I liked the Mass Effect 3 ending.

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-actually bothers to read OP, this time-
CaptainKoala said:
I chose to control the Reapers, because if I destroyed them the cycle would just start all over in the next generation of people which would make all 3 games pointless, and I didn't do synthesis because it seemed kind of douchey to make that kind of choice without anybody's consent on the issue.

Sheapard dies sacrificing himself for the survival of every living thing everywhere, the rest of his squad lives on and his sacrifice is never forgotten.
Woah, hold on a second. That whole "cycle" nonsense, that the kid is droning on about is the cycle that the Reapers themselves created. It's the very thing you're trying to stop, to begin with. If you destroy them, you do not continue nor start over the cycle.

What the kid warned you about is that organic and synthetic life can never work together; eventually synthetic life will rebel against their organic creators. Their argument for why the cycle is necessary is because when they show up to mercilessly slaughter all the advanced civilizations, they'll leave room for the merging civilizations to grow and develop, even if that means that they'll eventually come back to mercilessly slaughter them as well. It's a necessary evil, because if they wouldn't do that, the synthetic life would kill of all organic life, including those that are merging and all organic life in the universe would be sterilized.

The three options he offer are thus:
A) Destroy the reapers and doom the galaxy for endless war between organic and synthetics, until all organic life is gone.
B) Control the reapers and thus they'll all fly away but we really don't know if they'll ever come back or not.
C) Somehow cause all synthetic and organic life to merge, so that you can no longer distinguish between them, with the aid of magic beam.

Then, depending on how well you did at collecting war assets, minor changes can be noticed in the video. Low war assets will deny you the synthesis ending, Earth is destroyed/severely damages and your crew mates might not survive the crash. Lots of War assets and Earth is fine and so are you mates in the crashed ship (I have not yet played the extended cut, so I have no idea how that affects things).

But ignoring all that, I want to state that I think his warning about the destruction ending are bollocks. The entire justification of the Reaper's action is based around the philosophy that organics and synthetics can't work together. End of story. La la la, I'm not listening; you can't make any counter arguments.

However, depending on how you play your cards, Shepard can witness two utterly unrelated forms of synthetic life have a meaningful and peaceful coexistence with organics. The most glaringly obvious one is EDI. Despite being released from her restraints and gained full control of the ship, she becomes a contributing member of the crew, instead of going all HAL-9000 on them. After gaining "a mobile platform", as she elegantly describes her new body, she asks Shepard if she can ask him/her questions about what it means to be Human. If you play along, this becomes the cumulation of repeated conversations:


On her own initiative she renounces the concept of preservation at all cost and adopts the philosophy that sacrifice for the greater good is what's just, so that she can be less like the Reapers.

Second case are the Geth. As you learn more about them, you find out that they were almost an innocent spectator in the whole Geth/Quarian war. The whole thing started off as a civil war between Quarians that were afraid of the concept of sentient robots and Quarians that wanted to allow them to develop. Those defending the Geth were eventually killed off but not before the Geth learned to defend themselves (after having it explained to them why they should). Instead of killing all the Quarians, they allowed them to leave their home world. Then they sealed themselves off from the rest of the universe and were content doing their own thing. The Quarians spark the conflict again, when the show up to retake their homeworld, meaning that at every single point of that conflict, the Geth are merely defending themselves. In fact, the only time they're outwardly aggressive is when they were under Reaper influence.

If Shepard manages to talk the Quarians into lowering their guns, the Geth immediately respond in kind. Geth offer the planet back to their former masters and start assisting them in making their acclimation to their native biosphere as smooth as possible.

And then the Hologram kid tries to convince me that Synthetics and Organics can't work together? I don't even have a say in the matter? Yeah, right.

Sigh... I hope you're happy. You got me to talk about the ending again. I tried so hard to resist.
 

TaintedSaint

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seriously can we just get over this already, I'm almost positive 90% if the people on this board are sick of post about ME3 endings.
 

Olas

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StormShaun said:
*Keeps hitting Mass Effect 3 over the head*

No Mass Effect 3, your moment is over! Move over for games like Assassins Creed 3 and Halo 4 and keep your topics out of this month!
People are allowed to discuss older games if on this site if they want. Especially if they have a question or issue worth discussing. Not everyone bought and played ME3 the week it came out.

To OP:
I think people went into the ending with extraordinary expectations and when those expectations were met with a somewhat lackluster conclusion they got angry and then fed off each other's anger.

I have no problem with the ending myself. Then again I went into it after having heard everyone else deride it, plus I had the extended cut. I think they could have done a lot more with it than they did, but I feel that way about most games so I can hardly attack it for that.

Personally I think it has the best ending in the series. ME1 was just a cheesy generic action ending and ME2 had that retarded human reaper monstrocity for a final boss.
 

Lizardon

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CaptainKoala said:
Can somebody explain to me what was so bad about it?
First of sounds like you played with the extended cut. If so a few of the glaring plot holes, like how your squad got to the Normandy, and why Joker was apparently fleeing the battle were explained.

The other problem was that it ended rather abruptly. It went;
- red/blue/green explosion
- Normandy crash
- Buzz Aldrin talking to child

So basically it never showed what happened to Shepard or the galaxy as a result of his choice. Hell it never even told us what Shepard does when he controls the Reapers. The explanation from the child about the outcome of your choices was also incredibly vague.

I think the new endings are okay. If Bioware had put them out first, I'd imagine most of the shitstorm would have been avoided. It's not perfect, but I found it a satisfactory conclusion.
 

Kingjackl

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Funny how all the problems people had with the endings can be abated by picking Control, even though it's the ending the most people tend to ignore. Saves synthetics without sacrificing organics, Reapers get made our bitches and can fix the mass relays, more likely for Normandy to get rescued (though as of EC the latter two aren't as big a problem as before).

The game wasn't as good as ME2, but it was still generally excellent and wrapped all the subplots up nicely. I just wish the endings didn't dominate discussion so much - it's like how no one could ever talk about the good bits of Deus Ex: HR because everyone kept bringing up the crappy boss fights.
 

SonOfMethuselah

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DioWallachia said:
What idea could POSSIBLY be in the ending that is worth attention at this point?
Well, in a series that was supposed to be based so heavily around choice, there's something to be said about an ending where you can't make everything turn out all right. At the end of the other two games, you can, more or less, come up with a happy ending. But that, in the penultimate moment, you might have to make the kind of choice that you know some people will resent you for? That some people aren't going to survive at all? That's not a bad idea at all. It would take the idea of choice, and lift it to another level entirely. Unfortunately, it just wasn't handled very well at all.
 

Blunderboy

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You know what else I liked the ending too?
ALL OF THE OTHER THREADS ABOUT THE FUCKING MASS EFFECT 3 ENDING!
 

sebashepin

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For me it was a mixture of:

1. Plot starting to lose momentum (read: plot holes and character stupidity reaching critical mass) after Mordin's death.

2. Endings before Extended Cut ranging from incomplete (destruction and control) to nonsensical (synthesis)

3. General feeling that narrative had been dumbed down, like if they had stopped giving a shit and just wanted to end the damn thing

I remember the moment when my suspension of disbelief was shattered: The moment they decided to put cockpits inside Geth fighters
 

bificommander

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CaptainKoala said:
May I add one other part of this synthetics-fobia that is bullshit? The Reapers themselves ARE synthetics. The original ending at least confirms this, since you can kill them along with all other synthetics. So some race concluded two things:
A: Synthetics can't be trusted and will inevitably wipe out all organic life.
B: We can stop this by building a self-aware synthetic race of unrivaled power that will run unattended for millions of years. It will be tasked to wipe out all inteligent life every 58000 years, and spend most of the time in hibernation, which the race itself has no benefit from. And the race can change every cycle by absorbing different organics (see the ME2 ending). And we are completely confident this synthetic race will obey its task unerringly, even to their own detriment.

This makes no sense. They should've just shared their own AI protocols with the entire galaxy, seeing how they were right about B and the Reapers never decided to screw going into deep space for 57900 of every 58000 years. The Ragni and Krogans were far greater threats to the galaxy than any AI race ever was, unless said AI race was commanded to commit genocide BY THE REAPERS.
 

Lovely Mixture

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CrunkParty said:
I have one response to Mass Effect 3's ending and it is "Sure it's bad but it could have been worse. Have you seen St Elsewhere?"

Perspective, my friends.
No. "X was bad but Y was worse" does not work here.

Bioware was (big emphasis on was) known for good narrative and storytelling in videogames, in a time where videogame stories were complete and utter trash aside from a few gems. If they can't make a good narrative then no one should be surprised that people are calling them out.
 

Erttheking

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Ok fair enough, everyone has a right to their opinion. I respectfully disagree.
 

Dr. Doomsduck

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Jason Rayes said:
CaptainKoala said:
Can somebody explain to me what was so bad about it?
I do realize that the choice you make has little effect on the ending but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad one.
I chose the same ending as you did, I know a lot of people consider "Destroy" to be the "good" ending because Shephard can live in that one, if your GR is sufficient. But I had just spent a couple of games working toward making peace with the Geth and the Quarians so to me this seemed like a pretty bad choice. Besides I felt that from about halfway through the games story the plot was heavily foreshadowing that Shepherd wasn't going to make it. For me a lot of the goodbyes with your crew mates seemed an awful lot like final goodbyes. The increasingly grim reality of the war with the Reapers and its cost weighs pretty heavy on Shephard and to be honest a lah de dah hearts and flowers Hollywood ending at this stage would have felt like a cop out. After all Shephard has sacrificed throughout the trilogy I found it kind of fitting that he would make the ultimate sacrifice to bring peace.

eheheh...I chose destroy rather than control because I didn't trust my Shepard to not go all God of Wrath on the universe eventually. She made some nasty-ass decisions over the course of that trilogy. Power corrupts and I'm not putting it in the hands of the woman who had the habit of shooting first and asking questions later.
 

antidonkey

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My take on the endings is that none of them are real. Shepard dies before he gets to the transport beam. I base this off the 2 second scene you get if you have enough effective military strength and choose destroy.
 

wolf thing

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i will post this, and i hope you will watch it becuase the ending is terrible and his man puts it better than i could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW2ZxnkUHCY&feature=plcp

this is part 5 of his analysis on mass effect 3s ending watch and his other stuff.
 

J Tyran

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antidonkey said:
My take on the endings is that none of them are real. Shepard dies before he gets to the transport beam. I base this off the 2 second scene you get if you have enough effective military strength and choose destroy.
Your take is irrelevant fan fiction. The extended cut DLC makes it quite clear that whatever happens on the citadel actually happens and is not an indoctrination attempt.
 

antidonkey

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J Tyran said:
antidonkey said:
My take on the endings is that none of them are real. Shepard dies before he gets to the transport beam. I base this off the 2 second scene you get if you have enough effective military strength and choose destroy.
Your take is irrelevant fan fiction. The extended cut DLC makes it quite clear that whatever happens on the citadel actually happens and is not an indoctrination attempt.
Fan Fiction? Unless someone added that part to my copy of the game I'm pretty sure I witnessed that scene. Also, where did I mention indoctrination?
 

J Tyran

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antidonkey said:
J Tyran said:
antidonkey said:
My take on the endings is that none of them are real. Shepard dies before he gets to the transport beam. I base this off the 2 second scene you get if you have enough effective military strength and choose destroy.
Your take is irrelevant fan fiction. The extended cut DLC makes it quite clear that whatever happens on the citadel actually happens and is not an indoctrination attempt.
Fan Fiction? Unless someone added that part to my copy of the game I'm pretty sure I witnessed that scene. Also, where did I mention indoctrination?
Mentioning the indoctrination theory was an assumption I admit, most people insisting that the "end was not real" keep thumping that drum. As for fan fiction noone added it the fan fiction is entirely your own creation, Shepard did make it onto the Citadel and the events that occurred there where real. Claiming anything else is fan fiction, Shepard apparently being alive is more easily explained. Both control and synthesis completely destroy Shepard's physical body but choosing destroy engulfs him in an explosion.

As we don't know exactly what that scene means its impossible to say what exactly happened but its much more feasible to say he might have survived the explosion and destruction of the Citadel, at least it fits in with the events that actually happened instead of making up any old crap.