*This is likely to be the part that is most irrelevant to you, actually, since I'm fairly sure everything I'll say has been said before.
Our Epic Story:
Read a review from a professional gaming site and the story of Mass Effect will most often be cited as its biggest strength, its defining feature, the reason it is so great, and the reason we should ignore all the other little problems the game has. Sorry to say, there’s too many problems with it to justify that.
The one caveat to that statement is that ME1 has a completely fine story. There’s nothing wrong with it – so long as it is viewed in isolation. Almost everything is wrapped up at the end – except for a hint that Shepard must continue to find a way to stop the eventual Reaper invasion. This is odd, because presumably if the Reapers are out in the Void and the Citadel Relay isn’t active, they’d have to physically fly there under their own power, which would take forever. Also, defeating them would require them not being the Robot Space Chthulus they proclaim to be. I don’t deny that defeating them would ultimately be a suitable ending, only that the enemy remains sufficiently powerful and threatening such that only a truly heroic and unlikely effort could stop them – none of that “conventional victory” crap some of the haters of ME3’s ending wish they could achieve. However, a continual problem with how this is set up is that the Reapers should presumably take far longer to reach the Milky Way than they do – unless their engines are mini mass relays or something, but if that’s the case the game needs to explain how they travel so quickly and if that’s the case, why they even needed Sovereign in the first place.
So what should ME2 be? Well, here’s the thing: if it’s the middle act, then this should be the part where our heroes hatch their plan, so to speak. This is where we prepare for the Reaper invasion – in ME3, we actually fight them. But does this happen? NOPE.
ME2 is frequently cited as the best game of the series. Ironically, its main storyline is not only barebones and kind of contrived, but the entire game is effectively a sidequest that does nothing but assure Shepard cannot prepare to fight the Reapers in the time between ME2 and ME3, thus putting the Galaxy in a royally fucked position. It’s honestly not the kind of thing you base the entirety of the game around, especially if you’re not also going to fulfill the Second-Act Requirements of a three-act story. Things that were in ME3 like Leviathan, the Crucible, Javik etc should all be in the second act as exposition of the story and preparation for Act 3. This doesn’t happen. In fact, things that would be important to the main story like the Derilect Reaper and the weapon that destroyed it are casually mentioned and dealt with no further investigation as if Shepard has forgotten the Reapers are coming. Instead most of the game is basically in the format of an episodic TV series, with a bunch of only very loosely connected missions each with their own subplot and relevant characters and only a few episodes dealing with the actual overarching plot which is rather simple. I don’t object to this being a way to make a Mass Effect game, but I do object to it in this case because of the way it was handled. See, the subplots all have to do with finding characters and putting them on your team, and then going on a mission of personal importance to each character. These missions are good in their own right (well, most of them) and they do a lot for building these characters the game wants you to care about, but virtually none of these missions have anything to do with the main plot - which as I already said is an largely irrelevant sidequest – and as they say, the clock is ticking. I get that the player would need to do some exploration but spending all this time recruiting soldiers for a sidequest of little importance instead of finding ways to combat Reapers is the height of folly and it makes no logical sense for Shepard, who vowed in ME1 to find a way to stop the Reapers, to drop that idea and run around finding people and doing errands for them.
ME2 also introduces two concepts to us that are supposed to have significance in ME3. One does, and one does not. The one that does is the revelation that the Reapers are actually Cyborgs, with organic parts manufactured from the literal flesh of an organic species. The science about how this is done is never explained – I could buy it if it was explained adequately but it isn’t, and thus comes off as fantastical and also, contradictory. ME1 established the Reapers were machines, their minds being hyper-advanced AIs. ME2 blatantly contradicts what its direct predecessor said and turns them into cyborgs. There is no excuse for this discrepancy, it is simply a case that Bioware changed its mind about what it wanted the Reapers to be AFTER they had already created ME1, indicating that they DID NOT plan out this trilogy beforehand and simply made it up as they went along; the pointless nature of the story of ME2 is further proof of this. This is a fundamental problem with the way the series was created and I’m not sure exactly why it wasn’t planned out beforehand. It’s possible Bioware didn’t know if they would be making a sequel but that doesn’t excuse contradicting your own narrative. If it’s already set in stone you have to live with it or you will have to come up with something contrived to explain the discrepancy – and ME2 doesn’t even attempt that beyond having Harbinger allude to it with his dialogue. But that doesn’t explain Sovereign’s dialogue then. See what happens when you don’t plan ahead?
The other concept alluded to is that strange things are occurring as a result of Dark Energy influence. Now any physicist would tell you the effects don’t make any sense but I don’t think Bioware’s writers ever consulted a scientist on anything they put in their games. As we now know this was supposed to be the hook for the original purpose of the Reapers: to build an armada of Reapers, each imbued with the very nature of the species they are created from (being cyborgs now, apparently), and to combine their intellect and ability to find a way to literally bend the universe to their will and stop Dark Energy from causing its heat death. Apparently biotics speed up the process of heat death although it doesn’t really make sense how they cause Universal Dark energy to increase – that’s not a well explained point. Regardless, the final dilemma for Shepard at the end of ME3 was supposed to be either Shepard destroys the Reapers and risks the universe being doomed to heat death, or let the Reapers carry out their plan, dooming you and everyone you know but perhaps ultimately saving the universe. Since these hypothetical events would happen so far in the future and the Reapers are known to trick people, it is entirely up to the player whether they believe the Reapers are telling the truth.
This idea was ditched. Why I have no idea. But what it was replaced with is a fuckup of epic proportions that caused the most hate and vitriol I’ve ever seen about a video game story. ME3’s ending, following a relatively solid plotline awkwardly interspersed with Shepard making up for lost preparation time, ME2 having wasted the opportunity, is bad. It just is. I recall that after the Extended Cut I used to defend it on this site but I no longer do. It’s very poorly told, utilizes two Deorum Ex Machinae at once, one of which is also a MacGuffin (which is even worse since it’s a background MacGuffin that doesn’t take an active part in most of the story), results in a jarring tonal shift that makes the entire sequence feel wrong, eliminates all sense of character traits from Shepard causing him to act like a mindless drone, and finally executes the endings via an extremely video-gamey, unbelievable mechanic. The endings themselves don’t make any sense because the mechanics behind them aren’t explained.
To be honest ME3 was told the way ME2 should have been – a bunch of necessary sidequests integral to the main plot that both tie into it but also have interesting self-contained subplots. This is the good part. It has three major flaws: Cerberus, the ending, which I’ll explain in more detail later, and the Crucible, which I’ll explain now. The Crucible is the Mega Weapon of Doom that will kill all the Reapers. It was fairly obvious to anyone that such a MacGUffin would be needed since the Reapers can’t be defeated normally, but the way it is introduced and functions in the story is badly done. The game tries to get us to believe that the Crucible is being built even though no one actually understands the instructions exactly or how it works. This is frankly impossible given the tech involved – understanding would be required to build a device that can manipulate the Mass Relay network. Granted, no one knows how those work either, but that’s the function of the 2nd Act – to find out. So we know how to build the weapon of doom, which we should have found earlier. Oh wait, Act 2 was a bunch of dicking around, so now we have to shoehorn its discovery not just into a convenient timeframe (right before the Reapers attack) but also in a convenient and again, unbelievable location: Mars. There is no ****** way that you went to the Mars archives and found all the info you need to get to the Charon relay and build FTL drives yet never noticed the blueprints for the giant weapon of doom or records of the Reapers. That’s ludicrous. Furthermore, why would these plans be on Mars anyway? It was a surveillance post not a construction site or a research lab. The people working there would have had nothing to do with the whole thing, so why would they have blueprints for it?
The Crucible’s actual functionality is more a problem with the ending so I’ll get to that in another section. Cerberus is another problem. I never mentioned the problems with forcing the player to join Cerberus in ME2 before because, well it’s kind of obvious. Also I forgot, and it didn’t fit with what I was talking about (see? I’m already getting sidetracked and ****. I knew this would turn into a rambling mess). It’s extremely out of character, whether Paragon or Renegade, to simply go along with TIM because he says so. It’s also illogical that TIM would bring back to life someone who would probably kill him given the chance, and it’s furthermore illogical for Shepard to even be alive anyway given the contrived forced-reset of the game’s universe allowed by his death at the beginning of the game. The player cannot directly oppose Cerberus in ME2 even though by all rights Shepard should be hostile and trying to hunt them down. I can understand letting the player CHOOSE to work with TIM, but forcing them to do so doesn’t create a morally grey situation, it just feels hamfisted and forced.
It gets worse in ME3 because TIM somehow becomes convinced he should be trying to control the Reapers rather than destroy them. However he has nothing to prove he can do this so where the idea came from is anyone’s guess. You could argue he’d already been indoctrinated before the game even starts, but that would imply the Reapers can’t figure out an intelligent way of utilizing his resources for their own gain, because Cerberus is employed in utterly ridiculous ways. We don’t actually know at what point TIM becomes indoctrinated – if it’s from the very beginning, then you could try to pass off Cerberus’ actions as simply the Reapers using them as more cannon fodder, though they still do it in immensely stupid ways. If it’s not until later, say Thessia, then TIM turns into an utter illogical moron that is completely out of character for the first 2/3rds of the game, since the way he deploys his forces is guaranteed to make him lose and also doesn’t help his cause. The Citadel Coup to this day does not make any sense – there is no reason given or inferred as to why Cerberus attempted it nor how they planned to win. Nor does it make any sense at all why Udina helped them – and Bioware themselves don’t even seem to care. They pass around a half-assed ‘maybe he was indoctrinated’ comment and leave it at that, as if they know they just made a bunch of crap up without thinking it through but were too full of themselves to admit it was a mistake and take it out of the game.
The Ending:
Finally we have the ending, and there’s some elements of the ending that don’t make sense before you even get to the beam run, such as why the Citadel is there. It’s the stupidest thing you could possibly do. The Citadel can be locked up to prevent anyone from getting in, but if you put it next to planet and hook a teleporter beam up to it, then your enemy can get inside. The Citadel being moved to Earth is simply a contrivance to A) Have a fight on Earth for no reason other than that it’s Earth; and B So you can actually get into it easily. Even then though, why the Reapers don’t shut the teleporter off once the Galactic fleet shows up is up to interpretation – though I’m pretty sure it’s just “We can’t think of another way to do it so even though it makes no sense we’ll let Shepard get to the Citadel this way no matter how stupid the Reapers would have to be to actually allow him to do so”. This is further made dumber by the fact that, conveniently, Harbinger decides to land a ways away from the beam and shoot from afar rather than right in front of the beam, entirely blocking anyone from getting to it. Again, it makes no sense for him to do so, this oversight is simply contrived so as to make it possible for Shepard to actually get there, because otherwise he’d be doomed. Notice how many asspulls are being made here? I’m starting to think they did not at all think this out when they wrote the ending.
But wait, there’s more! The Extended Cut tries to make the playerbase feel better by having a cutscene where your friends don’t die and get picked up by the Normandy and flown away so they can live happily ever after and whatnot. This is absolute garbage for a number of reasons, #1 being the idea of anyone surviving Harbinger’s beam – how Shepard does is nothing short of ANOTHER asspull, he should be dead, period. For Shepard to survive he would need to be out of Harbinger’s sightline, which he could easily do, but for “dramatic effect” and due to shitty linear level design, you can’t maneuver so Harbinger can’t see you, you can only run straight at the beam while Harbinger massacres everyone but magically (literally) you don’t get killed. In addition, the Normandy should be shot down while it hovers there, there is no reason at all Harby doesn’t kill it other than blatant, illogical plot armour. The 3rd reason is that it is entirely out of character for any of your friends to run away from the fight, they have already stated they are willing to die and are in it 100% no matter what happens to them. They would NEVER abandon Shepard, EVER. This is simply a contrivance so that the player can feel good about their suqadmates not dying, especially since they are likely to have picked their favourite squadmates for the last mission. You know what? Sometimes, good storytelling requires that people DIE, and in this case, given the thematic structure of the ending, having anyone else but Shepard and Anderson get to the beam would not work; Bioware knows that, which is why your companions don’t come with you, but they are unwilling to kill them. Grow some balls guys, come on.
Why Anderson says he got to the Citadel after you but gets ahead of you makes no sense and I’m not sure why they decided to say that. Saying he got to the beam while Shepard blacked out would be perfectly fine. Anyway, how TIM got there is yet another asspull since the answer basically doesn’t exist, he’s just there. Why he wasn’t dealt with at his actual base, I have no idea. They felt the need to stick him in at the end and have Anderson die a more glorious death by his hand than get unceremoniously blasted by Harby and thus deprive us of that admittedly touching vista scene where he ultimately dies. That scene actually is so good and would have made such a good ending I’m willing to accept TIM’s presence, but only if it was explained, which it isn’t. Also there’s the fact that uh, well, what happens AFTER is…dear god what did they do????
All they had to do was cut from the vista view in the control room to the Crucible firing and a destroy-style ending. That’s it. That’s all that had to happen. But they didn’t. Shepard gets lifted up by some magical elevator and is transported to lala land.
I am very aware that Leviathan sets you up to expect the Catalyst’s existence, but the whole Leviathan backstory for the Reapers is dumb anyway. It’s completely illogical, I’m not even sure why I need to explain it: the conclusion of the Leviathans was that they were incapable of stopping their thralls form being wiped out by their own synthetic creations. This makes no sense simply because the Leviathans can use mind control, thus they should be able to A) Stop the creation of these machines; and B Control the machines so they don’t kill the organic thralls. Why they can’t do either is not explained – and of course it can’t be, because it would likely be stupid and thus make the entire explanation look like a contrivance; though, it already is anyway. Their solution to this non-problem was then to make a machine themselves to solve the problem for them, never anticipating that it might perceive them as a problem. Again: how did this not cross their minds? Answer: there is no answer. Not a real one .The Leviathan spouts some nonsense about their perception of the Catalyst as simply a tool but there’s no way they were stupid enough to not realize the intelligence and capability of the thing they created. So that explanation doesn’t make sense.
The Catalyst itself is not the problem since it’s simply a classic case of a badly programmed AI with an unintentionally horrific logic loop. But the way it is used at the end is very badly utilized because it doesn’t come off as a mis-programmed AI, it comes off as simply Mr. Exposition. Despite the glaringly obvious contradictions of logic the Catalyst follows, Shepard never points them out because of the Catalyst’s ulterior purpose, one that has nothing to do with the story: a developer mouthpiece. Contradiction of the Catalyst’s flawed logic would cause the player to reject the endings the Catalyst sets up via a painfully gamey “here is option A and this is what it does, here is option B and this is what it does, and here is option C and this is what it does” monologue, and Bioware doesn’t want that. Well, that’s one explanation. The other is that the two geniuses that wrote this ending actually wrote the Catalyst as if they thought its logic made sense, thus giving Shepard no reason to object to what it’s saying. If THAT is the case then I cannot fathom how utterly stupid and/or unaware they must have been in order to actually think the train of thought this character follows makes any sense at all. In either case, Shepard, completely out of character, simply acts as a yes man, like a Fox News anchor: only asking questions the obvious answer to which allows the interviewee to further spout their own opinions and nonsense.
Regardless, the sudden change from sentimentality to exposition dump to stupidly-gamey faux-philosophical ending choice is so jarring and out of place it makes the ending seem flat out wrong no matter how you slice it. The ending either needed to have the sentimental scene with Anderson removed, or everything after that scene removed. They cannot both exist in the same ending, the tonal shift causes major mood whiplash.
The endings themselves are hamfisted attempts to make some kind of pseudo-philosophical point to the player while failing horribly because the logic behind said points is given by an AI with a psychopathy-inducing logic loop. The game wants you to pick Synthesis, it wants you to be the yes man and just accept what the Catalyst tells you without question and create some kind of hippie communist post-organic paradise. Even though that’s not what you came up here to do and is an entirely immoral decision to make since you are basically forcing it on everyone without their consent, but rather on the advice of your ****** ENEMY. How Synthesis works isn’t explained either – but then again, how the Crucible works isn’t explained period, as mentioned. Control is supposed to be an “Illusive man was right” ending - why the Catalyst recommends this course of action when it will cause him to be deleted, I have no idea. Why the Destroy ending can’t JUST kill the Reapers? No explanation given. The actual reason is simply for there to be a downside to picking it – remember, Bioware REEEEAAAAALLLY wants you to pick synthesis, so they need to force you to commit genocide in order to get the ending you wanted in the first place in order to dissuade you. Of course, they never counted on the fact that virtually everyone picks Destroy anyway and simply hates Bioware for the forced synthetic genocide rather than hating themselves for choosing that ending. Also note how condescending the colour coding is: Control, where you become sole ruler of the entire galaxy, is somehow “Paragon” blue, as if Paragon Shepard would ever think a space dictator with an armada of genocidal cyborgs was a good idea. Destroy is “Renegade” red – even though killing the bad guy rather than turning into Space Hitler is more suited to Paragon then Renegade Shep. And of course Synthesis is Green, colour coded to imply a new genesis and a happy fresh future. Oh, and it’s in the middle, the ‘true’ path. The other options require you to walk to the side, ruining the physical imagery and symbolism of the environment that you would get if you picked the ‘right’ ending.
On top of this, there’s simply no denying that the ideas and any valid points for or against the ideas of Control and Synthesis aren’t brought up until the end. For the entire rest of the series it’s a constant Destroy Destroy Destroy mantra, so the other two endings come out of ****** nowhere and picking them seems like a dice roll or a random “**** it” moment, which is an insane thing to do when deciding the fate of the universe.
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