Well as mentioned last week here's the long awaited (?!?) evaluation of the 'Mass Effect 3' storyline. Sort of. I say that because the more I thought about it the more I realized that my issue with the game unlike the many others who've complained about it isn't rooted in the ending. Sure, as you may have heard, the ending is more than a tad bit disappointing but a lot of the issues with it can be seen coming based on earlier events of the series. OK, so that isn't totally true the part of the endgame for 'ME3' where it basically comes down to push button receive ending can piss off. That sort of mechanic has no place in anything resembling open ended gameplay gaming and feels like a rush job. That said from an actual story perspective as already mentioned the seeds for these issues where sown very early in the series.
Alright before I get any further I should probably explain the Reapers. In the 'Mass Effect' universe the Reapers are giant sentient spaceships who appear every 50,000 years, destroy/harvest advanced civilizations and then leave. There are a lot of them. They are hard to destroy. They can subtly control peoples minds. That's probably enough of a guideline to get a feel for the threat that they pose within this particular setting.
Hopefully you've now got something of an idea of what the villains of the series are like. If not (and even if you do) I encourage you to watch this video from near the end of the first game of the series. This video is the players first and only interaction with Sovereign, the sole Reaper encountered during the first game. During this conversation, in between giving some pretty badass one liners, Sovereign, from a writing perspective, by my count gives no fewer than four complete cop out answers when queried about the Reapers creation, purpose, motivations, etc. This is not so good. There are times when a character gives ambiguous answers because the writer wants them to play coy about something and then there are times when a character gives ambiguous answers because the writer has no idea where they're going with something. This conversation falls squarely into the “no idea” category and at the time it occurred (late in the first game of a planned trilogy) it wasn't an issue. However once we've gotten to the third game it has become an issue and without giving too much of a spoiler let's just say that the eventual explanation is...lacking.
Alright that's my only complaint about the ending. The other issue I have with the series' writing is a little more...pervasive...I guess that's the right word. If you clicked on the link above and then clicked around a bit you probably saw a video or two showing the ending of 'Mass Effect'. An epic space battle with the combined human, lizard people and blue women fleets shooting at a really big ship being escorted by lots and lots of smaller ships (these ships belonging to a machine race that allied themselves with Sovereign). Good times. Or not. See in the first game to destroy a single Reaper is portrayed as being incredibly difficult and, according to Sovereign, there are enough of them to darken the skies of every planet. Houston we have a problem. How do you stop that?
Now before I answer that I'd like to direct you to the Wikipedia page for Galactus, a godlike being from the Marvel comics universe. His deal is that he's extremely powerful and likes to eat planets. Starting to sounds kind of familiar? Reading some of the quotes from those who created him it becomes clear that Galactus and similarly designed foes ***cough*** Reapers ***cough*** are a sort of end game for raising the stakes. The hero is powerful so an even more powerful villain is introduced so the hero levels up (or whatever) and defeats the villain repeat until your hero character is essentially fighting a god. Well that's a problem. We can't have our hero characters ascend to a godlike status or their heroing stuff is no longer compelling as it should, in theory, be too easy and I swear that there's a point to all of this. What it comes down to is that the writer needs to have way for the hero to defeat someone much more powerful than themselves without becoming as powerful as the thing they're fighting. Without going into too much detail of Galactus' origins/back story* one of the ways in which he is defeated is the Ultimate Nullifier, a massive writing cop out if ever there was one. How do we destroy a god? Why a weapon whose sole purpose is to destroy gods of course (this is the simple version of how all this crap goes down). How this relates to 'Mass Effect' is that from the first game onwards, given the difficulty as mentioned that destroying a single Reaper presents, I was very worried that a similar McGuffin would get pulled out of the writers collective asses when it came time to wipe out the Reapers. Again minor spoiler, it turned out that I was more or less correct. Really? You had ~4 years from when the first game came out to when the third game wrapped things up to come up with a plausible solution to this problem and an Ultimate Nullifier analog was the best that you could come up with? Bleh.
Yup, not super happy with how that turned out. It's even more frustrating when you think about the fact that this was (I believe) planned as a trilogy from the start meaning that there really should have been a greater degree of foresight with regards to how things eventually get revealed and/or solved. But no. Not even close. Oh well. See you all next week.
*Not going into any comic book characters origin/back story as any character that's been around for a while tends to have a very convoluted and often contradictory history having likely been written by dozens of different people over the years, each one with slightly different idea of how to write the property. Galactus, having been created ~50 years ago, has a back story that reads like a continuity directors worst nightmare.
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