User blog comment:Aleksandr the Great/Bioware HAS Written Themselves into a Corner/@comment-1503545-20121112224821/@comment-3399608-20121116043057

Being mysterious for the sake of it means nothing to me. Sure they're mysterious, but so what? Unless it's an intriguing mystery with a satisfying answer, that means squat to me. It wasn't even ever a big thing, something that is barely discussed in the game, and in the end, the answer is unsatisfying. Having someone be mysterious without actually making them interesting is lazy.

Looking back at the reapers, they were just the big bad. Hell, I can get the same thing from the Flood. The reapers, to me at least, were just a dime a dozen cliché. The monster in the dark. The vastly superior enemy with no personalities whatsoever. At least with the forerunners, we had actual personalities and a culture to go with our threat, in this case, we have something that does something because it was made to do it, made by not only the Catalyst, but the writers to be the thing that wants to kill us. The reapers were created to be the big bad, and really, that's all they are.Until the end at least, in which case... ugh.

I understand that the lack of personalities and culture was to emphasise their mechanical nature, but I still see it as just lazy writing. Here, we have an enemy with no real motive until the very end (and it's a stupid one at that), no personalities, and no culture.