A few days ago I put a bow on the end of the Mass Effect trilogy. I was streaming the game, and I had planned to do something else after I had finished the game, but as the credits were rolling, I felt so jumbled up, my mind processing, and feeling a bit shaky, I had to stop. I needed time to process this.
I took to the discord with the friends who convinced me to play it. Discussing my ending, talking about the side bets they had taken on my playthrough and talking about how controversial the ending was for some people, even with the corrected ending I had played.
Gonna talk about the ending and other things, so spoilers ahead.
I chose the Green Ending. This was the only ending that made sense for the journey I had been on for the past hundred hours across three games. Based on the information I had been given, the Red ending, the one that would have wiped out all of the Reapers, and all other Synthetic life, which would include the Geth and potentially myself, was out of the question. I had spent several arcs stating that the Geth had evolved and changed to be their own sentient species. After telling Legion that he was a person, that he was alive, and that the Geth were living, it would have been such a fundamental betrayal to do that. Further cemented with a conversation I had with Garrus on the Normandy. He was talking about the cold calculus of war. Do you willingly sacrifice five billion people in one place to save ten billion elsewhere? At that time, I had, optimistically, said that I wanted to do it without having to sight a death warrant like that. These factors combined had me completely shut out that ending.
The Blue ending was the Control the Reapers option. This is what the Illusive Man was after all along. I had to eliminate this option as well, as I roundly rejected the Illusive Man at every turn when he brought this up. Well, almost every turn. At the end of Mass Effect 2, I gave the Illusive Man and Cerberus the Collector Base, as they had pitched it as a tool for fighting the Reaper invasion. What better way to know how they work and how to fight them than a huge archive of their own information? Come Mass Effect 3, and I'm out of the insulated bubble Cerberus had put me in to keep me from seeing how awful they were during the second game, and when the Illusive's Man real plan comes to light, I couldn't side with them any longer. Nothing leashed stays that way forever, and trying to order around these ancient weapons of destruction feels perilous at best, no matter what the Catalyst and the Illusive Man said. The Blue option was out.
That left Green. A more harmonious one. The one where synthetics and organics were altered to be some hybrid of the other. This seems like a good happy ending, the Reapers stop, organic beings become better through this fusion, and synthetics start to understand humanity more. Win win... except in a way... The Reapers still won. Their goal was to wipe out Humans and other advanced species. And they did. I did. Those humans aren't pure humans anymore. Those Asari, those Krogan, Turian, Quarian, Salarians, Volus, Elcore, Hanar, Batarians and Geth aren't what they were anymore. They may not have been killed, but the species have been permanently altered on a fundamental level.
This is the ending I chose. It's painted as an optimistic one. All the different races and civilizations rebuilding after the initial Reaper invasion. The Reapers assisting in the rebuild and providing access to their stores of information. The world is changed, hopefully for the better. Hopefully there is some sort of understanding that can now be reached due to the merging of Organic and Synthetic.
I like this uncertainty. For a conflict this big, this dramatic, a clean solution that isn't tinged with some underpinning of sadness would feel wrong. The ramifications of removing the Reapers would have been felt for decades, as the civilizations fixed the damage, even if they just magically went away. The ending I got was optimistic, but it came at the cost of Shepard's life and altering all races in the galaxy.
One more part of the ending I want to touch on. I like that if you even want to get to that point where you make this final decision, you HAVE to take a Renegade action, lest you be shot by the Illusive Man in the control room. This series is about making decisions, and Mass Effect 3 absolutely hammers home the concept of making a difficult decisions to win this war. If you played all Paragon up until this point, you could have ignored the first prompt, which would have resulted in a longtime ally being executed by the Illusive Man. Then you would get a second prompt, with the gun trained on you. If you ignored this Renegade prompt, he would shoot you, resulting in the Game Over screen. If you believed in playing a pure Paragon shep, you need to stop your game right there, and say to yourself "My Shepard was unable to make the hard decision when it mattered most". At this point, the fate of the galaxy is out of your hands and into someone willing to make that decision.
I had been playing a mostly Paragon playthrough. I hardly took Renegade conversation options, and I let most Renegade prompts pass me by. The only ones I can remember taking was the Thane loyalty quest in Mass Effect 2, when interrogating the guy, so we could get the information quicker, and the one to shoot Udina during the coup at Citadel. I also took the first Renegade prompt at the end, to save the ally from being executed. These were pivotal moments where I felt that action had to be taken and that trying to work things out with words would not have worked.
At launch, there were people mad that a Paragon option didn't exist, that you somehow couldn't talk yourself out of this. That you had to take a Renegade option to see the end. I wondered "Why should there be a Paragon option?". Well, some could say, the game had presented Paragon options all along! You never had to take a Renegade choice before. That may be true, but why should the world bend to your Shepard who wants to talk instead of taking action? At the point the issue is forced, we are at the final hand. All cards are on the table, and everyone is all in. And Shepard is meeting the one person in the Galaxy who is as confident in their own personal beliefs as they are in the Illusive Man. To me, saying he should bend to your Paragon decision to stand down is the same as saying you should bend to his plan. This is an unstoppable force versus an immovable objects, in terms of ideals. The only difference is, the Illusive Man is also willing to take action where a Pure Paragon wouldn't.
The cold calculus of war.
Forcing you to take this prompt makes me think and realize that at some point, words aren't enough. The rallying speeches aren't enough. When push comes to shove, an action needs to be taken. If you aren't able to pull that trigger, someone else will and they will be the one to dictate history.
If you haven't figured it out, I really like how this ended. I love how it shows that everyone is compromised. You can have all the idealism in the world, but if you don't have the action to back it up, it doesn't mean jack. I won't play these games again, at least not for a long time, but I am satisfied with how it ended. Shepard may have died, but he died for the people he believed in. He died for the good that existed out there. He died because everyone deserved a chance to make up for the mistakes of the past.
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