Out of courtesy to anyone who hasn’t seen it for themselves yet, I guess this might constitute as a spoiler alert.
Yeah, it really is just like that.
At first, I figured when I found out about the general outcry of how much the ending sucked, I figured it was just the typical internet overreaction, and the subsequent snowball effect of everyone too dumb to formulate their own opinions, piling on. I was still in the midst of playing through the game myself, and I figured the ending couldn’t really be as bad as everyone seems to think it is, and that I would wait until I had seen it myself before coming to my own conclusion.
Well, during my sick day, I had ample time to play ME3, and I ended up beating it. And gone through the possible endings.
Evidently the internet was right – Mass Effect 3’s endings ALL blew. But not only did they blow, they simply made little sense, too. And the more I think about the endings, the more they come out to suck afterward.
At first, I figured people must’ve been upset because none of the endings were truly happy – either Shepard dies in two of them, or he pretty much dies in an explosion in the third one, and the entire galaxy is stripped of machines. It doesn’t take a genius to think about how someone is boned, no matter which decision you make. The mass relays are all destroyed in all three choices, so you have to imagine all the alien races who came to help earth are all stuck in the Sol relay forever now. If you rid the galaxy of synthetics, then the Quarian race is kind of fucked, since the Geth were essentially helping them recover. Or the hero of the galaxy is dead. Nobody’s happy – but that’s life, a series of down endings. All Jedi has was a bunch of muppets.
But then I thought more about it, and thought to the part after the relays are all destroyed, and the epic conclusion of the war. The last thing you see before the credits is the Normandy, crashed on what’s probably the same island from LOST, and Joker emerging from the wreck. And despite the fact that they were all on Earth with Shepard during the war, two random members from the team end up emerging from the wreck too, to look at the landscape. For me, it was EDI and Ashley, then Ashley and Javik, and then Tali and Garrus. Yeah, my Shepard had emotional one-on-ones with all of them before going into war, but somehow they’re coming out of the Normandy which was in space the whole time Garrus was on Earth with me, fighting Banshees.
I’ll still go on record and say that a series, Mass Effect is still the pinnacle of video game storytelling and plot development, but just when I had hope for American-made storytelling, ME3’s ending is about as mind-fucking and unsatisfying as the original Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series.
From what I’ve heard but not verified, ME3’s current ending is somewhat of a re-write; a reactionary move as result of some fucktard(s) who apparently discovered the first ending to the game when the demos of ME3 were released. Obviously, people like me ignore everything pre-release, in hopes of savoring everything when it’s official, but there are some too impatient and overzealous that they go and ruin things for everyone else. But due to the backlash of how much the current endings suck so badly, there’s supposedly yet another re-write in the works that will be released in the future as downloadable content. And as all XBOX gamers are well aware of, promises of DLC are about as reliable as hoping to see a no-hitter or a UFO in the sky, or Nessie in the lake. So possible salvation of a better ending are probably going to be a long time coming, and probably long after everyone has stopped caring about ME3.
I’m disappointed in Bioware for actually green-lighting this steaming turd of an ending for the general release. It’s not just internet-bad, it’s just down right bad. Bad that’s its convoluted and inane, and bad that it simply makes no sense. It doesn’t really matter if the re-written ending is the greatest ending in the history of storytelling, as far as Mass Effect 3 goes, there will always be the asterisk* of shame that nobody will ever let Bioware forget their “original” ending.
