The setup and story of Mass Effect, more than the optimistic tone that was referenced before, was mainly a very classic science-fiction setting. Space here was protrayed as the infinite frontier, with our knowledge of discrete parts of it clashed with a large mass of unknown in between the main branches of the mass effect grid. In general it is an almost perfect copy of the themes at the core of a space opera, the eddification of it as a new time for discovery similar to the naval discoveries of the 15th century for Europe, the main conflict not visible but as a quest for truth or discovery instead; for that same reason, the full story of the Reapers was kept under wraps until the climax as well, for that is the main drawn of the science fiction epic, the mistery itself.
The Reapers part in this was thus rightfully fit. The fact that their motives were an unknow was the classical Lovecraftian edification of what horror should be and that fits greatly into the exploration theme. At their core, the Reapers were edifications of the danger of the unknown; they were the concept of pure evil as seen built from motives and logic beyond our human concepts, they were the ?hole in things? and the dragon of Saint Jorge all along. When faced with an enemy such as this, born out of the unknown, the proper way to battle it, can be nothing other than the search for knowledge, and the edification of Mass Effect was just that; you(as the player and as a human) contained no special skills of your own, and your quest in the end was nothing more than a long search for answers with those answers edificated in the presence of your various companions. It?s an hard task for game designers to impair the sense of intelectual accomplishment to the player when you?re supposed to achieve it as a character, but here by shifting that task upon your own work as the game progresses, the discoveries and companionships you form as direct opposition to the Reaper menace fulfill that role.
Of course even after all of that, as this was a videogame we needed a boss battle. The de facto ending of the game?s climax was the meeting with Virgil and the subconsequent jump through the mass relay into the citadel. Here, for all we care Sovereign had lost; its plans were know and we had managed to put ourselves into the pivotal point of it, so intellectually we had already won the fight. Thus the existence of Saren as an opponent. Saren?s edification as an anti-you, and the end game revelation of his cybernetic enhancements brings once more the theme of a confrotnation of intellectual merit to the table; except here the intellectual component has turned into the concept of a battle between transhumans. While Saren represents the transhumanist who seeks his betterment without any regard towards his old humanity, with his body changed by edifications by the part of the Reapers(again edifications of the unknow, of what lies beyond the horizon, of the dark fringes beyond which lovecraftian horrors lurk), we as Shepard represent the transhuman with his roots still firmly set upon our past; our strength and power comes not from drastic enhancements to ourselves, but through the work of a lifetime and through alliances with teammates that complement ourselves; this was also a big aspect as to why the suicide we force on Saren was so important from a storytelling point of view, it served as the most direct and just battleground where two transhuman might met, dialogue versus teh brawn. In the end, even after this the physical boss battle served was best confrontation so as to end the game, the old tale of intelect vs brawn when faced with unsourmauntable odds; in here we had already achieved victory and this was nothing more than a formality, we here David versus Goliath, Batman versus Joker, the Man with No Name versus the Bad, Luke and Vader versus the Emperor and the measly insignificant human against the vast and unknow universe and we came out triumphant.
This seems to be where Mass Effect 2 most diverged from the first. Despite the darkening of the mood, which all by itself could not justify a change of theme(after all so did Empire Strikes Back and it still mantained many of the same aspects of episode IV), the 2nd game showed us a shift towards the use of force for an estabilished goal. The fatc that pretty much from the beggining we have as an objective the Omega Relay somwhat lessens here our task, because the torch then has passed from triumphant discoverers who find the path by themselves, to measly taskmasters who do what they are told so as to achieve a preset goal. Even our ultimate inspection past the Omega Relay and into the climax, even though it is supposed to be a journey of discovery, turns into a simple reaction to teh thing we are confronted with. Here, the mistery that is discovered is done such with little or no effort by our part and we lose the sense of uniqueness that makes us believe that only us Shepard(the player) could have done this and assembled this team. Even beyond that, the only confrontation we have with this monster(because if before it was only the concept of a monster, now it fully takes the form of a monster and surprise! there is a giant coakroach behind the door and now despite opening it again and again it is not scary anymore) is purely physical. We lose all aspects of the intellectual growth towards the role of Homo Galactus and we just unload ammo upon ammo towards the problem. We have regressed towards the Homo Sapiens of ago, whose accomplishment could be defined by ?USE rock ON bug?.
Unfortunately, the teaser for Mass Effect 3, only seems to create a greater feeling of this. Here the cat is out of teh bag pleanly, and the immense presence of the Reapers on Earth seems to tie us ever closer to the roots that we were trying to shake. While before the confrotnation was towards the unknow and our exploration of it was the pathway towards a solution and steps which made us abandon our lesser feats to elevate us an example of the species, here we have to come back to our home, not to solve the problem as a transhuman but to use the above appointed rock on the bug. In the end, it seems that our role here has been relegated towards the application of brute force, which has always been the anti-thesis of the space opera. While there might be a physical confrontation, when dealing with the concepts of science-fiction, we are directly tied to the fact that we reached beyond our planetary orbit by using our intellect, and as such that would be the tool that we would refine towards the world of tomorrow and upon which our betterment relied. The obsession upon a strictly physical confrotnation might fit with purely macho-militaristic concepts such as Halo, but here we are trying to portray the post-Sapiens human, and clear-cutting the way towards only a physical confrontation as the teaser seems to indicate is quite wrongly built upon the initial story.
