Another 'I Just Finished ME3' Post
I have lots of feelings and I will talk about them using lots of words.
So, putting all this under a cut to avoid spoilers by insinuation, but basically, all the good things I want to say about this game are kind of overshadowed right now by just how much the endings hurt me.
So this is actually a list.
EDIT: Added one, so now this list is:
12 Reasons why the ME3 Endgame is Terrible.
Feel free to add your own if you want to. Or disagree with me, or just skim over and go about your business - I just I need to talk about this, and I need to do it publicly.
1. Shepard’s adaptive personality ignored
Depending on how you chose to play Shepard, this might vary for some people, but my Shepard firmly believed in peace between organics and synthetics, and spent three games reassuring her crew that they were not going to give up, that they were going to find a way to succeed, were not going to accept defeat or the idea that the future can’t be changed. Because of this, Shepard’s almost instant acceptance of the Crucible’s projections felt like a betrayal of the character I thought I’d been playing. What reason does Shepard have to accept the Crucible’s offers so easily, without any attempt at finding another solution, or even accept them as unchangeable fact at all?
2. Lack of Squadmate payoff
After three games, the ‘heart’ of the Mass Effect universe is all but undeniably the characters. Mass Effect 3 allows you to have an emotional farewell with your squadmates from all three games, but unfortunately considers this sufficient as emotional closure. Playable squadmates are not involved in the final portion of the game, and their ultimate fate is confusing at best and likely extremely bleak. In the case of squadmates chosen to accompany Shepard to London, there are conflicting images presented as to whether they even survived at all, which is made more painful by the fact that many players are likely to select their ‘favorite’ squadmates to accompany them at endgame.
For squadmates who were not playable in ME3, their final farewell with Shepard is the last we hear of them at all.
3. Making Paragon/Renegade choices meaningless
The decision to have both Paragon and Renegade actions contribute to an overall ‘Reputation’ score was a good one in terms of conversational choices; the ability to show kindness, mercy, diplomacy, ruthlessness or anger depending on a specific situation makes it feel like you are playing a real individual rather than a ‘nice guy’ or an ‘asshole’ that you really have to cling to in order to be effective. Unfortunately, in ME3, how you treated people and the alliances you made are ultimately meaningless; the same endings can be achieved, for example, whether you cured the Krogan genophage or lied about doing so to Wrex’s face (assuming he’s alive), and because of the purposeful ‘grey’ nature of the endings, there is no clear moral choice Shepard must make, which would be more acceptable if not for the presence of two previous games where morality calls essentially amounting to humanity vs. all others were not only encouraged, but demanded. In ME3, the morality comes down to a matter of personal taste between unappealing options - ‘pick your poison’, more or less.
4. Endings only cosmetically different
As discussed elsewhere, there are only three real ‘successful’ endings to ME3. The only actual difference is in the state of the Reapers. No matter which ending is chosen, the face of the galaxy is irrevocably changed for the worse. Even the fate of Earth felt insignificant to me in a game where Earth is one planet among thousands, and one where we have spent no time before this game (no more than one third of players even have reason to feel that their Shepard has any personal ties to Earth, so it is nothing more than the human homeworld to him/her and losing it should mean no more or less to the galaxy than losing Palaven, Thessia, or any other planet.
5. Previous game’s choices meaningless
Because the only real determining factor in ME3 comes out to a plain numerical value, none of the choices made in previous games actually matter whatsoever. All any of them do is contribute to the number anyway. The multiplayer mechanic provides the same ability to complete the game “successfully” as playing the previous games does - which was its purpose - however, it also renders every other action insignificant along the way.
6. Successes meaningless
Probably several examples could be used, but the quarians and the geth are possibly the best. In two out of three endings, ending the quarian-geth conflict was pointless aside from the points it offered. The victory of creating peace between a synthetic and organic race is rendered totally pointless if the geth are destroyed along with the reapers, and likewise if organics and synthetics are merged into a single, new ‘race’. Worse, no matter what ending is chosen, the Mass Relays are apparently destroyed, which means that whatever portion of the quarians were in the sol system and not on their long-sought homeworld can now never return. That means Tali will never have her house on the homeworld after all - if the quarian race can survive at all, now that the technologic capabilities/advances they have depended on for life are in serious question.
7. No poetic death
ME3 contains some of the most well-written, emotional and satisfying character deaths I’ve ever seen, but Shepard’s is not one of them. Although everything in Mass Effect has always come down to Shepard’s choices, to be sent into a final conflict alone, without my lover, without my best friend, without any knowledge or mention of whether they were alive or dead, felt cold and unsatisfying. My Shepard fought for the people she loved. At one point, before playing this game, I was afraid I would have to choose between my loved ones and the greater good. To not even be offered such a choice felt insultingly hollow.
8. Ignorance/abandonment of foreshadowing
Although writing and story choices will necessarily change through the development of a game on this scale, the level of disconnect in this case was very bad. Again, there are probably multiple examples that would work, but there are two that I had speculated about a lot beforehand and they bothered me the most: 1. Dark energy. I suspect strongly that when ME2 was written and released, dark energy was fully intended to be ‘the catalyst’ in ME3, but this was changed. As it stands, there was a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to dark energy on the way to revealing that the Citadel was the real catalyst, although precisely how is not explained. 2. The existence of the geth. In ME2, Legion tells Shepard that the geth are ‘outside’ the Reaper’s plans. This implied to me that the geth could be the key to defeating the Reapers in this cycle, but in the actual endgame, the geth serve as nothing more significant than a war asset, no different from any other.
9. Arbitrary choices/false dilemma
Shepard’s endgame choices have little to do with anything that has happened in the game thus far. There is no reason given as to why these three specific options are the only choices Shepard has. If the Crucible creature created the Reapers, why is Shepard responsible for deciding their fate? Why can’t the Crucible being control them itself?
10. Lack of explanation
As a follow-up to the previous point, the endgame options bring up a lot of questions that are apparently ignored, both by Shepard him/herself and by external exposition. Why exactly can Shepard control the Reapers if no other human could? What is the Crucible being? What consequence would there be to letting galactic life die out, if peace could never be achieved? Why doesn’t Shepard attempt to fight the force that has actually been responsible for the destruction of countless civilizations instead of cooperating with it? Why must all synthetics be destroyed instead of merely the Reapers, particularly when Shepard has already (optionally) established peace between an organic and synthetic race, proving that such an alliance can exist? Why has the concept of combining synthetics and organics (other than implants) never been introduced previously, and how would this be accomplished, particularly in an apparently instantaneous way? Why must Shepard be sacrificed to achieve this? And, perhaps most painful of all, if everything Shepard ever did was ultimately completely out of his or her control, what the hell was the point?
11. Unbalanced war
What is the point of offering a potential weapon for organics while simultaneously making the catalyst of that weapon also a trap and the carefully-designed first strike location for every Reaper invasion? Stacking the odds against organics this badly would all but guarantee failure, so why offer them the option at all? One logical purpose would be to find a civilization that was advanced enough to free itself of the cycle, but this is clearly not the case since the Crucible being offers no such option.
12. Lack of aggressive action/choice
Throughout all three games, Shepard has been defined by his/her ability to take action when nobody else would/could. The logical endgame sequence for Mass Effect, then, should most likely have involved an action scene rather than being solely a long conversation. Even if this was the case, the bigger disappointment is the fact that Shepard’s ultimate action for the entirety of the Mass Effect series is a passive carrying out of someone else’s demands. Shepard doesn’t actually decide the fate of the galaxy, the Crucible Machine-God did. Shepard, man or woman of action, is ultimately reduced to little more than a cosmic dice which is rolled by a higher power.
I've got more, but these are enough for now, I think. I'm just a big bundle of hurt feelings right now. I actually wasn't able to finish the game, myself; I got up to the point of making my big "choice" and realized I couldn't go on. I had to shut down the game. Looked them up online instead, and here we are.
All my sads and disappointeds.
So, putting all this under a cut to avoid spoilers by insinuation, but basically, all the good things I want to say about this game are kind of overshadowed right now by just how much the endings hurt me.
So this is actually a list.
EDIT: Added one, so now this list is:
12 Reasons why the ME3 Endgame is Terrible.
Feel free to add your own if you want to. Or disagree with me, or just skim over and go about your business - I just I need to talk about this, and I need to do it publicly.
1. Shepard’s adaptive personality ignored
Depending on how you chose to play Shepard, this might vary for some people, but my Shepard firmly believed in peace between organics and synthetics, and spent three games reassuring her crew that they were not going to give up, that they were going to find a way to succeed, were not going to accept defeat or the idea that the future can’t be changed. Because of this, Shepard’s almost instant acceptance of the Crucible’s projections felt like a betrayal of the character I thought I’d been playing. What reason does Shepard have to accept the Crucible’s offers so easily, without any attempt at finding another solution, or even accept them as unchangeable fact at all?
2. Lack of Squadmate payoff
After three games, the ‘heart’ of the Mass Effect universe is all but undeniably the characters. Mass Effect 3 allows you to have an emotional farewell with your squadmates from all three games, but unfortunately considers this sufficient as emotional closure. Playable squadmates are not involved in the final portion of the game, and their ultimate fate is confusing at best and likely extremely bleak. In the case of squadmates chosen to accompany Shepard to London, there are conflicting images presented as to whether they even survived at all, which is made more painful by the fact that many players are likely to select their ‘favorite’ squadmates to accompany them at endgame.
For squadmates who were not playable in ME3, their final farewell with Shepard is the last we hear of them at all.
3. Making Paragon/Renegade choices meaningless
The decision to have both Paragon and Renegade actions contribute to an overall ‘Reputation’ score was a good one in terms of conversational choices; the ability to show kindness, mercy, diplomacy, ruthlessness or anger depending on a specific situation makes it feel like you are playing a real individual rather than a ‘nice guy’ or an ‘asshole’ that you really have to cling to in order to be effective. Unfortunately, in ME3, how you treated people and the alliances you made are ultimately meaningless; the same endings can be achieved, for example, whether you cured the Krogan genophage or lied about doing so to Wrex’s face (assuming he’s alive), and because of the purposeful ‘grey’ nature of the endings, there is no clear moral choice Shepard must make, which would be more acceptable if not for the presence of two previous games where morality calls essentially amounting to humanity vs. all others were not only encouraged, but demanded. In ME3, the morality comes down to a matter of personal taste between unappealing options - ‘pick your poison’, more or less.
4. Endings only cosmetically different
As discussed elsewhere, there are only three real ‘successful’ endings to ME3. The only actual difference is in the state of the Reapers. No matter which ending is chosen, the face of the galaxy is irrevocably changed for the worse. Even the fate of Earth felt insignificant to me in a game where Earth is one planet among thousands, and one where we have spent no time before this game (no more than one third of players even have reason to feel that their Shepard has any personal ties to Earth, so it is nothing more than the human homeworld to him/her and losing it should mean no more or less to the galaxy than losing Palaven, Thessia, or any other planet.
5. Previous game’s choices meaningless
Because the only real determining factor in ME3 comes out to a plain numerical value, none of the choices made in previous games actually matter whatsoever. All any of them do is contribute to the number anyway. The multiplayer mechanic provides the same ability to complete the game “successfully” as playing the previous games does - which was its purpose - however, it also renders every other action insignificant along the way.
6. Successes meaningless
Probably several examples could be used, but the quarians and the geth are possibly the best. In two out of three endings, ending the quarian-geth conflict was pointless aside from the points it offered. The victory of creating peace between a synthetic and organic race is rendered totally pointless if the geth are destroyed along with the reapers, and likewise if organics and synthetics are merged into a single, new ‘race’. Worse, no matter what ending is chosen, the Mass Relays are apparently destroyed, which means that whatever portion of the quarians were in the sol system and not on their long-sought homeworld can now never return. That means Tali will never have her house on the homeworld after all - if the quarian race can survive at all, now that the technologic capabilities/advances they have depended on for life are in serious question.
7. No poetic death
ME3 contains some of the most well-written, emotional and satisfying character deaths I’ve ever seen, but Shepard’s is not one of them. Although everything in Mass Effect has always come down to Shepard’s choices, to be sent into a final conflict alone, without my lover, without my best friend, without any knowledge or mention of whether they were alive or dead, felt cold and unsatisfying. My Shepard fought for the people she loved. At one point, before playing this game, I was afraid I would have to choose between my loved ones and the greater good. To not even be offered such a choice felt insultingly hollow.
8. Ignorance/abandonment of foreshadowing
Although writing and story choices will necessarily change through the development of a game on this scale, the level of disconnect in this case was very bad. Again, there are probably multiple examples that would work, but there are two that I had speculated about a lot beforehand and they bothered me the most: 1. Dark energy. I suspect strongly that when ME2 was written and released, dark energy was fully intended to be ‘the catalyst’ in ME3, but this was changed. As it stands, there was a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to dark energy on the way to revealing that the Citadel was the real catalyst, although precisely how is not explained. 2. The existence of the geth. In ME2, Legion tells Shepard that the geth are ‘outside’ the Reaper’s plans. This implied to me that the geth could be the key to defeating the Reapers in this cycle, but in the actual endgame, the geth serve as nothing more significant than a war asset, no different from any other.
9. Arbitrary choices/false dilemma
Shepard’s endgame choices have little to do with anything that has happened in the game thus far. There is no reason given as to why these three specific options are the only choices Shepard has. If the Crucible creature created the Reapers, why is Shepard responsible for deciding their fate? Why can’t the Crucible being control them itself?
10. Lack of explanation
As a follow-up to the previous point, the endgame options bring up a lot of questions that are apparently ignored, both by Shepard him/herself and by external exposition. Why exactly can Shepard control the Reapers if no other human could? What is the Crucible being? What consequence would there be to letting galactic life die out, if peace could never be achieved? Why doesn’t Shepard attempt to fight the force that has actually been responsible for the destruction of countless civilizations instead of cooperating with it? Why must all synthetics be destroyed instead of merely the Reapers, particularly when Shepard has already (optionally) established peace between an organic and synthetic race, proving that such an alliance can exist? Why has the concept of combining synthetics and organics (other than implants) never been introduced previously, and how would this be accomplished, particularly in an apparently instantaneous way? Why must Shepard be sacrificed to achieve this? And, perhaps most painful of all, if everything Shepard ever did was ultimately completely out of his or her control, what the hell was the point?
11. Unbalanced war
What is the point of offering a potential weapon for organics while simultaneously making the catalyst of that weapon also a trap and the carefully-designed first strike location for every Reaper invasion? Stacking the odds against organics this badly would all but guarantee failure, so why offer them the option at all? One logical purpose would be to find a civilization that was advanced enough to free itself of the cycle, but this is clearly not the case since the Crucible being offers no such option.
12. Lack of aggressive action/choice
Throughout all three games, Shepard has been defined by his/her ability to take action when nobody else would/could. The logical endgame sequence for Mass Effect, then, should most likely have involved an action scene rather than being solely a long conversation. Even if this was the case, the bigger disappointment is the fact that Shepard’s ultimate action for the entirety of the Mass Effect series is a passive carrying out of someone else’s demands. Shepard doesn’t actually decide the fate of the galaxy, the Crucible Machine-God did. Shepard, man or woman of action, is ultimately reduced to little more than a cosmic dice which is rolled by a higher power.
I've got more, but these are enough for now, I think. I'm just a big bundle of hurt feelings right now. I actually wasn't able to finish the game, myself; I got up to the point of making my big "choice" and realized I couldn't go on. I had to shut down the game. Looked them up online instead, and here we are.
All my sads and disappointeds.