My headcanon is that all Red does is destroy the Reapers and nothing else. That the starkid's explanation of it destroying all synthetic life was just it trying to cover its ass and persuade you against choosing that option. It is itself a Reaper after all, and even being controlled by tech-Shepard would be preferably to ceasing to exist entirely.
I mean, how would the crucible choose what synthetic life is in order to destroy it all? What makes "synthetic life" different from this keyboard i'm typing on at this moment? How complex does a synthetic thing have to be before it becomes "alive"? Does it scan the software for a "selfLiving = true" variable? If it doesn't have that specific cutoff, then it would end up destroying every single nonliving electronic component in the galaxy in addition to the Reapers, EDI, and the Geth. That doesn't happen, so it had to have been targeted at a specific thing. Targeting the Reapers specifically would have been much easier to do than whatever this nebulous "synthetic life" definition is.
in my head I saw it as destroying anything to do with the reapers at all, including the relays and including the geth who chose to take reaper code, which I find thematically satisfying
I think it really says something about the options that I've come to the conclusion that Blue is the best ending, and that's after being told for three games straight that Blue is an absolutely terrible idea that you should under no circumstances attempt to do.
Red requires you to commit genocide against an allied race (if you made friends with everyone, which I did). And green, just...no. Green doesn't even hold up to five seconds of serious thought. And the 4th 'Fuck all of this' option is no better, because you're just passing the buck on to the next cycle and getting billions of people killed in the process. Future Cycle Shep is going to have the same 3/4 choices you have.
Blue is the only option where no one dies, the Reapers get used to repair the damage they've done, and you can always headcanon it that Shep flew them all into the sun when it was over. It's the only 'good' ending. And it's also what the bad guys have been trying to do for three games now and you kept shooting them for it. Just...I have to mentally flip a desk every time I think about it.
0
chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
I think it really says something about the options that I've come to the conclusion that Blue is the best ending, and that's after being told for three games straight that Blue is an absolutely terrible idea that you should under no circumstances attempt to do.
Red requires you to commit genocide against an allied race (if you made friends with everyone, which I did). And green, just...no. Green doesn't even hold up to five seconds of serious thought. And the 4th 'Fuck all of this' option is no better, because you're just passing the buck on to the next cycle and getting billions of people killed in the process. Future Cycle Shep is going to have the same 3/4 choices you have.
Blue is the only option where no one dies, the Reapers get used to repair the damage they've done, and you can always headcanon it that Shep flew them all into the sun when it was over. It's the only 'good' ending. And it's also what the bad guys have been trying to do for three games now and you kept shooting them for it. Just...I have to mentally flip a desk every time I think about it.
Cost of war. Sometimes good people die. And trusting the Reapers to just play ball if you get uploaded... not happening.
Sorry, geth and EDI. Your sacrifice will be remembered in the coming empire.
they can try and tell me something else happened, and i can tell them that they wrote a bad ending so i don't care and they're going to ignore it for future games anyway so why are they harshing my buzz
+4
Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
in the brave world of mass effect 3's synthesis ending, who is the hero who fucks a husk before anybody else?
Like, you have the final showdown with TIM, and then
you and Anderson are lying there, and the Crucible doesn't trigger, and Hackett is like, Shepard, something's wrong, nothing's happ- actually we got this, never mind
And there's an awesome space battle and the Normandy picks you back up and you kill Harbinger one on one and everything is rad
I think the entire premise of ME3's conflict, where the Reapers can just putter their way out of dark space to wage conventional war within less than a year, flew in the face of the entire setting up to that point and took away from the primary conflicts of the first two games
Well I say that but it didn't retroactively desensify them
Rather ME3's primary conceit is a legitimate giant plothole, or at best a retcon
I think if the macguffin had made simply conventional victory possible instead of being entirely an I win/do something extremely ill-advised! button that would have been best
trying to imagine a universe without the colors is doing a number on me though
what kind of reality is even possible without RGB?
I would be okay with Shepard dying or sacrificing themselves to activate the Crucible, without the whole genocide/relay destruction. Sure Garrus and I wouldn't be cruising the Galaxy, adopting Krogan babies, but it would be a great ending.
QuirkyLittleTyrantA Mug Featuring Pichu On A CloudRegistered Userregular
I actually expected the ending
to be a horrible loss for all the Citadel races. Maybe your friends get out, escape somewhere, but they know they're gonna be hunted down and slaughtered at some point. But the Citadel races dealt the Reapers a truly crippling blow - flash forward next cycle, some sentient stumbles upon Liara's time capsule and some advanced Crucible plans, roll credits.
The game was so bleak and dark I was 98% sure that's where it was going.
Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
the game should have ended with shepard and anderson sitting there. the arms open up, a beam comes out of the crucible, the reapers die, so does shepard, right next to anderson. roll credits
+1
chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
it's so consistently weird to me how DA2 has these interesting and nuanced and morally complex villains and every other bioware game has bad guys who make voldemort look like hamlet
I think the entire premise of ME3's conflict, where the Reapers can just putter their way out of dark space to wage conventional war within less than a year, flew in the face of the entire setting up to that point and took away from the primary conflicts of the first two games
Well I say that but it didn't retroactively desensify them
Rather ME3's primary conceit is a legitimate giant plothole, or at best a retcon
How so? All your efforts in the first two games have always been about delaying them, nothing more.
By simply completing the catalyst the reapers stop you having proved that this cycle can move past the faults of the previous ones, rendering the reapers moot or some such.
It's been stated a number of times that you can't win in conventional war, one reaper ripped apart some of the most advanced ships on their own, but also just killing all the reapers would be, iunno, too easy? giving the catalyst a means to stop them without also being a big off switch would have been a nicer surprise.
No! No you should be able to reject the star child's stupid premise
say "I'm not picking any of your options and I'm not walking away, because you're entire argument is wrong. It's bullshit. It's provably bullshit"
That's the problem with the ending. It gives you these choices within the context of a situation as informed to you, but the situation is a load of absolute bollocks on face value. Not even if you explore what it means, on face value. "Yeah synthetic and organics cannot possibly co-exist so I have these synthetics wipe out organic life every 50000 years"
WHAT
WHAT
It's totally contrary to the rest of the game and is the most hackneyed, stupid, juvenile toss
An ending where if you have enough resource points or whatever you could totally just beat the Reapers through conventional force
I know, I know, that contradicts the whole idea
But I mean
Isn't that kind of Shepard's Thing by the time ME3 rolls around
Looking at this impossible thing and going "no fuck you i'm gonna do it"
It should have been really really hard, definitely nearly impossible
But how satisfying would the ending of "no, fuck you, we're just going to kill all the reapers" have been
Right! That would have been great!
Yeah!
And like, I never really bought that it being impossible was actually the case
People sure said it a whole bunch, but people also said
the suicide mission was for sure a suicide mission, and look how flawlessly that turned out
Well yeah, but
The suicide mission didn't involve directly fighting thousands of reapers.
Like, every time a reaper went down in the ME games, it was with luck and a LOT of combined firepower in the right place at the right time.
In ME1 you only beat Sovereign because he made himself vulnerable to attack when he plugged himself into Saren and then temporarily lost his shields after Necro-Saren gets axed. And that was because the entire Alliance fleet and CItadel forces were primed and ready to go.
On Tuchanka, you manage to beat one, a pretty SMALL reaper, with the help of Kalros, the most massive Thresher Maw in fucking existence.
The one in Rannoch goes down only with the combined might of the entire Quarian Migrant Fleet.
AKA, an entire race's ships, including their standing army, their farmhouse ships, storage ships, and every other vessel for every purpose that they use a ship for, given guns and militarized.
The single greatest military force in the universe not under Reaper control, was all firing at one target at the same time, and so it went down with relative ease. As it should have.
But that was a lone Reaper, away from the rest of their kind. And it wasn't even the scariest reaper we've met!
There was no way they were all going to be beaten in a straight fight. It was never going to happen.
I think the entire premise of ME3's conflict, where the Reapers can just putter their way out of dark space to wage conventional war within less than a year, flew in the face of the entire setting up to that point and took away from the primary conflicts of the first two games
Well I say that but it didn't retroactively desensify them
Rather ME3's primary conceit is a legitimate giant plothole, or at best a retcon
How so? All your efforts in the first two games have always been about delaying them, nothing more.
Everything in the first two games was predicated on the idea that the Reapers needed control of the Citadel because they couldn't make it back out of dark space on their own - it was just too far out for them to make it, and they'd drift in the void forever unless the Citadel was activated. It's why the games implied for a long time that Sovereign spent something like a thousand years trying to seize the Citadel before launching an all-out assault on it. It's why ME2's original ending has Harbinger shaking his fist and going "You have stopped nothing. We will find a way." And then Arrival/ME3 revealed that the way they found was apparently just moving under their own power for a few months.
+6
chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
No! No you should be able to reject the star child's stupid premise
say "I'm not picking any of your options and I'm not walking away, because you're entire argument is wrong. It's bullshit. It's provably bullshit"
That's the problem with the ending. It gives you these choices within the context of a situation as informed to you, but the situation is a load of absolute bollocks on face value. Not even if you explore what it means, on face value. "Yeah synthetic and organics cannot possibly co-exist so I have these synthetics wipe out organic life every 50000 years"
WHAT
WHAT
It's totally contrary to the rest of the game and is the most hackneyed, stupid, juvenile toss
But Red does reject the thing's premise. Starkid goes on how red will just repeat the cycle, how it's doomed. Picking red is telling him he can go fuck himself. You're solving the practical problem (Reapers) and the philosophical problem will get dealt with when new AIs come online and don't get fucked over right from bootup.
Just another little way red is the best. RENEGADE!
In addition to all that, the entirety of ME3 only happens because the Reapers took their sweet time letting the central hub of galactic power and communication go about its merry way until the last act when they finally move in on the Citadel.
Had they just done that outright, which they obviously were capable of doing, Shepard would have never gotten out of the Solar System.
I actively disliked the grimdark grimdarkness of ME3
it's not why I fell in love with the series
and might even be the antithesis of why
The Mass Effect series has aliens which go to titty bars, dance to futuristic techno music and make investments on the stock market
That didn't really call for what the third game was
Platy on
0
Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
The best ending is
switching the game off when Shepard and Anderson collapse next to each other, and accepting that you lost because the reapers are ancient machine gods, but good try anyway.
A tragic ending is better than a dumb nonsensical ending, imo.
I actively disliked the grimdark grimdarkness of ME3
it's not why I fell in love with the series
and might even be the antithesis of why
Uh, I dunno, the whole series has grimdarkness. The whole series has it. The first one has nearly all the inhabited colony planets wiped out of it's inhabitants, either by the Geth, by Cerberus, or by nefarious unknown means. You got people being turned into mechazombies, a untraceable brainwashing thing that can't be stopped, and a robot race that is intent on destroying humanity, working for a mysterious Cthulhu that wants to wipe out everyone.
The second one has a city which makes Mos Eisley look like a civilized spaceport, a plague, a ruined homeworld of a planet that was nuked before anyone ever met the inhabitants, the 'dead' body of an unknown alien that isn't quite dead, a 'Civilized' city where as long as you sign on the dotted line, anything can be bought. Your friend is being hunted down by one of the most secret individuals in the world. Mercenaries, betrayals, and you're working for an organization with very questionable motives. And to top it all off, a mysterious race of bug people who reeeeallly want you dead, who capture their victims by paralyzing them, then turning them into grey gloop, while they're still conscious.
Honestly, ME3 seems rather upbeat for the setting.
I think the entire premise of ME3's conflict, where the Reapers can just putter their way out of dark space to wage conventional war within less than a year, flew in the face of the entire setting up to that point and took away from the primary conflicts of the first two games
Well I say that but it didn't retroactively desensify them
Rather ME3's primary conceit is a legitimate giant plothole, or at best a retcon
How so? All your efforts in the first two games have always been about delaying them, nothing more.
Everything in the first two games was predicated on the idea that the Reapers needed control of the Citadel because they couldn't make it back out of dark space on their own - it was just too far out for them to make it, and they'd drift in the void forever unless the Citadel was activated. It's why the games implied for a long time that Sovereign spent something like a thousand years trying to seize the Citadel before launching an all-out assault on it. It's why ME2's original ending has Harbinger shaking his fist and going "You have stopped nothing. We will find a way." And then Arrival/ME3 revealed that the way they found was apparently just moving under their own power for a few months.
The last line of ME1 is "the reapers are coming and I'm gonna find some way to stop them"
ME2 begins with Miranda and Tim talking about how the reapers are still coming and the last shot of ME2 is... them coming
The reapers never capital N Needed the citadel, it's just the most convenient way for them
I will post in full when I am at home, but the short of it is that I would think that three people talking about the inevitability of conflict does not contradict Vigil explicitly saying that the Reapers are trapped, Sovereign's multiple failed attempts to take the Citadel, or Harbinger saying at the very end that they will find a way back to the galaxy - assumedly by taking the Citadel or otherwise activating their mass relay.
It wasn't until Arrival that any other method of their return was even suggested as possible. Arrival changed quite a few things about the lore - like making mass relays destructible - but I get the feeling these things were implemented to make room for the retcons necessitated by the plot of ME3
switching the game off when Shepard and Anderson collapse next to each other, and accepting that you lost because the reapers are ancient machine gods, but good try anyway.
A tragic ending is better than a dumb nonsensical ending, imo.
Agreed, with the caveat that we keep Shepard's
"What do you need me to do?" which is bar none my favourite line in the series. Just... gives their absolute everything, gets the job done, and even lying there near dead, still tries to do more.
Posts
Blue is the only option where no one dies, the Reapers get used to repair the damage they've done, and you can always headcanon it that Shep flew them all into the sun when it was over. It's the only 'good' ending. And it's also what the bad guys have been trying to do for three games now and you kept shooting them for it. Just...I have to mentally flip a desk every time I think about it.
Sorry, geth and EDI. Your sacrifice will be remembered in the coming empire.
Also, a picture of my Shep. She's a very angry person.
Why I fear the ocean.
she beat up and killed all the reapers
they can try and tell me something else happened, and i can tell them that they wrote a bad ending so i don't care and they're going to ignore it for future games anyway so why are they harshing my buzz
Probably... Shepard?
I know, I know, that contradicts the whole idea
But I mean
Isn't that kind of Shepard's Thing by the time ME3 rolls around
Looking at this impossible thing and going "no fuck you i'm gonna do it"
It should have been really really hard, definitely nearly impossible
But how satisfying would the ending of "no, fuck you, we're just going to kill all the reapers" have been
Right! That would have been great!
Yeah!
And like, I never really bought that it being impossible was actually the case
People sure said it a whole bunch, but people also said
And there's an awesome space battle and the Normandy picks you back up and you kill Harbinger one on one and everything is rad
Well I say that but it didn't retroactively desensify them
Rather ME3's primary conceit is a legitimate giant plothole, or at best a retcon
trying to imagine a universe without the colors is doing a number on me though
what kind of reality is even possible without RGB?
WoW
Dear Satan.....
The game was so bleak and dark I was 98% sure that's where it was going.
Steam: ZappRowsdower
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
It totally came up.
Why I fear the ocean.
it's not why I fell in love with the series
and might even be the antithesis of why
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
ME3 was very badly written. They turned Martin Sheen from a somewhat understandable villain with identifiable motivations... into Saren 2.0
Also, Kai Leng.
How so? All your efforts in the first two games have always been about delaying them, nothing more.
is what kai leng says, sounding like a two year old
it's my favorite line of his
I'm not telling you to shut up
you do you
these ME3 ending discussions have compiled in a whole Mass Effect 3 that I would rather see
that I'll never fucking write-out because what's the point
because I have pretty solid ideas on what role Cerberus and the Illusive Man would have in it
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
It's been stated a number of times that you can't win in conventional war, one reaper ripped apart some of the most advanced ships on their own, but also just killing all the reapers would be, iunno, too easy? giving the catalyst a means to stop them without also being a big off switch would have been a nicer surprise.
say "I'm not picking any of your options and I'm not walking away, because you're entire argument is wrong. It's bullshit. It's provably bullshit"
That's the problem with the ending. It gives you these choices within the context of a situation as informed to you, but the situation is a load of absolute bollocks on face value. Not even if you explore what it means, on face value. "Yeah synthetic and organics cannot possibly co-exist so I have these synthetics wipe out organic life every 50000 years"
WHAT
WHAT
It's totally contrary to the rest of the game and is the most hackneyed, stupid, juvenile toss
Well yeah, but
Like, every time a reaper went down in the ME games, it was with luck and a LOT of combined firepower in the right place at the right time.
In ME1 you only beat Sovereign because he made himself vulnerable to attack when he plugged himself into Saren and then temporarily lost his shields after Necro-Saren gets axed. And that was because the entire Alliance fleet and CItadel forces were primed and ready to go.
On Tuchanka, you manage to beat one, a pretty SMALL reaper, with the help of Kalros, the most massive Thresher Maw in fucking existence.
The one in Rannoch goes down only with the combined might of the entire Quarian Migrant Fleet.
AKA, an entire race's ships, including their standing army, their farmhouse ships, storage ships, and every other vessel for every purpose that they use a ship for, given guns and militarized.
The single greatest military force in the universe not under Reaper control, was all firing at one target at the same time, and so it went down with relative ease. As it should have.
But that was a lone Reaper, away from the rest of their kind. And it wasn't even the scariest reaper we've met!
There was no way they were all going to be beaten in a straight fight. It was never going to happen.
Everything in the first two games was predicated on the idea that the Reapers needed control of the Citadel because they couldn't make it back out of dark space on their own - it was just too far out for them to make it, and they'd drift in the void forever unless the Citadel was activated. It's why the games implied for a long time that Sovereign spent something like a thousand years trying to seize the Citadel before launching an all-out assault on it. It's why ME2's original ending has Harbinger shaking his fist and going "You have stopped nothing. We will find a way." And then Arrival/ME3 revealed that the way they found was apparently just moving under their own power for a few months.
Just another little way red is the best. RENEGADE!
Why I fear the ocean.
Had they just done that outright, which they obviously were capable of doing, Shepard would have never gotten out of the Solar System.
The bad writing is pretty much the main plot and villains.
Shepard and the gang are all pretty well written, as are the individual plot missions themselves, and the DLC stuff is golden.
It's the overall narrative that suffered and fell apart.
That didn't really call for what the third game was
A tragic ending is better than a dumb nonsensical ending, imo.
Uh, I dunno, the whole series has grimdarkness. The whole series has it. The first one has nearly all the inhabited colony planets wiped out of it's inhabitants, either by the Geth, by Cerberus, or by nefarious unknown means. You got people being turned into mechazombies, a untraceable brainwashing thing that can't be stopped, and a robot race that is intent on destroying humanity, working for a mysterious Cthulhu that wants to wipe out everyone.
The second one has a city which makes Mos Eisley look like a civilized spaceport, a plague, a ruined homeworld of a planet that was nuked before anyone ever met the inhabitants, the 'dead' body of an unknown alien that isn't quite dead, a 'Civilized' city where as long as you sign on the dotted line, anything can be bought. Your friend is being hunted down by one of the most secret individuals in the world. Mercenaries, betrayals, and you're working for an organization with very questionable motives. And to top it all off, a mysterious race of bug people who reeeeallly want you dead, who capture their victims by paralyzing them, then turning them into grey gloop, while they're still conscious.
Honestly, ME3 seems rather upbeat for the setting.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
The last line of ME1 is "the reapers are coming and I'm gonna find some way to stop them"
ME2 begins with Miranda and Tim talking about how the reapers are still coming and the last shot of ME2 is... them coming
The reapers never capital N Needed the citadel, it's just the most convenient way for them
It wasn't until Arrival that any other method of their return was even suggested as possible. Arrival changed quite a few things about the lore - like making mass relays destructible - but I get the feeling these things were implemented to make room for the retcons necessitated by the plot of ME3
Agreed, with the caveat that we keep Shepard's