ME3: Thessia and Kai Leng (Spoilers)
- Thread starter Lupus80
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Adam Jensen was an okay character. I like having a game make me lose, showing your player character utterly fail at something is effective. Call of Duty 4 for example.
Kai Leng. Kai mother-fucking Leng.Lupus80 said:
He's from the novels, and he's just as much of a pathetic, trying-too-hard, plot-protected loser of a Marty Stu there as he is in the game.
He was a terrible character in the novels, and just as terrible in the game.
...you finally get to disembowel the smug bastard.
Seriously, did ANYONE not take that Renegade interrupt? Anyone?
Anyway, I didn't really have a problem with it... I think the idea was to get the player to hate him so that he could function as a "final boss" type enemy. Of course, if you already read the novels, then you already hated him - a lot - so the effect was absolute overkill.
I felt that way too. "You didn't beat me. I kicked the crap out of you!" However, I did feel a sense of payback when Shepard finally got to fight Kai in a straight fight. I'm not talking about seeing him bleeding on the floor, nor even the very awesome renegade "That was for Thane, you son of a *****!" moment. I'm talking about the actual fight.
Shepard mocks him for running every time they've met. "You ran from Thane. You can on the Citadel. You ran on Thessia. Running's all you're good at." And it gets to him. His only response is to shout "Shut up!" like a spoiled little brat. There might have been more, but I killed him so quickly that it cut off the dialogue.
Shepard mocks him for running every time they've met. "You ran from Thane. You can on the Citadel. You ran on Thessia. Running's all you're good at." And it gets to him. His only response is to shout "Shut up!" like a spoiled little brat. There might have been more, but I killed him so quickly that it cut off the dialogue.
One hundred percent paragon Sheperd, nice guy, never punched Khalisah Al-Jilani, Westerlund News in the face, never threatened or attacked via cutscene in all three games.Bara_no_Hime said:
Until him of course.
OT: Yeah, that's kinda the point there OP, he cheated, he used a freaking attack helicopter because sniping in the face is too much for him, that's the point. The game wants you to hate him, wants you to blood lust after him. So yeah, defeat is sour when the enemy is that son-of-a-*****.
Apparently Kai Leng was in a Mass Effect book in which he WAS supposed to be an uber psycho badass. I actually know exactly what you mean with your OP, but let me offer you another perspective on it: they intentionally wanted you to feel cheated.Lupus80 said:
They want you to think that KL is just the biggest pussy in the galaxy, that you could absolutely murder him in a fair fight. For people who might be unfamiliar with the character, I think Bioware WANTED to instill a sense of absolute pure hatred for the guy, the kind that Shepard gets after the Thessia incident. "The next time I see him, he dies." Or as Garrus suggests: "You bottle up all your anger and hate and then use it to rearrange every molecule in Kai Leng's body." Really I was looking forward to killing KL ever since the Citadel, but words can't describe how much I hated him and wanted to kill him in literally indescribable ways (edit: after the mission on Thessia).
That's why after the Thessia mission they have KL send you a letter to rub it in. He's just so over-the-top arrogant "Ha ha, I kicked ur ass, u mad?" To which all I could think was "YOU didn't kick my ass...you called in a fucking airstrike and leveled a building...and you STILL couldn't kill me!"
And of course during the fight when you do finally kill him, Shepard brings up the fact that he is, indeed, the biggest pussy in the galaxy, taunting him by saying "All you every fucking do is run. You ran away like a ***** on the Citadel, you ran away like a ***** on Thessia. Now there's nowhere to run!" and you blast his fucking face off with a shot from the Black Widow. And good god did it feel satisfying to kill him.
They didn't have a whole lot of time to build up his character for those who didn't read the books, but they still wanted you to have a vested interest, a true hatred for the guy. And that's why I think he's so god damn annoyingly arrogant.
As I mentioned in my first response to this topic, I think you're SUPPOSED to feel cheated from that fight to instill a true hatred for the guy, a real sense of "I want that fucker's head on a pike!"SmashLovesTitanQuest said:
That said, I do agree. I've got nothing wrong with "you're supposed to lose this fight" fights in games. But generally they're supposed to be fights where you're getting your ass kicked from start to finish, instilling a sense of hopelessness. I've fought Kai Leng 3 times now, and here's how all 3 fights have gone:
Liara throws a singularity on him.
He shadow dances around the blue spot that appears with the singularity.
I unload a couple Black Widow rounds into his face.
Recharge shields.
Rinse and Repeat.
"I'm getting my ass kicked here, call in the airstrike and destroy the entire frickin' building."
I just lement over how much of Thessia was cut from the final game. It was originally going to be MUCH longer, including Javik and the Prothean AI getting captured by TIM and Cerberus and having a bunch of branching quests to do much like Tuchanka and Rannock had. Both of which were ALSO very cut down. Thessia was supposed to be a VERY big deal in the story, but all be got was a turret section and a straight hallway...
Kai Leng is a terrible character. He's the sort of character that emos who watch too much Bleach would put in their Mass Effect fanfiction.
He's also a terrible bossfight, a massive bullet sponge who runs really fast, ignores all your crowd management powers that you are supposed to use to fend off melee enemies, and can one-hit kill you in melee has no place in a pop and shoot cover based shooter.
They did this as well in Knights of the Old Republic, when you fight Malak on the Leviathan it's quite possible to be sufficiently manly and hard that you can annihilate him in a single combat round, but when you do that he turns on Super Cutscene Power and wins anyway.
He's also a terrible bossfight, a massive bullet sponge who runs really fast, ignores all your crowd management powers that you are supposed to use to fend off melee enemies, and can one-hit kill you in melee has no place in a pop and shoot cover based shooter.
If you abrogate the rules of gameplay to make the player lose, their ire is not directed at the character that defeated them, but at the designer. This happens because when you suddenly break the rules of gameplay like this, you make the player notice that there are gameplay rules in the first place. They stop having an experience and notice, for a few moments, that they are playing a game.RJ 17 said:
They did this as well in Knights of the Old Republic, when you fight Malak on the Leviathan it's quite possible to be sufficiently manly and hard that you can annihilate him in a single combat round, but when you do that he turns on Super Cutscene Power and wins anyway.
I've written much about Leng, mostly in connection to reviews and how they couldn't use the defense of high scores for the game being "perfect up until the ending" when Leng and the writing/design surrounding him is a horrendous joke on it's own.
That said I am going to be constructive since I've said everything I can about how much Leng sucked. If they were going to do the Thessia thing they should have had Leng already in the temple with the VI when you got there rather than showing up after you recover the VI, even if that would have involved some major changes to the way the VI works and needed to be recovered.
If you showed up a bit too late and the bad guy already had the thing and rabbited, that would have been a little more tolerable than the plot armor boss fight. Especially if he wound up using a small army to keep Shepard busy during his escape.
This is sort of what I mean about writing, they could have had the same basic events, but made things more palatable in the way they progressed.
That said, nothing really excuses Leng's character design or truely terrible writing. He just doesn't fit in with Mass Effect.
One conversation I was listening to involving Leng (in an MMO) was about how political correctness might have fit into the whole thing. I never paid much attention before, but the point was that there were no asian, male characters in the game, with only one being mentioned (Keiji, Katsumi's ex boyfriend) even if there were some ladies. The implication being that Leng was added into the game, along with the two latino characters, to fill out a wide range of minorities and genders, and address a rising point that while asian women get into the media for being hot or exotic, the men don't see to get much attention outside of eastern media. of course the counter point in the same conversation was that Leng is both apparently Chinese, psychotically evil, and dresses like a villain from a C-grade Japanese production, which happens to reinforce a lot of negative stereotypes, political or otherwise making it kind of counter productive if that was the intent.
I am NOT saying that any of that is true, just that it did get me thinking, because honestly for all my ranting about political correctness at times, it didn't occur to me. Truthfully with some of the things I heard about the ending being created at the last minute and being jotted down on a cocktail Napkin, I could almost see someone at Bioware being told from on high "we have decided you need to insert a male asian character into the game that gets a decent amount of screen time, and he needs to look distinctively asian make him Chinese since we already had a Japanese character" and then figuring "well, we still need a henchman for the Illusive man... I guess we can make him Chinese... and distinctively Asian... we can make him a Ninja, yeah those are Japanese but nobody will notice, and tech-Ninjas are popular, look at all those other games.... people are going to love this!". That probably didn't happen, but it's uncanny because on some levels I could actually see it after hearing that conversation and it being a last minute shoehorned addition would explain soooo much.
That said I am going to be constructive since I've said everything I can about how much Leng sucked. If they were going to do the Thessia thing they should have had Leng already in the temple with the VI when you got there rather than showing up after you recover the VI, even if that would have involved some major changes to the way the VI works and needed to be recovered.
If you showed up a bit too late and the bad guy already had the thing and rabbited, that would have been a little more tolerable than the plot armor boss fight. Especially if he wound up using a small army to keep Shepard busy during his escape.
This is sort of what I mean about writing, they could have had the same basic events, but made things more palatable in the way they progressed.
That said, nothing really excuses Leng's character design or truely terrible writing. He just doesn't fit in with Mass Effect.
One conversation I was listening to involving Leng (in an MMO) was about how political correctness might have fit into the whole thing. I never paid much attention before, but the point was that there were no asian, male characters in the game, with only one being mentioned (Keiji, Katsumi's ex boyfriend) even if there were some ladies. The implication being that Leng was added into the game, along with the two latino characters, to fill out a wide range of minorities and genders, and address a rising point that while asian women get into the media for being hot or exotic, the men don't see to get much attention outside of eastern media. of course the counter point in the same conversation was that Leng is both apparently Chinese, psychotically evil, and dresses like a villain from a C-grade Japanese production, which happens to reinforce a lot of negative stereotypes, political or otherwise making it kind of counter productive if that was the intent.
I am NOT saying that any of that is true, just that it did get me thinking, because honestly for all my ranting about political correctness at times, it didn't occur to me. Truthfully with some of the things I heard about the ending being created at the last minute and being jotted down on a cocktail Napkin, I could almost see someone at Bioware being told from on high "we have decided you need to insert a male asian character into the game that gets a decent amount of screen time, and he needs to look distinctively asian make him Chinese since we already had a Japanese character" and then figuring "well, we still need a henchman for the Illusive man... I guess we can make him Chinese... and distinctively Asian... we can make him a Ninja, yeah those are Japanese but nobody will notice, and tech-Ninjas are popular, look at all those other games.... people are going to love this!". That probably didn't happen, but it's uncanny because on some levels I could actually see it after hearing that conversation and it being a last minute shoehorned addition would explain soooo much.
Which brings up the 2nd part of the response you quoted:GloatingSwine said:
There have been plenty of games with fights that you're not supposed to win. As Egoraptor points out: the first fight against Vile in Mega Man X is a great example of how to do such a fight properly. It opens up with ominous/evil music as Vile hops off the airship in his ride armor and he proceeds to just completely whip your ass up and down the screen. "You don't even know if anything you're doing is affecting this guy." The first time you play the game, you don't know that you're supposed to lose the fight, so you're fighting your heart out just to survive. Then you get imprisoned in that electric thing and Vile puts the squeeze on you only for Zero to blow the ride armor's arm off and save you. That's how you do a "you're supposed to lose this fight" fight the right way.RJ 17 said:
You don't have the guy dance around like an evil fairy as you just utterly destroy him before he can even land a single attack (through 3 playthroughs, Kai Leng has never - not once - landed a hit on me...even when you fight him in TIM's room). But that said, as I mentioned, I think Bioware wanted you to feel cheated about this fight to instill a true sense of hatred for KL.
It's one of the less significant problems with him, but who else is annoyed by the fact that
(in a game where taking cover to recharge your shields is a pivotal mechanic) the dipshit kneels right in your line of fire to pull energy out of nowhere and re- shield?! Ugh, the fights make so little sense.
And if he knew in advance exactly where you would be (including the middle of his stronghold, for fuck's sake) why did he not just lay a trap? Bust out your superficially badass one- liners AFTER you snipe Shepard's trigger arm off. This guy is almost as bad at ambushing as the Collectors.
(in a game where taking cover to recharge your shields is a pivotal mechanic) the dipshit kneels right in your line of fire to pull energy out of nowhere and re- shield?! Ugh, the fights make so little sense.
And if he knew in advance exactly where you would be (including the middle of his stronghold, for fuck's sake) why did he not just lay a trap? Bust out your superficially badass one- liners AFTER you snipe Shepard's trigger arm off. This guy is almost as bad at ambushing as the Collectors.
This cannot be denied. I was playing full paragon in ME3 and I just could not stop myself from tearing him open to see what his kidneys looked like.Jaeke said:
I kicked his ass in the first fight. But, the following cutscene made me dislike him even more. It was nice and cathartic to be able to kill him in the manner that he deserved.
I wasn't too troubled by him, I kinda got what they were going for.......but then I saw his mask and thought I was fighting Robin or something 
I didn't find him that easy the first time I fought him. (Although on my second playthrough I kicked his ass). But yeah, I can kinda see where you're going with this. It's sort of like Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX.
In all three fights you have with her, no matter how well you're doing, she is always ALWAYS going to end the fight with an attack that brings everyone's health down to 1. But I just accepted it as part of the story and moved on.
I just hated Leng's cockiness after the fight. He emails you boasting about his "victory" with shit like "Remember your best wasn't good enough to beat me" "The legend of Shepard is coming to an end and I want to be there when it ends" I was just sitting reading his mail like "Bring it the fuck on."
He's so pathetic, not only would you kick his ass on Thessia if he didn't hide in cover every 10 seconds "I NEED A RECHARGE, PROTECT ME" and have his gunship give him covering fire, but when Thane fight's him on the Citadel, let's face it, Thane is dying and he still more or less kicks his ass. If Thane was in his prime when he fights Leng, Thane would have wasted him right there and then and Leng wouldn't have lived past the mission on the Citadel.
He's so pathetic, not only would you kick his ass on Thessia if he didn't hide in cover every 10 seconds "I NEED A RECHARGE, PROTECT ME" and have his gunship give him covering fire, but when Thane fight's him on the Citadel, let's face it, Thane is dying and he still more or less kicks his ass. If Thane was in his prime when he fights Leng, Thane would have wasted him right there and then and Leng wouldn't have lived past the mission on the Citadel.