Fapmaster5000 wrote...
Imagine further, this Shepard, who never activates Legion, who never trusts EDI, who chooses the Quarians over the geth, or the geth for their raw power (but never trusts them), as he staggers towards the Catalyst, the fear and weight of an era crushing down on him, trying to drive the machines back, back into the void. The Catalyst speaks to this Shepard, and says, "This problem is not unique. You are not the victim. This is an inherent function of the cycle, and your solutions will not succeed."
For this Shepard, Synthesis might be revelation, a sudden flare of light in the black, a desperate, terrible gamble to escape a world of constant antagonism and fear between two alien existences. For this Shepard, the price of the physical Synthesis might be worth the gains, if this is indeed the last open window from a doomed hall.
Well said. Snipped for size and not for awesome quotient.
However, since I'm predisposed to playing spoiler, wouldn't such a Shepard be more inclined to pick Destroy, with her fears of synthetics merely confirmed by the Catalyst, and thereby forewarned and forearmed against future uprisings? Would such a Shepard not be ecstatic for a means to end the threat from beyond, with the only casualties being those she could not trust to begin with?
I came to this thought a while after the game came out, when I noticed that many of those who despised the endings played pure Paragon, or close to it, and I have to wonder if the ending is only so jarring to those of us who played Shepard as a true hero, and not an anti-hero or villain protagonist. It would be interesting to run a comparison of "what was Shepard's alignment", "how completionist are you", and "how did you react to the ending". We might get some surprising results.
Then I might surprise you. My Shepards fall within a narrow range between paragade and renegon. Full paragon is a path of cringe-worthy, stilted hero-speak and facepalm-inducing naivete. Full renegade is realist realpolitik punctuated by counterproductive psychopathy. I can't stand either extreme long enough to have my Shepard(s) espouse such nonsense.
My geth were dead at the quarians' hands, a victim of only my lack of sufficient reputation at Tali's trial*. Still, when told the cost of Destroy, I flinched. Then I cursed the devs for trying so very hard to make the decision difficult for no reason good enough for me. Then, I limped towards the middle beam, hoping their space magic would prove useful in some capacity**. Despite my failure on Rannoch, I couldn't accept the necessity of synthetic genocide put forth by Starbrat (and, by extention, the devs themselves).
Then I saw the green-tinted version of the ending cutscene, and existential rage ensued.
* I didn't have quite high enough a reputation score during Tali's trial to exonerate her without revealing her father's negligence. It pissed me off to no end that I had no recourse to my larger understanding, that I couldn't appeal to Xen's technolust or Garrell's warmongering, but relied upon the red/blue I-win buttons. That this lack was perpetuated and expounded on Rannoch was unforgivable.
** I fully recognize the intensely problematic nature of the Synthesis option. It was ten in the morning, I'd been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and I wanted the farce over and done with. I was hoping they'd have something more coherent, somehow, magically, than they did.
Retour en haut
