synobal said:
teknoarcanist said:
This Matrix Architect starchild bullshit is a slap in the face. Besides being immature, poorly-written, would-be-tragedy; besides being vague, alienating, impenetrable, and unsatisfying; besides all that, it invalidates every choice you've ever made throughout all three games. It renders every decision moot.
And we all know the reason.
It's railroading shit together to set up for DLC, an MMO, or both.
No it wasn't, you should really look a bit deeper into the ending. It wasn't dropped out of no where, there was a lot of subtle hints in regards to how the game was going to end and the choice you would have to make.
I think perhaps Bioware are suffering a bit from their own success, back in the day they use to only hit a very small target audience of people who seriously enjoyed RPGs and fantasy/scifi literature.
But Mass Effect really did a good job of crossing and blending the genre lines and so we have this Massive influx of people who are not well versed in story telling.
Please resist your knee jerk reaction to the endings people and look a bit deeper, maybe read some really good science fiction works and then come back and really look at the Mass Effect story across all three games. I think you'll find it was really very well done in the end.
Also: all those militaries stranded in Earth orbit with FTL travel? Yeah they're going to fucking destroy one other, vying for land and resources. I give it a few decades before the Krogan have wiped everybody else out and resort to cannibalism to offset overpopulation.
We really don't know that anyone was stuck on earth or that those fleets didn't get away. I know it is tempting to assume that the cut scene showed the crucible going off in real time but we don't know that for sure after all the Normandy got away and they apparently had time to pick up your squad mates off earth for extraction.
Oh and the Krogan didn't bring their females to earth, they are to precious to risk losing still.
It was NOT well-done. I'm not even complaining about the substantive material of the ending. I have no problem making difficult, seemingly-impossible ethical choices; in fact it's why I play these games at all. I don't care that it's not happy; I LIKE unhappy endings. Tragedies are my favorite kind of story.
What I have a problem with is the fact that it was poorly-written, ill-conceived, haphazardly presented bullshit. The ending didn't leave me emotionally exhausted, it left me going, "Wait.......what? That's it? It's just over? That was fucking stupid." It provides no sense of closure. No sense of finality. No understanding of the broader implications of the decision you've just made. I barely have any idea what even happened.
An all-powerful secret badguy who's more powerful than all the other badguys and was never mentioned before showing up in the last five minutes to dump exposition and force a false dichotomy on you is not good writing. It's very, very bad writing. It wasn't deep, or moving. It doesn't stand alongside Dhalgren as a postmodern science fiction dilemma that makes me question the very nature of reality. It's just idiotic, nonsensical, and badly written.
It's also tonally inconsistent -- it felt more like Deus Ex than Mass Effect. Why has Shepard spent the entire game marshaling forces to battle the reapers, only to go "Oh okay" and submit in the last five minutes? Shepard from Mass Effect 1 and 2 would have told that kid to shut the fuck up, pointed to the united armada above him, and delivered a stirring speech about how we're all working together and that proves the cycle wrong. And then he would have blown the whole damn Crucible the fuck up, and it would have worked out for him.
It even fails thematically. Mass Effect isn't ABOUT the conflict between organic and synthetic life! It never has been! That's a VERY small part of it, with the Quarians and the Geth, but the themes of Mass Effect are and always have been the scars of war, the disparity between foreign cultures, the anger bred from ignorance, the thin line between right and wrong, the difficult decisions that arise when dealing with war on a galactic scale -- that "ruthless calculus" Garrus was talking about. Again, it felt more like Deus Ex than Mass Effect. It was entirely out-of-place.
Mass Effect is a rollicking space opera. It didn't need a 2001 -style "sudden left turn" in the last five minutes. It needed a stirring finish. It failed to achieve that. And considering that the hours preceding it -- the siege on London, the last push to the beam, the choked goodbyes of all your former squadmates -- are some of the most dire, emotionally-fraught emotional peaks in gaming history, the ending fails to render that peak into a corresponding valley, or slowly bring us down from the gut-wrenching finality to tie things off with a bow. It just jumps off a cliff. You look at the last hour of Return of the King for an ensemble epic resolutely concluded. You look at the last five minutes of Matrix Revolutions for a similarly misguided cop-out.
And I'll reiterate that the rest of the game was absolutely pitch-perfect. Everything right up until Hackett tells you the Crucible isn't working and you get raised up on that platform was absolutely fantastic, emotionally-stirring, heartstring-tugging, thought-provoking stuff. It's amazing how they could possibly have dropped the ball so hard so close to the end.
Not sad or upsetting. Not powerful or thought-provoking. Not even interesting.
Weak, lazy, and disappointing.
Hackett out.
