The discourse about Mass Effect 3’s ending will never stop but we gotta admit it’s got one of the greatest openings to any game ever right
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Any galaxy where the Reapers continue to exist is at continuous existential risk from unknowable, lovecraftian machine gods.
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Control seems great for maintaining the peace, but you have to remember that it’s not Shepard replacing the Catalyst, just something that shares their values and is based on them . Your Shepard might fling every Reaper into the sun once given control, but that is evidently not how things go given the epilogue’s depiction of events. What stops Shepard-AI, after several eons, deciding that the Catalyst was right and restarting the cycle?
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Also, the control of such a force by a single entity (either the Catalyst which misinterpreted its creator’s commands to such a degree that it embarked on an eternal cycle of galactic genocide, or any Shepard-AI created in the control ending) is a bad idea because of points 1. and 2.
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Synthesis seems the ideal Deus ex Machina, sunshine and meadows forever ending, but there’s so much unknown about it. Obviously the Catalyst is going to heavily recommend it, because it’s the only resolution where it continues to exist. Also, it talks about how it can’t force synthesis on organics, but you, some schmuck from Planet Dirt, can now, by throwing yourself into this beam here?
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Even assuming you’re not just hurling yourself into a laser beam at the Reapers’ behest (which Shepard can’t know for sure!) You’ve got both the ethical nightmare of forcefully shoving mechanical bits into literally every lifeform in the galaxy. What the fuck even happens to the Husks in that case? Do they remember their past lives? Is their existence torture? Probably. Then there’s the question if this isn’t just the Reapers’ long-game ploy to indoctrinate/husk all life in the galaxy.
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Tali told me to come back to her. I will build her that house on Rannoch, dammit.
