I know we were all worried that the Reapers were going to be some horrible cliche. It’s just a bigger and grander version of the original problem, running in parallel. It’s not even a solution to the stated problem. This is akin to, “You burned dinner, so I have incinerated the city to save you from the dangers of a kitchen fire.” It’s ludicrous nonsense. The explanation for the Reapers is that they destroy all life, every 50,000 years, in order to fix the problem of synthetics rising up and killing their organic masters. Not since Fable 2 has there been an annoying second-fiddle antagonist that so gleefully overshadowed the main villain. I was hoping he wouldn’t show up in this game. I was so uninterested in him and his goals, and the guy seems to be a sort of plot-hole singularity where the gameworld bends around him until it stops making sense. He has no business being in in a cover-based shooter that’s trying this hard to be taken seriously.)Īll of this is a drawn-out way of saying that by the end of the game I was just sick to death of Cerberus, and so it was agonizing to have yet another nonsense conversation with the Illusive man right on the threshold of the final encounter. (When his shields get low, he crouches in the open to become invulnerable to all damage while mooks spawn and his shields recharge. This is to say nothing of Leng, the absurd plot-armored emo supervillain, who seems to be made of contrivances and looks like he just escaped from a school for Final Fantasy villains. You spend more time fighting them than you spend fighting the supposed enemy of the series. And yet Cerberus can conscript, arm, feed, train, equip, and field this endless army, which is powerful enough to fight a war on multiple fronts and even mount an open invasion of the Citadel itself. They’re everywhere, they know everyone’s plans, and have all the best technology. They now have an army, fleets, and military bases that dwarf the size of the human colonies we’ve seen. In the third game, Cerberus is even more ludicrously powerful. Despite this, they are still amazingly incompetent, with 99% of their victims being human and 100% of their experiments turning on them and destroying their stuff. In the second game they were expanded to be this vast organization with research stations, ships, advanced technology, and the ability to build a ship more advanced than the ship that the Humans and Turians could build together. In the first game, Cerberus was a bunch of idiot mooks that you mowed down for XP. To wit: If these writers thought Shepard was indoctrinated in the last stage of the game, we would know it. This theory involves an incredible level of subtle symbolism, which goes against just how ham-fisted the rest of the story is. I think that would be better than the ending we got, but I don’t think it it was ever intended by the writers. I just finished a re-play of Mass Effect 1, and it’s shocking just how many things seem stupid, contrived, inconsistent, or pointless now that I know how they turn out.Īnd no, I’m not a believer in the “ indoctrination theory“. I know it’s childish and melodramatic when fans say, “This new thing has RUINED this series FOREVER!” I don’t want to go that far, but I will say it’s done a lot of damage. It fails thematically, it fails logically, it fails at basic coherence, and it fails to be consistent with what has come before. But right now we’re talking about the ending to Mass Effect 3, which I rank as the worst ending I’ve ever personally played. I’m writing this mostly to get it off my chest.Īnd to deflect the likely objections: Yes, the rest of the game is often quite good, and there were many “fanservice” moments where players got things they had been hoping / waiting for since the original game. The truth is, my nitpicking skills are wasted on this, and I don’t have a lot to add to the conversation. The problems with the ending are very obvious, and I don’t think it takes a keen analysis or a deep understanding of the Mass Effect lore to uncover these issues. Also, most of what I say here is just a re-hash of points that have been made elsewhere. It should be obvious, but this post is going to be complete and total spoilers for Mass Effect 3.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |