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Ending All Over Again...
Jun. 28th, 2012 07:27 pmSo, the long, strange story of Mass Effect 3’s ending has finally come to a close.
I remember how exciting each new Mass Effect 2 DLC was. Sure, there were some less-than-impressive entries – Firewalker, Arrival – but it was a real thrill waiting for things like Lair of the Shadow Broker or Overlord to finish downloading, and then loading up the game and seeing some new corner of the Mass Effect galaxy.
The Mass Effect 3 extended cut, though? I just watched it on youtube. I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to download the damn thing, that’s how much this whole fiasco took the wind out of my sails.
Anyway. The good – if this had been the ending in the first place, I don’t think we’d have had the outpouring of rage. The ending options still aren’t great, they still come out of left field – but there’s at least a bit of closure, and the destruction of most of the setting is quickly hand waved away.
Of course, that raises the question of what the destruction of the relays and the Citadel, or the crash of the Normandy were doing in the ending in the first place. The Normandy crash seems even more baffling than before, since in the extended cut, the ship crashes on an Edenic world, Joker and EDI step out as the new Adam and Eve… and then a few minutes later, we see the ship take off again, apparently none the worse for wear, with all her crew eager to leave the new world behind. It’s nice that the writers did realise that the consequences of the ship’s crash would be the slow death by starvation of half the squad, and quietly removed that idea – but I’d still love to know where they were going with it in the first place.
The bad – well, there’s now an option to reject the Star-Child’s idiotic ending options! It’s well written, and for the first time, Shepard sounds like Shepard, standing up for free will and self-determination against the monster that unleashed the Reapers. We even get confirmation that the Child really was just Harbinger in disguise after all!
And then we’re told that this act of defiance was pointless, and by rejecting the existing endings, all sapient life is destroyed and the cycle of destruction renews itself. It’s hard to see how this can be read as anything other than a “Screw you!” by the writer, and it honestly makes the other endings even worse. If the Child really is Harbinger… why’s it offering us the option to destroy the Reapers as one of its choices? Why reveal this, but insist we’re still meant to take all of its explanations at face value?
And, if we need to have Shepard as a Christ figure, sacrificing him/herself for all life to survive… well, surely that requires rejecting the Devil-figure’s temptations, not eagerly going along with it? Even if we ignore the overly-obvious metaphor, telling Reapers to go screw themselves is kinda what Shepard does; having this time be the one time it dooms everyone rather than save the day seems utterly petty.
But, on the plus side, we got baby Krogan.
I don’t know, the whole thing is just too little, too late, even without the whole refusal can o’worms. At this point, I’m pretty much through with BioWare, and I think a lot of other people are too. Sales numbers for Dragon Age 3 are going to be interesting – that was already a game that was going to have an uphill battle to sell. This whole mess isn’t going to make things easier.
I remember how exciting each new Mass Effect 2 DLC was. Sure, there were some less-than-impressive entries – Firewalker, Arrival – but it was a real thrill waiting for things like Lair of the Shadow Broker or Overlord to finish downloading, and then loading up the game and seeing some new corner of the Mass Effect galaxy.
The Mass Effect 3 extended cut, though? I just watched it on youtube. I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to download the damn thing, that’s how much this whole fiasco took the wind out of my sails.
Anyway. The good – if this had been the ending in the first place, I don’t think we’d have had the outpouring of rage. The ending options still aren’t great, they still come out of left field – but there’s at least a bit of closure, and the destruction of most of the setting is quickly hand waved away.
Of course, that raises the question of what the destruction of the relays and the Citadel, or the crash of the Normandy were doing in the ending in the first place. The Normandy crash seems even more baffling than before, since in the extended cut, the ship crashes on an Edenic world, Joker and EDI step out as the new Adam and Eve… and then a few minutes later, we see the ship take off again, apparently none the worse for wear, with all her crew eager to leave the new world behind. It’s nice that the writers did realise that the consequences of the ship’s crash would be the slow death by starvation of half the squad, and quietly removed that idea – but I’d still love to know where they were going with it in the first place.
The bad – well, there’s now an option to reject the Star-Child’s idiotic ending options! It’s well written, and for the first time, Shepard sounds like Shepard, standing up for free will and self-determination against the monster that unleashed the Reapers. We even get confirmation that the Child really was just Harbinger in disguise after all!
And then we’re told that this act of defiance was pointless, and by rejecting the existing endings, all sapient life is destroyed and the cycle of destruction renews itself. It’s hard to see how this can be read as anything other than a “Screw you!” by the writer, and it honestly makes the other endings even worse. If the Child really is Harbinger… why’s it offering us the option to destroy the Reapers as one of its choices? Why reveal this, but insist we’re still meant to take all of its explanations at face value?
And, if we need to have Shepard as a Christ figure, sacrificing him/herself for all life to survive… well, surely that requires rejecting the Devil-figure’s temptations, not eagerly going along with it? Even if we ignore the overly-obvious metaphor, telling Reapers to go screw themselves is kinda what Shepard does; having this time be the one time it dooms everyone rather than save the day seems utterly petty.
But, on the plus side, we got baby Krogan.
I don’t know, the whole thing is just too little, too late, even without the whole refusal can o’worms. At this point, I’m pretty much through with BioWare, and I think a lot of other people are too. Sales numbers for Dragon Age 3 are going to be interesting – that was already a game that was going to have an uphill battle to sell. This whole mess isn’t going to make things easier.
