starcraft said:
It was not a bad game, it was a brilliant game. I liked it better than Mass Effect 2.
In my opinion, people who feel the ending was inappropriate have never thought things through. *MAJOR SPOILERS FOR REST OF POST*
The whole series the Reaper threat was slated as being unassailable and overwhelming. It should have surprised no one that the vast majority of endings were negative. It should have surprised no one that the actions we took leading to these endings were, by-and-large, futile. Hell, the whole second game was devoted to something called a suicide mission.
Something that certain gamers have decried as an error of narrative – namely that a series about choice wound up having broadly similar (and devastating) endings – was in fact a masterpiece. Ultimately, the game delivered what the franchise had always promised – significant limitations on the ability of humans and other species to impact change on the universe around them. It made complete sense, and was not a departure from the existing narrative at all. People are just so used to Hollywood endings in their video games (excepting the obligatory sad death of one or two characters 20 minutes before the ending, or to spur a revenge plot) that they couldn’t fathom that a franchise would actually end the way it had been implying it would end all along.
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Except, the story wasn't like that... at all...
You mention the that the second game was devoted to something called a suicide mission, but how did that turn out? If you played your cards right, you could *spoilers of course* save every single member of your party. You're told throughout the whole game that there is NOTHING you can do to survive this, but you (if you spend the time) prove them wrong. That doesn't demonstrate bleak nihilism, but the exact opposite. That's a message of hope and empowerment if I ever saw one.
Among the course of the games, you are able to save the Citadel from destruction, convince Saren to kill himself, save the Rachni species from extinction, survive a suicide mission against overwhelming odds, stop a centuries long was between quarians and geth, save a planet (well moon) from reaper infestation, restore the Krogan race, and so on so forth.
I don't know where you're coming up with this idea that you have limited control over the universe. Commander Shepard is specifically resurrected because he happens to be so damn special. Among the billions of humans, his remains were plucked from space because he as an individual was that important. And throughout the games, he and his crew are able to practically work miracles. This isn't Bioshock we're talking about. There are no shackles on Shepard's wrists. There is nothing in the first two games that indicates that your efforts are futile and meaningless.
And from a gameplay perspective as well, it was never implied that your actions were futile. You are encouraged to carry over a file through three games. Characters in the second game (like the rachni queen) pop up to say "hey remember me from before? There's a payoff to this, I promise." Reporters grill you about your decision to let the Ascension live or die. The gameplay promises at every turn what you do matters. And then it doesn't.
Aside from that, the ending just kind of sucks. Keep in mind, the OP played the extended cut which at least sucked less. There was little explanation for the literal deus ex machina at the end of the game. The starkid insists that the whole point of this is an inevitable war between synthetics and organics, but that plot point had been on the backburner since Me1. And, the game shows that you can make peace, and that the Geth are basically space Ghandi anyway. The endings are not just all terrible, but all the same. Except in one ending, everyone is robots at the end which is the stupidest shit in the world. Space radiation just made everyone a robot? The fuck?
And what the game promises above all else is explanation. This is a game where even the most minute things are explained with excrutiating detail. This wasn't being john malkovich, or serial experiments, or lost where everything is super vague and mysterious. Until the very last moment, everything is explained as clearly and meticulously as possible. Then at the last moment, your crew is thrown on a random planet, people you saw die were alive, buzz aldrin is talking to his kid, and everything is all wtf. You can't have such a dramatic tonal shift in the last five minutes.
To OP. Basically, it's like this. Imagine you have a wonderful date with the most beautiful girl (or guy) you've ever met. You spend the whole night in a dizzying state of euphoria. At the end of the night, you lean in for a kiss, and then, she stabs you in the scrotum. Sure the date was fine up to the last five minutes, but you'll probably be more focused on the whole scrotum stabbing thing.
