Mass Effect 3: The Problem of Vendetta

[ashacrone]

The Problem of Vendetta

(Or, alternately, Asha Fan Wanks some more, because she's got to get this out of her system somehow)

Actually, this should be more of My Problem with Thessia, but Vendetta is the main plot hole I plan to address here.

The two parts of ME3 that received almost universal praise were the Tuchunka and Rannoch missions. I'm in the same league with most others here; those two sections were incredibly well done. They were satisfying, working in with previous games and taking into account previous player choices in a way that was breathtakingly good. They were complete, they worked with continuity, and they rewarded the players for their hard work and investment.

But that's not why I'm here.

My third favorite part of ME3 was the Cerberus coup on the Citadel. It's tense, it makes sense as a player punch because I would never have seen it coming, and the conclusion with the Vimire Survivor was absolutely beautiful. Like Tuchunka and Rannoch, it stayed mostly true to continuity, gave a desperate situation that did have an excellent way out, and rewarded the player by giving the player the chance to see his or her choices throughout the game play out. The two detractors weren't even that bad: Thane or Kirrahe's attack and death was well done, and their presence or absence was again rewarded the player again with the results of her or his choices. I've already gone into why I disliked Thane's death, and that stands. His death itself was still well written and impacted the player. The major detractor, of course, was Kai Leng. Yet the reason it wasn't as annoying or frustrating to the player as the Thessia Mission was the fact that Kai Leng's presence was minimal. You barely interacted with him. Shep and crew standing there while Thane or Kirrahe attacked Kai Leng was annoying and made no sense, but that I could overlook because of how short the scene was.

The Thessia mission lacked all the parts that made the previous scenes good. None of the previous choices made by Shepard played into the story; there was literally no way to make the ending of Thessia different. This would not have been so bad; we can't change that Shepard dies at the beginning of ME2. Kai Leng's presence is complete and utter bullshit, and fighting him was utterly pointless. There was no reason to have an actual fight scene against him unless there was a chance Shepard could win. It sucked, because you can just about win until the cutscene where he wipes you and your crew out easily. You didn't come to feel that Kai Leng was beating you, you felt that the developers were cheating. That was just wrong.

But Kai Leng was an unnecessary part of ME3 (and if he existed, why bring back Shepard? Why not have him do the Suicide Mission?) and was from the beginning.

No, what I hated the most about Thessia was the asari temple, and Vendetta, the Prothean VI.

One thing that bugged me. Get your terms consistent, Bioware.

Prothean anything in the ME games tends to be reduced to 'beacon.' But our first thought will always be to think of beacon as what we saw on Eden Prime in the first ten minutes of the first game. The beacons were part of a communications network that spanned the Prothean Empire. They were communications devices. While their technology could be reverse engineered, and their mechanics explored... They were small-ish, isolated pieces of technology.

On Mars, they suddenly started calling the Prothean Archive (what? First game called it a data cache!) a beacon. Then Shepard, who should know better, called the statue of Athame... a beacon.

Okay. That's fine. It's a beacon. Why was there a VI there? None of the other beacons we've encountered in the previous games had a working VI attached to them. The first one we saw on Eden Prime was broken, so that could explain it. But we found one on Virmire, and it had no personality-based VI to guide it. We found another one in ME2, after a series of side missions, and it could reveal that the Collectors were Protheans if you found it early. Again, no Prothean-esque intelligence popped out to reveal great and startling secrets. It was all beamed directly into Shepard's brain.

All right, then let's look at the other Prothean VI we did find. That of Vigil, on Ilos. It was badly degraded by the time Shepard and crew arrived; I take it that was so we didn't know exactly what the Protheans looked like. However, there was no beacon involved and the VI had no problem upgrading its language protocols so that it could communicate with Shepard. It obviously has the ability to detect and determine if Shepard was indoctrinated.

So, why couldn't Vendetta chose to communicate with the asari scientists working on it?

It could measure the time depth and extrapolate where it was within the current cycle. It was working, as far as we could tell, almost perfectly. It didn't speak prothean to Shepard. The presence of Cipher in Shepard's mind was no barrier to it communicating with the others there with Shepard. It could tell that Shepard was not indoctrinated. It could be set to judge if the asari were intellectually ready to be informed of the Reaper threat, and there was no reason for it not to be.

So, why didn't it?

Perhaps, even more damning, is that the presence of Vendetta and a beacon on Thessia completely invalidates the premise of the original game. We find out that Benezia had known about the Prothean Archive (because that is NOT a beacon, and has nothing to do with a beacon) for well over a hundred years. Maybe longer. She could have informed Saren of its existence. As a Council Spectre, between the two of them, they could have bullshitted their way inside and either found the beacon there (well, was it? I don't know). There was no reason for them to look for the beacon on Eden Prime. Finding the Cipher might have still been necessary, but that could have been done and they returned to Thessia with no one else the wiser. Yes, we still might have had to deal with the krogan cloning facility on Virmire but there was no reason to find that second beacon there.

Hell, the way we keep finding beacons it's like the Reapers fucked something up.

Vendetta's existence, like the Star Brat, unmakes the first game. There was no reason for Sovereign and Saren to go searching for the Conduit with the Star Brat there at the Citadel. Yes, I'm aware of the definition of catalyst, but that doesn't make sense when it comes to the Reapers. If nothing, they have shown they were Dangerously Genre Savvy. That they would not have another way to gain control of the Citadel makes no sense at all. That they would leave the keys to their backdoor in the hands of the hired help without leaving a second set hiding under a convenient rock made no sense at all. The Star Brat had no reason to not be able to open the Citadel Relay.

And Vendetta had no reason not to inform the asari of the coming storm.

This is the point, where, for me, the story started to fall apart. Yes I wanted to slap Kai Leng's fool head off. Yes, I hated how it felt that the asari were being punished for no good reason. But the point was this: it made no sense from a story perspective. At all.

And damn, that just gets my goat.