Mass Effect 3 not-so-realtime-blog: It's Over!

There has been a lot written about the ending of Mass Effect 3 on the internet, and I've managed to avoid reading it all until today. I finished the game last night just after midnight, and it was, I think, a beautiful ending to a great game, and an even better story. Before I continue I should say that...

I am going to ruin the whole fucking thing for you in this blog post if you haven't finished the game yet. Spoilers will reproduce faster than rabbits in this post, and if you don't want to see them don't let your eyes drift below the red text. Also, if you're reading about the endings of the game before you finish playing it you're really cheating yourself.

Back to regular text now. I've had video games provoke some really visceral feelings from me since I started console gaming again in 2008. The Yakuza series really moved me, even though the plot was less believable than the sci-fi fantasy Mass Effect series. The Uncharted series has moved me in a genuine way, and the ending of Red Dead Redemption left me in a shock so big that I couldn't get to sleep. Mass Effect 3 is so far as I can tell and remember, the game that has gotten the biggest involuntary reaction out of me at its conclusion.

I remember a couple of years ago sitting in my video game chair playing the final sequence of Mass Effect 2 and literally holding my breath as Shepard, Jack, and Samara jumped back onto the Normandy as it flew out of the collector base. I was holding my breath because I didn't know which characters had survived the suicide mission, or if Shepard himself would survive. That was one of the greatest moments in gaming that I can remember, and even it was eclipsed by the ending of Mass Effect 3. Bioware promised that the third game would conclude the story arc of Commander Shepard. I thought that might mean that he could die in the end, or save the galaxy and return as a hero or savior figure.

Making such assumptions, I feel like I was really and truly underestimating the Bioware team and their writers. What they did with Mass Effect 3 actually transcended the game and put my head in a completely different space than it was in before. I think that this kind of thing makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and that's part of the reason that there has been such a huge reaction to the end of the series on the internet. People want a clear cut ending, clarification on what happened to everyone and every plot line left untied. I think it was at its most beautiful just the way it was.

The way my story arced, I thought for sure that when I embarked on the final mission, Shepard would not come out of it alive. There were three or four times before the actual end of the game where I thought that my mission had failed, and each of those times it felt like my heart stopped or at least skipped a few beats. One scene in particular, I think, created the feeling of desperation like I've never felt before. During the final push towards the transport beam up into the Citadel, your only job is to run. As you run you see all of the troops running with you get vaporized by the reapers' red lasers. The screen goes white and you come to, shell shocked and barely able to use a pistol to kill a few enemies before you make it to the beam alone. Time slows and all of your movements are pained, and it's done so well that your heart just aches for Commander Shepard.

Once you're inside the Citadel and have your final encounter with the Illusive Man you are summoned to the to another level where you meet the Catalyst, a god-like electronic child who explains to you why the cycle of reapers-destroying-all-organic-life-in-the-galaxy occurs, and you're presented with two or three choices. Destroy all synthetic life (this sucks, because you would lose the Geth and more importantly, EDI), control the reapers and break the cycle (this sucks because they tell you that this option will kill Shepard), or join synthetic and organic life together as one (also kills Shepard).

I felt the choices were a bit vague as the path split and there was only blue (the paragon color) and red (the renegade color) to guide you and I couldn't figure out in my head which option was more paragon. I walked toward the blue control panel, flipped the switch, took control of the reapers, and died. Afterwards, a cinematic featuring the Normandy crashing on a jungle planet, and it's door opening aired, the reapers pulled back from Earth, and the story was over.

I remember listening to Game Informer's podcast The Game Informer Show back when I was a professor in Miami and had a 90 minute commute, honestly it was always one of the bright points of my workweek to have a long ass commute and listen to dudes talk about video games for an hour on the way. Anyhow, one of the guys mentioned that he liked "Skeletors", you know, those  scenes that happen after the credits. I felt, even at midnight, that I had to let the credits roll all the way without stopping. The developers deserved it, and I had a sneaking feeling that there would totally be a Skeletor. There was, and it was beautiful. There was an old man talking to a child about the exploits of Commander Shepard, but they were just calling him "the Shepard." I can't say how much a simple scene with bad voice acting made the whole story feel okay, but it did. The whole Mass Effect story happened years ago, and Shepard had become known as the Shepard who had done his damnedest to protect his flock. And protect them he did.

So that was the ending of the game. A lot of people didn't like it. I've read lots of complaints from people who felt that all of the choices made in the game should have provided some sort of options or outcome that didn't exist in the game. People said that they felt like all of their previous choices didn't matter, either because Shepard died or because the outcomes were all catastrophic for the galaxy. That demand seems outrageous to me. We, as the players, aren't the ones writing the story. We don't get to decide how it starts or how it ends. The fact of the matter is this game gave you a lot a leeway for how you got to the endpoint, but the endpoint is the same, with perhaps very slightly different outcomes. I see it this way: If I'm driving home from work and I see that I'm about to get into a car accident, and I can either swerve left or right (one of which results in my own death), that last choice doesn't reduce the value of every other decision I've made in my life, right? Why would it be any different for a game?

All of this said, I loved the series, I loved the game. The ending was just part of it, and it really did work. The soundtrack was particularly stellar, the voice acting for the most part superb, the setting, graphics, visual design, and gameplay were great. The story behind Mass Effect, through three games and three (I've heard that reading the fourth novel somehow disgraces the whole series) novels works as a whole to create an incredible allegorical galaxy where you have adventures, but more importantly relationships that force the complex decisions you would never want to make in your real life out of your brain. I think that at this point in gaming, it's the ultimate "what would you do if" type of experience out there.