The Reapers are the main antagonist of the third game. If they weren't evil, they would be some kind of neutral or helping character. The fact that they want to harvest advanced organics and reprogram synthetics to turn against you (see the Geth under Reaper control), in addition to making their foot soliders out of your loved ones in the process is pretty obvious they aren't good hearted entities.
That part was already covered.
I'd argue TIM and cerberus are more of an antagonist.
Often the reapers feel like an afterthought.
It is weird that the Reapers largely serve the same role as the Blue Sun in ME3.
Like I said, its possible someone found his body as well as Shepards, forward a message to Hackett who relayed it to the Normandy for them to put up Andersons name. Yes its speculation on my part, but I would like to hear from Bioware how the Normandy found out he was dead. Maybe they have a better explanation then mine.
I don't believe I've ever said Shepard is dead in any of my posts if ems is above 3100 and destroy was chosen. The only time I've said Shepard is dead is if ems is below 3100
One question that I like to ask Bioware is how much time has passed from when the crucible fired its bag of goodies to the memorial scene?
I'd argue TIM and cerberus are more of an antagonist.
Often the reapers feel like an afterthought.
In ME2, the Reapers WERE and afterthought.
The story is concluded because the Reapers were dealt with in one way or another. Controlled, merged with, or destroyed. They were the central conflict of the entire trilogy.
And they were "dealt with" via genocide, slavery, or eugenics.
You see why people might have a problem with these endings?
Of course, there are some people who played Mass Effect 3 only for the characters or as a "romance simulator". So they completely ignore the Reaper story, and when the ending originally came, there was no closure for them. Those people don't believe the Reapers are the central point of the story, but rather the characters and their own personal conflicts which weren't resolved at the end initially.
You really want to go there? I'd say more people play Mass Effect as a murder simulator.
And while the Reapers may be the primary antagonist, Shepard is the primary protagonist. The player avatar. The eyes through which we see the galaxy. You can see why people would want Shep's story to at least have the option of ending well, yes?
As in they didn't tell you what happened to everyone after the game, but they tell you enough during the game to give you that sense of closure. Jacob says he's going to be a father, have a kid named Shepard. That's just one example.
Yeah I got to see the ending butcher the geth and EDI, put the galaxy forever under the thumb tentacle of the Reapers, or forcibly rewrite the DNA of every organic being in the galaxy (and teach synthetics what this thing called "love" is 
)
Oh, and I got to watch Shepard die horribly in all but one of those endings as an added bonus.
Can't imagine why anyone would get upset by this 
The game that they were sold was a galactic war against the Reapers. Not as a dating simulator or story which solely revolves around character interactions. It does wrap up the Reaper story as promised though.
No, the game they sold us was the adventures of Commander Shepard, with the Reaper war as the backdrop. It revolved solely around Shepard's interactions. And while it may offend your sensibilities, there was also optional romantic side content.
The title of this thread made me sad, but some of the comments cause me physical pain with how wrong they still are despite great stuff put out by people explaining everything. If you don't understand why the endings suck, watch and read the things in my signature. It's the best things I've found. And no, none of it is mine so it's not that I'm some genius.
But on the other hand, Shepard can duck most of those sacrifices through good gameplay. It isn't crazy for a player to end up thinking that ME is all about finding a way around the hard choices.
This isn't one of the posts I described above but I wanted to note it.
That's exactly what happens. It's not just good gameplay, it's good role play or the events of the story. The only hard choice you really have to make is Virmire. The Council choice was next to meaningless, as was the Rachni Queen. The Collector Base choice didn't matter and it's easy to have no casualties for the Suicide Mission. I guess you had to do several things right to get Peace in the Rannoch arc. Mordin or Padok Wiks sacrifice themselves so that's not on Shepard. The series was often about finding the third option or fixing problems, so the fact that Shepard couldn't do this at the end was an issue. And no, I don't mean Synthesis. I mean telling the Catalyst to cram it and laying out how things are going to go down because the Catalyst is wrong.
Mass Effect does not end with Shepard winning the day and riding off with his lady love (or man love depending) into the sunset. Bioware takes the notion of total war very seriously, and the story is as grim as it is engaging. Victory is possible, but not without heavy loss and the total alteration of the status quo. The game can end in several ways, depending on how you play. Even the best victory scenario comes at a price, resulting in the death of friends and allies. In Mass Effect, as in life, you cannot always get what you want and you have to make the best with the options you have, even when those options are not good.
The end also is not straight forward, no matter what scenario plays out. The entire end of the game appears to be an exploration of the human mind. Bioware has taken a page, it seems, from Inception, making it unclear what exactly is “real” what and isn’t. It’s surreal, unsettling, and makes you THINK about what is happening and why. It makes you consider every choice you have made up to this point in the series (one of the clever aspects of the series is that Bioware allows you to import your Shepard from one game to the next, coming with all the choices you have made, good, bad and ugly. Shepard always has baggage.) It makes you question your own assumptions and motives on several fronts, and how you deal with that impacts your final choices.
You do not come away from the end feeling happy. It is, regardless of what you do, a visceral punch to the gut, punctuated with the smallest ray of hope – a ray that is only there if you made particular choices through the series.
Some rabid fans of the game do not like this. They have started web petitions, written blogs, made Youtube videos all about how the end of ME3 “sucks”. There is not typical, flashy, shoot out with a final enemy to win the day. There is no triumphant hero pumping his fist in the air in victory. There is no simplistic, action movie, final moments. You are left instead, to think long and hard about what just happened and why
What Bioware has done is craft an ending one has to deeply consider and interpret, a very rare feat in a medium that is still maturing into a full blown art form: Did Shepard really defeat the Reapers? If so, how much of what we saw was “real” and not just in his head? The end offers up more questions and it does answers.
Rather than change the ending, my hope is that Bioware will do what it has always done – offer up downloaded additions to the game that expand the universe and lead us in new direction. But change the ending because some players have an over the top, fanboy meltdowns over it? No. We shouldn’t be asking to be spoon fed base pap. There is a legion of sitcoms and awful science fiction programing and lunk headed fighting games for one to delve into if you want that. What Bioware has created is something unique, that should be allowed to stand and players should learn that it is ok to have to think. The low common denominator they appear to ask for isn’t worth it.
They really don't take it all that seriously. They have you "take Earth back" because you, the player, are human, not because Earth has some ME universal significance. You mostly can get everything. You can get both Quarians and Geth. You can save the Genophage and still get Salarian support later. You don't need all the possible EMS and EMS is just a score that affects things in unclear ways with no differentiation despite being split into categories. Better get all those ground troops to fight 2km tall space ships! It wasn't about taking the best of bad options. That would have been pretty dark and a different series. Sitting here now, I'd love to play something like that, though I wonder if I'd hate it if I actually did. 
If you're right that Bioware tried to borrow from Inception, that's a glaring example of why the endings don't work. The ending of Inception fit the events of the entire rest of the movie. You can't just shove that into a different story that wasn't dealing with those issues and expect it to work. The shift in tone and pacing after the beam run was jarring. Indoctrination was never something that was nailed down because it was always something that was happening to other people which we mostly saw the end result of. We saw enough to piece a lot together, but we never experienced it first hand.
There is no depth to the endings other than what you've invented in your own mind to defend them. They are a shallow mish-mash of ideas from other stories that don't fit. More on that in response to the next post. The endings didn't make me think; they made me wonder what the hell the writer's were thinking.
Of course, there are some people who played Mass Effect 3 only for the characters or as a "romance simulator". So they completely ignore the Reaper story, and when the ending originally came, there was no closure for them. Those people don't believe the Reapers are the central point of the story, but rather the characters and their own personal conflicts which weren't resolved at the end initially.
As in they didn't tell you what happened to everyone after the game, but they tell you enough during the game to give you that sense of closure. Jacob says he's going to be a father, have a kid named Shepard. That's just one example.
The game that they were sold was a galactic war against the Reapers. Not as a dating simulator or story which solely revolves around character interactions. It does wrap up the Reaper story as promised though.
This right here is why you don't get it. While you might have been right about ME1, starting with Mass Effect 2 the series became about the characters. The Reaper conflict was almost absent from Mass Effect 2 and the main plot was trash. However, Bioware wrote far superior stories for most of the characters and gave them a lot more personality and screen time. The war become the events going on in these characters' lives: the challenge they had to overcome. Tuchanka matters because of Wrex and Mordin. Rannoch matters because of Tali and Legion.
And yet the characters were completely dumped from the ending. In a series and a game entirely devoted to gaining friends and forging alliances, Shepard is on the Citadel making the final choice alone. You had squadmates around for all the other decisions and they gave input, even if it was just binary to frame the choice. This has nothing to do with "romance simulator." That is another issue entirely. This is about Mass Effect being a character focused series.
The same is true of Star Wars. Your comment is the same as saying the character interactions didn't matter much as the space battle. It's the exact opposite. The Emperor dying isn't nearly as important as Luke's defiance and Vader's redemption. This is why we don't question how killing the Emperor saves the day when the Empire is still huge and powerful.
When I first played Mass Effect, I bought it to kick Reaper ass. Which the ending accomplishes that for me by destroying them. I didn't really buy it for the characters. That's just me though.
The Extended Cut does sort of cover what happens to everyone, so it had some character closure.
I'm not a pure action guy either. I do play ME3 on RPG mode with full decisions, so I also bought this game for the RPG aspects.
As for the endings, I guess some people completely threw out the idea of the endings and wanted it redone. Which you have to understand would cost millions of dollars and would cut into the other projects that they were doing.
And then there's some people who didn't want a new ending. Or others who didn't want them to do anything, and liked it for what it was.
If they had rewritten the ending, it would probably mean less post-launch content. Or even more backlash, not necessarily from the fans', but there was a lot of people who actually feared that if Bioware was to cave to fan pressure, they would lose all faith in them. So it's not just about the ending, but how others view them as a company as well.
They were in a no-win situation here.
Why did they make it this way and stick to it? Well it's like they said, it must tie into the greater narrative of the story that they were trying to tell. Least to them it did. In addition to writing it, they also have to edit it for accuracy and make sure it all fits in, which I guess they felt it did, but people here didn't.
Now there's the fans' version of how they view the story, lore, etc, and then there's Bioware's version. Which it seems there's quite a huge disagreement over.
When I first played Mass Effect, I bought it to kick Reaper ass. Which the ending accomplishes that for me by destroying them. I didn't really buy it for the characters. That's just me though.
I'm not a pure action guy either. I do play ME3 on RPG mode with full decisions, so I also bought this game for the RPG aspects.
As for the endings, I guess some people completely threw out the idea of the endings and wanted it redone. Which you have to understand would cost millions of dollars and would cut into the other projects that they were doing. And then there's some people who didn't want a new ending. Or others who didn't want them to do anything, and liked it for what it was. If they had rewritten the ending, it would probably mean less post-launch content. Or even more backlash, not necessarily from the fans', but there was a lot of people who actually feared that if Bioware was to cave to fan pressure, they would lose all faith in them. So it's not just about the ending, but how others view them as a company as well.
Why did they make it this way and stick to it? Well it's like they said, it must tie into the greater narrative of the story that they were trying to tell. Least to them it did. In addition to writing it, they also have to edit it for accuracy and make sure it all fits in, which I guess they felt it did, but people here didn't.
Now there's the fans' version of how they view the story, lore, etc, and then there's Bioware's version. Which it seems there's quite a huge disagreement over.
Well, by "kick Reaper ass" are we talking story or gameplay? Because you didn't kick any Reaper ass in ME2. The Human Reaper didn't have one yet. 
You're right on how things should be, but it's not how they were. So often it was like the writers of one part didn't play the previous games.
The title of this thread made me sad, but some of the comments cause me physical pain with how wrong they still are despite great stuff put out by people explaining everything. If you don't understand why the endings suck, watch and read the things in my signature. It's the best things I've found. And no, none of it is mine so it's not that I'm some genius.
This isn't one of the posts I described above but I wanted to note it.
That's exactly what happens. It's not just good gameplay, it's good role play or the events of the story. The only hard choice you really have to make is Virmire. The Council choice was next to meaningless, as was the Rachni Queen. The Collector Base choice didn't matter and it's easy to have no casualties for the Suicide Mission. I guess you had to do several things right to get Peace in the Rannoch arc. Mordin or Padok Wiks sacrifice themselves so that's not on Shepard. The series was often about finding the third option or fixing problems, so the fact that Shepard couldn't do this at the end was an issue. And no, I don't mean Synthesis. I mean telling the Catalyst to cram it and laying out how things are going to go down because the Catalyst is wrong.
They really don't take it all that seriously. They have you "take Earth back" because you, the player, are human, not because Earth has some ME universal significance. You mostly can get everything. You can get both Quarians and Geth. You can save the Genophage and still get Salarian support later. You don't need all the possible EMS and EMS is just a score that affects things in unclear ways with no differentiation despite being split into categories. Better get all those ground troops to fight 2km tall space ships! It wasn't about taking the best of bad options. That would have been pretty dark and a different series. Sitting here now, I'd love to play something like that, though I wonder if I'd hate it if I actually did.
If you're right that Bioware tried to borrow from Inception, that's a glaring example of why the endings don't work. The ending of Inception fit the events of the entire rest of the movie. You can't just shove that into a different story that wasn't dealing with those issues and expect it to work. The shift in tone and pacing after the beam run was jarring. Indoctrination was never something that was nailed down because it was always something that was happening to other people which we mostly saw the end result of. We saw enough to piece a lot together, but we never experienced it first hand.
There is no depth to the endings other than what you've invented in your own mind to defend them. They are a shallow mish-mash of ideas from other stories that don't fit. More on that in response to the next post. The endings didn't make me think; they made me wonder what the hell the writer's were thinking.
This right here is why you don't get it. While you might have been right about ME1, starting with Mass Effect 2 the series became about the characters. The Reaper conflict was almost absent from Mass Effect 2 and the main plot was trash. However, Bioware wrote far superior stories for most of the characters and gave them a lot more personality and screen time. The war become the events going on in these characters' lives: the challenge they had to overcome. Tuchanka matters because of Wrex and Mordin. Rannoch matters because of Tali and Legion.
And yet the characters were completely dumped from the ending. In a series and a game entirely devoted to gaining friends and forging alliances, Shepard is on the Citadel making the final choice alone. You had squadmates around for all the other decisions and they gave input, even if it was just binary to frame the choice. This has nothing to do with "romance simulator." That is another issue entirely. This is about Mass Effect being a character focused series.
The same is true of Star Wars. Your comment is the same as saying the character interactions didn't matter much as the space battle. It's the exact opposite. The Emperor dying isn't nearly as important as Luke's defiance and Vader's redemption. This is why we don't question how killing the Emperor saves the day when the Empire is still huge and powerful.
We never meant to cause you physical pain!Take my deepest apologies!
They were in a no-win situation here.
Right.
Why did they make it this way and stick to it? Well it's like they said, it must tie into the greater narrative of the story that they were trying to tell.
Just guessing, but I think they decided to stick with it, because of the reason above, not because "they" (whoever that was) were utterly convinced that the ending was actually good ("fitting the greater narrative") and only misunderstood (which is admittedly the message BioWare communicated with the EC, but, you know, that people say the only thing they can say while cornered does not imply that that's what they are honestly thinking, too).
If we take a look at games before and after the ME trilogy, we see that a lot of them did similar endings with great success (including the Deus Ex games, of which the ME:3 ending is actually a rip-off, and without breaking narrative cohesion), while other games sticked to simple action movie tropes (including boss fights and happy endings) and failed (including games that had arguably superiour gameplay compared to their contemporary ME installment). The hypothesis that gamers just weren't mature enough to appreciate what the ME:3 ending tried to do can easily be disproved this way, as can the concern that the backlash against the ME:3 ending might discourage game developers and lead to a regression to said action move tropes for future games.
We never meant to cause you physical pain!Take my deepest apologies!
You do understand this was sarcasm,right?!
Well, by "kick Reaper ass" are we talking story or gameplay? Because you didn't kick any Reaper ass in ME2. The Human Reaper didn't have one yet.
You're right on how things should be, but it's not how they were. So often it was like the writers of one part didn't play the previous games.
Correction, I mainly bought it for the story, not for the characters. How's that?
The other thing I was going to mention is that if Mass Effect is such a character-driven series, why is the next game being billed as an exploration-heavy game, instead of a character-heavy game?
In addition to this is how things should have been (according to the fans) and claiming the writers didn't know their own story just kind of speaks of arrogance on the fans' part. No offense.
You can't know it better than them, because they created everything you're talking about. They wrote the book on Mass Effect's lore. They created the universe, you are just its inhabitants. I wouldn't go around trying to play God (the creator) or be in their shoes. There is only one God (Bioware), not millions of them (fans).
Your $60 you paid for this game doesn't, and shouldn't give you that kind of power. Remember, if it wasn't for Bioware, there would be no Mass Effect. Not the other way around. So please try to show some respect to those who crafted this universe.
It goes back to you guys wanting to play armchair writer and take control of things when it goes off the tracks.
Wait, what?
I know where the breath scene takes place. He's beside some rubble in London. You can hear the wind blowing in the background. Suggesting everything between the time you got knocked out by Harbinger and the time you wake up again was all in Shepard's head.
The story is concluded because the Reapers were dealt with in one way or another. Controlled, merged with, or destroyed. They were the central conflict of the entire trilogy.
I am sorry, maybe I am dense but you'll have to explain to me how those two statements fit together in your interpretation of the ending.
Are you telling me that Shepard was shot by the beam, knocked out, had a dream/vision of the whole ending and at the same time while s/he was lying in London, all of this still somehow actually happened as well? I don't get it.
The other thing I was going to mention is that if Mass Effect is such a character-driven series, why is the next game being billed as an exploration-heavy game, instead of a character-heavy game?
To use your favorite comment. Why not tweet Bioware asking that question?
That´s no wind, it´s the Citadel losing atmosphere. 
That´s supposed to be wind? And what´s this weird sound like something metallic under stress?
don't forget when the citadel's arms opens right up, gravity on those arms would have flung anything left on those arms into space via inertia. When the citadel / crucible explodes, anything in that area is going to have a really really bad few milliseconds before being vapourised. Shepards meant to be on the citadel? Yeah Right....
an ending where your choice does not matter (even if you think it does) in regards to anything other than cutscenes and stranded (dead) crewmates?
I am sorry, maybe I am dense but you'll have to explain to me how those two statements fit together in your interpretation of the ending.
Are you telling me that Shepard was shot by the beam, knocked out, had a dream/vision of the whole ending and at the same time while s/he was lying in London, all of this still somehow actually happened as well? I don't get it.
That's a variation of IT
That's a variation of IT
Is there a place where this one is explained, 'cause I never heard of that particular variation and I honestly cannot imagine how it would possibly make any sense.
Is there a place where this one is explained, 'cause I never heard of that particular variation and I honestly cannot imagine how it would possibly make any sense.
Well, the variation I'm familiar with (sometimes called "Complete Your Mission" ending) doesn't have anything that happens post-beam run as "real" so in that sense it's not the same. But in the one I'm familiar with Shepard is having a Battle at the Center of the Mind while lying unconscious in London. The Reapers are trying to get Shepard to submit to them and the only "real" way to stop them is to shoot the tube and destroy the dream. At which point the breath scene is Shepard waking up in London, and continuing the fight.
I never said it made sense
Well, the variation I'm familiar with (sometimes called "Complete Your Mission" ending) doesn't have anything that happens post-beam run as "real" so in that sense it's not the same. But in the one I'm familiar with Shepard is having a Battle at the Center of the Mind while lying unconscious in London. The Reapers are trying to get Shepard to submit to them and the only "real" way to stop them is to shoot the tube and destroy the dream. At which point the breath scene is Shepard waking up in London, and continuing the fight.
I never said it made sense
Yea, that's classic IT, which does actually make some sense to me but also means that - as I said before - the story is not finished. What I don't get is that rossier somehow goes with both ideas at the same time. On the one hand, s/he says that Shepard is waking up in London and everything ending related until the breath scene happens in Shep's mind, on the other hand, rossier says that the story is concluded because the endings actually happened after all (see the two quotes in my previous post above). This is what I cannot fit together, how can you have it both ways?
I wonder how Shep is supposed to get back to London. The beam is definitely off (if it´s actually two way but well we are deep in headcanon teritory anyways). In IT it makes "sense" when everything is a dream anyway. Wasn´t the idea in IT that the coming ending DLC would be the real one then?
Yea, that's classic IT, which does actually make some sense to me but also means that - as I said before - the story is not finished. What I don't get is that rossier somehow goes with both ideas at the same time. On the one hand, s/he says that Shepard is waking up in London and everything ending related until the breath scene happens in Shep's mind, on the other hand, rossier says that the story is concluded because the endings actually happened after all (see the two quotes in my previous post above). This is what I cannot fit together, how can you have it both ways?
I thought 'classic" IT was everything up til the Magic Space Elevator was real. The Starchild was the only thing that was fake. And the Reapers were trying to manipulate Shepard into using the Crucible to their benefit.
Of course, I've heard variations of IT with all sorts of ideas where the indoctrination started taking place.
There is no depth to the endings other than what you've invented in your own mind to defend them.
So any argument that the endings are good is a waste of time since you have de facto declared them bad and instantly invalidated any such argument in their favor since such arguments (you claim) are only supported by headcanon.
I'd argue the point, but http://awesomegifs.c.../dead-horse.gif
By the way, MrBtongue's video that you link in your signature has been pulled for a copyright claim.
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