june gloom on 16/4/2013 at 10:15
I will never, ever understand the hoopla over the ME3 ending. Ever.
DDL on 16/4/2013 at 10:43
Well, lack of an actual "good" ending was what did it for me.
I'm going to paste in a rant I wrote somewhere else (unedited, ranty, read at own risk), but more or less it was that ending 1 arbitrarily introduced (and also trivialised) stupid off-screen deaths with no good explanation, ending 2 was incredibly suspicious and also non-cathartic, ending 3 was HAHAHHA WHAT and also non-cathartic, and ending 4 was depressing AS FUCK.
Also, ghost baby lolz.
I mean, I LOVED the series, absolutely loved it to death, but the thought of replaying it just gets...smeared in "oh god that ending" and I can't do it.
Quote:
So...having finally resigned myself to installing fucking origin just to play this, it's..done.
Was it an amazing game? Oh jesus yes. Did I feel like the ending screwed the pooch so spectacularly that it managed to spoil the previous forty hours of play, and the previous sixty hours of ME2 play, and the previous eighty hours of ME1 play? Oh jesus fuck, yes.
....ok, admittedly a good forty of those ME1 hours were probably VROOM VROOM FLIP TEH MAKO LOL FUCKIT I'LL LOOK IT UP ON TEH WIKI random planet explorations, but hey: they still count.
I've extolled the virtues of the actual gameplay in t'other thread, but I'll reiterate that they are BRILLIANT. The combat felt fast, fluid, and ultimately provided me with exactly what I wanted in a vanguard. ME1 was ANGRY GOD with Wrex on point and Tali in wall-shooting mode, whereas ME2 was mostly "shields? Everyone has fucking shields? And biotics don't work on those anymore? FUCK. I'll hide here pop-a-moling, and you guys go draw fire."
ME3 vanguard play is twitch-based hilarity at its best. 90% of your work will be done by spamming charge and then nova. You can throw in some shotgunning and pull/shockwave-spam, but essentially it's VOOOM KABOOM for the majority of the time. Amazingly, this never, ever gets dull. It leaves you utterly disoriented:
"Shepard, it's this way!"
"It IS? Jesus, glad someone was keeping track. Sorry: I can mostly only travel in straight lines that have headbutts at the end."
but it's awesome. It did occasionally necessitate pause-time just to swivel round and look for the next headbuttee, but I usually could exploit that to also make Garrus and Tali do something useful, or if Liara/Javik was there, stick something on my next headbuttee so they'd explode when I arrived.
It was also hilarious when combined with squadmate chatter.
"Hey, Shepard: snipers waay off in the distance, but it looks like they haven't spotted us ye-"
VOOOOOM
KABOOM
VOOOOOM
KABOOM
"Oh, for fucks...."
And once you'd got the weird-looking asari shotgun that was basically made of fiberglass and magic (but yet kicked like a horse), you could spam powers like crazy while still shotgunning people off cliffs. Ragdolls, you never cease to be wonderful.
War asset treasure hunting wasn't too bad, though the HOOOOOOONK *cue benny hill sequence* reaperchases were the dumbest thing ever, and the normandy still made VROOOM VROOOOOM noises.
The story? Well, up until the poochscrew it was (under all the constraints they must've had) amazingly done. Reading through this thread with all the spoilers now fair game, I'm amazed at what some people experienced (you can shoot mordin? You WOULD shoot mordin? You fucking monster). I played shepard as someone who was basically well intentioned, wanted everyone to stop being such dicks, and who achieved this by shooting everything until dickishness dropped below an acceptable threshold. I usually ended up about 70-90% of max renegade, and 40-50% paragon. She was usually much, much kinder to her crew than to other people, except when they were clearly being idiots. And the story managed to capture this in a way that felt...right. The genophage got cured coz Wrex is awesome (I was amused by the offer from Dalatress Linron: "hahahaha, nope"), Mordin got to redeem himself and went out on a song, and after a frankly really, really nailbiting conversation option-choosing session, the quarians and geth made peace.
"I am sick of saving you fucks, and right now, so help me god I WILL WATCH YOU BURN."
"......standing down."
That felt right. That felt amazing. I think I held my breath for the entire scene. Tali's been my awesome wall-eyed shotgunner since forever, and Legion was clearly one of the most fun characters ever, and trying to get the two sides to just stop being such dicks was a long-running hope of mine (and looking at the wiki, it's not actually that easy to do, so I guess I was lucky).
The writing was mostly superb, though it did get funny how Shepard's obsession with reapers spilled over into everything:
"I'm gonna make a coffee. You want one?"
"You can make me a coffee...by fighting the reapers!"
The dialogue trees were clever and intricate as always. It even felt a bit meta in places: one of my favourite bits was in the pre-endgame where when talking to my squad gave options to the question "Are you ok" of "No, no I'm not" or "I'M FINE".
Honestly, I was fine. I was SO GEARED UP to shoot TIM in the face an awful, awful lot, but was basically "like normal only probably angrier" (mostly angry at the forced-fail mission, but hey).
BUT: I reasoned that if I pretended to be miserable, my dudes would try and bolster me, and thus would feel closer to me as a leader, and feel like they were being useful. And this seemed to work! (probably you get all the power unlocks just from talking to them a lot no matter what you actually say, but I don't care ok *covers ears*)
Better yet, when I then went to see Javik he was arguing with Liara about sneaky prothean uplifting, and you could demand he apologise for being a dick (coz he is a dick), at which point he delivers a long speech about how the protheans always had the highest hopes for the Asari, that they might succeed where the protheans failed, etc etc. She does her usual thing and "leaves to think about it", and you can ask him
"Did you mean that, or were you just saying what you thought she wanted to hear?"
his reply?
"I meant it. Or is that just what I think you want to hear?"
....touche, Javik, Touche.
So that was great. Just, just..great. The endgame started well, finding more EDI backstory was fun (7 zettabytes of porn? That's...quite a collection), random ninja was ...well, random (I didn't think the game really needed a random ninja, but I was willing to overlook it as an aberration). Tying the citadel back into things was..silly but fitting (though I guess Bailey and all those ambassadors and shopkeepers and shit got melted), and the london showdown was suitably epic while also being very silly.
And then.
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.
Ok, the bit where you get fried by reaperlaz0r was nicely done (I did find it very silly that you were sprinting down open ground toward the beam while tanks and shit exploded around you -being shot by fucking harbinger no less-, yet the normandy -the one ship harbinger knows and HATES- was somehow able to swing in and take your squaddies away in quite a slow scene without taking any damage), and I honestly never really expected shepard to survive the ending -Shepard is essentially an archetype, and those never really live past their time-, so the slow, staggering walk toward the telebeam, with slomo huskshooting...felt like the only way it could end, really. It was always going to be a mammoth task, but you were never going to give up.
(though I note that medigel apparently has unexpected upper limits, something that you really think Shepard would've noticed before, given how borderline suicidal the Charge/Nova approach can often be)
Walking through the ship, talking to Anderson, and the showdown with fucking TIM, that all felt right too. It was a mirror of mass effect 1, after all (complete with the option to talk them into suicide, though I'll be honest, I have never been more ready for a renegade interrupt).
And in the last ten minutes they smear so much shit over the story that it leaks into the entire previous playing experience.
I'll be honest, I'm a fairly simple creature, and am easily amused. I'm willing to forgive a lot. And this ending could be (for me at least) saved incredibly easily by removing this line:
"...this will also destroy all other synthetic life in the galaxy"
That would be it for me. I'd be happy with that. Shepard has solved all her other problems by shooting them, why should this one be any different? SHOOT TEH CONDUIT AND YOU AM WINNAR!
But SHOOT TEH CONDUIT AND YOU AM KILL ALLIES LOL is just cockpunchingly insulting.
They could even tie it into the story, so if you'd managed to broker peace with the geth and ..I dunno, let EDI find her inner child or something, you'd have enough directed research to get "WAR ASSET UPDATE: THE CRUCIBLE IS NOW REAPER-SPECIFIC" or similar. That would be it. That would make me happy.
Hell, I'd've been reasonably happy if it'd be "...this will also destroy all batarian life in the galaxy", because: fuck batarians.
So that option was stupid. Unremittingly stupid. It's like: "Hmmmm..we need to make all these options ANGSTY. O I KNOW!"
I just wasn't prepared to kill EDI (who was awesome) and ALL THE FUCKING GETH -see "efforts taken to broker peace", above- just to kill the reapers. But holy SHIT did I want to kill the reapers.
The whole concept of the ending was dumb as tits anyway: you can't argue that organic and synthetic life will "always be in conflict" when you're the ONLY FUCKING SYNTHETIC LIFE driving the conflict. Millions of years old and you haven't figured out circular reasoning yet.
Just STOP. FUCK OFF. Watch the conflict magically stop.
I would've liked the option to say "Look, reaperkid: you may think all synthetic life will inevitably overthrow organic life (though I note that this is based almost exclusively upon yourself) but clearly this is not CURRENTLY the case. So just...fuck off. Come back in 1000 years. If you're right, well: easy cleanup job for you, then! If you're wrong....well. That will be an interesting day..."*cracks knuckles*
Secondly, you can't argue that you're "preserving the advanced races" when ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU DO IS DICKISH BEYOND BELIEF. At no point do reapers behave in any fashion that isn't outright monstrous. They don't collect advanced races for preservation, they MELT THEM DOWN (without anaesthesia) AND BUILD MORE REAPERS. Even the fucking CREATORS of the reapers didn't want to be melted down and used to build reapers. YOU ARE NOT DOING A GOOD JOB. YOU ARE NOT DOING A NECESSARY JOB. EITHER STOP, OR ADMIT THAT YOU JUST LIKE MELTING PEOPLE AND BEING DICKS.
And of course they lie constantly to get what they want, so any option that isn't "Make all the reapers really fucking dead" is inherently suspect.
Even if they're on the level, "control" is out, because I just don't think "Angry person who achieves peace by enthusiastic face-shooting" is the right person to be controlling the reapers. If you had the option to immediately fly them into the sun, that might've worked, but still: stupid option.
Synthesis? What is this shit. You're just fucking with me now. How would this work? Do we all get glued together suddenly? Or does everyone organic sprout cool facial scars, and everyone synthetic suddenly grows skin? Where does the biomass and hardware come from? What is this shit.
Also, again I'd have to die, which as noted was inevitable, but also: not for this bullshit.
Basically it boiled down to "Tong ending, Helios ending, or Invisible War's Helios ending. Except the tong ending will also specifically kill Paul, Alex Jacobsen, and Jaime for no good reason, and the other two kill you specifically"
"......Fuck you, and fuck your options, spaceboy. Gimme the Omar ending."
ROCKS FALL, EVERYBODY DIES, WE KILL EM IN THE REBOOT, DDL CRIES HIMSELF TO SLEEP
My personal "best" ending, if such a thing were ever achieved, would be one where if you'd successfully managed to get the whole galaxy behind you, you could take that last option ("To hell with your choices, we're deciding this on our own terms") and yet the sheer mass of military force, working together to a common goal, would be enough to defeat the reapers without the crucible. Especially since the dialogue shepard delivers, the way Jennifer Hale reads it, and the way the shot is framed all feels....triumphant. We finally won, and it didn't need a fucking ghost-kid.
But no. THEN THEY ALL DIED.faetal on 16/4/2013 at 11:00
I've still not played it, despite loving 1 & 2 (mostly just haven't been arsed to see what Origin is about as I'm loathe to add yet another DD account to keep track of in addition to Steam, uPlay*, GamersGate & GoG). I don't want to reveal that text, but so long as I'm not expecting an amazing ending, will I get my money's worth for completing the trilogy?
* At least the Ubi games have the good grace to be sold on Steam and just use uPlay.
DDL on 16/4/2013 at 11:21
The third game, in terms of gameplay, is (imho) by far the best.
It also manages to round everything off very, very well, and make you feel like all your choices and decisions have consequences. Most of the time this doesn't even feel too forced.
It's basically an amazing game, with a poor choice of ending. It's the sort of ending set that I wouldn't mind if it was in a shit game (like...say, pariah or something): it's not THAT bad, but it's placed up against a fantastic game and a really, really involving series, so if you normalise it against that it comes out like a turd sandwich.
faetal on 16/4/2013 at 11:41
Does the extra DLC ending ameliorate the bad at all?
DDL on 16/4/2013 at 12:01
In my opinion, no. (It's pretty much as Ulukai described)
Still a pile of shit, but now a pile of shit with a post-it on top explaining briefly why it's there.
Some have said that the leviathan DLC adds more story, but fundamentally it's still a pile of shit, even if it eventually ends up covered in explanatory post-its. You don't really necessarily want to know exactly why this steaming pile of shit is there, you just want it to not be there, and that is not what the DLC gives you.
Still definitely recommend you play it, though. As noted, I wouldn't be anything LIKE so disappointed if I hadn't been utterly in love with the game otherwise.
faetal on 16/4/2013 at 12:10
In my experience, keeping expectations lower can take the sting out of such things too, so I may not be as disappointed as you were.
DDL on 16/4/2013 at 12:12
Well, I played it a good year after release, so I A)already had the extra ending stuff, and B)knew it was going to be a let-down, and I still ended up ranting for a goodly while. I'm not sure you CAN lower your expectations enough. :p
faetal on 16/4/2013 at 12:21
Right. Well I guess I'll just have to see. My backlog is certainly mental enough that it's not a priority.
