It's like running a marathon and just as you're about to cross the finish line you fly off into space.

This is it. All week I’ve been trying to prepare you for this. The end of Mass Effect 3 after the jump.

Do I even need to say that there are spoilers incoming?

In Mass Effect 1 we learned of the Reaper threat and defeated their agent in our galaxy. In Mass Effect 2 we prepared for their arrival and destroyed their secret base. In Mass Effect 3 we witnessed their arrival, and we fought back. So how does it all end? Does Commander Shepard destroy the Reapers, or do they harvest organic life for another cycle? Watch the ending to find out:

And the Second Part:

So why is this such a bad ending that it has the vast majority of players up in arms about it? In all honesty, it’s not. The ending, in and of itself is not great at worst, possibly good at best. The problem lies in the fact that this is the ending of Mass Effect 3, the end of the Mass Effect trilogy that we’ve been waiting five years for. And the ending has nothing to do with it.


All week long I’ve been describing parts of the game that were done well. Combat, characters, decisions, and style. I did this, because each section is let down as much as possible in the ending.


Combat: There is no final boss. In Mass Effect 1 we got to fight Saren (either in dialogue form or actual battle) and then Saren’s corpse being possessed by the Reaper, Sovereign. In Mass Effect 2 we got to fight the, admittedly bad, Human Reaper, along with multiple Harbinger-possessed Collectors. In Mass Effect 3 the last thing resembling a boss fight before the end is a section where you have to survive for a certain amount of time against an infinite number of standard forces. If you want a proper boss fight, you have to go back an entire level to the fight with Kai Leng (the stupidest character in the entire series. Seriously, everything about him is like someone asked a 13-year old what a bad guy should be like). 

Really? I have a gun.

There is no final boss in Mass Effect 3, which is downright criminal. They wouldn’t even have to try hard. We talk to the Illusive Man, find out he’s indoctrinated, and can even get him to kill himself. All in a scene beautifully reminiscent of the final encounter with Saren in Mass Effect 1. So why doesn’t Harbinger possess him, just like Sovereign did back then? Sure, they couldn’t have Shepard mortally wounded at the start of the fight, but its not like it couldn’t happen later, or at all (we’ll discuss this further on). Heck, this way there’d be none of the slowly walking forward that is so incredibly boring and unfun. As the final game in the trilogy, we need a villain to beat, and boss fight with them. They spent all of ME2 building up Harbinger, and we don’t even get a single word out of him in ME3. The only time we see him at all is when he shows up and blasts Shepard during the final run in the ending.

Couldn't agree on a contract Harby?

Characters: Mass Effect has a great cast and does a phenomenal job of making you care about them. The series does such a good job in fact, that one of the biggest complaints people have about the end of the game, is that we don’t find out what happens to the other characters. Bioware spent three games building these people and their relationships, it's probably the best part of the entire series, especially in ME3, and then it ends. No closure. No final word on what happens to our party members, our friends.

But what about the scene on the alien planet that the Normandy crashed on? Well, I could start with asking what the Normandy was doing passing through a Mass Relay when they were fighting on Earth in the first place. Or how about how the squad you take with you on the final charge can somehow end up on the Normandy? What about Tali and Garrus? They can’t eat the same food as the other races (dextro stuff, read the ME lore for more information). Do they just starve? And then there’s the love interests. Bioware finally wrote a compelling set of relationships for the main character, and then there’s no end. Do they mourn Shepard? Do they go mad? Do they build their own relay to go back and find Shepard’s body? An ending where we don’t hear about the characters, don’t get closure with them, is by definition an unfinished one.

Who cares what happens to these guys. Right?

Decisions: For three games we’ve made decisions. Some small, like how to tell a bad guy to back off or we’ll shoot them in the face. Some huge, like ending the Genophage. Two of these games have allowed us to take our saves from the previous one, just for the express purpose of keeping our decisions recorded. So why would you make an ending that invalidates every single choice we’ve made up until that point?


None of our decisions matter. The Reapers won’t be defeated by the armies we’ve painstakingly gathered for three games. It won’t be our allies, who we’ve seen grow stronger, both as fighters and as people, who lead us to victory. It is some magic space-kid and his three magic choices that will stop the Reapers. Destroying them, controlling them, or the worst, making everyone into synthetic-organic dna-hybrids (seriously, what the fuck was this even supposed to mean?).


Mass Effect 3 has this neat thing called War Assets. See, as you play along your choices can get you allies or equipment, or vague concepts, that all increase your war assets. They all have a number attached. A particularly skilled assassin could be worth 25, or a fleet could be worth 100’s. Regardless, it ends up adding a lot of weight to the player’s decisions (something direly needed considering the relative lack of impact of most of the choices throughout the series). You spend the whole game, looking at these numbers, trying to make them go up. Gathering your army for the fight against the Reapers.

A neat idea, so why not actually use it guys?

And it all means nothing.


Well, not nothing. The green ending, synthesis, isn’t an option if your score is too low. And the Earth takes increasing amounts of damage in the final cinematics depending on your score. And if you get over 5000 points (4000 under certain conditions), something not possible in-game without playing multiplayer (a bad idea but mp is so fun I don’t really mind), you get that little 5 second cutscene of Shepard breathing at the end of the destroy (red), ending. BTW, the destroy ending is the worst one, at least if you like, Joker, EDI, the Geth, or even the Quarians depending on the circumstances (and don’t forget that Shepard’s still on Earth and the mass relays are gone, so they’ll never see the Normandy or its crew again, which likely includes their love interest). That’s it.


This is why people lose their motivation to play the game again. To play any of the games. When I beat Mass Effect 1, I started a new file to see what I could do differently. When I beat Mass Effect 2, I started a new file to see what I could do differently. When I beat Mass Effect 3, I stopped playing Mass Effect. Before those last ten minutes I was excited to play again, especially since ME3 has the best new game+ in the whole series. None of my actions matter in the end. Hell, the ending outright denies a huge number of them. Why would I want to play through any of the games, if I know that I could choose everything randomly and end up with the exact same ending?


Style: How does Revenge of the Jedi end? How does Harry Potter end? These are the movies that Mass Effect 3 feels like, was designed to feel like. So why doesn’t it end the same way? Not everyone clamoring for a new ending to ME3 is asking for a happy ending, and it’s true, it doesn’t have to be happy to be a good end. But it’s the end that players deserve. Not all ends should be happy. In fact, 90% shouldn’t end happily. But if you have a player who’s done everything perfectly, done every sidequest, passed every paragon/renegade check, done it all perfectly right for three games (roughly 100 hours of playtime based on averages), they deserve their ‘Big Goddamn Hero’ ending. Make the war assets matter. If we don’t get enough, then at least have a memorial to Shepard, to those lost in the path there. We need closure, one way or another.

Is this really too much to ask for?

Last but not least, remember the magic kid? Remember his choices? His choices? That’s it right there. They aren’t your choices, or Shepard’s choices. They’re his choices Shepard has consistently denied these kinds of no-winners decisions for the entire series, why not now? In fact, those choices: destroy all synthetic life, control the reapers at the cost of your own life, sacrifice yourself to end the cycle, they all sound like someone else. Some other character. Oh, right....

A fan of the series created a new ending. Wrote out the dialogue and gave some instruction on what should happen afterwards. This is it. This is the ending that Bioware needs to add to the game (even if it needs a little editing, like those swear words need to go). If Bioware does this, even if I have to pay for it, then Mass Effect 3 will go from a great game with the worst ending I’ve ever seen, to one of the best games I’ve ever played. The Mass Effect series will become something that can stand in my mind alongside the original Star Wars movies.


Will it ever be perfect? No. I have plenty of other complaints, like how boring the Crucible is as a Deus ex Machina, and how it was completely unnecessary. Or why we used the Reaper controlled portal to the Citadel, when there’s the Conduit sitting on Ilos. Using the Conduit would even add a nice, returning to your roots feeling, especially considering the Saren parallels with The Illusive Man. I could list complaints for days, but it would still be one of the best games I’ve ever played, and one of the best stories I’ve ever helped tell.

Guys? Hello? I'm still here.

P.S. Having Buzz Aldrin as a V.A. for the last scene was neat and all, but he is not a professional V.A., and that scene was on the dumbest things I have ever seen, and I don’t even care about the whole deviantART controversy. The Shepherd symbolism was fine without pointing it out, we were gathering all of these races and fleets, you didn’t need to point it out. Though it’d be nice if us doing so actually made some kind of difference.


P.P.S. If you have to point out your symbolism you’ve already fucked it up. Not that it needed pointing out in this instance.