How Mass Effect 3 SHOULD Have Ended
A Note From Tami
This is another of those glorious goodies that I conned my friend Aensu into writing. It contains NSFW language AND ME3 game-ender spoilers.
It ALSO contains a better … no the BEST Mass Effect 3 Ending.
Read at your own risk.
How Mass Effect 3 SHOULD Have Ended
(SPECIFIC SPOILERS BELOW)
To me, a good ending would be any ending in which your choices actually effect the outcome beyond the color of the fucking explosion and possibly some dumb looking circuitry overlay on organic material in a recycled cutscene.
Hey, maybe a binary Paragon/Renegade choice to match everything else in the game?
Okay, here’s how I would do it. First, throw away all the garbage about “The Catalyst”. Now, say instead of the confrontation with Kai Leng, Shepard just learns of the whole “Reapers harvest advanced organic life in order to prevent the inevitable development of synthetic life capable of destroying all organic life and wiping it out forever” bit on her way through Cronos Station, so that she knows the stakes ahead of time instead of at the very last minute. Perhaps she is haunted by this knowledge in a few cutscenes between the ridiculous fights on Earth, maybe has to be encouraged by an uplifting speech from the love interest and/or her squadmates to carry on.
After the whole failed charge/limp into the crazy teleporter beam bit, Shepard and Anderson meet up inside the Citadel and have to fight through a few easy Cerberus and Reaper cannon fodder troops at the same time. Uh-oh, why are Cerberus and the Reapers fully working together now? Are the Reapers controlling Cerberus, or did Cerberus actually figure out how to control the Reapers!? It’s not meant to be super challenging, but you have crippled movement and only your crappy pistol to make it interesting and dramatic.
In the final room, as the Crucible is flying toward the Citadel, Kai Leng lurks out of the shadows, aiming for Shepard with his stupid little ninja sword. Anderson notices him at the last second, shouts a warning and intercepts Kai Leng, then is promptly gutted just like Thane. Super pissed, Shepard finds her second wind and regains full movement, then we have the final confrontation with Kai Leng, only he doesn’t summon adds or do that stupid recharging thing, and you have to solo him. It’s just you, your pistol, and your melee key (protip: I found that punching Kai Leng in the face like a boss is the best way to beat him anyway)
Upon defeating Kai Leng, we are treated to a cut scene of Shepard pumping his stupid ass full of space bullets until her pistol overheats.
Shepard limps toward Anderson. Cue the ominous music as The Illusive Man is lit up in the background, all huskified and integrated into some nasty looking piece of Reaper/Cerberus tech; the culmination of his quest to control the Reapers. Here we have a conversation sequence in which we learn that The Illusive Man was one step ahead all along, as he always is, and the tech was installed during the attempted coup of the Citadel. It’s purpose: to turn the Big Weapon into a Reaper Remote Control, with The Illusive Man as the immortal controller, ensuring the dominance of humanity over all others from now until forever. The only piece it was missing was the Crucible, which even Cerberus couldn’t build on its own.
The entire galaxy unknowingly played right into his plan, and here he is at the precipice, but he’s seemingly defenseless and at Shepard’s mercy. Then we find out that, of course, Cerberus really did install a fail safe into Shepard’s implants, making her vulnerable to The Illusive Man’s indoctrination-like control at this crucial moment. (and also making the foreshadowing in Sanctuary base not be completely meaningless to the narrative) As The Illusive Man spews some great rhetoic, Shepard slowly raises the pistol to her temple and closes her eyes, seeing some sepia-toned flashbacks of her friends and accomplishments (if you wanted to get really artsy, maybe they could be sequenced in such a way as to be positive interpretations of The Illusive Man’s words). Fade to black…
*click* beepbeepbeepbeepbeep
Pistol’s still overheated. One last chance.
Shepard’s eyes snap open and through sheer force of will–you know, what Shepard’s been all about throughout the whole fucking game?–she overcomes the control long enough to snatch up Kai Leng’s stupid little ninja sword and insert it directly into The Illusive Man’s big stupid mouth.
Anderson groans, still alive, but just barely. Shepard, once again in control of herself, helps Anderson up and sits down with him for the touching student-mentor/father-child conversation bit, including the great dialogue that was inexplicably cut, watching the Crucible finish hooking up as Anderson bleeds to death.
As the player regains control of Shepard, Admiral Hackett’s voice crackles over the coms, informing us that something’s wrong, the Crucible isn’t firing, it must be something on our end. Then the player gets to choose:
1) Crawl over to the red-lit console and activate the Crucible for the ultimately selfish but hopeful Renegade choice, destroying the Reapers and ending the cycle once and for all, at the risk of dooming all organic life to true obliteration in the future. Shepard may or may not live, depending on how well you played, or maybe she’s just consumed as the Crucible powers up.
2) Crawl over to the blue-lit control device for the Paragon choice, replacing The Illusive Man and becoming the immortal controller of the Reapers, ostensibly to save everyone and still protect the galaxy from the dominance of destructive synthetic life, but at the cost of your humanity and everything you loved, and the risk of losing yourself to the Reapers in time and the cycle starting all over again.
Then, and most importantly, the player is treated to little scenes of how things play out during and after the credit roll. Give us some closure, damnit. Maybe if Shepard stuck with one love interest throughout the whole series, they both end up in the citadel to fight Kai Leng and get to die/control the reapers together. Give Shepard and Anderson a funeral and a monument. Show those who lived mourning and then going on with their lives. Show us the results of our choices!
If Shepard cured the genophage, becoming the heroic legend and savior for the entire species, do the Krogan mature into a society of noble warriors who follow The Shepard’s example and strive to protect the galaxy, or do they degenerate into brutal warlords and try to dominate everything?
If Shepard saved the Geth, do they prove whoever created the Reapers wrong and live in harmony with the Quarians? Or has it opened the door for another schism among the Geth in which one side vies for the destruction of all organics, and the other side becomes the new Reapers, starting the cycle anew?
What if Shepard didn’t do those things? What if Shepard did some different things?
Apparently, none of that matters at all! Hey, maybe BioWare was going for some artsy nihilistic crap, or it was all an “indoctrination hallucination” and we’ll be able to buy the “real” ending for $9.99 in six months. But to me it just comes off as bad writing at best, and bean counting at worst. Writing team couldn’t agree on a good way to finish the story or create an array of decent endings within the deadline? Couldn’t be arsed to produce a few unique cutscenes for different flavors of playthrough? So just slap on some one-size-fits-all garbage and call it good so EA can collect their motherfuckin’ movie check?
It’s the END OF SHEPARD’S SAGA and there’s no real closure, no resolution other than some generic, vague bullshit to fit all playthroughs. And it’s not even good bullshit!
I would at least like to know A) why the fuck the Normandy was suddenly in hyperspace instead of fighting in Earth orbit with everyone else and B) how the fuck members of my ground team got on board in order to be stepping off the crashed ship onto some random world, completely uninjured by the Reaper-beam-to-the-face they received on Earth. How about some implication of what happens to various races and cultures with all the Mass Relays destroyed? How about some implication of what happens to Earth now that members of every major galactic race are stranded there together? (MMOFPS alert)
How about ANYTHING other than that horribly voice acted piece of generic crap at the end of the credits and a goddamn pop up window telling me to buy DLC?
Now, that was all off the cuff and I have the memory of a hamster, so I’m sure there’s clashes between my invented ending and established canon lore, but goddamn. As it stands, even this joke ending is better, more fitting, and moreheartfelt than what BioWare gave us.
First Addendum
And, all that being said, don’t let the arguably poorly done ending discourage you from playing the game anyway.
Everything up to that last few minutes was fan-fuckin’-tastic, which may have just made the ending seem that much worse in comparison.
Second Addendum
Well, no I take that back, not everything was great.
Side quests were mostly just as lame and generic as the ending, quest tracking was stupid garbage, the Citadel map sucked, animation glitches were everywhere, and Joker had black teeth for the entire game, reinforcing my perception that the game was super rushed in every area but the shooting bits and dialogue/voice acting.
But those bits were so good that the rest was like the buzzing of flies to Vigo.
Third Addendum
Good to know I’m by no means alone in my assertions, either!
Here’s some supplemental reading that very astutely lays out why the ending rings so hollow for, apparently, a very large number of fans.
It’s all reminding me of some of those essays on writing I’ve read that talk about making sure to follow through on your narrative promises and sticking to your established themes, else the reader will end up hating you as an author.
6 Comments
“How about ANYTHING other than that horribly voice acted piece of generic crap at the end of the credits”
Agree with most things above, but the voice acting was pretty bad at that part because it wasn’t a professional actor at all. In fact, it was Buzz Aldrin.
@Jawn
Fair enough, though I’d argue it was pretty bad even for an amateur! All respect to Buzz Aldrin, but I actually cringed when he said “My sweet,” in a tone so stilted it belonged in a parade. It was like the voice director didn’t even work with him, he just walked in, recorded one take without even reading his lines ahead of time, and walked out. I know he’s a boss, but damn. In a game series where even minor side characters had decent voice acting, the whole clip stuck out like a sore thumb, ultimately served no purpose, and should have been cut for badness.
Kinda like the Catalyst God-proxy ghost boy in relation to the rest of the narrative.
It’s like some kind of meta-troll.
No sarcasm, you wrote a much better ending.
Better ending, wholly agreed. Not the one I would have picked, maybe but I would have been happy with it. Happier at least. I was thinking the synthesis could have been JUST SHEP, then she takes over, as in REPLACES, the catalyst, some lame ghost hologram integrated into the citadel, then she orders the reapers to freaking explode. Or attack each other. Or serve mai tais at that cute little bar in Bermuda.
I want to know what the frick is up with Harbinger. They bring him in specifically. He KNOWS Shep. He wanted her captured alive in ME2. WHY!!?? Then he just nukes her face, and he’s out of the pic, space junk once the Reapers are taken care of.
Then… she gets up, grabs a gun. Her freaking armor is burned off, partly fused to her body. She shoots her way past 3 husks, which apparently is all they can now muster for a defense, after all that crazy charge to the beam – good grief, if that’s true Shep shouldn’t have gone up at all, they won without the catalyst.
Ok, so she goes into the beam. WTF, it transports her to the ONE PLACE IN THE WHOLE FRACKING UNIVERSE where the Reapers DON’T want her to be. This isn’t like ME1, this is a beam the Reapers set up and fully control. The hell is it for anyway? If Shep is getting too close, turn the damn thing off!
Alright, I’m ok with it taking her to the Citadel, but RIGHT to the control room? And wtf is with the corpses? And the shifting walls? Never explained. That took some effort, and they just went “whatevs” and z-snaped them into irrelevance.
This is my problem… they created all the tools they needed for a DEEP and MEANINGFUL ending, and they wasted it on a cut scene that MAYBE took them two weeks to tack on to the end.
Ok sorry for the hijack. I’m a little carried away by the whole ME-ending rage…
In my opinion I think the whole reaper plan of we are synthetics destroying organics so they dont invent synthetics that destroy organics excuse is extremely stupid and whoever came out with that is stupid. Its like saying we put a car in a car so you can drive while you drive.
Here is the reasoning i believe the reapers should have had.
They were created by a long extinct species 1.2 million years ago, which means only 24 cycles since the reapers first started the whole cycles thing. 2.4 million years if you want to do the whole 42 cycles, 42 being the lucky number of the universe. Add in a few thousand year for an exact number because it took some time to destroy the intelligent civilizations.
Anyways the long extinct species (who look somewhat like reapers) created the reapers to insure the survival of all intelligent living things which reaper programming being what it is decided that it would insure the survival of all living things by harvesting all intelligent life and creating a vessel of it in some form whether as a new core for a reaper or as a destroyer. The decision of whether a species became a core or destroyer is based on its domminance in the Galaxy. Human dominance being established by the destruction of soveriegn ME1, the building of a human repaer in ME2.
I also believe the final battle should have been just that a battle. Where you unite the galaxy to fight back the reapers and the device is used to help in that fight. The reapers are then pushed back but not completely destroyed, which opens the door to more dlc in which you can fight the reapers and other games in the mass effect universe that take place many years after the destruction of the reapers with a different cast of charachters. Anyways this is just my two cents. Play on.
I always thought that the Reaper should have been designed by an ancient race to act as diplomats in a war between synthetics and organics (like Geth and Quarians), and the Reapers eventually decided for their to be a resolution, both had to become one, such as the Reapers being part synthetic and organic. They could also harvest potential species to ‘ascend’ to the status of Reaper, explaining why they took interest in Humans and Shepard, because they killed a Reaper. And so they have cycles where they harvest or kill all intelligent life in the universe.
For the ending, I thought that a hologram of Harbinger should have explained this to Shepard, and when the Commander disagrees with him. Harbinger himself shows up at the Crucible to stop Shepard. He calls in support from Hackett, who says that Harbinger is too close to the Crucible to open fire. So Shepard can find some heavy weapons, such as the Cain Nuke Launcher (or whatever it is) and attack Harbinger’s legs, and when that’s done, Harbinger is detached from the Crucible, and the multi-species alliance can open fire on the Reaper, killing Harbinger for good, giving gamers a boss battle. So Shepard gets to the controls, and can A) Take control of the Reapers and have them destroy each other. _ Paragon. B) Take control of the Reapers and take over the galaxy. – Renegade. Or C) Shepard enters the Crucible and combines synthetic and organic life, giving his/er life in the process. – Neutral.
So gamers would be given a good, bad, and neutral choice. Also, there’s an option where everything can return back to normal, making everyone happy.
Anyway, that’s what I think would make sense.