What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Anonymouswizard]

Mass Effect 4 Balls?

Spoiler: ME3 Ending

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I'm the weirdo that likes the Star Child ending, because it appeals to the Babylon 5 fan in me. The Crucible is the stupidest thing in the entire franchise and shouldn't exist, and the Star Child represents talking to the Reapers which is the only way you could realistically have the younger races survive. Yeah, it could have been done a lot better, but the alternative is three games of running around the galaxy doing literally nothing only to have a Deus Ex Machina handed to you by blueprints found on MARS. It's head-explodingly dumb. With Star Child at least you can pretend you're negotiating with the Reapers to either get them to go away (Destroy), get them to become mentors (Control), or fuse with the younger races to ascend to a new form of existence (Synthesis).

There's a lot of problems with the ending, but almost all of them are rooted far earlier in the franchise. ME3 has a bad ending because they never set the groundwork to make a good ending possible.

Followed by Mass Effect Quint, a spinoff dating sim set on Tuchunka

Spoiler

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Honestly replace Starchild with Harbinger and I'm down for any of the endings. Control's actually my personal favourite, willingly performing a destructive upload to give the Reapers new parameters.

Honestly, I feel like that's a big contributor to why it's so good. The Reapers were never an interesting main plotline.

ME2 just completely messed up when it came to the Reaper's. It should have shuffled them off screen, instead they spend half the game talking at you whenever you fight one enemy faction, with so few voice clips that they become boring. Oh, it tries to bait you into believing it's not a Reaper, but what's the first thing the characters say when you're given your overall mission? That the Inhibitors are behind it.

What the Reapers needed to be was the big looming threat behind the relatable villains, which the first game got. Saren was an amazing villain for the game, and TIM very nearly serves the same role in the third installment. Really only ME2 is missing a Reaper Herald, which could probably have been fixed by giving the Collectors more defined characters than 'the Reaper who controls them'.


Also I like about 90% of ME3's story, I think having to creep around the galaxy securing alliances works. Most of your commando squad missions aren't about directly fighting the Reapers but the result of negotiations for aid that the Alliances needs.