When I first started playing Mass Effect back in '07*, I didn't like it much. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. I ended up uninstalling it after just an hour or two of play time and didn't touch it again before the release of the 2nd part of the trilogy. The reason behind this is twofold: First of all, I was expecting a role-playing game, not a cover-shooter. Crouching behind some boulder, poking my head out while the enemy is reloading, waiting for my turn to shoot... yeah, I'm not that kinda guy. And blindly rushing in (shot)gun blazing failed most of the time, I lost patience, I didn't like it.
*Could have sworn it was '08, Wikipedia says otherwise.
More importantly, once I got to the actual role-playing bit, I was simply overwhelmed. Mass Effect takes a fuckton (that's an actual ingame-term I have recently acquired!) of lore and crams it down your throat. Here, eat this: The humans are represented by their so-called 'Alliance', then there are the Turians, who used to be at war with the humans during the 'First Contact War', but then they made up and you get to hang out with a Turian on your ship, who is also a Spectre and Spectres are these super cool galaxy rangers, who stand above the law and get to execute the will of the Council. Oh yeah, said Council represents the galaxy's most advanced species, they're sci-fi space politicians, who get to hang around at the Citadel, which is a massive space station, which was supposedly created by the Protheans, who were a technically advanced species that got wiped out 50,000 years ago. There's also the Geth, a bunch of Synthetic super evil killing machines, which had been created by the Quarians and eventually rose against them and decided to wage war against all living beings in the galaxy - or so everybody seems to think. And that's only the first 20 minutes of actual gameplay...
Getting into Mass Effect feels like history homework. You get way too much information about all kinds of freaky alien races, technology, wars, politics, meaningful events and a quazillion other things, which quite frankly I didn't give a fuck about at the beginning of the game. If a game draws me in and feels fun to play, I want to learn more about its fictional universe - not the other way 'round.
Fortunately for me, I am part of a very active community of gamers, who love sharing their feelings regarding all the latest games. And everybody was talking about Mass Effect 2 the moment it came out. How much they loved it. How it was even more awesome than the first one. And I felt that I was missing out. So I grit my teeth and gave it another chance, starting with the first game (you keep your characters and progress throughout parts 1-3). I found it very difficult to keep track of all the background story and history lessons, what with my short attention span and everything, but things got gradually more interesting when I had my first epic moment on there:
(random Youtube video depicting that particular scene, this was not made by me)
Even with the shitty video quality on that Youtube clip and entirely devoid of context, this speech and the incredible music just might give you the goosebumps. This is where the game finally had me. This is where I felt I'm not just some random space grunt shooting stuff. It gave me purpose. I felt like I was doing something big. Yes, I'm that easy to manipulate.
As Mass Effect's story finally began to unfold, it became gradually more interesting until it completely sucked me in. Learning about the goings on in this virtual galaxy no longer felt like a chore - I genuinely cared for the characters, some of the impressive landmarks and the quirky, exotic alien species I stumbled upon. One particularly fascinating thing about this game is its open-minded take on love and sex. Your main character might be a guy, who falls in love with a girl, they get it on, nothing new here. Then again, your character might happen to be a girl, who falls in love with another girl. Said girl might be an alien. Once you get to the third game of the trilogy, one of your male crew members will tell you about his husband. A human female NPC can be overheard talking about her alien wife and their daughter.
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| My character and her partner |
(once again, this video is taken straight from Youtube and was not made by me)
Okay, I don't wanna give you the wrong impression here. This isn't some kind of sex simulation, it's all very tasteful and it's not the point of the game to shag your way across the galaxy - the name is Shepard, not Shatner. But as you are introduced to new team mates, as you fight side by side, watching each other's backs and saving each other's lives time and again, both your main character and you as a player might develop a strong emotional bond with some of your dearest comrades. And in some cases, these circumstances may lead to the characters in question falling in love with each other.
Of course there is always the other extreme: While Mass Effect gives you the chance to be a hero, constantly risking your own life for the sake of others, you can also be a complete asshole. Look at this:
Depending on how you behave, on how you solve your problems and treat the characters around you, your team mates will react and respond differently. This becomes especially noticeable at the end of Mass Effect 2, where many of the characters on your team can and will permanently die, if you have failed to earn their trust and loyalty. If you're that kind of person, then you might not care to see them again in the sequel. If you neglect them too much, however, then your main character might never return from his final mission in one piece, meaning he will never be alive to start Mass Effect 3. Because once everyone thinks you're a jerk not worth saving, it's gonna be fucking hard to survive. This is not a galaxy for lone wolves.
But don't get fooled into believing it's all about being good or evil. You can be the bravest, most pure-hearted hero in the universe and some friends are still going to die - by your own decision, on top of all things. Picture the following scenario: Two of your friends get abducted by the enemy and if you don't come to their aid, they will be killed. Problem is, you only get to save one of them, the other one will inevitably die. You know that, your friends know - the moment you pick one of them, your other friend knows you have just signed their death sentence. How do you make this decision? What do you base it on? Pick the one you feel closer to? Rescue the one who is better in combat? There is no right choice here and no matter what you do, the game leaves you feeling devastated.
All these decisions add up. The big and small ones. Seemingly small, meaningless dialogues and actions turn out to have a massive impact on the story later on, possibly saving or ending somebody's life.
I have just finished the whole trilogy and I'm watching Claire on her first playthrough right now. She is still in the middle of the first game and she has already made some decisions, which vastly differ from the things I did, beginning with her character's past.
I am utterly fascinated by this. It is hard to describe this to anyone, who has never actually played Mass Effect. Many of my friends have started playing Mass Effect 3 at the same time as I have. And when we talked, it turned out that some of us had entirely different quests with different characters and different outcomes, simply because the characters involved in my particular storyline were no longer alive in theirs or vice versa. On your course through the game, you get to choose whether to spare or destroy certain bad guys. You get to grant political power to certain characters. All of these decisions bear effects of such magnitude, you won't believe it until you see it for yourself, because there has simply never been any other game to pull this off.
Most importantly, though, the storytelling in Mass Effect is brilliant, it's touching, it moves you and if you're the kind of person who just might cry because of a video game, it's Mass Effect that will make you:
It's difficult to watch this scene and remain utterly untouched by it, even if you've never played the actual game.
Right, now I'm going to talk about the ENDING, so if you still want to finish the game and you don't want any SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW!
***HERE BE SPOILERS!!! LEAVE THIS BLOG NOW!***
Mass Effect was always meant to be a trilogy, so it should be no big surprise that the end of the third and final game in the series is indeed very final. According to IGN, there are 16 different endings in total, but to most fans, all of them are considered so confusing and illogical, that some players insist the ending is actually just a hallucination or some kind of dream and the real ending will be revealed in upcoming DLC, while other fans have even started an online petition, demanding a better ending.
I was satisfied with my ending at first. The bad guys got destroyed, earth was saved, my character survived. You don't get the kind of ending that tells you whether all the different aliens, which you have united on your quest, will live happily ever after or whether they go back to fighting among themselves. You don't get the stereotypical ending that gives you a black and white still of each character and a little note, "Bob left the army and opened a bar in Hawaii. He still tells stories about his adventures with you to his grandchildren." The bad guys are dead, most of the good guys survive, that's all you get. And I don't mind this part of the ending. In fact, this is what Mass Effect is all about.
You see, Mass Effect's primary bad guys, the Reapers, want to eradicate all highly advanced organic life for one reason: Once they become too intelligent and too powerful, they bring war, chaos, destruction. So every 50,000 or so years, all the smart species get eradicated and only the basic and primitive life forms are left alive. That is, until they get advanced enough to bring "chaos".
There are various encounters where this supposed state of chaos is presented as hard, inevitable fact. The galaxy will screw up, there will be chaos, there is no way around termination in order to prevent it. And your character's stance on the whole thing is basically this: Maybe they will bring chaos, maybe they won't. But they should have the right and the freedom to give it a try and nobody has a right to just end their existence. Because if you're destined to just be wiped out completely at some point, there's no reason to live in the first place. That's the whole point. It's a fight for freedom. The freedom to do whatever the fuck you want, to be allowed to screw up or to show that you can be better than what the Reapers predict for you.
With that in mind, it doesn't matter whether the different tribes and races and species in the galaxy live happily ever after, holding hands, picking flowers and singing songs or whether they spend the next billion years fighting. The point is that they're alive to actually do all those things. There is no more Reaper threat that might completely wipe them all from the galaxy. I can accept this part of the ending.
That said, friends and forum users have pointed out flaws and problems with the ending, which I find difficult to disagree with. At the very end of the game, you barely survive an attack, wandering around the area in a dizzy, bloodied state, more dead than alive. Your characer is in a trance of sorts and spends the rest of the game in that state. You see a few corpses, but for some strange reason your team mates are nowhere to be found - neither dead nor alive. You do the zombie shuffle to a transporter beam and teleport up to activate a so-called 'catalyst' that triggers a super weapon, built to destroy the reaper threat once and for all.
Once there, the catalyst appears to you as the talking hologram of a child - the same child you fail to save back on earth, which haunts your character's nightmares ever since. Why the catalyst would choose this appearance, nobody knows. Most of all, the little bugger has a very surprising change of heart: He tells you that he controls the reapers and that he has to destroy you and all advanced races in the galaxy to prevent chaos. You know, that thing I described up there. When you tell him how you feel about the whole thing, the freaky hologram sees things your way. Why? God knows. But depending on your actions throughout the trilogy, you get presented with three options:
1. Control the reapers and get them to stop their attack, sacrificing your own life in the process. 2. Destroy the reapers and all synthetic life in order to bring peace. The catalyst suggests that *all* synthetic life will die, including your character, who is partially synthetic. Interestingly enough, this is the only option that actually ends the game with your charcter surviving! And there's also 3. Make all life in the galaxy partially organic and synthetic, thus reaching what is supposedly the highest form of evolution. The catalyst suggests that this would ultimately bring peace to the galaxy. Why? Fuck if I know. But choosing this option turns everybody into a cyborg and your character gets killed. Not very satisfying.
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense. First the reapers are hell-bent on everybody's destruction, it's fate, it's meant to be, blah-de-blah, the holographic kid himself tells it to you and from one moment to another he's like: "Eh, nevermind. I'll let you destroy or control them or you can even turn all organic life into cyber-organisms. I dunno why, I just feel like it." His reasoning literally is: "The citadel has changed me. I have more possibilities now." What the hell is that even supposed to mean? So he didn't have the possibility to stop the reapers before or what? He just said he controls them anyway. What changed his mind? And why?
Here's the next thing: No matter, which of these options you choose - next thing you see is your ship flying away, trying to escape the aftermath of the ensuing destruction. Eventually, the ship crashes on some lush, green planet and you see some of your crew members climbing out enjoying the view. How does that make sense? Just a few moments ago, every single one of them were down on Earth with you, fighting back the Reaper invasion on all fronts and now they're in space, flying around in your ship? How? Why?
Then there's the scene where your character comes back to life. You see their burnt armor underneath some rubble, then you hear a gasp in your character's voice, suggesting they're not dead. So where did all that rubble come from? Where the hell are you? What happened? The game doesn't say. Logic suggests you got beamed back down to earth, some people even say you never actually really made it to the catalyst and it was all just a hallucination, possibly induced by the Reapers, themselves.
No matter how you twist and turn it: The whole thing is highly disappointing and not very satisfying. Maybe the ending was just rushed, they missed their own gaping plot holes and this is really it. Or maybe the raging community is right and the whole thing is gonna turn out to be some clever mind trick, played on you by the Reapers, which is all going to be resolved in some upcoming DLC. I don't know which of these two possibilities are worse. If I'm paying good money for a game, I'd like to get everything, including a proper ending. It is not okay to release the actual ending as future added content, especially when I might have to pay in order to access it.
If it turns out that this is indeed it, the ending is official canon and all this weird holographic kid, crew disappearing on a ship without you, your character buried in rubble nonsense is all supposed to be the real deal, then I can't help but wonder what the fuck happend here. This game features some of the best storytelling I ever had the pleasure to experience. At its best times, it was more touching, moving and inspiring than any book I've ever read and any film I have ever watched. But a half-assed ending like this leaves me feeling hollow and disappointed. There is no real sense of victory, no sense of achievement here. I'm genuinely trying to figure out what the hell really happened. And should it turn out that what some fans suggest is right and they might release a real, actual ending that explains all these plot holes as added DLC, then that's just downright evil. This is not how you should treat loyal fans and customers. This is not the kind of crap you'll expect after playing through what might be the most exciting story you'll ever see in any game to this day.
I don't know what to think. I don't know what this weird ending is all about. I seem to be missing the message here. Was this thing just rushed, is it unfinished, incomplete, something they had to come up with because they ran out of time or is there more to come? Am I supposed to get stoned off my ass to understand the true meaning of this thing? Somebody help me! I'm seriously lost!
All bitching and moaning about the final moments aside, I had one hell of a ride. Originally, I had filmed every last bit of the final mission, every fight, every moment of dialoge, all to the very end, hoping to share it with you. But I can't even get myself to look at the strange ending again. Instead, I'll just put my character's final speech on here, before the last push, before the big showdown. That's the way I want to remember her. Not as some weird, crawling zombie, who gets left behind by her crew for reasons nobody can explain.
-Cat Shepard
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