Damn @ this trailer talk. Y'all are passionate bout this shit haha
Anyway, to go off on my own tangent. After tying up loose ends and completing all the side quests and DLC(with the exception of LotSB and Arrival), I made my way to get the Reaper IFF and then completed Tali's and Legions loyalty missions before the crew got kidnapped.
Bringing Legion on Tali's LM remains just as funny now as it did the first time I did it, the way
the Quarians react to him is hilarious. I like how Bioware incorporated him into the mission with the added dialogue options and scenes, they did a good job with that.
But that's enough praise for them, because now it's time to head to the Collector Base and re experience some of the worst writing in the series. The individual squadmate arcs have been mostly alright, but the main story up till now has been on shaky ground, and once we get to the Human Reaper things will fall apart completely.
Shamus Youngs
Mass Effect Restrospective on the ME2 Ending Choice covers this shit well. He has a restrospective on the SM and the big bad Human Reaper itself which you can scroll back to, but I refuse to acknowledge the existence of that thing. Some choice parts on the ending choice:
So you shoot the baby Reaper in the face until it falls down and goes boom. Once it's gone, you can access the Collector power core or whatever, and you can either set it to explode, or set it to irradiate all life and leave the technology intact. The Illusive Man wants you to leave the installation so his scientists can study it. But Paragon Shepard objects because...
This place is an abomination?
This is some messed-up superstitious thinking. He seems to be suggesting that learning about our enemy is inherently evil. Your companions also take this position, too. Even #1 Cerberus apologist Miranda suddenly does an abrupt heel-face turn saying, ”I'm not so sure. Seeing it first hand... Using anything from this base seems like a betrayal." And not because of indoctrination, but because of some completely un-articulated principles.
The last game ended with us beginning a quest for knowledge. That idea was wiped away to fight the Collectors. And now at the very end of the game we finally return to the question of ”How do we stop the Reapers from killing us all?" except the narrative frames the acquisition of knowledge as an inherently evil and irresponsible thing. As a fan of sci-fi, I find this idea to be repugnant. The first game gave us a quest for knowledge and the second one is going to follow up with caveman science fiction?
The common defense of this line of thinking is that it's wrong to use research obtained through unethical means. This usually leads into a side-argument about the ethics of using (say) Nazi medial research. While I understand this attempt to bring an interesting philosophical discussion to this videogame, I want to point out that this comparison doesn't work and isn't appropriate here. Shepard doesn't actually articulate a moral or philosophical stand. Moreover, if he wanted to take that stand then he should have done so at the start of the game by refusing to work with Cerberus, who basically have ”Unethical Research" in their mission statement.
On Miranda's out of nowhere 180 turn:
On top of it all, Miranda's turn feels completely unearned. She's been willing to make excuses for everything Cerberus has done. And now she's willing to betray the organization because she draws the line at studying the technology of the machine gods who are trying to kill us? What is her morality even based on?
This might be a nice payoff if she'd spent the entire game gradually becoming more disillusioned with her employer and questioning her loyalty. That would actually make a fantastic character arc. But she's never budged. Even when confronted with the horror of the research station where Cerberus tortured children to make a better biotic, she was adamant that those guys were only a rogue cell and that Cerberus had nothing to apologize for. She never had a crisis of faith moment. She's never confided to Shepard that she's having doubts. And then we get to this choice and all of a sudden she goes full paragon when the fate of the galaxy is on the line.
This one especially pisses me off, because we have Miranda going from willing to die on a hill to defend Cerberus' involvement in murder and child abuse, to the point where she even antagonised Jack about it in their argument on the ship, to her suddenly turning on them for nonsensical reasoning. Like seriously what the fuck?
I made a huge mistake in re-reading the retrospective before I had replayed the Suicide Mission and completed the game, because now I'm getting angry.
I'm gonna calm my ass down by checking the sports scores before I give myself a brain hemorrhage.
