rianna wrote...This is not Finnegans Wake, for heaven's sake. Mass Effect has previously been a fun, solid story; it's not the place to attempt grand metaphysical commentary on the nature of man. I don't see a lot of fans asking, "But what did it all mean? What is the significance of this color or that gesture?" No, the questions are "Why is Shepard acting like a moron and agreeing with arguments she/he could easily refute with her/his actions earlier in the same game?" [/i][/i]
Had they
really been after that kind of question, it
could have worked out, perhaps. They didn't do too bad of a job treating some of the 'big themes' that they did pick up; such as, free will, right to self-determination, conditions for the possibility of 'perpetual peace', and so forth. At times it did devolve into sheer banality, but never to a level that insults the player's intelligence.
The awful truth about the 'ending', is that they simply did not bother to write a logical conclusion to the series. They thought they could get away with that, if they could concoct a sufficiently vague, intentionally murky, totally arbitrary stopping point. While 'the ending' does recycle some of the series' main themes, it does this in an incoherent context, that is utterly incongruent with the rest of the story.
It's a textbook example of becoming a parody, or even worse, a travesty, of
oneself.
Now, they (both BW, and profound people who felt the unfathomable depths of the ending) are trying to justify this in utterly ludicrous ways. I've heard at least one person claim that it switches to 'nonrepresentational art' in the finale. That's hypocritical name-dropping. In a word, it's plain old
dishonesty.