Palleon posted:

Does it really matter what you did? I thought Mass Relays exploding destroyed entire star systems, so shouldn't pretty much the entire known galaxy (at least anything you interacted with) be wiped out as a result of the end?

ImpAtom posted:

I got all my loose ends tied up? Really? Huh. So where in the game did it explain what exactly happened to all the societies and characters and such after we completely destroyed one of the most important parts of galactic civilization and also turned everyone into half-robots? Because those are pretty big loose ends.

Slim Killington posted:

There's a difference between telling you every tiny detail that ever happens with anything ever and denouement. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO EVERY PERSON I EVER MET AND ALL THEIR COUSINS AND poo poo is a little sperglord and I wouldn't expect a writer that wasn't severely pedantic to cater to that need.

PhantomZero posted:

As a femshep I romanced Liara in ME1, Garrus in ME2, then reunited with Liara in ME3. Right before the last mission I walked in on Garrus and Tali making out or whatever in the gun battery. The conversation was pretty funny "Oh uh, he was just checking my suit for ruptures!"

PhantomZero posted:

Really? How does hell make any sense? Enjoy the comforts of heaven for half an hour before the devil knows you are dead and takes you down to hell, is how I interpreted it.

quote:

You got all your loose ends tied up during the game, and you should've been appreciating it. Curing the genophage? Putting quarian back on Rennoch? Making the geth a real intelligent race? These are the moments that mattered. The end was never going to be good enough, and it wasn't supposed to be.

I said come in! posted:

Earth is still "around" but it gets completely wiped clean, to the point where there's no atmosphere left even and it's just a huge gray rock. The cutscene for it is pretty cool actually, the whole planet slowly turns gray, as you see a huge blast cleanse it of all life. So it pretty much turns to a dead world with no atmosphere. It reminded me of a episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where a sequence like this very thing happens.

Lloyd Boner posted:

No this is complete bullshit. It would be one thing if it were just some generic action movie ending. But this ending literally makes all the specifics of your journey entirely meaningless. It doesn't matter if you put the quarian back on Rannoch, because 90% of their race is on Earth now with no way of getting back to the home they just reclaimed. Curing the genophage just means that you have billions and billions of Krogan overpopulating their local solar system because they have no means of leaving. It also means that any Krogan on Earth, should there be any females, will massively overpopulate and probably end up fighting with everyone else. Wrex is also stuck on Earth, so even if he can keep them safe, he can't guide the Krogan back home to not go crazy and nuke each other to death. Making the geth a real intelligent race is completely moot if you picked destroy, seeing as how you commit genocide in doing so.

It's not a matter of the end not being good enough. It's a matter of the end being so actively terrible that it makes almost every decision you made entirely loving pointless.

Slim Killington posted:

Anything you could ever do is going to be moot. The galaxy is hosed one way or the other, and you're complaining about the flavor of the loving. It doesn't matter what happens to everyone. poo poo starts over from scratch in literally every scenario, so it doesn't loving matter. At all.

What matters is what Shepard experienced. It's the story of Shepard's experiences. At that last decision, the story is over. Everything goes back to square one for the galaxy one way or the other.

I said come in! posted:

That is super weird to me, I feel like no matter what, another cutscene should have played. All I got was the Normady on that jungle planet, a door opens and then the credits. After that, it's some old guy talking to a kid.

Slim Killington posted:

I remember the scene you're talking about, and it doesn't really infer that anyone dies. People scatter from an explosion, but that's it. There's nothing written in that scene that says "EVERYONE HERE IS NOW DEAD OKAY GO AHEAD INTO THE BIG LIGHT BEAM"

Lloyd Boner posted:

And that's a terrible loving ending!

TheJoker138 posted:

I just finished this, and they say exactly that. You hear everyone's radio chatter asking if there were any survivors, and the response being no, everyone is dead. So yeah, they do say that everyone there is dead, so it makes even less sense for my dead crew members to be on the normandy with Joker.

DarkHamsterlord posted:

I think if your effective war assets are low enough the ending cuts off early?

TheJoker138 posted:

I just finished this, and they say exactly that. You hear everyone's radio chatter asking if there were any survivors, and the response being no, everyone is dead. So yeah, they do say that everyone there is dead, so it makes even less sense for my dead crew members to be on the normandy with Joker.

Nitrousoxide posted:

So why did the two crewmembers I had in my party in the last mission end up on the Normandy. And why the gently caress was it going through a mass relay Weren't they just fighting reapers in orbit?

Also, what the gently caress was up with having a "push button A,B, or C to receive the ending you want."

Like literally NOTHING I did in my past 100 hours or so of game play between the three games mattered in the least at the end here.

I said come in! posted:

God, there was some hilarious poo poo in ME3. I got quite a few laughs out of some of the stuff I encountered. At least Bioware has a sense of humor. The news reporter that is finally ready for your upper punch was pure gold. But she still got her rear end knocked out in the end!

TheJoker138 posted:

I just finished this, and they say exactly that. You hear everyone's radio chatter asking if there were any survivors, and the response being no, everyone is dead. So yeah, they do say that everyone there is dead, so it makes even less sense for my dead crew members to be on the normandy with Joker.

Amateur Saboteur posted:

Anyone else get drunk Tali/Ashley, they were both sufficiently humorous.

Slim Killington posted:

You're entitled to your opinion, but the ending itself as far as the narrative is concerned is perfectly fine.

Amateur Saboteur posted:

Anyone else get drunk Tali/Ashley, they were both sufficiently humorous.

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

Maybe the jungle planet is heaven and the kid is God.

Amateur Saboteur posted:

Anyone else get drunk Tali/Ashley, they were both sufficiently humorous.

Nitrousoxide posted:

But in the synthesis ending it has cyborg plants too, indicating that it was impacted by the pulse from the mass effect relays.

It seems really weird that an after life would be impacted by whatever is running through mass effect relays.


Also, can we talk about the synthesis ending and why it's loving out of nowhere and makes no sense? Why are cyborgs suddenly immune to the whole cycle thing?

Slim Killington posted:

There's a difference between telling you every tiny detail that ever happens with anything ever and denouement. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO EVERY PERSON I EVER MET AND ALL THEIR COUSINS AND poo poo is a little sperglord and I wouldn't expect a writer that wasn't severely pedantic to cater to that need.

ImpAtom posted:

No it isn't.

The primary themes of the Mass Effect universe are focused around the idea that the impossible is possible. It's there from the very beginning. Every time you come up against an impossible situation you can find a way to overcome it. It begins small and grows larger with each passing sequence, but it happens. In ME2 you can finish a literal suicide mission without a single casualty. In ME3, you can bring peace where it seems impossible.

A nihilistic, pointless, "everything is hosed, who cares" ending is actually a complete mess when it comes to the narrative. Instead of a culmination of the themes built up over three games, it ends with you going "Oh, well, I guess it is impossible, let's pick a lovely answer instead."

xeria posted:

I don't think anyone is so much asking for "every tiny detail" as they are asking, "so...uh...what happens to the Sol system now that Shepard's completely disabled every mass relay and stranded a metric fuckton of various alien races inside it?"

ImpAtom posted:

No it isn't.

The primary themes of the Mass Effect universe are focused around the idea that the impossible is possible. It's there from the very beginning. Every time you come up against an impossible situation you can find a way to overcome it. It begins small and grows larger with each passing sequence, but it happens. In ME2 you can finish a literal suicide mission without a single casualty. In ME3, you can bring peace where it seems impossible.

A nihilistic, pointless, "everything is hosed, who cares" ending is actually a complete mess when it comes to the narrative. Instead of a culmination of the themes built up over three games, it ends with you going "Oh, well, I guess it is impossible, let's pick a lovely answer instead."

You can do a game about hard choices and bad answers but Mass Effect is not the franchise. It is a game about telling increasingly large numbers of people that their lovely answers are wrong. Both ME1 and ME3 end with a speech duel where you flat-out get the villain to admit that his "for the greater good" plans are actually dumb and the result of them being controlled and they shoot themselves in the head because of it.

xeria posted:

I don't think anyone is so much asking for "every tiny detail" as they are asking, "so...uh...what happens to the Sol system now that Shepard's completely disabled every mass relay and stranded a metric fuckton of various alien races inside it?"

randombattle posted:

Palleon posted:

The only rationale I could think of is that if we accept the logic of "anything created will eventually turn on its creators", and then decide "everything is the same so there are no creators or createes any more", then everything is fine. And then we ignore the fact that cyborgs can still create things, because he said the issue was with creations, not the fact that one was synthetic and one was organic.

So no, it doesn't make any sense.

Slim Killington posted:

You write a better one then, and let's see if it really satisfies the expectations of everyone that experienced this story.

Amateur Saboteur posted:

I just had a sudden flashback to reading the epilogue of the last "The Dark Tower" novel where Stephen King basically writes "well, I couldn't think of a good ending so well here ya go, but reading the books up to here was pretty sweet right?".

Slim Killington posted:

You write a better one then, and let's see if it really satisfies the expectations of everyone that experienced this story.

The primary theme of the story is self-sacrifice for the greater good, to the point where you can't even make renegade self-preservationist decisions because later plot events will just undo them. You can't instate a human council despite trying, the series just gives you more random aliens. The (perceived) impossible being possible isn't a theme at all, it's a device to control the interest of the audience. Even if it were a them, the endings you hate so much still would satisfy it's development.

RedneckwithGuns posted:

No matter how god awful the endings are, if I forget they ever happened nothing can take away the fact that I made peace between the Quarians and Geth. That whole sequence of Legion sacrificing himself to give the Geth individuality and then peace with the Quarians was the high point of the entire game to me.

I'll miss you bro-bot