...it's the fact that it feels like you
lost. And I didn't spend three epic games Heroing around the galaxy to
lose in the end. That's a bit too avant garde/outside the box for me.
Why do I say I lost?
1) my character died. (even in the "take a breath" ending, I can't believe she lived. She's in the middle of the huge pile of Citadel wreckage, she was already crazy hurt before the final explosion, and no-one in the really-beat-up fleet has any reason to look for her. She takes that breath, and then dies.)
2) my party is 99% dead. The two I brought with me are 100% dead, and the rest of them were part of that final push, so odds are they're down too. (yes, I'm discounting the "Joker and Normandy flee, and several people jump out on a new planet" thing - it's a total non sequitur that makes no sense. How could he pick them up in the little time their was? Why would he even be fleeing in the first place? It makes less than no sense, it's disregarded.)
3) the rest of the galaxy is screwed. Mass Relay explosions blow up anything near them. Lack of interstellar travel. All the attacked planets are in ruins, and now will have more difficulty repairing (what with the lack of transport to bring in specialized supplies). All those fleets of aliens in orbit around Earth (I contend that the Quarians have farming/hydroponic/etc ships that can feed them and the Turians, so starving isn't it... but there's the fact that so many ships and people are jammed into one small set of systems. Plus, those ships aren't back in their home systems.)
3b) And then there's the fact that all three endings are losses as well.
A) Kill all synthetic life (EDI, the Geth who I just made close allies to the Quarians, any useful AI's out there. Perhaps VI's as well, so maybe we can't even run half those ships and machines anymore. Plus the other things mentioned in 3).
B.) Control the Reapers (not as obvious, but it MUST be a loss.... power corrupts, the Reapers still exist, and the exemplar for that ending was the Illusive Man, Complete Monster?... it was beaten into our heads through the entire second half of the game that trying to control them would be a Huge Mistake?.)
C) Synthesis. Worse than destroying just synthetics, since instead of just killing one or two races, you kill them all. (Note that when I was given the choice, I didn't picture that shallow "Oh, look - Joker's got a glowy skin texture" thing. I pictured something more along the lines of everything gets put into a blender and pureed into new life forms. Sure, there's still life, but it's not what was there before.... new people, not the old people. Hence, the old people are dead. I was picturing some of the Star Trek weird ethics episodes, like Voyager's "Tuvix" - two characters get combined by a transporter accident. Once they figure out how to re-separate them, they end up in an ethics debate over whether they have the right to kill the new combined person (who sees himself as a unique person and doesn't want to die). So.... I certainly didn't see the Synthesis ending as better than the Kill Synthetics one.
So yeah.... I feel like I lost the game.
Somehow, I don't think that's what Bioware was going for, even with their comments about "wanting to make people think"/etc.
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Another sign of the problem with the ending..... ME1? Love the ending, look forward to it when I play, the climix still stirs the soul. ME2? Similar, if not quite as strong. ME3? I don't think I want to play the game again, I don't look forward to that ending at all.
This is also a potential problem for DLC. Why should I (or anyone) bother buying some "tell me another story of The Shepard!" adventures? I'm just going to go down in flames in the end. Adding more is pointless.
» Mon May 07, 2012 12:20 pm 
