Mass Effect 3
The Mass Effect series are my favourite games. Not in an intense kind of a way, but just in terms of sheer enjoyment of a video game. The series was the one thing that tipped me over from buying a PS3 to buying an X-Box instead.
I tried really hard to stay unspoiled, which was difficult because it took me much longer than most people to finish the game because of various real life things I was up to. I think I did pretty well, but the one thing I couldn't stay unspoilered about what that the ending was, in some way, bad. There was even a small piece about it in the bloody Times. I'm supposed to be able to trust a newspaper not to spoil me.
So I went into it knowing that the ending was going to be bad. I was not prepared for quite how sodding bad.
So all that crap about how our decisions in previous games would have a big effect on the ending was total bullshit then? Because I've seen all three endings on YouTube now, and frankly the biggest difference is that the glowy mystery light is a different colour. Apparently all that slogging around I did collecting various armies and other resources for the big final push on Earth simply unlocked one of the stupid endings. I was expecting... I don't know, for all this military strength I had amassed to somehow help in the fight?
It's exasperating because I thought it was a great game up to that point. It was solely and completely the ending that disappointed me, and ruined an otherwise amazing game. I've read a lot of crap from Bioware about how the ending to Mass Effect 3 represents some kind of artistic integrity. I've also read a lot of people claiming that Bioware doesn't owe its customers anything, we should just be grateful for the game.
I suspect both those things to be bullshit. For the three games, and the DLC, I have spent somewhere in the region of £130 on Mass Effect over the years. For that kind of money they do owe me a decent, satisfying ending. If they want me to buy another one of their games, they certainly do. When I bought a copy of Twilight second hand for £2 to see what all the fuss was about, then I was okay with it being bad, because it was cheap. For £130, your story had better be good.
Which brings me to another point. Even if you look at the ending from a purely artistic perspective, the fact that it is a video game aside completely, it's still bad. It's hugely pretentious, and unoriginal. Not to mention, lazy. The three options play out in nearly identical fashion. The 'Catalyst' - a small child representing some kind of mysterious higher power, is a painful cliché. The guff about synthetics and organics, created and creator, is nothing that a franchise like Battlestar Galactica hasn't already been over in superior fashion a hundred times before. There's nothing particularly insightful in it, nothing that artistic. Mostly it comes across as a bizarre rip off of 2001 A Space Odyssey, star child and all. The sudden change in tone from the rest of the series, even the rest of the game itself, is jarring and unwelcome.
In fact, it comes across as an ending that got suddenly changed at the last minute. Oh wait, that's exactly the case. I'm not sure how the ending he mentions would have played out, but it could only have been better. It's obviously what they were planning for, because it fits with all the foreshadowing of the previous games that I was expecting to be relevant to the end of ME3, but that weren't mentioned at all. Humanity's genetic diversity, the star Tali was studying being consumed by Dark Matter, etc, etc...
I'm just going to cling to the Indoctrination Theory as my personal headcanon. It's the only way it's not all complete drawers.