2: The Normandy's Crew: Our hero's loyal companions
3: Mass Effect 3's ending- and how the above make it bad
1: Commander Shepard
"You bested all of them. That's just one reason we chose you."
Commander Shepard is a hero. Now, Shepard has many qualities, but what makes him/her a hero? Is Shepard a hero because he/she is so skilled with weapons, biotics, tech or such? No. Is Shepard a hero because he/she is smart and can persuade almost everyone? That's closer, but not quite it. Shepard is hero for a whole other reason, a reason that TIM saw, the reason why he brought Shepard back to life, the quality that makes Shepard worth more than the army that could have been equipped with the Lazarus founds, the one thing that makes Shepard truly unique:
Shepard is a natural leader unlike everyone the MEU has ever seen before.
TIM is not the only one who recognizes this.
"We were YOUR team, Commander. With the Normandy destroyed and you gone, there wasn't much keeping us together."
Not only has Shepard brought the team together and led it through hell, he/she was also the only thing holding them together. Shepard's death was the end of the resistance against the Reapers. Shepard's resurrection brought it back.
"I don't have what you do - that fire makes someone willing to follow you into hell itself."
In this scene, Miranda explicitely recognizes why Shepard is the hero and not herself, although she may be equally skilled and smart. Miranda is one of the best, she is genetically perfect, received the best training money could buy and is an experienced leader- but she's not a hero.
"Not too different from how you formed your squad to fight Saren, actually. You prove that you get things done and people join up."
Garrus has the same quality on a smaller scale, it's how he set up his team on Omega. However, Garrus fails where Shepard does not. Sidonis betrayed him, a thing that Shepard's crew would never do. To anyone who ever asked for a traitor among the squaddies: It would be bad storytelling. Squadmates don't betray Shepard because making sure that does not happen is part of what makes Shepard a hero.
2: The Normandy's crew
Now there are different kinds of heroes, and as I pointed out above, Shepard's most important quality is leadership, which involves of course people to be lead. Those people are the Normandy's crew and that turned out to be one of the core aspects of Mass Effect as proven by "intense" discussions about those characters and the ocean of fanfic that deals with them. It is part of the nature of our story that those take part in Shepard's heroism: A leader is nothing without his squad, and a squad is nothing without its leader.
Shepard is a hero that needs constant help and backup from others. The fact that those others are well-written characters that invite heavy emotional attachment is an important part of what makes Mass Effect great.
The typical situation is Shepard hanging on a cliff and someone comes to pull him/her up again. It happens all the time. Minor examples are in ME3 on the Geth dreadnought where the elevator collapses or on Thessia when Kai Leng leaves. There are also two major examples: In ME2 in the suicide mission, when you let too many friends die, no one is there to help Shepard back on the Normandy, and he/she is not able to pull back up him/herself, so he/she dies.
"We've got you!"
In the Citadel DLC, it becomes even clearer because hanging from the Normandy, it is the defining difference between Shepard and Shepard's clone about who survives: One tries to be the "lone wolf" (the clone even says so literally earlier) and dies because Shepard can't stand alone. Shepard him/herself has friends who help him/her back up and lives. They really can't make it more obvious: Shepard and the Normandy's crew together write a tale of heroism. Shepard is the best, but that is not enough because he/she stands against the impossible. When others would fall right away, Shepard manages to catch the cliff. Where Shepard would fall alone, the Normandy crew is there to pull Shepard back up. Thanks to Shepard, a group of people accomplishes something that would be impossible without Shepard, but also for Shepard alone. Together with them, there is nothing Shepard can't do. Together with them, Shepard is a hero.
3. Mass Effect 3's ending
Comparison: ME2's ending
This sense of accomplishing the impossible together is invaluable. For example, the Mass Effect 2 ending is superficially not a prime example of genious writing. We shoot our way in there, effectively plant a bomb and rush back out of there. No complex motivations, no plot twists, nothing special really. So why was the suicide mission overwhelmingly well-received? Because it gave us exactly what we want our Shepard to be.
"We don't know how many the Collectors have stolen - thousands, hundreds of thousands. It's not important.What matters is this: Not one more.That's what we can do, here today.It ends with us.They want to know what we're made of ? I say we show them, on our terms. Let's bring our people home!"
Shepard was given a bunch of extremely different individuals: a cold-hearted Cerberus officer, a frustrated ex-soldier, a Salarian scientist, a rogue Turian C-Sec officer, a badass mercenary, a Japanese master thief, a trank-bred Krogan, a notorious criminal biotic, an Asari warrior monk, a religious Drell assassin, a Quarian machinist and an avatar of the Geth consenus. And despite they are so different, even sometimes hostile towards each other (Jack vs. Miranda, Tali vs. Legion) Shepard manages to form the most badass team the galaxy has ever seen out of them, leading them into a suicide mission and returning to tell the tale.
"I'm going to stop the Reapers, but I won't sacrifice the soul of our species to do it."
The best way to enjoy that is keeping your whole team alive and returning with no casualties- because that's what Shepard does. Shepard is the one who always gets the squad on the other side. That's what makes Shepard special.
And now... the ME3 ending.
As I pointed out above, Shepard is a hero and that was made clear in the game all the time, just like it was made clear what kind of hero Shepard is. In case you missed it that far, however, Hackett has got your back:
"When you went up against Sovereign, there was no good reason to believe you'd win. But your crew didn't seem to care. They went along anyway. Your trip through the Omega-4 relay? That was a suicide mission if there ever was one. Yet there your crew was, standing beside you, proud to serve. Why? Because they believed in YOU, their leader! That's what I need now. Where we're taking them is likely to get pretty hairy, and I know you're the one who will get us to the other side."
Even in the very last moment before the ending, the theme is reinforced:
"I can't think of anyone else I'd rather do this with"
Moments after that, our squadmates are gone. Before the EC, they just vanished. Now, we get an evac scene that seems forced and out of place, with no understandable motivation for squadmates to leave, especially for some like Javik who does not care if he lives or dies, depending on your dialogue choice earlier he may be planning to die anyway even if he survived. However, that's not the main problem. The problem is the fact that the writers decided to have the squad leave altogether. By removing Shepard's crew, Shepard's heroism is gone with them. It doesn't thematically fit into the trilogy that Shepard could get this done alone. Shepard is not a hero that can pull him/herself back up the cliff without help. Alone, Shepard falls. And that is why the crew should not have left. Without them, Shepard should have fallen in the ending. Yet something completely different happens. Something worse.
"I am the Catalyst."
No "character" in Mass Effect ever received that much hate- and rightfully so. It is one of the core problems with the ending and most others revolve around it. After it briefly introduces itself as the mastermind of the Reapers, that means the one we are supposed to be fighting, it quickly invaluates the Crucible, the only sign of Shepard's heroism still present, as "little more than a power source" and the fact that the key component of the Crucible is supposed to be this Catalyst itself, meaning that all we did was worth nothing without the generous help of the Reapers. That's somewhere between bad and insulting, and it gets worse and worse. After Destroy is quickly invalidated to everyone who is attached to EDI and the Geth, it presents us two other options, Control and Synthesis.
The Catalyst offers Shepard to make a deal with the Reapers- and Shepard listens and considers it.
This, in my opinion, is probably the worst insult to our hero Shepard they could have come up with. No matter if we want it or not, our Shepard listens to the Catalyst, making only very weak arguments him/herself ("That's beside the point" followed by silence - how incredibly smart, Shepard). Then, we either accept a deal with the Reapers or we wipe out all our synthetic friends, 3 options granted by our enemy out of generosity and we may pick one. We were supposed to spit any "deal" they might offer us back in their faces because we don't need them. We were supposed to stand together and show them we are not insignificant. Yet Mass Effect 3's ending shows us we are. If we manage to ignore the way Shepard behaves in front of the Catalyst and try to be a hero anyway, we just get a "you lose" as an answer. Remember this:
"This war has brought us pain and suffering and loss. But it's also brought us together, as soldiers, allies, friends. This bond that ties us together is something the Reapers will never understand. It's more powerful than any weapon. Stronger than any ship. It can't be taken or destroyed."
This is what we wanted to do. We wanted to show that Shepard, together with his/her crew, can conquer the reapers. We wanted to use this heroism, this thing the Reapers will never understand, and it was supposed to be our ultimate victory. Instead, Shepard was left alone, all heroism was stripped from him/her, and we get to choose one of 3 options provided by the enemy we were supposed to defeat.
And that is, in my opinion, one of the two most important reasons why Mass Effect 3's ending was bad.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think.
Modifié par Argolas, 14 mai 2013 - 05:23 .
Retour en haut
offers three "solutions" to you. 
