Do I really need to search back and copy/paste your characterization of those who expected better writing to be barking up the wrong tree? Guess it’s time to open up a second QT3 tab.
Yep, idiotic. I think it’s idiotic to sign a petition demanding that Bioware rewrite the ending of the game to suit your demands for better writing quality (ha!), or less ambiguity, or more closure, or whatever stupid demands they feel the need to level at Bioware.
Maybe I just don’t have high enough standards when it comes to young adult space operas.
That’s what I was responding to. But I also happen to think the plots and story of Mass Effect 1 and 2 are mostly pedestrian.
Look, if you’re a Star Trek fan who doesn’t mind sifting through codex entries while you play a pared down shooter, I can certainly understand why you’d gravitate to Mass Effect 2 and want to heap praise onto it. But a game that appeals to your own predilections isn’t the same as a game with good writing, whether we’re talking about the larger context of world-building or the finer points of character development. Bioware’s work on Mass Effect is occasionally good, often downright embarrassing, and ultimately pretty conventional.
Can you see a trend here?
My comment was that you regarded the ME writing and story to be of generally poor quality, i.e., “garbage.” As in, its just a bunch of crappy genre fiction, your complaints about quality are as misplaced as complaining about the ambiance when one is dumpster-diving. It’s easy to argue when your premise is that the other side lacks a legitimate premise.
And a special bonus:
My argument – well, part of it, as this is a pretty big issue that we’ve all beaten to death variously – is that the ending of the Mass Effect saga isn’t just the 15 minutes that people have kvetched loudly about, often mischaracterizing it as the choice between colored beams that somehow invalidated or didn’t sufficiently acknowledge all the hundreds of choices they’d made along the way. The ending of the Mass Effect saga is the entirety of Mass Effect 3.
To repeat --that’s been my gripe with your perspective all along, that you are denying the legitimacy of the argument of the other side. I’m wrong simply because I think the pick-your-color ending was important. Never mind the points I have tried to raise about ME3’s place in a broader IP, or the concerns for managing that IP. You focus solely on the primacy of the storytelling, the story in isolation from its context – an odd premise given your prior lack of regard for the Bioware story collective’s level of craft.
If someone refuses to engage your points, all that is left is cross-mockery. That’s the reason for the film criticism japes, because all I see you willing to engage with is the viddygame version of the auteur theory and its implicit deference to singular authorship at the expense of all other concerns. By my reckoning, ME is not a singular work, and it is not the work of a single author (illustrated by all of the pointless story changes between games). Treating it as such allows you to dismiss the concerns of those focused on the impact to the broader ongoing fictional world.
That world is what I care about. As I said, I’m a sucker for a sprawling fictional universe, and I have read ME books and comics as well. I regard ME as an example of an interesting and relatively new art form – composed of interconnected fictional works – that emerged in the latter half of the last century with American soap operas and comic books. And yes, I’m going to get a bit rant-y when an example of this art form that I enjoy is botched.
