Everything Wrong With Mass Effect 3 Redux by GCN

Something to note is that the Quarians’ attack on the Geth in ME3 would have been successful if not for the intervention of the reapers. The funny thing is that while this doesn’t necessarily dispel the idea of a neverending conflict with machines, it presents the very real possibility that any future conflict simply ends with the machines being eradicated and life continuing for everyone else. It’s not ideal, but it’s not necessarily the end-of-everything deal that we’re supposed to buy into. 

I think also that the historical lore they created for the universe also undermines it. The krogan rebellion doesn’t seem like a situation that’s any better than a rise of the machines. Without the genophage, they would probably have subjugated and killed off a good portion of galactic civilization, consuming their resources like a plague of locusts. Heck the rachni war was probably a nightmare. Seems like organic vs organic conflict could be every bit as apocalyptic. 

You may be right, but bad faith arguments cannot be taken seriously nor be given any kind of legitimacy. First, because they are hostile, there is a difference between saying "I did not like the ending at all, I wish they had done something different" and saying "The writers at Bioware have no talent and should be fired", it's not the same to say "I don't think I like the frostbite engine, I'm dissapointed it's not as moddable as other engines" and "The devs are fools for not choosing one engine over Frostbite".

And second, most of them contain absolutely no consideration for the work being put into the games themselves, thus is the reason why the following is almost always true:

Bioware's most ardent critics are those that will never make videogames.

But again, we're in a corner in how they are destroyed. Is it possible, for example, that destroying the reapers was the wrong motivation throughout all three games, but the only motivation/choice characters had because it is the only one they foresaw? In other words, when new options present themselves, does "destroy the reapers" being the ideal choice still hold water?  

I remember an old game, Arcanum by troika, where the final boss and the reason you were on your journey was a long-awaited prophecy but can talk you out of killing him. That boss presents new information for you, things that contradict your reason to see him and presents a choice that on the surface seems disconnected from the journey there.  Yet it gave it character and context that the players can use for themselves. Is that not the same here?

As to it not making sense, consider why Sovereign forced the Geth into conflict; it was to begin the cycle that would wipe the slate clean. Going by the logic of the Reapers here; there have been constant issues with organic/synthetic to that point, such as the Geth pushing the Quarians back generations ago, we have full A.I beginning to gain sentience, and Sovereign states it was the time for it to take action because the conditions are on time for the cycle. The manipulation of the Geth, absorption of people into husks, all of that is the actions taken to pre-empt the extinction.

The logic fail is that it's imperfect logic from our standpoint, why kill or force conflict when none is there? Don't the Geth contradict this? Yeah they do, but that's also kind of the point that gives Shepard ground to argue that the Reapers way is wrong. The Reapers it's simply on the clock and wiping the slate clean - like a factory rest of a hard drive - and it's using the tools it has to start the process.  Resolving the Geth/Quarian conflict without killing either side is the perfect foreshadow to the Synthesis ending, for example, it proves the Catalyst and the Reapers method is wrong, which we know to be the case.

We got a lot of hints of that throughout, like Overlord DLC showing what happens when you force synthesis vs making the choice for it, or the folly of control and the god complex that accompanies it with characters. There is a lot of things strung together that support the theme, the only sin is that it was not the MAIN THEME in the first game. 

Destroying the reapers isn’t an incorrect motivation. The fact that they intend to eradicate billions and convert the remainder into an erector set fully justifies aiming squarely to eradicate them. Their reasons why don’t very much matter at that point. The result is the same nonetheless.

Don't pay him no mind. You always come across someone who cops out, by resorting to slander and childish remarks. Simply because they cannot handle any kind of criticism. 

The only reason peace was possible was because of reaper interference. If it wasn't for that interference, the quarians would have dealt with the geth. Meaning the reapers were never needed if the creators are able to destroy their creations. What could have made a good argument against thing is if Admiral Han "I have an itchy trigger finger" Gerrell stands down without having the geth upload the code. Would the geth have stopped firing back? Maybe. Both sides could come to some peaceful resolution, albeit, a temporary one, but  peaceful nonetheless. What would thing say? Most likely come up with some hocus pocus comment  saying it won't last forever.

I'm not angry about the ending, like so many seem to be, but I agree it's terrible, precisely because it's tonally, thematically, and narratively inconsistent with the rest of the series. You can't just plop thoughtful, weird, big idea sci fi at the end of a pulpy space adventure and come up with something coherent.

ME1 ends with a choice between human supremacy and interspecies cooperation, which makes sense because that was a recurring theme in that game. ME2 ends with a choice between straight-laced idealism and utilitarian expediency, where former Alliance soldier Shepard gets to decide once and for all how they feel about Cerberus. It's awkwardly presented, but it follows from what came before. To go outside of ME, DA:O's final big decision is about sacrifice, a recurring theme; DA2's deals with the ever present mage question.

ME3's ending is about the conflict between organics and synthetics, which is not a significant theme or conflict in any individual game, much less the franchise as a whole. Worse, we had just dealt with that in the Rannoch arc, and having to answer the same question over and over is obnoxious. The ending could have been about the Paragon/Renegade divide, multiculturalism versus human exceptionalism, or even your squad. Citadel is a much better denouement, ironically, because it's all about relationships Shepard has been cultivating throughout the entire narrative and which have allowed him to get this far.

I'd even go so far as positing that the games were never really about the Reapers, anymore than ME2 was about the Collectors. The Reapers are important because of how the galaxy reacts to them; who they are and why they do their thing is irrelevant and could just as well have gone unexplained.

Don’t forget the reaper trap itself. Accelerating civilization’s rate of development is something Mordin touches on in ME2 when he talks about the krogan. No one knows what the krogan would have been like if they were allowed to overcome their own problems on their planet after the war that decimated their cities. The salarians just came along and gave them more advanced tools, taking away that opportunity for them to grow into a more stable society that could have been better suited in galactic society later. 

Well, the Milky Way is roughly 13.5 billion years old, but advanced life, let alone life capable of space travel, could only have existed for a ridiculously tiny fraction of that. Of course, Mass Effect has whacky senses of scale when it comes to time, so it would probably be best that BioWare never try to come up with an answer. Of course, 50,000 years seems pretty arbitrary. Even if the reapers are artificially advancing galactic civilization, it would be impossible for them to develop uniformly within each cycle. I wouldn’t be surprised if they harvested some cycles and they didn’t even have synthetics that would rebel yet, or some might have taken much longer than 50K years for such a thing to be an issue. 

Just because they've been around at least 1 billion years, doesn't mean the 50,000 year cycle has been happening for that long.

Just imagine how long it would need to take for something like the mass relay network to be built. Even if the reapers could hurdle through space indefinitely, the time it would take to manufacture and situate each relay and the Citadel would be astronomical.