Tyeme Downs wrote...
Great, lets have a conversation. I hope my previous post atleast cleared up why the colors are aligned with their respective choices for you.
No doubt, Shepard had victories against the Reapers. In ME1 and 2, Shepard was dealing with a single Reaper trying to be crafty in each case. In ME3, Shepard is dealing with Reapers in force. It's a different situation. Against massed Reapers using brute force, we simpely can not win a convential war. Thus, the Crucible.
Against Cerberus, Shepard had that glorious fight in Cerberus HQ. Except, Cerberus is a conventional enemy. The Reapers are not. We can not expect the same kind of fight against Reapers that we had against Cerberus, or the Collectors, or Saren.
The fight your asking for came against Reaper forces before reaching the Citadel. The Citadel, Catalyst, and Crucible are as much the prologue as they are the final decision. Just reaching that point was defying the impossible. After all, Shepard is the first organic to reach the Catalyst.
I think the choices we are given actually fit the story. This is not a happy story after all. We lose atleast one crew member in ME1. We have the potential to lose more in ME2. We see people being liquified. We understand the horror of what the Reapers did to the Protheans.
In ME3, we are at war for our very existance against an enemy that is far beyond us in scale, longetivity, and technology. Sad stories abound in the background. Jokers' sister is killed by the Asari in the hospital. The refugee girl waiting for her parents in the refugee camp. The boy who lost his mother in Tali's loyalty mission and his father on Rannoch. Samura and her daughters. Ashley and her brother-in-law.
I think the endings choices were fitting. Moral choices requiring sacrifice. Remember Shepards N7 conversation with James Vega? Shepard didn't get the choices we perhaps wanted or that we feel Shepards life deserved, but we have a final choice.
Should all of Shepards previous choices affect the outcome? Well, if you only got to play the game once, or read it as a story, you'd assume those choices got you to this point. On the flipside, this is the final act for each of your Shepards. You, the player, should try to make the choice each of your Shepards would make. It should be based not on your preferance, but the characters as played. If their was a destroy the reapers only choice...where would the moral dilema be?
I will admit being dismayed a bit when I first did an ending. I had to think about it...alot. I had to look at it not only from the characters point of view, but the writers as well. The DLC helped.
Could the DLC have been better? Yes. You wanted to see the war. The Catalyst should have shown Shepard the war before the choice was made. Outside the Crucible, Reapers destroying the great fleet as it tried to protect the Crucible. Ships crews being sucked into space. Miranda watching a Reaper fighter destroy her wingman. Earth...Grunt and Wrex falling back as their units are being destroyed. Jack, bloody and crying with one of her dead students in her arms. Palavin and Thessia.....reaper forces collecting the dead for processing.
Shepard, head bowed, tears and anguish. Shepard must choose or reject.
The Catalyst is insane..to answer that question. The green choice is one the insane Catalyst created. It wiped out it's creators, perverting it's mission with the creation of the Reapers. Synthesis is it's solution to the possiblity that organics could one day defeat the reapers.
Control and destruction were the Catalysts' creators solution. That's why they are built in stations, not part of the power stream like Synthesis. A station to reassert control of the Catalyst, and one to destroy it (failsafe). The AI they built and lost control of. The AI that built the reapers that destroyed them.
All is not explicitly stated. We, the player are left to try to fill in the blanks. Like any good story, we must use our imagination. We must figure what the writer was trying to tell us. People still discuss Oedipus, The Iliad, and Hamlet.
Thanks for that, it's clear that you've thought about the ending. But the ending is anti-climactic. Everything up until this point led us to believe that we were going to defeat the Reapers, that we were going to save the galaxy.
Assembling the largest force the galaxy ever saw, Javik commentated that one of the reasons his cycle failed was because of the hegemony of the Prothean Empire. That gave us hope.
All the Paragon interrupts Shepard had when people were despairing about the Reapers. That gave us hope.
All the promises Shepard made to his/her LI, squadmates, and crew, about what they would do after the war. That gave us hope.
"We wouldn't do it any other way. How could you go through all three campaigns playing as your Shepard and then be forced into a bespoke ending that everyone gets?" -Mike Gamble.
"It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C." -Casey Hudson.
I also read another quote somewhere - 'There won't simply be a 'Reaper off-switch''
All the trailers that were released, "Take Back Earth!" "Form alliances!" "Assemble the largest fighting force the galaxy has ever known!"
At no point in the game, in the series, was there ever a sense of "No stepping back. No retreat. No way-out. No defeating the Reapers. Repeat. No defeating the Reapers. People die. Everyone Dies."
"And if they don't?"
"SAY AGAIN?"
"..."
"EXACTLY!"
***SPOILERS FOR RED DEAD REDEMPTION BELOW***
In the ending of Red Dead Redemption, the protaganist, Jon Marston, dies. But most people liked the ending. It was sad, but most people liked it. Why? We'll if anyone doesn't care about the end and is reading this anyway, I'll give you the plot. The game takes place in Texas/Mexico, in the early 1900s, the final days of the 'Dying West'. Jon Marston is an ex-Outlaw who used to run in a gang. In a robbery that went sour, he was left for dead by his posse. He was captured and arrested by the government. They offered Jon a chance at freedom, If he became a bounty hunter and helped bring down his former partners in crime, he would be pardoned. If not, his family's safety would be jeopardized. Through the whole game is filled with negative themes: the corruption of politics, the cruelty of criminals and people, etc. The protaganist himself is very pessimistic about his situation, and there is always a sense of 'You can't run from your past', 'Consequences will catch up with you'. This is amplified even more near the end of the game when he runs into his old gang leader, Dutch Van Der Linde.
The point is, the player was expecting this to happen. The game stayed true to its theme(s) and reached a satisfying, climactic conclusion.
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Mass Effect was never like that. Mass Effect was about unity, diversity, and working together, working together under one person - Commander Shepard, to complete the impossible. I don't think sacrafice was ever a major theme in the game. If the galaxy defeat the Reapers, conventionally, it would be devastated. Hundreds of millions of lives would have be lost, maybe more. We didn't need a final choice with what I think are very unnecessary consequences to prove that.
And I don't think Bioware intended the Reapers to be invincible, because frankly, having an enemy that is invincible and can only be stopped solely by a Deus Ex Machina is very bad writing. It's as if a completely different writing team was chosen to create the ending.
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