You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
But that's not all. The Citadel boasts central air, a food court, and a bevy of one-time-use plot devices.
Putting aside the breakdown-inducing Catalyst plot, the destruction of the relays seems like a cruel afterthought; a slap in the face after you've already been curb-stomped. All of this only made worse by the revelations I mentioned in the cliffhanger charge. No matter what you decide upon, no matter who lives or who dies, the Relays are set off like giant M-80's, and oh yes, by the way, people are stranded and you'll never know what happened to them, and the Galaxy as you know it – the interconnected ultra-civilization you were trying to save, is now set back a few hundred years and cut off from one another, regardless if people from differing races are stuck on foreign planets or not. All this from a plot to what, stop Geth Porn from inundating the galaxy?
Super sorry.
www.expansion-slot.xxx
I could accept this. It seems like the one sensible thing in the entire ending if they were shooting for finality to it all. It's not the ending you wanted, not the one you fought for, but at least people are alive, and there's hope. You won that much out of the cruel metallic tentacles of the Reapers.
But the Reapers, the cycle, the war, the lessons you learned and bled for, none of it mattered, so...
One more time.
All of this boils down to an inescapable fact that I've already touched upon. You can defend the ending. You can wax ad hominem and insult; say the doubters are simply too dull witted to grasp the intricacies of the finale. You can dismiss any naysayers as uninformed, meme-adherents idiots with no basis or leg to stand on, who could not possibly understand or effectively communicate their issues. You can do all that, and smile as you type it out.
But here I am, kids. I'm a proficient and prolific writer, who took the time to research and attempt to see the case from all angles, and who chose patience over lashing out in a knee-jerk fury, that I could better sift through my thoughts and question sincerely where I could be wrong. I am and have done all of this, and I came to one conclusion: the ending to Mass Effect 3 pisses people off, and they have a right to that anger, if for differing reasons from my own. As a gamer, it failed me. As a writer, it angered me because it committed sins that every single professor I've ever had for writing and literature warned against. It failed to convey it's intent in the same way that the rest of the franchise delivered. And unlike the con-happy people you might be dismissing, I feel I communicated my personal feelings on the matter quite succinctly.
But none of that matters. It is not the job of the audience to sift through hidden layers and meanings with a product like this. It's not an art-house piece. It's not the poetry of Cummings or Eliot. It's not the archaic scripture of a society long past. It's a sci-fi video game introduced to us in the action/shooter/rpg genre. That's not to say such a game can't be deeper, but that's not what the MEU showed us, and made us comfortable with. It is not our job to change our minds, and we are right to our opinion and views, and you are right to yours.
But before this all seems to be a beatdown of the MEU writers, let me close on a positive note.
To craft something that people love and are passionate about is a monumental task. To keep their interest and involvement, physically and emotionally, is one of the monumental feats of creative writing that often goes unsung. The writers on the MEU are to be rightly praised. They managed to juggle an incalculable amount of plot threads, outcomes, characters, interactions, locations, history, choices and world-building without misstep over the course of half a decade's worth of storytelling, and all of it designed to be different and changing (to a point) as driven by interactivity. Think about that. How many teams in any other format, let alone interactive ones, can say that? How many times have you heard “this show was great, but man did the writers lose it by the (x) season”?
The MEU writers managed that, and more. They were the great narrative plate-spinners of the medium. It was inevitable that at least one of those plates would fall during that time. My only heartbreak, and the reason for this article, is the sad fact that all the plates seemed to crash and shatter here at the end.
It was a great show... too bad the finale is all I'll remember when thinking on it. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another playthrough to start. Maybe this time I'll be a renegade vanguard... or a paragon Infiltrator...
Or maybe I'll be all of them in all combinations, and simply exit the game with a finale of my choosing.
A Winner is You. Unless your EMS and Paragon scores weren't high enough. If so, Welcome To Die.
I'd like to add something to your reasons, if I may.
ReplyDeleteThe entire series has been about making choices, tough decisions, and living with the consequences of your actions. The entirety of ME3 are those consequences, being the Reaper-Rachni you have to face, to whether the Krogan genophage gets cured or not based on keeping Mordin alive and the date Maelon collected, etc. etc.
But not only was ME3 a culmination, it was another outlet. What happens to the war as a result of helping the Krogan? What about the Rachni? Do the Krogan or Rachni rise up again to try and take the galaxy now that everyone is weakened? How do the Quarians fare on their newly retaken homeworld? How are the Geth receieved by the galactic community? I was expecting the ending of this game to be a culmination of those choices as well.
It wasn't. Not a damn thing seemed to matter. This obviously angered me. I simply wished there was a part of the ending that dealt with that. I would have been satisfied with something similar to how Dragon Age: Origins ended, with them telling you the consequences (instead of showing you).
What are your thoughts?
I considered a lot of that before I sat down to write out my thoughts on ME3. I took the tact that I did, because the culmination and core story has always been Shepard-centric. Everything else that happens on the outskirts of the main narrative, that is things that can literally go one way or another without skewing who we stay with and the ultimate goal off course, is something I chalk up to the extended individual experiences of the player. That's one of the reasons this game franchise is so great.
ReplyDeleteI didn't bring any of that up, or even really my own Shepard's story beyond the ending I got, because to me that's not central to the mythology, and the mythology's end is what I really wanted to focus on. For instance, my galaxy's rachni are dead, my love interest is off stranded on another world, conceivably the Geth are still helping the Quarian rebuild Rannoch (got the best ending on that one, yay), and the Earth is still whole, albeit battered with a long road to recovery.
For my part, while such a denouement would have been nice, to tie up loose threads and bring more closure, I'll agree with Bioware's choice to primarily focus on Shepard and those who were closest to him (at least for the endings that turn out well). My problem is, the ending we got didn't bring any kind of real closure, and what it did end was problematic, confusing, or in some cases damaging to the core story: Shepard's fight against the Reapers.
While elements and choices carry over to add flavor, by and large I've always noticed that they rarely have significant impact on the central story, just the narrative furniture and aftermath.
It's just another example of should've would've could've, but we can't always cover all the bases. I could think of a lot of things that even Gears of War 3's ending didn't wrap up, and that wasn't nearly as layered as the MEU. C'est la vie.
I had similiar feelings,especially about the whole catalyst non-sense. However, if we step back a little bit and even look at the basic 'destroy' choice, it's not THAT bad - for the characters/races in the MEU I mean not gamers. I mean the Reapers ARE destroyed and Earth IS saved. The billions of survivors on earth still have their technology and can rebuild. Hell they can still travel the entire Solar System. They just can't leave Sol because ALL of the mass relays are destroyed. That means no more contact with Rannoch or Palaven or Tuchanka. All these different systems are cut off from one another -permanently. They may pass stories down to their children but... without Reaper technology like the mass relays I seriously doubt any of the alien races will ever get out of their respective solar systems. Like you said it is a LONG way between these Stars even with FTL travel. That being said Shepard DID save the lives of billions maybe even trillions of people from being melted down into genetic paste. Yes, the galactic civilization is gone forever but so is the Reaper threat. Seems a fair trade to me. I feel like some (not you particularly) fans wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Dead reapers, safe/free galaxy, surviving Shep, momuments to victory,etc. I think that Bioware had to stick to their creative guns and have the balls to say "No, thats not believable - these are REAPERS" - and so their has to be some REAL sacrifice. The destruction of the Citadel and Mass Relays (Reaper Technology) goes hand and hand - fittingly I think, with the death of the Reapers. Now, if we could just have... not had that whole.. catalysty thing there with the...you know.. the thing.
ReplyDeleteThe Earth is only saved based on your EMF rating and Paragon score, actually. another possibility is the dissolution of all life, again based on those two scores. Only the major beats never change in the ending: I.e. Reaper threat gone one way or the other, Relays destroyed.
ReplyDeleteMy problem isn't that. I pointed out that I would have been fine with the kind of ending that was comprised of those kinds of sacrifices. My problem is the tonality of it: the epic struggle being curtailed by a literal deus ex machina, and that the struggles and sacrifices leading UP to that event are moot, because the threat itself was merely the heavy handed quarterly business paradigm of some intergalactic middle-management head who's best idea was to simply eliminate or enslave (though they call it saving and immersion) the races before "something bad happens".
Ok. So we kill the kitten so it never gets heartworms. Got it.
I understand the idea- do this before the ultimate doom happens: synthetics destroying ALL life, cultivated or not. It doesn't help the case when I JUST got the Geth and the Quarians playing nice. It actually serves to prove Shepard's point more than anything. But even with the playthroughs where Geth or Quarians come out on top, it's still nonsensical.
Now after that, unless you get the ultimate bad ending (and since Bioware never uses these as canon, we'll assume the bits about some being left alive), you're left with a Galaxy doomed to entropy, unless that Synthesis track is the flavor of the week. Think on this (and I've seen the point raised elsewhere, and it holds true) -
Yes. The core home planets of the races are cut off. Guess where the bulk of their military forces and sundries are, currently? The Sol system, and now the Charon relay is a game of Jenga wherein someone introduced a quarter-stick of dynamite. Turians and Salarians can't eat anything that is native to the Sol system. Earth, even if it survived the attack, is an utter mess of broken infrastructure, and now they have the assembled might of the Galaxy floating around them. Those people can't get home. I'm not even counting the refugees that fled to other colonies or planets across the Milky way that will face similar survival odds, either.
Basically, you will get all the hallmarks of this scenario: famine, disease, death, and finally breaking down to rioting and inter-species violence as supplies and means dwindle. Yeah, life will continue, but the galaxy you fought and sacrificed for it now bound for a foregone collapse of decades before it can finally rebuild on the individual level. Help and relief isn't forthcoming, as the key pieces for those supply lines are no more. You're all fucked, kids. Sorry if that's inconvenient.
(cont Oh Dear God) I guess what I'm saying is, an unhappy ending is fine, and from a need for pathos it works beautifully. But in this scenario, the ending that we were given, the best analogy I could use is this (and excuse the LOTR analogy, but it works in my head):
ReplyDeleteFrodo has to take the ring to Mordor to destroy it, and defeat/destroy Sauron, or Middle Earth's races will be killed or enslaved. Along the way, he loses his friends, his allies, and before that last climb up Mt. Doom, he loses Sam. Alone, and beaten and exhausted, he enters Mt. Doom to find a ghost. The Ghost doesn't explain who it is, really, but Says that it is the overseer for the greater plan. Sauron is merely a servant of this plan, who's ilk appear every few ages or so to subjugate and kill the dominant races to ensure that they are never wiped out by... horse carts. The choices frodo has are counter to the original established goal over three books, and in the end, giant walls spring up to separate everyone, but strand everyone where they are, good bad or ugly, and we only get vague hints that something might come after, but Frodo's gone, too.
Sacrifice and tragedy can only work when they are connected to the events that spawned them. I would have killed for a truly tragic finale, if it made sense as an outcome to what came before, and was an actual ending; not this new slow death the Galazy is going to suffer before it reaches equilibrium and starts coming back, if at all.
In closing? Space-Kanye.
Additionally, I just have to take it on faith that Earth survived the destruction of the Charon relay, because that would really be dumb otherwise.
ReplyDeleteSomeone showed me this today, and it actually made the ending pretty satisfying, Catalyst nonsense and all. http://shannon.users.sonic.net/masseffect/
That's pretty clever and enjoyable overall. It makes the denouement a lot more interesting and conceivable (I appreciate the attempt at explaining the Normandy's run through the Charon relay), and I have to assume that this "extended cut" DLC we're getting will do similar gymnastics in terms of the narrative. It's still not an ace ending with me, but it is satisfying in a closure kind of way, even from a purely fan perspective. We'll see what they turn out on Bioware's end.
DeleteIncidentally, I have to ask: was your experience with the ending the inspiration for the "On Storytelling" strip?