@sdinc009
Thanks for the kind words. Aye, I dropped the ball a little on a few of the points of my post, but in fairness, I had done a 9 hour work shift, with an hour either end travel, got home at 11 pm, and it was 1 am when I wrote this!
Like you I have a hate, and I hate when folk talk about great art being rubbish. You can like or dislike it, that is your inalienable right that I will defend ferociously, but what makes it great is not up for disagreement because the criteria are historical, thematic, and in execution of the painting – the way the paint was mixed was new, it wasn't painted on wet plaster but on wood for the first time, they used chiaroscuro effects for the first time (making light glow out of the darkness- Caravaggio I think). Something was very greatly innovative about that painting, that artist, and it has worked for all time since it was done.
Mass Effect series was innovative, was that new genre of almost an interactive novel we could live in and experience, with our decisions mattering on the outcome. Until the very last part of ME3. Then they threw their "artistic integrity" out the window, in my opinion by inventing a god-like intervention and restricting our choices to try and force us in one direction only.
Themes through ME 3 are right from the get-go, fighting indoctrination, hope, standing together, making alliances, all old grouses forgotten to fight on the same side against a bigger foe. Kill the Reapers in other words. Yes, gray decisions, like helping Aria unite the 3 gangs under her leadership for one. Leaving the last Rachni queen to die because of loyalty to Grunt.
Suddenly, at the end, it doesn't matter any more. Our focus is magically shifted from Kill the Reapers to Placate the star-kid who IS a Reaper! You what??? Suddenly out of the blue you want me to do a 180 and negotiate with these things you have had me strive to kill through 3 games. Kill, not negotiate with as you have shown again and again ALL they do is lie and Indoctrinate any organics, and some like the Geth, to their purpose of reaping us??
Suddenly the theme is it is Right and Proper to commit mass Genocide and destroy the baby and bath water just in case in the far future something bad might be done by one of those races. Excuse me? I am fighting for now and the foreseeable future! I am not a glowy god-stick, I cannot see what might happen in 50,000 years. I should have expected this after the ending of Dragon Age 2. I was forced into Kill all Mages, they might become Blood Mages... Same thing here.
All I know is that now we have broken your pattern, we are ALL standing together against you, organics and synthetics, we did it, so GET THE HELL OUTTA OUR GALAXY!
Where is the integrity in your endings? Where is the common sense in this? THIS is why we are so angry! You give us an enemy to fight, then at the last minute you tell us Negotiate and Accept one of the 4 (not 16) artificial endings we give you, or "Game Over" as they said in Aliens.
Did Ripley ever give in to the aliens? No. Did she stop fighting them, even when cloned and they had also magically and impossibly gotten a queen from her DNA, who birthed the next alien form? Nope! She let it get nastily sucked out a small hole in the ship's window due to decompression, into space.
Man, that was bitter sweet, you couldn't help but feel her pain and sorrow at doing it, but she did it and you cheered! And that is what we want.
That is the Integrity here, delivering what you promised us – a satisfying end to the Reapers, not a poor idea, bad writing and a 180 shift in whole game focus so suddenly the ultimate bad guys are now to be trusted and we must take one of their choices, and then provide out own imaginations to the ultimate ending because your imaginations are so lacking. And that is what we are fighting here for, Integrity, our contract with you – because when we buy a game based on your hype you are creating a contract with us, one you failed to fulfill by giving us an ending that fit the game.
I am beginning to feel that toward the end of making ME3 that someone forced the focus of the whole game onto the Multiplayer end of it, and an ending for the SP game was scraped together. It sure plays like that! You even try to sweeten it by saying MP affects the outcome of the SP campaign. Nope, not by that much. It's the stick and carrot – play MP and get hooked then SP doesn't matter so much.
As a footnote, did anyone else catch the owner of the Apollo Café in the Presidium after the attack say that he lost a member of staff to it, and Liara's Dad is missing? I assumed it meant she died but like so much, it was never clarified either.
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