"Humanity is Special" Trope

Doesn't BW have a huge boner for the asari?

Honestly, as a gay dude, I still would rather see attractive asari in the game.  Also, asari that didn't all appear to have been cloned.  I'd actually love it if a DLC revealed that the Kett actually exalted the majority of the asari and then cloned just one of them to throw us off somehow.  That would give them an out for their screw up and maybe do something with the ongoing Kett plot. Imagine them unleashing a bunch of Not-Banshees on the AI.

well Remember those Keeper Tunnels that were mention within the Original Trilogy,  it would be cool if we had a fire fight within them. also potential for some nightmare fuel that has old Reaper traps and Husks for the pure lolzy.

Well, a Mass Effect game about being a keeper on the Citadel would be kind of boring... walk from Terminal A to Terminal B, enter something and then walk from Terminal B back to Terminal A.  For excitement, you might get to push Shepard around the load dock for a little bit... rinse and repeat.

I just don't think that the protag not being human adds anything really.  I think the "we want to play as an alien" trope is as overdone in the gaming world as playing as a human is.  Regardless of being human or not, the PC always winds up being "special" or else it would be boring game with no way to build a character to be the big hero at the end of the game.  Role playing as an alien is really just a gimmick, IMO.  We ultimately wind up motivating them like humans, injecting human-based morality into them and, in essence, making them human... every bit as much as a game with a human PC generally winds up giving them some type of supernatural powers that enables them to take down myriads of enemies.

I honestly can't think of many developers who don't give the players some sort of power trip.  I don't think many people would buy a game about being a keeper just walking around from console to console day after day monitoring the workings of the Citadel and occasionally discarding a corpse or two into the protein vats.

Before I begin, let me just say greetings, thanks for letting me post on this forum and I hope my contributions work out. Now without further ado, 

Is anyone getting a little tired of the whole "Humanity is Special" trope that BioWare seems to have made the defacto story telling device for Mass Effect? Ever since Mass Effect 3 declared in it's advertising campaign that we should "Take Back Earth", it looked like the franchise was starting to go in the wrong direction. I mean, seriously. They made Earth, the one world we never visited or even cared about in the first two Mass Effect games is going to be the focus of a galaxy wide conflict? And let's not forget the extended ending that made humanity the dominate species in the galaxy by giving Earth THE WHOLE FREAKING CITADEL.



Yeah. That one place that no single alien race laid claim in order to function as a galactic government, now belongs to Humanity. So not only was the Illusive Man right about being able to control the Reapers, his plan to make Humanity the dominant species worked after all! Yay...?

So now on to Mass Effect: Andromeda. A game that promised a new start, a new slate of characters and a whole new galaxy to explore! The possibilities regarding where this game could go are pretty much limitless given that nothing, and I mean NOTHING you did in the Mass Effect trilogy carries over into this one. So does this mean we can play as a different species like the Asari or Turians ect? Since four species are going to Andromeda on their own separate Arks, it would be a pretty cool "Dragon Age: Origins" situation where you start off in one unique location that eventually branches off into the story that all choices would come to. And what better way to broaden and expand the alien races that make Mass Effect unique than to take advantage of that opportunity? Well, according to Mac Walters from this Polygon.com interview,


Asari, Turians, Solarians ect. cannot dream. They are hollowed things that lack everything that makes humanity great. Cripes, even Alec's mission statement on this 'multi-race' initiative seems to confirm this.

Now, the omission of the other Arks, which by the way Alec Ryder believes are the last of their species when they arrive, could be looked at as mere oversight. But there are several points that would suggest otherwise. 

• The Ark Hyperion is more than capable of reaching the Nexus when everyone wakes up, but Alec insists on going to a visibly dangerous planet in order to gain a foot hold.
  
• One of Alec's motivations for creating an AI is so that Humanity can have an advantage over the other alien races.
• Alec continued to upgrade SAM by himself and never shared these upgrades with any of the other alien Pathfinders.
• Alec doesn't even contemplate about informing Castis about the Initiative that could save him and his family from the Reaper threat.

And that's just Alec. What about Sara and Scott? With the exception of some moments where you can have the characters chastise a whole freaking race for one person's actions, they're actually pretty decent. It's not until the climax of the main quest starts that things start to become very problematic. 

For some unexplained reason, the Ryder kids are able to interface with the Remnant technology without the aid of Sam. How is this possible? What's worse is that other characters like Peebee, who has a much broader understanding of how the Remnant technology actually works doesn't even know what to do. It's like they set up this character to do something important involving this very technology, and when the moment arrives for the pay off, they give it to the human who doesn't know jack. It's a real character robbing moment all for the sake of that bloody trope.

Oh, and remember that bit about ME3's extended ending and how it gave the Citadel to Humanity, effectively making them the dominant species in the galaxy? Good, because Meridian is essentially making Humanity the gods of Andromeda and EVERYONE is a-ok with it. This is not some typical planet we're talking about here. It's a facility that's capable of changing the living conditions of ALL the planets that the Initiative races and Angarans live on. How could any of the alien races, including the Angara allow this? If anything, shouldn't Meridian serve as the new Nexus for all species to inhabit and run things? Meridian is too big of a deal to simply allow one race to lay claim to it simply because their Ark crashed there. It's also the only world that isn't being attacked by the Ket, pirates, exiles ect. Not even the Nexus itself has decent security given how easily the Archon was able to hijack the Hyperion. 

So, "Humanity is Special". Anyone else have thoughts on this? Is this really what you want Mass Effect to be about in the end? I mean, I like humanity and all, I just don't feel comfortable about saying we're the best when there are other races that should clearly have more say.