I did not write a piece of Fiction this time around. I finished off Mass Effect 3 and was incensed enough about the ending to write this:
A discussion of what I think is the main source of disappointment in Mass Effect 3. Be warned, this contains spoilers for all three games. If you have seen the videos about the ending of Mass Effect 3 I am not ruining anything for you. If you have not, well, continue reading at your own risk.
These are the reasons why I believe that Mass Effect 3’s ending was so disappointing to the majority of gamers. Mostly it has to do with expectations. The first two games establish a pretty clear pattern as to how Mass Effect games end. Mass Effect 3 does not adhere to this pattern. I am confident that this is the largest source of disappointment and strife for fans of the series, there are others for sure, but I think this is the main one.
Mass Effect 1 – At the end of the game you participate in an epic battle with your squad mates against the chief Antagonist of the game Saren and his army of Geth. During the ending sequence the player discovers a giant Plot Twist. Everything is not as it seems, Saren and his army are in fact pawns of a larger force, the Reapers. The "ship" Saren has been riding around in, is actually a Reaper. The ending is satisfying. You kill Saren, you destroy the Reaper named Soverign before it is able to contact the rest of the Reaper Fleet. It is satisfying but leaves you with a sense of foreboding, the Reapers are out there and they will come eventually.
For clarity in case you haven't played the games and do not intend to: Reapers are Giant Death Machines who arrive in the Galaxy every 50,000 years and destroy all advanced sentient life. They are the size of space ships. The "small ones" are roughly the length of a modern navy Friagte, some of them are the size of aircraft carriers.
You also get to make some significant decisions that affect the game world. You get to save the largest most powerful ship in the galaxy, the Destiny Ascension – or not – and, Save the interstellar government (Citadel Council) - or not. It is obvious that the over arching plot of the franchise can be continued should it prove to be a success. It is a commercial success, and hurray, we get Mass Effect 2.
Mass Effect 2 – At the end of the game you participate in an epic battle with your squad mates against an embodiment of the chief antagonist of the game. During the ending sequence the player discovers a giant Plot Twist. The humans that have been abducted have been rendered down into “raw genetic material” and are being pumped into a “Proto-Reaper” – a massive human looking hybrid Organic / Synthetic Construct.
This is a little vaguer and a little less satisfying than the ending of ME1. The chief Antagonist of ME2 are an alien race called the Collectors. Except that, over the course of the game you learn that the Collectors do not actually have their own motivations, they are essentially Synthetic / Organic hybrid drones that do the bidding of the Reapers. There is an entity called Harbinger, which is a Reaper, which speaks to you through the Collectors it controls over the course of the game, but you never actually face Harbinger itself. You do get to blow up a lot of Collector Bodies that Harbinger inhabits. Harbinger is a Reaper that is as larger than most spaceships, can’t exactly take that on with small arms. You do however get to explode the Human “Proto-Reaper” which is a Reaper like Machine which kind of makes it feel like you’ve blown up a reaper.
You also get to make some significant decisions at the end of ME2. You can choose to hand over a Collector Space Station to Cerberus – a human organization whose MO is conduct research on live beings (including humans) without their consent, for “the betterment of humanity” – or you can blow up the station and deny them of this tech.
ME2 also added a component about the decisions that you made throughout the course of the game. You could choose to purchase certain upgrades - or not - that would improve your chances of succeeding on the suicide mission at the end. Did you not purchase those new ship upgrades? I’ve got bad news about your companions that inhabit the areas of the ship that get attacked in the approach to the Collector Base during the final mission. Thats right, they’re dead. Obviously, these decisions have major impact on the end of the game.
Mass Effect 3 - At the end of the game the allied forces of the entire galaxy have assembled on Earth and need to make a push to take a landing area guarded by a small Reaper (they call it a Destroyer) that will allow them access to The Citadel. Once inside The Citadel Allied Forces will have to take over a control room in order to make use of the giant weapon that has been built by all of the races working together to destroy the Reapers. In order to prevent the Allied Forces from winning, the Reaper Forces simply have to keep them from entering The Citadel. You have taken down a "small" Reaper already at this point in the game, but it required an entire fleet of Spaceships bombarding it from orbit.
Okay, before we talk about the ending any more we need to talk about some other things first. first we need to establish who the Chief Antagonist is. You would think it would be the Reapers, but, actually it is Cerberus the shady group mentioned earlier. They believe that the only way to win is to control the Reapers, and they have been opposing your quest to destroy the Reapers every step of the way.
This might seem counter intuitive, I know. How can the Force that is systematically wiping out all life in the Galaxay not be the chief antagonist. It is unfortunately simple, they're just too big to fight. The Reapers are more like a set piece in Mass Effect 3. An obstacle that the story flows around like a giant stone in a river.
A show down with Cerberus on the Citadel makes total sense. Both parties duke it out right at the very last second, and the one who is left standing at the end
This would fit the pattern of the first two games. An epic battle with your squad mates against the chief Antagonist, and the ability to make decisions that have significant and lasting consequences for the game world. I'm fairly certain that everyone would be at least mostly satisfied with an ending like this one.
Unfortunately this does not happen. To make matters worse, it feels like almost the exact opposite of that happens.
Once you manage to secure the Landing Area to then mount the assault on The Citadel, the game essentially ends. It essentially becomes one long, extended, animation sequence. Everything that has defined the Mass Effect franchise is essentially tossed out the window.
You get to walk along a linear path. You enter a conversation where regardless of the options you pick the results are the same (it is also possible to just end up in a straight up "game over" situation). You enter another conversation that spit contradictory information at you, and then leaves you with a choice of three options, without clearly defining what those options are. Once you make that choice the game goes into an "end movie", all three of those are essentially exactly the same, and also depict things that make no logical sense. Also throughout all of this Sheppard is injured an moves at 1/3 of normal movement speed, just to add extra frustration. There is a scene which shows members of your squad crash landing on a random planet - which is impossible because they were on Earth with you, and are still fighting the ground war. There is a scene at the end of the credits that implies that the entire Mass Effect Series took place generations ago, and has been a story that an elderly man has been telling to a child. If you choose a specific ending option and have done specific things, you get a scene after the elderly man scene that implies Sheppard is still alive. This scene occurs in "real time" (as in not generations later in the time frame of the Elderly man) and is literally three seconds long. It simply shows Sheppard's chest rise with a sudden intake of breath.
To Sum Up:
- No epic battle with squad mates
- Given control but forced along a specific path.
- Forced to move along specific path extra slowly for no apparent reason.
- Decisions you make have very little effect on the conversation you are in.
- Decisions that you have made through out the entire game have no impact.
- Decisions that you have made through out the entire series have no impact.
- Ambiguous final options.
- Final results too similar regardless of what options are chosen.
- Confusing and impossible final Cinematic sequence
- Ambiguous scene post credits, based on confusing and impossible final cinematic
- "Sheppard Lives" scene further complicates and confuses
Arguments have been made that the ending sequence is an artistic vision of what happens in the final moments of ME3. A vision that seems to be couched in Symbolism. This could have been an acceptable choice, but, there is nothing to communicate to the player that this is what is happening. There is no precedent in the series for use of such an "artistic vision" segment. The only thing that comes close are a couple of Dream Sequences in ME3 where we witness Sheppard's emotional turmoil. These are very obviously Dream Sequences, and it is very directly communicated to the player that these are Dream Sequences. There is no such indication to the player that the ending of ME3 is something of this nature.
In conclusion not only does the ending of Mass Effect 3 not adhere to the pattern that the franchise has already established for the ending of these games, but, it flies in the face of that pattern and does everything the opposite way long time fans expect.
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