Caramel Frappe said:
Zen Toombs said:
I usually don't indulge in this but:
If you want to start saying who ripped off who, you have to go back a hell of a lot further than Final Fantasy. XD
There are only around 7 unique stories after all.
Anywho, you're absolutely right, the ancient AI's logic makes no sense at all. Which, in my interpretation, is precisely the point.
Look at it this way, the AI never said the Reaper cycle was to save any particular organic species, but rather the purpose was to preserve organic life in general. Also, the Reapers don't kill everyone, only races that are sufficiently advanced. Another hypothetical AI might not be restricted in such a way. So, if an organic race is capable of creating AI, it must be killed off. And you'd have to kill them off before they became more advanced than the tools you're using to kill them. Otherwise, an AI could be created that WOULD destroy everything, rather than just killing everything sufficiently advanced. It creates a nice, orderly cycle that will endlessly repeat itself (until I suppose the galaxy is depleted of resources in a few hundred billion years?). Thus, there is no danger of organics completely wiping themselves out.
And just like a typical machine would, the ancient AI assumes that there can be no deviation from the cycle. It MUST continue to try to impose order on the increasingly chaotic universe, because that's why it was created.
Well, anyhow, that's what I got from the story. I think the games have evidence to support that interpretation.
Now, what I infer implicitly is that the ancient AI must be limited in scope, despite it's age and sophistication because it does not enter the possibility of dialogue with a synthetic race as I viable option, even when the Geth PROVE that it is. That's interesting.
What I think is bullshit about the endings is how they ALL destroy galactic civilization. Not to mention, why the crap is Joker running away? Or why is Javik now back on the ship? He was clearly incinerated in a Reaper blast!
How can you continue the Mass Effect universe in any form if you irreversibly break it in the end of ME3?!?
Meh, enough rage. Guess I'll go play the surprisingly fun multiplayer now. XD
Well of course. If you wanna go into who exactly ripped off who and do an exact study, were eventually going to come down to one story. The Protagonist does something.
But that isn't the point. The point is the exact words, to save you I must kill you. Were spoken in Final Fantasy X and X2. Oh sure there are a ton of movies it's ripping off. But here's the thing. I don't remember those. What I got whilst watching the God Child spout exposition was an image to Seymour, probably cause both characters have equally poorly explained logic and have pissed me off.
The point of a good story is telling you a tale, if the tale is interesting you're not gonna nitpick it. Because it left me so confused (not in the good way), full of questions and dissatisfied I'm gonna put this thing under a microscope and analyse it.
Because the correlation between Mass Effect and Gurren Laggan had been made so often I decided to take another route. That of comparing it to Final Fantasy.
The thing is. The AI takes away from the mystery of the reapers. Harbinger WAS the central enemy at the end of ME2. The Reapers had been given a face and a Name that was supposed to be their leader. At the end of ME2 you had the idea that they were sort of like the Geth, ancient machines created by a now long dead species who programmed in a safety flaw. The fact the reapers can't reproduce themselves, meaning that even in the case of a rebellion the Reapers would die off in about 50k years. However the Reapers found a nice little roundabout way which was using organics as building blocks. Why that worked and not just mining a bit of ore I can't tell you.
Now back to the AI though. A flawed AI controlling the reapers functioning on sci-fi cliché logic, which makes no sense. Unless he was MADE for the specific purpose of protecting organic life, you just assume it was his job to bring order to a chaotic universe, you don't know that, which makes you wonder WHY he was built at all then. Because the guys that built the reapers seemed to be doing dandy till the God Child decided it was time to screw them over with the Reapers. The cycle of logic has to start somewhere.
2001 has an AI with circular logic to, but why he has circular logic is explained. For one he is far less sophisticated and second they fucked up programming the laws of robotics. His number one Priority is not "Get Humans to Jupiter" no it's "Finish the Mission to Jupiter". It makes SENSE why he would kill them. Because in his programming they are 100% expendable. They are not actually an essential part of the mission as much as the malfunctioning coffee machine. To that AI the mission is a success even if the ship lands completely empty.
What gave the God Child the idea to Kill his masters, presumable when he was the synthetic race that killed his own creators, then proceed to take control of the reapers and do this every 50k years. NOTHING. That is the point. He pulls the circular logic out of his ass without explaining events pre-dating it. Why did this kid start the cycle? The first time he did it wasn't because synthetics were killing organics, after all if he didn't do it synthetics would not kill organics.
The thing about allowing organic life to thrive is nonsense to. When the Geth started their killings. What did they do? Did they go about conquering the Galaxy. Not really. They withdrew to their homeplanet in an isolated nebula and help radio silence for hundreds of years. Why did they come out of the nebula? Because the reapers instigated a civil war between them and indoctrinated part of the Geth into serving them.
The only time organic life was faced with actual extinction was when some species created the God Child. We always come back to the fact that if the reapers hadn't done anything. About 9/10 of the cycles would have probably concluded in peace between synthetics and organics, with far fewer casualties than if the Reapers swept the broom through the Galaxy.
Not to mention the fact that evolution doesn't guarantee the production of sentient races every 50k cycle (which is an INCREDIBLY short time on the evolutionary scale). Would that mean the reapers would die out? After all all of the Reapers are Prothean based Reapers, it's safe to say they can only reproduce using organics. The entire Reaper fleet would die out or have severely reduced numbers for the next cycle, what are they going to do? Harvest the Shifty Space Cow from ME1?
As you can tell Allot of questions, with no answer, no CHANCE of getting an answer except being nickel and dimmed for DLC. All you and I did was speculate on probable explanations. The fact we both have been thinking about this and trying to find explanations shows just how unrewarding the ending is. It doesn't even have the decency to explain itself.
Am I saying I always need an answer, no some things can go unexplained, you don't have to give me an answer on why anyone would think teaming up an Elcor and a Space Jellyfish (blanked on the name) into a buddy cop movie would sell. I don't need an exact reason why the Elcor walk on four legs rather than having no legs and moving like snails, after all. If you have no legs there is no chance of falling to your death on your extreme gravity planet.
That's a bit of silly fun and some things you just have to accept have no answer, they just are like that because the artist drew em like that. However if you introduce basically the Mastermind of the entire game into the last 10 minutes of your game. You are gonna raise questions. Questions that Need answering. None of the questions pertaining to this weird God Child were answered except for a hand wave circular logic monologue of exposition.
