Is the Citadel DLC the culprit?

Citadel's success was in it being a happy release in the middle of a very dark story, as well as being built around established and already loved characters.

MEA was just a different tone from the trilogy. I enjoyed that a lot. I didn't want Shep mark 2.

Alright, can I just say that I've never bought into the idea that MEA was a lighthearted game. I mean, seriously, I feel like the developers just said the game was lighthearted and everyone decided to agree with them. MEA is a game where the main antagonists are genocidal monsters, with no redeeming values, that have potentially converted hundreds of other species and plan to same to the angarians and Initiative races. They plan to do this by murdering anyone who resists and throwing everyone else into literal concentration camps where people are forced into back-breaking slavery until they are "exalted" into soulless Kett clones that will precede to fight against their own people. The Kett are basically Reapers but instead of being inspired by Lovecraft their every real world evil from Nazism, Communism, Religious zealotry, to colonialism, all rolled into one race. For fuck's sake we get to see the corpses of dissected salarians on the Archeon's ship. How the fuck is that a lighthearted adventure? Because Liam makes a stupid joke every once in a while and had a fun loyalty mission? And don't even get me started on how the threat of starvation, power loss, and anarchy on the Nexus is quickly handwaved once the Hyperion shows up. MEA's premise is horrifying and yet for some reason the narrative and writing rarely captures that and instead distracts itself with bland subquests and characters. It's just so tonely off that it almost gives me a headache.



The Citadel DLC could be argued to have the same problem but to me it felt like the writers knew that DLC was basically non-canon and just decided to have fun with an evil clone plot that made no sense.



Regardless, I wish MEA was genuinely lighthearted. Completely remove the Kett and just make this a game about a crew of space explorers in a new galaxy discovering new worlds and civilizations in the final frontier. Or actually admit that Space Nazis are not a joke or Saturday morning cartoon villains and make this the dark game that it truly is. MEA tries to do both and a consequence fails at both.



That's my opinion anyway.

They just should have made a sarcastic/joking dialogue option. You had no idea what was going to come out of Ryder's mouth if you chose the casual option. Since when does casual = joking/sarcastic. There were also too many times when professional and casual were the only two options, so it was either be serious or a goofball.

The tone also never fit the gravity of what you were doing to me. It was find a new place for a colony, or the AI fails. Seeing that the reapers were coming to the MW, you were potentially on a mission to guarantee the continuity of all advanced races in the MW. The tone of this game fit more to a group of people traveling around trying to find their place in the new galaxy, let's see what adventures await them.

What sorcery is this? A BioWare game only giving two distinct bi polar options?  I haven't ever heard of such a thing!  All joking aside the casual option was the joking sarcastic option.  I was pretty confident of exactly what was going to come out of Ryder's mouth every time I clicked it.  It was very rare that me clicking on an option in MEA gave me an unpleasent surprise.  After all casual, to me, brings up connotations of 'laid back' 'care free' 'unprofessional'.  And jokes and sarcasm are exactly what that is.  You really do not want jokes for a professional dialogue choice after all?  

That's meta knowledge.  Did the characters in game know about the Reapers?  No...well not until the veerrry end of the game but that is a story for another time.  To the characters it was a grand old adventure of survival.  Besides, I think a lot of people do make light of dramatic situations.  Its a trope at this point.