Mekado said:
(snip) I sure hope they'll answer the "why would they build a human reaper?" question in ME3, and please, no cheap cop-out like "oh they were so impressed by you killing one of their own that they wanted to imitate you.It's obvious that they have nothing but disdain for any other race than their own.
It is heavily (28 metric tonnes or so) implied that the generic recipe for a reaper is:
- 1 hugely advanced artificial intelligence technology thing
- 1 large percentage of the bodies and minds of some sentient race
- whisk the sentient beings until smooth, then pour over the hugely advanced artificial intelligence thingymajig
- bake for however long (we never really got to that part)
It seems that what is for everyone EXCEPT the reapers a "cycle of omnicidal extinction" is for the reapers "one reproductive cycle". It is very strongly indicated that the "Human Reaper", or the construction of a reaper, is in no way a NEW way of creating one, it's simply never been seen before by anyone who's written history books (or created art). It's likely that their previous "harvests" of all sentient life every what, 10k years or so, result each time in a reaper being built, and that this is indeed the entire purpose of the exercise. Possibly this time was different since this time, the reaper fleet's return had been thwarted, and thus it had to improvise to get itself built. Likely the Collectors are not the bulk of the Protheans, but rather the few that were left after a "Prothean Reaper" was built from the bulk of them. There's nothing saying that there was not a remnant of some OTHER race "collecting" Protheans 10k years ago, before the war began, since so few records of those days survived.
All in all, while SOME of my suppositions are rather long leaps, the idea that harvesting a race to create a new Reaper is their standard form of reproduction is all but confirmed by the storyline. There is another reason to believe so as well, which is (ironically) the fact that there aren't MORE Reapers. Yeah, there are a fair few, but if they could create more simply by building more, then there's nothing stopping them from consuming all usable materials in the galaxy, and no reason for them to ever allow life to flourish to begin with. If they can't create more, then there would be only a single one. If they require the collective memories, thoughts, dreams and ideas of one interstellar civilization to serve as some integral part in the Reaper mind, then all of a sudden it makes an abundance of sense.
As for the reaper looking human? There's nothing to suggest that there isn't a huge metallic Prothean skeleton surrounded by Prothean-slush inside the sleek starship-hull exterior of another Reaper somewhere. And other races long since extinct in yet others.
So no, I don't see a plot hole there, it's all fairly well explained.
What saddened me about ME2 was the incredibly lackluster, linear and boring level design, the (lack of an) inventory management system (ME1's inventory management was crap, but ME2's complete lack of an inventory was far worse), and the complete and total lack of exploration. Probing doesn't count unless Minesweeper is an "epic game of exploration". And the level design.
Seriously, the level design was so bad it made the rest of the game look worse than it was. "Take one long tube of playable area, litter with things to hide behind, add X amounts of bends and a character to talk to along the way somewhere", this is NOT PROPER LEVEL DESIGN! Whoever was responsible for this atrocity should be strangled in front of their loved ones. The surface exploration in ME1 may have needed some tweaking to make it less tedious, but at least in that you felt like you were DOING something! GOING somewhere, seeing what was beyond the hill, all that jazz. ME2 offered a bunch of areas, each the home of exactly ONE quest, and each of them re-skinned versions of the same basic level. How could they have screwed that up so bad after such a stellar performance on character design, dialogue scripting, the GORGEOUS visuals (let's not deny it), and solid gameplay design? It boggles the mind.