I needed to understand why the robotic Great Old Ones were solving the Fermi Paradox about as much as I needed to hear about Godzilla's adolescent summer romance. It might send me to worldbuilding hell to say this, but the last thing the Reapers needed was a motivation.
Five RL years and sixty hours of gameplay (on the low end) with "stop the Reapers" as the narrative mortar binding together all the narrative beats and character drama. They and their cryptic contemptuous one-liners might not be the most engaging from a standpoint interpersonal drama, but that's not the point they're the motive force to drive the squabbling, fractious people in the setting (be they black or white or blue bisexual babes or robots) to crisis. That rules.) Robo-Cthulhu is a threat that is chilling and viscerally offensive, whose reliance on pawns and catspaws indicates a sinister intelligence beyond the Mechagodzilla threat of their physical presence, gives Shepard a stream of targets, and implies that powerful as they are, they're scared enough of their lessers that they don't act openly without securing absolute advantage. Even a Reaper that's been dead for millions of years, floating in the big empty, is a corrupting, malignant force that breaks down the sense of reality and identity of the people trying to study it, until they walk themselves into the zombification spikes. And that is the best case at no point in the trilogy did I feel as unconflinted about a Renegade decision as the cell of Indoctrination subjects on Virmire.
Best case, they just turn people into cyber-zombies to throw at their enemies. They aren't just fuckhuge creepy robots, they warp and ruin everything around them. So no matter how much time you spend hacking terminals or threatening store clerks or an emotional journey going from a vaguely human- chauvinist anti-turian with a suspect turian ally of circumstance to a friend and confidante to a rock of stability in a hostile galaxy to a fuck buddy to a love to last the ages Shakarian OTPyou have the threat of the Reapers putting it in context and keeping our ragtag band of space heroes together, and to set against all the more personal, emotional conflicts that pepper the setting (human/turian, turian&salarian/krogan, quarian/geth).Īnd damn do they work as a threat. This is a game that wants you to care about the world it's built, and show it as one worth saving for all its flaws. The Reapers threat is the connective tissue of the trilogy and setting. We don't know what it is yet, but we'll find out. We see our first Reaper after our first dialogue wheel and before we fire our first bullet. Our first look at the Reapers comes in the opening cut scenes, as a grainy photo. The first Mass Effect comes out November of 2007.
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