Mass Effect ended on a strong note. We knew who our enemy was and we knew that humanity had an important role to play in the future. Shepard was vindicated and he stop Saryn. Obstacle conquered, setting defined!
Mass Effect 2 allowed player to have a greater impact on how the story played out, and probably represents what many people expected from Mass Effect 3. In Mass Effect 2, Shepard choices directly impacted how the final mission panned out. Your actions directly determined whether you and your squad survived. In fact, your decisions in Mass Effect 2 determined who would be in Mass Effect 3 and what role they would play. Some outcomes are not possible in Mass Effect 3 based on what you did in Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 2 had an awesome ending. I was extremely impressed how the writers drew the player into Shepard's sense of accomplishment, depending on how your mission played out.
Mass Effect 3 purported to have a arch-ending where our decisions would have profound consequences. Maybe our decisions did have profound consequences, but we just don't know. The only thing we know is that two of the choices Shepard makes at the very end - synthesis or control - perpetuates the reaper belief that fundamentally different life forms can't co-exist. This conclusion violates one of the over arching themes of the series, and one the that is particularly emphasized in Mass Effect 3. Namely, cooperation and tolerance is possible in spite of differences.
When you destroy all synthetic life forms or you make every life form the same, your homogenize the galaxy. It's easy to tolerate and cooperate when everyone is the same. The message I got from these two endings is that Reapers were right. Tolerance is impossible. That doesn't reconcile with the message that is repeatedly echoed in each game. These are two of the conclusion the writers wanted us to make?
The third choice is no solution at all. It is delaying tactic. Sending the reapers away only to return doesn't break the extinction cycle. How is that a solution? If you take this option Shepard mortgages the future for the present. Another major focus of these series is how shorted sight biological life is, and this choice that represents short sightedness.
The the writers leave us with three option, all of which indicate that no real growth has occurred. In each instance we either subscribe to Reaper philosophy or we justify their conclusions about life. No lessons are learned, no growth has occurred. Shepard just dramatically sacrifices himself, but ultimately accomplishes nothing. It's not even heroic: it's lazy.
These three choices would be fine, great even, if Mass Effect was a nihilistic game that fatalistically embraced that morality and life is arbitrary. That would have been bold if Mass Effect were a nihilistic game, but it wasn't. The choices we were given made me think the writer didn't think very critically about what they were doing.
However, even that's not what really bothers me. What really bothers me is that the writers introduced a new character in the last few minutes of the game. We know practically nothing about this person, yet this character dictates the shape of how the game ends. We aren't given an option to explore this characters rational for his conclusions, we're just suppose to trust that they are correct. All we know is that this person is responsible for the mass extinctions. E.g., the bad guy. And Shepard trusts him implicitly. WHY? Shepard is reduced to the role of frog in the frog and scorpion fable. This person provides us with three choices that are largely arbitrary because the ultimate results are the same. Lots of people die, the mass effect relays are destroyed, and for some inexplicable reason Joker and crew end up stranded on some world.
Why is Joker flying away? How did the crew get to the Normandy? Why did he abandon Shepard? He HAD to abandon Shepard if he took a relay before it exploded. These are just a few of the questions that occurred to me while I watched them happen. Later I wondered what the point of dealing with the genophage or resolving the geth/quarian issue was. We're provided with no clues and no information on how our decision mattered. The writers simply threw all of that stuff out the window. They did not address it in the slightest.
I think it would be a mistake for the writers to provide complete closure on every issue, but if a selling point of your franchise is that your choices matter, then you have to provide some evidence that major game decisions mattered. Just telling us that our decisions mattered doesn't magically make it OK to leave it out. In the absences of any evidence to the contrary, our only conclusion is that our choices didn't matter. It's all arbitrary. Telling a player to just use their imagination is a cope out because you can imagine anything. There is no 3rd party feedback that renders those choices inherently meaningful. It's all just meaningless. It's natural to be curious about the consequence of what you choose, and it's something the writer just had to anticipate, but chose to ignore.
When Mass Effect 1 ended, we destroyed Saryn and we had a mission: prepare the galaxy for the reapers.
In Mass Effect 2, we destroyed the Collector thread and delayed the Reapers returns, giving the galaxy more time to prepare.
In Mass Effect 3, we destroyed the galaxy as we knew it because some glowly reaper kid told us to. Also, joker and crew somehow magically got away. It's a terrible conclusion. Shepards story is over, and the parts that are directly related to him should have had dealt with.
Modifié par Drak41n, 15 mars 2012 - 05:07 .
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