Dream in 8Bit

My thoughts on Mass Effect 3’s Ending

Lets start this off with a fair warning this post will contain SPOILERS!!! so if you haven’t beaten the game yet, you have been advised.

*****SPOILERS******

Alrighty then, Let me begin by saying, I love Mass Effect. This was a series that astounded me, with how damned important every choice I made in the game felt. Sure many situations boiled down to binary decisions of Good/Evil, Save/Kill, Protect/Destroy, but these choices had weight, and more importantly consequence. Something many games strive for but fail to achieve.

I remember loading up Mass Effect 2 for the first time, and realizing that this world was directly impacted by the decisions I had made in the first game. This realization gave even minor choices in the game that much more meaning, as I knew that I would be impacting my experience for the inevitable third installment, which the world just got it’s hands on.

Now, if you’ve been under a rock, you may not have heard the fan “uprising” against the way Mass Effect 3 came to a close. And I have to agree, they pulled a “LOST” here. Now, I won’t say pulling a Lost is necessarily a bad thing. In fact I kind of appreciated the final scene with the Normandy being marooned on some sort of jungle planet. It left us with a sense of mystery and intrigue. Something I can genuinely appreciate. normandycrash

However, if you back up just a few seconds before this to see Liara and Garrus (at least in my game) join Joker beside the downed Normandy… both of whom had been in my squad on Earth as we stormed the tower in London, you can begin to see the holes in this ending. So let’s go back a little further to that moment, the moment the ending went to shit.

Seeing that tower, you knew you were approaching the final moments of the Mass Effect trilogy. You had just taken down a reaper with a damned rocket to the face, and now you were barreling headlong towards the tower at breakneck speed, dodging left and right as your adrenaline pumped. The tower was mere yards away when suddenly the reaper focuses square on you and blasts away, and then the screen fades to white.

At first I thought I had fucked up, that I somehow chose the wrong path to the tower, I expected a Mission Failure screen, but instead was given some bloody/hazy filter over my screen and a Shepard who could barely walk. My first impression was “oh hey it’s another slow-mo dream sequence” I didn’t see Liara or Garrus anywhere around me, which reinforced this idea, so I shambled my way towards the tower, blasting the reapers who stood in my way. Once I reached the tower and was taken inside, it was made apparent that this wasn’t a dream. My Shep had just somehow survived the reaper’s face laser and was now onboard one messed up looking Citadel. I immediately became concerned that my squadmates had actually been killed until Anderson mentions “WE came in somewhere else”. With a sigh of relief I trudged forward through the corpse filled hallway and the shifting plates of the Citadel looking forward to regrouping with my squad members. Looking forward to a final showdown with the Illusive Man.

When I got to the control room, I was happy to see Anderson standing at the console, but Liara and Garrus were nowhere to be found. Anderson had clearly said “WE”, but yet there he stood, alone. After a few moments the Illusive Man made himself known, shows he has been indoctrinated and gives us a nice little speech. Though I had played a Paragon since the opening moments of the first Mass Effect, I didn’t hesitate for a moment to pull the Right Trigger for the Renegade action to save Anderson’s life. (Just as I did with Udina and Kai Leng, because I feared that failing to take those actions would result in losing one of my squadmates). The Illusive Man was down, but in a much tamer manner than I had hoped for.

So Shep sits down next to Anderson, to savor their victory, and what does Anderson do to thank me for saving him? He goes and dies?!? Really? I mean I know you just got shot dude, but you’ve seen worse, hell a reaper just went full on Cyclops on me and I got right back up. The dramatic music starts playing, but Anderson’s death felt to forced and pointless that it was hard to even care. In comparison to Mordin’s sacrifice (which to me was actually the most gripping part of the game, and I even started to tear up a little) Anderson kind of went out like a bitch.

Then Hacket comes over the radio, and basically says “But wait, there’s more”. Shep gets up, and stumbles over towards the control panel, while I still am wondering where the hell my other squad members had gone, when out of nowhere some magic elevator lifts my broken body up into the Crucible.

I think to myself one last time, maybe this is where my squad members have gone. Somehow I’ll reunite with them for one last battle to finish off the trilogy. But my hopes are immediately dashed as that dumb burning kid from Shep’s nightmares greets me. I figure, surely this is the last stand of the Reapers. They are reading my Shep’s mind. Somehow taking the form of the one thing that apparently gives me pain.(even though I always found Shep’s connection to this one kid kinda strange, I mean yea he had a sweet model starship, but there were a ton of other people Shep couldn’t save ***coughASHLEYcough***) So I talk to the kid, he tells me that the Reapers had been telling me the truth the whole time. That they really were just there to keep “order”. But then he goes on to pull some sort of 70’s game show routine to reveal the endings. No mention of Harbinger, the reaper Shep had so much beef with, no mention of my squadmates (whom, at this point im convinced have been killed) Instead this what I felt this kid was saying to me.

Starchild: Congratulations for completing Mass Effect 3. Behind Door Number One you get the Paragon Ending! That’s right, That guy you just killed downstairs was right all along, and somehow doing the RIGHT THING by killing people all across the galaxy. Look how pretty and blue it is. Choose this one to spare the Reapers and pull a Legion.And it’ll destoy the relays!

Shepard: Uhh, wait, The Illusive Man was on the Paragon Path?!? And what was that about the relays?

Starchild: Behind Door Number two we have the Renegade Ending! Ohhh fancy! Turns out Anderson was kind of a dick, and despite the fact he was more or less a boyscout leader, he was full on Renegade. Pick this one to make all those Geth sorry they ever trusted you, and Kill Joker’s one chance at love by taking EDI offline! And it’ll destoy the relays!

Shepard: …Anderson didn’t really seem the Renegade type, and wait, I just saved brought peace between the Geth and Quarians. Plus EDI is basically like a female Johnny5. I don’t wanna cock block my pilot, I’ll never hear the end of it. And again, destoy the relays?

Starchild: Behind Door Number 3 you can just merge all Organic and Synthetic life in the Galaxy, but we’ll have to turn you into pure energy in the process… Look at how NEUTRAL it is. And it’ll destoy the relays!

Shepard: Wait… what? How the hell is that an option? And wait… none of these options have anything to do with that giant fleet of starships I have right outside the window? And seriously??!? The Relays?

Starchild: ~~Choose which color you want to destoy the relays with!~~ Make your choice.

So I carry my broken ass over to the Paragon ending on the left. Not because I felt super stongly about preserving the Reapers, but because that’s how I had played my game. I was a Paragon character, and I wanted the Paragon ending. Turns out that Paragon ending, was nothing but a Blue Overlay on top of generic ending 1. (sure in the Paragon ending the Reapers fly away, and in the Renegade ending they fall down, but it’s the same damned clip at it’s core). Then we cut to the Normandy, which moments before had been on the front lines of battle, the last we saw any of the squadmates, they had all been readying for the final assault on Earth. Now the Normandy is suddenly in the middle of a Relay Jump, just as Shep had chosen his ~~color~~ choice to end the war. So Joker is sitting in the cockpit going nuts trying to keep the Normandy steady, but he can’t do it, and the Normandy crashes on some seemingly Jungle planet. As Joker steps out, I can’t help but think about how his bones aren’t completely shattered from the crashlanding, but I shove that from my mind, I think to myself, “alright I’m cool with this, maybe he got sent into the past or the future or something, maybe he’ll see something that explains what the hell just happens”. Just as I finish that thought, Liara steps out. WHAT THE FUCK? How the hell did she get on the Normandy, I’ve been looking for this blue bitch for the past 10 minutes, and now she’s on some jungle planet on the other side of the galaxy?!? Then Garrus steps out, so now both of the squad members that I thought had died while storming the tower with me, are just wandering around some jungle planet with Joker. How the hell did they get onboard the Normandy, is the rest of my squad there? Where are they…

This is pretty much my exact thought process at this point:

“How the hell did they get onboard the Normandy, is the rest of my squad there? Where are they…Hey… the screen is starting to pan up… don’t fade out… I’m asking questions, hey wait… This sounds like the Faunts, I love this song… wait, no, I dont care about that right now, what the fuck, how did that just work out?!? Did everybody seriously just get stranded on Earth? Wrex is gonna be pissed!!!! Where did the Reaper’s go? Am I controlling them now? God damnit, that sucked, maybe they’ll be something after the credits. ***WAITS*** sweet there is something!”

Buzz Aldrin talks to some kid about space, and how there are more stories to be told about Commander Shepard, and all I can think is… but I just watched myself get vaporized… but apparently I did more. While this makes me happy to know that they still intend to do things with the Mass Effect universe, I can’t help but wonder what the hell just happened. My war assets, which i spent the entire game acquiring seemed to do NOTHING, the hours I spent in multiplayer to increase my Galactic Readiness, seemed to do NOTHING. The choices I had made across 3 games, seemed to do NOTHING. So I couldn’t help but feel like I just got a gnarly case of story blue balls. A series where it seemed like the choices were all building up to one ultimate finale, where all my choices would come to a head, whimpered out and boiled down to selecting a color. And I’m colorblind…

All things said, I still really enjoyed this game, and Mass Effect 3 was a phenominal experience, but just like LOST, which I also loved. I gotta say the ending sucked. It left the audience with more questions than answers, had glaring plot holes, and feels like so much of what it was asking it’s audience to invest in along the ride was just thrown out the window at the last moment. Here’s hoping DLC fixes that.

…I… I dont even remember doing this, i found it in a folder labeled Drunk in Domitilla (the dorm i lived in while I went to school in Boston)

when i lived in the Fillmore for about a week in 2006 (before moving to Boston) I sat on the couch and drew the building across the street. I must have been real bored, cuz I dont think I’ve drawn a single building since.

super old mech concept

random character study

sometimes I like to zone out and draw trees

monster concept for Nomad.

some weapon studies Im working on with Ruune. Trying to figure out what I want to do with his mechanical limbs.

concept for Ruune (obviously unfinished)

trying to come up with a concept for a character for the book im writing. I tend to doodle out a lot of the characters first. This is infiniti. She’s an artificial intelligence. I’m trying to make her unique (aka: not a copy of Cortana) so I’m playing around with making her young.

Sometimes I wish I could breath fire…