Mass Effect 2 is celebrating its 14-year anniversary right now, January 26, 2024. Beneath, we glance again at one among its strangest elements, and the way it arrange a broader subplot that went virtually fully unexplored.
The Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2 is among the all-time nice climaxes of a online game. After tens of hours constructing relationships with a crew of characters you’ve got recruited from everywhere in the galaxy, you are taking them right into a ultimate battle the place it’s important to make use of their particular abilities and any missteps may end up in the deaths of any one among them (or probably even all of them, and also you). However much less remarked upon is the climax of the climax–a boss battle with an enormous robotic known as a Reaper.
Mass Effect launched a Reaper on the finish of the primary sport, cementing what an enormous menace these items had been. What the characters first thought was a colossal, extremely highly effective spaceship turned out to be a colossal, artificially clever creature, bent on the destruction of all sentient life within the galaxy–and it was just one of a complete species. It was so huge that it took a complete fleet of spacecraft to defeat it. And now we had been going through one head-on, simply Commander Shepard and the 2 crewmembers you introduced with you and no matter weapons you had available.
That may have been a reasonably intense second, however the Mass Effect 2 Reaper did not appear to be the one from the primary Mass Effect, which resembled an enormous area squid and had an actual Lovecraftian cosmic horror vibe about it. This Reaper seemed like a T-800 from the film Terminator–if that human-shaped robotic was additionally an enormous, unfinished child. As an alternative of being scary and bizarre, it was unhealthy and dumb. No person talks concerning the battle with the Human Reaper as a result of it is one thing Mass Effect followers could be extra inclined to need to overlook.
The Human Reaper was the end result of your entire fundamental plot of Mass Effect 2, and was mainly by no means talked about once more. And that is a disgrace. As deeply anticlimactic and downright goofy because the Human Reaper was, I want it had gotten extra time to shine and had been a much bigger a part of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. BioWare had concepts concerning the Human Reaper, concepts so huge they made the ultimate boss of their sport an enormous screaming robotic child. I must know what these concepts had been.
To know simply what BioWare took from us with the Human Reaper, it is essential to have slightly extra context from the story of Mass Effect 2. Whereas there’s so much occurring with protagonist Commander Shepard and Cerberus, the ostensibly human supremacist paramilitary group managed by a billionaire, the explanation all that ensues is the Collectors, a bunch of aliens marauding across the galaxy, attacking human colonies and absconding with all their residents.
The Collectors are the remnants of a race of aliens known as the Protheans, a civilization that existed and was worn out the final time the Reapers cleansed the galaxy some 50,000 years earlier than the occasions of the Mass Effect video games. The Reapers turned the Protheans right into a type of cyborg individuals they may management, and used them as instruments to get issues carried out within the eons between their returns to the galaxy to homicide everybody.
You do not actually perceive the reasoning for the Collectors’ actions till the very finish of the sport whenever you hit the Suicide Mission, which takes place within the Collectors’ base. There, you uncover their aim (and by extension, that of the Reapers) was gathering up a bunch of individuals to show them into goo, after which use that goo to create a Human Reaper.
There have been even some emotional stakes for the player–just earlier than the tip, the Collectors assault your ship and abduct a bunch of minor characters you’ve got been hanging out with all sport, together with your private assistant with whom it is doable to have an inappropriate office relationship. You might have had a sexual encounter with Kelly Chambers, after which she bought kidnapped by aliens, and should you did not save her, she bought smashed right into a jelly and pumped into an enormous robotic! And Mass Effect by no means actually talked about that ever once more!
The entire concept raises lots of questions concerning the world of Mass Effect and the Reapers’ complete deal. Is that this how an infinitely outdated and extremely highly effective group of synthetic intelligence creatures reproduces, or is humanity particular ultimately that makes us notably good as Reaper guts? What was the Human Reaper purported to do–would it have been particular ultimately, or was it simply going to be a complete big man flying via area, zapping stuff with lasers, the best way all the opposite Reapers do, like some form of Assault on Titan monster? Would the Collectors have made extra Human Reapers, given sufficient time? In that case, to what finish?
For the reason that plot thread was just about deserted after Mass Effect 2, we don’t know what the solutions to these questions are. However we do have some hints at what they may have been, because of author Drew Karpyshyn, who labored on the Mass Effect video games and wrote a number of of the tie-in novels between installments, however left BioWare between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.
Again in 2013 when Mass Effect 3 was launched and followers had been complaining about how the sport ended, Karpyshyn fielded a few questions about what the story was deliberate to be like earlier than he left. Karpyshyn made it very clear that whereas there have been some concepts concerning the conclusion floating round throughout Mass Effect 1 and a pair of, much like all these people you failed to avoid wasting, the concepts had been fairly, uh, unfastened. Nothing had been totally rounded out or determined upon on the time.
The concepts Karpyshyn shared gave the Reapers a motivation that took a distinct angle on the one Mass Effect 3 lastly adopted, wherein they work to forestall a catastrophic wrestle between natural life and synthetic life by murdering anybody with self-awareness. One concept was that, every time the Reapers annihilated sentient life within the galaxy, they used a race to create a brand new Reaper. Their total aim was to cease darkish power (the power counterpart to darkish matter) from spreading via and destroying the galaxy and all life inside it–a unfold that was intensified by means of the “mass impact,” the science that gives the individuals of the galaxy with the flexibility to journey at faster-than-light speeds and offers some individuals “biotic” superpowers. This might have been a reasonably cool concept, as a result of, within the fiction of Mass Effect, using this tech was in every single place, from spaceships to toothbrushes. Type of like how residing in a civilization depending on oil ruins a planet, residing life in Mass Effect was serving to deliver concerning the galaxy’s destruction.
For some cause, on this conception of the story, to cease the darkish power the Reapers actually wanted to make that Human Reaper. One doable ending can be for gamers to choose of whether or not to sacrifice all of humanity to make a Human Reaper and save everybody else, or to take their probabilities towards the legal guidelines of physics, I assume.
Is all that bizarre and presumably nonsensical? Completely. However at the least it provides the Collectors a cause for liquefying everybody, and form of gives one for the Reapers to need to make a 100-story-tall metallic model of an accountant or no matter.
Whereas BioWare may not have been down with that specific concept for the Reapers’ motivations, I want we bought one thing that was extra immediately associated to the Human Reaper. Because it stands, Mass Effect 2’s conclusion seems like a foul dream. It’s just like the Collectors had a bunch undertaking due in school however the sensible child who often does all of the work was out with pink eye that week.
I nonetheless discover myself questioning concerning the Human Reaper. What was its deal? Why would unknowable cosmic AI creatures make this abomination? Was its existence a unending supply of struggling? Once we killed it, was it a child, and what are the ethical implications of killing a child big robotic human? These are issues that Mass Effect by no means answered, and the world is slightly worse due to it.
(Picture Credit score: Trophygamers on YouTube)