SirBryghtside said:
I liked the ending. What the hell makes it 'universally wrong' that I'm not seeing?!
...then again, I liked the ending of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, too. So maybe I'm just an idiot.
You an idiot? Not at all. I'm happy you enjoyed the endings. I'm happy for anyone who enjoyed the endings, because you don't have to feel the way that those who didn't enjoy the endings feel. I hesitate to explain all the problems that make the games ending, at least to me, the worse I've seen for a game series I loved, because I don't want to make you go 'oh yeah that does suck'. It's not the worse ending ever made. There are plenty of games that are bad from beginning to end. But I digress.
There will be spoilers ahead so don't read if you dont want to know things about the endings.
I'll try to put it as simple as I can, as to what my problem with the endings are.
It comes down to a few things. One of which is choice. Be it ME1, or ME2 Shep always made his own choice. Not the ones that were presented to him. That is what the paragon, and renegade options were for in the conversations, and in the interrupts. It was Shepard making a choice that changed the situation in ways that no one else had seen. That is what is missing from the end. Sheppard is given three choices by the AI god child. In the conversation there are no options to use paragon, or renegade to prove the reaper god child wrong. There is no way for Shepard to tell the AI to go F itself. Shepard just meekly takes one of the thee choices, and that is not Shepard. Not through ME1, ME2, or even ME3.
Two would be results of building your forces up. In both ME1, and ME2 what you did through the game ended up effecting the ending. In ME3 the same can not be said. Earth being destroyed or not, and Shepard living in one of the endings, depends on building up your forces. That value can be changed from just doing multi player. I'd have to test it out, but from what I see you can build up that force with multi player, do only the priority missions, and skip loads of forces, and missions, and go to the end and get the best ending the game can give you. There is no pay off for spending the time prepping your fleet, and building allies.
And that brings me to point three. Seeing the forces, and companions in action. Which is part of the payoff. We want to see the fleet, and people we brought together in the battle. We want to see what happened to them after the battle. We got neither. We want to know why Joker is in either FTL, or riding a mass effect relay. We want to know that if the mass effect relays are gone that they can be rebuilt. We want to know that all the effort we put into uniting the galaxy payed off.
What we get in the end is the normandy stuck on a planet, and in my case with a companion who was with me on that last mission (leaving me going wtf). This happens in all endings. The Mass Effect relays destroyed, and in two out of the three endings Shepard dead (no real problem there. I Thought I'd die anyway). The fleets are all stuck at earth. And that is it. The reapers are gone in one way or another in all endings, but that is all we get. The NG+ ending is a joke. It really does nothing but show that humans survived and they tell the story of Shepard. This is the end of the trilogy of Shepard. This was suppose to be a hell of a ending that made you sit back and go 'wow that was great'. Instead the three cookie cutter endings just come across as lazy, unimaginative, and rushed.