5087 réponses à ce sujet

[Gwtheyrn]

Not just thematically revolting, but revolting from a writing standpoint too. AWFUL.

[Ultra Prism]

Your professor said up straight!

[BigZ7337]

One of the best rundowns of why the endings sucked, without going on forever about it.

[count_4]

Kudos to your prof. He nailed it.

[Jassu1979]

If you handed the script of ME3 to the teacher of a creative writing class, asking her what she thinks of it, the response would be pretty straightforward:

Sublime writing throughout most of it, with fleshed-out characters, a coherent plot and spot-on execution in many scenes.

But the final five pages of the script do not live up to the rest, and need to be reworked. Style and tone change drastically (for the worse), and the whole passage feels tacked-on, rushed, and sloppily executed.

In order to illustrate the difference, contrast Legion's (or Mordin's) sacrifice with the ending, and you'll be able to pinpoint the difference between a scene that works and a scene that does not, in spite of superficial similarities with regards to the actual content.

Lastly, note how you basically take the focus away from the main hero in this pivotal scene: those final five minutes do not tell the hero's story, concluding his archetypal journey:
they belong to the "Catalyst", a newly introduced character who also serves as a deus ex machina.
This contributes strongly to the scene's overall failure: it would be best to remove this character altogether, but if you insist on keeping it, you need to either introduce him much earlier, or else see to it that the focus remains on the hero, for example by giving him control over the flow of the conversation, and allowing him to have a real say in the matter. Demoting him to a mere spectator does not work.

Finally, (and here we pretty much return to what the OP said), the theme does not fit the rest of the plot, which consistently spoke of strength-by-diversity and hope being rewarded, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Modifié par Jassu1979, 16 avril 2012 - 09:04 .

[Jassu1979]

count_4 wrote...

Kudos to your prof. He nailed it.

Emerrgency Induction Porrt! One of my favourite scenes in the game.

[Jassu1979]

Wow, the forums have moved up to FTL-speed once again!

[Relwyn]

Oakenshield1 wrote...

Made Nightwing wrote...

sporeian wrote...

I wanna go to your college...NOW!

And now would be an excellent time for me to advertise Campion College in Toongabbie, NSW, Australia.  A Liberal Arts Degree for Thinkers and Leaders! We also have Chess Club, Fencing Club, Boxing Club and Latin Club.

My college has a medival melee weapon club. Not even kidding.

Weapon club? You mean a mace?

[RollaWarden]

I have a feeling that there may be more lit professors (I've revealed more than once that I'm one) lurking on this forum who haven't come forward.  Part of the reason, I suspect, is that we want an argument’s merit to come from its objective quality, not from the prestige of the person making it.  I am continuously impressed by the quality of many arguments criticizing the endings, and applaud the posters.  Their arguments are no less valid than mine or any other professor who posts on this forum.

That said, I realize this is a far from perfect world.  Credentials matter more than they should.  If we scholars in the literary academic community could be consistent in our message, and articulate it consistently as well, perhaps we could do some good regarding the ME3 ending.  Maybe not, but at least we would have tried. 

I'm disappointed that such enormous potential for transcendence in storytelling through the medium of video games was squandered when (what I suspect happened--of course we can only speculate) the ugly corporate head of greed bulldozed creative development.  I had believed that in the ME series I was seeing a new level of interactive storytelling--the ascension of a new genre with production values, writing, and direction on par with any film, and transcending film through the interactive nature of video games.  Then in 10 minutes at the end of ME3, that potential died in three colors.  That's what saddens me the most: the wasted potential.  And now the artists are (forced?) to hide behind a wall of carefully planned PR statements and long palls of silence.  Worse still, our wholly justified and consistently accurate criticism of the endings has been twisted into yet another cynical marketing slogan.  Just a shame.

I'll tell all of you, fellow posters, what I tell my students, and what we've discussed in my fantasy literature class this semester.  Never give in.  Never surrender.  Hold the line.  Continue to stand united, in one voice, championing the achievement that the ME series has represented through 99% of the series, and the potential it still has.  That potential still exists if the artists on the ME3 development team can come to terms with what they did to the series, and what they can still do to correct it with this summer's DLC.

Hold the Line.

Since I've made a claim about what I do for a living, I'll sign my post.  Cheers, everyone.  Time to start prepping for my classes today.

Best,

Dan Reardon
Assistant Professor
Director of Composition
Department of English and Technical Communication
Missouri University of Science and Technology

Modifié par RollaWarden, 16 avril 2012 - 03:13 .

[pharsti]

Voods07 wrote...

Bioware disapproves of this logic.

This.

[Flextt]

Spot on by your professor. Even better to see that most of his concerns were already brought up by Retake members and have found their way in the concensus!

[Gibb_Shepard]

That's actually my biggest problem with the ending. I like narrative, and when one is completely turned on it's thematic head i get really pissed off. The thematic shift is my biggest problem with the ending. And this will never be changed, so i will never be satisfied with the narrative. Therefore i can only dub ME3 one of the worst narratives to ever grace Sci-fi.

GG Mac Hudson.

[rivqa]

Needless to say... Well put.

[Flextt]

Bumped for academical ownage

[Kilshrek]

If only more people thought like your prof, OP.

[Mad-Hamlet]

Dan Reardon
Assistant Professor
Director of Composition
Department of English and Technical Communication
Missouri University of Science and Technology

Your assesment is accurate and what few people I know where I live share and agree on your sentiments. The ball was dropped and everything the corporation is doing seems to be counter-productive to both the growth of the genre, of storytelling in general and- and this goes to show I am in no way a businessman- profitiability.

Mad-Hamlet
No where near your level of qualifications.
ESL Teacher
Composition
Creative Writing
School You've Never Heard Of.
Hungary.

[Grimwick]

Your professor is a genius, he makes me want to study lit.

[MaxMcKay]

Made Nightwing wrote...

So, my lit professor and I are nerds. I throw in 'but the prize' references on my essays about Odysseus and Achilles, he throws in Firefly references in his lectures, we get on great. Now, I've previously mentioned that he disliked the endings, but today he gave me a full rundown on what exactly he found displeasing about the endgame:

"I don't get it. You get a choice between control. I just shot The Illusive Man five minutes ago because I said that we weren't ready for that power. Why on Earth isn't there an option to express how faulty that choice is? And then Destroy? Dammit, I just saved the geth and quarians, they're working together as a re-united race. Why is genocide an option? WHY? And then Synthesis just completely mistakes everything about evolution. There is no apex of evolution, we continue to adapt and move forward or we die. Aside from that, I'm forcing a choice on the entire galaxy, without the option to tell the damn thing to go to hell! All three endings were so entirely removed from the themes of the whole series that they were completely unrecognisable! It's like Casey had just finished playing Deus Ex and Mac had just watcched teh season finale of BSG."

"If I'm going to speak about 'artistic integrity', I will be compelled to point out that the ending was in no way the artistic vision of the team. BW has already stated that the ending was thought up between Casey and Mac, without any part of the peer review process being consulted. It was not a product of the team, but individuals. Aside from that, saying that artistic integrity forbids them from changing the ending is ridiculous. Many novelists have re-written entire works because of negative feedback on them. Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in chapters, publishing each one as they went, and each chapter would be based on the feedback that he got for that chapter. Conan Doyle brought Holmes back from the dead. Those are just wo examples, there are many more. BW broke their own artistic integrity when they allowed EA to set their deadline. Now there are many things that you can say about ME1, but you can never say that it was rushed. The graphics were glitchy, sure, but the characters and dialogue were finely polished."

"In conclusion, I must say again that all the endings were thematically revolting. It is absolutely critical in the name of good writing that the ending of a story must match the journey. Mass Effect has never been a story about the disparity between synthetics and organics. As a matter of fact, it has been quite the obvious. For three games, BW has hinted and pointed out that life could be so much more greater and mysterious than the organic perception. It's driven the point home, time and time again, that unity is possible. So why, then, at the very end of a series that has clearly been about unity and co-existence, would they end it with the point that different forms of life simply cannot co-exist unless their diversity is totally stripped away? It makes no sense. Furthermore, it is emotionally crushing that all this hope of co-existence that has been built up from the quarian-geth storyline  (Geth Prime:...and then we will help you rebuild your world.) is suddenly yanked away at the last second. Good day."

Dr. C. Dray.

could you maybe have him send a copy of this directly to casey and mac with a copy of his laurels.  Have to love it when you get a prof like that glad you do!  Also thank you very much for posting this, it was very interesting reading and I enjoyed seeing his P.O.V

[RollaWarden]

Grimwick wrote...

Your professor is a genius, he makes me want to study lit.

Victory!!! 

Well done, Made Nightwing and Professor Dray!

[BDelacroix]

Oakenshield1 wrote...

Made Nightwing wrote...

sporeian wrote...

I wanna go to your college...NOW!

And now would be an excellent time for me to advertise Campion College in Toongabbie, NSW, Australia.  A Liberal Arts Degree for Thinkers and Leaders! We also have Chess Club, Fencing Club, Boxing Club and Latin Club.

My college has a medival melee weapon club. Not even kidding.

Everyone should know at least one martial art.  Never know when a sword fight might come in handy.

[ManiacalShen]

Strange Aeons wrote...

Let's ignore the insanity of Shepard taking the word of the catalyst, an unknown creature who just appeared out of nowhere with absolutely no buildup or justification, at face value in making a choice that could potentially condemn the galaxy to a fate worse than death (really, the most sensible conclusion about the Catalyst from Shepard's perspective would be that it's a trap). These "choices" do not even rate as meaningful ethical dilemmas, where there's some doubt as to what's good and bad. They are outright evil, and not even in an abstract way: each manages impressively to contradict the specific lessons of the previous events in its own unique way.  After explicitly stating that he would not sacrifice his soul for victory, ME3's ending forces Shepard to do exactly that;  each "choice" demands that Shepard commit a senseless and unconscionable act and then calls the nebulous outcome victory.

Nothing in the preceding games established this sort of hopeless, futile tone, and for good reason: people do not generally play games only to have all their efforts reduced to nothing and then perverted into an atrocity.  People are revolted by the ending, in part because it's a betrayal of the themes of self-determination and strength through unity, as well as the unprecedented interactivity that they loved about the series. This is not some calculated philosophical meditation: it's just plain thoughtless and incompetent storytelling.

The only option that would actually be consistent with Shepard's character as established over three games is the one we weren't given: to defy the Catalyst and refuse to accept his false dilemma. 

I was going to respond to the OP, but actually I'll just tack some points onto this great post.

Where I think a lot of the disagreements come from is the idea of tones and expectation.  When people bring up the idea of an impossible choice and the legitimacy of a grimdark ending, they're not WRONG, exactly, but I disagree that such a thing is totally appropriate here.

Mass Effect is not a nihilistic arthouse piece.  It is an epic-scale, epic-length hero's journey.  Real life can be crappy, random, horrible, unfair, and totally nonsensical - but fiction does not have to be.  A lot of times, we don't WANT fiction to be.  It has its own set of rules by which it plays, used to draw precise emotional reactions from the audience.  Story turns should make a sort of meta sense, following those rules.  Audiences know these things, and if they want to see something that reminds them of how life sucks, and then you die (so you'd better appreciate it), they watch or read something known to be depressing.  This is not generally why people get emotionally invested in hero's journeys, however.

The games had tough choices, as suits a gritty setting, but there was always a perceived, worthy reason for making them.  I left Aralakh company to die and felt like a huge jerk, but I thought we needed those Rachni.  The Heretic choice in ME2, as well, was tough, and another poster was right to bring that up as possible thematic foreshadowing.  However, those two instances have key differences from the overall ending - someone was screwed either way, and it felt like Shepard's place to make those decisions.  Either the krogan soldiers or the Rachni were going to die, and Shepard was in command of the operation.  Her choice to make and live with, to own up to when she talks to Wrex.  The heretics were Reaper-tainted and, if left unchecked, would continue to cause destruction on multiple levels.  Legion, avatar of the non-indoctrinated Geth consensus, the only party who could be said to hold any responsibility or ownership over the other Geth (who were no longer able to decide for themselves), PUT that choice in Shepard's lap.

So when, at the end, you're left going, "Who is this Star Kid, what is up with these choices, and are you telling me that this thing can rewrite - or in the case of synthetics, CREATE - all DNA in the galaxy but can't selectively destroy the Reapers?" it's really not the same, in my opinion.  The bad consequences of your options didn't feel like they had to happen or necessarily even made sense, and I was not convinced that it was Shepard's place to either kill synthetic life just to take out the Reapers soonest or rewrite everyone's biology.  I mean, she just lucked out, being the only one who made it there alive.  Control I can kind of see, but man that feels like a trap, plus that whole thing were you JUST shot TIM for trying to support that idea.  That's why I bolded that bit of the post above; I agree with it strongly.

Heroic sacrifice?  I can take it or leave it, because I see it as being in-theme but too depressing for words.  Shepard hasn't had a life of her own for years, to the point of being brought back from the dead to fight this war.  Not everything is shiny perfect after the fact?  War is hell - that's a solid theme of the series.  Even destroying the Relays I get, even if it sucks, since civilization could be said to need to jump the rails of Reaper-directed advancement.  But what exactly happened, and how?  No.

[Velocithon]

Bioware got owned.

[SaladinDheonqar]

Wise words from a wise man. You're lucky to have a prof like that.

[Xenite]

I've said from day one, the entire concept of the ending (Deus Ex Machina) is consider bad writing in general. Why the Bioware writers didn't know this is beyond me, I picked it up in high school.

[shodiswe]

Jassu1979 wrote...

count_4 wrote...

Kudos to your prof. He nailed it.

Emerrgency Induction Porrt! One of my favourite scenes in the game.

That scene is pretty good considering it's just one of those little Normandy side shows