What I loved about the ending?
I already wrote I loved all ME3 but the ending, so now, I'll speak about the ending, what I believe to be good, and what I believe to be bad.
AFTER THE EXPLOSION (GOOD)
Harbinger did laze the whole area. Shepard wakes up, groggy, and tumbles around. The fact I can't aim deepens the immersion: Shepard was heavily, if not fatally, wounded. Chances of success are... slim. The few enemies I see before entering the beam are easily dispatched for a weakned Shepard, but then, they would have been wounded, too, so... The fact the gun has no ammunition limit is secondary (as long as the story is good). Shepard is barely conscious, so it makes sense he/she doesn't bother to look at that.
In (almost) the same way, no biotics. Too bad for an Adept. Again, this deepens immersion: Shepard can't concentrate. (An botched attempt at a singularity or something would have been cool, to show how weak Shepard was).
I almost recognized Ashley, that is, a body with blue armor, dead, near the beam. 1st victim... Where is IDE? Because, yes, IDE did come with me the whole mission on earth (I loved combine her Incinerate with my Shield Drain... Most effective against Marauders).
CITADEL ENTRANCE (GOOD)
Apparently, the humans were processed there. I'm almost not surprised to hear Anderson is there, to. Could he have been sent to another chamber? Why not. The problem is that the layout doesn't seem to support that, but at that moment, I don't really care: Shepard is wounded, but he/she still tries to reach whatever point inside the Citadel to open the arms (I don't even know how he/she hopes to do that). A little company is not unwelcome.
THE ILLUSIVE MAN (GOOD)
There was the moment I thought everything had failed. TIM was there, and not wounded. Deeply indoctrinated, Ok, but mostly healthy, and apparently able to yield some of the Reapers' control powers. This bothers me, as indoctrination was not supposed to be so fast as utterly dominate/control the subjects, even weakened ones.
But still, I go with it: Shepard and Anderson are wounded (I'm now realizing how much of Shepard's armor have been teared out), and still, they fight for control. I try all Paragon's answers but the last one: TIM is becoming annoying so I lose patience, and this is my way to tell "f*ck off". Anderson is wounded by my own gun, and somehow in the confusion and discussion, I succeed in killing TIM. Cool.
The arms open, Shepard and Anderson sit together. The scene is very powerful, and I feel they both will die, soon. At that moment, any cheezy fiction would have sent some Kodiak with Joker on board yelling "We found them!!!", but this isn't cheey fiction. The music is very sad. The theme is loss.
I'm now accepting that, with all the DLC I bought for ME1 and ME2 (that is, all), and all the missions I did in ME1, ME2 and ME3, that is 99%, I have maxed out the success of my Shepard (without Multiplayer, of course). And still, I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact the victory over the Reapers outside will come alongside the slow agony of Anderson and Shepard inside.
The scene is powerful, and I wonder what will happen when they'll find Anderson and Shepard's bodies, side-by-side...
Then Hackett calls.
????
AFTER THE ILLUSIVE MAN (BAD)
Either the writers came up with some surprise event in the end, I feel this is not going to get better. Shepard falls unconscious on some platform, and is awakened by some ghost child.
"Hello there," I mutter, remembering Obi Wan's catch phrase. Seriously, what's that???
The child starts to speak, some kind of nonsense. Apparently, he is the omniscient/omnipotent controller of the Reapers, and is destroying biological civilization on account of biological DNA.
The ghost child becomes therefore my first ennemy on my list. Shepard went through the Galaxy trying to put people together, and even succeeded in bringing back the Rachni, the Krogan, and even make the Quarians and Geth reach a tentative peace, and that mongrel of a ghost is speaking about synthetics vs. organics as the only and only one conflict in this galaxy, justifying the Reaping because, hey, as his creators were not able to have peace, they decided no one could reach it.
The arrogance and enormity of the assertion is humbling. Apparently, hundreds of thousand years alone organizing genocides doesn't help keep one mind's sane.
So I think about the journalist. You know, the one I hit, three times, once per episode. She was so arrangant, so stupid, I had to make that Renegade thing. And I want to do the same to the ghost child. And I wait for the opportunity to tell him to f*ck off, even if it could kill my Shepard. Or to strike that thing. Or anything that could express my disagreement with its own delirium.
But I don't have that.
This is were the suspension of disbelief explode: Did I play all those hours/days on ME1, 2 and 3, what I have is some kind of "RPG from the 80's" three choices, none making sense whastoever:
1. Destroy all the synthetics. WTF??? Where in this universe do you get the power to destroy every synthetic AI without touching the VI, or even the simple computers? And how the destruction of the red "thing" will both destroy the ghost child, the reapers and the AIs? Is this space magic ? Isn't there a simple solution to kill the ghost child only? How did it became tied up with IDE or the geths? This is ridiculous.
2. Control the Reapers. Ok, it will kill me. But... How can I control the Reapers if it kills me? I guess Shepard is mortally wounded, Ok, but even then, this doesn't make sense. Unless it was promising Shepard he/she would become the Emperor/Empress of the Galaxy and that he/she would rule unchallenged with his/her apprentice, Darth Joker?... Er... Did I miss something?
3. Synthesis: Ok, space magic again. This time, with the right reagents and the right incantations, the spell could work and mix together organics and synthetics. I already mentionned that destroying hatred and xenophobia with absolute conformism wasn't a solution, so that anti-solution seems so wrong finally it's worthy of the thing that spawned it. The ghost child is really irritating, and there is no way I can smack its ghostly face. Damn...
THE FLEEING NORMANDY
Ok... So apparently, for a reason I can't imagine, Joker fled with the Normandy. Thanks for the vote of confidence, bones! So apparently, the Normandy is navigating between two mass relays, and followed by the colored explosion.
Ok, next image, the Normandy did crash one some planet. In one of the endings, Everything organic has now some layer of electronics on it. Gross... I guess the unification on the DNA level didn't succeeded so well...
Oooh... IDE was on the Normandy (in the Synthesis end). Good for her, because I believed her to be dead near the beam... Ok, so how come the Normandy did succeed to flee the battle, after taking IDE back on board I'm still wondering. This was a very fast ship, indeed. To bad the Normandy (and IDE's brain) crashed on some planet.
Oooh, now Liara is there too. It's cool because I specifically did not take her in my team because I feared she would die while my Shepard would survive. I guess it's Ok... The Protean is there, too, but then, who cares...
POST CREDITS
The credits were cool, but then, at the end, some strange scene with some adult talking to a child. I'm just hoping this is not the Ghost Child. So the old man is promising more stories about Shepard... Cool...
I'm feeling left out.
I'm realizing I'm looking at the last minutes of Mass Effect with a dumb expression on my face, so powerful I fear it will remain there. I'm still trying to compile what I saw since the Ghost Child tried to frame me into some spiritual discussion about his holy mission. And no, it doesn't make sense.
POST IMPRESSION
I'm not a writer. I'm not an author. I'm just a random software engineer.
But I have some years (decades?) of tabletop roleplaying as a master/storyteller behind me, and what I see there is either a failed attempt at some gratuitously spritual explanation with a massive dose of deus ex maquina, or just the product of a burnt-out author overdosing on caffeine who spat something, anything if it could get him/her some sleep.
Seriously, I can't even remember the last time I tried this kind of heist on my players.
So I feel somewhat betrayed, and mostly hugely disappointed because what I consider the most impressive sci fi trilogie of all times (did you say "alternative"? Star What? Nonsense...) ends in a way so dumb it spoils the whole universe.
I'm not even writing about the lack of closure (no, some happy random soldiers, a crashed Normandy and some old guy and his nephew are not closure). The closest closure I had were the photos of Joker, Anderson and Love Interest (and the music... Awesome...).
The point is: I don't know your plans about a possible "Endings" DLC, and seriously, I'm now beyond that. I have that "Collector Edition" of Mass Effect sitting near my console, and I'm seriously wondering about either selling the whole trilogy, or let it dies there hoping that someday, my disappointment will have decreased enough for me to play again (and stopping the game just before the Ghost Child... I'm no masochist).
Fact is, I contacted my friends, telling them exactly WHERE to stop to avoid the end. I was the most vocal proponent of your games (I even offered ME, DA and Jade Empire to 3 of my friends, just because I knew they would love them), and the day I arrived at work after finishing the game, my co-workers, which were joking about the fact they wouldn't see me for weeks understood something was wrong with the game. I didn't have to tell them. And still tried to tell them the ME trilogy was the best game I ever player, but even that is spoiled by the fact I must add at the end "but the 10 last minutes are so dumb I can't express it".
You just messed up the whole Mass Effect trilogy (and possibly universe) with an ending I could have written on less than four hours for a Toons RPG.
The way is not important, but I guess the Mass Effect franchise should have a real ending for Shepard's trilogy. Write a book. Do a DLC. Make a fanfiction, or some kind of "You're the hero" visual novel game fiction. Anything, but don't let your game universe go the DragonLance way (you know, the way T. Hickman and M. Weis just f*cked up their world because they had no creative control on it).
As far as I am concerned, the current ending won't be my end of Mass Effect. I was thinking about some tabletop RPG based on it, and should it go all the way, don't doubt the "multicolored end" won't be part of it.
Regards,
P.S.: We still love you. If we didn't, we wouldn't have bothered to tell you so much.
P.P.S.: One day, one of my managers will ask me "what is the strange N7 logo you have on your corporate email signature?" This will be awkward...
:-)
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