[Spoilers follow.]
Quite late to the discussion, but I just completed Mass Effect 3 and I liked the ending.
Of course, the ending was massively controversial when the game came out, even described as “soul-crushing”.
So what is the ending like? It is revealed that the Citadel and the Reapers are actually the creation of the child apparition that Shepard has been seeing, all with the goal of preventing organic life from creating synthetics so advanced that they will destroy organics… Therefore advanced organic civilizations are regularly destroyed to prevent organic life from destroying itself.
Depending on your military readiness, you are offered one of three options that amount to:
- Destruction: Destroy the Reapers and most of Earth too. Mass Relays are destroyed as well.
- Control: Reapers neutralized, people on the Earth surviving. Mass Relays are destroyed too.
- Synthesis: Create a new state of harmony between synthetics and organics (I didn’t get this one).
Shepard dies in nearly all endings. (Overview here.)
What’s not to like? We get to be self-sacrificing heroes, determining the fate of the galaxy, with some high-flying Space Opera metaphysics to boot. It sort of is what I had hoped for.
But here is a typical complaint from a forum poster:
1: characters that died from harbinger show up on the planet the Normandy crashed on after the mass effect relays explode.
2: All the choices from the first two games enhance the players experience in the game but not the ending
3: Every ending has somewhat of the same result
4. No feeling of closure other than saving/destroying the galaxy, I know that sounds like closure but in a incredible story driven game like mass effect its about the characters and not the overall goal or at least for me it is.
I like point 4, “No feeling of closure other than saving/destroying the galaxy”.
As many people have observed, it really is like the ending of Lost: this is an experience that is sufficiently open for people to have attached to it for different reasons. Lost was always veering between Sci-Fi and new-age fantasy stuff, and the new-age feel-good ending was therefore disappointing to those who were into Sci-Fi (count me in here).
For ME3, I think we can distill players’ attachment into a few different types:
- Action hero: Those who were waiting to kick Reaper A** – and were severely disappointed that they did not actually get the chance.
- Role-player: Those who were into characters and the long-term repercussions of their game choices. And were disappointed that those choices were barely reflected in the ending. (Long-term repercussions featured more prominently in ME1 and ME2.)
- Narrative arc fan: Those who desired that comforting feeling of inevitable narrative closure. Which they got.
And writing this I realize that I belong to category 3. I was playing Mass Effect for the pre-written story, and hence I did not share the disappointment. Don’t tell.
[Update June 10th:]
I am thinking that this should be broken down a bit. In some way, it is not that I was playing for the story as such, as much as I was playing for the part of the story that contained the solution to the mystery of the Reapers. We would probably usually include the fate of the characters in “the story”, but for some reason the characters just weren’t that interesting to me.
This goes a bit of a way toward explaining what determines your motivation for playing: If I had found the characters more interesting, I would surely had been more interested in the role-playing angle of witnessing the effect of my actions on the characters’ fates.
I definitely consider myself as belong to the third camp, and in part the second camp, and almost against the third camp (as in I’m really tired of all that “save the universe, make a choice” crap thrown at gamers all the time). Yet narrative closure? No, not really. Suddenly, something completely new appears, and then more stuff happens, and then we get a simple little movie which didn’t inspire me or tell me much. I do not consider that narrative closure at all, rather, it felt like they just opened a wound and then had to finish up (while incidentally leaving some of the instruments behind).
@Ava OK – but doesn’t Sci-Fi closure involving ending on some philosophical meta level, rather than hearing what happened to all the individual characters?
“Destruction: Destroy the Reapers and most of Earth too. Mass Relays are destroyed as well.”
The devastation of Earth is almost entirely dependent on your EMS. It can happen with both the Destruction and Control options.
Furthermore, you’re over-simplifying the complaints people have about the ending by focusing on the symptoms they’re complaining about instead of the fundamental problems with the ending:
(1) Negation of choice
(2) Thematic incoherence
(3) Continuity errors
(4) Blatant lies in marketing leading to false expectations (which compound 1 thru 3)
The ending of ME3 is fundamentally flawed on a structural level. It would not be terribly inaccurate to describe it as literally being the exact opposite of everything that made the games successful and popular up to that point.
Mass Effect 3: The Structure of a Failed Ending
I think Justin has better described my experience of the game.
From the very beginning it was a problem how to motivate the actions of the reapers and in the first two parts you have enough traces of a bad feeling by the writers themselves when they let the reapers say: humans cannot understand our thoughts thus making this black box to the unmoved mover of the whole plot. But as someone pointed out in the end actually a small child can say those unfathomable thoughts in a few sentences.
Other problems result from discrepancies between game lore and things said and done at the end, or between the interest of the player carefully created for some aspects of the game world, especially the characters, and the way this interest is treated at the end.
But the biggest conflict between the game and the end of the game is hidden in point 2 and 3 of your list of typical complaints – they really converge into one: up to the end the whole game is centered around choice and repercussions of choices made and the end doesn’t show any respect toward this theme to put it mildly (well, on the other hand the destruction of the mass relays is shown in different colors depending on your choice, this has to count for something).
The whole logic of we have to destroy, really to wipe out all advanced civilizations of organics because otherwise synthetics will destroy all organics isn’t really convincing – on a general level because there is some lack of necessity not to mention ethics to the argument and on an ingame level because the existing conflicts between organics and synthetics can be resolved by your actions explicitly disproving the point. The assumed inevitability of the historical cycle stands in a stark contrast to the topic of freedom of choice found in most other parts of the game. But in the end your avatar suddenly succumbs to this unconvincing argument made by the deus ex infans (which resides in the Citadel making the whole point of me1 rather moot) and you as the player of Shephard are forced to accept this ‘logic’ as the norm of the game contradicting all you have done in the last 150 hours (all 3 games together).
At the moment I cannot see a point of view from which this contradiction can be resolved but I am looking forward to summer and to the explanatory parts filling in the gaps.
Sorry Justin, just now followed the link to your article which expresses many problems I have with the ending very clearly. Maybe one could describe the problem we are talking about using the notion of ‘norm of the game’ which is just a relabeling of Booths ‘implied author’. The game follows different norms which are even in conflict.
@Justin Right, there are many details to how exactly each ending plays out.
Reading through your post, I think it again comes down to your motivation for playing the game.
I just didn’t feel that I was being a coherent character with an unwavering set of universal ethics … and I especially don’t except such ethics to beautifully play themselves out when faced with galactic destruction… I rather expect things to get quite ugly. That’s why the issues of “negation of choice” and “thematic incoherence” that you bring up just didn’t work that way for me.
I also think there is a change of scale … it could be that you have fostered all these nice relationships to other characters, but it seems reasonable to me that this would be lost in general galactic destruction. I think the story motivates the loss of choice.
The only thing that I think _is_ objective is that there is something odd about the Normandy in the ending.
Another issue where ME3 clearly rubs _me_ the right way concerns the fate of all the characters and races that we have interacted with. Apparently many people feel that they should be told what happens to every single character based on the player’s choices. But I personally abhor the kind of bullet point storytelling where you have to go through an interminable “where are they now” debriefing at the end. I am grateful for being spared from that, but others apparently miss it.