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.

A uniquely Korean experience.

The last few days I realized that in less than a year we'll be leaving Korea and if we come back it will likely be only for a visit if at all. We tried taekwondo, but it was pretty expensive, communication was difficult, and honestly, after a day at work as a teacher the last place you want to spend a substantial part of your evening is with a bunch of screaming kids. We've tried soju and all night drinking benders and those are fun here and there, but you can do that at home (though, not really to the same degree). Noraebang is fun, but it's really not all that different from Karaoke at home.

Last year after the Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival the only shelter we could find was a PC Bang, which is a room filled with computers, smoke, the smell of ramyeon noodles, cans of mountain dew and coffee beverages, and Korean dudes screaming into headsets while they play online computer games. Now, that night it wasn't all that awesome. I was tired, as were my travel mates (although Brittany's then-boyfriend stayed up all night playing World of Warcraft or something like that) so I crashed in my chair until it was time to wake up and get on the train.

Now, the actual playing of video games for hours on end might be fun, but I need to get into the right kind of game to make a PC Bang night worthwhile. I think I might see if EVE Online runs on my computer. There's some hilarious stories that have come out of this game, which allows you to use in-game currency to pay your monthly membership if you're good enough. I think it might be worth a go at playing for a few weeks to see if this is something I'd be interested in, but I'm really not so sure about it. There's a 2 week free trial I might get on and see how it plays and feels. But that's probably as far as I'll take it...but maybe I should do it for the cultural experience.

Plus maybe I could be as epic as Leeroy Jenkins (29 million views...ha!)

Expat Problem

If you've read this blog for any significant period of time, you know I love me some video games. One of my favorite video game series is Mass Effect. Mass Effect is a space opera, much like Star Wars or Star Trek. It has a really great science fiction story, stellar voice acting, and a very detailed and complete universe that it feels like you could jump into. As a game, it goes a little bit further. Each Mass Effect game is truly whatever you make it to be. The progression of the story is decided by you as much as it was by the developers. For example in the first game, there's a member of your party that appears to be a threat to your entire team. You can choose whether or not to keep him around, or to put a bullet in his thick skull. There's another scene in which you have to decide which of your teammates to save, and of course there's only enough time to save one. The whole idea is that the characters are introduced in such a way that you care about them and these choices are difficult, and you know what, they are difficult.

So what does that all matter, you might ask? Well, when you start Mass Effect 2, it imports your game information from the first game. Characters that didn't survive the first game don't appear in the second game. People you pissed off in the first game hold a grudge, and so on and so forth. Each game took me roughly 20 hours to complete. I played them on the XBox 360, because they weren't available for the PS3 at the time. Then we moved to Korea. I brought the PS3 along, but not the Xbox, and I thought that resisting the siren call of wanting to see how this whole space saga plays out wouldn't be too hard to resist. Cue the release of Mass Effect 3.

The game released a couple of days ago. It would cost about $70 to ship the U.S. version of the game in from Hong Kong, not too bad, really. The problem is my game saves are on my Xbox, so I'd really need to play through Mass Effect 2 on PS3 before starting Mass Effect 3. I can download it for $20 from the Playstation Network or I could feasibly order it with ME3 from play-asia.com. I don't know if I'm up for the challenge. It would take a good 20 hours minimum to complete ME2 again, and by the time I put in that much gaming time it could be close to time to move home, and how on Earth can I avoid finding out what the hell happens in ME3 when I read Kotaku every day?

This is the dilemma, do I get cranking on getting back through the Mass Effect saga on PS3, or try to wait until I get home, settled in enough to play it on an Xbox that could die at any moment some time in mid to late 2013 while simultaneously starting up a new life in New York with a wife, high rent payment, maybe two jobs, and so much other cool stuff to do than play video games?

I might have answered my own question by writing this.

Hope for the little gamer inside of me :)

Finally after hours and hours of searching Waygook.org (ironically for lesson plan ideas...) I found a thread about PS3 players in Korea. Someone in the thread mentioned shops to buy accessories and games at, and then someone just happened to mention a place called 88GameLand here in Daegu. It's only a few subway stops away, and it seems like the only thing comparable to a GameStop in this city of 2.5 million people.

MAYBE THEY HAVE THE AV CORD I NEED!!! MAYBE!!! OMG I HOPE SO!!!!

Now I just need to survive for three more hours at my desk without sounding like a completely giddy and hopeful schoolgirl until I can go home. Not sure if we'll make it all the way downtown tonight as Babehoney is a bit under the weather, but maybe! We might also go out of Samgyeupsal tonight. Mmmmm pork belly.

Multiplayer Madness

Last night I discovered something that could be potentially dangerous for my romantic relationship...online multiplayer gaming. No, not massive multiplayer online rpgs, just regular online multiplayer. My old internet connection was such crap that I could never make it through a game without lagging out. Now I can run around and shoot dudes in the face!

This all started because I was playing Battlefield: Bad Company and thought I'd like to see how I held up in online play. I tried online play once playing Battlefield 1943 and the other dudes playing C I L Led me too fast for it to be any fun, and the same goes for the Uncharted 2 multiplayer demo. Things started out a little bit similar and then I got my first kill. HA! One on the board for me! After that I kept playing and playing until I racked up a few more kills, then went to sleep.

Tonight for whatever reason I remembered that Uncharted 2 had a multiplayer mode and logged in. Next thing I knew I was leading my team in kills for a few minutes at a time. I often catch dudes from the back and pump them full of bullets before they even know I'm there. I love it. It's like Uncharted 2 is a brand new game, which is awesome because I'm going to need something to hold me over until Uncharted 3 comes out on 11-1-11. I'm a happy camper.

In unrelated news, today I did something I've always wanted to do. The Girl and I made truffles. We started out making a ganache which was then chilled to harden, dipped in dark chocolate, and rolled in a variety of things (cocoa powder, confectioner's sugar, nuts, etc.) It was really cool to do this. Eat your heart out, Godiva. We also made candied orange peels which seem to have turned out pretty great too. All in all a nice productive day of cooking, gaming, and we even went on a walk.

Also, my nice suit from a few years back fits again, and my skinny jeans fit too. Woot.