T w e n t y S i d e d

Shepard rides an elevator up to the Crucible. I have no idea why a control panel has an elevator that lifts you up to the exterior of the Citadel. I don’t know how you survive there with no helmet. I suspect that the answer both questions is that the writer simply wanted you to be someplace fantastical when you meet…

The Star Child

So the personification of the Reapers is a ghost hologram of a ten year old boy. This is the best idea in this entire scene. Which is a shame, because it’s still a terrible idea.

Star Child introduces himself and explains that he controls the Reapers. He explains that his job is to command this fleet of machine gods to kill all spacefaring organics every 50,000 years. He does this because advanced organic species inevitably build robots, and those robots will inevitably wipe out the organics. So that’s why this kid has his robots kill everyone. To prevent this.

This is the explanation behind the Reapers. For real.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 49: Star Child”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

If there’s anything that drives home how Mass Effect 3 is playing flagrant bullshit for profundity, it would have to be…

Dream Sequences

At the end of each of the major chapters in the game there’s a long dream sequence. Shepard chases Some Kid That Died – a nameless character we have no connection to – through a forest that has no context or meaning except to be “spooky” in the most generic way possible. There’s no gameplay, no dialog, the plot doesn’t move forward, nothing is foreshadowed, and no information is conveyed.

While I think “playable dream sequence” is a terrible idea in the context of Mass Effect, this could have been greatly improved with some basic changes:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 48: What Dreams May Dumb”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.