The Non-Mass Effect Fans' Guide To Why The ME3 Ending Was Objectively Terrible
Okay guys. We're going to sit down and talk about why the ending to Mass Effect 3 is terrible and why if you write off the fanbase as entitled brats, you don't understand the situation.
So here is the non-Mass Effect Fans' Guide To Why The ME3 Ending Was Objectively Terrible.
Here is the basic thesis of the ME series: Your Decisions Matter. Players are asked their opinions and decisions at nearly every turn. Each of the games has Big Goddamn Deal choices you have to make, including
Let me go into detail about just one Big Decision from the third game. One one hand, you have the Krogan, who have a history of violence and rose up against the galaxy and almost took over. The Salarians, another race, created the Genophage to put them down. It reduces the krogan birth rate to something below sustainability. For 2000 years (IIRC) the krogan have literally been dying out.
So if you've played the game well enough, you have the chance to cure the genophage. The krogan have been punished long enough, are on the verge of extinction, and if you give them this cure, you will be able to save them and add them to your war effort. Yay!
Ah, but! The Salarian government calls you up and gives you this dilemma: you either sabotage the genophage cure or you'll receive zero support from their people. This is a huge blow, and unless there is a way to trick the Salarians (doubtful, I haven't found a way), you are sacrificing a lot.
So you can go ahead and cure the krogan and get their support. Or, you can trick them into thinking you cured it, secure their loyalty and the salarians, making your chances of surviving the Reaper War better.
Other issues: to double-cross the krogan, you will have to murder two of your team mates in cold blood. Also, you haven't been around for the Krogan Rebellions-- curing the genophage will lead to a huge population boom, how can you be sure they won't threaten the entire galaxy again like they did before? And do you even have the right to make this decision? And, through your actions helping certain people become leaders of the krogan people, have you set them up in such a way they are even ready for a cure?
This is the really boiled down version, not even going into the details of Mordin's justification of the genophage, Wrex's work to unite the krogan, the turians' involvement, etc etc etc, oh dear god so much lore.
Welcome to Mass Effect! I hope you like ethical debates with history-changing consequences!
That is the kind of universe ME is. The project leads have promoted the game from the start as a story where your choices matter. And they were right. All those big decisions? They came back in ME3 and they mattered. Some people had to live with the consequences of bad choices back in ME1 and ME2. That is the way the narrative structure of ME works. I don't even know how to emphasize this enough.
So that's the narrative structure we're dealing with. Choices you make building on each other to a logical conclusion.
Let's talk about two of the biggest themes of the series, as they are equally important to understanding why the ending was shit.
1. Diversity Is Important
The MEverse is populated more by alien races than humans, actually. Humans are the newcomers to the story and are the analog of an ethnic minority in the story. They've been a Council Race for less than 100 years and are viewed as dangerous upstarts. A big part of the story is Shepard, the player character, showing what humanity can do and the strengths and weaknesses they bring to the galactic community.
And it is a varied community. Each race is extremely distinct, brings it's own culture and norms to the table. You have turians, quarians, salarians, krogan, asari, geth, batarians, and humanity as just the major players. There are also elcor, hanar, drell, volus, and probably others I'm forgetting. All of these races matter. They are vital to the make-up of the galaxy, and this is emphasized over and over in the series. Your own squad in the game is usually at least half alien, and your greatest friendships in the game are most likely going to be with non-humans. Hell, in ME2 and ME3 it is only by pooling the resources and talents of as many people are possible that you even succeed.
And even within the races, the emphasis on diversity is strong. Let's look solely at Garrus Vakarian, a turian who's on your squad in all three games. He comes from a militaristic society that has very different social structures than we do. Turians are promoted by their superiors, and if they fail, the person who promoted them is the one penalized, because they put someone in charge they shouldn't have. Personal responsibility is ingrained in them, to the point that it's stated in-universe that they have a hard time lying about crimes they commit. They make decisions, they stick to them, hell or high water.
Garrus, though, is a self-described "not a very good turian." He's rash and bucks authority and even becomes an honest-to-god vigilante in ME2. He has his species' usual prejudices in ME1, but grows out of them by ME2 and openly apologizes for some of his bullshit in ME3. He is different from every other turian you meet.
The races have their traits and trademarks, but there are always outliers. Fuck, you meet a krogan poet at one point in the series. Diversity, diversity, diversity.
2. Organics vs Synthetics
I have no idea how to even scratch the surface here...
Arguably the best arc of ME3 is the Quarian-Geth War. 300 years ago, the quarians synthetic assistants, the Geth, grew true sentience. They were no longer servants, they were their own people. And the quarians panicked. See, in their understanding, synthetic life is dangerous. Organic life has nothing to offer it, so it will always dominate organics.
They tried to shut down the geth, but failed. The geth grew too intelligent too quickly. This lead to the Morning War (the morning of Geth sentience) and the geth won, driving the quarians off their homeworld.
Now the geth live on Rannoch, the homeworld, while the quarians live on the Migrant Fleet. They have no homeworld and live on a flotilla of thousand of ships. Their immune systems are slowly being eroded and they're forced to live in full-body suits from puberty onward.
The quarian people are divided. Some want to find a new world and begin the long, arduous process of adapting to a new environment. Others though want to make war with the geth and retake Rannoch.
Enter Shepard, who is friends with Tali'Zorah, a quarian, and Legion, a collective geth consciousness (it's complicated).
In ME2 and ME3, if you are very, very fucking careful with your decisions, you can actually achieve peace for both races. The game makes you work for it though. You learn about the geth, how they don't want to fight the quarians, and have to convince the angry, war-mongering quarians to try peace. It is a long plot-line and I'm not going into the details.
The important thing here is that if you pull it off, the best possible ending for the conflict involves the quarians returning to Rannoch and living in tenuous co-existence with the geth, who proceed to help them re-adapt to their homeworld and rebuild.
This is important later on, trust me. It's central to why the endings are terrible.
Speaking of which.
Why the ME3 Endings Are Legitimately That Bad
The series revolves around a mysterious eldritch abomination race of living machines called the Reapers that wipe out all advanced organic life every 50,000 years or so. ME3 takes place during their latest extinction cycle and revolves around fighting back and building a little-understood super-weapon called the Crucible that uses something called the Catalyst to stop the Reapers.
If you want more explanation than that, join the club.
So by the endgame, you build the Crucible and connect to the Catalyst and Shepard gets to the Very Final Decision.
Here's where the whole thing goes pear-shaped.
"It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C." -Casey Hudson, project lead for Mass Effect series
Oh Casey. You lying piece of shit.
Because that quote is exactly what the ending is.
The Catalyst, the creator of the Reapers and the extinction cycle, is an actual being. The Catalyst explains that purpose of the cycle is to bring order to chaos. In every cycle, organic life creates synthetic life and then synthetic life wipes out organic life.
This is presented by the Catalyst as fact.
Hrm. Wait. Didn't I just spend X number of hours handling the Quarian-Geth Conflict? Haven't I shed light on what the geth want and how co-existence is not only possible for both races but will likely be the most beneficial solution for them both?
And hey, isn't EDI, one of my squadmates, an unshackled AI that not only hasn't tried to wipe out anyone but has grown into a fully sentient being and even fallen in love with one of my other crewmembers?
Fffffff, you can take your LOGICAL ARGUMENTS and show yourself out.
You know that one meme? yo dawg, I put some X in your X so you can Y while you Y?
The Catalyst's motivation is perfectly and accurately summed up as
YO DAWG I heard you don't wanna be killed by synthetics, so I made some synthetics to kill you every 50K years so you won't be killed by synthetics.
No. That's literally it. That's the reason behind the Reapers. Some deus ex machina Star Child rip-off shows up in the very last scene of the game and explains this clearly faulty circular logic.
That's. It.
And then you are given your Final Choice. oh jesus god
The Catalyst basically shows you three buttons and tells you to pick on.
1. Control. Shepard controls the Reapers, sacrificing herself to make them leave. Your team inexplicably becomes stranded on Gillian's Planet. The Mass Effect Relays, the means of interstellar travel are all simultaneously destroyed. Roll credits.
2. Destroy. Shepard destroys the Reapers, but also all other synthetic life, including the peaceful geth and EDI. Your team inexplicably becomes stranded on Gillian's Planet. The Mass Effect Relays, the means of interstellar travel are all simultaneously destroyed. Roll credits.
3. Synthesis. Ironically presented as the "best" option. Shepard, who is partly synthetic herself, puts herself in the Crucible. It forcibly rewrites all life in the galaxy to be a mix of synthetic-organic. Your team inexplicably becomes stranded on Gillian's Planet. The Mass Effect Relays, the means of interstellar travel are all simultaneously destroyed. Roll credits.
Let's go down the list of everything wrong here.
1. The Mass Relays are destroyed.
In The Arrival DLC, the entire plot of the mission hinges on the fact that when a Mass Relay is destroyed, it lets out a shockwave of unstable energy that will wipe out the system it's in. So in every one of these endings, you get an Inferred Holocaust. Good job.
2. Rocks Fall, Everybody Starves to Death.
Even if the Mass Relays for some hand-wave reason no longer go supernova upon destruction, at this point in the game, you have collected a victory fleet made up of a bulk of the galaxy for the Big Final at Earth. The entire turian military, all of the Salarian Task Force, every single fighter the krogan can spare, what remains of the asari fleet, all of the human Alliance fleet, and the Migrant Fleet, along with the geth. If you're me, you also managed to recruit the remains of the elcor, volus, batarians and probably more.
In every ending, all of these races are going to die. Because they are now stranded in the Sol system over a devastated Earth. It's stated in-game that humanity's going to need a new homeworld, so Earth can't support humanity, let alone everyone else. Fuck, the turians and quarians are dextro-amino instead of levo-amino and literally cannot eat human food. So they'll starve first, I guess?
3. The Destroy Ending.
I'm sorry, hold up a second Mr. Ex Machina. Why do I have to genocide the geth and murder EDI? No, really, why? Hey, hey, earlier on I recovered some Reaper code. Why don't we use that to target just the Reapers and kill them? Or you claim to control them-- why don't you just make them leave?
Yeah, guess what questions you can't ask. The options given by the Catalyst are laid out and you have no option to question them to get more details. Apparently, in the original cut of the ending, that was an option, but Casey Hudson had explanations cut because he expressly wanted "speculation from everyone!"
4. Control Ending.
This one is harder to explain, but basically the Control ending is, in universe, the worst choice. It's the option The Illusive Man, the secondary Big Bad of the game wanted. This option lets you control the Reapers, but it's established that this is a Bad Thing and leads to indoctrination and-- okay, this option, you're going to have to play the games to understand the issue with. Sorry, guys, I'd have to go over so much lore to explain this.
Control is Bad. See: Cerberus.
5. Synthesis is the Worst Ending in Disguise.
It's strange, but synthesis, the option to merge organic and synthetic life is actually the worst one, in my opinion. See back above, re: story themes, re: Diversity is Important.
The synthesis ending essentially says to save all the races, you must annihilate everything that makes them different. You use Shepard's body as a template to change everyone without their consent into hybrids.
Um. How about no? How about the fact that the purpose of Legion in ME2 is to explain how the geth are their own people, they have their own systems and structures that are almost entirely alien to everyone else, and that is how it should be. Who the fuck are you to impose your own idea of order on them. To steal a quote from Matriarch Aethyta, don't be an anthropocentric bag of dicks.
I honest to god believe that if Shepard had the option of informing the races of this options, they would all tell her fuck that, we'll die as ourselves before giving up what makes up who we are.
6. There is no fourth option.
This is the weirdest part to anyone familiar with the games. Shepard just takes the Catalyst's explanation and... accepts it. No questions, no arguments, nothing.
Are you fucking kidding me? You are telling me the woman who broke through Saren and the Illusive Man's indoctrination is just going to take this? The woman who mediated a peace between the quarians and geth? The woman who cured the genophage and got the krogan to fight on Palaven to save the turians?
The woman who, whenever in the past she was given two options has always said fuck that and made her own third option?
No. No. No. This, perhaps is the second-biggest insult with the endings. That Shepard listens to the Catalyst's internally paradoxical, circular logic, sees the three flawed choices offered, and just goes with it?
There needs to be a fourth option: Refusal. It is the quickest, most in-character way to fix the endings. Shepard sees the options and tells the Catalyst no. No, we will not resign ourselves to your flawed, impossible choices. We will fight the Reapers and if we die, we will die as ourselves, as we should. Then the game could tally up your War Assets and Military Readiness and decide how the final battle goes. That is a suitable ending that lets your decisions across all three games actually matter.
7. It Doesn't Actually Matter Which You Choose.
Those are the endings.
98% the same assets, the same exact unfoldings, the same everything. Except with three different colors.
They are functionally and visually identical. There's no reason to cure the genophage. There's no reason to unite the geth and quarians. There's no reason to spare the Rachni. There's no reason to do a single thing, because none of it matters in the end. Still the same three options, still the same three endings.
"It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C."
Bullshit, Casey Hudson. Bull. Shit.
That got long-winded to say the least. I hope it was illuminating and I hope I've shed some light on why fans are so angry. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.
The worst of this is, outside the endgame, ME3 was almost flawless. It was the most emotive, powerful piece of fiction I have ever seen. If made me think, gave me real cause for personal reflection and made me think about ethical dilemmas I'd never considered before. It was a fucking masterwork.
And it was all throw out the window by that endings.
Bioware can fix this, and I hope they do. Their fans deserved better, and the story deserved better. As I told Holly, this is like Lord of the Rings having the same ending as 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is Actually That Terrible.
Originally posted at DW. Comment here or there. DW comments:
So here is the non-Mass Effect Fans' Guide To Why The ME3 Ending Was Objectively Terrible.
Here is the basic thesis of the ME series: Your Decisions Matter. Players are asked their opinions and decisions at nearly every turn. Each of the games has Big Goddamn Deal choices you have to make, including
- whether to give a genocidal race another chance or to wipe them summarily out in the name of protecting everyone
- whether to sacrifice a huge chunk of your own human fleet or to sacrifice the heads of galactic government-- basically, do you put humanity's interests ahead of the interests of everyone
- whether the intelligence from ethically unsound experiments should be kept or destroyed
Let me go into detail about just one Big Decision from the third game. One one hand, you have the Krogan, who have a history of violence and rose up against the galaxy and almost took over. The Salarians, another race, created the Genophage to put them down. It reduces the krogan birth rate to something below sustainability. For 2000 years (IIRC) the krogan have literally been dying out.
So if you've played the game well enough, you have the chance to cure the genophage. The krogan have been punished long enough, are on the verge of extinction, and if you give them this cure, you will be able to save them and add them to your war effort. Yay!
Ah, but! The Salarian government calls you up and gives you this dilemma: you either sabotage the genophage cure or you'll receive zero support from their people. This is a huge blow, and unless there is a way to trick the Salarians (doubtful, I haven't found a way), you are sacrificing a lot.
So you can go ahead and cure the krogan and get their support. Or, you can trick them into thinking you cured it, secure their loyalty and the salarians, making your chances of surviving the Reaper War better.
Other issues: to double-cross the krogan, you will have to murder two of your team mates in cold blood. Also, you haven't been around for the Krogan Rebellions-- curing the genophage will lead to a huge population boom, how can you be sure they won't threaten the entire galaxy again like they did before? And do you even have the right to make this decision? And, through your actions helping certain people become leaders of the krogan people, have you set them up in such a way they are even ready for a cure?
This is the really boiled down version, not even going into the details of Mordin's justification of the genophage, Wrex's work to unite the krogan, the turians' involvement, etc etc etc, oh dear god so much lore.
Welcome to Mass Effect! I hope you like ethical debates with history-changing consequences!
That is the kind of universe ME is. The project leads have promoted the game from the start as a story where your choices matter. And they were right. All those big decisions? They came back in ME3 and they mattered. Some people had to live with the consequences of bad choices back in ME1 and ME2. That is the way the narrative structure of ME works. I don't even know how to emphasize this enough.
So that's the narrative structure we're dealing with. Choices you make building on each other to a logical conclusion.
Let's talk about two of the biggest themes of the series, as they are equally important to understanding why the ending was shit.
1. Diversity Is Important
The MEverse is populated more by alien races than humans, actually. Humans are the newcomers to the story and are the analog of an ethnic minority in the story. They've been a Council Race for less than 100 years and are viewed as dangerous upstarts. A big part of the story is Shepard, the player character, showing what humanity can do and the strengths and weaknesses they bring to the galactic community.
And it is a varied community. Each race is extremely distinct, brings it's own culture and norms to the table. You have turians, quarians, salarians, krogan, asari, geth, batarians, and humanity as just the major players. There are also elcor, hanar, drell, volus, and probably others I'm forgetting. All of these races matter. They are vital to the make-up of the galaxy, and this is emphasized over and over in the series. Your own squad in the game is usually at least half alien, and your greatest friendships in the game are most likely going to be with non-humans. Hell, in ME2 and ME3 it is only by pooling the resources and talents of as many people are possible that you even succeed.
And even within the races, the emphasis on diversity is strong. Let's look solely at Garrus Vakarian, a turian who's on your squad in all three games. He comes from a militaristic society that has very different social structures than we do. Turians are promoted by their superiors, and if they fail, the person who promoted them is the one penalized, because they put someone in charge they shouldn't have. Personal responsibility is ingrained in them, to the point that it's stated in-universe that they have a hard time lying about crimes they commit. They make decisions, they stick to them, hell or high water.
Garrus, though, is a self-described "not a very good turian." He's rash and bucks authority and even becomes an honest-to-god vigilante in ME2. He has his species' usual prejudices in ME1, but grows out of them by ME2 and openly apologizes for some of his bullshit in ME3. He is different from every other turian you meet.
The races have their traits and trademarks, but there are always outliers. Fuck, you meet a krogan poet at one point in the series. Diversity, diversity, diversity.
2. Organics vs Synthetics
I have no idea how to even scratch the surface here...
Arguably the best arc of ME3 is the Quarian-Geth War. 300 years ago, the quarians synthetic assistants, the Geth, grew true sentience. They were no longer servants, they were their own people. And the quarians panicked. See, in their understanding, synthetic life is dangerous. Organic life has nothing to offer it, so it will always dominate organics.
They tried to shut down the geth, but failed. The geth grew too intelligent too quickly. This lead to the Morning War (the morning of Geth sentience) and the geth won, driving the quarians off their homeworld.
Now the geth live on Rannoch, the homeworld, while the quarians live on the Migrant Fleet. They have no homeworld and live on a flotilla of thousand of ships. Their immune systems are slowly being eroded and they're forced to live in full-body suits from puberty onward.
The quarian people are divided. Some want to find a new world and begin the long, arduous process of adapting to a new environment. Others though want to make war with the geth and retake Rannoch.
Enter Shepard, who is friends with Tali'Zorah, a quarian, and Legion, a collective geth consciousness (it's complicated).
In ME2 and ME3, if you are very, very fucking careful with your decisions, you can actually achieve peace for both races. The game makes you work for it though. You learn about the geth, how they don't want to fight the quarians, and have to convince the angry, war-mongering quarians to try peace. It is a long plot-line and I'm not going into the details.
The important thing here is that if you pull it off, the best possible ending for the conflict involves the quarians returning to Rannoch and living in tenuous co-existence with the geth, who proceed to help them re-adapt to their homeworld and rebuild.
This is important later on, trust me. It's central to why the endings are terrible.
Speaking of which.
Why the ME3 Endings Are Legitimately That Bad
The series revolves around a mysterious eldritch abomination race of living machines called the Reapers that wipe out all advanced organic life every 50,000 years or so. ME3 takes place during their latest extinction cycle and revolves around fighting back and building a little-understood super-weapon called the Crucible that uses something called the Catalyst to stop the Reapers.
If you want more explanation than that, join the club.
So by the endgame, you build the Crucible and connect to the Catalyst and Shepard gets to the Very Final Decision.
Here's where the whole thing goes pear-shaped.
"It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C." -Casey Hudson, project lead for Mass Effect series
Oh Casey. You lying piece of shit.
Because that quote is exactly what the ending is.
The Catalyst, the creator of the Reapers and the extinction cycle, is an actual being. The Catalyst explains that purpose of the cycle is to bring order to chaos. In every cycle, organic life creates synthetic life and then synthetic life wipes out organic life.
This is presented by the Catalyst as fact.
Hrm. Wait. Didn't I just spend X number of hours handling the Quarian-Geth Conflict? Haven't I shed light on what the geth want and how co-existence is not only possible for both races but will likely be the most beneficial solution for them both?
And hey, isn't EDI, one of my squadmates, an unshackled AI that not only hasn't tried to wipe out anyone but has grown into a fully sentient being and even fallen in love with one of my other crewmembers?
Fffffff, you can take your LOGICAL ARGUMENTS and show yourself out.
You know that one meme? yo dawg, I put some X in your X so you can Y while you Y?
The Catalyst's motivation is perfectly and accurately summed up as
YO DAWG I heard you don't wanna be killed by synthetics, so I made some synthetics to kill you every 50K years so you won't be killed by synthetics.
No. That's literally it. That's the reason behind the Reapers. Some deus ex machina Star Child rip-off shows up in the very last scene of the game and explains this clearly faulty circular logic.
That's. It.
And then you are given your Final Choice. oh jesus god
The Catalyst basically shows you three buttons and tells you to pick on.
1. Control. Shepard controls the Reapers, sacrificing herself to make them leave. Your team inexplicably becomes stranded on Gillian's Planet. The Mass Effect Relays, the means of interstellar travel are all simultaneously destroyed. Roll credits.
2. Destroy. Shepard destroys the Reapers, but also all other synthetic life, including the peaceful geth and EDI. Your team inexplicably becomes stranded on Gillian's Planet. The Mass Effect Relays, the means of interstellar travel are all simultaneously destroyed. Roll credits.
3. Synthesis. Ironically presented as the "best" option. Shepard, who is partly synthetic herself, puts herself in the Crucible. It forcibly rewrites all life in the galaxy to be a mix of synthetic-organic. Your team inexplicably becomes stranded on Gillian's Planet. The Mass Effect Relays, the means of interstellar travel are all simultaneously destroyed. Roll credits.
Let's go down the list of everything wrong here.
1. The Mass Relays are destroyed.
In The Arrival DLC, the entire plot of the mission hinges on the fact that when a Mass Relay is destroyed, it lets out a shockwave of unstable energy that will wipe out the system it's in. So in every one of these endings, you get an Inferred Holocaust. Good job.
2. Rocks Fall, Everybody Starves to Death.
Even if the Mass Relays for some hand-wave reason no longer go supernova upon destruction, at this point in the game, you have collected a victory fleet made up of a bulk of the galaxy for the Big Final at Earth. The entire turian military, all of the Salarian Task Force, every single fighter the krogan can spare, what remains of the asari fleet, all of the human Alliance fleet, and the Migrant Fleet, along with the geth. If you're me, you also managed to recruit the remains of the elcor, volus, batarians and probably more.
In every ending, all of these races are going to die. Because they are now stranded in the Sol system over a devastated Earth. It's stated in-game that humanity's going to need a new homeworld, so Earth can't support humanity, let alone everyone else. Fuck, the turians and quarians are dextro-amino instead of levo-amino and literally cannot eat human food. So they'll starve first, I guess?
3. The Destroy Ending.
I'm sorry, hold up a second Mr. Ex Machina. Why do I have to genocide the geth and murder EDI? No, really, why? Hey, hey, earlier on I recovered some Reaper code. Why don't we use that to target just the Reapers and kill them? Or you claim to control them-- why don't you just make them leave?
Yeah, guess what questions you can't ask. The options given by the Catalyst are laid out and you have no option to question them to get more details. Apparently, in the original cut of the ending, that was an option, but Casey Hudson had explanations cut because he expressly wanted "speculation from everyone!"
4. Control Ending.
This one is harder to explain, but basically the Control ending is, in universe, the worst choice. It's the option The Illusive Man, the secondary Big Bad of the game wanted. This option lets you control the Reapers, but it's established that this is a Bad Thing and leads to indoctrination and-- okay, this option, you're going to have to play the games to understand the issue with. Sorry, guys, I'd have to go over so much lore to explain this.
Control is Bad. See: Cerberus.
5. Synthesis is the Worst Ending in Disguise.
It's strange, but synthesis, the option to merge organic and synthetic life is actually the worst one, in my opinion. See back above, re: story themes, re: Diversity is Important.
The synthesis ending essentially says to save all the races, you must annihilate everything that makes them different. You use Shepard's body as a template to change everyone without their consent into hybrids.
Um. How about no? How about the fact that the purpose of Legion in ME2 is to explain how the geth are their own people, they have their own systems and structures that are almost entirely alien to everyone else, and that is how it should be. Who the fuck are you to impose your own idea of order on them. To steal a quote from Matriarch Aethyta, don't be an anthropocentric bag of dicks.
I honest to god believe that if Shepard had the option of informing the races of this options, they would all tell her fuck that, we'll die as ourselves before giving up what makes up who we are.
6. There is no fourth option.
This is the weirdest part to anyone familiar with the games. Shepard just takes the Catalyst's explanation and... accepts it. No questions, no arguments, nothing.
Are you fucking kidding me? You are telling me the woman who broke through Saren and the Illusive Man's indoctrination is just going to take this? The woman who mediated a peace between the quarians and geth? The woman who cured the genophage and got the krogan to fight on Palaven to save the turians?
The woman who, whenever in the past she was given two options has always said fuck that and made her own third option?
No. No. No. This, perhaps is the second-biggest insult with the endings. That Shepard listens to the Catalyst's internally paradoxical, circular logic, sees the three flawed choices offered, and just goes with it?
There needs to be a fourth option: Refusal. It is the quickest, most in-character way to fix the endings. Shepard sees the options and tells the Catalyst no. No, we will not resign ourselves to your flawed, impossible choices. We will fight the Reapers and if we die, we will die as ourselves, as we should. Then the game could tally up your War Assets and Military Readiness and decide how the final battle goes. That is a suitable ending that lets your decisions across all three games actually matter.
7. It Doesn't Actually Matter Which You Choose.
Click to viewThose are the endings.
98% the same assets, the same exact unfoldings, the same everything. Except with three different colors.
They are functionally and visually identical. There's no reason to cure the genophage. There's no reason to unite the geth and quarians. There's no reason to spare the Rachni. There's no reason to do a single thing, because none of it matters in the end. Still the same three options, still the same three endings.
"It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C."
Bullshit, Casey Hudson. Bull. Shit.
That got long-winded to say the least. I hope it was illuminating and I hope I've shed some light on why fans are so angry. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.
The worst of this is, outside the endgame, ME3 was almost flawless. It was the most emotive, powerful piece of fiction I have ever seen. If made me think, gave me real cause for personal reflection and made me think about ethical dilemmas I'd never considered before. It was a fucking masterwork.
And it was all throw out the window by that endings.
Bioware can fix this, and I hope they do. Their fans deserved better, and the story deserved better. As I told Holly, this is like Lord of the Rings having the same ending as 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It is Actually That Terrible.
Originally posted at DW. Comment here or there. DW comments: