My guess is that they dont care beyond how it hurt their bottom line.
People don't become game developers for the money, the actual devs at Bioware must have some kind of pride in and enjoyment of their work, or they'd be building enterprise applications and designing advertisements instead.
Those left a while ago.
Mass Effect Retrospective 32: No Take-Backs
As with Mass Effect 2, I’m going to be referring to the writers as if they were a single individual. In reality, each game was written by a team of people that shared some difficult-to-quantify overlap with the other teams. So yes, I realize that “The Mass Effect 3 Writer” isn’t actually a single person, but for convenience that’s how I’ll refer to them.
This is for the sake of my own sanity. The question of “Why?” lurks behind every plot hole, every retcon, and every implausible character beat. What happened to Mass Effect? Why did the story change so radically? Part of me wants to put up a bulletin board of photographs and newspaper clippings, forming lines between them with bits of yarn, obsessively toiling over this puzzle until I can crack the case and figure out Who Killed Mass Effect.
But that’s a fool’s errand. We don’t know what was said in the writer’s room. We don’t know what kind of pressures the writing team was put under, or what sort of ideas were imposed on them from the outside. We could just as easily end up cursing the name of an overworked writer who, in reality, did the best they could with the time and material given to them and who might even agree with a lot of this analysis.
Moreover, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done. It doesn’t matter who broke this story, or why. In the end, you can’t “take back” Mass Effect because not even the authors themselves have the power to do that. For good or for ill, this is the story we got. The point of this series isn’t to identify the guilty or single them out to be the focus of the widespread nerdrage the surrounds this franchise. The point is to put all the nagging issues to rest, simply by identifying and acknowledging them. We can’t fix the problems, but we can catalog them, and that brings a sort of calming sense of order to the madness and offers a grudging kind of closure. This is about moving on by way of clearing up all the questions that might be preventing us from doing so. I don’t know about you, but when this series is over I will be well and truly out of things to say about Mass Effect.
U Mad?
I said at the start of Mass Effect 2 that it wasn’t a horrible game, and that I wasn’t angry. I feel less sure about both of those statements this time around. Parts of this game are pretty horrible, and the failures do make me mad sometimes. We’re still talking the story apart and looking for problems, but this time the problems are more more pronounced, more numerous, and more baffling.
I suppose it’s not good to get mad at a videogame, but my anger doesn’t come from the fact that the game wasn’t everything I wanted. I mean, I thought Deus Ex: Invisible War andMaster of Orion 3 were pretty huge disappointments, but I didn’t write novel-sized reviews enumerating their flaws. No, what angered me in Mass Effect 3 was how many problems are shockingly obvious and easily avoided. The problems with the game aren’t bugs, or janky assets, or asset recycling, or padding, or any of the other problems you might expect from a game that ran low on budget and time. Mass Effect 3 could have been drastically better for no additional expense. It was a game that was exceedingly weak in exactly the areas where the original was strong.
I’ve said before that if Phantom Menace had just been a random sci-fi movie and not a STAR WARS movie that it wouldn’t have drawn nearly so much rage. It would be a Fifth Element kind of thing: Campy, illogical, but otherwise inoffensive space opera with pretty visuals and fun action. We wouldn’t be outraged over the many plot holes or annoying characters (Ruby Rod and Jar-jar) because we’d be happy Hollywood threw us sci-fi nerds a bone this year.
Likewise, if Mass Effect 3 had been an off-brand Gears of War knock-off, we probably would have given it credit for being, “Pretty smart, for a shooter.” But this isn’t some random shooter. This was supposed to be something special. This franchise originally stood in stark contrast to the lowbrow bombast of stuff like Quake, Gears of War, Dead Space, Space Marine, or Bulletstorm. This was the conclusion to the Mass Effect franchise. This was the “Star Trek” of videogames. We weren’t just mad at the game we got. We were mad because of the game we didn’t get. The game we would now never get.
Previously we could look at Mass Effect 2 as this awkward bridge as the series transformed from middlebrow science fiction to broad action adventure. But now the transformation is complete and it turns out that the writer isn’t really sure how to make action adventure, either.
We Still Have The Original
Sometimes when you criticise a book or a movie or a game that stands as a sequel to an earlier, better work, you’ll hear the defense, “What’s the big deal? It’s not like they burned the earlier stuff. They still exist and they’re still as good as ever!”
Let’s set aside the problem that, “You can pretend it doesn’t exist if you want” is a really sad thing to say in defense of a work. The more important point is that it isn’t actually true. Terrible sequels can and do harm our enjoyment of their predecessors. This is particularly true if the sequel is a continuation of a story begun by the earlier work. If some hack takes over for Tolkien and writes a version of The Two Towers where it’s revealed that Gandalf is actually a fool and a liar, then our perception of the first book will be changed.
In Fellowship of the Ring, there’s a scene where Gandalf and Frodo sit in front of the fire at Bag End[1] and Gandalf slowly reveals the history of the ring and the danger it poses not just to Frodo, but to the whole world. By the end Frodo’s perception of his place in the world has dramatically shifted, and he realizes that the seeming safety and calm of the Shire is an illusion, and that he is naked and helpless in the face of an implacable enemy capable of dominating armies. His wise and powerful friend is even more wise and powerful than he ever understood, and yet still far too weak to defend him from this looming threat.
But in light of the alternate version of Two Towers, the scene loses everything that makes it special. The revelations that seemed so profound are just stories. The feeling of looming danger is dispelled and replaced with the mild irritation that this massive exposition dump is now a waste of time because none of it is true or meaningful.
When the reader returns to the beloved first book, their natural curiosity from within the story leads them to wonder about the future and how the story will turn out. Through this contemplation they are reminded of the revelations in the second book and how it diminishes the impact of this one. They are at the same time compelled to look forward and yet unable to do so. What should they do? Compose their own end to the story to take the place of this unsatisfying one? Indeed, you can see people doing exactly that.
But if you’re mentally sorting through multiple works and trying to build some sort of coherent story by picking and choosing among their elements, then you are very much stuck in the Primary World. Your sense of immersion is gone, and you’re left with the thankless task of cleaning up the mess left by a careless author. The best outcome you can hope for is to purge the later works from your mind and accept that the beloved original will be left forever incomplete, its questions unanswered, its characters abandoned, and its problems left unsolved.
Which is to say that yes, terrible sequels can ruin what came before. Mass Effect 1 is no longer a story where Commander Shepard embarks on a journey of discovery that will show him how to win reprieve or salvation from the Old Gods that are coming to unmake civilization itself for reasons beyond our comprehension. It’s a story about an apathetic galaxy that doesn’t want or deserve to be saved. It’s a story where the galaxy has been wiped clean by drooling idiots who cause the problem they were designed to solve and who only win because their guns are biggest. It’s a story where Shepard pointlessly works with and then fights against a Cobra Commander style supervillain instead of keeping his mind on the more important problem of learning about the Reapers. It’s a story that ends in the worst sort of Deus Ex Machina: One that ends the story but fails to conclude it.
Mass Effect 1 is the Best Part of Mass Effect 3
Just as Mass Effect 2 was a nonsensical mess intercut with fantastic character pieces, Mass Effect 3 is an absurd disaster of a story intercut with wonderful vignettes about how the various species resolved their original differences before coming together and having all of their hard work rendered moot. It’s not a good game with a bad ending. It’s a towering heap of juvenile action schlock with no understanding of tone, themes, genre, pacing, or even rudimentary story structure, but with solid mechanics and a couple of really good side-missions.
People defend Mass Effect 3 by saying they liked the resolution to the Krogan genophage story. Or the resolution to the Quarian / Geth conflict. And those stories are indeed interesting, smart, and reactive to player choice. But they have no connection to the main story. At the end, some people agree to join your cause, and that cause could have been anything. They didn’t need to be attached to this sophomoric tripe. Battlefield Earth wouldn’t be a good movie if you inserted a couple of popular Star Trek episodes into its runtime.
All of the problems with the Mass Effect 2 story are repeated here, only to a greater degree. The human characters take center stage, overshadowing both the antagonist and (at times) protagonist. The main character has even less agency this time around. The attempts at pathos are so crude and clumsy they become offensive.
Yes, the resolution to the Quarian / Geth storyline is great, and so is the conclusion of the Genophage. Same goes for those final character moments at the end when you say goodbye to Garrus, Liara, and Tali for the last time. But those are things introduced and built up in the first game. Mass Effect 1 made the investments so that those stories paid off. This is what you get from careful and patient worldbuilding: Stories with a ton of personal, emotional, and thematic heft. You get groovy stuff like catharsis, meaning, and closure.
In contrast: What did we get from Aria? The Collectors? Kai Leng? The Human Reaper? Sure, there were some stories there. But none of them led to the kind of payoff we got from the Mass Effect 1 storylines. Instead, radical new ideas were introduced (often with no sense of build-up) and were later forgotten without closure, or dissolved into nonsense.
Which is to say: The best parts of Mass Effect 3 – perhaps the only genuinely good parts of Mass Effect 3 – are only good because of the groundwork done by Mass Effect 1. Mass Effect 2 gave us a bunch of wonderful characters, but they’re mostly absent this time around, or demoted to side-characters[2]. I don’t defend Mass Effect 3 because the Quarian and Krogan stories turned out so well. I condemn it because almost nothing else did.
I look at the dumb conversations with Aria or the stupid assault on Cerberus and think, “Why couldn’t this be as good as the mission to cure the Genophage?” The screen time is there. The art assets are there. The company spent the money, hired the actors, and scripted the cutscenes. The only thing wrong is that the script was a dreadful mess on every level.
Gameplay
I’ll give Mass Effect 3 this: I think they nailed the gameplay this time. The way the weights of different weapons will impact the cooldowns of your special abilities is a wonderful design decision. Weapon selection is now more nuanced than “figure out which gun has the best DPS”. Two characters with the same build might have totally different weapon loadouts, depending on playstyle.
The old linear skill trees have been replaced with branching skill trees that offer interesting tradeoffs. Do you want this attack to have a bigger blast radius, or higher single-target damage? Do you want to hit harder, or more often? Do you want to boost your own power, or your team’s?
On the other hand, the fact that one button is used to sprint, enter cover, exit cover, vault over cover, and interact with items is a pretty glaring flaw.
Still, if you were going to rip the story out of the entire Mass Effect series and judge it on its gameplay alone, Mass Effect 3 is the clear winner and Mass Effect 1 is the loser. This makes things somewhat difficult, since the reverse is true if you judge the series on any criteria related to the story.
It’s a videogame! Gameplay is all that matters! Therefore the game isn’t that bad.
It’s a BioWare story RPG! It’s all about the story! Therefore the game is a disaster.
On top of everything else, Mass Effect 3 is almost engineered to ignite flamewars.
Mass Effect Retrospective 33: Sentenced to Plot-Jail
I know I said earlier in this series that I wouldn’t be covering DLC. And it certainly wouldn’t be fair (or wise) of me to attempt to dissect content I haven’t played. But I think we need to stop and at least mention the events and ideas of The Arrival anyway, because of the problems it creates for the main story.
The Arrival
Link (YouTube)
The Arrival was DLC for Mass Effect 2. You can watch the whole thing above. In it, Shepard abandons the team he established in the main game and finds a cult of indoctrinated people who are predicting that the Reapers Are Coming. They even have a countdown timer on the outside of their base, showing how long until the Reapers arrive. Shepard ends up fighting them and then crashes an asteroid into the local Mass Relay to blow it up just as the Reapers arrive, thus slamming the door in their face.
This seems to make a mess of the previous games: How did the Reapers get here? Did they just fly in from dark space? Remember that we saw them all “wake up” at the very end of Mass Effect 2. So long was it from the end of the second game to The Arrival? A few weeks? Months? If that’s all it takes, then Sovereign and Harbinger are idiots for enacting their plans instead of… whatever caused this to happen. The Arrival retroactively makes Mass Effect 1 dumb and pointless.
But that’s not the worst problem. The worst problem is that we are now dealing with an immensely important plotline that may or may not exist in the main story, depending on whether or not you bought enough DLC from BioWare. This is exactly the dystopian world people predicted when DLC became a thing.
Players: We don’t want to have our games cut into pieces! Will we have to pay for lore? For the last boss fight? For the end of the game?
Publishers: DLC is all about hats and guns and new skins and cosmetic things.
But here we are. The “How do we stop the Reapers from coming to kill us all?” plot – which most people seem to regard as the main plot – doesn’t budge in Mass Effect 2, and instead it only moves forward in this piece of DLC. The Arrival moved the Reaper plot forward, then moves it back again, because no matter what it does it can’t feed back into Mass Effect 3 because not everyone is going to choose to pay for The Arrival.
This also creates headaches for me as I analyze this story. Specifically, I have to deal with:
Me: So Mass Effect 2 never advances the main plot…
Fan: That’s not true! The Arrival does exactly that. You can’t claim a book doesn’t make sense if you skip chapters!
Me, later: So the Arrival establishes that the Mass Relays…
Fan: You can’t cite Arrival, because not everyone played it. It’s just add-on DLC, making it less canonical than the core games! You’re just looking for stuff to complain about.
(To be fair, nobody on this site has made these arguments. I’m just trying to show how optional content makes story analysis problematic.)
This series is long enough without me needing to review every possible permutation of every game+DLC. Mass Effect has a nominally branching story, but this blog is non-branching. So for the purposes of this series: I may have to reference DLC lore, but “it’s explained in the DLC” is never a good enough excuse for the failure of some plot element in my book.
At any rate, The Arrival ends with Shepard blowing up a mass relay, which also blows up a star system and possibly kills millions[1]. That’s a big deal. That’s a “Shepard dies” level plot point. And like Shepard’s death, it’s going to be glossed over because this writer doesn’t care about worldbuilding and wants to create huge character-changing events but never wants to stop and explore them in detail.
So at the start of Mass Effect 3, Shepard is in the custody of The Alliance. He’s either there for blowing up a Mass Relay or he’s there for reasons unexplained. He’s been stripped of his rank, his ship, and his crew. Maybe this means the Alliance are idiots and maybe it means Shepard was an idiot for turning himself in and maybe his squad were jerks for running off, but to what degree any one particular character is an idiot depends on whether or not we’re talking about a universe where The Arrival took place.
Arrival and non-Arrival are both broken plots, but they’re broken in different ways. Luckily the Mass Effect 3 writer did us a favor by sweeping all these problems under the rug, giving us a choose-your-own-plothole kind of deal.
It was all Part of the Plan. If such a thing existed.
In this series we’ve had a lot of discussions about whether or not the writers had a plan, if they broke from that plan, or if they needed to plan. Tolkien purportedly didn’t have a hard plan on how Lord of the Rings would be resolved, and his story turned out just fine. Other writers failed spectacularly when working from a plan. The focus on “having a plan” is something of a distraction. The reader generally doesn’t care if the writer spent years planning out their story, or if they came up with each idea thirty seconds before they appeared on the page, as long as it holds together in the end.
What the audience wants is a story that’s not full of contradictions, contrivances, loose plot threads, forced dialog, dumb characters, and sloppy justifications for character actions. I suspect that the more scrupulously you adhere to the rules, the less you need a plan. If you’re willing to let the rules of the world and the personalities of the characters drive the story[2] then you can get away with winging it. But if you want to arrive at some predetermined outcome at a predetermined time – perhaps you have a plot that needs to run for the length of three AAA games, end each game at a logical and satisfying point, and conclude at the end of the third with a resolution to the central conflict – then the sooner you get something passable on the dry-erase board, the lower your chances of ending in failure.
A plan can help a writer achieve this, but it’s not required and it’s no guarantee of success. What matters most is that the author makes a world that holds together. The reason I bring this up now is that Mass Effect has some bizarre story structure:
Mass Effect 1 is a slow reveal of the Reapers, ending with what seems to be a quest to prevent them from ever showing up.
Mass Effect 2 abandons this for a side plot, then circles back and ends on the same note as Mass Effect 1.
Having skipped act 2, The Arrival seems to jump to the end of the story with OH NO THE REAPERS ARE HERE oh wait you fixed it.
Mass Effect 3 then opens with OH NO THE REAPERS ARE HERE. AGAIN.
While we can perhaps forgive them not having a proper through-line planned for the whole trilogy, this goes far beyond a lack of planning. The Arrival and Mass Effect 3 were made one after another. It’s even possible their development overlapped. Maybe it’s not fair to expect a writer to have a plan for five years from now, but certainly they ought to have a plan for what they’ll do tomorrow, right? Not burning a bridge you’re about to cross isn’t really “planning ahead”. It’s just basic sanity.
But now let’s get into the game proper…
Arrested Plot Development
1) 'Idyllic future' is an outrageous mis-characterization of the tone of this universe.
2) The Reapers are 'about' to return? HOW? The last two games made it clear they didn't have a way to get to us. This is the core hurdle the bad guys needed to overcome in this story. You can't just brush it away without explanation in the opening crawl.
3) Actually, EVERYONE saw that legend come to life when Sovereign attacked the Citadel.
4) Are we really going to frame this supposedly epic conflict as 'only one soldier can save us all'? Ew.
Like last time, the game opens with jarring discontinuity. Shepard is under some sort of arrest for past events. Shepard has potentially done any number of things that might land him here:
1) Maybe the alliance is mad about him swiping the Normandy at the end of Mass Effect 1?Except, things were just fine at the start of Mass Effect 2.
2) Maybe the Alliance was mad about the whole “working with Cerberus” thing. In which case, this is an infuriating case of the game condemning you for something you didn’t want to do, and only did because none of the more sensible options were available to you. Spec Ops: The Line did this. But Spec Ops was doing it on purpose. People hated and resented the game for it, but at least the Spec Ops railroading was intentional. It was a deconstruction of a genre. In Mass Effect 2 it was just a dumb plot that ran on circular logic, and having Shepard punished in the third game is just salt in the wound. Instead of glossing over the mistakes of Mass Effect 2, it rubs the player’s nose in them. Also, it uses those past mistakes as an excuse for why the game continues to make them: Shepard isn’t allowed to pursue his goals because of the way the last game forbid him from pursuing his goals.
Also, Joker resigned[3] and signed on with terrorists. But instead of being put in plot-jail he was given back his old rank and even allowed to fly the Normandy again. If working for Cerberus is a sin, then why isn’t he also stripped of duty and rank like Shepard?
3) Maybe the Alliance is upset that Shepard blew up a solar system in The Arrival DLC? This would be one of the most historically significant events since the Rachni wars or the Krogan uplift. It’s the equivalent of dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima. The death toll is massive. Given that most of the galaxy still doesn’t believe in the Reapers, there will be a lot of controversy on how “necessary” this was. The various races will be asking themselves: Can other Mass Relays be destroyed? Has the balance of power changed? Is this something we can do defensively? Offensively? Do we know who did this and why? A Paragon Shepard should be haunted by the weight of this choice. And if nothing else, this act should have brought the galaxy to the brink of war.
All three of these are wrong, but the frustrating thing is that the writers wouldn’t at leastcommit to one of these wrong ideas.
Intro
The game opens with a conversation between Anderson and Shepard, and the writer flat-out refuses to nail anything down. Do people believe in the Reapers yet? Maybe. Is the military preparing for them? Maybe. Is Shepard under house arrest, or here of his own volition? Eh. Why did Shepard turn himself in? If so, why? Why didn’t he keep his ship and his mandate?
For a series that began with such an eagerness for worldbuilding and details, this is a horrendous way to open a game. This is the opposite of worldbuilding. This is tearing down the ideas and assumptions of the series, and then refusing to build something new in their place. Nobody knows anything. Nothing matters. Don’t ask too many questions. Just shoot the bad guys when the talking stops.
Regardless of what happened during Schrödinger’s interlude, it’s not the only thing wrong with this setup. Once again, the last game ended with Shepard making a promise to solve the Reaper threat in some vague, non-specific way. And once again the next game opens with him having abdicated all his agency and leaving the non-believers in charge.
Imagine instead, a game that opened up with Shepard mid-mission. Perhaps he’s hunting down someone with information. Or he’s securing a base that has technology. Or he’s exploring a ruin that might have historical information on the Reapers. He could then have some dialog with his squad, “Boy these things we’ve been doing for the last few months sure have been effective/not effective!” We would get the sense that our hero is dirven, forward-looking, and proactive.
But the writers of Mass Effect 2 & 3 never really understood how this story was supposed to work, so they never have Shepard doing things on his own. Shepards defualt state seems to be one of inaction. He simply reacts to the world around him. In Mass Effect 2, he was wasting his time on orders from the council until the Collectors showed up. After that, he took orders from TIM. Here in Mass Effect 3, he’s sitting around for various reasons and not making any progress on his goals.
Before the player has a chance to settle in and figure out which part of this broken story is the most annoying, the writers distract them with OH NO THE REAPERS ARE HERE.
AGAIN. SOMEHOW.
Mass Effect Retrospective 34: We Fight Then We Die
The Alliance calls Shepard to some sort of hearing. This hearing (or whatever this is, they don’t follow any sort of protocol) would have been a great chance to pave over the plot holes of Mass Effect 2 and give us some context for what happened between “I’m going to find some way to beat the Reapers” and “I’m going to sit in this room doing nothing until I’m sent for”.
Maybe show that the Alliance was really, really wrapped up in some secondary problems or conflict that seemed really important to them at the time, which is why they seemed so inert in the last game. Maybe show a political struggle that explains or partly justifies their seemingly odd behavior. Maybe show that they were indeed working on the Reaper threat, but were afraid to tell you because of the whole Cerberus thing. Maybe this is all just an inquiry, so Shepard can explain (to both the Alliance and the players who missed Mass Effect 2) what happened at the Collector base.
As it stands, we know more about what happened in the Rachni wars two thousand years ago than we know what our protagonist has been up to since the end of the last game. This writer must hate worldbuilding.
Ideas? Anyone?
The writer put the Alliance behind a stage curtain last game. At the start of this game they were free to claim whatever they liked about what the Alliance was doing. And they chose to reveal that the Alliance was doing… nothing.
Just to drive the point home, the writers have the Alliance ask Shepard what they should do about the approaching Reaper fleet. This is really annoying, since Shepard doesn’t actually have anything useful to say and answering that question was supposed to be the plot of the previous game. Not only were they not doing anything, but they still aren’t doing anything. They have no plans, no ideas, no initiative.
Mass Effect 3 decided to focus on Earth, and then refused to make Earth an interesting place. None of these people have names, personalities, or agendas. They just look at Shepard like dumb kids who forgot to study the night before an exam. The player is being asked to struggle to save a planet of apathetic people who can’t think for themselves. Make us care about these people before you blow them up, so we can have some sort of tangible motivation for saving Earth.
And of course there’s the infamous trailer-bait line where Shepard proclaims, “We fight or we die!” I feel like everyone has already dog-piled on this, but for the sake of completeness:
Yes, that line is flat-out dumb beyond parody. It’s not an answer to their question. (I’m pretty sure they were asking how you fight the Reapers, not if you fight the Reapers.) It’s not a terribly inspirational or interesting thing to say. (Compare this clunky one-liner to Shepard’s speech just after taking command of the Normandy in Mass Effect 1.) It’s monumentally bad advice, bordering on sabotage. (If you’re attacked by an invulnerable foe, you don’t fight them. You run. You hide. You don’t gather into a fleet to be killed en masse, you scatter like cockroaches so they have to chase you down and kill you in detail.) And it’s 100% wrong by way of being a false dichotomy. Just ask the Protheans. You don’t choose between fighting and dying. You do both.
And the writer thought this idiotic line of dialog was so awesome they don’t bother to give you a dialog wheel for it, because otherwise you might ruin their scene by not choosing to say it.
The writer then ends the conversation by having the Reapers come down out of the clouds and kill everyone that isn’t a named character with a single well-placed laser beam. I guess that’s one way to avoid having to write dialog or characterize people.
THE END
As far as I’m concerned, the story of Mass Effect should have ended here. The first game sold us on the idea that the Reapers were indomitable foes with vastly superior technology. The battle against Sovereign showed that even if the galaxy united, we wouldn’t have a fraction of the strength required to hold them off. The fact that they’re invading Earth now means that Shepard’s quest has essentially failed.
But note how this also damages the previous two stories. In Mass Effect 1 we were left with the impression that the Reapers were all trapped in dark space. That was why Sovereign was daring to expose himself for an audacious run for the Citadel. He wanted to turn on the mass relay in the Citadel and let his Reaper buddies in. In Mass Effect 2 the Collectors were trying to brew up a baby Reaper by attacking colonies. It was a dumb plan, but we understand it was a backup plan.
But now we learn that the Reapers were so close that they could arrive in… how long? A few months? A year? The game doesn’t say for sure, but it’s not long. What was the point of those other two plans if the Reapers could just show up whenever they wanted? This makes both Sovereign and Harbinger come off as hasty and foolish. Not only was Shepard wasting his time fighting the Collectors in Mass Effect 2, but the Reapers were also wasting their time by simply not invading when apparently that option was always open to them. A couple of years is nothing to them.
At the End of Mass Effect 2 we saw all the Reapers “wake up”. What woke them up? Could that have happened sooner? Did Harbinger do that? These questions are central to the mystery presented by the first game, and here the writer brushes them aside without resolving or explaining them. “Yeah, the idea that they were trapped in dark space? That’s not a thing anymore.”
They have now handled the Reapers exactly backwards. For the story to work we needed to know how their invasion process worked so that we could stop it. To keep them mysterious, their motivations and origins needed to remain a secret. But at the end the writer will tell us everything about their now-idiotic motivations, but they never explained to us the basic mechanics of how the trip from dark space happened or how this important obstacle was overcome. This isn’t “drama over details”, this is “drama only, to hell with the details”. This was the thing that the Reapers needed to find out how to do, and what Shepard needed to prevent. This isn’t some nitpicky side-story objection. This is the core obstacle that drove the conflict and questions of the entire series. And it was skipped over without explanation. The characters don’t even lampshade this with speculation. It’s like the writer didn’t realize this was important. It’s like the writer didn’t know the plot of the story they were supposed to be writing.
Part of the problem here is that the Mass Effect 3 writer either never understood or never respected the whole “Elder Gods” angle the first game set up. Sovereign had a very particular voice[1] and attitude with regards to organics, and we never hear that voice again after the first game. The Cthulhu idea was abandoned. The Reapers are reduced from gods to bullies.
This is why the whole “quest for knowledge” idea was important. You can’t beat gods with guns. You need to find the secret to close the gate, break the spell, placate the gods, or otherwise avoid or forestall your doom. (Even beating them with a superweapon feels sort of lame and ill-fitting.) The change in Shepard’s quest necessitated a change in the villain (or perhaps the other way around) and as a result both have been diminished and the story has been filled with cracks and ugly seams.
But… fine. This writer didn’t like the elder gods idea and they just wanted to make a bombastic action adventure where you fight space-monsters. That makes lore-nerds like me all butthurt, but if that was the only crime then at least we’d end up with a serviceable action romp at the end. Over the next 16 weeks I’m going to try and make the case that – after changing the tone, a bunch of lore, the story focus, and many of the characters – the writer couldn’t even make the story succeed at the basic level of simple dumb action movie.
The first of the writer’s staggering blunders is that they tried to build the emotional core of the game around the moment where…
Some Kid Died
So the writer wants to have someone act as a symbol for humanity and to haunt Shepard in his dreams. They want something to drive home just how alone he is and how much weight he’s bearing. Someone that could be used as the abstract symbol of the entire human race, and which can then be co-opted by the bad guys at the very end for the big exposition dump.
Our writer has two major problems here:
1) They don’t want to build on what came before.
2) They don’t want to pay for the new stuff they’re adding.
They could have used the voice of whichever squaddie died on Virmire. Or even Jenkins. I mean, Shepard at least KNEW Jenkins. Or have Anderson perish in the opening and use him. But instead the writer introduces a child who gets less than a minute of screen time. No name, no personality, no relationship to the rest of the gameworld. He’s just there because – aside from kittens and puppies – children are the most direct and expedient means of telling the audience “You care about this thing”. It’s the problem with assumed empathy again.
This character might work if the author was willing to build up some kind of bond between the audience and the kid, but the writer just wants to get this dialog over with and get back to the shooting. The kid gets two lines of dialog, and neither one rings particularly true. Neither one is a particularly kid thing to say, and neither one humanizes him.
The kid’s big “gotcha” line to Shepard is, “You can’t help me.” That’s not the sort of thing terrified children say, but let’s ignore that and just assume the writer is trying to imbue this exchange with some capital-M Meaning. It’s true that you can’t help the kid, but only because he won’t let you. Based on what we see, Shepard could have taken this kid with him to the Normandy and he would have lived at least as long as everyone else on the ship.
I’m not saying that’s what should happen, I’m saying that in all their heavy-handed groping for messages, the author is telling us one thing and showing us another. This kid isn’t a symbol for all the people Shepard wants to save but can’t because the Reapers are Too Strong, he’s a symbol for all the people Shepard wants to save but they won’t allow him because They’re Too Dumb And Obstinate. Shepard’s struggle isn’t against the Reapers, but against a galaxy that stubbornly refuses to let him save it.
At the end of the intro the kid is killed by a Reaper, and the writer hasn’t invested enough to get the payoff they need. It sucks when the kid dies, sure. It makes for some quick brute-force pathos. But this moment doesn’t have enough kick to begin to justify what the writer is trying to do here. In this character-based game, the writer is trying to build the emotional core around someone that you can only care about in the most abstract way.
Now Leaving Earth
The Normandy appears. The Alliance grounded Joker for basically no explained reason in Mass Effect 2, but now that he’s gone AWOL and joined up with terrorists, they’ve given him back his previous rank and reinstated him as a pilot?
And the rest of the ship’s crew was nearby? And the Normandy hasn’t been assigned to a new commander and put to use? Instead it was fueled up[2] and waiting for Shepard to return?
I agree with the writer: Having the Normandy swoop in and save Shepard is a great dramatic moment and a good way to get the story moving. But they spent the entire last game and the intro to this one smashing the setup that would have made this moment natural instead of a massive contrivance.
Anderson and Shepard reach the Normandy and argue about who is going to stay on Earth. This is an idiotic conversation that requires both characters to forget everything they know about the Reapers. Shepard is talking about going to get help, and Anderson is talking about staying to fight.
The Protheans were objectively more technologically advanced than the galaxy we see in these games, and the Reapers mopped the floor with them. The first game showed that it required a bulk of the military might of the galaxy just to kill one distracted Reaper, and we see a half dozen Reapers on the horizon. Assuming the invasion is global and not focused on this one city, we can infer there are hundreds or thousands of Reapers attacking Earth alone. The idea of “getting help” is ridiculous, only surpassed by the staggeringly preposterous notion of staying behind to fight.
Even if Earth was the only planet under attack and even if every single other race in the galaxy magically aligned under Shepard’s banner, and even if they gathered every single space-worthy ship in Earth orbit to fight, it would not be enough to save a single continent. We know this. The previous games made it clear this battle couldn’t be won through force of arms, and now the plot of this game is rounding up those armaments that the story has repeatedly insisted couldn’t save us.
The writer clearly wants machismo and heroic dialog more than they want to adhere to the rules of the universe. Running away and leaving the Earth to fend for itself wouldn’t be “badass”. It would be the only correct thing to do, but it wouldn’t be badass. And the writer wants these two to come off as badass.
It’s like the writer is at war with themselves here. If you want Shepard to act like an action hero, then don’t start the game with an invasion of indomitable space-gods. The Reaper invasion is wrong for this story. Shepard’s quest is wrong for a plot about an ongoing Reaper invasion. And Shepard’s heroic dialog is wrong for both.
Everything is wrong. Every single writing decision here is wrong, jarring, dissonant, stupid, contradictory, confusing, lame, implausible, or frustrating. None of this works. Mass Effect 2 didn’t fit as a sequel to Mass Effect 1, but Mass Effect 3 doesn’t work as a sequel to either of them. Neither does it work on its own terms.
This opening is just as much of a sophomoric disaster as the ending. The only difference is that here we have beloved characters like Anderson and Joker to maintain our connection to the universe, and we have the false hope that maybe the writer can still untangle all of this.
But whatever. Shepard jumps on the Normandy to fly off and find some allies. Luckily(?) Admiral Hackett phones up and sends Shepard to Mars.
