3 Years Later: Mass Effect 3 Ending Revisited [spoilers!]

[DeepReaver]

the me3 ending will always sting to me, always. There is no getting over it for me due to the fact that I finished the game ON my birthday. Game came out March 6, 2012, my birthday was March 9th. Looking back on it I was just gobsmacked at the ending, I thought I had done something wrong, I thought I had missed something important. So, I reloaded, I beat the final boss that was Marauder Shields I got the elusive man to surrender his face to a firearm, and then one glowing pillar of light Jesus analogue later my world descended in to a red ring or rage. I, like a whole lot of people, were furious about that ending. It WAS tonal whiplash to go from an epic hard sci-fi [given they tried to explain everything in codex entries even biotics] to pure science fantasy with hand wavy magic to boot.

For me, the Extended Cut fixed nothing, the closure was important yes, but it felt tacked on, it felt like they were begrudging going "Ok we will give the crying baby a bottle to shut it up" instead of actually caring that so many people had invested so much time and money and felt betrayed... I still feel betrayed even three years later. I feel hurt that so many called me an entitled twat for standing up and saying 'this is wrong' when at the time it felt so very wrong. But what can you do? It's all in the past now... But I for one lost total faith in Bioware, it is why I have not played anything else by them since.

And don't even get me started on the plot holes with dark energy or the tali thing...

 

[El Camino of Rampage]

I never really understood what the big deal was. I thought the ending was more or less the same level of quality as the rest of the games. After a series full of "Pick the Red or Blue Choice to give you the illusion of changing the story," you got the biggest, reddest/bluest choice ever to give you the illusion of changing the story. And I liked how neither choice was the obvious "good" choice; both had obvious drawbacks.

EDIT: Hard Sci-fi? Did everyone miss the planet full of sexy blue sex aliens?

 

[ScorpionPrince]

I finished mass effect 3 with the extended cut. I watched some documentaries that posited "the indoctrination theory". I interpret the ending as: "the reapers are slowing taking over the mind of shepard, steering him away from destroy in many subtle ways. The endings of control and merge are illusions, destroy is the only true ending."

At first, the ending seemed lazily slapped together, as if they suddenly ran out of time to make a proper one. But the many weird details about the dialogue, environments, and actions of shepard and those around him make it seem like most of it is taking place in shepards head. I thought that was kind of cool actually. With that in mind, I like the ending.

 

[koobismo]

Still the worst thing ever.

Over time, I've grew to appreciate Mass Effect 1 more, overtaking ME2 as my favorite in the series, while my ME3 appreciation as a whole (not just the ending) waned. I still love the universe (and still intend to finish my alternative ending thingie), but I treat the third game as somewhat separate nowadays, not-really-all-that-included in my "I love Mass Effect!" exclamations.

 

[zinho73]

The ending is probably the worse in videogame history because of the context.

1. The rest of the game is good to great, so the contrast is immense;
2. They actually made the opposite they said they were going to do in previous interviews; Hype is one thing, but it just felt like the developers were just lying to the fans.
3. It was incredibly badly written and executed on its own right;
4. The last thing you actually see is an ad to buy DLC for the game;

It was a perfect storm of bad decisions.

And, in my opinion, bad decisions is now a trend in Bioware, that is keeping their games of being great.

 

[zinho73]

I would have greatly preferred it if they went with the dark energy idea. It was hinted at already, but they never used it for some reason.

Dark energy is slowly starting to rip the galaxy apart. The first species, those squid things, turned themselves into reapers to become a 'collective intelligence' to solve the problem. But they couldn't find a solution. So more species' intelligence were added in the form of reapers. And more and more... And the human reaper would have been the last piece of puzzle. So the dillema would have been "do we let the reapers 'reap' intelligent life one more time, or do we destroy them and take our chances with solving the dark energy problem ourselves?" Sounds like it would have been a far better ending... Still not nearly perfect, but far better than what we got.

I also agree with the poster above. The ending was so bad that it kinda ruined all three games for me. Whenever I think of playing mass effect I immediately get that bad taste in my mouth the ending left me with. And I just...lose the motivation to play again.

I agree with you.

Dark Energy ending is simple, already introduced, based on actual science and would have left space and time to develop a bit more the consequences of our choices and the destiny of our allies, but vanity is the devil favorite sin and Casey hudson had to write his own version of the ending.

I also find it incredible that a bad ending could ruin all games before it for me, but it actually happened.It just consumed my will to play the games.

 

[zinho73]

I played it after the extended cut and...it was ok. Not really satisfying but not bad enough to throw a fit over. It's annoying that you can't argue with the Star Childs "logic" and meekly go along with it. Although to me its not quite as stupid as "sending synthetics to kill you so you won't be killed by synthetics", it considers making a race into a Reaper preservation and it's doing this more for the sake of pre space faring species who would never get to advance if synthetics became dominant, not the current dominant races that they are attacking. If they wanted to do that sort of theme I think it would have been simpler if they were just trying to stop any race becoming too dominant and too advance to ever be challenged by developing races and didn't make it a synthetic vs organics thing.

I mostly dislike the synthesis ending. I can ignore a lot of things that don't quite make sense or are justified with "it's really really advance technology, ok?" but that was just bullshit space magic that came out of nowhere (at least biotics where in at the start and justified with their made up element). I also don't really like the implications of it and thought it was too "nice". I ended up going with destroy.

Some people didn't like that it came down to once piece of tech to stop the reapers rather than fighting them off traditionally but it was fairly clear that it would have to be something like that from the first game with how powerful the reapers are meant to be.

I more disappointed that they did nothing really compelling with indoctrination or Cerberus. I also wished they kept Kia Leng out of the games.

And the Stargazer epilogue always rubbed the wrong way... I understand why is there being more of homage of sort and I don't fully understand why I don't like it, but I don't like it.

I disliked it as well. I'm not sure quite what it is. Maybe its the voice acting or that fact that they refer to Shepard as "The Shepard".

I seem to remember it as you sort of not even having a choice from the start.

It's supposed to be a cycle, you just choose how that cycle develops.

I sort of get why people disliked the ending, but to me it seemed like a "hey this story doesn't have a happy ending deal with it" kinda thing to me.

No matter what you did, you were always going nowhere.

But what if that was the point?

Wouldn't that make the shitstorm that was caused exactly what makes the game memorable?

A bleak ending is ok. There are countless of great "bad" endings, with sad outcomes.

But something poorly written, with the wrong tone, contrary to what was advertised, that ignores its own cannon and what the players did is actually pretty disappointing.

 

[Blachman201_v1legacy]

I see many trying to defend the ending by saying that what the Catalyst does makes sense from its own insane perspective. That it is supposed to come across as an AI who has taken its programming too literally.

The problem is that Shepard never appears to come to this realization. During the entire scene, they keep talking to the Catalyst, not as if it the insane and broken machine it really is, but instead as if it's telling an inspired truth as it spouts what can easily be - depending on how you have played the game - pure gibberish. It is indeed easily as the player to conclude that the Catalyst sounds like the archetypical result of an faulty AI taking its programming too literally and going rogue because of it, but because are not allowed to make this observation known through your avatar in-game. Every ending (and that includes the Destroy and Reject ones) seems to start from the assumption that you, or at least Shepard, believe what this obviously insane, genocidal creature tells you; that you buy the idea that the reason for everything in the series stems from the conflict between synthetics and organics, when it up to this point really only has the theme of one of out several plot-lines, and a couple of minor sidequests.

For a series that has prided itself on giving the player a pretty high degree of agency in its world through its main character, this is an extremely blatant example of railroading and - again, depending on how the player has played the game - a potentially glaring case of disconnect between the player and the player character. It is the designers stepping directly in and forcing an set conclusion upon the player. All you are left with is a choice on how to answer this assumption, but you sure as hell aren't allowed to question it in any way.

 

[Pseudonym]

There is just a kind of emptyness whenever I think about the ending. I've never really gotten angry about it, but then it doesn't evoke anything strong at all in me. (I can contrast this to curing the genophage in ME3, the ending of ME2 and the mission on Virmire in ME1 about which I have clear thougths and feelings)

The ending was originally just kind of confusing for me. I think the problem is that the tone suddenly shifted miles apart from the rest of the games. I don't mind some abstract questions but they didn't really fit here. Yes, there was some organic vs synthetic themes in the rest of the games but that always felt like merely one theme amongst many. The synthetics (the Geth, EDI, that one AI from ME1) were another 'Other' so to speak, along with quarians, humans, krogan and everyone in the story from somebodies' perspective. More importantly, there is no reason why sythethics and organics have to be at eachothers throats any more than organics are at the throats of other organics already. A lot of the story of mass effect was about living happily together, tolerance and all that hippy shit. That is why Joker and EDI end up together and why the Quarians and the Geth can both survive the storyline and that is why humanity, despite the first contact war and the general mistrust everyone feels against them can get reasonably along with the rest. It is why the good ending where you end up with a lot of paragon points to the krogan storyline is the one where you cure the genophage. After all that, SC's assertion that synthetics and organics can't live together just fell flat for me. If you want to give the enemy of the entire storyline a motivation it better make sense on some basic level. None of this should impress shepard in the least.

At the time I didn't really feel anything strongly about it. I thought, 'yeah, I see the themes they were going for but it didn't really work, I think.' None of the specifics make any sense though. There is a line were SC says 'the fact that you stand here proves we cannot continue harvesting civilizations.' This is just not true. Shepard is weak and barely understands where he is anymore. A single collector footsoldier flying in with a gun could kill him and the reapers can continue their cycles. There is no reason to fire the crucible yet SC allows shepard to do it.

The most damning thing I can say about the ending though is that whenever I think about any specific part of the canon, even reaperrelated things, the ending just somehow doesn't feel like it counts or like it can give me meaningful information. Something about it is just so entirely off, that it feels like it never happened to me. (not within it's own universe, I mean) Everything inside the citadel with TIM and SC feels like it isn't properly part of the story and merely a tacked on fable. A fable about organics and synthetics which perhaps sheds some light on something but which just isn't an ending to the story I was playing through.

There is a long video by mrbtongue on youtube about it where he says that the story loses it's cohesion. That, I think summarises what I have been saying in this post quite well. I don't really think or feel that much about the ending because I can't really see it as an ending to the story I cared about to begin with.

 

[Danbo Jambo]

Some great posts in this thread. Credit to those of you who made it to the ending, because I thought ME3 was that bad a game I got nowhere near finishing it.

What a travesty. I'd love nothing more than to see a ME3 version 2 (alongside a re-done Dragon Age 2&3). Thank God for The Witcher 3