Mass Effect Andromeda ~ Not Quite "The Something", Eh?

I again only bring that up because the Nexus is literally sitting there, defenseless, and has ALL the species that traveled here from the Milky Way. But whatever, you get there and the Archon's ship has captured the Ark and basically sees the frozen Salarians within as a smorgasbord of genetic material. Because we have the Normandy 3.0 we're able to stealth in and find that the Salarian Pathfinder, Raeka, was hidden within one of the stasis pods to avoid being captured, and that their SAM was dismantled for the same reason.

You wake her up, fight through the ship for a bit, then get trapped in some kind of immobilizing force field. The Archon walks up, stabs you with a syringe and takes a blood sample, while also injecting some kind of transmitter thingamajig or something. SAM instantly analyzes the field and determines that because it only reacts with living matter, the only way to escape is to KILL Ryder by stopping his heart, thus automatically shutting down the field.

...So already Ryder has died and come back to life more than Shepard. Wonderful. Also why does the field only interact with living matter? What kind of field is that? That's an awfully selective force field. A more generic one that just...I dunno...affected EVERYTHING would be better, no? Seems oddly specific, aside from SAM once again having the solution to a problem instantly. So Ryder finds a way to deactivate the fields surrounding his team without killing them, then they move forward to the Archon's private chamber. You muck around for a bit trying to find a way to free the Ark and find a Star Map to Merdian, which is what the Archon is looking for. Along the way you come across what looks like a Kett Krogan in a big tube, which is exactly what it is.

So you find the map and the Salarians activate an EMP to disable the Archon's ship temporarily. Also the Archon now knows about SAM and saw you kill and revive yourself. The EMP also frees the Kett Krogan (called a Berserker) and he runs into the room and attacks you.

He honestly isn't that much of a threat. I never got close to him to see how bad he is in melee, but from a distance the guy was a joke. Regular Kett enemies out damage him drastically. His main strength is that he's an ENORMOUS bullet sponge, made worse no doubt by the fact that I was playing on Insanity. Immediately after dealing with the Berserker the Bioware Choice(tm) comes into play. That one Berserker was apparently part of a lost detachment of scouts that belonged to Drack. Coincidentally, at the same time, Raeka has become trapped and is trying to rescue the Salarian leadership, who are scheduled to be exalted into Kett.

I ended up choosing the Salarians and this upsets Drack, but screw him. I've already ensured the future safety of the Krogan botanical supply thanks to doing his loyalty mission--I'll get to those later--so I rescue the Salarians and Raeka and get the hell out. In hindsight the choice was even easier than what I first thought it was, given that it's literally just a small team of scouts, and the Kett have already figured out the Krogan genome anyway while they haven't done so with the Salarians yet. That said it's already been stated that they're close, so I'm going to assume it wouldn't mattter anyway in the long run and that Kett Salarians would be an enemy later on in any potential sequels regardless.

That said, the choice does have an effect on enemy composition for the rest of the main quest. Saving the Salarians means having the occasional Kett Berserker drop in since the Kett have ready access to Krogan material, whereas saving the Krogan deprives them of this, but they instead replace them with brainwashed (but not yet exalted) Salarians. I like the effort put here. Drack naturally throws a hissy fit at you, equating random Krogan scouts with Salarian leadership and a Pathfinder, but he gets over it eventually and thankfully. If this were ME2 I'm sure he'd become unloyal at that point given how silly that got in that game, but that's impossible to do in MEA so whatever.

Overall not too bad of a mission, and I like that enemies you fight change slightly depending on what you chose. An OT equivalent would be if you faced no Ravagers in ME3 because you killed the Rachni Queen in ME1. The mission also shows how much they're reusing the concept of Indoctrination and augmentation from the Reapers, and reskinning it and throwing it on the Kett, except to my knowledge there's no "field" or anything, they just brainwash people the old-fashioned way.

So yeah. The Archon figures out the SAM connection. What does he do? He rolls up to the Nexus, and takes the goddamn human ark. Literally takes it. Like drives it away. Also he captures your sibling and uses her own connection with SAM to manipulate Remnant technology.

I've made this point before but the Initiative are a bunch of goddamn idiots. So are the Kett too, but damn. The Initiative has literally only survived this long in their idiocy thanks to the Kett also being idiots. It's idiots all the way down. The Citadel is unarmed, true, but at least that had a goddamn impenetrable shell it could activate that even Sovereign had to bumrush the gates for before he was locked out of the thing.

The Nexus is defenseless. The arks are defenseless. Their freaking Nomads are defenseless. It's like the Milky Way kicked out all the milksop pacifists barring the occasional badass the Initiative could hire away from the galaxy. Quite simply, the Archon could've captured the Nexus from the get-go and then picked off the arks one by one as they entered the cluster. ALL their genetic material would be his. He'd likely get at least one SAM out of it to boot. Apparently there's this Primus character who actually rebels against him for choosing Remnant tech over the fresh meat, but by the time I got to that quest the Archon was already dead and the quest immediately ended. Apparently you can make a deal with her that reduces Kett efficiency in the final mission, but I didn't need that anyway despite being on Insanity.

But seriously though, why? I give Star Trek crap all the time for Starfleet's "we're explorers, not a military!" attitude, but at least the Federation still arms the "explorers" with enough weaponry to wipe the surface of a planet clean of life while out there exploring strange new worlds and civilizations. I guess part of this is to even the odds? Because even though the Milky Way tech is 600 years behind whatever the Milky Way has now, assuming they haven't become Reaper paste, it's still more than a match for Kett technology. Better sometimes to top it off.

Anyway.

So you bust through to fight the Archon and kill him. He dies. You get a planet named in your honor. You also choose a "Nexus ambassador". Now from what I can gather, the Initiative's plan at some point is to set up a Council-esque type of government, with representatives for each race, yaddayaddayadda. Even though as it stands they already basically have this. Tann is constantly representing Salarian interests, Kesh favors the Krogan, Addison's an idiot, and Kandros is basically the face of the Turians/Nexus security. The human ark is marooned on Meridian, so the humans decide to just make that their colony world. Given that this world is brimming with Remnant technology unmatched anywhere else in the cluster, this sets up humans to be even MORE special in the future.



So here's what grinds my gears. I listened to their inputs on available choices. You get Raeka, if you saved her, the Krogan Rock-Em Sock Em leader whose name I forget, Bradley the Eos colony leader, and the Moshae. I ended up agreeing with Tann and chose Raeka. Now for the gear grinding part.

At some point I picked up a quest from the meek Krogan botanist who has a crush on Kesh to go deliver a flower or some such nonsense to her. Very trivial side quest. I get there and talk to her. What does she do? SHE IMMEDIATELY CUTS OFF ALL COMMUNICATION WITH ME BECAUSE I PICKED RAEKA AND DIDN'T FAVOR THE KROGAN. SAYS WE HAVE NOTHING TO SPEAK ABOUT.

Like WTF? Kesh has been one of the more rational Krogans up to this point. But this one incident is what finally drove me to hate the Krogan more than any other race. The straw that broke the space camel's back. She says something about how "After all Drack's done for you you couldn't support the Krogan" or something like that and that was it for me. I gave your goddamn colony a Remnant Drive Core! Keep in mind that when whats-her-face is introduced as a choice for ambassador Kesh straight-up LAUGHS at the possibility that the Krogan leader would be in charge. I initially took this to mean incredulity, but apparently she was thrilled at the prospect instead. Thrilled that this swaggering, overbearing leader with the tenacity to style herself Overlord, something even Drack isn't comfortable with, could have power as Nexus ambassador.

So screw the Krogan. Screw Kesh.  Of all the whiny species in Mass Effect I think the Krogan take the cake, and that's saying a lot considering the competition. "Yeah we're aggressive and make veiled and not-so-veiled threats of expansion and war if you don't agree with us, but why don't you trust us brah? It's because you're A SPACE RACIST, THAT'S WHY. IT CAN'T BE BECAUSE EVERY TIME WE'VE HAD POWER WE'VE THROWN OUR WAY AROUND AND THOUGHT ABOUT GRINDING YOU UNDER OUR HEELS, OH NO, YOU RACIST."

Or Drack's "HOW DARE YOU CONSIDER THE LIVES OF MY SCOUTS AS LESS IMPORTANT THAN THE SALARIAN LEADERSHIP AND THEIR PATHFINDER". To his credit he does get over it after the heat of the moment, but this type of attitude keeps rearing its head with no signs of slowing down.

So screw the Krogan.

The father memory segments are meh. For those familiar with Batman villain Mr. Freeze, well, Ryder Sr is basically Mr. Freeze. Just without the cool cryo suit, cryo ray gun, and the ice puns. Joins the Initiative and creates the greatest AI in the galaxy to cure his wife. Can't cure his wife. Puts her in cryo-stasis until a cure can be found. The "benefactor" that pushes the Initiative out is probably Cerberus related, but that's left hanging for a DLC hook. Most of the main mysteries are left for future games or DLC.

- Who is the benefactor? You don't know by the time the game ends.
- Where is the Quarian ark? Stay tuned for DLC
- What killed the Remnant? The Scourge probably. Who used the Scourge on them? Wait for the next game.
- What about the greater Kett empire out there? Wait for future games.
- Wow, the Angara were genetically engineered by the Remnant? Nothing major happens after this discovery that would shake Angaran culture to the core.

The Initiative is just laughably unprepared for anything. Even going into a cluster on 600+ year old intel is a stupid idea. It seems to me like a stop in dark space for some recon might be advised... And who jumps in something the size of the Nexus or an ark without a fleet of at least scout ships if not real escorts? And further why waste the effort/mass on a station the size of the Nexus unless you plan on having all your colonists living on it? Wouldn't it make more sense to pack, I don't know, buildings maybe? What happens if you happen to jump into a cluster with life that isn't dextro or levo based? Or one that happens to be hostile (and more competent than the Kett?) The more I think about it the more I like the bad robot copy theory...

The Kett ship to ship weapons seem really poor compared to the Milky Way equivalents, if anyone had bother installing shields on the arks they would have laughed off the short little guns the Kett had considering a biotic or 2 could shield against their antiship missiles. And speaking of heavy weapons, a Cain sure would have come in handy for those Architect fights. Would have been lots of fun but I guess that's not an option.

Primus gives you an override code to shut down her ship, which I'm assuming means fewer dropped troops? I donno, I sure can't be bothered to replay to find out. She is unhappy with the Archon and wants to help you get him out of the way.