Der Human Reaper von Mass Effect 2 war dumm und ich bin traurig, dass wir nicht mehr davon bekommen haben

Der Human Reaper von Mass Effect 2 war dumm und ich bin traurig, dass wir nicht mehr davon bekommen haben

Zeitstempel: 26. Januar 2024, 10:00 Uhr
Quellknoten: 3084548

Mass Effect 2 feiert heute, am 14. Januar 26, sein 2024-jähriges Jubiläum. Im Folgenden blicken wir auf einen seiner seltsamsten Aspekte zurück und wie daraus eine umfassendere Nebenhandlung entstand, die fast völlig unerforscht blieb.

The Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2 is one of the all-time great climaxes of a video game. After tens of hours building relationships with a crew of characters you’ve recruited from all over the galaxy, you take them into a final battle where you have to make use of their specific skills and any missteps can result in the deaths of any one of them (or potentially even all of them, and you). But less remarked upon is the climax of the climax–a boss battle with a giant robot called a Reaper.

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Läuft gerade: Mass Effect Lore: Reaper (feat. Indoctrination)

Mass Effect introduced a Reaper at the end of the first game, cementing what a massive threat these things were. What the characters first thought was a colossal, incredibly powerful spaceship turned out to be a colossal, artificially intelligent creature, bent on the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy–and it was only one of a whole species. It was so big that it took an entire fleet of spacecraft to defeat it. And now we were facing one head-on, just Commander Shepard and the two crewmembers you brought with you and whatever guns you had on hand.

That might have been a pretty intense moment, but the Mass Effect 2 Reaper didn’t look like the one from the first Mass Effect, which resembled a massive space squid and had a real Lovecraftian cosmic horror vibe about it. This Reaper looked like a T-800 from the movie Terminator–if that human-shaped robot was also a giant, unfinished baby. Instead of being scary and weird, it was bad and dumb. Nobody talks about the battle with the Human Reaper because it’s something Mass Effect fans might be more inclined to want to forget.

The Human Reaper was the culmination of the entire main plot of Mass Effect 2, and was basically never mentioned again. And that’s a shame. As deeply anticlimactic and downright goofy as the Human Reaper was, I wish it had gotten more time to shine and had been a bigger part of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. BioWare had ideas about the Human Reaper, ideas so big they made the final boss of their game a giant screaming robot baby. I need to know what those ideas were.

To understand just what BioWare took from us with the Human Reaper, it’s important to have a little more context from the story of Mass Effect 2. While there’s a lot going on with protagonist Commander Shepard and Cerberus, the ostensibly human supremacist paramilitary organization controlled by a billionaire, the reason all that ensues is the Collectors, a group of aliens marauding around the galaxy, attacking human colonies and absconding with all their citizens.

Die Collectors sind die Überreste einer außerirdischen Rasse namens Protheaner, einer Zivilisation, die existierte und ausgelöscht wurde, als die Reapers etwa 50,000 Jahre vor den Ereignissen der Mass Effect-Spiele das letzte Mal die Galaxie säuberten. Die Reaper verwandelten die Protheaner in eine Art Cyborg-Volk, das sie kontrollieren konnten, und nutzten sie als Werkzeuge, um in den Äonen zwischen ihrer Rückkehr in die Galaxie Dinge zu erledigen und alle zu ermorden.

You don’t really understand the reasoning for the Collectors’ actions until the very end of the game when you hit the Suicide Mission, which takes place in the Collectors’ base. There, you discover their goal (and by extension, that of the Reapers) was gathering up a bunch of people to turn them into goo, and then use that goo to create a Human Reaper.

There were even some emotional stakes for the player–just before the end, the Collectors attack your ship and abduct a bunch of minor characters you’ve been hanging out with all game, including your personal assistant with whom it’s possible to have an inappropriate workplace relationship. You could have had a sexual encounter with Kelly Chambers, and then she got kidnapped by aliens, and if you didn’t save her, she got smashed into a jelly and pumped into a huge robot! And Mass Effect never really talked about that ever again!

The whole idea raises a lot of questions about the world of Mass Effect and the Reapers’ whole deal. Is this how an infinitely old and incredibly powerful group of artificial intelligence creatures reproduces, or is humanity special in some way that makes us particularly good as Reaper guts? What was the Human Reaper supposed to do–would it have been special in some way, or was it just going to be a whole giant guy flying through space, zapping stuff with lasers, the way all the other Reapers do, like some kind of Attack on Titan monster? Would the Collectors have made more Human Reapers, given enough time? If so, to what end?

Da der Handlungsthread nach Mass Effect 2 so gut wie aufgegeben wurde, haben wir keine Ahnung, wie die Antworten auf diese Fragen lauten. Dank des Autors Drew Karpyshyn, der an den Mass Effect-Spielen gearbeitet und mehrere der dazugehörigen Romane zwischen den Folgen geschrieben hat, haben wir jedoch einige Hinweise darauf, was sie hätten sein können.

Als Mass Effect 2013 3 veröffentlicht wurde und sich die Fans über das Ende des Spiels beschwerten, Karpyshyn beantwortete einige Fragen darüber, wie die Geschichte vor seiner Abreise aussehen sollte. Karpyshyn machte sehr deutlich, dass während Mass Effect 1 und 2 zwar einige Ideen zum Abschluss im Umlauf waren, ähnlich wie bei all den Menschen, die man nicht retten konnte, die Ideen aber ziemlich, äh, locker waren. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt war noch nichts vollständig abgeschlossen oder beschlossen worden.

The ideas Karpyshyn shared gave the Reapers a motivation that took a different angle on the one Mass Effect 3 finally adopted, in which they work to prevent a catastrophic struggle between organic life and artificial life by murdering anyone with self-awareness. One idea was that, each time the Reapers annihilated sentient life in the galaxy, they used a race to create a new Reaper. Their overall goal was to stop dark energy (the energy counterpart to dark matter) from spreading through and destroying the galaxy and all life within it–a spread that was intensified by the use of the “mass effect,” the science that provides the people of the galaxy with the ability to travel at faster-than-light speeds and gives some people “biotic” superpowers. This could have been a pretty cool idea, because, in the fiction of Mass Effect, the use of this tech was everywhere, from spaceships to toothbrushes. Kind of like how living in a civilization dependent on oil ruins a planet, living life in Mass Effect was helping bring about the galaxy’s destruction.

Aus irgendeinem Grund brauchten die Reaper in dieser Konzeption der Geschichte wirklich die dunkle Energie, um diesen menschlichen Reaper zu erschaffen. Ein mögliches Ende wäre für die Spieler die Wahl, ob sie die gesamte Menschheit opfern, um einen Human Reaper zu erschaffen und alle anderen zu retten, oder ob sie ihr Risiko eingehen und gegen die Gesetze der Physik verstoßen, denke ich.

Ist das alles seltsam und möglicherweise unsinnig? Absolut. Aber zumindest gibt es den Sammlern einen Grund, alle zu verflüssigen, und den Reapern gibt es sozusagen einen Grund, eine 100 Stockwerke hohe Metallversion eines Buchhalters oder was auch immer herzustellen.

While BioWare might not have been down with that particular idea for the Reapers’ motivations, I wish we got something that was more directly related to the Human Reaper. As it stands, Mass Effect 2’s conclusion feels like a bad dream. It’s like the Collectors had a group project due in class but the smart kid who usually does all the work was out with pink eye that week.

Ich frage mich immer noch, was der Human Reaper ist. Was war der Deal? Warum sollten unerkennbare kosmische KI-Kreaturen diese Abscheulichkeit erschaffen? War seine Existenz eine nie endende Quelle des Leidens? War es ein Baby, als wir es töteten, und welche moralischen Implikationen hätte es, wenn wir einen kleinen, riesigen Robotermenschen töteten? Das sind Dinge, auf die Mass Effect nie eine Antwort gegeben hat, und die Welt ist deswegen ein bisschen schlechter.

(Bildnachweis: Trophygamers auf YouTube)

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