Book buster wrote...
Preaching to the choir here, I know but...
The ending. Dear god, the ending! What. The. Fark. I mean... I think actually managed to ruin the entire series for me. All of that work doing completion runs with my One True Shepard. All of that investment of time and emotion. And none of it mattered. The endings are the same for everyone - paragon and renegade, completionist and speed-runner, ME2 final mission party-survival or a near-total wipe- and all of them suck, and not in a satisfying 'heroic sacrifice at a terrible cost' or a 'I hated it but did what had to be done' kind of way.
Each choice on offer was effectively a surrender for my paragon Shep who has been to hell and back, fighting to the bitter end all the way to keep her ideals. Destroy all synthetic life? Goddamnit, I just spent half of ME2 proving that synthetics don't just want to kill all humans, and again in ME3 proving that synthetics and organics can actually get along. What total bulldust.
Control the Reapers by effectively becoming them? The whole moral of the Cerberus storyline is that unchecked power corrupts even the strongest of ideals and leads to the creation of even greater atrocities than you seek to prevent; and that you can only ride the tiger for so long before it turns on you and devours you. Merge organic and synthetic life together into a new whole? You know, between the Joker/EDI romance, the mind-trip into the Geth server and the massive amount of cybernetics plugged into my Shep's body (as you yourself pointed out, glowing blue annoying child), we're doing quite well at that ourselves, thank you. We would like to continue doing so, at our own pace, in our own time. Besides, isn't your cybernetics tech/software the one that robs everything it touches of their free-will?
The whole thing also flies in the face of what I took to be one of the greater over-arching themes of the Mass Effect universe: the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The council races are a pack of squabbling teens who are forced to rebel and grow up after realizing that their parents are not perfect, and - worse - are no longer acting in their best interests. It's a theme we see reflected in several of the key characters of the series. Miranda flees her controlling, ego-maniacal father and ultimately kills him. Liara quietly rebels against Benezia all of her life, and later has to come to terms with the fact that her mother was deeply, deeply flawed. A second blow comes when she realises that the Protheans, who are largely father figure to the council races, weren't the benevolent paragons she'd idealised them to be. Tali spends a great chunk of her life trying to make up for her father's mistakes, only to realize that she has to stop living for him and start living for herself. Jacob's father goes so far 'round the twist that has to be put down. Ashley lives perpetually in her father's shadow until she is forced to step up and surpass him. And the ending effectively reduces the council races to a state of enforced childhood again, like someone who's forced to move back in with their parents after living on their own. "Stop having a temper tantrum - mommy and daddy are here now and will make it all better." The whole point was to break the council races out of their box, and the ending put them right back in it.
I'm tempted to replay the final chapter again (no save points! argh!) just so I can shoot that goddamn glowing starchild thing in the face. Actually... has anyone tried that? Maybe it offers another, better ending...
Very well said. We all feel your pain.
Ce sujet est fermé
Retour en haut
