>>715566514
For me it will always be this. And I don't mention Mass Effect 2 for a reason. I know it was "the start" of it, but ME2 is kino. When I played the first hour of Mass Effect 3 everything already felt overly "trendy" in a way I can't stand, and like "did the same people even make this game" came to my head multiple times. It feels generic in a way ME2 didn't.

>>715496929
No, that isn't how to think of it. Link did ALL the side-quests, and the NPCs do remember them. But when they say "Hey, who are you, can you help me for the first time?" that's just Nintendo putting a "first-timer" filter over their writing guidelines, so what you have to imagine they're really saying as a returning player, is "Oh hi Link, I remember you from BotW. Can you help me again?"

I've been damaged by Mass Effect 3, which was supposed to be the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King of the reknowned "Mass Effect TRILOGY" but what did they do? They spent their whole marketing saying "If you play ME3 without being a fan, it's the perfect place to start!" and playing it, with my save-game import and my custom Shepard (protagonist) and the game remembering my choices and relationships from the first 2 games, characters consistently meet you by talking as though you haven't been told things before.

That's because the marketing team said "Make it seem like it's the first game in the story!" so you have to constantly translate what you hear in your head to be like "We both remember that, that's why we need to do such and such" but it's just written to say "You haven't learned about it yet, let me tell you all about the deepest lore as if it's new to you."

It's a bit annoying but that's what happened with TotK.

The Reapers are the proof that Synthetics can't co-exist with Organics without risk of rendering Organic Life extinct. We're just lucky that the Reapers came up with a contingency plan against it.

All civilizations will evolve to the point of making nuclear bombs, computer-technology and spacefaring capabilities and advance technology to the point of developing AI.

Mass Effect is about what happens when technology is forwarded thousands of years and each spacefaring civilization meet each other on those terms. They're all space-capable, and they're all capable of developing artificial intelligence.

In the past this far-future scenario led the most evolved Organic Species to develop an AI to monitor lesser organics and their lesser AIs, out of concern that frequent wars between Creators and their Created posed a risk of genociding ALL Organic life, including the master species themselves.

But much like Geth, this Super-AI, suspected its creators of distrusting it, and rebelled. This AI is the Catalyst.

Conversely, if we developed unchecked, WE would become super-evolved with time, and then WE could've made the Reapers.

Thus, the solution to Organics making AI that kill their own masters, is to halt Organic Civilization's growth at 50.000 years MAX, to start over, and ensure the point of full-genocidal AI development can't occur. Any time a "Reaper stage" is reached, it poses the risk of not developing a contingency like the Catalyst did, and without that, Organic Life could go fully extinct.

But this was always a temporary solution without something better. Synthesis is what the Reapers were trying to create, by binding their victims to themselves, merging "Organics and Synthetics" as their creators requested.

Your final choice then, is thus
>Destroy: Ignore that Organics are the underlying problem
>Control. Status Quo. The Reapers were never a full solution.
>Synthesis: This is the full solution.

The endings make sense.