Last week, I let my Mass Effect 3 review slip out, and it was, if you recall, overwhelmingly positive. No game series has achieved as much, be it with story, or character development, or action or even scope, as the Mass Effect series has done. And possibly the greatest element of Mass Effect, and the core of what Bioware has become great at, is choice. Choices and the consequences of said choices are the spinal column of the big, lumbering, wonderful beast that is the Mass Effect trilogy. Everything you do can, and will, yield results down the line.
That is, until the end of Mass Effect 3. As you may have heard, the internet has somewhat exploded with justifiable, and pleasingly coherent, articulate, organised and copious dissent over how Bioware have wrapped up this truly staggering space opera. Alarm bells went off throughout Mass Effect 3 when several vital characters were killed off in spite of all your choices, and in spite of your overwhelming abilities. I can deal with these fatalities, however, as they (by and large) fit with the motivations of the characters in question.
But the end of Mass Effect 3 either is a triple-pronged bird-flip to loyal fans, or the most brilliant, open-ended, artful conclusion to a game I've ever seen. It goes without saying that BY GOD THERE ARE SPOILERS ALL UP IN THIS HIZZOUSE.
Shepard, Anderson, two teammates and an Alliance troop movement charge the teleport beam, in order to reach the Citadel, open it up and activate the Crucible. However a Reaper starts razing the clearing you and your guys are bolting up, and when a beam gets close, Shepard blacks out and wakes up, bleeding, in what feels like a trippy dream sequence. He (or she) then ends up on the Citadel, encounters a ghostly version of the kid he couldn't save at the start of the game, and is given one of three unbelievably vague and largely tragic endings.
Fans are pissed because, as I said, Mass Effect is all about choice and consequence, and being given three unnervingly similar cut-scenes which entirely fail to address a single facet of the individual Shepard's journey is either insulting, or not an ending at all. Fans have formed and rallied behind the #retakemasseffect movement, a movement with thousands upon thousands of vocal supporters, and who are donating to the charity Child's Play all the while.
The Bioware forums are on fire with thousands of pages worth of dense
theorycrafting regarding the ambiguous nature of the ending, namely the idea that everything from the pass-out is Shepard battling indoctrination and being tested; three endings are provided, one letting you to control the Reapers, one letting you force a new stage of evolution upon organics and non-organics, and one, highlighted as being evil by the star baby thing, letting you destroy all reapers and, apparently, all non-organics. All three apparently destroy or disable the Mass Relays, and all three leave the Normandy stranded on a lush planet with your crew intact. There are many, many musical cues, visual cues and narrative hints that help back this idea up. This theory is further bolstered by the fact that if you have a high enough preparation rating and choose the 'bad' destruction option, you see Shepard wake up in rubble, hinting that he succeeded in dishing out a huge fuck you to the Reapers indoctrination attempt, and then woke up in the rubble where he fell in the streets of London.
And after my second play-through of the final act, I agree with this more and more. And to add credence to these theories, the official Mass Effect 3 twitter account has dished out the following words, vague though they may be:
