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Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

Endemic

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The genophage sub-plot has some good C&C as well.
 
Unwanted

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You can try to broker peace, but it’s only possible if you have enough paragade juice and you haven’t pissed off either side too much. Brokering peace gets you both fleets and a big happy ending to this story[8], but does require quite a bit of effort. I’m pretty sure it’s only possible if you imported a Mass Effect 2 with the right decisions. The default Mass Effect 3 state can’t ever attain it.
If that's actually true then that's more C&C in this one quest than in the entire Dragon Age series.


So it's probably not true...
The hell are you talking about man, it has a lot of C&C, I give you that, but it's not a difficult thing to achieve. Just check the wiki. First, you need a save game from me2 with both tali and legion alive (standard stuff); you must complete a quest on rannoch called geth fighter squadrons (easily done if you are a systematic guy). Second, the more complex stuff. You need to resolve the loyalty argument between tali and legion using the PARAGADE option in order to gain both loyalties (easy enough if you are the systematic guy). You need to prove tali's innocence during her trial and you can do it by choosing, again, the PARAGADE option (surprise!). You need to destroy the heretics during legion's loyalty mission (this is the only difficult point because if you decide to rewrite the heretics you will NOT be able to save both quarians and geth in me3 [this is the only difficult thing to accomplish because the game actually punishes you for choosing the paragon option in the long run]). Actually, even if you rewrote the geth you can still get the thing done by completing the mission to save admiral koris in me3 and you're still good (bonus points if you save the admiral [again, using a PARAGADE option]). Pretty crazy C&C, I must admit it, spanning two entire games nonetheless and multiple choices with many possibilities to screw things up but, and I must say but, if you are the methodical kind of gamer, doing all side quests, sticking to paragon or renegade choices (and I mean, ALWAYS sticking to paragon or renegade choices 'cause the game punishes you MASSIVELY if you think of mixing morality points together), you have a 100% rate of success (absolute certainty) in saving both geth and quarian.
Still not enough for me: an incredibly complex quest does not make up for all the choices you have in dao.
 
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Bleed the Man

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The hell are you talking about man, it has a lot of C&C, I give you that, but it's not a difficult thing to achieve. Just check the wiki. First, you need a save game from me2 with both tali and legion alive (standard stuff); you must complete a quest on rannoch called geth fighter squadrons (easily done if you are a systematic guy). Second, the more complex stuff. You need to resolve the loyalty argument between tali and legion using the PARAGADE option in order to gain both loyalties (easy enough if you are the systematic guy). You need to prove tali's innocence during her trial and you can do it by choosing, again, the PARAGADE option (surprise!). You need to destroy the heretics during legion's loyalty mission (this is the only difficult point because if you decide to rewrite the heretics you will NOT be able to save both quarians and geth in me3 [this is the only difficult thing to accomplish because the game actually punishes you for choosing the paragon option in the long run]). Actually, even if you rewrote the geth you can still get the thing done by completing the mission to save admiral koris in me3 and you're still good (bonus points if you save the admiral [again, using a PARAGADE option]). Pretty crazy C&C, I must admit it, spanning two entire games nonetheless and multiple choices with many possibilities to screw things up but, and I must say but, if you are the methodical kind of gamer, doing all side quests, sticking to paragon or renegade choices (and I mean, ALWAYS sticking to paragon or renegade choices 'cause the game punishes you MASSIVELY if you think of mixing morality points together), you have a 100% rate of success (absolute certainty) in saving both geth and quarian.
Still not enough for me: an incredibly complex quest does not make up for all the choices you have in dao.

Although the C&C in ME3 has some pretty impresive bits (the Tuchanka part does very clever stuff with it, too clever for Bioware standards), I thought how they handled the Ranoch elements were a bit cheap, probably due to time constraints. They just used a point system for it. You proved Tali's innocence, you get two points, you destroyed the heretics, two more points, saved the admiral, 1 point, and so on. If you reach a certain threshold, you can have peace, if not, then you're out of luck. There's no real complexity here, all the past choices only amount to the possibility of a third option at the end, there's barely any effect anywere else on the Rannoch ark outside of some throwaway line.
 
Unwanted

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The hell are you talking about man, it has a lot of C&C, I give you that, but it's not a difficult thing to achieve. Just check the wiki. First, you need a save game from me2 with both tali and legion alive (standard stuff); you must complete a quest on rannoch called geth fighter squadrons (easily done if you are a systematic guy). Second, the more complex stuff. You need to resolve the loyalty argument between tali and legion using the PARAGADE option in order to gain both loyalties (easy enough if you are the systematic guy). You need to prove tali's innocence during her trial and you can do it by choosing, again, the PARAGADE option (surprise!). You need to destroy the heretics during legion's loyalty mission (this is the only difficult point because if you decide to rewrite the heretics you will NOT be able to save both quarians and geth in me3 [this is the only difficult thing to accomplish because the game actually punishes you for choosing the paragon option in the long run]). Actually, even if you rewrote the geth you can still get the thing done by completing the mission to save admiral koris in me3 and you're still good (bonus points if you save the admiral [again, using a PARAGADE option]). Pretty crazy C&C, I must admit it, spanning two entire games nonetheless and multiple choices with many possibilities to screw things up but, and I must say but, if you are the methodical kind of gamer, doing all side quests, sticking to paragon or renegade choices (and I mean, ALWAYS sticking to paragon or renegade choices 'cause the game punishes you MASSIVELY if you think of mixing morality points together), you have a 100% rate of success (absolute certainty) in saving both geth and quarian.
Still not enough for me: an incredibly complex quest does not make up for all the choices you have in dao.

Although the C&C in ME3 has some pretty impresive bits (the Tuchanka part does very clever stuff with it, too clever for Bioware standards), I thought how they handled the Ranoch elements were a bit cheap, probably due to time constraints. They just used a point system for it. You proved Tali's innocence, you get two points, you destroyed the heretics, two more points, saved the admiral, 1 point, and so on. If you reach a certain threshold, you can have peace, if not, then you're out of luck. There's no real complexity here, all the past choices only amount to the possibility of a third option at the end, there's barely any effect anywere else on the Rannoch ark outside of some throwaway line.
Precisely. There is something that has always bothered me about bioware C&C: there is always a third choice. In dao you could kill connor or sacrifice his mother to exile the demon, but you had also the third option to save the mages and use their power to enter the fade and save everybody. In the forest quest, you could exterminate the werewolves or take revenge on the elves, but there was that third goddamned third option to save everyone. Here you can save geth or quarian, or both, if you're the cool guy. And every cumulative choices you've been making just sum up to the third option: gain both tali's and legion's loyalty, choose paragade whenever you can (every single paragade option is by definition a third choice since you are using the infinite power of shepard's charisma/badassery/plot armor to do shit your way and get the best outcome no matter what). It's as if letting the player face the consequences of his/her actions was not enough, they always have to give you the possibility to get the happy ending. Failure is what defines meaningful C&C, always has been and always will.
 

Jick Magger

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Precisely. There is something that has always bothered me about bioware C&C: there is always a third choice. In dao you could kill connor or sacrifice his mother to exile the demon, but you had also the third option to save the mages and use their power to enter the fade and save everybody. In the forest quest, you could exterminate the werewolves or take revenge on the elves, but there was that third goddamned third option to save everyone. Here you can save geth or quarian, or both, if you're the cool guy. And every cumulative choices you've been making just sum up to the third option: gain both tali's and legion's loyalty, choose paragade whenever you can (every single paragade option is by definition a third choice since you are using the infinite power of shepard's charisma/badassery/plot armor to do shit your way and get the best outcome no matter what). It's as if letting the player face the consequences of his/her actions was not enough, they always have to give you the possibility to get the happy ending. Failure is what defines meaningful C&C, always has been and always will.
Well they did try to invoke a situation where you had to make a hard choice between one side or another, and that was at the end of Dragon Age 2, where Anders blows up the Chantry, thereby aggravating the Templars enough to finally try to exterminate the Mages, and forcing the mages to fight for their freedom for the sake of survival. Anders even outright says that there won't be a third option to save everybody this time around.

Ironically, this was a terrible implementation of it since there was an obvious third choice available: simply making Hawke, the protagonist, invoke his right as the Viscount of the city to demand that both sides stand down and that Anders be arrested and put on trial. Anders has already admitted that he worked alone right to the face of the leaders of all major parties involved, and all it'd take is a perfunctory investigation into his background to confirm it, thereby proving that the mages of the circle are entirely innocent. Sure, you can argue that it wouldn't solve the situation (The templar leader is clearly irrational, the citizens of the city will still probably be outraged that it happened and hate mages even more, etc), but it feeds into the overall issue the game has that despite the story supposedly being that of Hawk's rise to power and prominence in Kirkwall, you never actually have any agency over what's happening around you. You start the game an errand boy, and you end it as an errand boy with a fancier title.
 

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Ironically, this was a terrible implementation of it since there was an obvious third choice available
This is always a problem with bad C&C and arguably these kinds of situations are even worse than having the 3rd option. If you want to implement good C&C then do it the way MotB did, where which is good and which is bad is entirely dependent on what you're trying to get out of the game. Situations where each outcome is "bittersweet" and you kinda have to choose between 2 bad options because even though a proper solution is painfully obvious the writers locked it out because reasons... it's just bad writing. I think it's partly because game writers really want to write movies instead. They forget that stupid decision-making in movies works because you're a passive spectator; the whole point of a game is that you're not just watching, and forcing you into situations where you scream at your own avatar "you moron" is the best way to yank a player out of the game.
 

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it feeds into the overall issue the game has that despite the story supposedly being that of Hawk's rise to power and prominence in Kirkwall, you never actually have any agency over what's happening around you. You start the game an errand boy, and you end it as an errand boy with a fancier title.

IIRC, the game actually lampshades this in the ending cutscene with Varric.
 

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Mass Effect Retrospective 45: The Temple of Duh
splash800_takebackearth.jpg

Supply lines are cut. The military is being consumed by an implacable enemy. Resources are low. Millions have died and entire worlds have gone dark, production-wise.

And yet somehow the galaxy[2] is building the Crucible, which is a massive mystery device of future technology built from ancient Prothean blueprints. This is like Great Britain building the Apollo program during The Blitz.

The Catalyst
The story never says where the Crucible is being built. I’m really curious about that, since there must be a constant influx of people and supplies to the place. It’s the most important thing in the galaxy right now. It should be very hard for the Reapers to overlook. The entire plot turns on this object, and it’s being built entirely off-screen, mostly by people we never meet, in an unknown location.

The the best scientists in the galaxy have gathered to build a device they don’t understand, they don’t know how to use, and don’t know what it will do when they turn it on. Imagine this. They literally have no idea what this does. Is it a weapon? Should we aim it at something? How? Where do we put it? Is it a super-shield to protect a planet, or a super-nuke that will blow up a star system? Do we need to stand way, way back when we turn it on? Does it need a crew? Fuel? A driver-side airbag and parking lights?

Despite that, they do know it’s not complete. They know they need one more part, but they don’t know what it is, what it’s for, or what it will do, but they’re calling it the Catalyst. Really, the list of things they do know and don’t know about this device are oddly specific.

The Asari councilor summons Shepard. She might have some information on the Catalyst. She sends him to a temple on their homeworld. When he gets there, the Reapers are attacking and everything is chaos, etc.



me3_thessia2.jpg

I know it's petty, but I HATE how the Asari have jargon for ranks, units, weapons, formations, vehicles, and tactics that are simply a mindless copy of 20th century American (movie) military. It feels so... lazy.


Liara says this on the way to the temple:

“The coordinates the counselor gave you are for the Temple of Athame. My mother took me there once. It’s several thousand years old. And for some reason it has classified government funding.”

It’s revealed that the entire Asari religion and goddess-worship is actually a government-created conspiracy that lasted for thousands of years to cover up the fact that they had Prothean beacons, which the game implies is the source of their technology.

So the government formed a religion, and took this alien artifact – which, again, is apparently a source of a lot of their knowledge – and put it inside of a statue, and put the statue in a public temple.

I Have Questions
This entire section is a piñata of bad ideas. Every line of dialog spews out several new, unsupported, contradictory, nonsensical points that have never been foreshadowed and lead to no payoff. It’s so bad I’d suggest it was sabotage if the rest of the main story wasn’t such a mess.

Why didn’t the Asari learn about the Reapers from the beacon?

The entire point of this device is to warn the people of the next cycle about the Reapers. And yet the Asari somehow studied this thing enough to get a technological boost from it, and yet never turned it on or saw it fulfill its one and only purpose? What were they doing with it?

The Asari had this beacon on their homeworld, which they continued to keep secret (and never investigated themselves) even after the business with Saren and the Reapers and the frantic search for beacons all over the galaxy?

Why didn’t the Protheans just TELL the Asari about the Reapers?

This sequence in the temple also reveals that the Protheans uplifted the Asari. Maybe not to space, but to agricultural-level society. They knew each other personally. So that means the last Reaper invasion overlapped with the friendship between the Protheans and the Asari. So the Protheans didn’t tell the Asari about the Reapers, even during the Reaper invasion? And then the Protheans created a beacon to tell them, and it still somehow didn’t tell them, despite them studying it for centuries?

This is not another case of the writer forgetting to read the codex. Both of these concepts are introduced here, together, in the same scene. Somehow the Asari remembered all this stuff from the Protheans, but never managed to remember their godlike friends being wiped out by space demons?

Why did the Asari hide this Prothean beacon in a statue in a public place?



me3_thessia3.jpg



Imagine aliens crash on Earth and the US government wants to conceal the wreckage. But instead of sticking the ship in Area 51, they put it in a giant statue of the Virgin Mary, which they put in the biggest church in New York. If the artifact did anything interesting, there wouldn’t be any science people around to observe it. Moreover, if you decided to run new tests on it, you wouldn’t be able to, because it’s now sealed inside a statue. This both increases the chance of exposure and prevents you from studying it.

Governments have secure facilities for this very reason!

Actually, it’s not like they made a Virgin Mary. It’s like they made some new figure that nobody had ever heard of, and then somehow got people to worship it. Which makes me wonder…

Why would you create a new religion?

What’s the religion for? Assuming you’re just set on this idiotic statue idea, why not invent something way easier? Why not just make a park with a big secular statue? What possible benefit would there be to invent a new religion?

But even if you had a good reason for doing that…

HOW would you create a new religion?



me3_thessia11.jpg



Maybe if you’re 8 years old you might imagine that you can wander out into the streets and say, “This is a new god I made up. Everyone believe in them now” and then you’ll become the Pope of a new religion.

But people with some sort of rudimentary, middle-school grasp of history will observe that religions tend to have some kind of background and culture associated with them. Laying aside arguments over a supernatural divinity[3], a historian can observe that religions don’t simply materialize at random. They’re the result of political changes, cultural shifts, charismatic leaders, and heroic deeds. That’s not something a group of scientists could manufacture, even if they had a reason to do so. Especially if the only point was so that they would have a container to prevent them from studying a technological artifact.

This is on top of the fact that the Asari only seem to have one religion right now. Presumably they had others before this one came along. How did this abruptly-invented government religion supplant the established ones?

And since this religion is so popular[4] now…

Why would the government secretly fund this religion?



me3_thessia8.jpg



Governments can do that in the open. Moreover, this is the dominant religion – indeed, the only religion depicted – of an entire species. If they have some sort of system of tithes, then money really shouldn’t be a problem. If they don’t, then how is the government funding a secret? Do none of these billions of worshipers ask who’s paying to keep the lights on? Do the millions of priestesses never look down to see who signed their paycheck?

While not impossible, this is a strange idea. It’s like if I tell you a story, and in the middle of the story I casually mention that half the people in a city killed themselves, but I never say why and I never say what the aftermath was. I just sort of mention it in passing. If you were the listener, you would probably stop me and demand an explanation, because details like that stand out.

This entire section is filled with these sorts of strange ideas, and Shepard doesn’t ever step in on our behalf. He doesn’t even seem to notice how ludicrous this is.

How did the government keep this gigantic conspiracy a secret for thousands of years?



me3_thessia4.jpg



Funding a religion in secret only makes it seem extremely suspicious. Which would be fine, except little Liara had apparently heard of the covert funding, which means it must have been a poorly kept secret. Which… fine. But then why is she shocked about any of this? Why isn’t this common knowledge by now?

Can you imagine as each new generation of Goddess-worshipers comes to work for the Department of Fake Religion and they have to be told that everything they’ve been taught is a lie? That’s got to be the most awkward employee orientation ever.

And then none of those shocked, disillusioned former worshipers ever went public? This suggests an abrupt new sinister dimension to the Asari that the writer doesn’t explore because they didn’t realize that running a conspiracy for thousands for years would require a level of ruthlessness, cunning, and zealotry that goes against what we’ve been shown about the Asari until now.

What technological advantage?

This is something that’s never come up before in the series. While the writer might talk them up in the codex from time to time, are the Asari really that far ahead? Their combat prowess comes from their biotics, not their zap guns. Their ships don’t seem to be anything special. In fact, in the previous shooting section we see the Asari have the same thump-thump mounted turret they have back on Earth, and the soldiers are all carrying pedestrian ground weapons.

The story has never shown us any mystery technology or seemingly-magical gizmos in the hands of the Asari[5]. Not once has anyone ever expressed wonder at Asari technology, much less asked how they could be so far ahead. Sure, they do seem to be a little better than everyone else, but the Asari seem closer to the Turians than (say) America in 1950 compared to America in 2015.

Yes, you could make the case that they have lots of advanced technology that we’re never shown[6]. But that’s my point: This is an explanation to a mystery that’s never portrayed.

But even if we accept the premise that the Asari really are significantly ahead of the other races…

Why would the Asari need an explanation for their technological advantage?



me3_thessia6.jpg



The Asari are supposedly hiding this beacon from the rest of the galaxy so that nobody will know where they got their technology. Except, doesn’t everyone get their technology from the mass effect relays and the Citadel? In the first game it was made clear that the relay network was kind of a trap invented by the Reapers. It was designed to funnel technological progress along certain lines, and make organics dependent on the relays.

Ignoring that, the Asari were the first ones in space in this cycle. Of course they should be ahead of the other species in terms of technology! Moreover, they live for 1,000 years. That is an amazingly long time. Imagine if every great thinker since 1100AD was still alive and working today, and they had spent all of the intervening years continuing the study we know them for.

Imagine that right now, in Cambridge, you could find Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Sir Edward Victor Appleton, and Niels Bohr hanging out with Stephen Hawking. And all of these guys are busy doing research, writing papers, and commenting on one another’s work. Imagine if we still had Da Vinci, Charls Darwin, Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, Johannes Kepler, Nikola Tesla, Nicolaus Copernicus, Rosalind Franklin, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Even better: Most of these people are still in their prime. None of them has entered the last century of their life[7]. Galileo is pretty busy, but if you corner him at a party he’ll tell you all about hanging out with Al-Khwarizmi before his death in the 1700’s. And if you get a few drinks into him, he’ll wax nostalgic about the teachers of his youth, most of whom studied under Plato, Archimedes, and Pythagoras.

A thousand years is a really long time!



me3_thessia9.jpg



That’s the problem with us humans. It takes a good 30 years to get the knowledge into your head so you can contribute, and then you’ve got maybe another 30 left before you start to fall apart. For the Asari, this “useful” phase is apparently about 900 years long. The Asari might live 10 times longer than us, but they have something like 30 human lifetimes of productivity.

It would be strange if the Asari weren’t the most advanced race in the galaxy. I’d expect them to be centuries – perhaps millennia – ahead of the other races. But instead the game shows them only slightly ahead. Fine. I always assumed the relatively even technological match between the various races was due to general Asari openness.

The Asari should be far, far ahead, but the game shows us they aren’t. And yet the writer claims that they are, but they shouldn’t be. This is double backwards. And no that doesn’t mean the stupidity cancels out. It’s just twice as dumb.

Fine. Whatever. Let’s just go with it. But even ignoring all of that…

Why would the Asari councilor think this artifact would help us?

She hears that we need help building the Crucible, and her first thought is to send us to a religious temple so we can smash open an ancient and presumably revered statue because the Prothean beacon inside might have more information for us? This requires her to know that the religion is fake[8], that the beacon exists, and that it will have something new to tell us, when you might assume the Asari had squeezed out all of its secrets thousands of years ago. And she also knows that it will reveal stuff somehow related to the Crucible, when the plans for that were found on Mars. And while we’re at it, why wasn’t this stuff about the Catalyst stored with the rest of the Crucible plans?

Once again, this is a mountain of strange ideas that are casually glossed over.

But the worst part of these reveals is that they’re all for nothing. I mean…

Why did the writer do ANY of this?



me3_thessia7.jpg

So Cerberus arrived here ahead of us to get the beacon. I guess TIM has been reading the script again? They slit the throats of the SCIENTISTS who work at this TEMPLE. Then Cerberus withdrew without attempting to get the beacon, and put up the high-security barrier on their way out.


None of this is used later. This isn’t part of a build-up to the finale. These concepts don’t exist to support the theme of the game, or the ending, or help us understand the motivations of anyone in the story.

Heck, in Mass Effect 1 you could’ve used any one of these ideas a central plot for a particular quest or colony location. This reveal in Mass Effect 3 is like Vader stopping in the middle of his fight with Luke and saying, “By the way, I’m your father and I built C-3P0.” And then they go back to dueling and the topic never comes up again in the entire trilogy.

The only reason to do any of this – and this might be the most damning thing I can say – is that the writer thought this was cool.

World Un-building
So the Asari studied an artifact without ever learning the one thing it was specifically designed to teach them, but which gave them a technological boost that isn’t depicted. Then they decided to hide the artifact by making up a religion they didn’t need, and which people had no reason to believe in, so that they could put the artifact where it couldn’t be further studied. Then they formed a secret conspiracy to give the religion money it shouldn’t need, in order to conceal the source of technology they didn’t have, from people who weren’t looking for it.

This writer isn’t just bad at worldbuilding, they hate it. They have contempt for the very concept of creating fictional universes. Dialog is so vague and perfunctory, yet it’s still bristling with these goofy, awkward, ill-fitting ideas. Nothing works together. Nothing is ever set up beforehand. Nothing is supported by anything else. Nothing leads to a payoff. The writer just lives in the moment, lashing snippets of cliche dialog together to bridge the gap to the next shooting section. Never look back. Never plan ahead. Just pound out the requisite two minutes of exposition for the nerds and get back to making action set-pieces, which are the only thing that matters.

Any one of these ideas is a big reveal that needs to be given proper attention and weight. But this writer apparently attended the M. Night Shyamalan “anything unexpected qualifies as a plot twist” school of storytelling.

Hey, Listen!


me3_thessia10.jpg

How do thousands of species collaborate across space and time to build a machine that none of them understand? How do the plans keep surviving when basically nothing else does? Why do people keep building it when it's never worked? This entire concept is just as complex in its stupidity as the fake religion idea I just tore apart. And in about six seconds, Kai Leng is going to show up. The insanity is just so overwhelmingly DENSE here.


Shepard does the lamest puzzle in the world, the statue of Athame shatters, and a Prothean beacon is revealed. Although instead of working like a proper beacon that gives a vision that only Shepard can understand, this one spits out a little VI buddy. But this VI isn’t anything likeVigil from Mass Effect 1 in terms of lore, outlook, personality, goals, appearance, or even voice acting.

Did the Asari ever find this VI? Did the Asari ever TALK TO this VI? If not, why not?

And no, I’m not asking for some fanboy to jump in here with a, “Well maybe the writer was suggesting X?” fanfiction patch. I’m not asking the reader to write me a story. I’m saying the writer of Mass Effect 3 should have written a story.

The answer to all of these questions I’ve been asking is apparently, “Shut up, nerd.” Because the only thing this writer hates more than worldbuilding is not shooting things. And boy is it ever time to shoot something.



me3_thessia1.jpg



Guess who we’re talking about next week?
 

Bumvelcrow

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All this rage is paradoxically making me want to play ME3 again, just so I can experience the outrage in person. I thought it was odd, disappointing, and bizarre first time round (although not as infuriatingly railroaded as ME2) but I must have turned down the knob on my brain dial by this point as all I can remember is thinking:

What, another set piece fight? <sigh>
Okay, Kai Leng <cracks knuckles>

Looking forward to next week's extreme :deathclaw:
 

pippin

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Kai Leng is one of the most cringeworthy charactersto ever appear in any sort of videogame. Sonic OC donut steel tier cringe. The novel he first appears in is also said to be one of the worst video game novels ever written. Kinda funny how Bioware games got especially bad novel adaptations, considering how the press praises their writing.
 

Jick Magger

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It's kind of hard to fully articulate how shitty a villain Kai Leng is. I can kinda break it up into a couple points:

* Pippin's dead on the mark that he's pretty much a bad fanfiction character ("W-Well my character is a half-cyborg ninja who has a cool ponytail and dresses fully in black and knows kung-fu and has a sweet katana and is better and stronger and faster and cooler than the main character and everyone is scared of him!")

* Because of that he's treated very much as a 'creator's pet', insofar as he's only ever successful due to plot armor and cutscene incompetence on the part of the player character.

* Him being essentially a cyborg ninja kinda encapsulates how much the new writers loathe the tone of Mass Effect 1. This is a setting with man-portable railguns, armor and weapons that can be made out of energy fields, autonomous mechanized infantry and drones, all-in-all a setting dominated by ballistics weaponry, and here we have a cunt running around with a goddamn sword. Having a cyborg ninja in Mass Effect would be like putting a Jedi in Star Trek, it just does not work.

* He's not an interesting character. I vaguely recall promotional material hyping him up as being essentially the anti-Shepard, but all this really translates to in-game is him throwing high-school tier insults at you and acting like a cocky prat for no reason.

* We're constantly told he's a badass, but never actually shown it. As I said before, he only ever succeeds due to plot armor or the protagonists being morons.

* His two boss fights are utterly abysmal too, the first being probably the worst fight in the entire series:
- Kai Leng himself is a virtual non-threat, the only reason you don't stove his head in immediately is because plot armor will stop his shield from being completely depleted at scripted moments
- He'll call in a helicopter when he takes enough damage. Despite Shepard having destroyed at least two or three of the things in the span of this game alone, you cannot do any damage to this helicopter, and Kai Leng will make fun of you for trying
- You beat him, only for the writers to say "NUH UH" and have him win in a cutscene. The cutscene is just great too: he throws his sword away, and your teammates suddenly forget entirely what they should do when an unarmed man is running at them while they have a gun pointed at him, forcing you to try and save him and allows him to trap and disable you all.
- Following cutscenes on The Normandy have the entire crew 'console' Shepard for not being cool enough to beat Kai Leng, Anderson tells you that it's okay, because Kai Leng was just faster and stronger and cooler than you (I mean jesus, did you see that sweet katana of his?), and he then sends you passive aggressive emails about how much stronger and cooler he is than you that read like that fucking Chad copypasta from 4chan.

Shamus'll probably do a better job of explaining it, but the point is that he's just bad.
 

pippin

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The plot armor in the game isn't just enough to describe how shitty he is. I've readpeople saying how he, in the novel, was supposed to be a deadbeat and a cripple, and suddenly he receives this almost literal "plot armor" of him being turned basically into Raiden from MGS Revengeance. Kind of ironic how that game also represents a serious shift in tone from its main series, but the creators made sure he lived in his own universe, so to speak.

The icing on the cake is that he's voiced by Troy Baker, who around that time got to do almost every Action Man Character (tm) in almost every goddamn videogame. He's kind of a bro irl (like Mark Meer) but he was being so much overused at that time. I think he's not doing as much roles as he did like 3 or 4 years ago though....
 

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The plot armor in the game isn't just enough to describe how shitty he is. I've readpeople saying how he, in the novel, was supposed to be a deadbeat and a cripple, and suddenly he receives this almost literal "plot armor" of him being turned basically into Raiden from MGS Revengeance. Kind of ironic how that game also represents a serious shift in tone from its main series, but the creators made sure he lived in his own universe, so to speak.
I was trying to be fair to him by not counting supplementary materials, but yeah, apparently in Deception (which was the book that was so bad Bioware promised to revise it, though so far they don't seem to have done it) he's pretty much got the same level of plot armor, except he's also been so badly crippled by a prior injury that he has to walk around with a cane. Highlights include him sneaking in to Anderson's apartment and eating his cereal, solely because he's an 'adrenaline junkie', specific detail being given to how badly he needs to pee in a vase he brought while in a sniping position, and killing the most powerful biotic in the galaxy with a sharpened toothbrush.
 

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Shamus is finding levels of stupidity I had never even considered when I played through ME3. Although, by that point in the game I think I was just so overwhelmed with how bad the game was that I just wanted it to be over. A little later, during the final mission, I turned the difficulty all the way down just so I could breeze through the combat and get it out of the way.

The story wouldn't even really be that bad on its own, but it just seems like at every step the writers ignored the previously established lore in favor of some new, completely retarded direction. Take indoctrination, for example. It's a major theme of the first game and appears throughout the second, but in the third game when there are reapers fucking everywhere it barely comes up. Cerberus are supposedly indoctrinated, but for all indoctrination matters to the Cerberus stuff the Reapers might as well have bribed them with promises of cake. This is in direct contrast to how Reaper invasions were said to work in ME1: the Reapers show up at the citadel, use it to shut down the mass relays, and use info from the citadel to then pick off every major colonized planet one by one. They indoctrinate people and use them as sleeper agents, who go and find out information about any coordinated resistance which keeps the Reapers two steps ahead and enables them to track down every last piece of evidence that there was ever higher life in the galaxy. It's a brutal and efficient strategy, although I was never really clear on how they extinguish all life and traces of civilization from a planet without leaving it a barren wasteland. In ME3 they go after a few individual worlds, never bother shutting down the mass relays so their enemies can coordinate a defense, and apparently never bother to even indoctrinate anyone since TIM is the one doing that.
 

oldmanpaco

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In ME3 they go after a few individual worlds, never bother shutting down the mass relays so their enemies can coordinate a defense, and apparently never bother to even indoctrinate anyone since TIM is the one doing that.

Didn't Anderson or someone say indoctrinated people were being released back out into the population to undermine the war effort by claiming that if people surrendered they would be spared or something. Can't remember what was said exactly but I know it was brought up. I don't think you actually met any of them though.
 

Xor

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In ME3 they go after a few individual worlds, never bother shutting down the mass relays so their enemies can coordinate a defense, and apparently never bother to even indoctrinate anyone since TIM is the one doing that.

Didn't Anderson or someone say indoctrinated people were being released back out into the population to undermine the war effort by claiming that if people surrendered they would be spared or something. Can't remember what was said exactly but I know it was brought up. I don't think you actually met any of them though.
I don't remember that, but that would make things even worse - indoctrination is possibly the Reapers' most powerful weapon, since there's apparently no way to resist it, and they only utilize it to try and demoralize people? Indoctrination is the ultimate intelligence gathering tool. The Reapers should know about the Crucible before they even start building it, and one indoctrinated suicide bomber would be all it takes to solve that potential problem.
 
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Mass Effect Retrospective 46: Kai Leng
splash800_takebackearth.jpg


It’s finally time to talk about Kai Leng. Except not. Because first we need to talk about…

Dungeons & Dragons
dnd_books.jpg


Imagine you’re going to play one of those nerdy tabletop games with your friends. The group has a kind of grounded, low-key approach to worldbuilding. The world is basically “middle-ages Europe”-ish with a very understated dash of magic. Rather than invent new characters for my hypothetical game, let’s just borrow a few. The players around the table have the following characters:

Boromir: A son of nobility but not royalty, he’s a stalwart man who trusts more in arms than in magic. His mind is often on his troubled homeland.

Frodo: A gentle idealist. He hates violence, but understands the necessity of it. He’s reluctant to draw blood, but also curiously wise and forward-thinking for a halfling.

Gimli: Dwarf. Proud. Practical. Loyal. Simple.

And then there’s this guy. Let’s call him Josh[1]. Josh brings in this character:

Xantar Shadowwalker: A reincarnation of an elven god that was slain by an army ten thousand years ago. He’s a half-elf with a clockwork robo-arm. He carries a glowing samurai sword, wears a Zoro mask and a black cape, and has glowing white eyes. Xantar doesn’t have a fixed personality, but seems to jump from being a swaggering sarcastic joker, to a gravel-voiced agent of vengeance, to an unflappable gentleman, depending on whatever will make the biggest scene.

Some people will complain that he clashes “thematically” with the setting. And he does. Others will worry about his character being overpowered. And he probably is. But that’s not really the problem with Xantar. The problem is that Josh is trying to make him the main character. Xantar is so outlandish that he will stand out in every scene. He’s screaming for attention, and the other characters look like extras when they stand next to him.

The other players are here for a cooperative and symbiotic experience. They want to work together to make an interesting story about their adventuring party. Josh is here for a competitive and parasitic experience. He sees the other players as people to play audience to his one-man show of attention-whore badassery.

Josh is fundamentally a problem player in this particular group. Unless his real-life charisma is so astounding that people don’t mind mind playing his sidekicks and passively watching his antics for hours at a time, then he’s a social vampire and he’s going to suck the life out of the game. Good D&D games – and even a few friendships – have been ended because of selfish assholes like Josh, who entertain themselves by magnifying their own glory at the expense of others.

Now imagine Josh isn’t just a player. Imagine Josh is running the game. Everyone still has to play grounded characters like Boromir and Frodo, but Josh designs the villains using the same self-indulgent approach he used to design Xantar.

That’s how you end up with Kai Leng.



GMPC
me2_aria.jpg


This Trope even has a name: GMPC.

This is a load of bullshit. You don’t know the first thing about Call of Cthulhu and you sure as Hell have no idea how to run a role-playing game if you think our idea of a good time is being your pet character’s FUCKING ENTOURAGE!

Al Bruno III, from the Binder of Shame.

Kai Leng is not the only offender when it comes to GMPCs. He’s simply the worst example of an ongoing problem: A self-indulgent writer run amok.

If you look, you can find other instances of the writer making colorful antagonists for their own gratification. Aria is a strutting diva who gets flashy camera angles and gets to proclaim, “I AM Omega!” She has no reason to star in the nightclub scenes, except the writer liked the design and wanted to play Aria and they wanted you to participate by watching and playing the part of the dumb mook she’s got wrapped around her finger. That would be fine as a sort of “flavor text” kind of character, except that your paragon / renegade responses have been re-mapped to “moron” and “bootlick”. You’re not allowed to decide how you feel about Aria, because the writer says you think she’s awesome.

Likewise, The Illusive Man is a chain-smoking shadow master with glowing robot eyes who sits in front of a dramatic backdrop. The Star Child is a glowing god that controls all the Reapers gets to smugly Know Everything while his robots ravage the Earth in the background. These people don’t actually have clever things to say, and in fact a lot of their dialog is shallow and dumb when it isn’t just clichés copied from better stories. But when they’re on stage the world revolves around them, because they have character designs that overshadow everyone else and the cinematographer is on their side to give them all the dramatic cuts and close-ups they need. When these characters are around the storyteller treats them like the protagonist and relegates Shepard to the role of their impotent sidekick / whipping dog. It would be bad enough if the writer simply made Shepard an inert observer of this show, but then they co-opt your dialog wheel and force you to participate.

“But Shamus! It’s not fair to compare a scripted Videogame to a tabletop game!”

You’re right. This is unfair. It’s unfair because what the Mass Effect 3 writer has done is actually far more offensive than just sidelining the player character for a “more interesting” character controlled by the author. In a tabletop game, the GM doesn’t presume to dictate how your character behaves. Sure, as the god of this world the GM can make their villain effectively omnipotent and omniscient, but at least you’re still allowed to play your character according to the rules. Here in Mass Effect 3, not only has the author made a self-indulgent Mary Sue for you to fight, they presume to make your character act like an idiot in cutscenes in order to amplify the glory of their pet character.

me3_kaileng4.jpg


In your first encounter with Kai Leng, Shepard says, “It’s over, pal!” when his team surrounds Leng. It’s really strange. Shepard says it spontaneously with no player input, and it doesn’t sound like a very Shepard-ish thing to say. (Really? Shepard is going to call someone “pal”? Why is my space marine suddenly talking like a 1950’s gumshoe?) It’s kind of lame. Kai Leng responds with a smirk, “No. Now it’s fun.” And suddenly Shepard’s dumb line makes sense. Shepard is not talking to characterize Shepard, he’s setting up “cool” one-liners for the writer’s pet villain.

I’m not saying that characters aren’t allowed to be impressive. Sure, there’s a time and place for dramatic antagonists. But Kai and company aren’t designed with the needs of the story in mind, they’re designed to gratify their author. They look like characters designed to be above this nerdy pedestrian Star Trek bullshit around them.

Anyway. Let’s get back to…

Thessia
me3_thessia1.jpg


Kai Leng struts in. He’s not afraid of your three-person squad, because he is the writer and the writer has given himself multiple layers of plot armor.

Shepard knows this guy is with Cerberus, and he already ruined Shepard’s day when Cerberus invaded the Citadel. The player has no reason not to start shooting. But instead of simply attacking to protect what is now THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTIFACT IN THE GALAXY, cutscene Shepard strikes up a conversation. And not by saying something clever, or interesting, or even tactically useful, but by asking a stupid question. “What do you want?”

Kai Leng puts Shepard in a conference call with TIM.

Compare this scene to the exchange on Virmire, which I talked about way back in part 10 of this series. Both scenes have very similar goals. We need the bad guys to make their goals clear. (Saren wants to serve the Reapers to save himself. TIM wants to control the Reapers.) We need to raise the stakes by taking something away from the heroes. (Kashley / The Prothean VI.) We need the player to lose a fight.

But the Saren fight was a pretty good encounter by the standards of second-act mandated player loss, and this scene on Thessia is one of the most irritating sequences of the entire franchise. Let’s look at why:

There’s no reason to strike up a conversation with Kai. The writer has done nothing to intrigue us, and in fact his character design is extremely off-putting[2]. It’s like having Sephiroth visit the starship Enterprise. Furthermore, He’s not the leader of Cerberus. He has nothing to offer us. he’s just dumb muscle. We have more important things to do.

You can make a forced conversation work if you give the audience something they want. If there’s a big emotional reveal, or a character enters the turning point of their arc, or you hit them with a plot twist[3] then they’ll hold still while the revelation plays out.

In Mass Effect 1, the game had us encounter Saren right after learning about what indoctrination was and how it worked. We were getting the chance to see Saren in light of this new information. Moreover, in that conversation we learned about his motivations. We could see why he thought he was serving Sovereign[4] and we could also see why he was really serving Sovereign[5] and so his already-developed character was given additional depth.

me3_tim9.jpg


In contrast, Kai and TIM have nothing new to say to us here. Kai waves his sword around and does ninja flips, and TIM simply repeats the same points he already made back on Mars. TIM once again tries to sell Shepard on the idea of controlling the Reapers. I guess he’s read the script and knows that the Catalyst will offer us that option at the end, because nothing in the story (aside from TIM himself) has suggested that this might be possible.

We can tell this is going to end in a fight. In Mass Effect 1, the two sides didn’t start talking until they’d taken cover and traded a few shots. They were taking a break from the fight to see if they could talk their way through. Here in Mass Effect 3, Shepard and company are just stupidly standing around in the open, making them seem impotent and short-sighted. Do they really think Cerberus is just going to give up and go home? Why don’t we start shooting? Why don’t we take up defensive positions? Why don’t we secure the VI? Why is my team standing around like a bunch of numskulls?

We could understand Saren’s point of view, even if we didn’t agree with it. He was trying to survive, and he arrogantly[6] thought he could put one over on Space-Cthulhu. We can’t understand TIM’s point of view because we’re not allowed to ask about it. Where is he getting this idea of controlling the Reapers? Is this something he came up with himself, or is it from the copy of the Crucible plans he’s looked at, or is this just another blind assumption on his part due to indoctrination? We can’t ask him what he’d do with the Reapers, or how he thinks it will work, or where he got the idea, or how he plans to achieve it. He just shouts “Think of the possibilities!” If the game actually defined his end goal and how he means to achieve it, then we would have something to think about in this scene, as opposed to just waiting until we’re allowed to make meaningful input again.

As I’ve said before: The Illusive Man is a disaster of a character. Sometimes he’s hyper-competent, and sometimes he’s a blithering idiot. Sometimes the story pretends (through our friends) that Cerberus is serving humanity, and sometimes they’re just mass-murdering terrorist dingbats. And here is where all of those sloppy contradictions come back to bite the writer. Maybe TIM’s plan is a pipe dream, like Saren’s. Or maybe it’s just audacious, like taking over the Collector base. We can’t tell what the writer is trying to say, and we’re not allowed to ask.

Shepard is railroaded into disagreeing with TIM, and yet he isn’t allowed to make any intelligent arguments. Shepard continues to moralize or threaten, but never says anything incisive or persuasive, and he certainly never articulates anything approaching a solid argument. Even when TIM says stupid, contradictory stuff, Shepard doesn’t call him on it. Instead, Shepard’s arguments are simply emotional appeals.

me3_kaileng2.jpg


The exchange ends with some taunting from the writer. TIM tells Kai to take the Prothean VI, and both of them do the swaggering villain thing where they act like the hero is powerless. Taunting is a dangerous thing for a villain to do in a game. If the player likes the villain, it can intensify the rivalry. But if they don’t, it instantly creates animosity towards the writer. The player is already aware that the writer is omnipotent within their own story, and it’s generally considered bad form to rub the player’s nose in it. And it’s really bad form if the writer seems to be reveling in that power. Suddenly this isn’t about Shepard vs. Kai Leng, but Player vs. writer.

The writer doesn’t want you interrupting their swaggering avatar, so they just point the camera at the bad guy. Because in the writer’s mind, people can’t take action if they’re not on the screen. The fight can’t start until Kai Leng allows it, and he has some sweet ninja poses he wants to show you first.

Of course, the writer doesn’t want to be caught doing anything lame and stupid like shooting a gun or hiding behind cover. That’s for losers. So Kai Leng fights with a sword and when his shields are low he drops into another ninja pose. In the open. While you shoot your gun at him from behind cover.

me3_kaileng5.jpg


Once you drain his shields three times, you win. And by “win” I mean the writer takes control away from you again and makes you lose. Kai grabs Liara[7] and throws her into your third teammate[8] and they both fly out of frame. As far as the writer is concerned, this means they have traveled to another dimension and can no longer contribute to the fight. Kai orders his gunship to level the temple[9]. Cracks open up in the floor. Shepard falls on his ass and drops his gun into the abyss, then falls in after it for good measure.

Kai is only a couple of steps away, but he’s strutting confidently. The crumbling floor doesn’t apply to him. He’s not worried about falling in because he’s the writer and he made that abyss just for you. You can cling to the ledge just long enough to see his dramatic exit and listen to his one-liners. You don’t get any dialog, because the writer doesn’t want to hear your voice while he’s busy jerking off in your face. Loser.

Instead of giving us an interesting villain, the writer gives us a bland villain and tries to make up the difference with a crazy costume. And since the writer doesn’t have the talent or vision to make the villain seem impressive with wit or clever plans, they drag Shepard down with lame dialog and cutscene incompetence until the villain looks impressive in comparison.

“How can I have my super-cool bad guy escape this impossible situation? I’ll have Shepard fall down and shit his pants and cry!”

Like I said during Mass Effect 1:

[…]cutscene fights are a fragile point where the movie-story is crudely attached to the game-story, and the designer needs to be scrupulously careful about what happens during these encounters. The bigger the villain’s victory, the more carefully their actions need to be portrayed, because the player is going to resent when control is stolen from them. Their player character needs to take actions that are acceptable to them, the villain needs to do things that obey the established rules, and the whole thing should have some sort of emotional payoff to justify (to the player) the loss of their input.

To sum up: You’re forced to talk when you’d rather fight. The talking simply repeats what you’ve already heard before. Then you’re forced to disagree when you’d rather ask for more information. But your disagreements are forced to be childish instead of pragmatic. You’re forced to continue talking when you can see that they won’t make any difference and it doesn’t matter what you say. The conversation ends with the writer taunting the player about how much power he has over them. Then there’s a fight where the writer flagrantly breaks the rules of the world, simply because they want their self-serving avatar to look “cool”. And then in the end, Shepard is beaten not by clever plans, but by cutscene incompetence, dumb luck, and by the writer ignoring the abilities of Shepard and his team.

me3_kaileng6.jpg


Once again, this conversation isn’t in the service of the story or entertaining the player. It’s in service of the writer. He’s grabbed the controller out of the player’s hands and shouted, “MY TURN!” Because Shepard isn’t the main character. He’s the audience. Or maybe a prop. He doesn’t matter.

“Shamus, it’s not fair to say Kai Leng becomes the main character. He’s still the antagonist, and the antagonist can’t be the main character. Aren’t you just being salty because YOU selfishly want to always be at the center of the universe?”

The closest analog to Kai Leng is a slasher movie villain like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. They’re the signature characters. They get the cool camera angles, the cool one-liners[10], the wild costumes, impressive musical cues, and they exist in a world where everyone else is a boring peasant. They get to be unstoppable badasses for most of the story, and even at the end they get to die the death of a badass. If you want to kill them you have to overkill them, because they’re Just That Tough. Even in defeat, they don’t ever suffer from regret or humiliation.

That’s fine if you’re supposed to be writing a story about a supernatural killing machine who slaughters his way through a cast of disposable, mostly-unlikable sacrificial lambs and treats them like his playthings, but in a sci-fi story about Commander Shepard finding a way to stop the Reapers, introducing this author-serving side-villain halfway through the final installment is maximally wrong.

It’s bad enough to prop up your villain by making the player character into a boring dunce, but it would be less painful if this was done in service of an interesting villain. The problem is that…

Kai Leng is All Costume
me3_kaileng3.jpg


What drives Kai? Why did he join up with Cerberus? What does he value? What’s the big ideological difference that puts him and Shepard at odds? Nothing. He’s just another indoctrinated loony who can go anywhere in the universe at will, simply by jumping into the scene from just off-camera.

The whole point of Kai Leng is to give Shepard an adversary to oppose. Except, this game is already overflowing with adversaries. Cerberus is seriously crowding out the Reapers as Top Villain, and we have The Illusive Man running that show. We have Admiral Han’Gerrel and the Salarian Dalatrass acting as people who oppose him politically. There is not enough room in this crowded story to meaningfully introduce, build up, confront, and resolve yet another bad guy.

In Mass Effect 1, Saren is introduced during the tutorial. We learn his name, we see he works for the council, we see him betray a fellow Spectre, we see he commands the Geth, and we learn that he’s interested in the beacon. We learn his goals, we meet his allies, we visit his base, and we hear about his history with Anderson. He’s part of the story all the way until the end, and his death happens at the very climax of the story. By that point, the player will probably respect him as an adversary, and they may even pity him. Heck, if you spend your paragade points right, and you can even redeem him.

Kai Leng isn’t even introduced[11] until the second act, he dies at the start of the third, and he does nothing to build up or underscore the themes of this game. He has no relationship with Shepard and no connection with the story aside from being someone you fight. Despite his outlandish and attention-grabbing character design, and nothing interesting to say.

After the first fight with Kai Leng, Anderson phones up. As soon as Shepard mentions “an assassin”, Anderson says (paraphrase) “Holy shit it must be Kai Leng! Watch out for him, he’s a total badass!”

It’s like the writer looked at Mass Effect 1 and noticed that Anderson and Saren had a history, so they tried to do the same thing here. But Anderson has an interesting story to tell about Saren that ties into his character, his past, the Spectres, and acts as a payoff / reveal for things said during the Council meeting. It also contributes to the Turian / Human animosity that’s been simmering since the First Contact War. Saren fits within the world, and his backstory supports and even highlights the galactic politics currently playing out around you.

me3_kaileng7.jpg


The guy playing with the Kai Leng puppet – who I’ve been charitably calling the writer – has missed the point entirely. Aside from the fact that he’s Yet Another Human in a story overflowing with them, there are no interesting stories like this about Kai. There’s just Anderson telling you how evil and dangerous he is. The writer has a sock puppet on each hand, and the left one is telling you how cool the right one is. You do get a bit of backstory, but that comes from an audiolog you find just before you fight him for the last time, and it isn’t even interesting or connected. The writer decided to make his character look like Nightwing, and they pretty much ran out of ideas after that point.

Kai Leng isn’t needed in this story. And even if he was, he wouldn’t work as a foil for Shepard because he isn’t given enough screen time to develop as a character. He’s another of the writer’s self-gratifying playthings. The writer – who is supposed to be making an entertainment product for the audience – has instead chosen to entertain himself at their expense.

Everybody makes a big deal about the ending to this game. Yes, it sucks. But Kai Leng’s presence in this story is grotesque, infantile, and self-indulgent. It’s shocking that this character design was even proposed, much less modeled, written, voice acted, scripted, and put into a real AAA videogame. He’s the antithesis of the BioWare style of storytelling. He doesn’t fit in this universe, this genre of videogame, or this genre of fiction.

I’d rather sit through the ending a dozen times than watch one Kai Leng cutscene again.
 

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