Mass Effect 3: It Ends Here

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by stefan

I like how Refusal is more or less an overt middle finger aimed at everyone who rightfully pointed out how much of a lazy cop-out the original endings were.

Pretty much.

...I suppose it's nice that you can still help the next cycle win and whatnot, but when the other endings all universally allow (most of) your friends (and humanity) to live, it's basically Bioware railroading you into RGB and mocking you if you dare express displeasure.

My problem with the endings isn't so much that they're terrible (the Extended Cut does vastly improve the RGB endings, most notably Control, which is now a legitimate option instead of 'that choice no one with two brain cells would choose'), but rather that Mass Effect seems to no longer have any thematic resonance or narrative coherence.

When the first two games are all about achieving the impossible, persevering against the odds, uniting the galaxy against a threat, respecting all races equally, achieving true independence, a willingness to die before submission, etc., it establishes a certain vision of the kind of person Shepard is -- whether your Shepard is paragon or renegade.
...And then you're basically punished for roleplaying Shepard as the kind of person s/he is and has been since the beginning.

...That's my biggest problem with the new ending(s). I appreciate that Bioware has given the fans more closure and dealt with a few of the glaring plot holes. But every time I'd ever play ME3, I'd feel compelled to choose the 'Refusal' ending because that's what every incarnation of my Shepard would do.
And then Bioware just basically gives me the middle finger for being true to the very themes they originally established.

It's like if Apocalypse Now was 95% the exact same movie, and then at the end of the film a random U.S. marine shows up and starts kicking Vietnamese ass and a heroic orchestral soundtrack swells and the Marine logo shows up: "What are you waiting for? War is amazing!!! Enlist Today!"

Or if just as The Princess Bride was about to end and all the characters are walking off in victory Westley announced that he was actually having an affair with Inigo Montoya throughout the entire story, therefore proving that 'true love' was valueless, leaving Buttercup to commit suicide in despair.

[Ramary]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Or if just as The Princess Bride was about to end and all the characters are walking off in victory Westley announced that he was actually having an affair with Inigo Montoya throughout the entire story, therefore proving that 'true love' was valueless, leaving Buttercup to commit suicide in despair.

I know you are trying to make a point here, but I am currently super distracted by just how much I want to see this now.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

So, it turns out you can polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it's still a turd. They may have expanded upon and improved the endings (yay the relays no longer explode and kill everyone, control is no longer totally stupid), but the core bullshittery and stupid is still there and unchanged (Refusal is just a "fuck you" from Bioware, the Reapers still wiping out organics because they don't want them to be wiped out by synthetics by wiping them out with synthetics, the dialogue in most of the endings is pretty terrible, the relays are still dead for a while until they get repaired in Synthesis and Control (duno if they do in Destroy) leaving everyone still mostly stranded for a while and the Stargazer scene is still really out of place, even more so if you choose Control or Synthesis).

So yeah, improved in parts, but still pretty crappy.

[Bells]

C'mon now... it works. It's acceptable. Hell, i can't hardly remember a good game with a great ending in the last few years... it's always a shitty ending with a sequel hook or a "i can swallow this" ending from a game with a string for a story.

For how big mass effect is... this DLC did just fine.

The Reapers are not beatable by direct confrontation, the refusal ending is just there to allow you to die on your own terms. "Go Down Swinging" if you may... if the plot wasn't broken enough up to this point, having it turn into a sunshine happy ending by virtue of telling the starkid to fuck off would be simply fan wishing... it's just not feasible without a metric ton of eye squinting...

The explained a ton of the plot holes of the previous ending and did give proper resolution to the game... the costs were huge, everything is changed forever, but the galaxy will rise up back to where they were, in due time, and now probably working together... it's good. Hell, even Synthesis was made to look good... you can question it's logic, but go questioning Sci-Fi is never trully the best thing to do... specially in video game form.

[Sifright]

Originally Posted by Bells

*snip*

The Reapers are not beatable by direct confrontation, the refusal ending is just there to allow you to die on your own terms. "Go Down Swinging" if you may... if the plot wasn't broken enough up to this point, having it turn into a sunshine happy ending by virtue of telling the starkid to fuck off would be simply fan wishing... it's just not feasible without a metric ton of eye squinting...

This actually isn't true it's shown pretty often that not only can the reapers be destroyed they are much less of a threat than the narrative states. from being taken down by a giant threshermaw which should be impossible regardless of the creatures size to many other examples

The codex has an entry about 4 dreadnoughts being able destroy a reaper capital ship.

We personally blow up a smaller reaper ship with a single handheld weapon.

The FTL drives could also be used to make FTL ship weapons. If terrorists managed to override the saftety features to turn a ship into a weapon that could crack a planet then then mass effect militaries certainly could.

The civilian ships managed to blow a reaper on the Quarian home world and the cut scene only showed about 15 ships firing. Conventionally the reapers can be defeated it just requires more work than "lol charge head on" given the way the relays work there is nothing stopping them from simply setting up enourmous mine fields that read for IFF transponders and explode anything that isn't considered friendly.

The refuse option is crap simple as. It's not even about it being an eventually lose. The problem is that it ignores all the ways that have shown the reapers to be actually beatable by conventional means. The fact that the game has people saying repeatedly that they can't be beaten is bullshit.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by Bells

C'mon now... it works. It's acceptable. Hell, i can't hardly remember a good game with a great ending in the last few years... it's always a shitty ending with a sequel hook or a "i can swallow this" ending from a game with a string for a story.

For how big mass effect is... this DLC did just fine.

The Reapers are not beatable by direct confrontation, the refusal ending is just there to allow you to die on your own terms. "Go Down Swinging" if you may... if the plot wasn't broken enough up to this point, having it turn into a sunshine happy ending by virtue of telling the starkid to fuck off would be simply fan wishing... it's just not feasible without a metric ton of eye squinting...

The explained a ton of the plot holes of the previous ending and did give proper resolution to the game... the costs were huge, everything is changed forever, but the galaxy will rise up back to where they were, in due time, and now probably working together... it's good. Hell, even Synthesis was made to look good... you can question it's logic, but go questioning Sci-Fi is never trully the best thing to do... specially in video game form.

No, it's not. Granted I haven't seen all the extra dialogue that may now be available (I've just watched the final cutscenes which miss those parts out) but unless they went into great detail on exactly how having synthetics wipe out organics to save them from being wiped out by synthetics isn't completely retarded circular logic then the core problem with the Reapers entire purpose is still present. If this is still the problem then the question of "why didn't the Reapers just act as peacekeepers and guide the organic races so that they never built synthetics if they believe that synthetics will kill them all" remains.

Control seems to imply that this is what Shepard is now attempting to do with the Reapers, so why didn't the Reapers just do that in the first place, instead of wiping everyone out all the time? Synthesis too shows the Reapers working with the other races, teaching them and guiding them, so again, why was this not the original case in the first place? How is "destroy everyone over and over again, make them like us" a better solution to a problem than "guide and teach", that anyone would ever implement the former over the latter in an effort to resolve this problem? But of course, the answer to that is, "there'd be no conflict and thus no game then", to which I reply, "well then that's fucking stupid."

Frankly it seems to me that Bioware wanted some massive twisty revelation for the sake of a twisty revelation regarding the Reapers motives just so they could try and make the game seem deeper by making it about the nature of life and existence and it just doesn't work. It would have been better if the Reapers just simply believed they were elevating advanced races to another level of existence because they just believed it was better that way. It's still Blue and Orange morality, it's still utterly alien and abhorent to most life forms, it still implies that the Reapers are seeing things in a way and on a scale that mere organics can't comprehend, but it doesn't have the stupid "save you from yourself by destroying you" nonsense that we currently have.

Personally I'd have been fine if the Reapers motives were never explicitely explained. We knew what they were doing, we knew how they were doing it, both of those facts were enough to horrify everyone into opposing it, we didn't need it explaining any more than that. It's what made them interesting, we didn't know where they came from, who built them, or why they were doing what they did. It added mystery, and then the mystery got destroyed by bullshit. We don't need to know why the Borg in Star Trek want to assimilate everyone into the collective, they just do it. They're not doing it for some grand purpose, they just think it's the right thing to impose on the galaxy and everyone else thinks otherwise.

As for it explaining all these other plotholes, no, they don't. Destroy still leaves the galaxy with no Relays, and thus mostly stranded (I'm pretty sure it's not in the power of the organics to rebuild the relays on their own, since they're basically the most advanced things in the galaxy and we've never had any evidence that organics have had any success in trying to build their own). So that still leaves a lot of a people stranded and cut off from each other, including the Quarians whose home is on the other side of the galaxy. Enjoy the trip home guys, guess all that time spent fighting over it was a waste eh?

And if you pick Control or Synthesis you still get that Stargazer scene at the end, which makes no sense since it seems to imply those people still have no FTL travel or knowledge of anything beyond their world despite the fact they should have had the relays rebuilt by then. At least in the orginal endings that scene made sense since it implied that with the destruction of the relays everyone was stranded for several generations at least, but in the new Control and Synthesis endings it shouldn't take that long to rebuild them since there are now armies of Reapers to get to work fixing things. Maybe that was true in the orginal endings as well though, which still makes the Stargazer bit make no sense. Note that I'm using the words maybe and imply a lot to talk about this, because the entire thing still isn't clear and explains absolutely nothing, which is exactly the problem.

And then there's Refuse, which whatever way you look at is just Bioware going "oh you don'y like our endings? Fuck you, everyone dies, the end." If you can't see that that's the case then you're probably delluding yourself, and the fact this ending now exists like it does just makes me like Bioware even less.

Note that I haven't once commented on anything about these endings being bittersweet or happy perfect endings. I don't care about that, I'm fine with either, I never asked for a "perfect" ending where everyone lives, the Reapers are stopped and peace reigns forever. What I asked for is an ending that makes sense and isn't a giant "fuck you and all your choices in this game series based entirely around choices." Everything you do still all amounts to shit in the end, and in the stupidest way possible.

I would also argue with you over the act of questioning Sci-Fi. Why should I not question the plot of a sci-fi? Should sci-fi plots be held to a lower level of expecation than other genres or something? Since when has sci-fi not been about questioning things? The original purpose behind science fiction stories was to expand peoples minds to new possibilities, to look to the future and imagine, to apply scientific principles and logic to things. If a particular plot doesn't make sense I should be free to call it out on that fact, regardless of what it's about. This plot still has holes, therefore it is not a good plot.

Anyway, there are probably other points, but this rant has gone on longer than I meant to, so I'll stop now.

[Marc v4.0]

1) Never read anything on BSN, that place is worse than The Nexus websites and most people there are way too infatuated with the LI plots and golden bullshit endings.

2) Nobody with a right mind wanted Bioware to make it a totally happy ending. It was never the problem with the majority of the complaints. We wanted an ending that wasn't written at the last minute by the Lead Producer and the Head Writer locking themselves in a room and coming up with it without any critical input whatsoever. Believe it or not, the games have always had a 'peer critique' system going on within the writing team to keep bullshit like this from happening, and they up and pulled rank over it. It really shows.

3) This is not acceptable. If it had been included in the first place with the game then, yes, it wouldn't have been a great ending but it would have been your typical crazy game ending. This was Bioware's chance to really pull it together and regain some faith within the customer base, and they simply set fire to the ashes again. Everything Hawk said, basically.


I'm certainly not very excited for whatever franchise they come up with next to burn into the ground, and I know a lot of other people aren't either. EA must be shitting itself over all this crap with Bioware, cutting into their bottom line and ability to sell DLC.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Hawk

(I'm pretty sure it's not in the power of the organics to rebuild the relays on their own, since they're basically the most advanced things in the galaxy and we've never had any evidence that organics have had any success in trying to build their own).

The entire last act of Mass Effect 1 revolves around racing to the experimental relay that the Protheans built and used to return to the Citidel. It was kind of a big deal, remember?

[stefan]

yeah, the core problem here is that while these expansions may give a more in-depth explanation of the endings, they fail to address the key complaint and problem about the endings, re: everything that happens after Shepard gets fried by harbinger is absolutely and irredeemably retarded.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by Marc v4.0

The entire last act of Mass Effect 1 revolves around racing to the experimental relay that the Protheans built and used to return to the Citidel. It was kind of a big deal, remember?

I never actually played ME1, I'm on ps3. Even still, just because the Protheans built a relay, did we ever have anything saying the current races managed the same? I always saw the relays as being highly valued, irreplacable items that were beyond anyones ability to fully replicate, like Stargates or something.

And if it is the case that they can be rebuilt by organics with their current tech, then doesn't that just make the stargazer bit even more stupid? The exchange with the kid implies (there's that word again) that for several generations they've had no or limited space travel, which wouldn't be the case if relays could just be rebuilt.

[EVILNess]

I still say that the last sequence of the synthesis ending is totally the final minute of Gurren Lagann slightly retooled.

ALL THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ARE STARS.