Antony
(Still) On 13 week vacation
Posts: 10,289
Well, Bioware has finally pissed me off. What kind of bull**** is this?
I'm going to put my rant in spoiler tags, because I'm going to discuss details of the ending(s).
So, there are three different ways to end the game. The way this works is absolutely ****ing stupid. As you progress through the game, you get "war assets" for completing various missions, or scanning certain planets. These war assets are assigned a number to determine their value in the endgame fight. The numbers assigned to your war assets total into your "Total Military Strength". Then there's the "Readiness Rating", which is a percentage of, I don't know, how ready you are. I'm not sure what it's really supposed to mean, but it's obvious that it's some dirty **** that Bioware is saddling us with. So your TMS is multiplied by your Readiness Rating, and that's how you get your "Effective Military Strength". Now, you have to have an Effective Military Strength of at least 4000 for commander Shepard to survive the end of the game, which is literally impossible to get unless you play the multiplayer quite a bit, because in single player your Readiness Rating can not go above 50%. The only way to get it above that is to play multiplayer. Furthermore, the "readiness" that you pick up by doing multiplayer is map specific, so you have to do all kinds of different maps online to raise the readiness in each part of the galaxy, and it ****ing deteriorates over time, so unless you play it often, you're wasting your time.
Now, all of that aside, I'm not done *****ing, because none of the endings are what you would consider "good" at all. The first gives you the option to destroy the Reapers, but in order to do so you have to wipe out all synthetic life in the galaxy, including your newfound friends the Geth, and your pilot's robot girlfriend EDI, so if you pick that, you're a dick. Oh, and that's the only option you have if you want Shepard to survive. The second option is to take control of the Reapers, which kills Shepard. The third option is to somehow bind all organic and synthetic life together, making everything a hybrid of the two. This option also kills Shepard. Now, after whichever of those you pick, when you fire the superweapon you've made using the Citadel, it destroys the Mass Relays, and you see the Normandy crash-land on an Earth-like planet, and the crew (whoever is left) walks out. This poses a few serious problems for me. First of all, the entire crew (sans Joker) was on Earth during the final battle. How the hell did they get back to the ship before all this **** went off? This isn't Star Trek. Nobody beamed them to the ship (although some beaming does take place, just no one on the ship). It doesn't make any sense. Second of all, no matter what, they're stuck there. Are we to believe that these 6 or so people of various species are going to produce a new society or something? Not to mention with the Mass Relays destroyed, damned near every warrior in the galaxy is stuck on Earth with no way home. And even if you do get the "Shepard survives" ending, you get nothing to really signify it. They just explain that you'll survive the process. You don't see Shepard back on Earth rebuilding or hanging out with any romance interest. There's no closure at all. Joker and co. are stuck on an Earth-like planet... and we have no idea what happened to anyone else. You get to talk to everyone before the final battle, and that's it. Once again: NO CLOSURE AT ALL.
But none of that **** matters, because after the credits we find out that it's being told as a bed-time story. Seriously.
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