Mass Effect 3 Ending: What’s The Big Deal?
This article discusses a large amount of spoilers for Mass Effect 3, including the ending, and lesser spoilers from the previous titles. Continue reading at your own risk.
Last night I refused to put the controller down until I had triumphed over the Reapers. I had read and seen the rumblings of rage over the ending all over the internet (including our own site) and I was prepared for the worst. Hesitantly I finished the fight and after awaiting a blow that never came I feel I have to say….what’s the big deal?
The ending wasn’t great, in fact it felt a little tacked on and anti-climatic, but it certainly didn’t make me want to cut myself like a vast amount of nerd rage consumed gamers out there would lead you to believe. In fact if I hadn’t read and seen all the backlash I wouldn’t have expected it. With how bad everyone spoke of it, as far as I could read without spoilers, I expected something as bad as Shepard waking up on the ground in front of the first Prothean beacon, the last two games being a prophetic vision.
Instead what I got was “meh” at worst and “just ok” at best. I truly don’t see what all the fuss is about. Many of the complaints about the ending say that they invalidated the choices of the player in a series that has always been about that very thing. To those gamers I say….huh? How exactly did it do that? I must have been playing a completely different game. While, yes, there are a few endings and none of them involve Shepard riding off into the sunset aboard the Normandy and, no, there aren’t 500 endings so every choice you made mattered you could also argue the same for Mass Effect 1 and 2.
Really when it comes to the end of your game, as far as the legitimate finale, your choices mattered little in any of the games. At the end of Mass Effect 1 you could choose to save the council and they like you, but still ignore you about the Reapers or you can let them die and they don’t like you and still don’t listen about the Reapers.
At the end of Mass Effect 2, sure you could destroy the collector base or give it to Cerberus and your main character can even die. Did it really change how the game ended though? The Reapers were coming, you worked with Cerberus, and like it or not that’s the same way Mass Effect 3 will start. So really based on the arguments of the many then all of the games are terrible.
Secondly if you’re choices didn’t change the ending then again we must have been playing entirely different games; which is possible considering that’s kind of the point with all the choices. Still I don’t know what choices you the reader made, but personally my ending was ultimately satisfying regardless of the confusing delivery. See, in my ending a race who were near extinction were saved, Geth and Quarian work together to bring peace to a centuries old conflict and rebuild their homeworld, Shepard rallied the galaxy utterly and completely and Earth was saved because of it. Sounds to me like my choices had plenty of meaning.
In the end though the game was fantastic and I had so much fun rallying the galaxy for the final fight. While in every game ever made pretty much your protagonist is the eye of the storm and the weight of everything lays on his or her shoulders in Mass Effect 3 I felt like it really was the case for a change. The virtual relationships my avatar in this galaxy forged with NPC’s and companions were satisfying and more real due then other games. I was amazed that even some of the smallest choices made as far back as half a decade ago by myself in Mass Effect 1 reverberated, even if in small ways, through Mass Effect 3 and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the entirety of the game even if the ending missed the mark.
Valo_Soren
March 18, 2012 @ 2:44 pm
Why the ending was crap: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QT4IUepvrU1pfv_B95oQj0H84DlCTUmzQ_uQh1voTUs/preview?pli=1&sle=true
Robert Strick
March 18, 2012 @ 3:33 pm
Good overview.
Daniel Flatt
March 18, 2012 @ 3:49 pm
This is actually pretty good and honestly I didn’t stop to think about every little thing as I don’t tend to pick things apart.
Still I stand by the fact the game was fantastic regardless of the ending.
Clayton Berry
March 18, 2012 @ 5:54 pm
I’ll tell you why Mass Effect 2 ending is superior. One scene is simple, has closure and answers all the questions we need to know. At the end, we see all our teammates, just the ones that lived. They look at us. They’re proud of you. Then we see the reapers coming toward earth. Thats it. Now that is the end after you make your last choice. What is the end like after you make your last choice in Mass Effect 3. we get different colors, we have no idea who lived and who died. we have no closure. we have some creepy old guy and kid telling stories and walking through the snow….that end sucked.
Now you’re talking about choices. Mass effect 2 ending where you attack the collector base is all about choices, we recruited all these characters and now we can choose our tech expert, our squad leaders and depending on our choices, the characters either live or die and totally change the simple of ending where you see who is alive or dead. All the characters had their own loyalty missions also and if you did those missions that also affects whether they survive the end mission. Mass Effect 2 is all about your choices.
So Mass Effect 3 is all about collecting war assests, but unlike Mass Effect 2 you don’t get to choose how you use your war assets, really the only war assets you get to decide on is saving the rachni queen, ending the genophage and saving the quarians and geth…that it. Unlike Mass Effect 2 there is no deciding how to use those war assets during the battle for earth. I was duped by this because since Mass Effect 2 led me to believe that my choices matter, I thought the battle for earth was going to turn into some kind of strategy game. NOPE…all those war assets did was give you little tweaks to 3 different outcomes thats it. So rethink your article buddy and maybe play the games. Or you could just quit taking money from Bioware and actually think for yourself.
Robert Strick
March 18, 2012 @ 7:07 pm
“So rethink your article buddy and maybe play the games. Or you could just quit taking money from Bioware and actually think for yourself.”
Nobody takes money from Bioware or any other company for that matter.
karlo
March 18, 2012 @ 6:36 pm
sorry but you are wrong. like many others who are defending the ending you are basing your article on your interpretation of variebles seen at the ending. problem is none of those were specified so you are making interpretation based on youre preconcieved discourse and opinions of the same. You mentioned how you saved earth and geth and quarians. You don’t really know that. We dont really know if mass relays caused the destruction of the system or not. Not to mention that all the quarian and turian are gonna die in matter of weeks. And what should we make of the animation of shepard grasping for air on Earth? I don’t know if you’ve checked out ” The Final Hours”. It is clearly presented there that BW decided not to show as an understandable and definitive ending, but a confusive one that opens room for personal interpretation and speculation. So stop making articles saying how you got an ending that was understandable and made sense. It was game developer’s idea that those are not the characteristics of the game’s ending. You dont know what the real ending is. You are just making assumptions.
Taylor Parolini
March 19, 2012 @ 3:11 am
“Grandpa, tell me again how the Shepard made out with Mr. Cortez.”
“Yes my sweet.”
Michael
March 19, 2012 @ 8:21 am
I agree with the author…to a point. The ending wasn’t nerd-rage worthy. Especially sense those that were getting pissed started clamoring for BioWare’s hypothetical head just under a week after the game came out. In this day and age, we all know that DLC will inevitably come out. It’s not a matter of if, its a matter of when. I felt that the ending was ok, but it obviously left the door open for future content. At least, mine did. I managed to have enough assets and make the right choices to have the “Shepard lives” ending I had been hearing about. Honestly, I am more than willing to wait for the DLC to come out, or at least for BioWare to explain themselves. I mean…you guys that are nerd-raging and petitioning for a new ending do realize that…ME3 has been out less than two weeks, right? I mean, I absolutely felt the exact same way about the ending of the Matrix trilogy. It made absolutely no sense to me, and I felt that there wasn’t any real closure to a franchise I felt so invested in. I will still watch the movies, though. I didn’t start a petition to force the Wachowski’s to change it. I didn’t troll the internet, pissing everyone off. I just grumbled about it and accepted it.
Honestly, to me, the final cinematics just left too many holes and head scratchings for that to be the end all ending the developers envisioned. I don’t think we’ve seen the ultimate end of the series, or the Mass Relays. Just give it some time, guys.
Victor
March 25, 2012 @ 3:50 am
The ending was horrible you see the Normandy destroyed and if you had a romance it doesn’t even give a hint on its outcome even when Shepard lives