I just wrapped replaying ME2 and I was listening to the 2010 GOTY bombcast and didn't get why the guys hated the terminator reaper. It was out left field, but I didn't find anything outright bad about it. Am I in the minority?
Mass Effect 2
Game » consists of 21 releases. Released Jan 26, 2010
After a violent death by an unknown force and a timely reanimation by the human supremacist organization Cerberus, Commander Shepard must assemble a new squad in the seedier side of the galaxy for a suicide mission in the second installment of the "Mass Effect" trilogy.
So what was wrong with the final boss?
I never understood this either.
I thought it was a pretty good final boss, I mean you are basically fighting a fucking Reaper.
It's been awhile since I played it, but the only thing that really bothered me about it was how silly the idea of it was.
They were melting down people to make a giant humanoid thing to kill people, kinda dumb.
The mid point boss was so much better, and so was the final boss of ME1.
Because it was a Necron situation and people expected to fight the Collector leader or even Harbinger for some reason
Basically, because it looks stupid in the eyes of more than a few people. Reapers should probably look mysterious and alien instead of looking like a massive Terminator.
@owl_of_minerva said:
Basically, because it looks stupid in the eyes of more than a few people. Reapers should probably look mysterious and alien instead of looking like a massive Terminator.
This. It didn't feel powerful and otherworldly, it just looked like a giant stupid impractical robot.
@owl_of_minerva said:
Basically, because it looks stupid in the eyes of more than a few people. Reapers should probably look mysterious and alien instead of looking like a massive Terminator.
The original design was a foetus inside a techno-womb with wires and tubes and all kinds of grotesque, disgusting things. I think people would've preferred that.
The boss encounter itself is fine, but I have to admit I stifled a laugh once I saw it was an actual Terminator. The Reaper foetus would've looked far more horrific and hammered home the idea that what the Reapers do is abominable.
The boss itself I might not have a problem with. Except the fight itself was my problem. "oh no look out. Hand smash.....oh charged laser....evade....oh hes gone down...wait for him to pop back up again." its felt like a sonic the hedgehog boss.
I bet you this entire fight was similar.
@James_Giant_Peach said:
Because it seemed stupid as all hell. Also it had totally been done before:
As a "videogame boss" it was fine imo.
Not the greatest, but ... eh whatever.
But as a piece of ME fiction it seemed comical and a bit out of place.
Not the reaper part, but the one where they needed liquid people mush for some reason to make it more human. As if meat passed through a grinder is what makes humans you know ... human.
It's the same logic that reapers somehow preserve all the races by exterminating them and processing them even tho they have never shown that anything at all is preserved.
Like a broken deluded excuse of a serial killer: "but i killed them all to save their souls" or some shit like that.
Human form? Why? As if the form matters at all.
And what would it be like when finished - a giant humanoid robot floating through space!
Truly the reapers figured it out.
Make a giant robot dude out of human slurpies.
Kind of like a boss at the end of Bioshock 1.
Sure it's a cool boss as videogame bosses go.
But why is he there?
The answer is: Just because the game designers felt like there needed to be a traditional videogame boss there, that's why.
The attempted lore justification was (more likely then not) only secondary to the process.
Call it a case of "well we need a boss at the end of our game, lets come up for some reason for such to be there"
Some people don't mind that.
You know a videogame being all videogamey up in your face.
Others do dislike that.
TLDR:
It looked silly/dumb and felt out of place / comical.
The fight itself was fine, but I was confused as to why I was fighting a human reaper. I decided it wouldn't matter, it was a mystery that would be explained in the final installment.. and then it wasn't.
So yes, retroactively it's a terrible fight because the reaper is nonsensical, looks kind of dumb, the fight is meaningless and ultimately the entire plot of the game was dumb.
My whole hangup with the Reaper fight wasn't that it basically looked like a Terminator, it was that I couldn't get over the fact that the Reapers suddenly decided to make more of themselves based on other forms of life. It's safe to assume that the Reapers we all know (and love?) are based on an incredibly ancient form of sentient life that probably looked like space squid.
So then why all of a sudden did the Reapers, after repeating this cycle of mass extinction over and over again, decide to make a new Reaper based on humanity? What makes us so special? We're actually a pretty terrible candidate for Reaper-ing. You'd think they would've picked something with a more rigid, condensed frame like a krogan or something, not humans.
my question is how the hell was that thing supposed to move through space would it just be walking on thin air or would it have thrusters on its feet or something?
Wasn't a bad boss fight but it was just a silly design, would have made more sense to just make some thing better in design or maybe an uber reaper ship or hive consciousness with all the people lining the inside of the uber reaper ship as batteries/shields (with no way to remove them or something other than just making jelly out of people).
I think if you compare it to the Sarren fight, which the entire first game lead up to, it is kind of strange that your are fighting a terminator in ME2 when it's building towards the collectors.
Sarren seemed like like a real character you were chasing, and it was neat that you could convince him to kill himself, then there was the twist second form.
The reaper human seemed like a giant space flea from out of no where.
@Nottle said:
I think if you compare it to the Sarren fight, which the entire first game lead up to, it is kind of strange that your are fighting a terminator in ME2 when it's building towards the collectors.
Sarren seemed like like a real character you were chasing, and it was neat that you could convince him to kill himself, then there was the twist second form.
The reaper human seemed like a giant space flea from out of no where.
Yeah, I think this might have hit it on the head. Kinda wanted to shut that guy up about assuming control.
I didn't think it was that horrible, but I'm not someone to complain about video game-y elements in a video game. Disappointing that it wasn't well-explained, but ah well.
I'm more disappointed by the actual fight. It wasn't really all that great or entertaining to me, it was just another enemy to blow out of the way.
It wasn't the best looking boss, I have to admit that, but the fact people are complaining it was made of human genetic material?
All Reapers, which are modeled after the Reaper Cuttlefish (not squid) by the way, are partly made of genetic material. When a cycle comes to an end, all the advanced, space faring organics are ground up and the material is used to build more Reapers, along with some heavy and light metals and other elements.
This is all extracted from in-game lore, not speculation. Here comes the speculation though, this means the Reapers are partly organic/have a central organic and robotic brain that gives the Reapers their power of free will (kind of).
@TEHMAXXORZ said:
It wasn't the best looking boss, I have to admit that, but the fact people are complaining it was made of human genetic material?
All Reapers, which are modeled after the Reaper Cuttlefish (not squid) by the way, are partly made of genetic material. When a cycle comes to an end, all the advanced, space faring organics are ground up and the material is used to build more Reapers, along with some heavy and light metals and other elements.
This is all extracted from in-game lore, not speculation. Here comes the speculation though, this means the Reapers are partly organic/have a central organic and robotic brain that gives the Reapers their power of free will (kind of).
The problem with that lore is it's in explanation of this boss. It's not like Sovereign dropped that line in ME1 or something. And fine you want to condense that genetic code down and shoot it into a baby Reaper, except any selection will result in a bottleneck for diversity (you will inevitably lose out unless you blender almost every member of a species), but it's not like you've exactly kept the minds all that intact. And of course the heterogenous nature of even a single person's collection of cells (ie same genes, but how they are being regulated and which copy you are using)
I didn't particularly have a problem with it as the Reapers could just plain be insane or unknowable elder god intelligences. But combined with the apparent tacit need for that Reaper to then look human made it just goofy. Heck, had it just been human sized but with the combined capabilities of thousands of humans would have been an epic fight (a couple low end biotics, dozens of trained Marines at least, etc) .
@Pinworm45 said:
The fight itself was fine, but I was confused as to why I was fighting a human reaper. I decided it wouldn't matter, it was a mystery that would be explained in the final installment.. and then it wasn't.
So yes, retroactively it's a terrible fight because the reaper is nonsensical, looks kind of dumb, the fight is meaningless and ultimately the entire plot of the game was dumb.
Uh, it was explained in 2... The Reapers changed forms every cycle to resemble what was the strongest race in the galaxy. Since Shepard killed Sovereign in the first game, they deemed humans to be the most dangerous and were trying to change in form to resemble humans.
@Bocam said:
I just wrapped replaying ME2 and I was listening to the 2010 GOTY bombcast and didn't get why the guys hated the terminator reaper. It was out left field, but I didn't find anything outright bad about it. Am I in the minority?
same thing as ME3 the endings rule but the fans drool
I never understood the anger about the boss either ... to me it's shape made perfect sense in the context of the universe and the argument of "how can liquid people turn into a reaper" never really was valid to me. The fiction clearly said that the reapers harvest organic life to create more reapers.
@LiquidPrince said:
@Pinworm45 said:
The fight itself was fine, but I was confused as to why I was fighting a human reaper. I decided it wouldn't matter, it was a mystery that would be explained in the final installment.. and then it wasn't.
So yes, retroactively it's a terrible fight because the reaper is nonsensical, looks kind of dumb, the fight is meaningless and ultimately the entire plot of the game was dumb.
Uh, it was explained in 2... The Reapers changed forms every cycle to resemble what was the strongest race in the galaxy. Since Shepard killed Sovereign in the first game, they deemed humans to be the most dangerous and were trying to change in form to resemble humans.
Except they didn't. None of them looked like Protheans, they just all looked like cuttlefish. Even the ground based ones had a similar shape.
@WarlordPayne said:
@LiquidPrince said:
@Pinworm45 said:
The fight itself was fine, but I was confused as to why I was fighting a human reaper. I decided it wouldn't matter, it was a mystery that would be explained in the final installment.. and then it wasn't.
So yes, retroactively it's a terrible fight because the reaper is nonsensical, looks kind of dumb, the fight is meaningless and ultimately the entire plot of the game was dumb.
Uh, it was explained in 2... The Reapers changed forms every cycle to resemble what was the strongest race in the galaxy. Since Shepard killed Sovereign in the first game, they deemed humans to be the most dangerous and were trying to change in form to resemble humans.
Except they didn't. None of them looked like Protheans, they just all looked like cuttlefish. Even the ground based ones had a similar shape.
Who said the Reapers thought that the Protheans were the most advanced race? Just because the current aliens think they were doesn't mean the Reapers agreed. There are a ton of races the current races haven't even heard about.
My problem with it was that the game felt so cinematic and immersive and then that boss came along and I was like "oh yeah, it's a video game." It's such a video gamey boss. It totally broke immersion for me. It felt like I was transported from an interactive sci-fi adventure to a 1980's video game. I half expected a Gradius/R-type boss battle with the Normandy against him after that since that's the kind of boss those old shmups used to have.
The fight itself is fine. Not particularly memorable one way or another, mechanically.
Ultimately, it's just sort of an underwhelming denouement for the Mass Effect 2 narrative. The first game was this sprawling epic that clearly positioned two antagonists--Saren and Sovereign--against your Shepard. The final confrontation is this massive confrontation that allows you to address these antagonists more or less directly. It's a satisfying end to the third act, to have the protagonist and his ilk clash against the immediate antagonist and theirs.
Mass Effect 2 built up several new characters to perhaps slide into that antagonist role. The Illusive Man and Harbinger. The argument is that Harbinger must survive to lead the Reaper forces into the Milky Way, and that the Illusive Man needs to remain a liminal moral character, whose true motives are loose ends meant to be revealed in Mass Effect 3. This justification is absolutely fair, but it isn't by nature mutually exclusive with the idea of having Shepard confront one (or both) of them at the narrative climax.
Ideally, you're looking at a Luke Skywalker-Darth Vader-in-Empire sort of match-up to round off the end of Mass Effect 2, something where Shepard and Harbinger--a presence whose role has been to this point almost entirely amorphous--face off but leave some of their rivalry on the table. For the narrative's sake, you want the match-up to reveal something about both parties, something like, "Oh, Harbinger is totally a Reaper" (which turned out to be the case, so half-credit gets awarded), or "Oh, Shepard totally isn't ready to take on this thing by his lonesome" (akin to the whole Luke-gets-his-hand-lopped-off-and-sobs-for-his-sister thing).
Instead, Mass Effect 2 ended with a curveball. But not the good kind of curveball. Not the kind that goes over the plate.
You fight your way through the Collectors, through Harbinger-controlled field lieutenants and throngs of Husks and those really shitty floating things that were stupid-hard on Insanity, and then boom. Here's this thing that has no precedent in the 1.9 games leading up to this moment. Here's this entity that is neither an antagonist nor a known quantity of this universe prior to the revelation of this entity's existence. Here's this thing that isn't that closely related to the character you've been trying to best the entire game. It just happens to be a completely separate, half-finished Man-Reaper. Oh, and it totally bears the iconography of a monolithic portion of the science fiction cultural lexicon.
So, you have all these elements. They're crashing together at the same time. And, like I said earlier, the game doesn't go out of it's way to make this fight any more striking than the twenty-or-so hours that preceded it. You literally defeat this enemy by using the exact same tactic you've been using the entire game (read: take cover and shoot at it when it stops firing).
I think the Terminator likeness is a little overstated, but it's also the hardest detail to ignore.
As others have said, the design is what killed it for me. I personally loved the idea of turning humans into some sort of reaper paste (as it's a great out to the "We are each a nation" line that Sovereign spouted in ME1 and is inherently more interesting then "they're just like the Geth but bigger and more...squid like?" which I was personally expecting) but it just felt a little....on the nose, if you will, to have the human reaper actually look like a human. I mean, why? What benefit does that form confer over others? Does it dog-paddle through space? And if it's enclosed in that sort of squid like shell that all the other reapers seem to be, why have it take that form at all?
In game lore or not, the idea that you'd see a big terminator stomping around on a planet or superman-ing its way through space to punch(?) some ships is fucking ridiculous. They should have just kept all the reapers looking squid like and have them fill up with the paste of the best lifeform of that cycle or whatever, and then have you fight one in drydock. I half expected to see a wide variety of Reaper shapes in ME3 (which, while still looking pretty fucking stupid, would at least validate what they were saying in ME2) since the harvesting cycles were supposed to go back a fucking long time, but nope. Just about all squid reapers.
Plus, running a Solider with a Cain and the Widow sniper meant that the boss died in near two hits, which made me throw my arms up and think "Hell, these Reapers aren't so bad after all! If it takes a couple of thousand humans to produce something this half-assed, we should have much trouble putting these guys down if man-portable weapons do it in like three shots!"
@LiquidPrince said:
@Pinworm45 said:
The fight itself was fine, but I was confused as to why I was fighting a human reaper. I decided it wouldn't matter, it was a mystery that would be explained in the final installment.. and then it wasn't.
So yes, retroactively it's a terrible fight because the reaper is nonsensical, looks kind of dumb, the fight is meaningless and ultimately the entire plot of the game was dumb.
Uh, it was explained in 2... The Reapers changed forms every cycle to resemble what was the strongest race in the galaxy. Since Shepard killed Sovereign in the first game, they deemed humans to be the most dangerous and were trying to change in form to resemble humans.
I know why they make human reapers.. The question was why were they using the collectors to make a human reaper in the center of the galaxy before their arrival? Why were they using collectors to kidnap human colonies which could do NOTHING except risk Humans and/or other races realizing there's a threat, and preparing for it?
And the answer comes down to them being impatient, I guess. They didn't want to wait a year to start their harvesting so they had itchy trigger fingers. That's a pretty lameass plot.
I was super pumped during the whole fight but with the nagging "WTF, a giant baby robot thing?" shooting through my head off and on. Not the coolest ending fight of a game but don't you finish Harbringer shortly there after? That was satisfying...I think. It has been a long while since I played that one. Its on my "I need to play through this again" pile.
@Kidavenger said:
They were melting down people to make a giant humanoid thing to kill people, kinda dumb.
Perhaps this as well.
@Bocam said:
I just wrapped replaying ME2 and I was listening to the 2010 GOTY bombcast and didn't get why the guys hated the terminator reaper. It was out left field, but I didn't find anything outright bad about it. Am I in the minority?
The fact that you can nearly kill it in one hit might be a reason why.
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