The Night Mammoth wrote...
Mass Effect has never really had a terribly good overall story. In it's most basic terms, sure, it sounds pretty interesting, but in reality it's never been great.
BioWare excel at characterization. Why do I think ME2 has the best story? Derp, it's because of the characters. There are heaps, each is interesting in their own way, and the great think about that game in particular was that you could ignore characters you disliked (in my case Jack), and cultivate a more meaningful relationship with those that you did (Garrus, Thane, everyone else except Jack, really).
Now, Mass Effect 3 did a half decent job with a lot of characters by weaving them into the overall narrative. Basically, I'm talking about Tuchanka and Rannoch. With the former, you had Mordin/Wiks, Wrex/Wreave, and Bakara, and with the former it was Tali, Legion (or his stand in), and the Admirals.
Every other character felt left out except Liara, EDI, Miranda (kind of) and at least partly the Virmire Survivor, during the story. A few missions here and there caused pretty much the entire cast of the last game besides Shepard to be reduced to a cameo. Part of that is a lack of squadmates, another being partly due to a lack of any character-centric 'loyalty' missions, and another part being amuch higher concentration on the over-arching plot rather than the specific parts of it.
That last part is especially prevalent in the ending. Yes, I'm going there again. BioWare took their eye off the ball, as it were. It seems they decided not to concentrate on saving this cycle, these species, and these characters, and turned Shepard's conflict into a fight for the entirety of organic existence with some bull**** ass-pull plot change - the Catalyst's problem.
Now, I don't know about you, but playing as a Paragon Shepard who romanced Liara, arguably the character with the most screen-time besides the Commander herself, this battle was not a simple fight for survival, to end the Reapers cycle of destruction. It was a fight to save Shepard's friends, to save this incarnation of advanced life. Shepard would not do that by sacrificing everything that made them fight in the first place, she says as much a few times. Something along the lines of "and I'll do it without sacrificing the soul of our species", to the Illusive Man, probably at the end of ME2 after you destroy the Collector Base.
You could argue that every choice you make could have that motivation, but I'm sorry, Shepard would not, WOULD NOT, choose any of these options. They all have you commit some sort of attrocity, or have you basically agree with the villain whom you potentially just convinced to shoot himself, since he was F*CKING INDOCTRINATED.
TL;DR - If BioWare wanted this to be a grand and epic struggle for the existence of life itself then they shouldn't have concentrated on such a wide range of characters, factions, and allies, with so much death. They shouldn't have created the Mass Effect universe with the amount of detail and care that they did.
OMG, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Finally someone said it... Mass Effect was not the greatest story ever.
To the second bold part... they seemed to forgot that if Shepard stops the Reapers and saves this cycle and these characters. Guess what by defualt you save the ones after it from Reapers too - there really is no need even mention the whole "organic vs synthetic" problem which we solved 2 hours prior...<_<
Mac Walters committed character assassination in the greatest sense at the end of the game. You are right Shepard choose niether of these... its like he as the lead writer did not understand anything about the character he was writing.
Mass Effect did not need the turned into this grand struggle for the existence of life in the ending because that is something that is usually reflected on after the grand struggle. I can point out several stories, games and shows when it boiled down the grand struggle for life but the characters driving motivations have always been more personal that ties them to the greater struggle..
More importantly Mass Effect 3 ending fails a Bittersweet ending because it lacks the personal connection where we can see the effects not only Shepard but the people around him/her.
Modifié par nitefyre410, 01 mai 2012 - 07:01 .
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