I barely play games other than
chess nowadays (and I'm terrible at that too), but apart from Freespace, there's another series of games I go back to from time to time, and that's the Mass Effect's trilogy. I've been doing a playthrough for the past
year and a half of it (yeah, barely a few hours per month), and just finished it again last week. I have some thoughts about it. Now they may well be dumb or late or both, but I wanted to put them in writing, as a closure for my thoughts.
But first, a slight detoured context. The last playthrough I made in this game, I had botched the story somewhat and when I reached the Geth / Quarian battle, I couldn't save them all. I ended up saving the Geth insteead. This had several repercussions in my story when I finished the game. First, I wasn't given the Synthesis choice, and second, I couldn't see the
Control choice as a "renegade" choice and
Destroy as "paragon" at all.
Now before you all tell me this is patently obvious, let me remind you that it wasn't and still isn't. If you search this on the web, it's almost
consensual that these choices were to be regarded as such. This is obviously ridiculous if you think about it for a second. The visual design even indicates as much by portraying Anderson's choice as "red" and Harper's choice as "blue", contradicting the obvious reading. But from my playthrough, Destroy would mean a new Genocide of an entire species and the murder of a crew member. All of which without even attempting to solve the biggest problem of a new eventual AI supremacy. It's like a Thanos solution, equally cruel and barely delaying the problem it's trying to solve. With Control, I would be having the galazy ruled by an unquestionable supreme leader and an abominable fleet. A tyrannical solution at best. Not the ideal thing, but an incredible deal. In return, I wouldn't commit genocide, everyone would be saved from extinction, and we'd all have an incredible firepower against a future AI insurrection, if needed. AI Shepard's speech was also so badass that I had deemed this the best solution at the time, by far. Soberly dark, but workable.
But in this latest run, all was different. Apparently I had done everything well, and I could save both the Quarian and the Geth, so I did. I decided at that point that Control was going to be my choice, in order to save both species. But when I reached the Citadel at the end, AIboy bullied me into accepting the marvelous unprecedented solution that was Synthesis. And so I did.
And I realised something. One very common criticism against Mass Effect's ending was that it came out of nowhere
and it was actually against its own themes. How could StarChild be correct in stating that AI and Organics could never cooperate
when we were able to do just that in a previous mission and save both? But here's the thing: He is
contextually correct. If you are unable to save them both, you will just have sufficient war assets to have either the Control or Destroy ending. He's correct in that timeline: you saw it yourself, you can't save them both. But, if you are actually able to save them both, you are given another choice:
Synthesis, and with this the game is rewarding your ability to make both Organics and Synthetics to come together, by presenting
exactly that as the solution in a more general way.
I know this didn't work like that when the game came out initially, but this is how it works now.
And it worked for me. More than that, it established a new thing in my head: the endings are not equivalent, they should have never been rendered in equivalent colors (RGB?), but rather in something that would make reality more clear: these are laddered choices. Destroy is clearly worse than Control, which is clearly worse than Synthesis. War Assets mechanics make this as clear as day, but the presentation introduces a certain amount of ambiguity. These aren't "real" choices. The real choices are the ones you did throughout the games, did you save the Rachni? Did you save Wrex? Did the Quarians or the Geth survive? Did you cure the Genophage? What kind of world will there be after all of this?
All in all, I'm fond of the endings now. They are almost perfectly executed (except a detail here and there, TIM's presence in the citadel probably the worst) and fit the thematics well. Maybe it's the Quarantine's madness talking, or maybe I just have lowered my expectations following how Star Wars' closure went. You know, watching
that really put things into perspective to me. But I like the endings now, and I can finally say that this trilogy is whole, complete and Good.
e: I also thought about actual sequels to these games, and I think I had a neat idea about them. I will write about that eventually.
