Everything Wrong With Mass Effect: Andromeda

Why not? Sure, it sucks, but you gotta do what you gotta do. It's the price you pay for overcoming the Reapers. I don't fault the ME3 endings for being difficult on players. In execution, yes. In concept, no. You can't have your cake and eat it too - that's one thing that I do admire about the endings. For all their narrative breakdown, they aren't pulling punches with consequence. 

If Joker can't understand/accept it, he's going to have to deal with it. It wasn't his call to make.

He's hilarious!

To be fair, the entire franchise is basically a hot mess plot-wise. Lots of things as far back as ME1 may not make much sense. If this wasn't a game, where the standards for internal logic in storytelling may be significantly lower, it would have been ripped to shreds. 

Andromeda has its fair share, but there are worse offenders that typically go overlooked because of presentation. Stuff a game with enough interesting characters and proper set piece action gameplay sequences and plenty of flaws will go overlooked. Like, few ever notice that Tali's inclusion in ME1's plot makes no sense, or that just about everything Saren was doing turned out to be meaningless. 

Tali was never needed in ME1

After talking with the council, Udina suggests checking out Feros since they lost comms and there were reports of geth in the system. The mission plays out the same except Shiala is brought back to tell the council what she told Shepard. Saren is stripped of his spectre status.

Unless you put a bullet in her head, of course...

This is a pret-ty solid look through on ME and BW, long read

www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792

I suppose Noveria could work as well, since there's a report of geth there too. (Hey, who filed that report?)

When Tali presents the recording, when exactly could she have obtained this? Obviously it happens after Eden Prime, but where was this geth she found, and how did she know who was even in the recording to even bother determining who to tell about it, and how did she get to the Citadel before the Normandy? The Council knew since they could recognize his voice (which in itself is shaky in terms of actual evidence), but doubtful a wandering pilgrim from an insular society would. 

As for Saren, where to start? 

Why does he need the Conduit? Noveria proves that Saren can use his connections to smuggle large numbers of geth into the port. Paying someone to do the same on the Citadel should be no major feat for a Spectre. But putting aside whether or not he can even do that, being a Spectre gives him special access to parts of the station most people wouldn't, and having Benezia at his side, along with a complement of asari commandos gives him a serious edge. Also, since the Council had their heads up their asses about him, he pretty much had free reign, until he and C'thulhu jumped the gun and assaulted Eden Prime for a mere warning beacon. 

But in the end, the Conduit leads to the same exact place we went to via elevator. Maybe it was simply a matter of the dev team not bothering to use new assets to create an entirely new space on the Citadel, but the fact that the Conduit basically leads to the same spot in the Presidium made everything Saren/Sovereign did a waste of time. On the other hand, it was a setup for the perfect trap: lead Shepard & Co on a wild goose chase, they find the Prothean bunker, and then destroy the Conduit when they get through, leaving them no time to get back to the station before Sovereign closes it up. But instead, they leave the door wide open with a few armed guards, even though there was no good reason to leave that pathway open. Of course, this trap relies heavily on the Council simply not believing anything Shepard says. If they truly believed a geth attack was imminent, they could have closed up the station, and fortified the area with their fleet, leaving Sovereign no choice but to either wait it out or assault them head on with no direct access.

Of course, none of that matters either, because ME2/3 establish that Sovereign(I guess the catalyst?) was an idiot, because the reapers were going to be there in about 2 1/2 years anyway.

I've said this a couple occasions before, but I think while DA's plots aren't perfect either, generally handle their stories' internal logic better overall than Mass Effect ever did.

Thing is, they never really found the point of failure; they only found the point of entry, and Sovereign was doing his tentacle thing to fix the sabotage. The keepers were the key here, but for some reason went ignored. After all, they are the only active entities the reapers have operating aboard the Citadel. Whatever happened really started with them.

I really don't want to think about this, but I also wonder about the Conduit itself, namely when they constructed it and set up the Citadel end of the pathway. It couldn't be before the invasion, because the reapers would have noticed it and dismantled it. I like to think that they intended to leave it for someone else to use and never got to use it themselves, but I'm not sure how much thought really went into that whole thing. I think the monument being more than it seems is a cool idea, but I wish it made a bit more sense. 

How do you reconcile this with Saren and Benezia's conversations in the cutscene and on Tali's recording?

Wasn't this thread about shitting on MEA?

That was fun.