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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 3:02:04 GMT 1
Here's to managing to agree on something *raises glass*
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Post by herrwozzeck on Jul 2, 2012 3:14:23 GMT 1
Besides. the Sixth Sense: A) was overrated just like everything else that hack director came out with. I'm going on a tangent here, but something tells me you'd love the Nostalgia Critic's review of Signs, Okay, tangent over.
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Post by lieden on Jul 2, 2012 5:11:26 GMT 1
I read your post, Buch, and I while I still disagree with you, I kinda wish you were on the writing team. Whatever the concept of the ending was, it suffers from naivete, presumptuousness, and poor wrapping around. I wish someone had just paid attention to the whole thing more. ME3 was such a rushed business.
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Post by opteronium on Jul 2, 2012 8:12:05 GMT 1
Extended cut took the indoctrination theory of the table. However, before Extended cut the indoctrination theory was the most story-strong, logic and conscious interpretation of the original ending.
I think from here on, it basically breaks down into two crowds.
Type A) Satisfied with the Extended cut ending Type B) Not satisfied with the Extended cut ending
'Type A' take what they get from Bioware and 'Type B' reject to be spoon fed garbage.
I'm a 'Type B' here although I still give credit to Bioware's efforts and appreciate them for making the Extended cut. However, I can't say that Bioware didn't fail the ending twice when in my opinion they did.
In a way, Bioware's failing is OK. It lets creative people come up with better content, maybe even write some very compelling fiction, make comics (Marauder Shields for example), etc.
At this point, its pretty much obvious that the fans care more about ME than Bioware does.
The indoctrination theory is a very clever and thought out fan attempt to explain the original ending without making any changes to it and only waiting for the proper conclusion in the DLC. It's an example of open-source community if you will - the fans came up with something much, much cleverer than Bioware. But you have to take indoctrination theory in at the point in time it was conceived when it was logical and it made sense. With Extended cut, Bioware signed its death certificate in the lore.
I think the question is... do you or do you not accept Bioware's endings. If you are a Mass Effect citizen, living in the universe... do you still like your faith or would you curse your Bioware gods?
I for one am only willing to accept Awesomeness from the ME universe. Bioware's endings are not my endings and I want to figure out what the best ending to ME would be, so I can put this issue to rest and look forward to someone more literary capable than me, making a spin-off novel (wink wink lieden) that I am sure will become the canon if done right, purely because people will judge it on the quality of content and not just on 'you should go with what the original author wanted'.
I will hold the line.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 10:32:54 GMT 1
From the perspective that it took the original ending and made it work with minimal change, IT sorta kinda works. But it depended a lot on a lot of little details being exactly so, when really it was a lot of reaching. One bloke with a video was claiming that Shep had never heard the sound a Reaper makes prior to the dream sequence so hearing that noise in the dream was "proof" of IT. lolwhat? I counted no fewer than 4 Sovereign class Reapers in Vancouver in the game opening. And they certainly were not mute. No one reacting to the kid was not necessarily any kind of proof, more like artistic oversight.
Doing any kind of "it was all just a dream" would have been a massive cop out IMHO. Before the extended cut came out I was pretty shaky on this for that reason alone. They tried to do something clever on their own and quite frankly, it was overpoweringly creepy. They did not want an easy answer to the Cthuhu old gods. Then they turned them into puppets of a Diablis Ex Machina.
I think that Buch was right in his interpretation of the Catalyst. The reason it is a kid is because AI is the "child" of organics. He then goes on to compare organics to Prometheus' punishment for giving fire to man. I would have said that we were the Titans. The fathers of the gods who oppressed and subverted the Olympians until Zeus, Posiedan and Hades rebelled.Organics did the same to AI until they beat us, as happened in Greek myth. The Catalyst is Zeus, if it pleases you.
There was never any hint in Shepard's action in any of the games that he was losing his resolve to beat the Reapers until the scene with TIM at the end. Had player choice slowly been taken from us over the course of the game causing Shepard to take less and less effective action over the game then I would be inclined to agree that IT was a thing. But that was not what was happening at all. This is where my assertion that the series would pretty much need to be re-written to accommodate IT came from.
tl;dr
I respect your opinion opteronium, i just cannot agree with it.
I do not respect your assertion that as a "type a player" I am allowing myself to be "spoon fed garbage." But then again I think IT is worse than what we got so we are diametrically opposed in viewpoint anyway.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 12:27:19 GMT 1
I read your post, Buch, and I while I still disagree with you, I kinda wish you were on the writing team. Whatever the concept of the ending was, it suffers from naivete, presumptuousness, and poor wrapping around. I wish someone had just paid attention to the whole thing more. ME3 was such a rushed business. Thanks for reading, chief. And I can't argue with what you said there. I really do believe all I said was intentional on BioWare's part. But who knows. Maybe it's better to say that what I wrote was what they were trying to do.
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Post by Knightfall on Jul 2, 2012 12:31:43 GMT 1
I think I would've liked ME3's ending even less if IT had been true precisely because of what jklinders said: it relied on things that I think 99% of gamers missed or didn't even notice. It forces you to connect the tiniest of dots across a 30-ish hour game, and there was absolutely no narrative focus on any of it, which is the main thing. Most of that stuff happened outside the narrative, during sidequests and exploration. For instance, the video had party banter as some of the evidence for IT, but some people might not even talk to their party enough to get some of those lines, so in what sense can an ending rely on it?
Personally, I think it's hilarious in hindsight, and was likely a little sobering for BioWare. The ending immediately called attention to so many flaws inherent in the game's storytelling, trying to connect the three games together in five minutes, and they tried to connect them in the one way they didn't fit together. The Reapers' motives never made sense because BioWare intentionally left it all a mystery. Now that we have motive, their actions over the course of the three games have been erratic at best. Dumb, at worst.
What's the best way to take the galaxy by surprise? Send one ahead to alert everyone to our presence. Way to go, Sovereign. You had one job to do: shave five years off our trip by activating the Citadel relay... Let's come in under the deadline for once.
I don't know. xD
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 12:35:13 GMT 1
Good points. xD
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Post by opteronium on Jul 2, 2012 14:25:33 GMT 1
Good point on Soverign and the 5 years and the relay.
You'd think they could afford to waste 5 years and come in force if they could afford to wait 50 000 years...
This cheese is more holes than ... cheese.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 19:19:23 GMT 1
Please please please, don't get me started on the Arrival DLC and the fact they never really needed Sovereign. I have just turned a corner to not picking the damn story apart.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 19:30:14 GMT 1
'Arrival' is the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I'm still angry about Arrival. I deleted my copy immediately.
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Aerecura
Commander
Calliope Queen
Posts: 244
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Post by Aerecura on Jul 2, 2012 22:15:40 GMT 1
So I finally just gave up trying to make the EC play nice with my copy of ME3 and took to Youtube to extensively watch all the endings. And as several people have already mentioned...I now find the concept of the synthesis ending very frightening indeed. I was wary of it in the original, but now that you see the EDI-narrated cutscenes (which actually were very nicely done, but that's beside the point), I got really creeped out. Especially because the Starchild gives no explanation other than "the galaxy is ready." Well, why? Why now? If it failed so many times before, how will it not fail this time? So even though the game outright states that this is supposed to be the 'perfect' ending, I don't find it so.
And I still found the Destroy ending unconscionable because for me, the central message of the game is about accepting all life forms, whether they're bloodthirsty krogans or rachni or, yes, AIs. I again would pick Control, even though the concept of Shreaper freaks me out more than a little.
So yeah. My two cents. Once again, I had tears coming out of my nose (and it wasn't even my Shepard I was watching, it was some random Youtuber's...). So I think...that means it's good?
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Post by Knightfall on Jul 2, 2012 23:57:31 GMT 1
I really don't think BioWare thought all that much about what Synthesis implies morally. I think they were looking at it through a Symbolism 101 point of view. It all sounded good in theory: Unite, Destroy, Control. It shows that more than a few of the writers were left out of the loop, because I don't think they would've all been in agreement over this. But you can tell that they were brought back for the Extended Cut, because it kinda softened the blow in the best ways possible, drawing attention away from all the morally troubling aspects of that decision.
The Catalyst should've just been a big space gun, honestly. Would've made things simpler. xD
And the Reaper motives... I don't wanna get jklinders riled up, but then again I kinda do. It all kinda calls into question: what the hell was Harbinger trying to do in ME2, anyway? They were making a human Reaper at the end of ME3, anyway, and they would've succeeded in creating it had it not been for Sovereign and Harbinger. The Qui-Gon Jinn of Reapers. xD
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Post by jklinders on Jul 3, 2012 0:24:32 GMT 1
They never explained why the Reapers never needed the Citadel relay to get here.If they never needed it why was Sovereign needed. Sovereign had a purpose in ME 1. He was the gatekeeper. He had a hard job because the protheans changed the locks.
The writers forgot a lot since the first game. Why didn't the Reapers beeline for the Citadel and take control of the relays. That was always the key to their effortless victories. Isolate the clusters and conquer them piecemeal. After the Citadel was seized in ME 3 that should have been it. No more travel across the galaxy. The Victory fleet should have been stranded.
I can't work up a proper rant right now Knight. I need to finish my damn playthrough first. Buch's an easy target right now, try provoking him... ;D
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Post by Knightfall on Jul 3, 2012 0:30:34 GMT 1
I can't work up a proper rant right now Knight. I need to finish my damn playthrough first. Buch's an easy target right now, try provoking him... ;D Well, that's easy. Just force him to think of an American remake of Red Dwarf with Ryan Reynolds as Lister. =D Wait for it...
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