![]() ![]() The problem is that, in all-too-typical video game fashion, the ending is less an effortless payoff for good storytelling than a heavy-handed attempt at aping profundity. Shepard, have often tried to argue that this was a necessary rebuke to the power fantasies inculcated by most mainstream video games and an attempt to tell a more mature story. But it requires every being in the galaxy to submit to a kind of cyborgification, for all synthetic life to take on organic qualities and vice-versa, which I’d find cool, personally, but I imagine there would be billions with profound personal, moral, and spiritual objections to such a radical change. Synthesis seems like the “best” ending where everybody (except Shepard) lives. Control, meanwhile, effectively means enslaving the Reapers (the mechanics of this, and of Reaper consciousness, are not made clear but the overtones are unpleasant to say the least). So you exterminate AI like your robot companion EDI, and the entire cybernetic Geth species. The Destroy ending destroys all synthetic life in the galaxy, not just the Reapers. My partner, a brilliant sci-fi writer in her own right, bitterly scorns the ending of Mass Effect as “choose-your-colour genocide.” That phrase, when she first used it a couple of years ago, went through me like an arrow. But now, on the eve of Mass Effect’s long-awaited remaster, I’ve come around to a more nuanced point of view with implications for how we understand pulpy sci-fi like Mass Effect, and its inherent value. Mass Effect is a series about making a choice and living with the consequences,” he writes. A crisis as big as a Reaper invasion necessitates compromises and hard choices. Fanbyte’s aptly-named Kenneth Shepard also revisited the trilogy and made what was, perhaps, the best argument in the ending’s favour 3: it refused players the simplistic fantasy of straightforward, cost-free solutions. Reflecting on the matter years later, however, after having replayed the entire trilogy amidst 2020’s unending quarantine with the pandemic as an especially relentless context, I’ve been forced to reassess things. My natural reaction was to regard ME3’s ending as a flawed but misunderstood piece of art, and argue that it had its merits. ![]() There could never be sober or sensible criticisms, only volcanoes of outrage. The ME3 explosion simply seemed to be another wave of this. There was no question that the cause was, at least in part, the same gamer entitlement that leads to studio employees being doxed and harassed 2 for making changes some players disapprove of. The reaction was furious-the FTC complaints were merely the tip of a massive iceberg of tears-abuse, bitter arguments, harassment, and threats were the order of the day in what was, at the time, perhaps the biggest freak out in the world of gaming. And each ending involves the destruction of a sentient race, culturally or physically. In every case, Shepard seemed to die, and there was no happy ending available with your companions or romantic interest, despite building those relationships over three games spread over five years. Red, Blue, and Green endings, respectively, in line with the colours they were assigned in game. It was an infamously minimalist affair that saw the heroic Commander Shepard deciding between one of three fates for the galaxy: ‘Destroy’ the invading Reapers outright, ‘Control’ them and use the titanic space cephalopods to rebuild the galaxy they’d destroyed, or effect a ‘Synthesis’ between all organic and synthetic life, turning the galaxy’s sapient population into cyborgs. In 2012 the release of Mass Effect 3 (ME3), the conclusion to BioWare’s legendary sci-fi trilogy, was met with much fanfare and then, suddenly, a cavalcade of outrage. This is not a sentence one would expect a video game critic to say, of course, unless one is familiar with the overwhelming tantrums that rock the gaming world like seasonal hurricanes. I think the moment I realised something was amiss was when a fellow named “El Spiko” filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 1.
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