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Monday, March 4, 2013

My opinion of the new and old ending of Mass Effect 3

Since I finished playing Mass Effect with its original ending and then found out about the "revised" version, I figured I might want to address the new ending in a new post.
I posted my experience of the original already in an earlier post so this one will just cover the new ending.

So now we have 4 different endings.
When I started replaying the end scene after I had talked with the catalyst, I was so mad at it for still forcing me to make a decision, I just shot at it and I discovered the ending where you make no decision.  It got pissed off and said the cycle would continue and that was it.

Then I re-picked my original choice of synthesis and saw all the added stuff....The relays not completely blowing up, extended scenes of my crew mourning my death, the Earth being saved, planets get rebuilt, people live, etc. etc.
If you've played the game or done any research you'll see the original 3 endings of destroy, synthesis, and controlling the reapers have been "updated" a bit.  What I was missing was the original beauty of the first endings.  I know a lot of people were mad over them, but what they had, the rewrites were missing, and that's emotion, beauty, and an artistic heartbreaking end.

Video games now-a-days, can be just like movies.  Just as entertaining as movies, with either just as good a script, or in this game's case, even a better script than most movies.  What I loved about the entire series, is the writing, the characters, the fantastic story, and the original ending did not let me down in those cases.  Sure I was disappointed that it was over, only because  I never wanted it to end at all.  I wasn't mad at the ending itself, in fact, the music, the cinematography, the quiet and stillness of a dialogue-less ending in the last few minutes was so emotional for me, I just cried.

The utter braveness of the Commander not just stepping into her/his fate, but in my case, running into the beam of energy with all the strength she had left, knowing this would give the galaxy peace, finally, it was so emotional.  I still think about it sometimes and it makes me tear up, it was really well done and beautiful in my opinion.

When a story ends, you have to accept it, the way it was written.  It pissed me off that "fans" demanded that that was not the ending, that it be changed.  No one does that with books, or movies, or tv shows....Once it's done, it's done and BioWare was actually really generous trying to go back and give the bitching "fans" some more explanation.

Good stories, don't tell you everything, they let you discover what the ends means to you, personally.  How you interpret it, is up to you, and there's nothing wrong with that.  Maybe for people who can't think critically, or think for themselves and need to be told every last detail had problems with the original ending, but I didn't.  I really enjoyed it and thought it was perfect the way it was.  It was tragic, and heroic, sad and beautiful all at the same time.  It gave me a real feeling, an experience, it wasn't just a video game by the end, it was an adventure that was personal to me all the way through to the very end, and it was great ride.

It's the best damn video game I have ever played, and probably always will be.
For me it was perfect the way it originally ended and that was all I needed.

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