I'ma going to repost something I made a thread for, because now I realise this was probably the best place to post it ;X
I actually think that the ending of Mass Effect has the
potential to be one of the most profound, soul-searching endings I have
ever experienced in a video game. Ever.
Before I get labelled as
just another **** bleating about how great they are and how I lick
their boots, let me just tell you how much I have come to care about my
Shepard and my initial reaction to the ending. I don’t blame
anyone for
the hatred towards the ending, because when I finished for the first
time I sure as hell know I was hating it. Oh my god I was hating it. I
swore out loud several times. I took so long making that single,
horrifying decision I ran out of time. Twice. I took the decision I
thought was right, watched it play out, walked away, ranted at my
flatmate, came back and swore at the screen before shutting the game
down and going downstairs for tea and cake. I couldn't believe how
terrible and incomplete an ending it was. Was this it for the most
beloved series of all time for me?
Having invested so much time
and effort into this game the ending as it stands is a complete kick in
the teeth. It…..destroys everything I have ever felt for and cared about
when it came to my Shepard.
Let me tell you about him.
I
called my Shepared Alexander. That name means ‘defender of mankind;
humanity’ - it felt appropriate. He was born on Earth; orphaned, he ran
with gangs until he joined the Alliance military to escape the cycle.
He made his name when Elysium was invaded, in the infamous Skyllian
Blitz. He is a young, perhaps idealistic man who believes that there is
good in everyone, that each side has a story to tell. He's an
Infiltrator; one hell of a shot with a sniper rifle. But he lets Garrus
win that impromptu contest on the Citadel, because he and Garrus have
the greatest bromance the galaxy has ever seen.
Like your own
Shepards, his accomplishments started small. He talked down Wrex on
Virmire. He made the terrible decision to let Ashley – who he had been
lightly romancing – to die there. He talked Saren into shooting himself
before taking down Sovereign. In ME2 he took an entirely loyal team
through the Omega relay,
and got them all back out again, blowing up the base as his parting shot at the damned Illusive Man. During that time he
took
pity on and fell in love with Jack. Sure a lot of people hated her. But
like I said, this was a Shepard who saw both sides of the story. And I
still find Jack’s story tragic – made all the more heartwarming when you
catch up to her on Grissom Academy.
In Mass Effect 3 I
united the entire galaxy.
No man left behind. I saved Eve and watched as Wrex and her came to
lead a new, stronger krogan, cured by the genophage. The krogan formed
an alliance with the turian – two
most hated of enemies – to save
the turian homeworld. My personal highlight? Uniting the quarian and the
geth in one glorious, drawn out campaign that had me crying like a baby
at the end of it. Uniting those two was something I had wanted to do
ever since ME1, as my Shep quietly made Tali question just what their
attitude towards the geth really was and only solidified on meeting
Legion in ME2.
I saved the rachni queen -
twice. I saved
Grunt. I saved Jacob. Every little moment where a decision from an
earlier game came back, I felt a surge of joy. Conrad Verner lived in my
game. I even talked Balak into supporting the fleet.
Balak. I saved every goddamn last one of the little lives that I could possibly save, because that who
I am. It is
who my Shepard is.
Neither I or Shepard allowed ourselves to lose sight of the individual
lives lost in a hellish, apocalyptic war. Sure that meant a few moments
coming back to bite me in the ass. I frankly cried on seeing both Mordin
and Legion sacrifice themselves for the greater good. But as I brought
the entire galaxy down upon the
Reaper’s heads as we went back to
take Earth, I knew I had done the damn right thing. I spoke to my team
- my people - in London and shed a few tears at every conversation
before I chose Garrus and Liara to accompany me as we set out for the
conduit to the Citadel.
So yes. After all that emotional
investment, the ending. It felt like not just a kick in the teeth but a
shotgun to the gut, leaving me to slowly bleed out. It sullied
everything I had ever done. Everything I had tried to do was for
nothing. What the heck was even that conversation on the Citadel. Why
was shooting the Illusive Man a renegade choice?!
Why was the Illusive Man seen taking my eventual Paragon-coloured decision?
It had to be Paragon, right?
No. It wasn't. It was a bloody lie. The end decisions are all lies. You THINK you have a Paragon/Renegade choice because of the
colours. You, the player, have been indoctrinated to believe that blue = paragon, red = renegade.
I
was fortunate that right after the ending, while I was still raging, a
friend of mine instantly linked me to the indoctrination theory video.
It fetched me right out of the brink of anger and despair, to being
suddenly so wildly passionate about how awesome this could be I stayed
awake until 6 in the morning, feverishly reading everything I could
about it, poring over ever video and screenshot. Given all the evidence,
I am a pretty firm believer that every moment since the time Harbinger
nearly blasts you is Shepard's hallucination as the Reapers attempt to
indoctrinate him. I am fully behind it. And this is what makes the
faux-ending truly great.
Thing is, I am not someone who pays much
attention to plot - I tend to take things as I see them at face value. I
tend to read a story and never think about how ends are tying up, and
as such every last little twist out of left field takes me utterly by
surprise even if it has been clearly telegraphed throughout the entire
film. I never predicted a single Harry Potter villain. Or thought about
who Jon Snow’s parents might be. It never crosses my mind to *ask*. But
the first time I played the ending, throughout the whole of this last
scene in ME3….something felt *wrong*. Too many things felt completely
and utterly wrong.
I asked all these questions, for someone who
never questions: Where did Anderson come from? Where is my team? What
are those black shadows creeping out from the screen? Is this the
Illusive Man trying to
indoctrinate me? Can he even do that? Why
was the Illusive Man at the Paragon decision and Anderson at the Renegade
decision? Why is my Shepard so....passive? Why doesn't he argue down the
boy - my Shepard would have argued passionately against both the
Control and Synthesis results. Why is the Catalyst this same boy that
has been haunting me? Why does it take on that form, that means so much
pain and grief to Shepard? Why do all these choices SUCK?!
I knew
my Shepard was willing to die. In fact, I had expected Shepard to die
and as I heard reports of hatred towards the ending while I was playing
through, I simply assumed that Shep dies and people were raging because
of that fact. I still think Shepard will die. As a Paragon, laying down
his life for the galaxy is pretty much a given.
But these
choices....well I said it out loud at the time. Those choices SUCK. They
utterly suck. All of them. I chose blue, of course. Because I was a
Paragon. And I raged about the ending. It felt horrible, unsatisfying. I
learned no one's fate. I felt like my choice was horrible. I felt that
all of my time and effort to unite the galaxy - to broker peace between
the krogan and turian, cure the genophage, unite the quarian and the
geth - to save all those little lives - was for nothing. I
gained...nothing.
But if the Indoctrination theory is TRUE -
it changes everything.After
trawling through all those pages and theories suddenly I felt connected
to my Shepard again. I realised why he's acting so strange, why he's so
passive, why the image of the little boy is so jarring and WHY the
options presented at the end all suck and why two of them are clearly in
the favour of the Reapers way of thinking. He's facing his final test -
his crucible - in that the Reapers go all out and try to indoctrinate
Shepard into their way of thinking. And the first time I FELL FOR IT.
I
loaded up the game again. And this time, when I got to the choice, I
followed my gut. I followed the option that I actually wanted to take
when I first had to make that choice - to destroy the Reapers - but
after ten minutes of agonising I ended up rejecting the option
because it wasn't blue. Oh my god. I made my entire first ending choice based on the fact
the option was blue. Because the
game had completely indoctrinated
me to believe that Paragon is blue and that therefore I was making the best choice.
So
this time I followed my gut. I followed Anderson. I chose Destroy. It
presented itself in a horribly Renegade way. I wondered...if this was
even right.
And then Shepard woke up.
==================================
IF
the Indoctrination theory is right, that everything of the ending was a
hallucination that Shepard has had to fight off to stop himself being
lost to Reaper indoctrination, then
when we get the true ending
to this game this will be the greatest, most profound end-game moment I
will have experienced in my 22 years of gaming and will fully have
captured the horror of indoctrination and just how it feels to lose
everything. It feels right to me. Indoctrination is what makes the
Reapers horrifying; it's been the constant terror in the shadows. It
makes sense that Shepard has finally had to confront that horror head
on...and in a way that also dragged us, the PLAYER, into the terrifying
idea of indoctrination and how easy it is to have your own judgement
swayed merely by the presentation of ideas. Because I bloody feel like
this game indoctrinated me! If the theory is true then god I LOVE this
game for having so thoroughly, insidiously, turned me over to the
Reaper's way of thinking through the
colour of a single option.
They've
done this on purpose. They've done this because Bioware wants YOU, the
PLAYER, to feel just how Shepard is feeling when he wakes up and
realises that all that was a lie, born from indoctrination. They've
evoking a real, emotional response in the player - anger and rage at how
the very core of their Shepard, who for many of us has come to
represent a core of OUR very being - has been assaulted and betrayed.
I'd even use the r word to compare how my Shepard would feel at being so
horribly, cruelly misled and exposed by that indoctrination. As a
player, I feel that. How you feel, right now, sheer anger and rage at an
ending that doesn't feel right - is how Shepard feels. And I actually
think that if they had followed the dream sequence with the actual
ending...it wouldn't have had so much impact. The time I have spent
since the ending of ME3 researching the Indoctrination theory and
feeling that ray of hope that this could be the greatest ending ever
makes my initial rage feel worth it and part of the experience of the
game.
The one thing that could possibly challenge the theory is that the Prothean VI says
that no one there is indoctrinated. But THAT could also be wrong. Let's
face it, we know nothing about indoctrination and what it actually
feels like to go through, 100%. I read the Paul Grayson novel. To him it
was a very clear overtaking; feeling the Reapers in the back of his
mind, sensing them. Was that how Saren felt it? How TIM felt it?
I don't think so. To them it was a very, very slow, gradual warping of
their ideas. Benezia, when she was taken, knew it was the ship but
thought it was Saren doing the indoctrination. It comes in many, many
more insidious and quiet forms. Here's food for thought - if the
Prothean VI was so damn good at picking up indoctrinated people then WHY
did this not become a defense against it? Why did sleeper agents and
spies still end up betraying their own if they had a foolproof way of
spotting indoctrination? Simple put - they didn't. The whole idea of a
sleeper agent is that they don't even know they're an agent.
Indoctrination really can be as insidious as to be completely
undetectable -even to the afflicted - until that moment the Reapers need
their agent to do their work.
That's why the VI didn't pick it
up. And that's why they finally pull out this last gambit against
Shepard to stop him. And why Harbinger has to intervene....personally
People are right. This IS our story, our investment. This
is why - I hope - we have this small grace period where Bioware can look
at our feedback and see what people want out of the *real* ending. I've
heard the comparision to a GM before where people have said that when
you run an RPG that the GM needs to listen to what his players want.
This might well be Bioware's GM moment, that moment where they pause and
listen to their players to see if they've picked up all the little tips
and tricks of the plot, to see if they are getting it, and to tweak the
ending if needed (or confirm that they are right).
I have
always thought that the best games, the best stories, sometimes leave
more questions than they give answers. They're the games that stay with
you long after it is over. They made you confront yourself head on and
question who you are as a person and what you believe in. And my god
this game is going to stay with me long after I have finished it.
Now,
before it all comes out with EA/Bioware smelling of roses there is
still one thing that makes me worry that this could still be screwed up
and ruin the entire game. Because if this true, and our real ending
after Shepard wakes up is just around the corner - if this comes in the form of
paid DLC then
I will feel betrayed as a customer. I would probably still buy it but
paying for the real ending would be an absolute kick in the teeth and
would leave me upset and disappointed. Playing on my emotional
investment into this game to get more money out of me is frankly
despicable and if that is true...I don't honestly know if I could trust
Bioware again. And this is from someone who bought all the DLC for every
other Bioware game because it felt worth my money.
I hope that
this is not what Bioware (or, let's face it, EA in reality) intend to
do. I am hoping that this is a small grace period, to let us collect our
thoughts, understand and come to terms with everything we have known
about our Shepard and ourselves, and to enjoy that surge of hope when we
find out that it was all a lie and the Reapers were making one last
ditch attempt to stop the sheer charisma and might of Shepard from
bringing them down. If it is, then this game will truly have been
brilliant. This is our cliffhanger.
Right now, my entire
option of the game will come down to whether we have to pay for our
happy ending or not. Is it an utterly brilliant last twist to fully
invest you emotionally into Shepard, or a just money-grubbing exercise
to milk more pennies out of customers eager for a full experience. And
well, if we ever DO get a happy ending, because this is a theory.
I
have a great deal of faith in Bioware as storytellers. I've followed
them since the days of Baldur's Gate. Hell one day I'd like to write for
them. That'd be my dream job. So I'm sitting here hoping that my faith
in Bioware is well placed and that the true moment of epicness is just
around the corner.
And that Shepard gets to give one last two-fingered salute to the Reapers when he wakes up ready to kick some ass. [smilie]../../../images/forum/emoticons/cool.png[/smilie]
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Cheesy and cornball, but I'd be happy.
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