People have already stated my opinions at length, but I'll throw another voice into the mix.
I played ME1 and ME2 each several times through. I didn't just do the quickest critical path on the subsequent runs either. I skipped nothing. I took each one very seriously and even set up some guiding rules that each Shepard follows when making decisions.
The first one is always the closest to my own reaction to the decisions. This Shepard is mostly good but more pragmatic and still has his faults... sometimes has trouble forgiving and/or controlling his temper. He didn't save the Council, because it was too risky. He would tell Joker to hang up on them when they weren't heeding his warnings. He punched Admiral Gerrel for not listening to him and almost getting him killed. He shot Udina with no hesitation. He romanced Liara and stayed faithful to the end (one of the made-up rules being that he would go to her after coming back from every mission). If I considered any of my Shepards "canon" it would be this one. His story is the one I'm most attached to.
The second Shepard has a strong moral code he never deviates from. He always does what is right no matter how hard it makes things for him. He tries to save everyone whenever possible and never lets his temper get the better of him. The third is the "end justifies the means" type, is a bit power hungry, takes **** from no one, and holds grudges for a long time. Those two are more for seeing how differently things can play out.
I very carefully avoided all spoilers leading up to ME3. Like many other people, I felt that the game was incredible up until the last 15 minutes or so. The end made absolutely no sense whatsoever. We spend the whole game uniting the entire galaxy and building the MacGuffin to fight the Reapers. It looked like everything was coming together for an epic conclusion... then it takes a left turn to deus ex machina territory right before the end. God-kid shows up, gives us some lazy exposition full of gigantic plot holes, then they negate all the time we put into the game by essentially putting three buttons in front of us which lead to palette swaps of one short cutscene which explains nothing and no matter what you do, basically wipes out the technology from which the series got its name and makes it unique. I would have been fine with a bittersweet ending but, instead, I was just left staring at the screen
like this.
The entire premise behind the Reapers that the god-kid tells us is flawed from the start. Why is it considered inevitable that synthetics will kill organics? Their entire existence is based on that one assumption, but we've been shown nothing to support it in the entire series. All the AI we've seen has only become violent in self-defense or when corrupted
by the Reapers themselves (as if to try to prove their own point). On the contrary, the worst examples in the series come from organics. Quarians accidentally make Geth (their slaves) self-aware? Oops, try to "fix" it with genocide. Krogan expansion causes conflict? Almost commit genocide on Council races who wanted them to slow down, who then retaliate by almost committing genocide on the Krogans to stop them. Humans finally expand into space? First Contact War with Turians.
The Geth, as we find out in ME3, had the chance to wipe out the Quarians when they retreated. What did they do? They, by their own free will, let the Quarians live because the Geth were only fighting out of self-preservation, with no anger or grudges. The other main example of AI is EDI who, despite being made by evil people, turns out to be a valuable friend. The only other one I could think of off-hand was the rogue AI in ME1 which only tried to kill you because it knew it would be destroyed if anyone found it... again, self-preservation. Plus, if the Reapers hate synthetics so much that they're willing to go to such extreme measures to prevent them from taking over, why did they indoctrinate the synthetics to join their side of the fight?
Let's ignore that and assume the premise is sound and the Reapers have a valid reason. Let us also ignore the arrogant, abstract value judgment they make as to sentient organic machines having more innate value than sentient electronic machines. That still doesn't excuse their horrific actions. They decide to "save" organics by wiping out uncountable numbers of sentient beings over and over again. Not only do they kill them, but they do it in about as traumatic a fashion as possible and without warning or explanation. They make them into monsters and turn them against their own kind.
There are much better ways to go about their stated goal. I was already able to propose a better solution to their problem by the time god-kid's idiotic exposition was finished. The necessary technology is even presented to you
in a sidequest from the same game. In one of the scanning fetch quests, you find a fossil in amber. When you bring it back to the person who wanted it, they send it to
a cloning facility and within days they've already brought the animals back for use in the war effort. All these supposedly highly intelligent and advanced beings had to do was keep a simple DNA bank (like we already do with plant seeds) in case synthetics wiped out
all organic life (a nearly impossible task given the size of the universe), at which point they could reintroduce life into the universe right from where it left off without all of this messy genocide.
Also, to have a device create a pulse of energy as strong as this Crucible supposedly did is physically impossible. Because the pulse is shown to be spherical rather than a directional beam, the energy required grows exponentially the further you want it to reach. Even some of the most powerful explosions we've
ever witnessed (gamma-ray bursts from a massive star collapsing into a black hole) can
still only be detected from this far because it turns out the pulses appear to be bidirectional rather than spherical... and even then they only manage a little pulse of electromagnetic radiation from this far away. Having a device that is supposedly able to fuse synthetic and organic life all across the galaxy (much less the universe) would require enough energy to violate all sorts of laws of physics which haven't been explained away in the lore.
Come on, BioWare. I know you guys are better than this. I don't care if the ending is bittersweet as long as it is at least well done. The end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was a perfect example. It looks like everything is going to work out, then things take a bad turn quickly and it ends on a very dark note. I've never wanted to console an imaginary person as much as I did at that moment... yet I wouldn't change a thing about it. Sure, I felt bad at the end of Mass Effect 3, but for all the wrong reasons. Even though I would have preferred to have the possibility of a good ending if I put enough work in to make it happen, I would have accepted a well made sad ending. I should have been sad that Shepard wouldn't get to live out the rest of his days with Liara and their little blue babies. I should have been sad for all the people who had to die to stop the Reapers. I should have been relieved to finally break the cycle. There were a lot of emotions that I
should have been feeling. Instead, I was too busy watching such a great series of games trip and fall flat on its face right at the finish line.
Unless they retcon the ending to something less patently ridiculous, I doubt I will ever play any of the Mass Effect games again since all of my actions have been made completely devoid of meaning in the end and everything I do will be reframed in that light. It's a shame. I was looking forward to finishing the stories of my other Shepards, too. If they fix it, I'm willing to act as if this ending never happened. I'll pretend it was all a stress-induced dream that Shepard had after shooting TIM and collapsing on the floor in front of the computer. Then, the person yelling at him over the radio finally wakes him up and he pushes the button to activate the
real Crucible (which turns out to just disable the Reaper ships in the vicinity)... right?
kramerfan86 wrote...
You know what the worst part is? Had they just STOPPED it at the touching scene with Shepard and Anderson gazing out at their home, victorious, with your preparation level determining if they survived or died, followed by a small epilogue showing the destuction of the reapers and the rebuilding of society, it would have been AMAZING. Not only that, but if Shepard and Anderson die like that it would be a beautiful, touching, yet bittersweet end for the two.
See? Now, that would have worked for me. Just stop there and tack on an epilogue to tie up some loose ends by showing how your work made a difference and you would have an effective bittersweet but cathartic ending.
Modifié par CDHarrisUSF, 10 mars 2012 - 02:42 .
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