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SPOILERS: what did you think of the ending?


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After replaying one of my favourite series in gaming I'm interested to know what the rest of the PSNProfiles community thought of the ending to Mass Effect 3. Were you happy with it or disappointed? There will be spoilers below.

Spoiler

 

I played ME3 day 1 when it released on PC having played ME1 and ME2 beforehand. When I finished ME3 the extended cut ending had not been released, neither had the Leviathan or Citadel DLC. I was left feeling underwhelmed, it felt like quite a weak ending for what had been an amazing series. My thoughts:

- Bioware chose a deus ex machina to resolve the story (the crucible) largely making most choices made to that point mostly irrelevant: it looks like they did not have an ending in mind when they started making the series. I would have preferred are more mind-blowing sci-fi ending. 

- It felt like the development of the final missions on earth were very rushed. The earlier missions were great (e.g. Tuchanka was awesome) but the final earth missions looked terrible. The environment looked mostly dark and grey and did not have much or any music during critical events. The scene where Cortez dies was cringeworthy with Ash as a squadmate. I suspect the development was rushed after the first ending leaked, there was fan backlash then it was changed.

-  At that time, I was convinced that the indoctrination theory was the true ending (mind blowing sci-fi ending).

- I picked the synthesis ending.

 

Forgoing the mind-blowing sci-fi ending I would have liked to see more production time put into the final earth missions. It would have been cool if it took the form of a larger scale suicide mission like in ME2. For example, you have the various teammates, resources, races that you gathered over the course of the 3 games then you can deploy them across earth to perform certain tasks needed to complete the final mission. E.g. deploy Krogan to X location to perform task A, deploy geth to location Z to task B. Can that race complete task? Did you get said race on side yes/no? was task complete yes no? did you complete enough tasks to succeed in final push. This would have been really cool and given the final battle more substance and scale. All we had was a few on foot missions, which amounted to destroy AA gun, shoot missiles, and run to beam.

 

Replaying the entire package with all DLC was a much better experience. I would say now the ending is now just OK. The leviathan DLC explained the origins of the reapers and the extended cut ending answers a few questions.

The Citadel DLC was a great way to end the series. I played this last (reloaded save) as I think that is how it is intended to be played as it is light-hearted fan service. It was a great way to say goodbye to all the great characters of the series.

 

 

Edited by Rando-Calrisian-
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  • 2 weeks later...

The ending on release was terrible. There was zero closure and it was so abrupt. After they released the extended cut, it made things a lot better. The only part of the extended cut I don't like is the Normandy coming from orbit to pick up your squadmates during the run to the beam. It happens way too fast and Harbinger just stands and watches the Normandy for a good minute. It could and should have easily shot the Normandy down. I understand that this was supposed to be a goodbye to your LI, but Harbinger (or any reaper) being there makes it too unbelievable.

The only acceptable ending for me is destroy, and I very much enjoy Admiral Hackett's monologue. The slides we get showing how the rest of the galaxy are doing after the war is over is really nice. We didn't get any of this at launch. I think if the extended cut ending is what the game launched with, there would have been nowhere near as many complaints about the ending as there were.

I think Mas Effect 3 is underrated because of how people feel about the ending. The game has so many highs. The journey up until the final 30/45 minutes is absolutely amazing. I do agree that Priority: Earth should have been better. The Suicide Mission from ME2 overshadows it and I don't think that is how it should be. The space battle is great, but the ground battle is disappointing. I would like to have seen how a lot more of the war assets we collected were utilised during the ground battle. All of our current and past squadmates should also have been involved. It seems strange that in what was the must win battle for this cycle, the squadmates Shepard doesn't choose seemingly go back to the Normandy and do nothing?

 

Even so, it's still enjoyable, and I can let the catalyst bullshit slide with the extended cut ending being part of the game.

Edited by NathanW18
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Endings are hard.

Most long-form fiction (TV series / Film series / Novels) that I have loved, still generally have bittersweet endings that fail to match the heights of the series - even good quality ones generally dip a little, as the creators are having to wrap up a lot - and the more amazing and expansive the series is, the harder it becomes to have an ending that wraps everything up and is satisfying.

 

Personally, I never had an issue with the ending of ME3 - it's not the highlight of the series (I would argue there has almost never been any long-form narrative in which the ending is... and frankly, if the ending is the best part of a series, I would argue that means you can't have enjoyed the story that much!)...

....but it didn't make me recoil in the way it did for some.

 

The one thing I really disliked was that Bioware debased themselves, and changed the ending based on "fan" outrage, twitter shouting and abuse / death threats.

That did make me lose a lot of respect for them as 'artists' - it's one thing to create an ending that fans might not like, but quite another to change that ending just to appease them.

 

I will certainly try and avoid ever seeing the stuff added on after the fact - it's obviously non-canonical anyways, given that it is purely "fan-Fiction", crafted as a reaction, rather than as an artistic endevour.

Edited by DrBloodmoney
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ME as a whole is by me a must-play trilogy for anyone with interest, I love the game - but no matter the ending version it was terrible (the ending). The entire conclusion was terrible.

Similar to OP I stared at the credits when I finished it first time on PS3 and felt like nothing of matter was resolved. But the entire core of the story conclusion is imho rotten and cannot be fixed with small tweaks or re-works. I picked synthesis the first time and only that time, for me Destroy is the only thing that can in any way shape or form be called an ending.

 

Never, not once, in the entire game is control of the reapers or synthesis of organic and inorganic life forms worked on, mentioned, developed, discussed or implied in any shape or form. The entire premise of the game (trilogy) is the battle for survival of all species and destruction of the Reapers while working to unite the galaxy, unite the organic and inorganic life with free choice (the Geth) that wish to live and make their own future. TIM just ups and decides they can be controlled at the beginning of ME3 which is perfectly in-line with Saren and Benezia being indoctrinated and led to believe they are in control.

 

Even then everything feels rushed and unconnected, the relays blowing up (more or less depending on what? the amount of allies you got? how does that work?)

  • Leviathan is such an intergral part to Reaper origin/lore that having included as DLC is a crime on its own
  • Javik being a DLC/pre-order bonus, again providing really integral insight in Protheans and Reapers is also DLC in poor taste (EA)
  • That entire sequence with running towards the beam and Marauder Shields is eh?
  • Extended cut with the aforementioned Normandy just sitting there in front of Harbinger

 

It's a sci-fi epic, and you could write 50 pages on nitpicks that you probably won't notice when you play and enjoy - but the entire final 1/3 of ME3 just spirals down into frantic conclusions, deus ex machinas and pure bs...

I really, really, really hope something good follows up with ME4 or ME:A2. This series is too good for the treatment it gets.
Imagine Sony buying off rights/studio off EA and pouring God of War or Horizon level effort into ME - it would be a game of the decade.

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I've been re watching videos on the indoctrination theory mass effect 3 ending, and I'm convinced that is the best ending (despite it being fan made and bioware saying it definitely isn't the ending). 

 

Bioware could have owned it and said, yes that is exactly what we were planning all along. 

 

I feel it's a much better conclusion than the one we were given.

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Was alright with it the second time around, the Leviathan DLC fleshing things out helped. I wish they would have tweaked the Destroy ending a bit more so that it just killed the Reapers instead of all synthetic life since, for me, that's the only ending that actually works. 

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The ending is terrible. Part of the problem is that ME2, as good as it was, simply did not give us good plot hooks for ME3; another problem is that ME3 was rushed (IIRC dev time was under 1.5 years) and things that could have been major for the story (Javiik and the Leviathans) instead got relegated to DLC. ME3 is a fantastic game for the most part, but also a colossally disappointing.

 

For me the ending's problems start as soon as the Earth mission begins. It just... doesn't feel like a final mission. It doesn't feel like a desperate struggle. You've been here before. You've run through Reaper-infested planets already, and Earth is just that but less pretty to look at. There's no tension or finality. There's no epic showdown where you call in missile strikes against a Reaper while dodging its attacks; there's no giant thresher worm versus Reaper battle. You just run around killing Reaper forces and escorting a vehicle for a bit. Of course, it gets a lot worse as soon as Marauder Shields shows up; that's where it really gets bad, but the whole last mission sucked to begin with. Mass Effect 2 did a final mission right - all your squad was there, each one had a part to play; it was tense, dramatic, and important. Priority: Earth, on the other hand... what are we doing? What are Shepard & co doing that nobody else could do? Hell, what the fuck are all the other squadmates doing? Hell if I know.

 

But anyway, onto the actual endings. They're bad. They were never going to be good. They're a bit better if you think of the Starchild as just being incredibly, incredibly irrational and the endings being the only way it could think of solving things - that's the only rational explanation for Synthesis, which is singlehandedly the worst implementation of transhumanism I have ever seen in media, and makes sense solely as a bloodless appeasement option. Turning everyone into space magic flesh-machine frankensteins isn't going to be preventing anybody from building a new purely synthetic AI. But if you're going to leave the Reapers alive anyway, why not just go for Control so that you don't have to worry about appeasing them? Refusal is, of course, a joke ending, Bioware's "fuck you" to people who expected a competent end to the trilogy. Destroy is alright, but destroying all synthetic life and crippling galactic society is kinda shit.

 

My personal preference is Control; the ending speech by god-AI Shepard is neat, and it's the most ethical ending available; in theory once the Reapers are done rebuilding everything you could just yeet them into the sun and call it a day. Or let them be disassembled and scrapped for parts, I dunno. Maybe you could make Harbinger do Fortnite dances for the rest of eternity as punishment for being a dick. The possibilities are endless. It also feels like a culmination of the RPG syndrome of the rest of the series; Shepard is played up as this messiah-esque figure who must singlehandedly save the galaxy; immortalizing them is an ultimate fulfillment of that role. Also, no reason they couldn't eventually get a host body like EDI has; hell, make the Reapers build it for them. Worst comes to worst, they could show up at their LI's doorstep possessing the body of a husk.

 

19 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

The one thing I really disliked was that Bioware debased themselves, and changed the ending based on "fan" outrage, twitter shouting and abuse / death threats.

That did make me lose a lot of respect for them as 'artists' - it's one thing to create an ending that fans might not like, but quite another to change that ending just to appease them.

 

They're game developers who made a series renowned for its fanservice. Fuck, there's an entire species of hot blue space lesbians. If they weren't appeasing players, they'd be bad at their jobs. But this is all hypothetical, because they didn't actually significantly change the endings. They added some much needed closure (saying goodbye to your LI before you leap into the beam) and added some extra monologue. Oh yeah, and there's a "fuck you" ending where you can doom the galaxy to oblivion to show everyone how much you hate the ME3 endings.

 

Plus, if I recall correctly almost all of the writers weren't allowed to interfere with the writing of ME3's ending; it was just the one guy, Casey Hudson, and he did a magnificent job of it, as we all know. On top of that, the game was rushed, having an incredibly short development time compared to 1 and 2. It'd be one thing if it were a monument of artists' visions, but it wasn't. It was a sloppy mess rushed out before it was anywhere near done. You're defending a vision that never existed.

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3 hours ago, Darling Baphomet said:

They're game developers who made a series renowned for its fanservice. Fuck, there's an entire species of hot blue space lesbians. If they weren't appeasing players, they'd be bad at their jobs. But this is all hypothetical, because they didn't actually significantly change the endings. They added some much needed closure (saying goodbye to your LI before you leap into the beam) and added some extra monologue. Oh yeah, and there's a "fuck you" ending where you can doom the galaxy to oblivion to show everyone how much you hate the ME3 endings.

 

Plus, if I recall correctly almost all of the writers weren't allowed to interfere with the writing of ME3's ending; it was just the one guy, Casey Hudson, and he did a magnificent job of it, as we all know. On top of that, the game was rushed, having an incredibly short development time compared to 1 and 2. It'd be one thing if it were a monument of artists' visions, but it wasn't. It was a sloppy mess rushed out before it was anywhere near done. You're defending a vision that never existed.

 

I always played the game any enjoyed it without much implications of "m'lady videogame gf"  and the galaxy was well fulfilled and varied. Would've liked to see Elcor, Volus and other Drell with a bit larger role. I've watched some videos of ME Development on YT and I do understand that creating new species is a very difficult task. If you think about it most sci-fi IP's be it Star Wars, Star Trek or Serenity all largely stick to the formula of humanoid + different skin, shape, size, finger count etc. And playing with a team full of random SPORE creations wouldn't be as much fun.

 

That being said I generally consider ME female characters to have good writing and a decent story arc (Liara and Tali in particular, I even enjoyed Ashley's somewhat inconsistent transformation from a Xenophobe to a far more understanding and trusting team member). I loved Vetra's character in ME:A and for me I don't care about the sex scenes it can just be fade to black to not consider how to put attractive female attributes on a Turian or Angara. But the relationships if you so choose do play a role in an RPG and your character. I did a speedrun on Insanity of ME3 and tbh seeing Liara and Vega get disintegrated by Harbinger makes you feel sad (not sad enough to suffer Insanity on another 100% playthrough tho).

 

Citadel is peak fan service and probably more of an apology for the ending than anything else. Even it's ending with the return to duty and implications about the larger ongoing conflict is very well made. But it's enjoyable for what it is.

 

Fully agree the entire ending premise, someone mentioned Rannoch being the last quality mission, feels like a rushed afterthought. And even here you can see most people made up their mind about the ending and how they see it happening - because they love the series. Bad/Sad endings are a tricky thing in videogames and movies (I personally feel TLOU2 to have a really good one..) and most people want a happy ending with the heroes walking into the sunset.

And ME3 had the potential for all of it - if you spend your time doing the game 100% and preparing everything then have a happy ending, with everyone surviving a ME2's style final mission and less troubles with Reapers as the entire galaxy's fleet would fight them and then just dock and fire the crucible as a weapon it should have been without ghost children and colored tubes.

Or more of a struggle against the Reaper fleets, loss of allies, harder and different final mission on Earth with Shepard even dying etc.

But what we got was A/B/C pick a color and 'fuck you'.

I immensely enjoy my 100% playthrough, imagine the allied fleets suffering losses but still keeping the reapers at bay, a better than given final mission resulting with Shepard together with everyone reaching the beam, docking the crucible and melting the Reapers.

 

Sorry for the long post but one more thing that I always found annoying is that there is a codex entry which says Reaper capital ships are incredibly well shielded and protected but that concentrated fire from 5 dreadnoughts does destroy them. So for the the fleets moving in, seeing Harbinger with its four glowing eyes and knowing it's a leader/priority target they would've just focused everyone on it and destroy it. (given that no way a 1v1 final boss fight Shepard vs Harbinger would've happened this would be a good part of a high EMS entry depending on how much losses the allies take destroying Harbinger). 

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3 hours ago, Darling Baphomet said:

The ending is terrible. Part of the problem is that ME2, as good as it was, simply did not give us good plot hooks for ME3; another problem is that ME3 was rushed (IIRC dev time was under 1.5 years) and things that could have been major for the story (Javiik and the Leviathans) instead got relegated to DLC. ME3 is a fantastic game for the most part, but also a colossally disappointing.

 

For me the ending's problems start as soon as the Earth mission begins. It just... doesn't feel like a final mission. It doesn't feel like a desperate struggle. You've been here before. You've run through Reaper-infested planets already, and Earth is just that but less pretty to look at. There's no tension or finality. There's no epic showdown where you call in missile strikes against a Reaper while dodging its attacks; there's no giant thresher worm versus Reaper battle. You just run around killing Reaper forces and escorting a vehicle for a bit. Of course, it gets a lot worse as soon as Marauder Shields shows up; that's where it really gets bad, but the whole last mission sucked to begin with. Mass Effect 2 did a final mission right - all your squad was there, each one had a part to play; it was tense, dramatic, and important. Priority: Earth, on the other hand... what are we doing? What are Shepard & co doing that nobody else could do? Hell, what the fuck are all the other squadmates doing? Hell if I know.

 

But anyway, onto the actual endings. They're bad. They were never going to be good. They're a bit better if you think of the Starchild as just being incredibly, incredibly irrational and the endings being the only way it could think of solving things - that's the only rational explanation for Synthesis, which is singlehandedly the worst implementation of transhumanism I have ever seen in media, and makes sense solely as a bloodless appeasement option. Turning everyone into space magic flesh-machine frankensteins isn't going to be preventing anybody from building a new purely synthetic AI. But if you're going to leave the Reapers alive anyway, why not just go for Control so that you don't have to worry about appeasing them? Refusal is, of course, a joke ending, Bioware's "fuck you" to people who expected a competent end to the trilogy. Destroy is alright, but destroying all synthetic life and crippling galactic society is kinda shit.

 

My personal preference is Control; the ending speech by god-AI Shepard is neat, and it's the most ethical ending available; in theory once the Reapers are done rebuilding everything you could just yeet them into the sun and call it a day. Or let them be disassembled and scrapped for parts, I dunno. Maybe you could make Harbinger do Fortnite dances for the rest of eternity as punishment for being a dick. The possibilities are endless. It also feels like a culmination of the RPG syndrome of the rest of the series; Shepard is played up as this messiah-esque figure who must singlehandedly save the galaxy; immortalizing them is an ultimate fulfillment of that role. Also, no reason they couldn't eventually get a host body like EDI has; hell, make the Reapers build it for them. Worst comes to worst, they could show up at their LI's doorstep possessing the body of a husk.

 

 

They're game developers who made a series renowned for its fanservice. Fuck, there's an entire species of hot blue space lesbians. If they weren't appeasing players, they'd be bad at their jobs. But this is all hypothetical, because they didn't actually significantly change the endings. They added some much needed closure (saying goodbye to your LI before you leap into the beam) and added some extra monologue. Oh yeah, and there's a "fuck you" ending where you can doom the galaxy to oblivion to show everyone how much you hate the ME3 endings.

 

Plus, if I recall correctly almost all of the writers weren't allowed to interfere with the writing of ME3's ending; it was just the one guy, Casey Hudson, and he did a magnificent job of it, as we all know. On top of that, the game was rushed, having an incredibly short development time compared to 1 and 2. It'd be one thing if it were a monument of artists' visions, but it wasn't. It was a sloppy mess rushed out before it was anywhere near done. You're defending a vision that never existed.

 

Strong disagree, the plot hooks were always there to the point that we could paint a clear picture of the original ending without having seen it.

 

The problem was the leaks and EA (presumably) ordering them to change the ending. I recall what ended up unchanged was pretty accurate. That's when Hudson had the brilliant idea of shutting out the rest of the writing team and writing the damn thing himself.

 

Personally I believe the Crucible was also a last minute addition. It's the one thing that doesn't belong and feels tacked on. You can practically write it out of the story without in any way affecting the game's progression. And posing it as the only hope was how they wrote themselves into a corner and boiled everything down to a number.

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By the time I got to ME3 the extended ending had been added and I did have all the DLC so I had the complete game as opposed to the day one players so I was not outraged at the ending it was acceptable if not satisfying. I think they could have made it better by taking a leaf out of Dragon Age Origins ending; Origins had the sideshow ending too but each slide was accompanied with a paragraph giving basically a short story that tied back to specific actions taken throughout the game. Imagine that but for the culmination of a trilogy. A slide about how each race was recovering, a teaser for a next game because of surging rachni or krogan numbers. Too much was left gray for the player to fill in. I am nearing the end of 2 for the Legendary Edition and I love all the call backs to first game that I didn't get my first time through since ME2 released first on the PS3, I hope 3 has as many cause that might help make up for the ending this time around. Playing them back to back is helping too.

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8 hours ago, NamoPh said:

Strong disagree, the plot hooks were always there to the point that we could paint a clear picture of the original ending without having seen it.

 

The problem was the leaks and EA (presumably) ordering them to change the ending. I recall what ended up unchanged was pretty accurate. That's when Hudson had the brilliant idea of shutting out the rest of the writing team and writing the damn thing himself.

 

Personally I believe the Crucible was also a last minute addition. It's the one thing that doesn't belong and feels tacked on. You can practically write it out of the story without in any way affecting the game's progression. And posing it as the only hope was how they wrote themselves into a corner and boiled everything down to a number.

 

Strong disagree; Mass Effect 2 did virtually nothing to further the plot. The only thing of consequence in ME2 was the collector base and it's rendered virtually useless because your only option is to give it to a terrorist organization. Mass Effect 1 gave us tons of exposition and helped us understand the Reapers better. Mass Effect 2 was basically a massive sidequest in comparison; no matter what ME3's ending was, it would have had to be developed from scratch in ME3. Nothing in ME1 or ME2 tells us how to defeat the Reapers.

 

So to some extent ME3's ending feels inevitable; ME3 makes everything feel desperate. You're not about to get completely obliterated, you've already been completely obliterated, and now you need a last minute superweapon you can conjure out of thin air. Even the best ending would likely have felt like a Deus Ex Machina under these circumstances.

 

Definitely doesn't help that the game was rushed on top of having very little to build on.

 

8 hours ago, Valkirye22 said:

Sorry for the long post but one more thing that I always found annoying is that there is a codex entry which says Reaper capital ships are incredibly well shielded and protected but that concentrated fire from 5 dreadnoughts does destroy them. So for the the fleets moving in, seeing Harbinger with its four glowing eyes and knowing it's a leader/priority target they would've just focused everyone on it and destroy it. (given that no way a 1v1 final boss fight Shepard vs Harbinger would've happened this would be a good part of a high EMS entry depending on how much losses the allies take destroying Harbinger). 

 

A lot was disappointing with that fight, honestly; for one thing we're told that the Reapers immortalize every species they consume, but all we see is space fleas; this has led to the (in my opinion) absurd theory that the Reapers create the species as Reapers, e.g. the human Reaper, and then put them in a regular space flea shell. But then, seeing a giant human Reaper swim through space would be pretty ridiculous as well. Mass Effect 2 went a little overboard with the rule of cool stuff sometimes.

 

It's sad how much was cut from Mass Effect 3; as I mentioned it had the shortest development times of all the games, which really wasn't enough to do it justice. There's a fair few cut content restoration mods out there on PC, e.g. the proper Anderson dialogue, but unfortunately us console peasants can't get any of that.

 

I agree with most of your post, though; the Mass Effect universe had a very good selection of aliens overall, and most of the characters were well written. The Citadel DLC was absolutely fantastic as well. Rannoch was definitely the last good mission; Thessia was very much rushed and Earth was... Earth. I have no idea why EA / Bioware thought that rushing the grand finale to their trilogy was a good idea. At least they made a lot of money off the MP, I guess.

Edited by Darling Baphomet
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People focusing on the Normandy picking up your squad and Harbinger ignoring them seem to either forget or overlook that's exactly what happened at the start of ME3 when another Reaper took out two shuttles while looking right at the Normandy. I'm not trying to defend the situation, but I understand why it happened the way it did. The original game had a plot hole of how did your ground squad make it onto the Normandy in the end and the Extended Cut ending tried to rectify that. Plus it allows you to say goodbye to your LI one last time.

 

Overall, is ME3's ending as good as ME2's ending? No. ME2's ending is still the single greatest experience I ever had playing a game.

 

But was ME3's ending a disaster? At launch on PS3, you could argue it was. However, the Extended Cut fixed a lot of the issues and for me, the series was about the journey, not the destination. And the journey spanning all three games, from becoming the first human Spectre to talking to Vigil to taking down Saren to dying and be resurrected to recruiting a new team and taking down the Collectors to being reinstated and fighting Cerberus and throwing one last party on the Citadel and everything in between, was it worth it? Fuck yes.

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36 minutes ago, Pirelli913 said:

People focusing on the Normandy picking up your squad and Harbinger ignoring them seem to either forget or overlook that's exactly what happened at the start of ME3 when another Reaper took out two shuttles while looking right at the Normandy. I'm not trying to defend the situation, but I understand why it happened the way it did. The original game had a plot hole of how did your ground squad make it onto the Normandy in the end and the Extended Cut ending tried to rectify that. Plus it allows you to say goodbye to your LI one last time.

 

Overall, is ME3's ending as good as ME2's ending? No. ME2's ending is still the single greatest experience I ever had playing a game.

 

But was ME3's ending a disaster? At launch on PS3, you could argue it was. However, the Extended Cut fixed a lot of the issues and for me, the series was about the journey, not the destination. And the journey spanning all three games, from becoming the first human Spectre to talking to Vigil to taking down Saren to dying and be resurrected to recruiting a new team and taking down the Collectors to being reinstated and fighting Cerberus and throwing one last party on the Citadel and everything in between, was it worth it? Fuck yes.

This is fair and something I'd actually forgotten about. Both are unbelievable, but the Harbinger one probably sticks out more because it's near to the end.

I agree with everything in your second paragraph. This series was definitely about the journey. I loved 95% of it. If I ever get to play a trilogy as good as this one again, I will feel lucky.

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Regardless of the extended cut or the DLC additions, the ME3 endigs are still pretty weak for all the reasons metioned above. I am a firm believer that for a game that prided itself on "choosing your own path" it should have given you the full spectrum of endings, from the darkest of endings to the mre Disney ending, if I put in the work I should've been able to "ride off into the sunset with my LI"

That being said, out of all my playthroughs I ALWAYS chose the Destroy ending, considering that I don't trust the AI brat AT ALL I don't trust it when it tells me I can control the reapers. Sure, let me just allow myself to be voluntarily indocrinated.
Then Synthesis just felt too outlandish first of all then again one of the themes I always saw on ME was celebrating each species differences and trying to live together despite those and then having everyone be like the Borg seems like a complete disregard of what the game was showing to me.

And then Destroy as I said I saw it as the lesser of the evils but then again since Sheppard SUPPOSEDLY is alive at the end from that short glimpse of taking a breath that again proves my thought that the AI kid is full of crap and it's possible that either EDI or the Geth survived.

That is all just my interpretation of it, and based on pure speculation I've read on the ME4 teaser, it all points that Bioware will make the Destroy ending canon.
But then again, that is all pure speculation

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  • 9 months later...
On 6/13/2021 at 4:10 AM, Darling Baphomet said:

The ending is terrible. Part of the problem is that ME2, as good as it was, simply did not give us good plot hooks for ME3; another problem is that ME3 was rushed (IIRC dev time was under 1.5 years) and things that could have been major for the story (Javiik and the Leviathans) instead got relegated to DLC. ME3 is a fantastic game for the most part, but also a colossally disappointing.

 

For me the ending's problems start as soon as the Earth mission begins. It just... doesn't feel like a final mission. It doesn't feel like a desperate struggle. You've been here before. You've run through Reaper-infested planets already, and Earth is just that but less pretty to look at. There's no tension or finality. There's no epic showdown where you call in missile strikes against a Reaper while dodging its attacks; there's no giant thresher worm versus Reaper battle. You just run around killing Reaper forces and escorting a vehicle for a bit. Of course, it gets a lot worse as soon as Marauder Shields shows up; that's where it really gets bad, but the whole last mission sucked to begin with. Mass Effect 2 did a final mission right - all your squad was there, each one had a part to play; it was tense, dramatic, and important. Priority: Earth, on the other hand... what are we doing? What are Shepard & co doing that nobody else could do? Hell, what the fuck are all the other squadmates doing? Hell if I know.

 

But anyway, onto the actual endings. They're bad. They were never going to be good. They're a bit better if you think of the Starchild as just being incredibly, incredibly irrational and the endings being the only way it could think of solving things - that's the only rational explanation for Synthesis, which is singlehandedly the worst implementation of transhumanism I have ever seen in media, and makes sense solely as a bloodless appeasement option. Turning everyone into space magic flesh-machine frankensteins isn't going to be preventing anybody from building a new purely synthetic AI. But if you're going to leave the Reapers alive anyway, why not just go for Control so that you don't have to worry about appeasing them? Refusal is, of course, a joke ending, Bioware's "fuck you" to people who expected a competent end to the trilogy. Destroy is alright, but destroying all synthetic life and crippling galactic society is kinda shit.

 

My personal preference is Control; the ending speech by god-AI Shepard is neat, and it's the most ethical ending available; in theory once the Reapers are done rebuilding everything you could just yeet them into the sun and call it a day. Or let them be disassembled and scrapped for parts, I dunno. Maybe you could make Harbinger do Fortnite dances for the rest of eternity as punishment for being a dick. The possibilities are endless. It also feels like a culmination of the RPG syndrome of the rest of the series; Shepard is played up as this messiah-esque figure who must singlehandedly save the galaxy; immortalizing them is an ultimate fulfillment of that role. Also, no reason they couldn't eventually get a host body like EDI has; hell, make the Reapers build it for them. Worst comes to worst, they could show up at their LI's doorstep possessing the body of a husk.

 

 

They're game developers who made a series renowned for its fanservice. Fuck, there's an entire species of hot blue space lesbians. If they weren't appeasing players, they'd be bad at their jobs. But this is all hypothetical, because they didn't actually significantly change the endings. They added some much needed closure (saying goodbye to your LI before you leap into the

 

beam) and added some extra monologue. Oh yeah, and there's a "fuck you" ending where you can doom the galaxy to oblivion to show everyone how much you hate the ME3 endings.

 

Plus, if I recall correctly almost all of the writers weren't allowed to interfere with the writing of ME3's ending; it was just the one guy, Casey Hudson, and he did a magnificent job of it, as we all know. On top of that, the game was rushed, having an incredibly short development time compared to 1 and 2. It'd be one thing if it were a monument of artists' visions, but it wasn't. It was a sloppy mess rushed out before it was anywhere near done. You're defending a vision that never existed.

Agree with most of it. with the development in ME2/3 there's little chance of logical ending to the reaper problem. Of course I didn't expect them to do THIS bad at the ending.. 

 

The Earth mission is mediocre, but as many have mentioned, the whole thing went down after Rannoch. The Cerberus headquarter is especially a joke. But at the same time, the Citadel DLC (even though the initial solo fighting scene is a bit dragging) did show the potential.

Edited by Maverick6146
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It's not an ideal ending and it does have some major problems that seem antithetical to the nature of the entire trilogy, but I'm honestly getting some nostalgia seeing people talk about ME3's ending. AAA games have fallen so far in terms of artistic quality that replaying the trilogy felt like a breath of fresh air and a direct time capsule to a time where every game didn't have to be an open-world Skinner box and where the biggest controversy was a bad ending. 

Seeing the ending through that lense, it is honestly not that bad... or maybe it's even worse. A sign of what came after. A game that actually had vision, worsened by corporate time restraint and some bad development decisions. What lit the fuse of the downward spiral of big budget blockbuster games in to the dreary trench of loot boxes and low effort. 

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  • 3 months later...

(Disclaimer: I never played the pre-DLC endings)

 

You know what? I didn't hate it. It's bad and clearly rushed, and clearly suffers a lot by being compared to the incredible ending to Mass Effect 2. But on a second playthrough, I think you can make the case that every possible ending kind of makes sense.

 

- Destroy is the original plan. Shepard sticks to their guns and decides the Geth and EDI are a price they have to pay to end the threat once and for all. Interestingly, throughout all the dialog, there's basically no indication of whether EDI even counts as a synthetic. She says herself that even with the body, she's mostly still just the Normandy's AI, so I'm not sure why everyone assumes she's dead too.

- Control means the Illusive Man was right. Instead of sacrificing anyone else, Shepard sacrifices themselves and ascends to godhood, and the Reapers help rebuild the damage they did. Depending on your Paradon/Renegade choices, that's totally in line with their character.

- Synthesis means Saren was right, all the way back in Mass Effect 1. Rather than sacrifice synthetics or become a god, Shepard continues to strive for peace, and resolves the conflict between organics and synthetics by making everyone in the galaxy both synthetic _and_ organic. I like this one the least, as it's the most out of left field, and has the least setup in the rest of the story.

- Refuse is basically the Liara ending. Shepard decides that all these choices are unacceptable, and refuses to use the Conduit, swearing to find another way to defeat the Reapers. They fail, of course, as the game has repeatedly been telling us would happen. But maybe all their research will allow the next cycle to evolve and defeat the Reapers in another 50,000 years.

 

The biggest problem is that the entire "plan" of the Leviathan AI is predicated on the idea that organics and synthetics will always go to war, and that the synthetics will wipe out all life. But literally a few missions earlier, you can prove that wrong by making peace between the Geth and Quarians. So when the AI says "these are the only three ways to end the war", why should you believe it? It's millions of years old and is wrong about its extremely basic assumptions. After that, everything else falls apart.

 

I'm not sure it would have ever been possible to write an ending that both made sense and made the fans happy. They presented the Reapers as such an undefeatable and existential threat to all life, a deus ex machina was kind of their only option. What was the alternative plan, kill every Reaper in the galaxy with huge guns one at a time? People would have complained as loudly about that but for different reasons.

 

Personally, I would have liked to see the Citadel DLC explicitly set after the events of the main game, similar to the Trespasser DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition. You've solved the world-ending threat... now what? I get why they couldn't do that without making one of the endings "canon," and that's the catch with games that offer choice. It's really hard to write a story that both makes sense, and also allows multiple different endings.

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