wall stupid and almost any solution consistent with the game's lore is better.

Yeah, dumb, I agree. I suppose the only thing one can believe is that within the story, the characters were desperate enough to cling to any hope whatsoever, and that is what they got. For the purpose of the story, it's just a bridge that gets us to the real final confrontation.

Beyond that, one of the last major accomplishments you are able to make in Mass Effect 3 before the ending sequence and battles is convincing the Quarians and Geth to coexist without controlling, destroying, or merging with each other. Why show peaceful separate coexistence between organic and synthetic life if the three choices you intended to present to players all along did not include that choice? It does not make any sense.

I'll refresh my memory when we reach the last game in our LP series, but if I recall, achieving that was not one of the easier things in the game, on a par with saving Wrex in the first one, and I seem to remember it being underscored at the time that the peace was not a permanent solution.

(Yes, in some cases a Geth mind would temporarily exist within a Quarian's environmental suit to help speed the immune system adaption to their homeworld but that was temporary, voluntary, and the goal was to allow the Quarians to stop needing their suits so it has very little relation to the synthesis ending which was permanent and involuntary for all the trillions of life forms who were not Commander Shepard.)

-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.

Again. Too reductionist for me. Either have a conversation or don't.

Sorry, I don't think I'm required to meet your arbitrary standard for reductionism. All of the above reads to me like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle" and that, to me, sounds cheap and silly.

How does static buildup explore the theme of race relations? You're dealing with this on the level of plot devices, and I don't care about that because I'm discussing the themes. Finding some trick that wins the battle means you resolve the conflict the same way Illusive Man wants to; the only difference is the nature of the trick. In fact, turning Indoctrination to your benefit is exactly the kind of trick you're suggesting. If that's your thing, what's wrong with that ending? It also conveniently means that the central question-- can organic and synthetic lifeforms coexist without conflict-- is either unaddressed entirely, or answered by "yes-- as long as I'm on the winning side"! And that's the part I find cheap, because while I think Bioware wanted to allow players to choose that, they didn't want to allow them to feel good about it.

What makes him great is how much he truly believes he is the good guy in the story yet he is an absolutely horrible person.

Thus leading to his brilliant "bad guys" monologue:

That's my favorite Handsome Jack line in the game :-)

While I like the "humans are superior" trope, that isn't the central theme of the ME universe.

Really? I'd have argued that it absolutely is. You play a human character and are given two human crewmembers who are suspicious to the point of xenophobia about aliens. Your military commander points out that he believes you about Saren being the bad guy because he's known to hate humans. The ambassador's primary thought and motivation is that humans don't get the respect they deserve.

You'll soon encounter a shadowy group of "humans first" activists with flexible morals, and they'll become much more important in the next game, essentially becoming the real antagonist by the third.

I think it's pointed out fairly commonly that humans are not superior. Wrex's comments about being spaced aside, Asari live for thousands of years, are tougher and are born with space magic. Krogan are nearly impossible to kill. Turians have metal laced skin. Even Quarians are hinted to be physically tougher but have their immunity issues. So at best humans have parity with Baterians and Salarians and some advantage over the Volus.

Mostly the human government has an attitude because despite being the third largest military power and significant economic might they get treated as a 2nd tier race like the subservient Volus, to the point of having to share an Embassy rather then get one of their own. Top it off with the first major alien encounter being an assault by the Turians on a human colony and of course you are going to have a bunch of ill will from humans to the rest of the galaxy. Of course the Council is full of morons who can't lead there way out of a wet paper bag, and is revealed to be full of Orwellian Big Brother types who hide the true history of the galaxy for their own benefit, so humanity's distrust is somewhat justified.

the only real "humans are special/superior" comments I saw where naval tactics, where the human fleets use a different strategy from everyone else (and far more carriers), and ME2 with them being chosen to make a new reaper, which is in part because Shepard defeated Sovereign in ME1.

Programming.

That's the flaw in the Reaper's plans, and it's one they know about. The Mass Relays they built to allow interstellar civilizations to flourish and constrain the galaxy's technological development can be used against them. If the Relays were reprogrammed by a cultivar race and fed with accurate targeting data, the Reaper fleet could be torn apart with FTL projectiles.

This is a known flaw, and the Reapers have taken it into account. Considerable effort has gone into protecting the Relays from tampering, and only the control terminal on the Citadel can reprogram the Relays. Every Reaper invasion begins with a decapitation strike that captures the Citadel. Complete operational surprise is achieved each time.

This is why Sovereign was so desperate to assume control of the Citadel, even though a Reaper fleet is only two years away from the galaxy. The Prothean team from Illos managed to disable the Mass Relay without alerting it, and it didn't know what else they had done. As it turns out, they did some of the preliminary work in opening up the Citadel's control network, but died before they could complete the work.

Fortunately, previous cycles have worked on the problem, and the most complete Prothean archives available speak of ancient plans to turn the Mass Relay network into a weapon. The Protheans themselves were interested in this project as a tool to maintain compliance throughout the galaxy, but were ignorant of the weapon's intended target. The Mars archives speaks of other Prothean research installations that were working on the project. Perhaps more information could be hidden there?

Just when it looks like the game is winding up for a repeat of the original game, it's revealed that you don't have to go hunting all over the galaxy. The Council dispatched research teams shortly after your death, and didn't tell you of their plans to combat the Reapers because of, you know, Cerberus.

You just have to pick them up and bail them out of trouble, but that's more of a side quest. The galaxy is falling apart, the Reapers are assaulting home systems and pushing toward the Citadel, and Shepard is the best bet to reunite everyone. Cue the missions we had in Mass Effect 3, with some rewriting to make Cerberus less stupid. Oh, and Kai Leng is going to be reworked into a less annoying stress ball.

Hell, you know what? Forget swords. Forget the trashy JRPG design. Forget making Kai Leng the anti-Shepard. We've already had an anti-Shepard, and his name was Saren. By this point, Shepard has waded through armies. Hotshots and criminal warlords and the galaxy's best assassins have tried to kill her and failed spectacularly. Kai Leng should be a villain who acknowledges that. Kai Leng should be a villain who fights asymmetrically, who avoids direct conflict with Shepard, who books it when it looks like he might get trapped in the same room as Shepard.

The Reapers capture the Citadel after a long and shut down the relay network. Fortunately, by this time the Reaper IFF you captured in ME2 has been distributed among the Council, so entire fleets are passing through the network unhindered. You've got the same buildup to retake the Citadel that there was to retake Earth in the original ME3, you've built a coalition with diplomacy and bravery and offering seats on the Council, and Reaper offensives are stalling across the board.

Side note: Keep the Reapers weird. They aren't here to make synthetics and organics play nice. The cycle does not repeat itself for any reason you can wrap your head around. If you make certain decisions, the Illusive Man turned himself into a husk hybrid trying to understand the Reaper's motives, and when you find him, he's eaten his gun. There are multiple conflicting answers as to what the Reapers were doing with the genetic paste in ME2, and when asked if the Reapers have anything to do with Dholen, credible sources answer yes and no, independently.

And when the Reapers take the Citadel, they activate something. Not a Mass Relay, but it's firing superluminal masses of dark matter out of the galaxy. Telemetry data suggests that they're launching these pulsed masses at dark portions of the sky. Even at superluminal speeds, these masses won't encounter a galaxy for billions of years.

So the coalition comes in hard to retake the Citadel. The Reapers are outnumbered, but they might be outgunned as well. But not for long.

You see, locking down the Citadel really did strand the Reapers out in darkspace. It would take hundreds if not thousands of years for them to return, but they had a contingency plan in place. And that plan was Harbinger's fleet, stationed relatively close to the galaxy. If the sentinel, Sovereign should fail, Harbinger and his fleet would rush in and open the doors.

And that there? That's the doors opening right now.

So the last level is a race through the Citadel to deliver the Crucible (A handheld device that will hack into the Citadel's control terminal and grant access) while Reapers pour through the Citadel's Mass Relay. And you aren't alone. Asari commandos and Salarian STG operatives are racing to other parts of the Citadel with their own Crucibles as mixed units of Turian infantry and Krogan Kakliosaur cavalry eliminate the Reaper ground forces and Geth artillery embeds itself on every flat surface available and pummels the Reaper small craft. It's ME2's suicide mission all over again, only instead of individual squad members, it's all the people you've united under a common banner.

I think there's got to be a boss battle, and Harbinger is the best candidate. He was underutilized in ME3 anyway. The fight should be to protect the Crucible as waves upon waves of Reaper troops descend upon your position. Harbinger is ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL of whatever he can, and argues with you in between waves.

You are, of course, going to survive with the Crucible intact. That doesn't mean that the Reaper invasion will be successfully averted. In order to control the Mass Relay network, dozens of Crucibles have to be in place and functioning, and if your forces are weak (Killing the Rachni, Quarians, or Geth incurs a massive penalty) then they might be wiped out. Even if they are successful, they may be delayed long enough for the Reapers to tear the Citadel apart, or destroy the Widow Mass Relay, or anything else that might cripple galactic civilization. The targeting of the Mass Relay turned Mass Driver might be shody enough that the Citadel itself is all but obliterated in the crossfire.

There isn't necessarily a happy ending. But victory and unity can be achieved, and the result respects your choices.

Agreed.

I liked the idea that the Reapers were tough but not invincible. That, like Sovereign said, they were able to win decisively over and over because organic life inevitably found the Mass Relays and the Citadel and developed along similar lines. As much as I like Mass Effect (I think it is easily one of the top series of the 360 / PS3 generation and rivals any other series of that time) in some ways it was a series marked by a string of plot based betrayals.

- Wasn't the original idea put forth that stopping Sovereign would strand the Reaper fleet in darks space? And, to me at least, the implication of "strand" meant more than "have them have to do an extra two years of easy, no consequences flying."

- One of the biggest ones, where the Council completely turned its back on you and pretended the huge battle at the Citadel simply did not happen. The disavowing of the Reapers was maybe one of the biggest let downs of the 360 generation. I'd have been ok with them publicly blaming the Geth, a known boogeyman, while preparing for the actual extinction they knew was coming... but instead they spent Mass Effect 2 in complete lala land after I sacrificed my friends and colleagues of the Alliance fleet to save them.

Is the problem that you don't think that was plausible, or that you didn't like it, as a character?

I don't think you're supposed to like it, but it seemed fairly plausible to me. Admitting the existence of Reapers publicly would undermine nearly every political authority in existence, and might still achieve nothing that you can't do in secret.

Like I said, I'd be ok with that being the public story to maintain galactic order while the council sent you, their top Specter, out with full support to try and find the solution to the real threat. Instead, they withdraw their support to you as well. On top of that, it was one of the first game's final major choices, to save the council by sacrificing lives for them or to let them die in the hopes of having the forces necessary to kill Sovereign. That those exact same three turn on you in public and private so dramatically feels completely wrong in a series who's stated goal was to respect player choice across games.

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?

Do you really not understand or are you just being ultra reductionist? I wanted Mass Effect to be a series where playing the hero and uniting the galaxy allowed much more of a true victory. Sure, there's a certain neatness to a series that commit totally to an inevitable bad ending, see Life Is Strange for a very recent example, but I don't think Mass Effect as a series made that commitment. Instead it lead players on to believing that their choices mattered then abruptly those choices didn't.

- 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.

One, each ending was shown to affect all races. So, if anything, Shepard was standing in for the entire galaxy. Two. I am very very much not interested in continuing this if you're going to reduce it down to "shooting aliens in the face." Yes, that was the primary gameplay loop, but it was not the point of the game's story. Reducing it down that far feels like you are ignoring very present themes within the game, as well as other poster's arguments. It kinda feels insulting and like you don't care to have an actual discussion, you know? I think the Mass Effect series was about a lot more than simply shooting aliens in the face and there's not much more to be said if you are going to return to that no matter what...

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.

But remember, I already consider the Crucible to be a horribly flawed plot device that itself introduced new characters and dumped out new backstory within the last fifteen minutes of gameplay. The "starchild"and the Reaper's true purpose to name two of the big ones. I really don't mind unhappy endings but I do think that games need to commit to them and embrace them and support them, and I don't feel as if Mass Effect as a series did any of those things.

Remember, my favorite ending of Mass Effect 3 is the everybody loses ending because it is the most strongly supported... of the four. But that it is the most strongly supported is a travesty to me because all three games spend the whole time telling you that you can make a difference.

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.

Except you're reducing my ending to a cheap out when I adamantly do not want it to be. I would want any such winning solution to be foreshadowed at from very early on. To have it demonstrated in a small scale as the series moved forward. Have it become important enough to be noted on more as things really heated up. And have it been a solution that could work but at great cost perhaps of sacrificing entire worlds or sections of the galaxy. To put it simply, I want any such solution to be very strongly supported both in subtle ways and direct ways as the series progressed. At that point it no longer would be the crutch you are making it out to be and would instead be the plot of the game.

Does that mean I wanted a different game? Sure. Like I said up top, I would not have taken the series anywhere near where it ended up. Because I didn't like where it went. But not only did I not like where it went, I do not think the did a good enough job to support the "all choices had to be bad" ending that we got, if that was actually the intention along.

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).

No. It is very much a better solution than "pour all our resources into a device who's end goal literally nobody understands." If I'm going to stand behind any point in this discussion it's that the Crucible was the absolute stupidest part of the entire Mass Effect series. We spent all of Mass Effect 3 searching for "the catalysts" but that didn't turn out to be an exotic gas or material or type of energy... it turned out to be the freaking huge space station that the Crucible docked with, a station that every race working on the Crucible knew about. It was facepalm your head into a bloody pulp against the wall stupid and almost any solution consistent with the game's lore is better.

Beyond that, one of the last major accomplishments you are able to make in Mass Effect 3 before the ending sequence and battles is convincing the Quarians and Geth to coexist without controlling, destroying, or merging with each other. Why show peaceful separate coexistence between organic and synthetic life if the three choices you intended to present to players all along did not include that choice? It does not make any sense.

(Yes, in some cases a Geth mind would temporarily exist within a Quarian's environmental suit to help speed the immune system adaption to their homeworld but that was temporary, voluntary, and the goal was to allow the Quarians to stop needing their suits so it has very little relation to the synthesis ending which was permanent and involuntary for all the trillions of life forms who were not Commander Shepard.)

-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.

Again. Too reductionist for me. Either have a conversation or don't.

Funny how that game so clearly communicates that message, and yet we still get an outcry at the end of the trilogy that the universe didn't properly take into account all the protagonist's choices.

That's such a cop out. It's fine to do it once, but at this point it's all so annoying. Choice in games should mean my choices matter.

Your choices DO matter. But not in the way people expected, and that was fully and completely the point.

What people really wanted was a way to "solve" the problem with their trigger finger. They didn't get it and that was the real complaint.

Agreed.

I liked the idea that the Reapers were tough but not invincible. That, like Sovereign said, they were able to win decisively over and over because organic life inevitably found the Mass Relays and the Citadel and developed along similar lines. As much as I like Mass Effect (I think it is easily one of the top series of the 360 / PS3 generation and rivals any other series of that time) in some ways it was a series marked by a string of plot based betrayals.

- Wasn't the original idea put forth that stopping Sovereign would strand the Reaper fleet in darks space? And, to me at least, the implication of "strand" meant more than "have them have to do an extra two years of easy, no consequences flying."

- One of the biggest ones, where the Council completely turned its back on you and pretended the huge battle at the Citadel simply did not happen. The disavowing of the Reapers was maybe one of the biggest let downs of the 360 generation. I'd have been ok with them publicly blaming the Geth, a known boogeyman, while preparing for the actual extinction they knew was coming... but instead they spent Mass Effect 2 in complete lala land after I sacrificed my friends and colleagues of the Alliance fleet to save them.

Is the problem that you don't think that was plausible, or that you didn't like it, as a character?

I don't think you're supposed to like it, but it seemed fairly plausible to me. Admitting the existence of Reapers publicly would undermine nearly every political authority in existence, and might still achieve nothing that you can't do in secret.

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.