User blog comment:Markurion/How many of you put a bullet in Godchild in EC?/@comment-2079715-20120719053243/@comment-2228120-20120720054507

Excuse me but the supposed EMS difference is too impersonal to actually matter. The highly emotional decisions, like to cure or not to cure, or geth versus quarians, are merely transfered to numbers which in no way reflect whether you were a goody two-shoe or a bastard who lied to everyone and their mother; you both get exactly the same results and the same choices. Impersonal, in a game with a lot of emotional investment in the character, can hardly be perceived as satisfactory.

I believe that foreshadowing means something else. A major twist and revelation coming towards the end is not foreshadowing, it's a story-telling mechanism which we, as the players, can reasonably expect since the Reapers' origin/creator was never hinted throughout the games. Now, these hints would be proper foreshadowing, but except Vendetta's one-liner, there are none, which is why the Catalyst is so often criticised as deus ex machina (not in the literal sense but as a superpowerful solution that comes out of the blue): even with hindsight, there is just that single Vendetta reference in the last of all three games you can relate to, nothing else. In a trilogy of this scope, I consider this a serious flaw, pointing at a lack of planning on the writers' part. The relatively frequent hints at attempts to control the Reapers might be considered as sufficient, for the player, though maybe not for Shepard, for whom the idea is constantly presented as dangerous and implausible. Finally, the worst job in foreshadowing was done for the supposed organic-synthetic conflict, since not only does it lack foreshadowing but it goes against Shepard's personal experience, especially if he brokered peace between geth and quarians. From Shepard's point of view here, the Catalyst fails to acknowledge the reality which is not in concord with its preconceptions, and we as players have no way to reflect this in Shepard's actions, except that final satisfactory shot in the face.