We just conveniently happened to find these blueprints to a device we don't know what it does made by species from...

Maybe it wasn't able to do it without the Catalyst giving it some needed boost or breaking the loop or whatever.

Doesn't matter either way. It was all a dream evidenced by the max EGM ending.

>indoctrination theory

Stop that

Why was it so hard for them to make the ending simple that if you got enough fleet power you beat the reapers instead of some retarded alien weapon plot device

Because beating them in a straight brawl was impossible and they explicitly set up a galaxy that wasn't remotely prepared for the Reapers. The only reason ME3 happens at all is because they made the Reapers forget the Citadel turns off the entire Relay network.

This is because ME2, which should have been about setting up a way to defeat the Reapers, was wasted on stupid horse shit and daddy issues

it took the entire fucking citadel fleet plus the destiny ascension to kill a single reaper, a deus ex machina was necessary but that's all on bioware

But a big part in 2 is that the weaponry of the Normandy and the Citadel fleet was way ahead of where it should be because they got to reverse-engineer Sovereign.

Alright, how does your ideal ME2 deal with the Reapers?

Sovereign was a particularly strong and large reaper to be fair, one wormy boi was all it took to beat a smaller one.

And they still did jack in the final battle without some asspull

Where does Shepard wake up? Certainly not on the station that just got destroyed, right?

>hey wasn't there a planet with a giant gun so powerful that it permanently scarred the surface? Maybe we should look into that

>Oh the Geth collective is similar to the Reapers in nature. Is it worth the risk to help them or not

>Should we help the Krogan cure the genophage so we can have a fighting force against the Reapers?

>What was that genetics thing Mordin was talking about

Just anything other than nothing at all

Spend three years mass producing warships and mounting Thanix cannons on all of them, as well as mass producing missiles with antimatter warheads for spam/knife fights. Citadel Space's economy is consistently depicted as retarded levels of powerful (starting with from single mining operations shifting quadrillions of tons of material per year in systems with planet-encircling constructs and culminating in Andromeda where a single billionaire can plausibly fund the construction of a multi-billion ton spaceship for extragalactic colonization) so with forewarning this really should not be an issue.

Of course, ME3 reveals that the Reapers have so many bullshit advantages (like having enough ships to put a dozen Sovereigns in each CITY on Earth and all of them being perpetual motions) so that wouldn't work, but that's no one's fault but Bioware's. They didn't have those abilities initially.

The game makes a distinction between Reaper Capital Ships and regular Destroyers. Capital Ships are the Sovereigns and the Harbingers of the Reaper armada. They tower over cities and require concentrated effort by whole civilizations to kill. They're made by amassing the corpses of a single race. Reaper Destroyers are the smaller Reapers with the single laser. They made from the junk races Harbinger doesn't like and can be killed by conventional weaponry

>Throw yourself into a beam of light
>Every organic in the galaxy is now part synthetic
>Every synthetic in the galaxy is now part organic

Yes and the majority of the fleet was Destroyers that they could kill with literal wild animals.

If the citadel had an ultra AI just chilling and watching everything going down why did sovereign wait so long to even attempt contacting Keepers? Hell, why did they need Keepers at all? Why not just wake up the ultra AI the second someone reached the citadel?

They can all be killed by conventional weaponry, a single Sovereign is said to be about evenly matched when fighting four dreadnoughts. ME is just one of the few mainstream sci fi series (perhaps the only one?) where ships of higher tonnage have proportionally better durability and firepower compared to ships of lower tonnage, as opposed to e.g. Star Wars where a 10-ton fighter can fuck up a 10 million ton capital ship with its guns alone, or Halo where the mainline Covenant warship is literally a hundred times the size of their opponent's mainline warship yet they don't instantly win every battle.

>hey wasn't there a planet with a giant gun so powerful that it permanently scarred the surface? Maybe we should look into that
Probably already ransacked. Other civs have scoured the galaxy for relics before we did.

>Oh the Geth collective is similar to the Reapers in nature. Is it worth the risk to help them or not
Help them with what? They're not particularly talkative. Not before meeting Legion. So we'd need ME2 to set that up, first.

>Should we help the Krogan cure the genophage so we can have a fighting force against the Reapers?
ME1 established that, short of Reaper tech, we can't cure the Krogan. Who was it? Hahne Kedar? The one that most recently failed at it and kept the Krogan funds put in the research?

>What was that genetics thing Mordin was talking about
Still need ME2 to establish that.

>Spend three years mass producing warships and mounting Thanix cannons on all of them
We kinda did, as much as we could produce, after discovering the Thanix cannon. Shepard doesn't need to do anything for that and that's not a game.

>Citadel Space's economy is consistently depicted as retarded levels of powerful (starting with from single mining operations shifting quadrillions of tons of material per year in systems with planet-encircling constructs and culminating in Andromeda where a single billionaire can plausibly fund the construction of a multi-billion ton spaceship for extragalactic colonization) so with forewarning this really should not be an issue.
Agreed.

Not him, but the very least they could have done is expand on the Citadel's ability to control the relay network, shutting them off in Reaper's path and greatly slowing their advance.

Also why not just indoctrinate people living on the Citadel directly?

>reapers systematically take millennia go purge all traces of their existence after a cycle, then fuck off
>hey guys, we found this artefact that requires literally hundreds if not thousands of cycles where the reapers just forgot to wipe it for it to merely exist
>and it conveniently solves our problems!
Here’s how you fix ME3; The crucible is a fucking trap. Sovereign left it as a contingency plan in case anything happened to him, and it opens up the citadel relay.
The plot is Shepard finding out that the alliance has it, realising that it doesn’t mesh with what Vigil said, and discovering that Sovereign’s sleeper agents have manipulated the alliance into uncovering it.

My hot take: ME3 should've been about sabotaging the Reapers ever getting here in person. Perhaps by trapping them in some stupid made-up dimension, I don't care. They were much better antagonists when they were space Cthulhus.

This is probably the most frustrating thing about ME3 because why wouldn't the Reapers do the exact thing they did. The moment they reached the first available Relay they blitzed through the galaxy so fast that by the time anyone realized what was happening several whole planets were on fire. Really the galaxy was saved by the fact that the Reapers didn't go after the Citadel which is basically their "I win" button

The guy who does those long winded articles on why things like ME2 and the Skyrim's Thieves Guild are shit pointed out that ME1 already had the basics of a plot laid out

>Shepard can go where he likes and do what he likes, with the only stealth ship around
>Citadel law prevents people opening new Relays in case another threat like the Rachni is behind them, meaning there's ample room to have unexplored space with more Prothean ruins or other, advanced species behind previously locked Relays
>as a Spectre it's basically expected of him to run his own profitable venture on the sidelines so it's perfectly reasonable that he's secretly funding weapon research and manufacture on the side
>if there was no retarded 2 year time skip from Shepard dying, he could actually spend the time gathering solid evidence that the Reaper threat still exists and get the Council to prepare for them

>Not him, but the very least they could have done is expand on the Citadel's ability to control the relay network
What for?

>shutting them off in Reaper's path and greatly slowing their advance.
In ME3? After the Relays reached the Milky Way?

>it's perfectly reasonable that he's secretly funding weapon research and manufacture on the side
But that's not a game. Also, illegal.

>if there was no retarded 2 year time skip from Shepard dying, he could actually spend the time gathering solid evidence that the Reaper threat still exists and get the Council to prepare for them
Well, turns out they were, they just never told you about it.