A Happy Ending for Mass Effect 3

(click to enlarge)

Yesterday, I covered one fan’s attempt to make up for Bioware dropping the ball on Tali’Zorah’s face reveal in Mass Effect 3. Today, I have a similar fan effort to correct the game’s far greater problem, the ending.

It’s been talked to death already, but needless to say it wasn’t satisfying. But you know what would be satsifying? A giant “The Reapers are dead party” aboard the SSV Normandy!

Sure, if this scene existed and the entire crew was alive and well and getting down to Party Rock Anthem, it might have been an equally controversial ending, but I can’t say that it would have been worse than what we got.

I just love the artist’s attention to detail. Tali’s straws, Wrex’s baby, Mordin’s karaoke. Yep, this is the ending I’m pretending happened.

 

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5 Comments

  1. Straw? You mean her Emergency Induction Port 😉

    btw, a friend just pointed me to this wonderfully made youtube video, providing a very fitting explanation for the finale (obvious spoiler alert!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ythY_GkEBck

    It would be nice if that is really what the developers had in mind. Only future DLCs will show (hopefully free of charge, otherwise it would be a really crappy money grab).

  2. SPOILER:
    So having seen the indoctrination vids and knowing there IS an ending where Shepard survives, do you all think we are looking at a DLC? or a Mass Effect 4? DLC to give a different ending would be dickish. But a Mass Effect 4 would mirror what happened with Halo 3 where you could save Master Chief and we are now looking at a Halo 4. This is essentially the same thing. I mean how insane of a “mental suicide” mission would this be, paving way for a ME4. Think about it. How many choices could have gotten you killed and still completed ME2?

  3. It still baffles that writers talented enough to make Tali drinking out of a straw into one of the funniest little personal moments in gaming came up with the ending they did. To answer HR’s question, Bioware have officially said that they are currently weighing feedback to decide what to do about post-game DLC. There have been tweets and facebook updates and the like where they are seriously hinting at plans that are going to fix this situation too, so cross those fingers.

    http://social.bioware.com/forum/Mass-Effect-3/Mass-Effect-3-Story-and-Campaign-Discussion-Spoilers-Allowed/Mass-Effect-Tweets-9890470-1.html

  4. I watched the video about the indoctrination, and while I didn’ quite connect the dots like that myself, I didn’t really need the video to be convinced not to hate the ending. It was a complex, well-written story for mature audiences, and such stories sometimes have sad endings. The whole indoctrination thing in the end was a great way to get the player’s interaction on a different level from moving a control stick and mashing buttons. What’s truly sad is that there are so many nimrods out there that can’t appreciate this ending for the brilliance that it is. If you want a story that spoonfeeds every little plot point to you, and is guaranteed a happily ever after type of ending, go watch a Disney movie.

  5. Ahh, Alaric… thank you for providing the token “I don’t really understand why people were dissappointed in the ending, so let me just assume everyone was sad, and be a dick about it because I don’t understand” for the thread.

    **spoilers**

    My wife got the ending where Shepard survives, and still hated it. Why? It was a dissapointment. A 1 minute clip with a handful of things happening set to a different color light and then credits and the cool little Buzz Aldrin post-credit thing that implies we are stranded in our own solar systems is pretty light for something you’ve sunk hours and hours into, and to follow up what ammounted to a teaser trailer with “be sure to continue your adventures in the upcoming DLC!” was like “ha ha, fuck you for playing!”

    Now, I on the other hand spent the whole game expecting to die… I was actually fairly tired of all the foreshadowing by the end of the game (though it was a series of phenomenal scenes taken individually: the prayer, the “we all die alone” speech, drinks in heaven–all put together it was like I was being beaten over the head with the fact that Shepard was a goner) I picked Synthesis and liked the subtle things like the circuits on the leaves and Jeff straightening up (makes sense that all common diseases would be cured by the fact that organics were now uncommon, and EDI’s smile and posture brought more ‘life’ to her as well to illustrate the trade off)… but since it was essentially the same scene as my wife’s, minus the ‘breathing chestplate’ clip, it was like “really? That’s it?”

    So, combine the dissapointment of that slapdash collection of generic clips with the just nonsense of the ending itself (“I did all this, because organics and synthetics will never be able to work together. Ever. It will never happen. Pay no attention to the epic space battle behind you, in which an entire galaxy of organics and synthetics have bonded together in about a week to take down these monstrosities I built completely invalidating my point (he’s kind of like a shitty internet troll!)… By the way, you’re also mostly synthetic; I’m going to remind you of this and how much better life is because of it right after telling you how bad it is… Now, choose how you die–it also determines what color explosion will follow, but that’s about the only difference it makes.”) and if you still can’t see people being like “that was kinda weak..” then, well, I don’t know what to say.

    I was satisfied with my ending, though only minimally. It lacked scale, it didn’t make a lot of sense (where was the Normandy going, and how did Liara get there? Why did all the Reapers near the citadel, the citadel itself, and the relays all explode if I chose to spare everyone [same quesiton when you choose to control them… just makes no sense]?), it left some interesting loose ends (Inter-system travel is disabled for a “long, long time” and Wrex is stranded in the Milky Way while Eve is pregnant on Tuchanka; the Primarch and the Turian fleet are in our system as well; Quarians have their homeworld back, but are cut off from it… all those species on Earth now) and the others leave some shitty ones (“controling” the reapers = tell them to go away and die? You destroyed everything and crashed to Earth and lived? If the other heavily synthetic-reliant races lost their implants and whatever, did it kill the Quarians and all biotics when you killed the Reapers, and why–it’s not like all technology was Reaper-tech, so why was the “off switch” for the Reapers a ‘destroy all technology’ button?).

    All in all, the ending was just a mess, but it still could have been satisfying if it just showed a few more moments of stuff happening around the galaxy instead of four clips that failed to make a lot of sense following a “pick a color, any color” choice that was predicated on horse shit.

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