I’ve realized that, though my hatred for the Mass Effect 3 ending is equal to (and in many cases greater than) the rage I see online, my reasons are different than what most of the reasons appear to be. Most people argue that the lack of choice in the end destroyed it, but let me ask you this: when did the choices you made up until the end truly factor massively into the end result of any Mass Effect game? No matter what, Mass Effect still ended with you stopping sovereign and Saren dying. Ultimately at the end you were faced with 2 choices – which were the only choices that mattered to the end of that particular game: (1) do you save the Destiny Ascension (yes or no) and (2) who should become the human councilor (Anderson or Udina). Yea, ok, Wrex may have died on Virmire and either Ashley or Kaidan did die. But let’s be serious, was any of that touched on in the end? No.
Mass Effect 2 was better than 1, but it still didn’t do much with the choices you did in the game up until the end. Ultimately your choices prior to deciding what to do with the collector base just effected the number of coffins on the Normandy and who was looking at them. Whether you slept with Miranda or Tali wasn’t important to the end. If you lost the entire crew of the Normandy wasn’t touched on in the end, just what happened to your squad and Shepard.
Mass Effect 3 did the same thing. The only difference is that it didn’t give you the Illusion that your choices mattered to the end. The only way your more minor choices mattered was the linking of game to game: If Thane dies in Mass Effect 2, he won’t be there to stop Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. But that does’t change the fact that Shepard stopped the Collectors, just like if Cortez dies, Shepard will still reach the beam.
Others argue that it needs a “happy” ending. All I can say to that is that not all stories need a happy ending. I, honestly like that Shepard had to sacrifice himself for the good of the galaxy.
No, I have no issue with these things, my issue is with the Reapers…
One of the biggest pitfalls in fiction is over-explanation and too much exposition. Up until the last 10 minutes of Mass Effect 3 my imagination was able to fill in the gaps of what the Reapers were. To me, and I’d lay odds a large majority of Mass Effect fans, they were the worst of what machines could become. No love, no hate, no sympathy, no emotion of any kind, simply cold logic. The antithesis to such logic (which can be described as order) is chaos I.E. organics. The cycle of evolution is extraordinarily chaotic, and would be vile to the eyes of something so logic and order-driven. The Cycle was simply as Sovereign said in Mass Effect. “We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution.”
Mass Effect 2 added clues to the mystery of the Reapers in that the Human-Reaper Larvae (or T-1000 as many call it due to it’s similarities to Terminator) was made by the melting down of humans. I.E. we discovered that Reapers were created out of organics – most likely one species per Reaper. However, that wasn’t nearly enough to actually answer the question, and the mind had room to imagine what could be going on here. I remember talking to friends, tying threads together and trying to make sense of the Reapers and what they were after. I ultimately came to the conclusion that there was a second motive in the Reapers return every 50,000 years: reproduction. By the end of Mass Effect 2 I had cultivated this image of the Reaper’s return having 2 motives (1) to cultivate the Galaxy, much like happens when people deliberately start a forest fire: Killing what came before so what comes next may have room to grow and (2) harvesting organics to create new Reapers. Which makes sense because as Mass Effect showed us, not all Reapers survive each cycle.
Mass Effect 3 added another clue: The Reapers don’t control the cycle. This one both worried and excited me, if done right Reapers could have remained the near-demonic destroyers that the previous entries had made them out to be and there would still be potential for a Mass Effect 4 after they are defeated by delving into the ones behind the Reapers. Unfortunately, Bioware decided that it’s best to sum everything up in 10 minutes by making them agents of a being with a very flawed sense of logic. In order to stop Organics from being destroyed (or ruled) by synthetics, we have to destroy them with synthetics. It’s logically the same as “I shot him in the head so he wouldn’t set himself on fire.” Yea, there is a logic there, but it’s flawed. Instead of letting him die the slow and painful death of burning alive, he shot him – ending it painlessly. End result of both is the same: In Mass Effect, Organics are being killed (and in a way, ruled) by synthetics. In my example, the guy still died. I can’t get behind that. It was a lazy way to end the series, and ultimately destroyed the image of the Reapers that had been cultivated for 5 years.
[EDIT] Oh, and one last thing I forgot to mention. I got so focused on the Reapers while typing this, I forgot to mention Shepard’s part in all of this. Commander [insert name here] Shepard, throughout the entire Mass Effect series, was never one just to accept things. Despite his beliefs (which are based on choices the player makes throughout the game) he has never been one to just accept things. No matter what, however, Shepard stood for one thing (The right for organic life to continue) through every game. However, at the end of Mass Effect 3, when the Catalyst laid out what it’s flawed plan was, Shepard doesn’t even bat an eyelash? Despite how tired he was, or how much pain he was in, I find that hard to believe.
mythicera 