iakus wrote...
...
Both Shepard and the galaxy sacrificed plenty even in the most optimal playthroughs. The Crucible is nothing but an arbitrary trageddy machine so even more angst can be dumped onto a mediocre story. The Crucible could have done practically anything, could be calibrated as specifically as they wanted.
...
That's a good point. None of the "tragic" outcomes possible from the ending sequence flow naturally or necessarily from the narrative of the game or from the trilogy. For that matter, neither do the "good" effects.
If you believe that the Crucible will allow you to defeat the reapers, you're probably expecting it to send some kind of signal that disables or weakens them locally, like the Leviathans did. You probably expect it to turn the tide of the battle. You almost certainly did not ride the beam up to the Citadel expecting to wind up with a chain of space magic explosions, nor did you expect to encounter the Mother of All Reapers in the form of the Catalyst.
If the elements you write into the final act of your script are arbitrary, if the entire sequence represents a massive shift in the narrative, if your outcome is driven by new characters you're pulling out of your backside simply to force the story into an end state, then you should probably avoid breaking the world, killing the protagonist, or in any other way limiting your ability to come back later and do it right.
If you have not, in the course of your narative, ever linked the fate and well being of two different characters, it is silly to come along at the end of the story and state that lilling one with somehow--without explanation--also kill the other one.
If you have not, in the course of the narrative, ever even posited the idea of using a biological element like DNA to provide an intelligent machine with organic properties, or to modify an organism on the molecular level to eliminate the need for AI, then introducing this as the solution to your central genocide plot is a bad idea.
If you have not, in the course of the narrative, introduced a god-like being that created and controls the entire army of almost god-like beings that are threatening everyone everywhere with etermination, it is a bad idea to--at the last moment--solve the conflict by simply allowing your protagonist to replace that god-like being with himself. Stories of apotheosis usually use it as a way to ameliorate the tragedy of the death of a sympathetic character, which occurs for reasons which flow natrually from the preceeding narrative.
In other words, if you're going to end your story with a deus ex machina and an incomprehensible resolution which you and the protagonist can only have knowledge of by virtue of a new character telling you, in general terms, what is happening, then whatever the outcome is cannot be other than arbitrary, capricious, and meaningless. If the best you can offer under the circumstances is an arbitrary and capricious ending to the story, there is no reason to also make it unpleasant.
Retour en haut
