(upbeat music)
- Ayo, what up guys?
Kris here and today we're hopping back
through the mass relay to talk about one
of the most divisive endings in video game history.
The mass effect trilogy is up there
with Lost and Game of Thrones
in terms of beloved stories with massively panned finales.
So naturally I'm going to defend it.
Something I certainly will not regret.
Just kidding.
I'm already filled with regret,
but let's soldier on with this Wisecrack edition
in defense of Mass Effect.
And as always, spoilers ahead for the Mass Effect Trilogy.
But before we get into it, I wanted to take a second,
and tell you about Wisecrack's movie podcast:
Show Me the Meaning.
It's hosted by Raymond, Austin and Ryan,
and has everything you already love about our videos
but with a lot more time to dive into
the deep end of film fandom.
It covers everything from award-winning films
to old school favorites and under appreciated cult classics.
And of course, video game adaptations
like the recent episode on Mortal Combat,
which was well...
you can check out the episode for our take.
We stream live here on the Wisecrack channel
and if you ever miss a stream,
you can check them out later on our Wisecast channel,
linked in the description below.
Check out Show Me the Meaning on our Wisecast channel,
iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
While you're there, feel free to rate and leave a review.
Now back to the show!
Let's start with the reason people were so upset
at Mass Effect's ending.
The whole franchise is built on the idea of choice,
choices that ripple through success of games
shaping the world and narrative.
So when players, who had been building their own
little universes of stack decisions, got to the finale
they were a little shocked
because none of it seemed to matter
unless, well it did?
Before we can figure out if the game completely
abandoned its central premise,
let's do a brief overview.
Set in 2183, Mass Effect tells the story
of elite soldier, Commander Shepard
and their quest to keep the galaxy safe.
Thanks to a series of massive devices
seemingly left behind by a now defunct civilization
called the Protheans,
people in Shepherd's time can travel
all around the Milky way in the blink of an eye.
Humanity is also in contact
with many other sentience species who they now
live alongside in relative harmony.
Now, you might be wondering: what happened
to Protheans themselves?
If they were so smart, how come they're so dead?
- This bunker might've been the last refuge
of their entire species.
- Well, Shepard's journey quickly arrives
at an unsettling answer to that question
in the form of the Reapers, a race of synthetic beings
who basically turn up every 50,000 years
and wipe out all of the galaxy's most evolved life forms.
Each of the three games sees Shepherd going
from planet to planet, learning more about the reapers
and assembling allies to stop the galactic cycle
of extermination.
Throughout each journey. a huge emphasis is placed
on the choices that the player makes.
After designing their own Shepherd's appearance
and abilities.
The player will quickly find themselves drawn
to the internal conflicts of the various planets they visit.
How they handle these situations often
has a big impact on how the story plays out.
Characters and even entire races live and die
depending on where the Shepherd acts as a principle paragon
or an ends-justify-the-means renegade.
Many of these consequences carry over
from one game to the next,
making them feel even more impactful.
- We owe you that much, after all,
you saved our lives in the battle
against Saren and his Geth.
- The choices often involve the crew mates
you recruit along the way by spending time with them
and helping them complete their own personally
motivated side missions,
you can earn their respect and loyalty,
or you can rule with an iron fist
and go around punching people in the face
when they disagree with you.
- I've had enough of your disingenuous assertions.
- And how you relate to those around you,
can literally become a matter of life and death.
For example, Mass Effect 2, ends with the
so-called suicide mission where you can kill
off your entire crew,
but if you've developed strong enough bonds,
and if you plan out the attack correctly,
they can all make it through unscathed.
Other choices, take place on a much larger scale.
Like when you find yourself in the middle
of an ongoing conflict between the technologically advanced
but biologically delicate Quarian race
and they're resentful, robotic offspring: the Geth.
Shepherd can opt to pick a side in the battle
so that one race joins him or the other is annihilated.
But if you're more diplomatic,
and less cool with the whole space genocide thing,
you can also help negotiate a peaceful resolution.
In either case though, the outcome hinges on a combination
of the player's skill and morality.
- I'd have killed the Geths with no regrets,
and I'd have been wrong.
Thank you.
- In some ways, this isn't that unusual.
You have a great hero whose actions can make
or break the fate of billions.
Trillions?
You get the idea, but it also hints
at larger questions about the nature of free will.
That is, individual human actions, in this case made by you
the player, are not destined, but chosen.
The universe is not fated to happen one way or another
because it's full of people like you who have free will.
And this is why so many felt burned
at the end of Mass Effect three,
when they were left with just a handful
of predetermined choices.
But this didn't necessarily come out of nowhere
because even before the finale, the game was complicating
the idea that our choices can make us master the universe.
From the very first game, it continually puts the player
into situations where they have to choose
between two bad options.
The battle at the end of the first game forces you to pick
between two human crew mates, Kayden and Ashley.
Whoever doesn't get the rose, is promptly murdered.
- Suppressing fire! Cover your flank! Cover your-
- Another major plot line, which runs through the games,
is the plight of the Krogans,
a brutal warmongering race who
have been afflicted by genetic disease.
Shepherd has to decide whether to
let the sickness go untreated or to take action
preventing their extinction, but potentially
creating an unstoppable adversary in the future.
Notably, even if you choose
to cure the disease once, and for all,
it still costs at least one, debatable, innocent life.
These moments are all about choice,
but choices that are extremely confined by circumstance.
Each of the first two games ends with the morally
fraught situation where achieving even temporary victory
against the Reapers comes at a heavy cost.
Which brings us to the deeply unpopular ending
of the third game.
If you were part of the crowd that was calling for blood
when this first dropped back in 2012, take a deep breath.
Everything is okay.
You're allowed to dislike things.
You good?
All right.
So here we go.
Shepherd spends the third game uniting races
from around the galaxy into one mighty military force,
ready to square off with the reapers and reclaim the earth.
At the same time, they try to repair a weapon left behind
by the Protheans, called the crucible,
which they believe could be their salvation.
After battling through the war torn streets of London,
a wounded Shepherd finally makes it all the way
to the crucible.
But before they can pull the trigger
on their ancient super weapon, they're confronted
by an artificial intelligence called the Catalyst.
Taking the form of a young boy
that shepherd wasn't able to save,
during the initial Reaper invasion.
Suffice to say that many gamers were not thrilled
by the arrival of the magic space baby.
The Catalyst reveals that it was behind the Reapers
all along.
It claims organic life is inherently
doomed to create the technology that destroys it.
Which is why the Reaper's wipe out
any civilization that gets too advanced,
preserving their DNA,
and leaving less developed lifeforms untouched.
Without this artificial cycle of life,
death and rebirth, all organic life in the galaxy
would eventually be wiped out forever.
Though we've long thought of the Reapers
as the embodiment of death itself,
they're actually revealed to be
on a mission to preserve life at all costs.
But the Catalyst also concedes that Shepherd has won,
and presents them with three choices
of how they can use the crucible to strike the final globe.
Shepherd can carry out the original plan
and use the crucible to wipe the Reapers out altogether,
but this will also destroy all other synthetic life
in the galaxy-
which I mean, bummer!
And of course the catalyst is adamant
that organics will eventually create a new race
of machines to wage war on them anyway.
- Soon your children will create synthetics
and then the chaos will come back.
- Alternatively, you can turn the Reapers
into a police force for the galaxy,
with an AI copy of Shepard at the helm.
This will bring about peace,
but it will also effectively turn shepherd
into an all powerful dictator who no longer
has any connection to organic life.
Finally, they can choose to add their DNA to the crucible
creating a chain reaction, which causes the DNA
of all synthetic and organic life
throughout the galaxy to merge, thus ending the war
perhaps permanently.
Though it does mean forcibly,
rewriting everyone's genetic code,
which is kind of a big deal.
Many players resented this final choice
for a couple of major reasons.
The first is that your final decision largely
overrides everything you did before.
Like curing the genophage, ending the Quarian-Geth war,
saving countless lives and bonding with
all of your teammates.
No matter what you did along the way,
it all boils down to this three-pronged fork in the road.
Secondly, the final outcome is largely the same
no matter what you pick.
You watch shepherd make their choice,
see the crucible do its thing
and then get to enjoy a cut scene
Where members of your crew gaze out across the horizon
at the brave new world you have created.
The color of the explosion is different
depending on what you chose,
and the synthesized ending sees your organic crew mates
sporting weird digital highlights to their bodies,
but side from that, and the implication
that shepherd might have survived in one ending,
the endings are basically the same.
For some, this flew in the face
of everything the series was about:
celebrating freewill as a force
that makes our lives meaningful.
- The defining characteristic of organic life is
that we think for ourselves, make our own choices.
You take that away.
We might as well be machines just like you
- But in truth, Mass Effect always made it clear
that this was no conventional hero narrative.
The consequences of humanity discovering the mass relays
was that it introduced them to a world far greater
and more complex than their own.
Throughout, the galaxy was shown to be far too vast a place,
for any one person's decisions to
ripple all the way through it.
Even a bad-ass space soldier like Shepard
only has a limited ability to guide their own fate.
Let alone that other galaxy at large.
Shepherd might talk to a baby space god.
But there's only so much they can do,
no matter how they got there.
Mass Effect highlights this by punctuating it's heroic tale
with know-in situations that bring the limits
of Shepherd's power into clear focus.
Take the series recurring motif of cycles.
Ultimately Mass Effect is about the endless repetition
of destruction, which organic life appears to be trapped in.
It's a galaxy doomed to eventually return to lifelessness
because organic life will always science itself to death.
The Reapers solve this problem
by creating a smaller cycle of their own.
wiping out one generation of organic life
to protect the next.
And the choices presented to Shepherd at the end
of the third game, represent three alternatives solutions;
either continuing this cycle by killing,
or commanding the reapers, or breaking it
by forcibly harmonizing life across the galaxy.
None of these choices feel great,
but that's kind of the point.
This happens on a smaller level too.
As most of the character's side quests are
about breaking cycles of their own.
Thane is trying to keep his son
from falling down the same path he has.
Tali and Legion are caught in the cycle
of violence between their people, while characters
like Zaeed, are consumed by a quest for vengeance.
And of course, the overarching cycle that the game deals
with is that of life and death.
From the mystery of the Protheans to the return
of the Reapers, Mass Effect revolves around the idea
of old things ending so that new things can begin.
It's the nature of the cosmos
and Shepherd is not immune to it.
Even if they have some say in what comes next.
No matter how tremendous our journey in life might be,
the destination is inevitably the same.
Yes, you can make choices, but
some of these things are simply out of your control.
But just because you can't change everything, doesn't mean
that all of your previous choices were pointless.
To figure out why, we can turn to a philosopher
who was big on endless cycles and fate: Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche wanted people to imagine
that our lives would play on a loop for eternity.
One in which the choices we made, the outcomes they brought,
and our inevitable death were all fated to repeat
again and again.
For some, this would be a literal hell
in which you're haunted by your mistakes forever,
but whether or not we're doomed to repeat our lives
Nietzsche argued that living your life well meant
embracing the idea that it had happened again.
To affirm the choices one has made, is to love one's fate.
What he calls: Amor Fati.
By not allowing our choices to ultimately affect the fate
of the galaxy, Mass Effect leaves us with nothing to do
but look back on the decisions we've made.
And it basically asks us to see those choices
as meaningful in and of themselves rather
than as stepping stones toward an idealized outcome.
It mattered because they involved us making value judgments
about what to protect and what to sacrifice.
They had us balancing principle against pragmatism
the direction of our moral compass
against the rocky terrain we had to travel through.
Our choices act as the external expression
of who we are, a way of imposing yourself
onto the world around us.
This viewpoint is underlined in the short post credit scene
which shows an old man entertaining a young child
with stories about the Shepherd who lived long ago
and fought against the Reapers.
He acknowledges that many of the details have been lost
to time, but what remains is inspiring,
leading the awe stricken kid to ask what they'll find
when they are able to travel out among the stars again.
The story of Shepherd lives on from one cycle to the next,
offering guidance, reassurance and encouragement
to future generations.
Shepherd's fate may ultimately have been bound
by the limitations of the final decision,
but all the choices they made along the way remain
powerful enough to resonate thousands of years
into the future. Perhaps in response to fans, disappointment
with the original endings fatalism, a fourth alternative
was later added.
That seems to indicate that what might feel hopeless
to us can still offer inspiration for future generations.
In this one, Shepherd rejects the Catalyst options,
refuses to use the crucible at all,
and allows the Reapers to complete their invasion.
In the post credit scenes to this ending,
the storyteller explains that a message
left behind by Shepherd's generation, allowed those who came
after them to eventually defeat the Reapers
once and for all.
- They fought a terrible war, so we wouldn't have to.
- A story told by those who came before,
allowed them to survive.
Still, Mass Effect was never going to provide the sort of
total closure that some players wanted.
Its concern, from the very beginning was with cycles rather
than definitive endings.
The conclusion of one battle simply provides the context
for the next.
But rather than rendering the whole journey meaningless,
the finale directs us to look for purpose
in a different way.
In the grand cosmic scheme of things,
our choices don't matter as much as we'd like to
think they do.
But in the moments where we stand by our friends,
or face down injustice, or fight for survival,
then they mean absolutely everything.
But what do you guys think?
Have we changed your mind about the ending?
Or do you wish you had a mass relay to launch us
into the sun with?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks as always to all our Patrons for your support.
Use your freewill to hit that subscribe button
and don't forget to ring the bell.
And as always thanks for watching, peace.
(upbeat music)
(singing) Amor Fanti!
- Very f*cking fantasy video game.
- Sounds like an attack in final fantasy seven
via some kind of a...
healing water Leviathan.