Is Shepard more relatable than Ryder?

So you relate to Shepard more (which is what this thread is about) because you can brutally kill someone through electrocution?
Righto.

Bugger, mucked up the quoting. It's not you setokaiba.

You clearly aren't paying attention to the dialogue choices then, it's quite easy to play a silly guy or a guy who is striving to take things logically and pragmatically throughout the game. 

This isn't me looking back through rose colored glasses.  I even stated in the video that I grew to like Ryder.  And I had almost no complaints about the original trilogy.  It's still my all time favorite sci-fi adventure.  I just think they executed Shepards intro/expectations better than Ryder's.  All that said, ME:A has a whole lot going for it.  It's a story of hope through adversity even though there are hints of doom in the Milky Way and a (possibly) pursuing threat to andromeda.  Great game, great trilogy.  Bad narrative execution at the beginning.

So, brutally killing dozens of merks minute later is ok, especially considering that you basically betraying and backstabbing them, yet you have a problem with a single merk and electorcution because, let me guess.... ah, its a RENEGADE choice, that must mean bad!!! Geez... that exact way of thinking why there is so much complains about paragon/renegade system, and a massive whining around Kai Leng final scene. Clearly people do not understand the idea behind paragon/renegade mechanic and that it not being based solely around morality choices. Would it be easier for you if shep just snapped his neck or shot him? Because there Shepards odds of survival are at stake depending on whether gunship gets operational or not. In that scenario any sane person would do what Shepard did... well, except sofa moralists ofcourse, but those would all have died on Eden Prime. Really, get a grip....

I edited the ending of my post to be more clear for the ppl like you, so you might want to reread it to realize better that you need to get a grip.

I added this to the original post, but sharing here so you don't have to go back:

Apr 7, 2017 15:05:50 GMT -4 thisisme8 said:
EDIT: Thanks everyone for your responses and for really keeping the discussion going, which is the reason I make these videos. Also, big thanks to whomever turned this into a poll.

I want to make sure before jumping in here with an opinion on who you liked more, this thread is about how the game initially presents the character in the beginning. I do, in fact, love Ryder. I like the hero's journey (Ryder) as much as the messiah complex (Shepard), I just feel the introduction didn't set me up as well at the very beginning.

To be honest, if the game had started on the shuttle en-route to Habitat 7, I believe we would have had a better narrative introduction to Ryder. In the end, though, I loved the game and I loved Ryder - memes be damned!

The biggest problem with Ryder is that they spread his characterization too thin and made him too broad partly due to his role but especially the sheer amount of dialogue that happens in the very non-personal style of non-cinematic cameras.

We associate more with Shepard becuase ME1 made sure to give him a bunch of money-shots. When does this happen to Ryder? The animations also let Ryder down big time because all he ever does in normal conversations is raise his eyebrows sometimes and make a hand-gesture. There aren't really many moments like this



You know? Cinematography lets this game down a lot.

I think the major difference is between the multi-layered dialogue trees present in ME1 only.  Although most of the choices made in those first dialogues were actually meaningless to the story, having the player select every bit of dialogue that Shepard used in those first moments drew the player into the character.  In ME:A a choice is made that does affect the relationship Ryder has with his twin, but the player does not see the results of that choice until after SAM establishes communicate with the twin which is much further into the game.

As for being "relatable" - Ryder probably is more relatable from certain POVs.  However, no one is really able to relate to the circumstance in which Ryder immediately finds him/herself - that of waking up in a new galaxy 600+ years after being put into stasis and the game just doesn't capitalize on that experience... reducing it to "I need a coffee."  While the whole scene is "kind of cute" it just doesn't draw the player in the same way as Shepard's long walk towards the bridge and, symbolically, beginning his/her journey through the story.

I can relate more to a young person out to explore and make friends, than someone who is already a legendary hero, and badass enough to save the galaxy. Just sayin'.

I'd definitely say Ryder is more relatable in the traditional sense. They're basically the typical accidental Chosen One, minus prophecy. A great destiny thrust upon the unsuspecting, relatively normal, quite young protagonist that grants them great powers above everyone else (Alec's special SAM and his connection to the Remnant technology) and makes them the one who has to take into their hands the fate of their people and grow into a leader in the process. I mean, that's the plot of 85% of Fantasy and maybe like 30% of Science Fiction out there and there's a reason for that - the Ordinary Guy With A Great Destiny is supposed to be an audience stand-in, a character you can reflect yourself onto, and it seems to work, especially with younger audiences. Then, Ryder's reactions are also more muted, either emotional, sassy or neutral, which is probably the spectrum most "normal" people would be on instead of Shepard's somewhat more extreme paths. (That said, especially in some of the more conversational options, I'm pretty sure even I, a very unimpressive ordinary person, would have had bigger quads than Ryder. I'm not talking about sassing the Archon, but you don't really need to be a hardened combat veteran to tell Cora to stop whining, for example. So Ryder is limited by their writing to a certain range of personality types which for me, personally, was not big enough.)

This Shepard introduction also highlights that we actually knew a couple important things about Shepard's past because we chose them. I don't think it was ever fully explained in game what Ryder actually did before coming to Andromeda. Digging up Prothean stuff with a unit, is my vague memory, but I don't think we ever learned much about them. There might be clarification in the metric tons of codex after-school reading material but yes, it all develops over the game and, as you mentioned, perhaps even a little too late. However, it's also not treated as terribly important because the Ryders haven't done anything noteworthy yet and only begin their real journey now.

(Before someone points it out, obviously Shepard is also a Chosen One (we used to call them Space Jesus), I just think that story deviated in more interesting ways from the Fantasy default. The most obvious is that they're not the typical Young Adult that stumbles through these stories while Coming Of Age, learning their place in the world, etc., but actually becomes a mentor to one of the other characters (Garrus) as early as ME1. Shepard grows subtly over the three games, but they obviously already had character development before the start of ME1.)

In the end, I just thought Ryder was boring and because a large part of the replay value for me is playing around with character types, that was disappointing. In DA:I, which also had a "personality wheel", you could be a lot more nuanced. It helped that there, you also positioned yourself on issues. Did you believe you were the Herald? Didn't you, but you told people for PR reasons you did, or did you rebuff any attempt to make you palatable to the masses? Mages - should they be locked up or not? Did you react emotionally or stoic or where you constantly surprised by everything, or pretty much almost mad? Did you put points into a special knowledge perk? Then sometimes that gave you branching conversation options. Even your class and your species gave you extra dialogue (although I think too rarely). Even if you didn't get the full possible choice wheel of I think 5 options, you usually got a sort of DA2 system (upper choice friendly/cautious, middle choice sarcastic/irrevent, lower choice aggressive/straight-forward), which were still distinct enough to allow a lot of different personality types by mixing and matching and keeping in mind the stance you'd made on the aforementioned issues.

Ryder is emotional or logical, or sassy or professional, usually not even all four at the same time, and logical and professional often amount to the same thing. That's kinda weak in comparison. And unlike Shepard, who also didn't have a wealth of options to choose from (the OT was far from perfect writing), I didn't find that choosing either of the two choices ever really made me think of Ryder as a different personality; just one personality with somewhat different tones.

TL;DR: Ryder is more relatable, but I don't want to relate to them.

I guess my expectation wasn't to have another Shepard. I got really attached to my fem Shep in the trilogy. With MEA, I just decided to play this as the character presented to me, like Witcher 3 presented Geralt as a set character, but nuanced. The difference with Ryder is that, obviously, he/she is younger, and the back story is not laid out in 5 previous novels and 2 games, like Geralt's in Witcher. I still loved Witcher and had no problem that Geralt wasn't as flexible as Shepard in Mass Effect. I view Ryder basically the same way and head canon some of the backstory. I suppose whatever was done with the Ryder character, people were going to be disappointed after playing Shepard, and helping create his/ her development over a whole trilogy worth of games.

re: jpcab comment -  reading his last 10 posts shows me he just wants to hate the game, not discuss the thread, which is which character was easier to relate to.

Just comparing ME1 Shepard to MEA Ryder, I think Ryder is definitely a much more nuanced character.  I love ME1 but Shep was pretty much a brick throughout it (unless you went full Renegade sociopath).  I think Ryder has lots of room to grow here if they stick with her.  I would say ME1's intro, themes, and story made me care a lot more about Shep and the setting in general than I do Ryder and Andromeda but that doesn't make Ryder specifically a poorly done character.