Can We Talk About the Mass Effect Ending?
The end of Mass Effect caused a fandom revolt. To the degree that Bioware offered an Extended Cut DLC to offer fans some closure. This wasn’t enough for some fans, but personally, I loved the ending.
Argh, here there be spoilers.
Remember when I said when you play old games, you have no one to talk to about it because they’ve all moved on? Well, I’m going to talk about the Mass Effect ending anyway. This game is one of the ones that will stick with me for a while. It’ll be the reason ten years from now that my husband is annoyed because I won’t throw away my Xbox 360.
A quick overview of my game: I was an Earthborn Paragon Engineer FemShep . I choose mostly all the Paragon options (as is my way in RPGs, other than my D&D character), unless someone made some sort of sexist comment. At which point I went Renegade on their ass. I somehow saved my entire crew in ME2, and blew up the collector base. I romanced Kaidan and stayed loyal to him. I got my “readiness rating” up to 80% before taking on the Illusive Man.
I feel like the ending isn’t just the final cut scene (or second to final really). It’s everything that happens after you go to Earth. I’ve got to say, every bit of that last hour or so of game play ripped my heart out. But most of all, it was the final conversations with my crew, and all of those I had met along the way. Doing a mind meld with Liara one last time, as she rested her head on my shoulder for comfort. Watching Wrex pump up the Krogan. Talking to Garrus about “old times.” The heartbreaking goodbye scene with Kaidan, the only one with who my character had the option of admitting being scared.
You go through another battle, against Harbinger this time, and depending on how you choose your crew (I chose Garrus and Kaidan, a soldier and biotic balance out my tech skills well) you’ll get another painful scene. They get hit by debris thrown by Harbinger’s beam, and you have to send them away. Kaidan begs to go with you (cue the waterworks). Shepard is alone. Fast forward to actually picking the ending.
You have three options given to you, and the fourth (I found after looking up the other endings online) is to kill the kid. I was glad to find out this was an option, because it fit in with Legion’s statement that organics are a variable the synthetics cannot predict. I however, chose the Synthesis ending. Why not just destroy the Reapers? Because as the series progressed, I felt the mission was to unite the galaxy. Not to destroy a race. I united the Krogans and Salarains. I united the Geth and the Quarians. I’ll be damned if I’m going to end my story on destruction or control. I know there’s several fans still upset about these options, and they way things had to end. But for me, the synthesis ending brought a lot of closure. When Shepherd dives into the beam, she finally appears to be at peace. The quarians are able to live without their masks. EDI and Joker can finally be together. The knowledge of the ancients is bestowed upon us all. I brought about the singularity, and it is fantastic.
For more on Mass Effect, check out the series Girl On Game is running about her initial play through.
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Nicole is a Software Quality Engineer, music collector, and chronic project starter. In her free time she enjoys reading trashy romance novels, catching up on her game backlog, and bourbon.
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I will always be curious about people’s Mass Effect ending experiences since the DLC can change it for everyone. My question is assuming you saw the extended cut DLC, but did you play through the Leviathan DLC along the way, too?
I did not. I’m still pretty bitter about having to pay EA to buy a pass to download the Extended Cut DLC and play online since I bought the game used.
Here’s the thing: Those final conversations are not part of the ending. They’re part of the rising action. Yes, they are heart-wrenching (especially with romances; Liara’s comment about the “little blue children” being disappointed she didn’t have anything to say, or Tali’s “I want more time” bring tears to my eyes). But it’s still rising action, not climax. The climax is the conversation with the Space Brat. And all the anger about the ending comes from that scene. First off, the Space Brat comes out of nowhere. It’s not foreshadowed (the Leviathan DLC has fixed that problem). The form it appears in is blatant emotional manipulation on the part of the writers. The fact that we don’t really get to argue with it, beyond an incredibly weak emotional appeal that even I didn’t find convincing, is lame. Then we’re forced to choose one of the options given to us by the insane omnicidal computer responsible for the deaths of more people than we can comprehend.
The Synthesis choice is easily the worst, as it runs directly contrary to several key themes. First, there’s the matter of personal choice – Shepard takes that away from all living things, forcing a massive change on them without their consent. There’s the theme of strength in diversity, with Synthesis arguably reducing diversity by making everyone more similar. There’s the dangers of being given rapid progress without earning it. And then there’s the frustratingly stupid “pinnacle of evolution” line, which completely misunderstands how evolution works. Evolution, by definition, has no “pinnacle.” There’s no end point to evolution. That’s the whole point of evolution, is that’s about constant change and adaptation to changing circumstances.
Before the Extended Cut, the ending of ME3 was simply one of the worst endings in the history of fiction. With the Extended Cut and Leviathan DLC, it’s just bad.
Except the Catalyst was foreshadowed. You were told exactly what role it would play in the story. You were even told by Vendetta that the Reapers were the servants of the cycle, alluding to their creator. Calling the Catalyst “Space Brat” does not magically make all of the foreshadowing for it vanish because you don’t want to acknowledge it by its real name.
And saying that Destroy or Control are the Catalyst’s options – especially given the Catalyst’s explicit condemnation of Destroy – is just proving ignorance of what happened mere minutes before you meet the Catalyst and how it introduces those two options. The only option that the Catalyst introduces is Synthesis, the option it prefers.
Also, how does Synthesis say that there is no strength in diversity? One can choose Synthesis because they believe in the strength of organic/synthetic unity, because they want all life to benefit from this unity. The entire point of the ending is that there is not clear-cut “moral” choice; it’s up to the player to decide which option is the best and what price is the most acceptable.
Which is what ALL of the ending-trolling comes down to: whiny crybabies who didn’t want to make a difficult decision that impacted the galaxy in a Mass Effect game.
Speculation that something else is behind the Reapers does not foreshadow the existence of an advanced AI living on the Citadel. A good twist should be something that causes the audience to look back on the rest of the story and say, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense now.” It should also be something the audience can predict is coming, if they’re smart. The Space Brat twist accomplishes neither of those things. It feels like a twist for the sake of a twist.
Destroy and Control are offered by the Catalyst. If he’d simply let you bleed out in front of the console below, then you never would’ve been able to choose either of them. The only reason any of those options are available is because the Catalyst made them available. And, honestly, Shepard has no real reason believe anything the Space Brat says isn’t just one big lie. He is, after all, responsible for an incomprehensible number of deaths. The three choices, at that point, are the Catalyst’s choices.
Synthesis reduces diversity by making everyone more similar. At the very least, it reduces the differences between organics and synthetics. And the ending actually does seem to want there to be a clear-cut moral choice. Synthesis is presented as the best possible outcome. The Space Brat makes it out as the best option, and then the Extended Cut takes it even further, turning the galaxy into a frigging utopia, with everyone getting along, the Reapers being everyone’s friends, the dead coming back to life, and the possibility of everyone becoming immortal. It’s stupid and insulting.
And no, it’s not about not wanting to make tough decisions. It’s about the whole thing being really, really bad and stupid. When you look at it from a literary standpoint, it’s just an objectively bad piece of writing.