I just recently discovered how Mass Effect 3 ends, and I must say that I'm disappointed. I'm entering the realm of spoilers here, so avert your gaze until you see bold lettering if you wish to play it with a fresh eye.
The adventures and missions embarked upon throughout the first two games of the ME trilogy foreshadow an epic, ridiculously awesome and difficult showdown with a huge, astronomically powerful alien race that plans to annihilate the galaxy. While the revelations about the Reapers and what their true intentions are seem interesting to me - I'm basing all of my information about ME3 by quick glances of reviews online - it's the ending that seems to have everyone in an uproar, including myself. It's a bit extreme to claim that everything you do up to the final moments is for nothing. Billions of beings' lives are saved by Shepard's efforts, and he is given somewhat of a godlike status for his actions. But a big part of what made this RPG so satisfying is that you, the player, have a ton of control over how the game plays out. Bioware hyped up this game and said that decisions had an even greater impact on the overall outcome of the game than ever before. Yet the ending resolution to the game ultimately ends the same way, no matter what choices you make: 1) Every mass relay is destroyed, leaving several and almost all of the galaxy's life forms stranded on foreign planets with zero contact to other species and a high probability of dying there. 2) Shepard dies. There's no avoiding it at all. Supposedly, if you have a high enough amount of XP you can see Shepard twitch right before the credits, clinging to life but ultimately losing the battle. 3) Your crew gets spaced, too. All of those characters you learned to love or hate, but appreciate and respect nonetheless, die in vain. Now, I have to play devil's advocate with this, as someone who is viewing this gaming series with a critical eye. Not everything in life has a happy ending. With something as huge, dramatic, and violent as this is, it's reasonable that there will be a lot of death and some seriously depressing results. But what many gamers who became invested in this series had hoped to see was the impossible: Shepard lives, has a happy ending with his or her LI (love interest), has drinks with the crew, and pans back to a view of the galaxy, which has taken a hit but is working on rebuilding itself. It's all too possible and realistic that the galaxy would be destroyed, almost everyone dies, and the Reapers essentially accomplish what they were aiming for. It's a bit surprising to me that Bioware chose to end the series this way, and, as I said before, disappointing. There's already a movement to get Bioware to create a DLC to "fix" the ending and allow gamers the choice to save more lives, prevent the mass relays from being destroyed, and not die. I, for one, am all for it and hope their efforts succeed. Technical images are most satisfactory when we have control over them, as I have likely shown through my gaming journey here. When the ending was taken out of our control and destruction and death became the only solution, we threw our controllers into the air with disgust. I'm not nearly as excited to play ME3 now. Had I heard that there was a possibility to save the galaxy and have that "only in the technical realm" happy ending, I would still be stoked to play, even with the spoilers. Here's to hoping.
Okay. Now to the stuff I actually did in ME2.
Jack Loyalty
There's an undeniable resemblance to Grunt with Jack. She, too, was tested by her own race to create the perfect biotic soldier. Many people died in pursuit of exploiting her abilities. The difference here is that the truth was hidden from her. There are so many things she never knew as the process continued. She was experimented on - tortured, really, because she felt a lot of pain on both a physical and psychological level - as a child. It was only through the Shadow Broker DLC that I learned a teeny bit more about Cerberus' motives with her. (It also made me hate Cerberus a bit more than I already do. They're dangerous extremists.) She was exposed to Element Zero, as other biotics had been, but she had been given a dangerous amount of it and, amazingly, survived. Cerberus lied to Jack's parents, who know nothing of Jack's whereabouts, and kidnapped her to be used as a labrat. She was dumped in with kids that had been purchased as slaves or stolen by pirates. The loyalty mission itself is to destroy the facility that kept her imprisoned. Literally. She wants to blow it up, and we do by the end of the mission. (I'm getting a slight vibe from The Count of Monte Cristo here. Deception, isolation, truth, and revenge - in that order - puts Edmond Dantes and Jacqueline Nought in a similar circumstance. I like that I found out her real name, too. I knew it wasn't simply Jack.) Her tough and sexual exterior are a response to her life in what seemed to her as a prison. This level also showed some of Jack's humanity - her soft side, if you will. She isn't just some obscene wild woman or rebel without a cause. She very much has cause. Cerberus stripped her of a normal life and made her what she is today. (Again, Monte Cristo much?) Granted, the choices she made after she escaped were her own and it can be argued of whether or not she could still make them, but that would be a purely hypothetical argument about a technical image, so you wouldn't really get anywhere with that. She said something along the lines of, "I believe that horrible things or actions must have a good reason". Under her hard outer shell, she has a reasoning and moral center that tries to find the good in the bad. For the most part, she's had great difficulty with this, which has led her to be frustrated and full of despair, as well as distrusting of everyone.
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| Pragia (testing facility where Jack was held) |
Mordin Loyalty
As much of the game has hinted at, Mordin's loyalty mission bears a connection to his previous work on the Genophage as a member of the STG. It weighs on his conscience greatly as he struggles with whether or not it was the right decision to make - whether he should have made the decision in the first place. (How interesting. To a certain degree, he represents human's struggle with the concept of power and the consequences that can come with playing god.) It also showed Mordin's scientific philosophies. He strongly values all life and would rather preserve it than kill an innocent being for research. (My hero.) He would never perform experiments on live test subjects, and limited subjects by their intelligence level. If they're "capable of calculus", he refused to work on them. Human scientists of today likely perform their studies similarly. Rats and mice are common test subjects. They're living creatures, as many pro-life animal supports will adamantly point out, but they lack the higher intellectual capabilities that humans are capable of (amongst other creatures that also have higher mental capacities). ME2 emphasizes how fascinating the human race is, and this level plays on that factor. Humans are shown to have been studied upon, valued for their "diversity". The game makers made it so that all other species are strikingly similar to one another whereas humans and their (or should I say, our) genetics have such a wide range. Mordin knows that "all life is precious" and is vehemently opposed to his former allies' efforts to restore the cure to the Genophage - not because curing the Genophage is necessarily bad, but because his fellow salarian's methods at achieving it were less than reputable.
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| Tuchanka (a giant dump that Krogans live on) |
And this brings me to the Reapers themselves, who are a combination of organic and synthetic material. ME2 hints at this in the final battle of the game. Reapers are made of organic material - humans, for example - and technology helps to support their size and the fact that they're also spaceships. It's honestly pretty difficult to wrap my head around. Consider it this way. Think about yourself and your body. You are an organic, living being, filled with anatomical parts that fulfill bodily functions. Now imagine that you're two or three as big as you are now, thanks to a technological experiment that hooked you up with wires and electronic parts. You have all the same internal organs and stuff, but there's now additional room to, say, store stuff. Maybe your cat can sleep in your chest cavity. The Reapers are like that. They're giant, semi-living creatures that have been heavily supported by a futuristic form of technology to make them live the dual identity of a creature and a ship. ME3 enforces this further with the final choices. (Sorry, guys. I'm a spoilery person, when it comes to games and TV shows. Can't help it.) And, as a sci-fi fan, I would be inept if I didn't mention Moya, the ship from Farscape that is, as Crichton mentions in the intro, "a living ship".
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| This diagram points out the fact that Moya is both a spaceship with a docking bay and a living creatures with a brain. |
Grunt Loyalty
I didn't take too much down for Grunt's mission, as it was also on Tuchanka and I just wanted to get it over with. It's mainly about seeking a personal and cultural identity. He feels torn as a Krogan who was created in a test tube - one who cost many potentially strong (both in physique and willpower) Krogan their lives - and whether or not he deserves to be part of the Krogan society on Tuchanka. As a true Krogan, which he technically is, he needs to be a part of their world. (Cue the accidental song lyrics reference to The Little Mermaid.) That's something the game makers took an interesting take on. Krogan have a biological need to satisfy their place in society, similar to what humans would call "puberty". (Jack points this out in that oh-so-sarcastic manner she embodies.) This mission centers on something all people must experience at some point in their lives, usually during the time between their mid-teens and mid-twenties. We must all have an understanding of who we are as individuals and where we stand in society. Self identity and cultural identity. One more point that I made a note of is emphasis on "krant", or comrades. As the Beatles famously sang, "I get by with a little help from my friends". At the risk of sounding corny with this cliche, the power of friendship is something that shouldn't be underestimated. Humans innately rely on a physical, intellectual, and emotional connection with others. In the Mass Effect universe, that same policy applies to all species with the "higher intellectual capacity" that Mordin elucidates.
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| A thresher maw, as previously shown in ME1. This thing is massive in size, and also a big pain in the butt. When I first played the game, it scared the crap outta me. |
One note I made reminded me of the television shows Bones and Sherlock. The titular characters, Temperance Brennan and Sherlock Holmes, are extremely brilliant but lack proper social skills. They're very honest and have a logical, scientific mind that deviates from traditional human compassion. Renegade FemShep strikes me as someone who fits into this group, but with a little more firepower involved. She's certainly not stupid, but also definitely won't go out of her way to shake hands with a fan or get to know a fellow soldier. She's driven by the job. Get from Point A to Point B in the most efficient way possible. End of story.
While there's nothing that can be done now, had I been able to do so, I would have liked to play a game I had never played before. It would have been annoying to have to stop and take notes on something I'm completely unfamiliar with, but it would have seemed less forced. On the flip side, there are advantages to knowing what's going to happen, beyond the obvious factor of no surprises. I can afford to gloss over things I know are insignificant and focus on immersing myself intellectually into previously unexplored areas. Pros and cons in everything, eh?
Only a few more posts to go! The end is in sight! I will say, though, that this experience will likely remain with me in the sense that I'll continue to play video games with a critical judgment. Similar to my film class and the theorist Barthes, I'll divide my mentality into half-immersive gamer that totally digs all the visual stuff, and half-intellectual gamer that sees beyond the image to why it's there, what it represents, etc. And that's fine with me. I might have better gaming experiences this way.
~Mel
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