I realize that I’m extremely late in posting something about Mass Effect 3′s ending. The game has been out for well over a month by now, and the internet really doesn’t need another blog post about how terrible the end was. I also realize that probably everything that can be said about it has been said by now. In fact I’m so late in posting this that Bioware has already announced more than a week ago, that they’re going to release a free expansion to the ending in response to fan outrage.
But as the only posts on this blog that become even modestly popular are the ones where I complain profusely about things, I simply have to put my outrage on paper. Spolier Alert:
The ending to Mass Effect 3 is complete garbage and shut up my opinions are important.
Having just finished Mass Effect 3 this weekend, I definitely have a huge number of complaints with the ending. Even knowing full-well in advance that the ending sucked and with my expectations primed for supreme disappointment, I was still shocked at how utterly terrible it was.
I had purposefully decided to avoid reading any specific details that would spoil the ending for me, but the sheer volume of press concerning the quality of the ending made it impossible to ignore. I saw the headlines all over, the ending was going to suck. I accepted this. I was ready for it. But I had to see it for myself.
I couldn’t help but imagine, as I worked my way through the missions, what exactly could be so bad in the ending. The rest of the game was so linguistically rich, the only kind of problem I could conceive was that the content of the ending was unsatisfactory. Perhaps that certain characters died, or the ending was too dark. I supposed that two things were likely: Shepard would have to sacrifice himself, and that the endless cycle was inevitable (ie. you end up losing the war). I could imagine that kind of ending might enrage some fans, but honestly I had no real objection to either.
But boy, was I in for a surprise. Firstly, neither of my predictions were too far off. Shepard does have to sacrifice himself. My second prediction was wrong in the specifics, but you don’t particularly “win” the war either, regardless of your choices (since the Mass Relays get destroyed in the process and potentially Earth or all synthetic life in the universe is destroyed). Browsing comments and forms now I actually see a lot of fans outraged by one or both of these plot points. I can’t say either are exactly satisfying conclusions, but that isn’t what makes the end to Mass Effect “bad”.
A lot of people smarter than me have nailed the real problems on the head: that the ending lacks narrative coherence, referring both to the sudden departure from the flow and path the story itself , and to the disconnected and unexpected emotions and responses by the characters in the scene. In a similar thread of reasoning, someone also called the ending options themselves thematically revolting, as none of the three choices left to your character were connected in theme to the entire plot-line that lead up to the ending, and worse they seem to actually contradict a lot of the themes presented earlier in the game entirely.
The major underlying story is that you are trying to stop the Reapers from wiping out all intelligent life in the galaxy. But the story is hardly that thin- a suite of supporting characters and races are critical factors in the success of this mission. Indeed it’s really the journey itself that makes this plot interesting and colorful. You make choices to help certain races and isolate yourself and your allies from others. You spend so much time in-game talking and learning about your crew, potentially even romancing one of them, that they are nothing short of family to your character. This seems to culminate wonderfully right up to the second-to-last level in the game, where you make an impassioned speech about having each others backs.
But the ending itself makes a turn so abruptly from these themes that you can’t believe what plays out in front you. The end itself is devoid of all of these characters. Despite their purported criticality, they are 99% absent from the entire last part of the game. Worse some of the characters closest to you presumably die in a mad last rush. I emphasize the word presumably because absolutely no time is given to their deaths whatsoever. If you happen to have your Love Interest with you on the battlefield, you get to limp awkwardly over their corpse for about 3 seconds and that’s it. Your character doesn’t bat an eye. It’s the first thing that really bugged me. For a full half hour before this part, there were speeches, goodbyes, then after another twenty minutes of battle they just croak without a second thought.
It was jarring, to say the least, and thematically disjointed from the entire rest of the game. It was also only the very beging of the downward spiral.
Next you know you’re beamed up to the Citadel and get to walk at a frustrating snails pace for several minutes, only to find The Illusive Man has taken control of your body and that of your comrade. He begins making a big dramatic speech about controlling the Reapers being the only way to advance humanity, even makes you shoot your friend – but instead of a big climactic fight, you either get to click the right-mouse and kill him immediately, or your speech skill is high enough he eventually kills himself. That’s it. A good half of the entire last game was about this guy, and he’s given no more than 4 minutes of screen time and just dies with a single boring shot. Frankly if they weren’t going to bother wrapping up his storyline in an interesting, meaningful fashion then they shouldn’t have put so much emphasis on attempting to defeat him the entire rest of the game.
So bad guy #1 goes down like a limp fish, and you go back to defeating bad guy #2, the Reapers. Theres a big beautiful scene of the Crusible docking, and then the narrative madness starts.
You zip up a platform to the roof of the Citadel, and the ghost of a child walks up to you. I audibly sighed to myself right then and there. The child immediately gave me an Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom menace sort of feel. So Star Child starts delivering plot points via clunky dialog at an alarming rate. My character gets to respond with the most awkward set of dialog choices, none of which make any sense whatsoever. The kid says that apparently he’s here to make sure robots and humans don’t kill each other, a theme made no sense in this story at all (hell I just saved the robotic Geth from destruction a few hours ago, and on top of that it’s the Reapers that seem to kill everyone all the time, and their organic…) and in my mind seemed needlessly ripped off from Battlestar.
Star Child then starts to describe my options. The options themselves are so difficult for this kid to describe each one takes a paragraph of dialog and they even have to show an example of your character doing them so you don’t get confused. You ever had a child try to explain a complicated board game game to you? It was exactly like that. The kid starts to blab about the choices:
“If you touch the blue thingy you’ll be able to control the Reapers. Oh also that will kill you . Because it’s really blue, it’ll blue you to death. You see how sparky that thing is, Shep? It’s definitely going to kill you. Painfully. Oh but you can save Earth and it destroys the Mass Relays. Essentially isolating all the races in the galaxy and undoing all you did to bring them all together in the last three Mass Effect titles, but you know, Earth rules!”
Hmm, I wonder, isn’t this option exactly what the crazy crazy Illusive Man was going to do? Man, do I feel silly for killing him now! So, in my mind I’m thinking .. OK, blue option has got to be the bad one because I just killed a guy to prevent this exact option from happening. I literally screamed at this man that no human had the right to take control of the Reapers, to we we’re ready as a species, and then shot him to end the debate. So, I say to myself — we’re not going the Blue option. So, what’s next kid?
“Ok, so option 2: If you shoot that red conduit over there, it’ll explode in your face, and like — kill you. With fire. But the Reapers will all die and you’ll accomplish exactly what you set out to do, with nearly almost no other negative side-affects whatsoever. Oh except it’ll kill the Geth and EDI and like — ALL of the synthetic life in the galaxy. All of it. Everywhere. Like, robo-genocide. Also it’ll probably ruin your iPhone.”
Oh wow. THAT’S option #2? That sounds pretty awful. I actually have to wipe out several entire races to destroy the Reapers? That option is so shitty it actually makes the crazy Illusive Man’s ideas seem sane. Also wait — this immediately confuses me because presumably the Reapers kill intellegent life to keep us from fighting with the robots we always end up creating — but that can’t be true. I literally hours ago just saved an entire race of robots who sacrificed their own lives to help me get here, on the Citadel. And now you’re telling me that I have to kill them all to save us from the Reapers who kill us … to keep us … from killing each other.
WHAT?!? This make no sense logically whatsoever. The fact that the Geth were visibly fighting in the space above my character right now, against our shared enemy — completely contradicted Star Child’s theory that we always end up killing each other and will never be friends.
But OK, the kid stops talking and I am supposedly left with Door #1 or Door #2, both of which seem utterly terrible, bizarre choices. Torn and confused, I decide sacrificing the Geth was better than leaving the Reapers alive, so I took that route and thought they’d be the inevitable casualties of this war. Tears and all.
BUT NO. This option seems to literally vaporize the surface of the Earth, and destroys the Normandy. And the last scene I see is the ship’s wreckage and … a door opening slightly. And star-wipe, roll credits.
My face is just blank at this point. I have no words for the train wreak that just unfolded in front of me. It was like watching a play where everyone forgot their lines, ab-libbed the last 5 minutes, then part of the set caught fire and fell into the audience. It was shockingly dreadful.
I figured I “picked wrong”. There is no way Blue Door could be so terrible as Red Door. So I loaded an earlier save to check out the other option, suffered through the limping scene, the Illusive Man’s terrible Bond-esque monologue that you can’t skip. I let the Star Child barf words at me, and picked the Blue Door.
WHAT THE HELL!?
It’s exactly the same, except blue, and apparently BLUE doesn’t kill everyone on Earth, because you know — BLUE! I was so stupefied that I actually started to laugh. The rest of it happened the same, ship crash, door ajar.
Apparently you can also take neither path and go up the middle, perhaps I’m just profoundly stupid or perhaps the Star Child’s horrendous dialog just dulled my mind, but I didn’t notice that was possible at all. Forgive me for thinking a game that previously gave me two choices for literally EVERY line of dialog (which are also always red vs. blue) actually had a third option all of a sudden. Apparently this choice is some “synthesis” where you make robots and organics fall in love or some trashy shit. This one is GLORIOUSLY GREEN and otherwise exactly the same.
It is all just so bad I literally had to write about it. Even though thousands have written about this before, I am so emotionally scarred by this experience that I had to put it all out on paper therapeutically.
So apparently the word is the “New Ending” content to be realsed this summer is going to “clarify” and expand on what happened in the end. But honestly none of those three options make any sense, even if they were explained far more eloquently, even if the scenes after the choice were more expansive or more unique — none of them make any sense at all. The choices presented are thematically flawed and no amount of downloadable-caulk and seal the gaps. Perhaps if it were delivered more masterfully in the first place my white-hot rage would only be a fiery-red, but it makes no real difference. All three options leave some pretty big plot holes and inconsistencies I can’t ignore, regardless of the quality on which they are served:
- Red (Destroy all synthetic life) — Genocide shouldn’t even be presented if you’ve gone Paragon. It’s a waste of time to present it as an option if you’ve made peace with the Geth. Choosing it under these circumstances is like choosing to drive your own car, filled with your own family, off of a cliff to just kill a wasp on your dashboard.
- Green (Synthesis) — Ok, so Star Child one minute ago said organics have “come a long way”, that just being in the Star Kids presence proved this since no one had ever done it in thousands and thousands of years. And just hours ago we proved that man and machine already can make peace, there’s an entire plot line that shows you that the Geth (and by extension, all synthetic life) are two sides of the same coin, that both share the same desires to live and be free and grow and evolve. This choice seems to suggest that the real purpose to life is a Borg perfectionist synthesis of both forms when you just proved (and fought and died for) the independent strength of each independent form.
- Blue (Take control of the Geth) — Even if you’ve gone Renegade the entire game, you just killed the Illusive Man for thinking that was a good option. Choosing this is like telling someone not to touch that pot on the stove barehanded because it’s hot, then immediately afterwords bear-hugging the pot yourself, with both arms and no shirt on. I don’t understand why you’d shoot a man for his ideals one minute and then adopt those ideals yourself two minutes later.
So really if all we end up getting are more supporting scenes to clarify the last few minutes of storyline, it won’t make much of a difference. I’ve seen a lot about the so-called “Indoctrination Theory”, that the ending actually isn’t what it seems at all, that Shepard is undergoing Reaper “Indoctrination” and supposedly this explains the myriad of inconsistencies and odd choices left to users at the end. I’ve watched the video on this and it is very interesting indeed:
But I also noticed that the theory is has some gaping holes. Parts of it make a lot of sense, the ghostly trees, the convenient level design. Some of it simply fit nicely — like the Illusive Man’s monologue. But a lot of it is a stretch. The video has to explain the last three choices as odd “symbols” brought about by your indoctrination — but it seems overtly complicated at this point. It seems to me occams razor cuts pretty deeply here.
Even if these guys are right about Indoctrination Theory, it was delivered to us all so inexcusably poorly I could never accept it was true.
It’s one thing to be craftily cryptic, to obscure the truth and then surprise your audience with the “twist”. But if the truth of your story is so hazy that only conspiracy theorists can see it, you did a really bad job with the delivery. This is a twist so thinly presented even M. Night Shyamalan would never have made it.
For this theory to work, Bioware really had to do what he Indoctrination video itself did — interlace the hidden truths with blatant exposition. If it were done right, it would have started ambiguously so only the careful would be able to spot it early. You leave clues like the trees and grass on the ground, the level design, stuff only a few would get outright, but then start to slowly show your hand. Perhaps make the dialog from the Illusive Man scene a little more to the point, and use the medium (video) to lead us down the path you’re intending: if you won’t tell us the truth, use sound and sight to visually explain that what your viewing in the game isn’t real, that your character is being indoctrinated.
When you make your choice of explosion color, if you don’t explicitly reveal the truth to us at this point, no one is going to get whats going on. Storytelling isn’t supposed to be like finding a needle in a haystack. Tell us the damn story at some point. Dropping a couple of hints is a crafty start, to get us interested in what’s going on, but at some point you have to tell us: did we “choose wrong” and get indoctrinated? Or did we “choose right” and kill the Reapers? The game shows us absolutely nothing — all we see is that we picked one of three colors for our explosion scene and the game ends.
So while Indoctrination helps make sense of the chaotic crap that was presented to us as “the ending”, the fact that (if true) it was told so appallingly that I actually hope it’s nothing more than conspiracy theory. If Bioware releases DLC that proves the conspiracy theorists right, it will feel at best like a convenient cop out. In my mind, they fucked up so badly at this point no downloaded explanation could iron it out besides a total effective re-write.
You already burnt the toast, spreading jelly on it won’t make it taste better.
Oh, and I almost forgot. After the credits, there is the most atrocious scene of them all. It contains a repugnant trifecta: lame voice acting, juvenile animation and modeling (note the child is just a shrunken copy-paste of the adult), and Stephanie Meyer-caliber writing. Watch the clip below, but make sure your barf bag is handy:
