Vurculac wrote...
Redraven19 wrote...
When I finished my first (and so far only) Play through of Mass Effect 3 I have to say I was truly and deeply disappointed. And I still am.
To go online and find out that I am part of the majority, well, that just makes me feel good.
I still don’t understand what the heck went on after Harbingers beam hits Shepard and now I’m going to explain why.
Things that don’t make sense:
1. Shepard surviving Harbingers beam.
Earlier in the game on Rannoch, Shepard fights a reaper on foot, and if he gets hit by the beam, he dies and you get the “Critical Mission Failure” Screen. In london, a cutscene shows a mixed race squad get vaporized by a beam regardless of how close they were standing in relation to the laser. If instantaneous death is the case when you get hit by a reaper’s laser cannon, how in the heck is Shepard not dead at this point?
Why can’t he dodge like earlier? If the scene with Harbinger was interactive, You know, if we could bob and weave and get to the beam just barely missing getting blown away and it was much harder to do than when we fought the Reaper on Rannoch, Then I would understand.
2.After he gets hit by the laser and Wakes up.
Why does the pistol have unlimited ammo? Why can’t you see his feet? The slow mo just makes me think about all the earlier dream sequences and makes me want to believe in the indoctrination theory that’s been floating around the Internet. Also, where is he hearing the Radio chatter from when half his armor is gone and the rest of it seems melted onto his body? Not to mention that the people on the radio say they are looking at the transporter and that nobody made it.
3. Illusive Man/ Anderson Scene
First off, Anderson already explained earlier that the only way up to the citadel was that transport beam. So how in the heck did Anderson get there before Shepard? And beamed to a different section no less. I can understand the Illusive Man being there, seeing as how he probably hightailed it even before Shepard and company stormed his headquarters. The whole Illusive Man being Saren 2.0 and convincing him to shoot himself was a nice nod to the first game, but explain why he’s able to utilize the Reapers Mind control methods on Shep?!
4. The Reaper VI/ Catalyst/ Child
Okay, so our hero passes out, gets brought up another level and has the catalyst explain to him that the Reapers are the solution. To what? The reply: “Oh I created the Synthetic Reapers to destroy organic civilizations and meld them into one synthetic being so that they can’t build Synthetic beings cause those synthetics will destroy them. They will never coexist.”
….
And I thought Ai’s were supposed to be smart.
Is not EDI living proof of Organics and Synthetics being able to Coexist?
And what about, Oh I don’t know, earlier in the game when you convince THE QUARIANS AND THE GETH TO WORK TOGETHER. And another thing! The Reaper VI claims that Synthetics will always rise to destroy organics, well, Newsflash: As revealed by Legions memories the Quarians are the ones who started the war by attempting genocide on the Geth. The Geth were peaceful up until that point.
5. The Ending(s)
So, after our hero blindly accepts what the Catalyst tells him without even trying to argue, he is given three choices.
Ending A: Control The Reapers
In this ending, Shepard Interfaces with the Crucible, turns into a husk and then disintegrates.
What The Catalyst Child Says Will Happen: Shepard is now the new AI behind the Reapers and makes them retreat to Dark space.
The Problem: Didn’t I just spend 2 games telling the illusive man that using Reaper Tech Bad, Blowing it up good? Even Renegade Shepard expresses Reservations before giving the Collector Base to the illusive man in ME2. Why is controlling the Reapers outlined as the blue Paragon Option? I just convinced him he was wrong to attempt to control them because it destroyed him! So why would Shepard try to do that now?
Ending B: Synthesis
In this ending, Shepard Jumps into the Crucible, turns into a husk, and then disintegrates.
What The Catalyst Child Says Will Happen:
Using the Crucible in this way will genetically rewrite the DNA of everything in the Universe making everything Part Organic/Part Synthetic. Y’know, like the Reapers.
The Problem: Three games we fight against what the Reapers want to do to us and then Shepard does it for them? NO. Just.. NO. This goes against everything that shepard has accomplised in the first two games.
Ending C:Destroy The Reapers
This is the only ending that really falls in line with the first two games IMHO.
In this ending, Shepard blows up the crucible, ending the Reaper threat once and for all.
What The Catalyst Child Says will Happen:
The Reapers will be destroyed utterly, but so will every other synthetic being in the Universe including Shepard.
The Problem:
Why is this choice outlined in Renegade Red with Anderson as the Avatar for the choice?
Isn’t this what we have been playing for? And choosing this kills The Geth and EDI? The beings that just finished proving their worth and have been accepted as allies? None of the choices fit shepard. Whether you’ve been playing as a paragon or a renegade, Shepard never comprises His/Her beliefs; even the Illusive man complains about Shepard's Idealism. So you shoot it, it blows up. Shepard blows up. Now onto the cutscene that is almost the same no matter what you do.
Final Cutscene:
The Reapers either fall down dead or fly away because: A: Shepard is controlling them, or B. Because: “Hurr Durr, nothing organic to harvest lets go home”. Joker flies off to the relay before it explodes, followed by every Relay in the universe exploding into red, green or blue. Then The Normandy crashes on an a garden world and the crew looks at the sky. If you had a high enough amount of War Assets and picked Destroy The Reapers, then you see a 5 second clip of the hero breathing. Credits Roll. Enter old man talking with child. Followed by a “Don’t forget to buy DLC” Message!
The Problem:
1. How did Joker know when to fly away? In the ending of Mass Effect 2, Shepard TELLS him to fly away because the Base is going to explode. Also, Everyone in the crew knew the only reason for going to the Collector Base was to blow it up. In ME3, None of the characters knew what the Crucible was going to do except Shepard, and he/she only finds out a minute before using it.
2.Why did Joker fly away? That’s not in character with all the heroic things Joker did in the first two games; Like leading the charge against Sovereign in ME1 or Unshackling EDI to purge the Ship.
3. It was established in Arrival that destroying a Mass Relay causes a catastrophic explosion capable of destroying whole Solar Systems. So If Shepard just blew up all the relays in the universe I guess that means everyone is as dead as those batarian colonists in Arrival.
4. If you want to argue that he didn’t blow up all the relays but instead rendered them useless or whatever, that still leaves the massive combined race military fleet that came to the Sol System to help you trapped with no way of getting home. So everyone is still screwed.
5. In two of the three endings, the people I watched exit the Normandy onto this Garden Planet were the two I had in my squad in London. They were with me When Shepard was hit by harbingers laser. So how in the heck did they get to the Normandy? In the Synthesis ending, you are shown Joker and Edi Hugging, and everything has a green tinted circuitry look to it. What were you trying to show here? Joker and EDI as a type of Adam and Eve in a brave new world where everything is Organic/Synthetic and everyone else in the universe is dead? That might be nice as a possible ending but that still doesn’t resolve any of the stuff that went down over the course of three games.
6. The additional five second scene makes no sense to me because Shepard is shown breathing after having blown up the Citadel. But wait: The Citadel was in space. So you mean to tell me that after getting blown out of a space station orbiting earth and crash landing on the ground Shepard is still alive? I might be inclined to believe that if Shepard hadn’t been blown out of a spaceship and landed on a planet in the beginning of mass effect 2 as meat and tubes that took Cerberus 2 years to rebuild.
Other things that are Terrible:
-The complete Cop-out on showing us Tali’Zorah’s face.
- The Face importer Glitch[/b]
The Lack of a Proper Boss Battle:
There’s Saren’s Husk in ME1 and then The Human/Reaper Larva In ME2.
Where’s the Boss Fight in ME3?
The art booklet included with my Collectors Edition showed that originally the Illusive man was going to mutate into a giant husk thing that the player would have to fight. It also mentions that this was scrapped because the writers wanted to show that the Illusive mans greatest weapon was always his intellect.
I don’t mind that, but a fight with harbinger would be nice; especially after all the interaction we had with harbinger in ME2 and Arrival. It wouldn’t be a big stretch considering that Shepard took down the Human-Reaper in ME2 and the Reaper on Rannoch on foot.
What we were Promised:
We Gamers and Fans were told that the game would diverge into wildly different conclusions based upon our actions in the first three games.It does not.
The ending cutscenes only differ in color scheme and it is never revealed what our choices did.
Even Dragon Age: Origins had the pages of text that detailed what happened after the final fight. Speaking of which, I feel that DA:O different endings were better done. If that game, Sacrificing the main character to save the world was a choice, but NOT the only choice. There was also an ending where a squad-mate sacrificed themselves to save the world, and an ending where NO ONE DIED and the world was still saved. Those are endings that are clearly different.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Bioware push the release date of Mass Effect 3 back from Holiday 2011 to March 2012 because they wanted more time to ensure the ending(s) exceed every-one's expectations? So they had more time to work on it but, this is the best they could come up with?
What we expected:
Multiple endings that reflected the choices our Shepard made over the course of three games and six years. Seeing the future of our Squad, the universe we worked so hard to save, and Shepard him/herself.
What We Got:
A bull-crap five minute Meta-philosophical cut-scene that leaves a trilogy with a very clear beginning and middle with no definitive end. A cut-scene that resolves nothing and is the major reason such a majority of fans are upset. With all the time and story-telling that went into making the choose your own adventure story of Mass Effect a branching but linear experience, why does it end like LOST?
I honestly feel cheated, lied to, and alienated.
What We Want:
Multiple endings that reflected the choices our Shepard made over the course of three games and six years. Seeing the future of our Squad, the universe we worked so hard to save, and Shepard him/herself.
Endings that make sense and resolve the game.
Here’s another point I’d like to make. The deaths of Mordin, Thane and Legion were beautifully written endings to their characters. Mordin finds redemption in fixing the Genophage he created;
and the singing as he died... beautiful. Thane spent his whole life assassinating people and his final act is to stop an assassination. Beautiful. Legion sacrificing his consciousness in order to give his people true intelligence? BEAUTIFUL. Those were all wonderfully written conclusions which only make me angrier that there was no such conclusion for the rest of your squad, the universe as a whole or Shepard him/herself.
I would be fine with endings where Shepard dies... as long as it is by choice and there are endings where Shepard can live. Endings that reflect the choices that were made.
This whole “Oh Shepard is screwed no matter what he does” just doesn’t mesh well with the events of the previous two games. In the ending of Mass Effect 2, it was very clear what choices you made over the course of the game would lead to death and which would lead to life. And then there is the final decision via paragon choice or renegade choice.
What baffles me more than any of the above is the fact that Bioware had a great formula with the first two games and threw it out the window in ME3’s ending in favor of a M. Night Shyamalanesque twist that is neither deep nor meaningful, and has only succeeded in breaking the promises Bioware made, alienating a majority of their existing fanbase, and left a lot of gamers, myself included, wanting their time and money back.
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