Kai Leng - Improvement and refinement.
Let me first say I've never read the Mass Effect Novels or comics, the most exposure to anything other than the game and DLC would be Lump_of_cole's fantastic Deception: Rage Edition so my opinion may be biased.
To me it seemed like Kai Leng gets a lot of hate and is generally agreed that he is one of the weakest characters in Mass Effect 3 (perhaps the books too?) and he is often looked on as a stereotypically asian-cyborg-ninja-samurai.
My thoughts are in the thread our could we clearly voice back feedback to Bioware on how to make better "archenemy" characters in the game.
[Personal Rate] I'll put my too cents in and say that the sword and the dialoge were the worse, while the dialogue was just horrible, the sword was so overtop, so cliche it was painful. The year is 2186, with biotic powers, that are not only common but that are interchangeable for magic and provide one of the best advantages a soldier can have in combat. Where techology has advanced so far forward that we can create beings that are sentient have have individual thought, and as TIM puts it best, "We've advance more than the past 10,000 years combined." So why the hell, when FLT travel is possible, where guns that require no ammo (ME1). WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU USING A SWORD, A GODDAMN KATANA YOU CLICHE MANGA NINJA. WHY!? [End of Rant]
My opinion, keep his outfit, hell keep his over-the-top banter and dialogue, get rid of the fucking sword, and give him something practical, but cool. Dual Carnifex anyone?
Tl:dr Anyone can make a character you hate, but writers should make characters you love to hate.
Posted Apr 1, 2012, 8:33 AM UTC · edited
I don't understand the hate, personally. Omniblades are okay but real blades are not? It's just his thing.
If you really wanted, you could justify it as insta-kill weapon that is not stopped by barriers/kinetic shields because those specifically block high velocity particles (like ME ammo slugs)
This. In the novels he carries a combat knife and it's for the purpose stated above(bypassing shields). He is also not in any way a ninja. He fights well in hand to hand, but almost always carries some sort of fire arm. Most of the time it's a pistol in one hand and the combat knife in the other. I really don't understand why he is like he is in the game, other than that it's easier. He's just a super barrier version of a phantom. It's too bad he turned out that way. If you really care, read Retribution. He's a no trash talking professional with N7 training and a hatred for alien races. In other words a perfect Shepard replacement for TIM.
I find it somewhat saddening to see the homogenization of enemy types, which I think is mostly done for the sake of cutting down on design time. Would it really be that much effort to make him a unique enemy type that isn't just a reskinned phantom?
I've never had any experience with the books but I might pick up the first two and the re-edited third one, I'm a sucker for lore of a good space opera/soft-sci-fi theme. I would have taken much more seriously if he had turned out like you explained. Also I would of definitely loved to see a CQC sequence between Shepard and Kai Leng with combat knives, hand to hand and limited pistol fire.
Same, I'm going to pick them up sooner or later. Maybe if the re-edited one comes out soon and they package them all together, I'd get that.
There are three books before the "to be re-edited" Deception. Kai Leng is in the third. Revelation, Ascension, Retribution, and finally Deception.
Ah awesome thank you.
There's a lot of difference between a Combat knife and a Samurai ninja sword. I would have been okay with him if he distinguished himself by falling back on a regular old combat knife. It might have actually been a nice touch because it fits with the practical militarism matched with flashy science fiction that Mass Effect is known for.
Knives (And by extension, Omni-blades, which is basically just a knife you can summon from nothing) are useful tools still used by pretty much everyone. You can use a knife for things other than killing a dude. You could use it to skin and clean prey in survival situations, unscrew panels, pry open cans and open packages, and probably a hundred other uses that soldiers like Leng and Shepard would be intimately familiar with, all available with a quick change of the weapon's orientation.
Swords (And especially Katanas) are specialty weapons that take a lot more training to use, are basically useless against any kind of good armor. It's flashy and neat, of course, but it certainly has no place in something like Mass Effect. You can basically only use a sword easily as a weapon. It's too long to really use for the hundred other uses a knife (Or omni-blade) would be used for.
Also I think Kai Leng looks like a Mortal Kombat character. That's a personal reason for my distaste.
I think and this may be my perspective, that the hate is mostly due to the lack of depth of the character, he is thrown in our face and never developed as a true enemy, he really isn't different from a normal phantom aside from his cheesy-bad dialogue and his custom model. He isn't Saren who had a rivalry with Shepard, he isn't an ominous, near mythical reaper like Sovereign who fills us with both awe in his power, and horror in his cold, hard logic. He is unlike TIM for the fact he isn't a relatable character who believes in the means always justifying the ends, and he is no omnipresent being like Harbinger (Lacking in ME3 :( ) who is constantly trying to discourage, intimidate and overall make us feel insignificant. Kai Leng feels like a generic cereal box villain who are suppose to hate because we should. Maybe this just me but even him killing Thane wasn't terrible, while I loved Thane, I knew he would die from a crippling syndrome and I think Thane wouldn't like any other way to die than in combat.
Said this in another thread but a little DLC centralized on Kai Leng would be well worth it. ME's always been about the story and a chance to flesh out Kai Leng and why he's doing what he's doing would not go uncared about, even if it was clumsily inserted into the events of ME3's timelime.
A Kai Leng DLC would be awesome, Bioware has shown to introduce more missions thats have great backstory and enrich the universe (LotSB and Overlord are two that come to mind.) A mission that would appear after you first encounter Kai Leng that could help give the character some depth would make killing Leng so much more satisfying.