1581

Excellent!

1582

Per se, for the love of all that is holy. I finished with no multiplayer at all and got the same stupid ending as everyone else, so you can always just do the side quests if you want and forget about galactic readiness.

1583

You know how the poet says distance brings proportion?

With enough time passed and time for reflection aplenty, the ending of Mass Effect 3 is still a jumbled POS.

(Apologies to John Updike)

1584

I just finished replaying ME1 (still my favorite game in the series) and discovered something on Ilos that I’d forgotten. Until the release of ME3 and the Javik DLC, I’d always had the impression that the Protheans had tentacular faces. Clearly, they didn’t, but where did I get that idea?

The answer is Ilos. The Prothean ruins there are chock full of statues of what I (and others, judging from various pre-ME3 websites) naturally assumed to be Protheans. Said statues all have squid faces.

So, the obvious question is, did the ME3 designers intentionally ignore that bit of lore or did they forget about it? There’s certainly no retconn in ME3 that says that Ilos was actually inhabited by a subject race instead of Protheans. Clearly, it’s a minor problem compared to the ending of ME3, but it still bugs me. They pulled so many elements from the previous games into the third that it’s hard to believe no one at Bioware knew about this.

1585

I recall Proteans weren’t just one race but a collection of races collectively called Protean. Perhaps my recollection is wrong though.

1586

A bit of both, IIUC. The core Prothean race were Jarvik’s race, but they assimilated other races into their empire thoroughly enough that they were generically called “Protheans” after 50k years of history muddied the waters sufficiently. That is to say, nobody was really sure wtf all that was about until they talked to Jarvik.

I’ve been debating since I finished the game ages ago, and I still can’t decide whether to write up my thoughts on the ending. It’s a topic of great interest to me, but I don’t know that anything I have to say will really be all that useful in furthering the conversation. The horse looks pretty dead to me, and even if it’s not, do I really want to wake up and smack around the poor beast during its last, tortured hours?

1587

The Adventures of James Vega

1588

Pure Brogan love.

1589

Oh why the heck not. My thoughts:

1590

nice write-up.

1591

You know what the ending sorta reminds me of, at least the lazy “three different ending that look the same”? Dark messiah of might and magic. Same thing: “Four different endings” but they were pretty much the same movie. If memory serves.

1592

I really enjoyed Dark Messiah and have absolutely no recollection of the ending. I guess it didn’t involve kicking things. Mass Effect should have had more kicking things - like in the ending you just walk up behind Joker and give him a boot.

1593

I just finished ME 3. I thought it dragged a lot once I arrived on Earth, and the firefights were too long and frustrating. Any other game in which I die 6-7 times in the same spot, I usually uninstall it and don’t come back to for months, if ever.

I wasn’t really angered by the (blue) ending, and then, when I read the other endings are basically the same but with a different colour, I didn’t think this was to be taken literally at first. I suffered through the last, awful, Banshee fight again (died another 5-6 times, too, turned XBox off and continued the next day), and had my big WTF-moment when I realized that yes, the other ending is REALLY just another colour. Wow. Even the Buzz Aldrin speech is the same.

I definitely expected something else. Different endings that reflect at least some key choices I made playing through the trilogy.

The question that’s occupying my mind now is this; if Shepard really chooses the synthesis option, how will this synthesis actually happen? Will the reapers build processing plants where all organics have to stand in line to get their chips installed? What species qualify as organics to be synthesized? Do more unintelligent species like, say, space hamsters, get to stay unmodified? How exactly will the Geth be synthesized? Will there be organ-growing farms that mass produce hearts that are then to be hooked up to the Geth somehow?

Or is there just a loud and bright bang and all organics in the universe are magically modded?

In both scenarios; really?

1594

It’s the latter, there’s a magic space wave of green energy and all biological life, including plants, become part machine ~somehow~. Presumably the equal but opposite effect applies to the Geth.

This is necessary because all synthetic life will inevitably destroy biological life, despite 2 major themes in ME3 being peaceful co-existence with synthetics. It will also somehow prevent the creation of new purely-synthetic life, which would have the exact same supposed issues with their hybrid creators as they did with biological creators, if you believe the Catalyst’s explanations.

It is considered by the writers as the “best” ending.

1595

Wow. Then the Reapers really ARE beyond our comprehension, no kidding.

I’m curious where they got the power to do something like that.

I mean, I don’t dislike the idea of omnipotent beings in (non-interactive) science fiction. I loved the “Q” Star Trek TNG character. But in Mass Effect, I feel it doesn’t fit, and it seems like a cheat.

1596

Finished this yesterday, and still cannot get it out of my head, so forgive me if I wax lyrical for a bit.

First: what an incredible series. Each installment had its very obvious flaws, but as a whole, it stands as one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had and one of the very few examples IMO of what it means to take the medium seriously to produce quality storytelling.

For all the hoopla about the infamous ME3 ending, I found myself barely bothered by it. Indeed, the Starchild’s inclusion and explanations seemed cheap. His stated reasons, capricious and illogical – or maybe suitably alien? The actual epilogue, more than a bit confusing and frustrating. I actually had trouble placing all of the characters’s fates, who had died or why or where. But…

…by then it mattered little. By that point the game had released its full emotional payload, and settled on a clear ending several scenes before the actual, controversial one. The only thing I was sure of is that it wasn’t going to be pretty. I was already in a funny mood because of the crescendo of unremitting bleakness that had plagued the latest missions, which I think was handled expertly; but what really got me was Shepard’s team’s final, suicide run. It’s a hellish sequence crowned by a marvelous synergy of visuals, sound and fury as one by one the team members are exterminated in their desperate push against impossible odds.

Next thing I know a wounded Shepard is lifting himself from the ground -looking complete and utterly defeated for the first time, his usually impeccable uniform in rags- and starts limping towards the Beam amongst the corpses of his friends, still stubbornly trying to reach its immediate goal but with basically nil chances of making past it, with barely strength left to hold a gun, let alone affecting the ultimate fate of the galaxy. I found the segment extremely successful in conveying the full horror of this realization, to the point that I kept pushing forward in dread, step by excruciatingly slow step, rebelling against the hopelessness of it all, and wishing it would end soon.

And all the time I’m thinking “this is it, they’re really gonna end this on such a grim note”. And I discover I’m amazed, thrilled, emotional. This is it.
When Shepard actually gets to the Citadel, it’s been transformed into some kind of red maw filled with the corpses of all the species in the galaxy. Will there be no letup? What follows isn’t as thrilling, although there are a few punches still in store.

Enough has been said, I guess, about the last few minutes. But as I said I was mostly OK with it. In a way, plot holes and inconsistencies aside, the obscurity made sense to me. The denouement pretty much ignores the decisions made along the game to present a dying Shepard with three preset ending options. The reason it didn’t bother me that much is that by that time I had accepted that all bets were off and indeed there was no point in anything we had done before – no point in all the war assets that seemed so vital at the time, all the sacrifices, all the struggle, all our carefully nurtured relationships. There had never been any hope. That was it. The nihilistic writing had been on the wall all the time, no matter how much I had wanted to believe Shepard’s and Hacket’s reassurances that we had a chance of winning the war or turning the tide. That’s what was so hard to swallow – both for the characters and for me as the experiencer. There wasn’t going to be a “happy” ending for the characters, but especially for me as a gamer. This was it. The joke was as much on me as on them. I wouldn’t even get my beloved closure.

Right before the end there is an amazing scene that I think has been brought up some posts earlier in this thread. Shepard lies on the floor half dead, for all we know, and Hackett comes up on the intercom. The Crucible is not firing, it’s not doing anything actually. Must be something on your side. Shepard lifts his head and after a pause asks dutifully, with a cracked, thin voice, “What do you need me to do?”. The galaxy is about to be turned to dust, but damned if he’s not going to invest his last blood cell into preventing it, like a true hero of legend should. It’s a touching, gut-wrenching scene, and I find myself thinking that this resonance is one of the reasons why I love video games. And the Mass Effect games, warts and all, rank IMO among the best ever made.

1597

Right before the end there is an amazing scene that I think has been brought up some posts earlier in this thread. Shepard lies on the floor half dead, for all we know, and Hackett comes up on the intercom. The Crucible is not firing, it’s not doing anything actually. Must be something on your side. Shepard lifts his head and after a pause asks dutifully, with a cracked, thin voice, “What do you need me to do?”.

I agree that this was the most powerful scene in the game, but not because Shepard shows greatness and resolve at this point, but because the character is shown as a pathetically-broken dog still desperate to obey its masters’ commands, regardless of what is going on around it, regardless of the fact that it can no longer carry them out. Only the desire to serve is still there. Speaks volumes about player agency and the nature of games themselves, if you like.

1598

Picked a bad day to stop taking antidepressants, scharmers!

1599

I’m so pissed off by the end of the game precisely because it essentially diffuses all that emotional payoff into a damp squib.

1600

Oh, absolutely. I failed to stress this. His question is mechanical, and absurd – clearly his training kicking in in the form of an appeal to the chain of command when every sense of autonomy has been lost. A shadow of the former, impossibly driven Shepard, at least for a moment. I agree that’s what lends the scene its pathetic quality and makes it poignant. We were witnessing the genesis of a legend that would last for generations, but I appreciate that the game didn’t sugarcoat the bitter end and was thankfully above investing the real Shepard with the traits of the heroic mythical figure he would inevitable become.