St. Apathy

The others were week days.

The discrimination.

I don't wanna peanut buttered my cock down your throat.

Lowest EMS scores result in a pyrrhic victory, where the galaxy is fucked even if you destroy the reapers. A little higher orders can have the galaxy being alright but Earth being destroyed, and so on.

The slideshow changes based on how you've achieved certain goals. Curing the genophage will be show to have a different outcome if Wrex isn't king of the Krogan, for example.

It's a rather forced, tonally and thematically inconsistent and bleak finale to what I thought to be a fairly idealistic series.

Or maybe maybe idealistic isn't the right word, but Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, and 97% of Mass Effect 3 have a lot about themes of cooperation, unity and compassion. Maybe not the most sophisticated or original premises, but worthy themes and well portrayed. Idealistic choices, and challenging paths to be rewarded satisfying conclusions ends form a major part of the mythos, even if you are playing renegade.

The first game, for instance, gave you the option of avoiding killing one of your teammates if you've previously fostered a rapport with him on a certain mission, and the end allows you the choice of having humanity effectively rule the galaxy or merely become one of the guiding races. The second game takes it further with the loyalty system. Help the ones under your command and you change their lives. Help enough of them, and you save their lives.

And if you’ve done that, then in the third game you get to end centuries of conflict between two sets of warring races and help them forge an alliance.

It is a game series that encourages you to become invested in the setting, the characters and connections between them, and encourages you to make the effort to get a better outcome, and it utilizes all for the sake of an infuriating gut punch ending.

And don’t get me wrong, gut punch endings are great. An example of so being Red Dead Redemption. That was a gut punch every bit devastating as this, but in a way it didn’t leave me angry because, though surprising, it felt natural to the narrative. I can’t really say the same for 3.

It comes across as kind of a warped Dues Ex Machina. Diablos Ex Machine? Is that a thing?

I wasn't really interested in the Reapers. I liked it fine when they were an eldritch, unknowable and inescapable blight. The series has always been to me about the character interaction and development.

In that regard, what upset me most is that they had a great ending in Shepard and Anderson watching Earth from the Citadel. And it went really downhill when you meet the Catalyst, get a hugely underwhelming explanation for the Reapers, and offered the options to end the war, of which I found none satisfying.

Destroy entails the annihilation of the synthetic life forms, including EDI, and the geth who were fighting at my side. You’d think that you could raise that point to counter the synthetic/organic unavoidable antagonism argument… But you don’t.

Control fills me with a sense of existential horror, while Synthesis is morally unsound and kind of ridiculous anyway. I have an odd regard for the Refusal ending. I wouldn’t pick it but I respect it as an ending.

And to be fair, there had to be a higher price this time around, with the danger the Reapers posed being actually realized rather than heralded. This was a shitty way to go about it, though. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t seen a worlds ravaged and the entire population of the Citadel liquidated.

As I said, a far better ending would have been the immediate activation of the Crucible after Shepard opens up the Citadel, and perhaps dying(?), and the outcome following based on everything that preceded that.

Or if there had to be a twist, some kind of sign that not every Geth is killed in the Destroy ending. Or Shepard merely controlling the Reapers into hibernating/leaving in her dying moments rather than become some sort of god.