Mass Effect – Reapers
The Mass Effect series is all about fighting synthetics, but it does try to introduce some nuance to the topic of machine intelligence throughout all four games. At first, you’re fighting the Geth, a group of robots believed to have driven their creators off their homeworld. But it turns out, the real villain is actually the robots’ greater synthetic overlords called the Reapers, who are using the robots to speed up their plan to wipe away organic life.
That’s why it’s so cathartic to get to the end of the trilogy and choose to destroy the Reapers rather than accept any kind of compromise with those who wished to annihilate us. That’s the decision we all made, right? The one that defies powerful forces in the universe who treat those they believe beneath them as expendable?–Kenneth Shepard
