Mass Effect 2:s Human Reaper var dum och jag är ledsen att vi inte fick mer av det

Mass Effect 2:s Human Reaper var dum och jag är ledsen att vi inte fick mer av det

Tidsstämpel: 26 januari 2024 10:00
Källnod: 3084548

Mass Effect 2 firar sitt 14-årsjubileum idag, den 26 januari 2024. Nedan ser vi tillbaka på en av dess konstigaste aspekter, och hur den skapade en bredare subplot som nästan helt outforskades.

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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Nu spelas: Mass Effect Lore: Reapers (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.

Samlarna är resterna av en ras av utomjordingar som kallas Protheans, en civilisation som existerade och utplånades förra gången Reapers rensade galaxen cirka 50,000 XNUMX år före händelserna i Mass Effect-spelen. The Reapers förvandlade Protheans till ett slags cyborgmänniskor som de kunde kontrollera och använde dem som verktyg för att få saker gjorda i eonerna mellan deras återkomst till galaxen för att mörda alla.

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?

Eftersom handlingstråden i stort sett övergavs efter Mass Effect 2 har vi ingen aning om vad svaren på de frågorna är. Men vi har några tips om vad de kunde ha varit, tack vare författaren Drew Karpyshyn, som arbetade på Mass Effect-spelen och skrev flera av de sammankopplade romanerna mellan avsnitten.

Tillbaka 2013 när Mass Effect 3 släpptes och fansen klagade över hur spelet slutade, Karpyshyn ställde några frågor om hur historien var planerad att se ut innan han gick. Karpyshyn gjorde det väldigt tydligt att även om det fanns några idéer om slutsatsen som svävade runt under Mass Effect 1 och 2, liknande alla de människor du inte lyckades rädda, så var idéerna ganska, eh, lösa. Inget var helt avrundat eller beslutat vid tillfället.

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.

Av någon anledning, i denna uppfattning om berättelsen, för att stoppa den mörka energi som Reapers verkligen behövde för att göra den Human Reaper. Ett möjligt slut skulle vara för spelare att välja om de ska offra hela mänskligheten för att göra en Human Reaper och rädda alla andra, eller att ta sina chanser mot fysikens lagar, antar jag.

Är allt så konstigt och möjligen nonsens? Absolut. Men det ger åtminstone Samlarna en anledning till att göra alla flytande, och på ett sätt ger det Reapers att vilja göra en 100 våningar hög metallversion av en revisor eller vad som helst.

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.

Jag undrar fortfarande över Human Reaper. Vad var det för affär? Varför skulle okända kosmiska AI-varelser göra denna styggelse? Var dess existens en oändlig källa till lidande? När vi dödade den, var det en bebis, och vilka är de moraliska konsekvenserna av att döda en gigantisk robotmänniska? Det här är saker som Mass Effect aldrig svarade på, och världen är lite sämre på grund av det.

(Bildkredit: Trophygamers på YouTube)

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