Sorry, this will be a bit long.I know why you dislike 2, so let's not talk more about that. I liked the franchise generally until I played 3, and I cannot follow the logic that if there's an "alien invasion" then you have to ask people to save MY country if the aliens have just invaded all of us, and that's how they approach the Reaper plot, by making it appear everywhere all at once, but for some fucking reason make it seem reasonable to ask everyone to drop their defenses for the sake of a united front to liberate Earth. And then it sorta half worked because of the Crucible being the miracle device that actually stops the Reapers, not the war itself.But now that it's over, and there's no more Mass Effects, and we wouldn't get a sequel that did the plot gymnastics to either explain how only Destroy mattered or how Synthesis happens but it didn't happen, yada-yada, I'm now free to imagine the franchise ending with 2 and then 3 being something completely different than what they made.I feel like Mass Effect 3 should've been completely different. It should remain an agentic "Space Mystery" where sure there's an invasion and a war, but Shepard is less of a paladin who goes around Dragon Age Origin style to rally all forces, and more of a "guy with a mission", where we're a bit smarter than the rest of the galaxy, with a ragtag crew, defying orders from Alliance Command because they only view the Reapers as a "military threat" and not the unstoppable mythological force it actually is. Cerberus has become untrustworthy but not outright enemies yet, and now Shepard's solo-operation is clashing with Cerberus on the same goals. Shepard is a bit smarter than everyone else. We have knowledge about how the past civilizations lost, and why the Reapers were undefeatable, and the story is about unlocking undeciphered pre-prothean memory imprints until you have the "Secret Sauce" of the Reapers, but the galactic war is raging outside, so you're running out of time.
And then eventually Shepard has to enter the hotzone where the war is, but kinda leap in, in front of everyone as time stops, and a warp corridor opens to a Reaper "Nest" in Dark Space or something, and you have to go in and defuse the original Reaper contingency programme that spawned them eons ago, and then discover that every Reaper is truly civilizational. Every harvest perfectly captures a digitized collective consciousness of the civilization, so all of them are actually "alive" and each Reaper is like a government. The final question of the story then becomes, if harvested civilizations inside the Reapers are actually alive is it mercy to kill them along with the Reapers, or let the Reapers roam without further harvesting capabilities, and let these "dead" civilizations roam among us, or find solace in "being a Reaper" and let them do the same to humanity.The Mass Effect story would get completely subverted in the final game if they told us that the Reaper harvesting, and genocide against all species, is actually not really genocide, because after we "die" we come alive in the Reaper, plus we become powerful, and this could be seen as the next step in evolution.Then killing the Reapers is an easy, legitimate option with no other strings attached... but people like the Geth or EDI are saddened by the outcome, because deep down they can see that the fate of synthetic life is to eventually reach the same level as Reapers, and then enter a similar conflict with organic life, where they end up building their society for them, by way of taking away their organic selves and remake them as a digital consciousness, 1 civilization per unit, or at least something similar. And then the trilogy would better end on an open question about the themes of the series, about free will, choice, and the meaning of "being alive".>TL;DR: let's imagine ME3 didn't exist and come up with your own version
>I know why you dislike 2When did this revisionism start that 2 was le bad actually?
>>750563896I'm tired of pretending that ME3 was bad. It wasn't. And it clearly would be great (probably even best), if they would have at least an extra year of development time.
>>750563913>imagine ME3 didn't exist and come up with your own versionreapers harvest galaxy for reproductionyou defeat the reaperspost game tali breeding sim
>>750563896>Sorry, this will be a bit longStopped reading there
>>750563926once people figured out that the entire game was a massive sidequest with a bunch of abandoned plotlines that forced ME3 to tackle way too much of the story at once and streamlined the gameplay unnecessarily in alot of areas like the thermals clips?
>>750563979The gameplay and music were both pretty solid.
>>750564248Couldn't care less.Okay, music is pretty important and yeah it was okay. But not the sad piano bullshit. Overall the whole "It's a WAR STORY" is a bad fucking fit for ME3. In the same way that Witcher 3 isn't a war story even though it has the culmination of 3 games worth of buildup about Nilfgaard invading redania in it, and yet that's still a huge part of its plot, but it never turns it into Geralt having to do a trench run and die as he gets shot on a beach or some shit, and the fact that they decided to frame ME3 as such, where we have to see Shepard "bleed out" after doing a trench run into enemy fire at the end, only to have some half-baked retarded M Night Shyamalan twist with a little boy speaks volumes of just how off the mark Casey Hudson was on the third entry.I actually think Casey Hudson was in a rut after 2 and knew he was missing something on the next game, so he looked for inspiration and watched a bunch of WW2 movies, and before he could properly think, he decided "ME3 is a war story".They bent the genre right then and there. It doesn't feel like Mass Effect.
>>750563979The premise was fucked. A year would've just allowed them to second guess themselves twice over, and ship the game with a Leviathan subplot and an even more elaborate Starchild scene. None of which actually make it any better.
>>750563926Nose ring bearers being utter dimwits and not comprehending how others see things differently than themselves and wish to put them in gulags, as per usual.
>>750563896sorry I meant 2
>>750563896>Mass Effect was great until 1FIXED
>3
>>750563926ME2 is not a bad game. It's bretty gud, actually. But it is a letdown as a sequel to one of the greatest video games ever made, and it's entirely down to the fact that they moved away from being committed to being a sci-fi RPG and closer to being a brainless shooty action game. Not all the way, but you could see the decline from orbit.
>>750564545Stalin would eat preppy chubby cheeks for breakfast.
>>7505639262 is my favorite mass effect game, but it's ultimately pretty irrelevant to the overall plot in the trilogy. You could legitimately skip it and not miss a beat when you start 3.
>>750566371I was cold...
>>750566783ME1 will always be my personal favorite, but I think ME2 is great because you get to just explore the underbelly of galactic society without having to do things by the book. The Illusive Man flat out tells you it's your show. Do what you gotta do, just report anything you find. None of that Alliance red tape shit.
>>750563926The plot of 3 makes it clear that with the reapers being an immediate threat rather than an imminent one (something established at the end of 2) only a deus ex machina could possibly stop them.That’s not to say 3 couldn’t have been vastly improved in multiple ways, but there was simply no way of satisfyingly defeating a vastly superior force with the time frame given.Maybe they could have pulled something off if they’d established it would take the reapers decades, if not centuries, to traverse dark space, but Arrival throttled that one in the crib.
>>750563896I liked ME3, including the endings. The kvetching on this board is pathological and I will not be a part of it.
>>7505638963 was a great game overall though, it just had a retarded ending. In terms of gameplay it completely mogs 2.
>>750563926>revisionismfound the tranny
The real truth is that Mass Effect was never all that great but 1 had lots of potential. Then 2 came out and destroyed all of that and made it a shitty dating sim for low IQ retards.At least 3 had fun gameplay though.
>>750563926>When did this revisionism start that 2 was le bad actually?I don't think ME2 was a bad game or anything, but to me it is definitely the moment I can say that Bioware started showing its cracks. I remember being puzzled when I saw my buddy play it for the first time that it seemed to have completely ditched trying to be an RPG and was just a basic cover shooter with some dialogue mechanics.
>>750563896lol noME2 did absolutely nothing for the story and was basically a soft-rebootthey literally killed of the mc and disbanded the squad
