Learning from Andromeda, Lessons for the Future.

This is a good point about something else that bugged me about the story itself. The Angara were able to hold off this Kett contingent for decades. Aya, Voeld, Havarl, all three of these important worlds were still held by Angara's fewer numbers. It's inferred, with all the Exalted victims that smaller settlements and vessels in open space pretty much got snapped up, but still this was not a group that truly needed the AI's help. If anything the Milky Way travelers needed them more than the Angara would ever need them. The crux of diplomatic relations should have been about the pathfinder trying to convince them that down the line--maybe a century from the game's outset-- they would finally crumble without some help. Hell, they didn't have any apparent working AI, so SAM could have been a major bargaining chip, offering up myriad story possibilities. They just took the shallow route.

Oh, and think how much more interesting the game would have been immediately following the Habitat 7 opening if the human ark had arrived *in the middle* of the rebellion? Yeah after finally bringing humanity "home" to the Nexus against all odds, the Pathfinder has to help exile scores of beings to at best an uncertain future.

So basically so long as all the space magic in a given franchise falls under the banner of that 'one big lie', it's fine, right?

So... what happens if this terrible violation of science that Gileaden is so concerned about turns out to be a use of mass effect? What then? Does it magically become ok? Or do we have to invent another reason why ancient alien kit acting like ancient alien kit shouldn't be allowed?

To a certain extent I'm playing devil's advocate on the above here. Having internal consistency is generally the mark of good fiction. The part I'm not seeing is why, in a story of a explorers finding ancient environment processors on a planet, activate them and find that they're capable of doing things that can't be immediately explained... within reason, si such a huge plot hole. This is all, of course, pretending Mass Effect actually does have 'one big lie' when it, in fact, doesn't.

To put it bluntly, I could see his point if Eos started off as a Gas Giant and ended up turning into the Bahamas. Flipping out over stuff like radiation does not appear to be solid reasoning. 

I don't see how pointing out their ignorance about radiation is a cheap shot or faulty logic. Radiation is a known phenomenon and they handled it wrong in almost every aspect. If the desert around you is irradiated, then any bit of wind will blow in contaminated sand and irradiate everything in its path too, something the game conveniently ignored. There was no reason to return to that outpost unless there was some irrational hope to somehow fix the radiation, a feat unknown to humanity as far as I know before the remnant vault got activated.

I think that internal consistency and logic was simply not high on the priority list on MEA's writing. We also have this amazing AI named SAM in our head, which is capable of incredible feats of data processing but apparently can't crack a sudoku puzzle. We have shuttles that are capable of interstellar travel even in a damaged state, which means that they must be fitted with an FTL drive, which in turn makes me wonder why those tiny spaceships are actually named "shuttle" in the first place.

If the original trilogy used these massive amounts of handwaving, I must have mercifully forgotten about them. I seem to recall that space magic was tied to element zero, which caused humans to be born with biotic abilities and which could create mass effect fields that altered the mass of affected objects. It was a defined and known factor. In Andromeda, they amped it up to eleven by simply giving the remnant vaults all the powers necessary for their planned plot without any explanations or discernible lore background. To me, that's clearly a step backwards from the OT.

Yes, the crucible. You're right.

A sign of things to come...

Ugh.  What a frustrating, obnoxious line.  I still grimace whenever I hear it. 

Yeah well that line was fixed.

Agreed. I didn't mind most of them but a handful were not needed. I liked how those tasks encouraged exploration but not all were good enough.

I think you misunderstood. I was referring to the quality of them not the tasks in general. I don't mind them in fact I quite enjoyed most of them. Just some could have been tweaked to be more interesting.

They are segregated in the Journal. Unlike the Inquisition.

I won't tell you exactly but I believe you have to have all dlc plus EC.

I do have them and have had them all for years and years.  However, I think I've played the original non-EC ending more times than I played the EC version in its entirety.  The first time I played the EC I accidentally triggered the Refuse ending and didn't get far into the conversation, and I think I've only experienced the EC ending a couple times beyond that.