Rethinking Mass Effect 3

I really like Shamus Young’s long retrospective on the Mass Effect series, and while compiling I read through it again because it keeps me entertained in a way that’s in contained chunks that can easily handle me getting distracted or pulled into something else (which isn’t true of videos or podcasts, if my work set-up would even allow that). So while re-reading it, I thought of something, which I’m going to explore in a couple of posts. And my hypothesis is this: Mass Effect 3 would have worked out better for pretty much everyone if they hadn’t had the Reapers show up in it.

In this post, what I’m going to do is look at how the Reapers were conceived of in the other games, which should be pretty obvious. Next week, I’ll look at how so much of the problems with Mass Effect 3 would have gone away simply by removing the Reapers as a direct threat.

As Shamus noted throughout the series, Mass Effect established the basic story of the Reapers: every once in a very long while, they showed up and wiped out all organic life above a certain technological level. Thus, in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, the entire plot was a desperate attempt to stop that from happening, and the entire goal of the Reapers was simply to get them to arrive. Neither Sovereign nor Harbinger ever suggested that they needed any kind of plan other than to show up and start reaping, and all the information we had from all sources said that when they show up, it’s all over. The only reason there’s a chance is because the Protheans stopped their normal way to get here.

All of this together strongly suggests that the Reapers finding a way to arrive is an instant “I win” button for them, which explains why their plots were so focused on that. In Mass Effect, Sovereign’s plan was to trigger the normal mechanism manually, with his indoctrinated follower and a fleet and forces to clear the way. In Mass Effect 2, the plan is quite vague, but I theorize that Harbinger’s plan was to start the reaping early which would allow him to create more Reapers which, combined with himself and the Collectors could trigger the normal mechanism manually as well (since a more subtle approach would be detected and protected against). Also, given the events in “The Arrival” — a DLC for ME2 — it might also have been to provide time, a distraction, and even a potential defense for other mechanisms they had out there. And, as just noted, “The Arrival” was some kind of backup Mass Relay that would let them come into the galaxy anyway.

So as we can see, the entire Reaper threat in the previous two games and DLC was all about them arriving. The entire goal was simply to stop them from showing up. Shepard even flat-out says that that was their goal at the end of ME1. So, again, the idea of the Reapers showing up was always treated as the end of the game (and I think that’s actually literal in the case of “The Arrival”). If the Reapers ever show up, it’s all over, so we need to make sure that they never show up.

So, then, why does Mass Effect 3 start with the Reapers arriving? Especially since, as Shamus notes, much of the plot of ME3 involves fighting Cerberus instead of the Reapers, reducing them to a complication in the system-exploration portions and in some missions?

I’m not going to blame the gestalt entity that Shamus refers to as “The Writer” here. I’m more likely to blame the fans here. At around that time, and what I heard from other people, fans were speculating about the end of the series and were looking forward to some kind of resolution to the Reaper story, which as Shamus notes had been pretty much ignored in ME2. So it would definitely seem risky to leave them on the sidelines again, or even just as a single antagonist. It would be the easiest solution to simply make them the primary focus, and the easiest way to do that would be to have them simply show up. But as Shamus notes, that causes so many issues and problems that the game simply doesn’t deal with. Even if they were the sole focus, the previous games set them up as being things that cannot be reasonably fought, in a game where much of the gameplay is shooting things from cover. We should be giving up and running and hiding, and the game didn’t want to do that. Moreover, their threat would overwhelm absolutely all other concerns, and while ME3 does do a decent job of tying the subplots into the main plot, a lot of the more minor things — like curing the Genophage — are things where those demanding those actions be taken should be really shut down with “If the Reapers succeed, we’ll all be dead, so can we work that out later?”. For them to be things we can fight, they have to be weak enough for us to do so, but if they are that weak, then that contradicts the previous games and risks them fading into the background.

And the renewed focus on Cerberus makes this even worse. Cerberus seems to be the more active threat, which they shouldn’t be if the Reapers are really out reaping things. And if they are the more active threat, then what’s the point of the Reapers?

Shamus seems correct to note that “The Writer” wanted to play with Cerberus more than they did with the Reapers. However, given that this was the end of the trilogy they definitely needed to make the Reapers prominent. In the next post, I will argue that the best way to do that was to take the cue from the previous games and keep the resolution of the Reapers to be preventing them from showing up in the first place, because doing so allows them to give Cerberus the prominent role they wanted to give them while allowing them to keep the Reapers in focus and resolving their plot in what I think would be a satisfying manner.