Poll: Mass Effect without Reapers

[Tuesday Night Fever]

I think that that problem was more a result of how the Reapers interact with Shepard and the story at large, rather than the Reapers just being intrinsically boring. I've always thought that the best villains are the ones that the hero interacts with multiple times before the final confrontation, while the Reapers are always just a big looming threat in the background. Not counting DLC, Shepard only has two conversations with a Reaper: once with Sovereign in ME1, and once with an anonymous Reaper in ME3 I guess there's also the infamous "Starchild", who's like the Reaper hive mind or something, but that's at the very end of the story, so it doesn't help.

Shepard probably has the most (direct) interaction with the Reapers in ME2, actually. Throughout the game you're frequently harassed by Collectors that have been possessed by Harbinger. I actually thought Harbinger had some potential in making me care a bit more about the Reapers.

I mean, in the first game, there's your conversation with Sovereign. Sovereign is more or less completely dismissive of Shepard, since really... why wouldn't it be? It'd be like me in real life trying to explain to a spider why I'm going to squish it - what's the point? So at that point in the story, it kind of made sense for the Reapers to be a bit of a mystery in the background.

Then in the second game there's Harbinger, who is clearly gunning for you. It directly addresses Shepard, it Assumes Direct Control of minions on the field to fight you directly, hell... it freaking taunts you. It's like the Reapers suddenly realized that holy shit... this "Shepard" organism actually managed to successfully stop (well, postpone) a Reaper invasion - MAYBE this is a threat worth paying attention to.

But then ME3 comes along, Harbinger is barely in it save for a name-drop at the end, and the Reapers go right back to being the "mysterious" generic villain that don't seem to really give a shit about Shepard anymore for... reasons?

 

[loc978]

Huh. I thought this would be speculation about the direction the 4th game might take. I'm firmly on the side of "Shepard's story required the Reapers to be compelling"... but now that they're gone, the Mass Effect universe is still a damn good one for space adventures.

 

[AD-Stu]

I've never understood this particular complaint - I honestly don't see how the Collectors (acting as agents of the still far-away Reapers) break the story. I'm not trying to belittle you or this idea, I just need clarification!

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but my personal problem with the Collectors was it was a narrative full of dead ends and foreshadowing for stuff that never happened - in the original Drew Karpyshyn version the Reapers were looking to harvest humans specifically, because human DNA was somehow going to be the thing that would stop dark energy destroying the universe or something.

In that context the entrance of the Collectors, their targeting of human colonies (as well as their shadowy back-story about sampling a heap of other races before settling on humans) and the ridiculous human Reaper at the end of ME2 make sense. Once they abandoned the human DNA / dark energy ideas in favour of the leviathans / yo dawg I heard you didn't want to be eaten by robots plot though, the Collectors don't make much sense any more.

Yes they were being controlled by the Reapers, yes they needed to be stopped from destroying human colonies, but it doesn't actually progress the overall plot of the series very much. It becomes a glorified side quest, if you will.

 

[schrodinger]

Apparently people really liked the Reaper plot, which is fine since it was done reasonably well.

I could have done without the Reapers. Yeah, it would take some tweaking to make each story standalone, but I think it would be worth it. I'm tired of big trilogies where everything ends on a cliffhanger until the next game. The Final Fantasy games came made dozens of sequels with their own continuities, the Ratchet and Clank games are almost all standalones, why can't we do this with Mass Effect?

Mass Effect 1: A rogue Spectre named Saren has found a way to control the Geth in order to exterminate humans in a genocidal campaign. No need for the Reaper plot whatsoever. You have your primary antagonist and his army of goons right there staring you in the face, no need for a puppet master.

Mass Effect 2: Aliens called the Collectors are attacking human colonies in the terminus systems. A black ops organization called Cerberus shanghais you and your crew to take them out before they can enact their nefarious deeds. Main antagonist is Harbinger and the Collectors' Hive Mind. There you go again, primary antagonist, army of goons, no need for Reaper influence.

Mass Effect 3: If a game did need to have the Reapers, it would be this one. Since the games already insisted on making the Reapers unstoppable without Space Magic, I would have changed the plot from building a "We-have-no-idea-what-this-thing-does-but-let's-try-it-anyways" device, to trying to discover the Reaper's origins, be they extragalactic, or a super powerful race that has lain dormant for millennium.

The games already have their own antagonists, they don't need some generic robot cthulu aliens to pull the strings every fucking time.

This is what i was thinking about; tweak the plots and you could still have interesting games. Why make an intriguing universe and characters only to destroy it in the end?(minus them making ME4)
Hell, you can still have the reapers, just explore the universe some more then have the big bad arrive.

Honestly, if you think that the Reapers are unimportant to the entire point of the Mass Effect trilogy, then you missed the point. Shepard would not have been necessary and the decisions that you are supposed to be making would not be difficult without the perceived threat of galactic wide advanced sentient life-form genocide. Basically, the entire series is about "what would you sacrifice to save everyone?"

Snip

I never outright said the reaper plot was unimportant, because if i did then why would i bother keep playing the games?

I was merely wondering if it would be interesting if the games were relatively the same(the plots would have to be tweaked), just without the reapers.

 

[0331chap]

Mass Effect without Reapers could've been a damn fine game. There was plenty to work with: Saren betraying the Spectres, the Rachnni-Krogan-Salarian conflict, the Turian-Geth affair, etc. and in the sequel, you kill collectors working with Cerberus and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everyone who's played the games knows about the core conflicts and enemies. Thing is that the Reapers, while influencing events, they're one-dimensional and unnecessary. Yes, they were interesting yet they weren't what made the game interesting. The subtlety of themes: racism, xenophobia, politics and self-serving interests against the fantastic back-drop of the galaxy while dealing with the consequences of player choices was what made Mass Effect good - not the Reapers

 

[Dragonlayer]

I've never understood this particular complaint - I honestly don't see how the Collectors (acting as agents of the still far-away Reapers) break the story. I'm not trying to belittle you or this idea, I just need clarification!

You don't learn anything new about the Reapers, other than that they enslaved the Protheans who are now the Collectors. But they all get blown up by the end anyway, so that knowledge loses all its value.

Shepard doesn't discover any kind of weakness or even deal any sort of blow to the Reapers other than destroying that human-Reaper thing. Which... what was the point of that thing again? And nothing Reaper related you did in ME2 (what little of it there was) even gets followed up on in ME3, other then Cerberus having the human-Reaper corpse hanging in their headquarters.

If not for your team mates, you could've jumped from ME1 to ME3 and not have missed anything from the main plot.

How does that knowledge become invalidated through the Collector's destruction? It was an exploration into the Reaper's ability to completely warp entire races - hell, it is the explanation that Reapers can do this in the first place, since ME1 only says that Husks are created by Reaper tech (suggesting that the Geth Heretics were loaned some temporary tools by Sovereign)!

The human-Reaper thing was a result of the Collector's..... uh, collecting humans from all over the galaxy - with the destruction of Sovereign, the Reapers needed a new "sleeper agent" as it were to finish Sovereign's job (faffing about with the Citadel to summon all its brethren at once and cripple the galaxy's resistance through a surprise attack at the heart of galactic government). Plus, I thought that the human-Reaper thing was a twisted compliment to the surprising effectiveness of humans: "This Shepard organic destroyed Sovereign and thwarted our plans; perhaps humans are worthy of ascendence and may be of use to us."

Apart from two entire years of galactic events....

 

[Dragonlayer]

I've never understood this particular complaint - I honestly don't see how the Collectors (acting as agents of the still far-away Reapers) break the story. I'm not trying to belittle you or this idea, I just need clarification!

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but my personal problem with the Collectors was it was a narrative full of dead ends and foreshadowing for stuff that never happened - in the original Drew Karpyshyn version the Reapers were looking to harvest humans specifically, because human DNA was somehow going to be the thing that would stop dark energy destroying the universe or something.

In that context the entrance of the Collectors, their targeting of human colonies (as well as their shadowy back-story about sampling a heap of other races before settling on humans) and the ridiculous human Reaper at the end of ME2 make sense. Once they abandoned the human DNA / dark energy ideas in favour of the leviathans / yo dawg I heard you didn't want to be eaten by robots plot though, the Collectors don't make much sense any more.

Yes they were being controlled by the Reapers, yes they needed to be stopped from destroying human colonies, but it doesn't actually progress the overall plot of the series very much. It becomes a glorified side quest, if you will.

Hmmm, you raise an interesting point but I still feel the Collectors had their place within the storyline: the abduction and genetic recycling of humans was a reflection of the interest the Reapers took in Shepard after he/she destroyed Sovereign and stopped their original plans to basically teleport into the center of galactic government and cripple it in one strike. And if Shepard proved the worth of humans (thus far only seen in Husk form, so presumably viewed as even less useful than the Geth Heretics by the Reapers), the human-Reaper construct could have been an experiment to determine what a human Reaper would be like to their race.