Ah yes, Dekuuna. This was easily one of the most underwhelming moments of Mass Effect 3. I feel the need to tell the whole story exactly as it happened, since I was struck by how much of a let down it was.
Prior to speaking to the Elcor Ambassador, I had already scanned all available planets (being the obsessive-compulsive completionist that I am), and thus had already visited Dekuuna. After speaking with him about his planet, I ran back to the Normandy as fast as Shepard's legs could carry him (incidentally, not terribly fast at all).
I traveled back to Dekuuna, and proceeded to ping it with my scan. When that yielded no result, I ran my scanner over every last inch of the planet, desperately looking for the telltale white blip marking the opportunity to finally get a proper look at the Elcor homeworld. Imagine my surprise when I discovered nothing whatsoever. No anomaly, no chance to launch a probe, nothing.
Feeling more than a little deflated, I trudged back to the ambassador. Upon reaching him, I found that I had already completed the supposed rescue on my first fly-over, and was thus done with the "quest". Needless to say, I was annoyed.
Frankly, it is moments like these that have a lasting negative impact on me, perhaps even more so than the endings. With the endings, I now know that Bioware is at least attempting to reconcile their vision of the story with mine. Whether they accomplish that or not, there was an effort made.
With little elements, such as Dekuuna, there is a sense of the issue being glazed over. The inclusion of a real mission here could have added to the waning value of this game. Instead, I remember many of the side-quests as frustratingly limited. There was a sense of having moved backwards, rather than progressing, as a series logically should from one installment to the next.
This fits in well with drayfish's eloquently worded observation on the core of the Mass Effect series. Exploration, or the feeling of wonderment at setting foot on new frontiers, meeting new people and blazing new trails, is what so powerfully drove the original Mass Effect. I was one of the few who actually enjoyed the Mako, to a certain extent (it handled in a similar fashion to a drunk Rhinoceros), for the simple fact that I could land it on so many planets. I lost count of the number of times I stopped to look up and around at the scenery. Despite how often the view was relatively barren, I still felt that sense of awe at being immersed in such a beautiful universe.
Mass Effect 2 managed to capture some of this essence in spite of its paradigm shift from a somewhat "fringe RPG" to a "AAA commercial success". We still landed on planets, we still had a variety of hub worlds to explore and get into trouble on. Even better, DLC expanded upon the original Mako concept, refining it into the Hammerhead (the fact the Hammerhead was made of tissue paper aside, of course); in particular, the planet Aite from Project Overlord was an astonishingly lovely location. However, there was a tangible sense that exploration, in the sense of Mass Effect 1 (planetary exploration), had taken a back-seat to action.
What Mass Effect 2 introduced, at least to me, was a fascinating remedy: instead of allowing us to explore the reaches of the universe, we were invited to delve into the minds of our companions. Our crew in Mass Effect 2 doubled in size. Amazingly, every one of those dozen was given a unqiue story, a unique way of approaching life. We lost the Mako, but we gained a squad. The deep conversations we had with characters like Samara and Thane staved off the bitterness that some of us felt toward the "streamlining" of Mass Effect 2. It didn't matter that we had fewer vistas to run over every inch of, because we were afforded a meaningful alternative. We learned to care about the galaxy not just for the chance to travel its width and set foot on new soil, but also for the lives of the people we came to care about. This was present in Mass Effect 1, certainly, but 2 truly hammered home the importance of "our" characters.
Which leads us to Mass Effect 3.
In this game, the wonderment from both previous games is...simply gone. The pioneering spirit that carried us forward to do battle with Saren and the Collectors has vanished, replaced by the gunmetal grey of war, replete with all the violently chaotic rushing about to save the galaxy. Illium, Virmire, and Omega have been cut down to the Citadel, the lone "hub" we are allowed to explore unmolested. In nearly every location we find ourselves, desloation and desperation hang overhead like a black cloud.
Even on the gorgeous landscapes of Sur'Kesh and Tuchanka (the old city), Reapers loom in the background. We are rarely given a moment to catch our breath. Those long pauses, where we would stand back and look up at stars, simply have no place in this game. We are always running toward the "ultimate goal", always pushing forward to the inevitable confrontation with the Reapers. There was no
time for us to take a step back and simply
look, not in the way that this arc of the story was presented. That pains me a great deal.
The same unfortunate truth holds for the crew interactions as well. We are given precious few moments with our friends and cohorts, far less than in the previous game. Adding insult to injury, our "conversations" were forced down two extreme paths. We were no longer given the option of stopping to explore our squadmates. Each "talk" felt as though it ended before it had truly begun. They were still emotionally engaging, especially those involving LIs, but many people (myself included) felt the bite of the "Kasumi/Zaeed Effect". We weren't truly getting to know these people anymore, the interaction largely boiled down to a short reprieve from the cloying responsiblity of finding a means to survive. Matters were not improved by the unfitting treatment that many of the Mass Effect cast recieved, both former squadmates and some of the more popular minor characters.
Which I suppose brings me to the end of my rambling. Mass Effect 3 was billed as a game hinged on the goal of saving a galaxy worth saving. It was, but only because of the investment that I carried over from the first two games. This installment tried to get by largely by merit of its action. Most moments in the game were related quite directly to foiling the Reapers. Some of these moments worked, some fell flat. I would suggest that those which
did resonate with the community were those which toned down the war rhetoric and built upon the relationships we had forged throughout the trilogy, as well as the planets and peoples connected to those relationships. I cared about Tuchanka because I cared about Wrex, about Mordin, and had a sincere desire to right the wrong of the Genophage. I cared about Rannoch because Tali was my friend, and I wished nothing more than to find a way to end the bitter rift between her people and the Geth, one which could give her the chance to build that house her father promised her.
If I were someone who were just dropped into this universe, without any sense of context of backstory, I would find little reason to care about what happens to everyone. This would just be "
another one of those save the world stories and blah, blah, blah. I'll just shoot stuff until nothing shoots back anymore. Oh look, those relays thingies are gone, ah well." Thing is, I can't blame people like this. Mass Effect 3 just does not provide the same level of...investment...or immersion that the other two did. This is why it works as a stand-alone title, and simultaneously fails as part of a trilogy. There simply isn't enough of the universe
there to get a real grasp of
why you should care about saving it, so new players are hardly surprised or upset by the sheer havoc the endings wreak on "our" galaxy.
Likewise, this betrayal of all that we have come to value makes loyal fans of the whole series rightfully furious. We feel as though we were cast aside to make room for a new crowd of fans. Ironically, those fans are of the notoriously fickle kind, those who rarely form a lasting bond with a story. The endings play out in light of all this, ignoring a fair portion of the previously established narrative foundation from Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.
In some ways, I feel as though I got another recycled FPS title, complete with the dreadfully nihilistic message of "War is hell". Yes, I understand that. I have seen and heard that mantra repeated oft enough to be capable of hearing it in my sleep. But this story was not only about war in and of itself. Moreover, it was about what comes
after the war is over, what the people I saved do with their freedom.
That is what I was fighting for,
who I was fighting for.
Whew, that was a very long post. Someone mentions Dekuuna, and I take the liberty of tossing out a convoluted rant. Goes to show just how hopelessly attatched to this story I am. Hope you can all make some sense of the jumble of thoughts.
Also, pardon the overuse of commas -- my grammar skills have not sharpened noticably despite the best efforts of my professors. I'm more than slightly self-conscious, considering I
am in a thread chock full of academics.
Modifié par MrAtomica, 11 mai 2012 - 03:48 .
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