fle6isnow wrote...
I suppose as a "pro-ender" I am part of this third group. It all boils down, really, to what you think the main themes of Mass Effect are. To me, they are:
Sacrifice (a.k.a. having to make difficult choices)
This theme is huge in the Mass Effect series. As we go along in the game, bigger and bigger sacrifices are required to stop the Reapers.
In ME1, we can choose to sacrifice the Rachni Queen, sacrifice either Kaidan or Ashley to stop Saren on Virmire, and finally, sacrifice either a huge part of the human fleet or the Council to stop Sovereign.
In Mass Effect 2, the story literally starts with the sacrifice of Shepard to save the rest of her crew and Joker. She is brought back to life, but again she is sent on a mission that will require huge sacrifices of her and her crew--the suicide mission. Yes, there is a way to go through the mission without anyone on your main team dying, but honestly, unless you look online, this is difficult. Little themes of sacrifice are scattered everywhere as well. Tali will want to sacrifice her place in the quarian flotilla to save her father's memory. Samara will want to sacrifice her daughter to save the hundreds or thousands that Morinth will kill in her lifetime; conversely, you can choose to sacrifice Samara and her ideals if you believe that Morinth's power is what you need to stop the Reapers. In Legion's loyalty mission, you either sacrifice the heretic geth outright, or sacrifice the heretic geth's free will.
The ending choice is a sacrifice as well--do you sacrifice the collector base for your idealism, or do you sacrifice your idealism to give humanity an edge over the Reapers? As a counterpoint to "I won't let fear compromise who I am" if you destroy the collector base, if you save the collector base, TIM tells you "don't let idealism blind you."
If we add in Arrival, again, we see huge sacrifices. Shepard has no choice but to let 300,000 batarians die on Aratoht, just so that she can give the galaxy more time to deal with the Reapers.
In Mass Effect 3, the sacrifices you have to make are even bigger. There's just so many instances of this that I'll just list them.
1) You start the game having to sacrifice millions of people on Earth while you go off and gather resources.
2) You can sacrifice the krogan race and Mordin/Padok (plus Wrex later on, if you still have him) if you believe that curing the genophage is the wrong thing to do.
3) If you cure the genophage, Mordin/Padok sacrifices himself to save the krogan. If Wreav is the leader, you are also pretty much sacrificing the salarians to get krogan support, because you know Wreav will want to wage a war of revenge after the Reaper War.
4) Thane/Kirrahe sacrifices himself to save the salarian councillor; if both Thane and Kirrahe are dead, the salarian councillor is the sacrifice to save the rest of the council.
5) On Rannoch, you can sacrifice Tali and the all the quarians OR the all the geth; legion sacrifices himself either way. Yes, the game gives you an out, just like it did for the suicide mission, but the "vanilla" game makes you choose one or the other.
6) You sacrifice Palaven, Thessia... all the other worlds for the chance to beat the Reapers on Earth.
There are also smaller stories of sacrifice, like Lt. Victus dying to disable the bomb on Tuchanka, Aralakh company (and Grunt, if not loyal) sacrificing itself to save Shepard and the Rachni Queen OR the Racnhi Queen dying to save Aralakh + Grunt, Eve dying to produce the genophage cure, Admiral Koris dying to save his crew (or vice versa), etc.
So, looking at those themes, the fact that each choice you have to make will require a different sacrifice makes sense:
Control: do we sacrifice the "free will" of the Reapers just as we sacrificed the free will of the geth heretics? Do we sacrifice our humanity and our morals to save the rest of the galaxy?
Synthesis: do we sacrifice Shepard to bring unguaranteed peace? Do we sacrifice everyone's choice in the matter?
Destroy: is true self-determination really worth the loss of all Reaper technology, which, unfortunately, includes the geth and EDI? (And before you say they are not Reaper tech, remember that Legion uploaded Reaper code to give the geth individuality, and we learn on Cronos base that EDI is built with parts salvaged from Sovereign).
Loss of Idealism
This is another theme that I believe is huge. Someone else explained this perfectly, so I'll just quote him here.
social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/11555820#11556659
Bookman230 wrote...
This fits perfectly. you see, in Mass Effect 1, Shepard was in his prime. Younger, especially mentally. He was blissfully unaware of the Reapers, his shoulders unburdened with the weight of the galaxy. He was confident, ****sure, "We'll talk to the Council, and they WILL listen!" "Saren MUST be stopped!" etc. Things were brighter, he had a crew with similar wide-eyed people who belived in the cause(besides Wrex,, who by the end also comes along). The ending reflects this; the Council pledge their support, and even the player is thinking, "The Reapers are going to get their ASSES kicked!"
Fast foward to ME2. Shepard has died, came back to life, and has found that the galaxy has forshaken him. Few believe in the Reapers. It had been for naught. Instead of following the trustworthy Alliance, he's serving under the devious Cerberus, and instead of people he can trust, he's put alongside assassins, convicts, mercs, theives, etc. Gone are the bright days of ME1. Things get grim, dark. Now, he doesn't even have the token support of the Council, not really. Only he can stop the Collectors from killing all of humanity. Publicly, he puts on a brave face, making the same bombastic claims and speeches, but deep down the foolhardy confidence of the man he was two years ago is gone. Lair of the Shadow Broker shows he's finally, truly starying to feel the stress of it all. (Snow note: I would add Arrival to this part. In sacrificing the batarians on Aratoht, suddenly Shepard isn't a big goddamned hero, but a war criminal, even if it was done to give the galaxy more time before the Reapers arrive. She now has to deal with the loss of idealism from this action, and this, more than LotSB, breaks Shepard.)
And ME3 is where it all comes falling apart. Reapers take Earth, and friends like Mordin, Thane, Legion, maybe even more are falling left and right. The galaxy is unprepared;the reapers are stomping everyone's asses. And once again, it's up to Shep to hold it together. But he can't. The deaths are getting to him. So many have fallen; who's next? Everyone concurs that the reapers are winning, that they probably WILL win. Earth, Palaven, Thessia especially.The fallen haunt him, but he doesn't let anyone in besides Garrus, Liara, and his LI. Now, he's at least partly just going through the motions. The Crucible and the Catalyst is what he banked everything on. But Anderson dies, his mentor, and all he's left with, what all the deaths led him to, are three horrible options for the galaxy. Shepard gives up, not on the galaxy, but on himself.
That is the theme of Mass Effect. A deconstruction of the PC of Bioware games, the man who has to deal with the whole galaxy calling for help again and again. The man who comforts others about their daddy issues or whatever over and over, yet lets no one knows how he feels, how he needs help. In the end, it's never one man who saves everyone. Mass Effect is the result of putting that pressure on one man. From ME1's "What About Shepard?" setting him up as the invincible hero, the Revan or Spirit Monk, etc, to Me3's "I don't know", where even Shepard can't believe that he can do this all on his own. And these two lines fully reveal the extent of Bioware's artistic beauty.
.....Nah, I'm talking out of my ass! It's conicidence.
To me, this seems like one of the biggest complaints of people about ME3. You finally see Shepard vulnerable, weak, and beaten, even suffering from survivor's guilt, as evidenced by those annoying dream sequences. She's not the big goddamned hero that she was in the previous games--in fact, in the face of the galactic cycle that has been going on for millions of years, she is nothing. A lot of people, Dr. Dray included, seem to really, really hate this theme. I, however, find it powerful and humbling. The fact that Shepard even has a chance to choose at the end is huge, and as Starbrat says, "you have choice, more than you know", because the alternative is simply the continuation of the cycle.
I'm still making my mind up about the third theme, but personally I rather disagree with the first two, largely because I disagree with the interpretation of a lot of these events.
When it comes to sacrifice, I think it's important to distinguish what is being sacrificed, people vs. morals/ideals. You list a number of sacrifices, but they are almost exclusively people sacrificing themselves for their ideals(Mordin, Thane, Victus, Legion) or Shepard sacrificing people for the mission (The council, Kaidan/Ashley).
You also list a few things that I can't really read as sacrifices. You don't sacrifice the Rachni Queen. Her existence is largely irrelevant to the story, and if anything killing her harms the mission to defeat the Reapers (100 EMS pts, blah). This is a choice of murdering her or sparing her, depending on whether you believe the Rachni can be peaceful (she makes a compelling argument they can be). I also don't think shepard's death at the beginning is a sacrifice. He dies, but it isn't to save anyone (except sort of joker) or accomplish anything.
I would also say that surviving the Suicide mission is quite easy. All you have to do is upgrade the Normandy, and do most or all of the loyalty missions (why skip would you skip them anyway?) and make intelligent choices about specialists (they're pretty obvious, don't send thane in the tube when you've got Legion and Tali). In 6 or 7 playthroughs, I've only ever lost Jack, once. Same for uniting the Quarians and the Geth, all that is needed is a high enough Reputation. An ideal solution is readily achievable. In neither situation are you required to sacrifice someone, it is merely a penalty for not being completionist.
The exceptions would be the Heretic Geth and the Collector base (Arrival isn't even a choice, it just happens), but these are both choosing between sacrificing morals vs. sacrificing people/objects. You can choose which to sacrifice. And that ultimately is the failure of ME3's ending, through the experience of the preceding narrative, players went in expecting to sacrifice shepard for what they believed in and ended up being forced to sacrifice both. In a series about never sacrificing your morals or at least having the option to never sacrifice your morals, the end is a choice between which moral you sacrifice. It's a nihilistic end to a fairly straightforward and hopeful journey.
As for the loss of idealism...
Again, this feels like nitpicking but my interpretation of events is very different than Bookman230's. I guess there is a loss of idealism, in the strictest sense, but not a loss of moral conviction. Working for Cerberus is an act of necessity, rather than preference. After all, the Alliance gave up on the Reaper threat. TIM is intent on surrounding Shepard with familiar/sympathetic faces (Cronos station vid) and painting Cerberus as misunderstood. In ME3 Shepard even looks back at working with Cerberus with regret, why
didn't he see how evil they were? Can he lose his idealism in ME2 and
get it back in ME3. All the same, even Renegade Shep is intent on pointing out he doesn't work with Cerberus, just using their resources. Indeed, you can defy TIM to the very end by destroying the collector base. You may work with thieves, assassins and convicts but the game gives you no reason to distrust any of them. They may have distrustful titles, but the game is intent on showing you their loyalty and integrity. Don't judge a book by its cover, and all that.
In ME3 he is worn down, the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, but you're never forced to sacrifice your morals. At one point saying (sadly, I can't recall when) we win this war without sacrificing who we are.
Again, the choice provided in this game in many ways allows the player to write the story. It's certainly possible to weave the narrative of Shepard losing his ideals, his morals, embracing the pragmatic over the just. I don't doubt that this was the story you saw. But it is not required. My narrative had no such occurrence. My shepard stood by his principles until the end. Exhausted, bleeding, and a little demoralized, he still stood there telling TIM that he was sacrificing too much for victory. My Shepard stood by his morals until Bioware made that impossible. Loss of idealism wasn't a universal theme, because many players never really experienced it.
Again, this is the problem with the ending, it takes the story out of the players hands and forces 3 unprecedentedly revolting choices on them, turning the story from a fairly traditional hero's tale into something much more nihilistic.
Modifié par Hawk227, 23 avril 2012 - 07:51 .
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seems incoherent to me, as a solution to the suddenly-promoted theme of synthetics vs organics.
