The Balrog Bridge

This was it. 5 years of gaming, countless battles, hundreds of decisions, shitloads of conversations, and traveling the entire galaxy came down to the final battle between Shepard and the reapers. The Mass Effect trilogy has been my favourite gaming series after Metal Gear, and it's without a doubt one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever told. Bioware, the developers were geniuses.


So how'd I get ready for the final game? I bought the Collectors Edition, and generally stayed away from anything which was a spoiler the week it came out. However, since I ordered the game from Ozgameshop, I had to wait another week before I could play since they were based in the UK. Now I realize that this was a mistake. Why? Because before I knew it, people had started talking about the Mass Effect 3 endings. It was the hot topic in the gaming industry. A retake movement had started, and was gaining a lot of support. However, I didn't want to know what the ending was. I was under the impression that, with my full paragon Shepard imported from the second game, all those blue options would be available for me throughout this game.


But then again, I always knew one thing, though I did not want to admit it. If people were complaining about a bad ending, then Shepard probably died, along with a lot if not all his squad. But then again, I always knew that my full paragon and choices made earlier would probably get me something better. However, I guess all Mass Effect players knew going into the final game that, they had to sacrifice a lot, because the Harbinger wasn't going to play nice with anybody.


So back to actually playing the game. I enjoyed every moment. I didn't like how Mordin died, but then again, his sacrifice cured the genophage and that was great. I always considered Urdnot Wrex a great ally and friend throughout the series. I was under the impression that Thane would be cured in the game, but then again, the guy was dying. When he died, I really did hope that would be the last death I would see in the game. However, Legion was next. But that got the Quarians and Geth to work together, and that added to my 'total war assets', which I didn't really understand at this point.

So I did some digging. Apparently, in order to get the 'best' ending (the best ending was still horrible), I had to have an Effective military strength of more than 5000. And how do I do that? Play multiplayer. Bioware, that was mistake number one. Why in the world should a single player storyline be effected by multiplayer? What about the people who don't have the internet, or don't like the multiplayer at all? It was a bad decision on every level, and I really hope they fix it.

But then again, this wasn't a big problem for me either, since I played the multiplayer demo and kicked ass. In fact, I enjoyed multiplayer. Therefore, before I went ahead to assault the Cerberus base, I had an effective military strength of more than 6500. OHHH YEAAHHH!

But wait! As I was watching the ending sequence at 5 am, I was very VERY confused. Who the fuck is this God-child, and what's he doing here? WHERE ARE MY PARAGON INTERRUPTS? Now, this kid tells me this:



But I JUST allied the damn Geth and Quarians, and they are fighting your Reapers! The God-child vaguely explains three options to me. The first one, or the Red Choice, 'Destroy'. It's where you destroy all synthetic life, along with the reapers. Depending on your Effective Military Strength, Earth may be destroyed or saved in the process. And there was the Blue Choice, or Control. This was exactly what The Illusive Man wanted to do. Control the reapers. However, this was never something I wanted to do. I didn't believe that MY Shepard would even consider that option. But this option apparently would kill Shepard. And then there was the third option. Synthesis. Combine synthetics and organics and let's live happily ever after. Well fuck that shit because I'm not Saren either. This option would kill Shepard as well. Therefore, I decided I only came here to kill the reapers, and even if it would destroy the Geth and EDI, I had to do it.


But wait! No matter what option you choose, all the Mass Relays get destroyed! I will get to that in a second. And so, I choose the Destroy option, and watch as the Crucible kicks in, and wipes out the Reapers. Soldiers were celebrating on Earth. And THEN I see the Normandy fleeing from this huge red/orange explosion, with Joker pressing every button on the ship (it was hilarious really). But then, the explosion takes out the Normandy's engines and the scene changes to some random planet. The Normandy has crash landed, Joker opens the door, and out steps Liara (My LI) and Garrus. These two I brought to the final fight. What the fuck were they doing, running away? At this stage, I was really confused. So with the Mass Relays gone, all the galaxy's species were stuck on Earth?


And suddenly, a new scene appears. Under lots of rubble, there's Commander Shepard, his N7 tags visible. And he breathes! The end.



Wait...no. How is THAT the end? What about the species back on Earth? How did the Normandy end up on that planet? Who was the God-child? And how did Shepard survive the Citadel exploding? And why didn't the Mass Relay take out the Solar system? What happened to my little blue children? Technically.....shouldn't every single person be dead?


Apparently, this was it. Mass Effect 3 was over. I will skip the ending scene with the old man and the child. It's irrelevant in my opinion. I just couldn't believe that every single decision I made over 3 games, over more than a 100 hours of gameplay and buying the majority of DLC's had no real effect over how the game ended. It felt incomplete, and didn't feel like Mass Effect at all. I didn't want to replay the game, because no matter what, it all came down to three similar endings with three different colours. No seriously, that was pretty much the only difference. This was when I joined the retake group, and went deeper into what people thought about the endings on Bioware's Social Network. People had come up with the Indoctrination Theory, that Shep was dreaming throughout. I don't really know what to make out of the theory, but what stands is that Bioware screwed up. Big time. Their co-founder released a statement due to the outrage by fans, but it was very vague. Not much information about anything, except that they were listening.

Mass Effect 3 was overall a great game. But the ending ruins it all. Tali's googled stock photo was funny when I learned about it on Youtube. It's really hard to believe that after everything which happened in the ME universe, that it would all come down to three colours and that's excluding major plotholes in the endings. And this, after everything Bioware said prior to the release. I would love to blame EA though. However, I'm just going to wait until PAX this April to find out what Bioware has to say. They need to fix the endings, and do right by their fans. Until then, no replaying or DLC's for me. Oh and also, IGN is such a disgrace.