AlanC9 wrote...
But doesn't a "happy" ending imply that there are best choices? A tragic ending is worthless if it only comes about because I deliberately screw up -- that's just Shepard being masochistic.
This is why I like, at the very least, the presence and tone of the end choices.
In ME2, people had to work really quite hard to get the 'bad' ending, whereby everyone but Joker dies. Some people actively work toward that ending for kicks, or something where everything went wrong but Shep is alive, so they can import a really dire save into 3 and see how things are different. But ultimately, it's very easy to get the 'best' ending whereby everyone lives to fight another day. Perhaps one or two of your squad might die because you weren't paying attention about who to assign to what task at the end, but from all I've read, most people have tended to reload and choose differently, in order to ensure they get that 'best' ending. In the end, that amounts to
less useful choice, even though there is, in fact, choice presented to us. It's safe to assume that most people view the end where everyone survives as the 'best' ending, and therefore by extension, the 'correct' ending.
In ME3, there really is no 'best' or 'correct' or 'real' ending. By not having one path toward complete, happy victory, which most will view as the goal to aim for, or the 'true path,' we're freer to make decisions based on the grounds of ethics, morality, and the type of person we believe our Shepard to be.
Personally, I would have liked, among other things, the inclusion of a fourth option: that to tell the Catalyst I wouldn't pick any of its options, and we would continue to fight this war on our terms. That would, of course, have ensured that the reapers win (even if, by some miracle, we managed to take back earth conventionally, it would have been with immense loss to the fleets, and then what of the other reaper forces in every other system? Earth was but one planet in one system in one cluster, and it took absolutely everything we could muster from all the species and fleets we could get on board to merely get to the point where Shepard could get to the Citadel beam), but at least I would have been able to make that extra moral judgement.
When we destroyed the relay in Arrival, we decimated the Batarian Hegemony, not because we were genocidal maniacs, but because their sacrifice meant we could slow down the reaper attack and have a better chance at saving more lives down the road. This is what we've done again at the end of ME3. Because, regardless of which option we chose, we did, indeed, stop the cycle. We might have done so with various amounts of casualties, depending on the choices we made, and we might be dead, as might most or some or all of our crew. But we stopped it. This was never only about the short term. This was never about only the people in our cycle. We stopped the cycle. Now there will be no more cycles. Many people had to die, and we had to sacrifice a way of life along with those actual lives. But now the galaxy lives on, free from the threat of the reapers that had been there for millennia.
The scale of the reaper threat was such that it was always going to change the galaxy as we knew it. As someone pointed out earlier, while we have been set back by the destruction of the relays, to a massive degree, no doubt, the relays were the reapers' method of directing our evolutionary path. We existed because they allowed it; we developed along the lines that they laid down. Now we are free of the relays, despite the fact that galactic cohesion has been utterly changed, we are finally free, for the first time ever, to evolve technologically along our own paths. For me, the destruction of the relays was an integral part of ending the cycle. It's not nice, it comes with massive immediate consequences, but it was necessary. It might take various groups who are now 'stranded' in various systems years, decades, generations, to get back home, or to colonise new worlds, to build up new governmental structures. We can speculate forever about what the galaxy will look like in 40, 50, 200 years. But at least there is life left to do that. At least the cycles ended. No more will the reapers come a'reaping, threatening the extinction (or 'salvation') of everything. We are responsible for those people left alive to finally shape their own destiny. We did that. And we sacrificed a heck of a lot to manage it, just as we sacrificed the Batarians to slow down the reapers enough to give us that chance.
I don't say all this without also recognising where criticism is needed.
I don't like the war asset system, and I believe it only exists because of the inclusion of multiplayer. I recognise that BioWare wanted to make the consequences of your choices more subtle and seamless than having very obvious cricket bat to the head moments, and that's the ultimate effect of the WA system, but it would have been better if the mechanics of it were hidden from view, instead of a points system being there to draw attention to the fact that this is, indeed, just a game mechanic. There are lots of other things I don't much like, or wish had been done differently. I believe that, had more time been given to the ending, it could have explained things like the Catalyst and Crucible in far more sophisticated and clear ways, and avoided the plot holes and inconsistencies that are causing so many of the issues. I also think that just a handful of things could have made the whole end sequence far more cohesive and satisfying: like a scene showing how Hammer was retrieved and ended up with Joker, a scene showing Joker's reasoning for being seen flying away from the beam, some explanation for just exactly where this planet is that they land on, something explaining more properly just what the destruction of the relays entails in each situation (to avoid the 'but it meant they all went supernova and killed everything and everyone' speculation) and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to actually interact with the Catalyst rather than stand there like a passive observer (although I can see the case for Shepard's passivity being a way of expressing the finality of the situation, of everything else having been utterly exhausted, but in this case I don't think it works adequately).
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