OH GOD BIOWARE WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I'm behind any move that brings us closer to loading celebrities into our virtual sex machines.

[Ecks]

[Aerozord]

Originally Posted by "Half Assed" Karesh

Even if the worm made perfect sense, again, from a narrative perspective the reaper shouldn't be gettin fucked up by worms anyway.

I just want to point out unless you toss in some plot devices there is no way for us to beat the Reapers. If they are represented as powerful and technologically advanced as they should be, this shouldn't even be a fight. Even vastly more technologically advanced societies got steam-rolled. Granted they were strategically crippled but still.

[Karrrrrrrrrrrresche]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I just want to point out unless you toss in some plot devices there is no way for us to beat the Reapers. If they are represented as powerful and technologically advanced as they should be, this shouldn't even be a fight. Even vastly more technologically advanced societies got steam-rolled. Granted they were strategically crippled but still.

Yeah. That's definitely a thing I've said repeatedly as a reason a Reaper shouldn't be getting rolled over by a Thresher Maw. Thanks for supporting my argument.

[Marc v4.0]

You Lose: THE VIDEO GAME is a terrible fucking idea

[Aerozord]

Originally Posted by "Half Assed" Karesh

Yeah. That's definitely a thing I've said repeatedly as a reason a Reaper shouldn't be getting rolled over by a Thresher Maw. Thanks for supporting my argument.

my point was, basically anything that takes down a reaper would have to be plot contrived. The one in ME1 if I recall was only killed because of some BS psychic link with its minion and even then it was the combined firepower of most of our ships.

Second it was because it wasn't complete, which was still kind of a lame way to justify beating it with infantry weapons.

They wrote themselves into a corner

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by "Half Assed" Karesh

Yeah. That's definitely a thing I've said repeatedly as a reason a Reaper shouldn't be getting rolled over by a Thresher Maw. Thanks for supporting my argument.

Actually what you've said is that you don't actually know what 'Narrative Sense' is. Exploiting a defensive weakness to defeat a superior opponent makes perfect narrative sense. In fact it makes a lot more narrative sense than finding some way to face it on equal footing, and the idea that the opposite is true (what you're espousing) is basically why all Shonen Anime is terrible. Seeming as you brought up anime in the first place.

Naruto is actually an excellent example of why what you're saying is completely wrong.

Let's take the first mission the kids get with Kakashi, they're ambushed by the water ninja guy and his hax kid. Kakashi is trapped. You have three kids against a highly powerful and skilled martial artist and ninja. How do they free Kakashi and win? They very much do NOT find a more powerful weapon to beat him. They work with the tools they have, and they outsmart him. They use his arrogance against him, and a bag of tricks to pull off a win and free Kakashi.

This was the best, and perhaps ONLY actual good fight in the series purely because it was decided by strategy, tactics, and exploiting weaknesses.

Later on the series goes to hell because they stop doing things like this and instead "OH MAN NARUTO HAS SO MANY DEMON TAILS HIS CHAKRA IS UNSTOPPABLE BUT WAIT THE OTHER GUY HAS MORE CHAKRA, BUT NO NARUTO HAS FOUND THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP" and then anyone with anything resembling taste stops watching.

This is also why DBZ was pretty bad compared to DB, and DBGT was just the worst thing ever. It's also why Yu Yu Hakusho went downhill after the Dark Tournament.

These shows all started with technically inferior opponents defeating superior opponents through guile and trickery and ended with them winning through 'powering up'. The latter destroys credibility and leaves any and all confrontations uninteresting and ending in exactly the same way. The former provides more drama through the arranging of, setting up, and triggering of a plan or trap that we know is our hero's only chance because he or she is not suddenly going to get stronger and has a good chance of failure.

Ergo, the Thresher Maw, depending on how it's handled, has the potential to be quite good, and either way makes much more narrative sense than Cerberus or the Council ass pulling a super ship/gun/whatever else that can take out Reapers left and right like it's Reaper Christmas and hot lead is the only present Santa's packing.

[Ramary]

Originally Posted by Marc v4.0

You Lose: THE VIDEO GAME is a terrible fucking idea

There is like an entire genre dedicated to that though.

It is called Roguelike.

[BitVyper]

None of this has any bearing on Mass Effect, because it would be patently stupid to beat the Reapers with a plot device power up. I don't think there's any way the series could end worse. That said...

It's okay if outright power is what makes the difference in a fight sometimes. Yu Yu Hakusho, for instance, really only ever had a couple of fights that came down to the hero powering up enough to win (Toguro and Sensui are the only two I can think of), and the powerful characters never made everything else in the series irrelevant; remember all the non-power challenges that had to be overcome in the Sensui arc, and that ultimately, the actual fight with Sensui wasn't really all that important compared with the completion of a series-long arc about the nature of heaven and hell in that universe.

The best example of a badly done power fight I can think of outside of Bleach (which is fully of them, but I don't really read it) is the first Broly Dragonball movie, and I choose this example because I think it really pins down exactly what the problem is: There is no conflict in the Broly movie. Absolutely none to be found anywhere. The heroes are utterly dominated by Broly for the entirety of the movie, not even bothering to try anything but shooting bigger and bigger fireballs at him while he kicks their asses, and then Goku goes from being unable to hurt him to killing him in one punch with the powers of his friends. This wouldn't be such a huge problem if there was some other conflict that was concurrent with the fight and central to the movie, but there really isn't. There is no conflict when one side has no chance, and if there's no conflict, there really isn't much of anything - You could reduce the entire movie to one sentence, "Broly beats up everyone and then Goku kills Broly," and lose absolutely no substance. Those are the only two characters that matter and that is the only thing they do. People might joke about being able to do this with the entirety of Dragonball Z, but you really can't; you can't, for instance, describe the Frieza saga without explaining Vegeta's history, or you'll lose a lot of substance from that arc and the characters. In the Broly movie, I'm honestly not sure the heroes were even trying to win. Hell, even THAT is something that could have been explored - say that Broly is so overpowering they're being defeatist about things and effectively sabotaging themselves, then have them overcome this and win or fail to overcome it and ultimately lose. I bring this up because it aalllmost seemed like they were starting to go that way with Vegeta, but then abandoned it so that they could power up the hero. Bleach does this constantly, and it's the main reason I stopped reading part way through Soul Society. It undermines everything that makes a story a story.

One of my favourite fights in the original Dragonball is Goku against Tao Pai Pai, and it's 100% about relative power levels. They were never on even footing for a second (well okay, in the ANIME they actually had a third fight where they were closer than in either of the other two, but whatever) - Tao Pai Pai utterly destroyed Goku and then Goku utterly destroyed Tao Pai Pai. However, in describing the fight that way, I've glossed over a fair bit of development on both sides. I'm also failing to demonstrate how interesting the fight is to read/watch, because Goku actually DOES try everything he can to beat Tao, and Tao does the same when Goku is beating him. I could pick apart the whole thing for examples, like how it raised the stakes by having Goku nearly die the first time with someone sacrificing their life to protecthim, but one that comes to mind is Tao making a last ditch attempt on Goku's life with a grenade - if I hadn't told you that part of the fight, you would have no idea that Tao is the kind of guy to carry around a grenade just incase his super powers fail, and that says a lot about who he is. Furthermore, it's surprising, and it's interesting to see what happens. You go "woah shit, fucker just pulled a grenade, what's Goku gonna do about it (obviously this is at a point when Goku wasn't invincible)," even though you really know Goku IS gonna win at this point. In fact, Goku almost dying in round 1 actually kind of serves to make Tao's attempt on his life with the grenade more interesting.

Gohan vs Cell is another good example of a fight with seesawing relative power levels that plays it out rather well.

Edit: And I actually LIKE the occasional monstrous, unstoppable, overpowering killing machine like Broly. However, I think when you're dealing with something as brutally powerful as him (compared with say Frieza or Cell or Piccolo, who never really felt unstoppable, and all had more fleshed out characters), it actually IS necessary to have the characters win through other means. Otherwise it just makes it look like he wasn't really all that powerful to begin with, and when that completely overpowering nature is the central purpose of his character, you pretty much just end up undermining the entire story by showing that it's possible to just plot device yourself to a higher level than him. This is why, for instance, it is impossible to punch Agents to death in Enter the Matrix (they were still rather poorly achieved though, since they were relatively easy to outfight even if you couldn't kill them).

Another good bad example is Superman beating up Darkseid (in the comics; animated Darkseid was a different animal), which everyone knows is patently ridiculous. It would be like if Spiderman got really mad and punched out the Juggernaut instead of trying everything he could and finally coming up with a way to stop him from being able to gain any momentum, thus trumping his unstoppableness (although it was still kind of dumb, given that concrete really shouldn't be able to hold Juggs). It totally ruins the premise of the characters.

Edit: Speaking of Spiderman, there is oooone exception that makes this sort of thing okay, and an example of that is when Spiderman beat Firelord. Yeah, Firelord is totally jobbing, but the way it's handled keeps it interesting, and while Spiderman ultimately just pummels Firelord into submission, it's really more of a win for Spiderman's sheer tenacity and willingness to fight his hardest even when he has absolutely no chance. We don't really come out of the fight with the impression that Spiderman is stronger than Firelord, but instead with an appreciation for what it means to "want it more." Analyzed objectively, there's probably no way Spiderman should have had a chance, but in this case the impossibility of it serves a story.

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

It's okay if outright power is what makes the difference in a fight sometimes.

Agreed entirely, but it's very very rarely the case where the hero should just gain a bunch of power and THEN decide it entirely on that. There's a few times when such is dramatically appropriate but none of them exist in a relatively hard sci-fi universe on the timescale of Mass Effect's story.

It would be like if Spiderman got really mad and punched out the Juggernaut instead of trying everything he could and finally coming up with a way to stop him from being able to gain any momentum, thus trumping his unstoppableness (although it was still kind of dumb, given that concrete really shouldn't be able to hold Juggs). It totally ruins the premise of the characters.

Basically a perfect way of putting it.