jaggedrain

So, everyone’s played Mass Effect 3. Most loved it, some loathed it…everyone was upset, one way or another, about the ending.

I’ve played the game through twice, and now I feel I’m ready to give my opinion about the various endings and what I think of them.

Spoilers ahead – be warned

Part one – The Endings

Destroy

This is the ending I chose first and, after reloading to see them all, the one I chose to keep. I don’t much like the idea of killing off EDI and the Geth (only con, so it doesn’t get a con list), but here’s my reasoning for choosing this one.

• Every other ending leaves the Reapers alive to come back for another round. Why would I do that? Shepard spent years of her life trying to end the threat of the Reapers, not just make it her children’s problem.
  
• The Catalyst didn’t like it. Call me contrary if you like, but I’m not going to blindly follow the advice of some manipulative machine from millions of years ago (yes, Mr. Reaper King, I saw what you did there, with the kid’s face, thank you, and I don’t buy it)
  
• There’s no guarantee that it will, in fact, kill off all synthetic life. Call it grasping at straws but I’m going to go ahead and believe that the phrase ‘You can kill off all synthetic life, if you want’ implies that I might be able to choose to kill only the Reapers. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
  
• EDI would understand. Not sure about the Geth, but EDI would understand why I had to do anything I can to take care of the Reapers for good.
  
• Shepard lives. I didn’t know this until my second playthrough, so it wasn’t a factor in my choice first time around. but it is important to me. I would have been okay with it if she had died and I had known the Reapers were destroyed, never to trouble the Galaxy again.

Control

This is the ending I might have chosen, were Destroy not available. I’ll list the pro’s and con’s of this choice now.

Pro

• Reapers are gone.
  If your control succeeds, the Reapers do, in fact leave.
  
• I don’t have to kill off EDI and the Geth.
  This is the one which could have made me choose this ending. I adore EDI. I admire and pity the Geth. I’ve loved the Geth since ME1, where they were pretty much faceless villains, and Legion stole my heart. If I hadn’t been able to get the Geth and Quarians to co-operate, I would have chosen the Geth, even knowing that Tali (my favourite character bar one) would die if I did. This is how much I love the Geth.

Con

• Reapers aren’t dead.
  This is important to me. How long does Shepard’s control over the Reapers last? Forever? Really? What’s to say she won’t be driven mad by the allienness of it all, or dissolve into the Reapers, leaving them free to come back?
  
• Shepard is dead.
  I love Miranda Shepard. She’s like my sister. I’ve played her through all three games, multiple times. I care about what happens to her, and I can’t sacrifice her if I don’t know for a complete fact, without a reasonable doubt, that the Reapers will never, EVER, be a threat to those she loves again.
  
• The Illusive man wanted this, and the Catalyst isn’t against it.
  Now, I don’t care what colour you make the machinery. Anything the Illusive Man wanted (while he was indoctrinated, mind you) can’t be the good option. The Illusive Man thought control was the best option when he was so under Harbinger and co’s control that the only way to free himself was death. This does not speak to the best way to go about it to me.
  Now a lot of people will say that the Catalyst says outright that TIM couldn’t have done it because he was indoctrinated, but Shepard can. Is he under a truth spell? Did someone slip him some Veritaserum while I wasn’t looking? Is he programmed never to lie?
  Really? then what’s to say he isn’t lying when he says that? Why wouldn’t he lie, if it meant Shepard would kill herself off for him and leave the Reapers alive to return in ten or twenty or a hundred years to complete the cycle?

Synthesis

I would never have chosen this option. Not even if it was the only one available, would I have let this happen. I’d have quit right there and never made this choice. That’s how much this choice repels me.

Mike Gamble (@gamblemike on twitter) has said that he likes Synthesis, it’s his favourite ending, and he’s not alone. A lot of the folks at Bioware seem to think that, especially because it’s supposed to be the hardest one to get.

That’s their right, of course, as people with opinions and the creators of the world we ultimately only visited. I disagree completely and utterly and here’s why.

• Saren wanted Synthesis.
  When he was so indoctrinated that all he could do was die (sounds familiar?) Saren thought that Synthesis was the only option.
  
• Isn’t Synthesis the Reaper's’ ultimate goal
  Not as the Catalyst describes it, certainly (but I’ve already drawn his trustworthiness into question). But in ME2 it’s made clear that the Reapers are in fact synthorganic themselves. They harvest organics. and turn them into something partly synthetic and partly organic. Like husks. And Banshees. And Reaper Ships…
  So it can, in fact, be argued that Synthesis is playing right into the Reapers hands. Claws. Lasers? Whatever. They want to harvest everyone and turn them into synthorganics like themselves. With Synthesis, Shepard does it for them, without all the pesky blood and screaming and hassle. Instantly, within seconds, Shepard has handed the Reapers what they have been trying to accomplish since the beginning. Good job there, kiddo.
  
• I come from a country that’s probably the closest to the Mass Effect universe that you can find on Earth – South Africa. In my small rural town we have black people, white people, Indian people, Asian people, Muslims, Catholics, gay people, straight people, every flavour the human being you can imagine. We’re not all the same. Sometimes we don’t get along. But we’re there, we’re different and that’s the strength and glory of our country.
  In Mass Effect you have Quarians, Geth, Turians, Salarians, Asari, Krogan, Batari, Vorcha, Volus…they’re all different, they don’t always get along, but…their infinite variety is the strength of the alliance against the Reapers.
  Javik said it himself – the Prothean Empire was homogenous, and was defeated. The current cycle’s strength is in its diversity, its beauty in its variety…its survival in its ability to adapt.
  Synthesis would take that away. Everyone would be the same, there would be no conflict, no growth. Just sameness. Forever.
  I don’t know about you, but I think that would be the most depressing thing ever.
  
• The other problem I have with this ending is that the conflict, to me, wasn’t about synthetic vs organic, but on a deeper level between freedom and control. The Geth didn’t have a problem with organics, they just wanted to be able to live their lives the way they wanted. The races you bring together don’t want to destroy the Reapers because they are synthetic, but because the Reapers don’t want to let them be.
  The whole fight is about the right to determine your own destiny.
  And with Synthesis…you’re taking all that away. You’re changing everyone to suit the Reapers image of what the pinnacle of evolution is. And at what point in the game did we start caring about what they thought?
        
       

  General thoughts about the end of the game.

It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t great, I think it could have been better, but it wasn’t a thing of horror, which is what I expected from all the internet dramas.

Pros and Cons

Pro

• Soundtrack and voice acting were, as usual, fabulous. ‘I need to stop the Reapers. Can you help me do that?” I swear that tone of pleading and weariness in Jennifer Hale’s voice…I cried like a baby. A hungry angry baby. You could really hear that Shepard is at the end of her rope. She’s tired, she’s wounded, she’s not entirely sure what’s going on. Her love interest is back on Earth somewhere, maybe dead, Anderson just died next to her and she’s trapped in an opium dream. Also that little choke in her voice when she tells Garrus he’ll never be alone before the final battle very nearly broke my heart.
  
• The entire Battle For Earth is very well done. It’s frantic and hard and the environment is gorgeous – in a war-torn sort of way
  

Con

• Kinda feels like you fell down a rabbit hole at the end there.
  Everything after Shepard gets hit by the beam is weird and seemingly designed to put you off-balance. From Anderson’s appearance ahead of Shepard when he was supposed to have followed her up, to…well, I have a list.
• Anderson appearing ahead of Shepard when he said he’d followed her up.
  For that to have happened he’d have had to’ve passed her along the way, but he doesn’t and the control space clearly has only one entrance.
• The Illusive Man showing up out of nowhere.
  Suddenly, he’s there. Nobody saw him arrive, how does he get there?
• Anderson’s gunshot.
  It’s on his lower left side. But there’s no blood. No mark on his armor, no hole, no nothing. Shepard, on the other hand, has a hole. In her lower left side. Where she didn’t have one before (She’s wounded, but she was holding on to her shoulder before, and if you’ve got a wound that bleeds as much as that one did, you hold onto that wound, not your sprained shoulder, and besides, there was no blood there before she sat down with Anderson)
• The disappearing-reappearing pistol.
  In the first place, my Shepard doesn’t carry a pistol. She carries a Disciple and a Geth assault rifle. No pistol..
  In the second place, where is the pistol while she’s talking to the Catalyst?
• The Mass Relays.
  I really think Bioware needs to explain this a little more. It explicitly stated in Arrival that blowing up a relay causes an explosion that will kill everything in that system.
  Did we just wipe out civilization? Will we be known as Shepard the Genocide for all time?
  And if it doesn’t, why doesn’t it? Someone said about this issue that if an exception is made to canon, it needs to be explained in canon. If it’s not there, if you can’t tell why something is suddenly completely different from the way you were told it was going to work, then they’re doing it wrong.
  
• It’s really, really short. I described it to a friend of mine as the worst coitus interruptus ending that I’ve ever experienced, and that was pretty accurate. Of course, Bioware is addressing that with the Exended Cut, but they shouldn’t have to. Bioware’s people aren’t stupid. They should have known better than to think people who’ve been playing this story for years are going to be happy with a two-minute cutscene that doesn’t make any sense to finish it all off. And about that cutscene…
• What the hell is the Normandy doing all the way out there? Wasn’t it in orbit around Earth?
• Why is Garrus (who was with me until I got hit by the Beam) on the Normandy?
• How did Joker survive a crash that ripped his ship all to pieces (brittle bone disease, remember?)
• I get that everyone getting off safely is supposed to be the good ending, but is their ship fixable? If not, who’s gonna die – the dextros or the humans? Because they don’t eat the same kind of food, you know.

In closing, the whole ending feels like a dream. Which is why I think Bioware should take the Indoctrination Theory and run with it. And not just because if they do that, we get to play a whole nother part of the game, which takes place after Shep wakes up! But the Indoctrination Theory is a story for another day.

To be continued…