Mass Effect 3: Endings (Spoilers!)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3.

99% of Mass Effect 3 is amazing, beautiful, outstanding, and superbly-written. 1% is a horrific travesty. Unfortunately, that 1% is the ending.

(The rest is below the break to avoid spoilers.)




Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3.


The ending of Mass Effect 3 makes no intellectual sense. Even worse, it makes no emotional sense.

It is odd that you can predict the exact single point where a game goes off the rails. It's during the Battle for Earth. Your fleets have jumped in, you're making a ground assault on the transport to the Citadel. You've just killed the Reaper guarding it and and running for the transport. Then a Reaper lands and starts blasting away at the troops rushing the transport, killing them as you run. This sequence is superb. Then, as you near the transport, the Reaper beam hits you.

ME3 is amazing up to that specific point, building to a crescendo. Everything after that point is terrible.

You regain consciousness, limp to the transport with a single pistol and transport up to the Citadel (which is now a charnel house).

Speaking of the Citadel, this is another bad decision. You spent a great deal of time on the Citadel, with lots of quests and NPCs and stories. Then the Citadel gets captured and all those people get killed, off-screen. A complete waste of all that time building bonds.

Anyways, you limp to a confrontation with the Illusive Man, who is indoctrinated, and who forces you to shoot Anderson. You have to have pretty much a perfect Paragon rating to get the Paragon dialogue option. I only made two Renegade decisions the entire game (and quite frankly, I think one was a bug), and I could not unlock it.  That means you have to take a Renegade action to shoot the Illusive Man before he kills Anderson, or before he kills you.

Then you get ported up to the top of the Citadel where you meet an energy being posing as a small child (always a sign of bad writing).  The energy being tells you that he controls the Reapers, which are a synthetic life form.

Apparently, it is necessary for these synthetic life forms to kill all advanced organic life forms, because otherwise, the organic life forms will create new synthetic life forms which will kill all organic life forms.

What the F**k?

Clearly, this is why children should not be given god-like power before mastering basic logic.

Of course, this might have worked if it had been set up in the game previously. But no. You encounter three species of synthetic life forms in the game: EDI, the Reapers, and the Geth. EDI is a loyal and valued crew member who has even fallen in love with Joker. You've just finished brokering a major peace treaty between the Geth and Quarians, and the Geth are your allies, with Legion sacrificing himself to aid you.

In fact, pretty much the only instance of synthetics not working with organics is the Reapers, which are under this god-brat's control. Everywhere else in the galaxy, synthetics and organics get along reasonably.

So god-brat offers you three choices. First, you can destroy the Reapers, but you'll also destroy EDI and the Geth. Apparently tech good enough to build the Reapers and Mass Relays can't differentiate between types of synthetic life forms.

Second, you can control the Reapers, but you die in the process. I.e. The Illusive Man ending. But the problem with the Illusive Man controlling the Reapers is that you couldn't trust him with that much power after the end of the immediate threat. What does control mean when the controller is dead and gone? Maybe you can order the Reapers to fly into the sun. How this differentiates from the destroy ending is anybody's guess. I think this also does bad things to EDI and the Geth, because EDI doesn't show up in the final cutscene.

Finally, you can do some sort of wacky synthesis, where you re-write the DNA of every organic and synthetic life-form in the galaxy to combine them into hybrids. Then they all live in peace and harmony. EDI survives in this ending.

Oh, and no matter what you do, this destroys the mass relays, ending galactic civilization as we know it. At worst, billions of lives are snuffed out because blowing up relays took out star systems in the previous game. At best, there's just plague and famine as colonies, refugees, and ships are cut off from their homeworlds.

I really do not understand how the same people who wrote the rest of the game wrote this ending. The rest of the game is pitch-perfect. I loved the first 99%. Even the ending sequence is magnificent, right up until that Reaper beam hits you.

It's like the writers felt that writing the ending the game deserved, that it was leading up to, was too "juvenile". That they need to make a twist, to introduce extra moral ambiguity.  That giving a rousing, triumphant ending wasn't "adult" enough. Basically, the writers tried to be too clever, and they failed, and so damaged the game as a whole.

If so, that was a travesty of a decision.

Honestly, I would love to see Bioware re-write and re-release an ending. Release it as an expansion pack or DLC. They can say that the current ending is a dream sequence or attempt at Reaper indoctrination. There's enough ambiguity (no UI, odd effects) that this could be reasonable.

Give the Mass Effect series the ending it deserves.