EDIT 12/29/12: I have since revised my opinion of the new Extended Cut ending of ME3. While I still hold true nearly everything I say below, I no longer can say that I think that the ending is, even incompletely, saved. The fact of the matter is that anyone who plays a Paragon Shepard--and let's face it, Renegade Shepard is fun and all, but Paragon is the only real Shepard--is forced by the ending to either invalidate the beliefs that Shepard holds true and sticks by no matter what, or lose. Control is a violation of one of the most important and powerful themes of the entire Mass Effect series, the danger of advancing your technology beyond what your species is mentally ready for, not to mention the hazard of playing with power beyond your ken. The series shows us that this is a bad thing through the history of the Krogan, the corruption of The Illusive Man, and the simple fact that the entire Reaper trap depends on sentient organics using the technologies the Reapers leave behind and thus developing their sciences along the paths the Reapers want--Sovereign himself says this. Synthesis is everything Control is, and worse, as it violates the right of every individual in the galaxy to make decisions for their own body, and depends on the utterly absurd reassurance that everyone in the universe is "ready" for a melding of organic and synthetic life (proven wrong multiple times over with all the anti-Geth prejudice seen many times from many people in the series). Refuse stays true to Shepard's principles, but ends in failure. Finally, Destroy requires the sacrifice of an entire species of life (and a personal friend of Shepard's) to occur, and it's shown many, many times in Mass Effect to be against Shepard's code to sacrifice the innocent to achieve his ends. Whether the Geth and EDI would consent to this sacrifice is irrelevant--they're not informed of it, not given the option to do so, and so the sacrifice is unacceptable to a Paragon Shepard. So, since anyone who looks at Shepard as a hero cannot win the game without destroying that very heroism, I conclude that the Extended Cut does not, in fact, save ME3. It's a vast improvement over what Bioware gave us originally, but it is not enough to make the ending minimally acceptable.
Anyway, for what it's worth, the actual rant is still below.
Well, 2 days ago it happened. Bioware released the Extended Cut, a free DLC package for Mass Effect 3 that modified the ending of the game to pacify the rage of the vast majority of its fanbase whose reactions were measurable. I, like so many others, spoke about why I hated the game’s ending so passionately, a rant which you can find here fairly easily. And as I did when Fallout 3’s ending was amended, I’m here today to pay penance for my words.
Or am I?
Well, maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. Let’s look at my complaints and see if Bioware actually has earned my apology (not to mention my future business). Let’s list’em out and see how the new ending material does. I’m going to assume that you read the rant on ME3’s ending’s problems, so here I’m not going to explain out the problems I wrote about in that rant, just restate them and consider whether they were addressed.
Additionally, the following basically assumes the best possible scenario of each ending (AKA, that the player has a high enough EMS rating at the game’s end to access the best version of the ending).
And because I’m tired of doing so, I’m just going to stop referring to Shepard as he/she here. My Shepard is a guy, and it makes slightly more sense for him to be (see another previous rant). You want a female Shepard, that’s fine, I’m happy you like inferior vocal work, but the inconvenience of writing it out all the time is annoying me, so you’ll just have to deal with my preferences for my rant.
And finally, as last time, major spoiler alert here. Should be obvious, really, but...
The Small Stuff
- Shepard Dies
Well, this hasn’t really changed all that much. Shepard’s death remains the same in the Synthesis ending. His consciousness DOES live on in the new version of the Control ending, which is actually not so bad, I suppose, but I’m not sure I can really count it, because...well, living on as the Reapers isn’t exactly the living I think most of us would have wanted for Shepard. I was kinda thinking more along the lines of him settling down with his love interest, retiring to the beach Garrus spoke of, meeting Jacob and Kasumi and several other friends for victory drinks, leading reconstruction efforts, and so on. And the Destroy option’s ending has the same thing as before, just the stupid second of Shepard breathing--the only difference is that his crew seems to have some idea that he’s not dead in that one, as the game doesn’t actually show them putting Shepard’s name on the memorial plaque. But there’s nothing more substantial there than before. So in the end, this issue has been made very, very slightly better, but not enough that it’s solved.
- Shepard’s Destroy Ending “Death” Doesn’t Make Sense
Unaddressed. No more information is given than before to explain why the Reaper-destroying energy will also target Shepard as a potential synthetic being.
- The Catalyst Hologram Kid Feels Out of the Game’s Context
The extra options for explanation of the situation with the Catalyst helps a little to make it seem less random, but ultimately, this entire thing still feels like it’s from a completely different science fiction story. The Catalyst, the truth of the Reapers, the choices offered, it all still feels like someone very ineptly attempting to force some Isaac Asimov into their Star Wars.
- The Normandy’s Escape
Completely and adequately addressed now. Admiral Hackett gives the order for them to pull out, the Normandy’s not the only ship escaping, and it can leave the planet it lands on, so if Destroy Ending Shepard does live and all, he can potentially reunite with his crew. Why Hackett orders a retreat right then is somewhat questionable, I guess, but not so much that it’s a plot hole, so this one is fixed.
About time something was.
- Magic Green Space Energy Makes No Goddamn Sense
Yeah, the Synthesis ending still is silly and stupid. Oh, the new ending content adds an extra line or 2 and a visual trying to give it some meaning, but it fails, and the whole thing still makes absolutely no sense and is entirely unbelievable still.
- Synthesis is a Dick Move on Shepard’s Part
This is sort of better now and sort of not. Shepard is still intimately violating an entire universe of life by forcefully changing their bodies without their consent or foreknowledge. The line of dialogue the Catalyst says about organic life being ready for it now should be disregarded as meaningless tripe, as we’ve not seen any indication that the people of the Mass Effect universe are any more intellectually enlightened than people of our own time, and thus we can quite safely assume that a huge number of people in the ME universe would NOT want to be an inexplicable mix of organic and synthetic since a huge number of people from our own reality would not want it. I wouldn’t even buy that “ready for it” explanation if we were using an intellectually enlightened future culture like how humanity is portrayed in Star Trek, and that’s not the case with the populace of Mass Effect.
On the other hand, the new ending content makes it very clear that the people of the galaxy do benefit from the Synthesis ending option, using the accumulated culture and knowledge of all cycles’ species to usher in a new golden age of the galaxy. Everyone seems plenty pleased about it from what we can see. So...I don’t know. I guess I have to let this one go now. I still think it’s wrong to have one person make a decision like this without the consent of the people affected forever, but the smiling, happy pictures and words afterwards say it was good, so...guess Bioware successfully sidestepped this one.
Alright, so we’ve had a few improvements to the minor issues here, but most of them are still as problematic as ever. But hey, these ARE the minor problems. So long as all the big stuff’s taken care of, this is easily forgiven.
But WERE the major issues addressed?
Serious Problems
- Incorrect Colors Associated with Control and Destroy
Yeah, this one wasn’t fixed at all. I really don’t care how nice and happy everything with Control is in the end. You don’t associate the option the villain, The Illusive Man, chooses with the color symbolic of virtue in Mass Effect. And you don’t associate the option chosen by Anderson, the perpetually heroic supporter of Shepard, with the color symbolic of being a Machiavellian jerkwad in Mass Effect. I understand that the Control ending is now shown to actually, really be a good and safe option, but you know what? It’s STILL what the Illusive Man would have chosen, it STILL correlates with previous choices in the ME series given the red Renegade color, IT STILL SHOULD BE RED.
- The Destroy Ending, Which Regardless of Color is Most in Accordance with Paragon Principles, Kills EDI and the Geth
Well...the Destroy ending still is said to kill EDI and the Geth. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that now, thanks to the Extended Cut’s content showing what happens after Shepard’s choice is made, we can see that the Control ending really ends up being a viable option for a Paragon player. We’re given solid evidence that it works as intended, and that everyone benefits from Shepard’s control of the Reapers, without having to resort to ridiculous, idiotic Synthesis Space Magic* OR killing the Geth and EDI. So, since I think Paragon players now have a halfway viable ending alternative to the Destroy ending, I’ll let this one go.
- EDI and the Geth Prove the Catalyst Wrong
Bioware TRIES to address this with the new content. They come up with this cockamamie explanation that the evolution of organic culture and synthetic consciousness inevitably leads them to conflict as those paths clash with one another. It’s one of the more ridiculous piles of rubbish I’ve heard in my time, and while it attempts to engulf the actions and personalities of EDI and the Geth in its explanation, ultimately it still fails to address the fact that for all intents and purposes, the peace between the Geth and the Quarians, and the strong emotional attachment EDI feels toward her crew, Joker in particular, proves that peaceful coexistence between synthetic and organic life is possible. Is it possible that conflict will arise at a later date between them? Certainly, but then, that’s a possibility between ALL thinking, free-willed peoples, now isn’t it? The important thing is that EDI and the Geth prove that peace IS possible, and so long as it is a possibility, the Catalyst’s belief that conflict between organics and synthetics is inevitable and permanent is, simply and emphatically, WRONG.
- The Cast and Events of the Game Are Not Adequately Depicted
This one is mostly addressed. I mean, a lot of the major war assets gathered during the game still aren’t properly depicted (STILL we see NOTHING of the Rachni, for example), but there is a bit more to the ending content now that does show scenes of the major characters of the series, and some of the major races and their battle against the Reapers, as well as how things go (at least a little) for several of the major characters of the series. Could’ve been a lot more and a lot better, but it’s there now, at least This one’s taken care of.
- Beating Saren was Pointless
Well, I suppose on the technical level, this one actually was subtly addressed. The Catalyst does make a comment that he’d tried previously to merge synthetic and organic life, but it never worked out, and was now an option only because of the Crucible and Shepard’s presence. I suppose this means that even if Saren’s dream of doing so had been something the Reapers would be down for (and it’s always been implied that it was just their way of dangling a carrot in front of his indoctrinated nose), they couldn’t have until now anyway, so defeating him was still necessary. From a thematic point of view, though, this is still just as big a problem as ever. If Shepard chooses Synthesis, it’s still basically saying that Saren’s belief, goal, and dream, at least, were acceptable and apparently, in Shepard’s opinion, right. Which still makes resisting Saren in the first game pointless. This one’s still a problem.
- Synthesis Doesn’t Actually Solve the Catalyst’s Problem
Still completely unaddressed. Unless the Green Space Magic also turns every atom of metal in the galaxy part organic, there’s still nothing to stop the new organic-synthetic hybrid life from creating fully synthetic life all over again, and to stop that life from going down the developmental path that the Catalyst says leads to conflict.
Uh...okay...a couple of the major flaws with the ending are fixed now...but most of the ones I listed above are still open, festering wounds in the game’s story. Not good. Still...we haven’t gotten to the biggest problems yet. Even with as many problems remain in the ending that I’ve listed, they only make it a bad ending, not an intolerable, godawful mess. If the following issues, the biggest ones, are solved by the new ending content, I can at least accept ME3’s endings, tolerate them, even though they’re bad. Let’s move on to the most important stuff.
Inspire Nigh-Universal Disappointment and Rage Problems
- The Ending Goes Against Everything Shepard Stands For
Mostly addressed. Unfortunately, Shepard does not argue properly against the Catalyst (he should have mentioned a lot of the stuff you’ve read above), but he at least is asking questions now, at least is able to argue a little with the Catalyst thanks to the new content. And more importantly, a fourth option was added: the option to refuse the Catalyst’s choices. Shepard can refuse to take the options presented by the Catalyst (or even attempt to shoot him), insisting that he and the races of the galaxy will fight the Catalyst on their own terms, and if necessary, die free rather than compromise. Sadly, this WILL be the doom of all the current major intelligent species of the galaxy--but the important thing is that there’s at least the option for Shepard to refuse. I do hate to give Bioware the point on this one because the Refusal ending SHOULD have had a possibility of defeating the Reapers (that’s the POINT, that Shepard can fight on his own terms and WIN), but...the basics are there, the option to throw the Catalyst’s stupid choices back in his face and have Shepard give a speech. And even in the defeat, there’s victory of sorts, for it’s shown after the credits for the Refusal ending that though humanity and its allies failed to beat the Reapers, the information they left for the next cycle’s species allowed THEM to defeat the Reapers once and for all. I have to admit, I’m way more okay with the idea of the galaxy’s people going the way of the Protheans, saving those of the future even though they could not save themselves, than I am with the foolish, inherently racist, and absolutely ridiculous concepts behind the Synthesis ending. Hilariously, Refusal, the ending that Bioware clearly considers the worst option, the “Bad Ending,” is STILL far superior to the ending that Bioware wants so hard to convince us is the best one.
But anyways, yes. This issue has been addressed adequately, if not in the way I would have preferred.
- The Endings are Basically the Same and Thus Player Choice Means Nothing
Addressed. While the endings (besides Refusal) are almost all still fairly similar, sharing structure and several cinematics, there are enough differences to them now that you can feel that you did, in fact, get a significantly different ending for each ending option. This is accomplished mostly through the narrative of Hackett, Shepard, or EDI (depending on which ending was chosen), but there’s nonetheless a goodly amount of differences in the FMV and presented cinematics that it’s no longer just 1 ending in 3 different colors. And hey, Refusal may be the short “Bad Ending,” but it’s nonetheless very different than the other endings, so the variety is there. In addition, smaller player choices are also reflected more adequately in the endings, with many small differences shown depending on who Shepard’s love interest is, who died in the course of the game, decisions made with party members throughout the series, and how Shepard handled the major plot events of the Genophage and war for Rannoch. I think that player choice has been adequately represented with the new content.
- The Ending Says That Differences Inevitably Result in Conflict
Well, it’s sort of addressed, but sort of not. By going into more detail about why, exactly, synthetics are supposedly fated to rise against their creators, the Catalyst actually makes it out less to be a case of differences inherently leading to conflict, and more to be a case of the general psychological development of synthetics inherently leading to conflict. While I wouldn’t say that’s any less illogical and silly than before, it at least is less easily turned into an argument for destroying those who are different. On the other hand, the Synthesis ending is still presented to be the ideal solution to this problem. So it’s still basically saying that the best way to avoid conflict is to make everyone the same. Still...still, I suppose the major problem I had here was that the conflict itself seemed rooted in the idea that physical and cultural differences between 2 individuals makes peace impossible (and the idea that Shepard wouldn’t speak up against this foolishness), and that much has been addressed by refining the problem to a question of how synthetic life desires to evolve. The new question is, again, somewhat illogical and silly, but it’s not thematically repulsive any longer, so...I guess I’ll let Bioware have this one.
- The Mass Relays are Destroyed
Addressed. Destroy, Control, or Synthesis, all say or show that the Mass Relays can and will be repaired, and so, galactic society and Shepard’s works are preserved. Probably some people will still have died before the relays are repaired (particularly in the Destroy ending), but all in all, this complaint, the biggest I had, is completely corrected.
Hm. Well, thankfully, we had some better luck with this round. While not always doing so wonderfully, Bioware did manage to fix all of these tremendously important points with their new content.
So, in the end, is it enough? Does the Extended Cut save Mass Effect 3’s ending?
Yes.
Yes, with reservations. Most of the small and large problems I had with ME3’s ending were not corrected with this content. The ones that were, usually could have been fixed much better. There are still SO many plot holes that I haven’t even mentioned, and a few new ones with the new content. No matter what, the endings are bizarrely unlike the entire series leading up to them, an entirely different form of storytelling violently jammed into the tale’s last 5 minutes. Though no longer the thematic antithesis to the game, the endings are still largely irrelevant to the most important themes and ideas of the Mass Effect series. As it stands now, Mass Effect 3 has 4 endings of various levels of bad quality, and no good one.
But 4 bad endings is better than a single, tri-colored ending that is thematically repulsive and completely intolerable. The endings dreamt of by fans in the Indoctrination Theory and the Marauder Shields comic series (found here: http://koobismo.deviantart.com/gallery ) are inestimably superior to what we now have, and it’s rather sad to see just how greatly the fans have outdone Bioware this day. But I nonetheless now have a finale that is only bad, not awful beyond comprehension, and a bad finale is something that I can (very unhappily) accept. And I can appreciate that Bioware did take the time to make this, even if I have the feeling that a lot of it was driven by a hope to win back the potential DLC customers who were leaving in droves. So I won’t cut my ties to Bioware as I have with SquareEnix. I’ll be a much wiser customer now, to be sure--no more pre-orders for Bioware no matter what the product is, and I’ll wait to know about the product’s quality before I commit to a purchase. But the important thing is that I will still be a customer. They’ve won back that much, at least.
But Bioware is on thin ground with me now, and it won’t take many more Day 1 Paid DLC packages, outright dishonest advertisements,** inept and insulting PR statements, or awful misunderstandings of their own products for me to leave the company behind for good.
* Admittedly, Control is kind of implausible, as well, and could also be ridiculed as Space Magic. But it’s still SO much less absurdly stupid than Synthesis.
** You want a laugh some time, find the interview in Game Informer Issue 217 (May 2011) with Casey Hudson, main writer for Mass Effect 3, and see what he had to say about what ME3 would be like. The one where he insists that the plot of ME3 won’t be dictated by finding “some long-lost Reaper “off” button,” and that Shepard getting to live in the saved ME universe was an important goal for the conclusion. If ME3 were any other product than a video game, its creators would be legally punishable for false advertising and selling a defective product. As it is, though, unethical and often illegal business practices are a daily routine in the video game industry. If game testers can regularly work unpaid overtime without breaks every day of the week, official gaming news outlets can be bribed into giving better reviews, and virtually unplayable products can be regularly rushed out the door to meet arbitrarily set deadlines, I shouldn’t be too surprised that a game developer can be allowed to tell you that you’re getting the exact opposite of what you’re actually purchasing.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Monday, June 18, 2012
General RPGs' Protagonist - NPC Romances
Ah, love. Love, the overpowering emotion we desire to give and receive, that permeates nearly every story told in modern times regardless of format, flooding our movies and books and shows and cartoons and video games and comics and songs, conditioning us to blindly want it and feel empty without it, yet cheapening our concept of it through relentless over saturation. No matter what work of fiction you're watching, playing, listening to, or reading, chances are good that a romantic angle is to be found in it, whether one was needed or not.
With all the romantic subplots going on in RPGs, whether or not they're well-written and/or relevant to the game's purpose,* it never fails to surprise me how unvaried they can be. The number of RPGs out there whose main romantic coupling can be described as "Protagonist x Girl With Healing Spells = OTP 4EVA" is a little high for my liking, and that sure isn't the only romance archetype that gets reused a lot. Even many of the good ones, and creative ones, in these games are just superior iterations of common themes of romance. Take Selan and Maxim from Lufia 2, one of the most unique RPG love stories I've encountered. The first part of their romance is a tough warrior chick coming to respect and trust the protagonist as an equal (a sexy equal, apparently) after he proves himself to be both a nice guy and pretty tough and capable in a couple dangerous situations. Not exactly award-winning creativity on that connection, even if they portray it well. What makes Maxim and Selan so unique is that the game actually hooks them up during its plot's progression, has them marry, and then shows their adventures as husband and wife, instead of just perpetuating a journey between Guy Who Likes Girl In A Non-Committal Way and Girl Who Likes Guy In Much The Same Way until hooking them up at the very end, like most RPGs would do it. But this (sadly much too) unique spin still does originate from a fairly standard romance subplot.
One kind of romance I'd like to see more of which has most certainly not been overused is the love subplot which pairs the game's protagonist with a character in the game who is NOT a member of the party. Now how often do you see that happen? It always just seems a given that if the story's hero or heroine is going to fall for someone, it's got to be one of the folks traveling with them on their quest. And sure, there's a substantial logic to this, that I do not deny. Strong feelings of companionship, be they romantic or platonic, are a natural result of spending large amounts of time with another person, particularly through dangerous and emotionally-charged events, all of which are intrinsic parts of most RPG quests. Nonetheless, the idea that one would have a loved one at home to fight to protect and come back to is also a believable (and in real-world practice, far more common) idea, as is the possibility of finding love in one of the many people that one might meet on one's world-saving journey, and these 2 options are uncommonly explored to any real degree in RPGs, and only very rarely with application to the game's protagonist.
Why is that, I wonder? Or I would, if I wasn't fairly sure that it's probably just because it's easier and more expected to have a romance in a game between major party members, and the thought of trying for something outside that box is frightening to some game writers, and utterly unrecognized by others. Nonetheless, there's really no acceptable reason for this trend against romances between protagonists and NPCs. It wouldn't have to impact a lot of games' plots negatively (since so many main romances of RPGs don't have strong relevance to the game's events overall (Final Fantasy 4 and Tales of the Abyss, for example)...and for that matter, some of the times that the plot IS importantly tied to the romance (Legend of Dragoon and La Pucelle Tactics, for example) would have been BETTER without the trite romance slapped on). There's room for creativity since it's done so infrequently. And I don't think there's significantly less potential for love and relationship depth with a Protagonist x NPC couple than there is with a Protagonist x Party Member one.
Regarding that last one, I do freely admit that almost all the really great romances I've seen in RPGs to date, as you can see if you refer back to the list I made of the best ones, have been between a protagonist and a majorly important party member (and the 1 of the list that wasn't was between a party member of minor significance and an NPC). I perceive this as a result of the number of protagonist x party member romances in RPGs so far outweighing the alternative, however, not as any real indicator that protagonist x NPC couples are inherently inferior. After all, few though they are, I have seen some really decent love stories between a protagonist and a character not actively on their journey or part of their team. The one in Arc the Lad 3, for example, between Alec and Kulara was honestly pretty sweet. They hit it off with that usual inexplicable quickness that RPGs are so fond of, yes, but the quiet mutual attraction they share and their small but sweet exchanges each time Alec returns to Kulara's orphanage on a mission seem very genuine and emotional. It's not an amazing tale of love or anything, but its gentle emotion grips the player a lot more than quite a few of the standard RPG love stories that try so hard to be epic and important.
As another example, what about Souji and Ai, from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4? Souji has the opportunity to court every lady in his party in that game, but it's Ai, an NPC, whose romantic Social Link chain of events are by far the most touching, deep, and romantically rewarding. Granted, this is partially because nearly all the other romances in that game are honestly pretty lousy, usually seeming spontaneous and forced. But even if Ai had any real competition, her love story would still hold up well, as a story of Souji's devotion and companionship, his good influence, helping Ai to rediscover herself, and grow to care about her true self and about those around her for more than just their appearance. It's also convincing in that Souji rejects her at first, implied to know her and have strong enough insight into her character that he'd rather wait until she's truly ready for a relationship than just dive in at the first opportunity with no regard to her real needs. I really do like this small protagonist x NPC story, and it would probably make it to my Top Romance List if I extended it to cover 10 spots--it certainly would make a top 15, at the very least.
There aren't many examples of this rare coupling between an RPG's protagonist and a character not actively traveling with them, but there are just enough to tell me that the idea has some real potential, and I want to see more. Too often this idea is relegated down to party members of lesser importance, and even then given too little attention and development. Game developers need to give the healing mages of the RPG world a little breather, maybe a chance to get up off their backs for a moment, and start exploring other romantic options for their games' main leads.
* Protip: Way, way too many of them are not.
With all the romantic subplots going on in RPGs, whether or not they're well-written and/or relevant to the game's purpose,* it never fails to surprise me how unvaried they can be. The number of RPGs out there whose main romantic coupling can be described as "Protagonist x Girl With Healing Spells = OTP 4EVA" is a little high for my liking, and that sure isn't the only romance archetype that gets reused a lot. Even many of the good ones, and creative ones, in these games are just superior iterations of common themes of romance. Take Selan and Maxim from Lufia 2, one of the most unique RPG love stories I've encountered. The first part of their romance is a tough warrior chick coming to respect and trust the protagonist as an equal (a sexy equal, apparently) after he proves himself to be both a nice guy and pretty tough and capable in a couple dangerous situations. Not exactly award-winning creativity on that connection, even if they portray it well. What makes Maxim and Selan so unique is that the game actually hooks them up during its plot's progression, has them marry, and then shows their adventures as husband and wife, instead of just perpetuating a journey between Guy Who Likes Girl In A Non-Committal Way and Girl Who Likes Guy In Much The Same Way until hooking them up at the very end, like most RPGs would do it. But this (sadly much too) unique spin still does originate from a fairly standard romance subplot.
One kind of romance I'd like to see more of which has most certainly not been overused is the love subplot which pairs the game's protagonist with a character in the game who is NOT a member of the party. Now how often do you see that happen? It always just seems a given that if the story's hero or heroine is going to fall for someone, it's got to be one of the folks traveling with them on their quest. And sure, there's a substantial logic to this, that I do not deny. Strong feelings of companionship, be they romantic or platonic, are a natural result of spending large amounts of time with another person, particularly through dangerous and emotionally-charged events, all of which are intrinsic parts of most RPG quests. Nonetheless, the idea that one would have a loved one at home to fight to protect and come back to is also a believable (and in real-world practice, far more common) idea, as is the possibility of finding love in one of the many people that one might meet on one's world-saving journey, and these 2 options are uncommonly explored to any real degree in RPGs, and only very rarely with application to the game's protagonist.
Why is that, I wonder? Or I would, if I wasn't fairly sure that it's probably just because it's easier and more expected to have a romance in a game between major party members, and the thought of trying for something outside that box is frightening to some game writers, and utterly unrecognized by others. Nonetheless, there's really no acceptable reason for this trend against romances between protagonists and NPCs. It wouldn't have to impact a lot of games' plots negatively (since so many main romances of RPGs don't have strong relevance to the game's events overall (Final Fantasy 4 and Tales of the Abyss, for example)...and for that matter, some of the times that the plot IS importantly tied to the romance (Legend of Dragoon and La Pucelle Tactics, for example) would have been BETTER without the trite romance slapped on). There's room for creativity since it's done so infrequently. And I don't think there's significantly less potential for love and relationship depth with a Protagonist x NPC couple than there is with a Protagonist x Party Member one.
Regarding that last one, I do freely admit that almost all the really great romances I've seen in RPGs to date, as you can see if you refer back to the list I made of the best ones, have been between a protagonist and a majorly important party member (and the 1 of the list that wasn't was between a party member of minor significance and an NPC). I perceive this as a result of the number of protagonist x party member romances in RPGs so far outweighing the alternative, however, not as any real indicator that protagonist x NPC couples are inherently inferior. After all, few though they are, I have seen some really decent love stories between a protagonist and a character not actively on their journey or part of their team. The one in Arc the Lad 3, for example, between Alec and Kulara was honestly pretty sweet. They hit it off with that usual inexplicable quickness that RPGs are so fond of, yes, but the quiet mutual attraction they share and their small but sweet exchanges each time Alec returns to Kulara's orphanage on a mission seem very genuine and emotional. It's not an amazing tale of love or anything, but its gentle emotion grips the player a lot more than quite a few of the standard RPG love stories that try so hard to be epic and important.
As another example, what about Souji and Ai, from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4? Souji has the opportunity to court every lady in his party in that game, but it's Ai, an NPC, whose romantic Social Link chain of events are by far the most touching, deep, and romantically rewarding. Granted, this is partially because nearly all the other romances in that game are honestly pretty lousy, usually seeming spontaneous and forced. But even if Ai had any real competition, her love story would still hold up well, as a story of Souji's devotion and companionship, his good influence, helping Ai to rediscover herself, and grow to care about her true self and about those around her for more than just their appearance. It's also convincing in that Souji rejects her at first, implied to know her and have strong enough insight into her character that he'd rather wait until she's truly ready for a relationship than just dive in at the first opportunity with no regard to her real needs. I really do like this small protagonist x NPC story, and it would probably make it to my Top Romance List if I extended it to cover 10 spots--it certainly would make a top 15, at the very least.
There aren't many examples of this rare coupling between an RPG's protagonist and a character not actively traveling with them, but there are just enough to tell me that the idea has some real potential, and I want to see more. Too often this idea is relegated down to party members of lesser importance, and even then given too little attention and development. Game developers need to give the healing mages of the RPG world a little breather, maybe a chance to get up off their backs for a moment, and start exploring other romantic options for their games' main leads.
* Protip: Way, way too many of them are not.
Friday, June 8, 2012
The Pokemon Series's Gym Hazards
Well, THAT was a bust. I take a month off to shore up my rant reserves, and what do I have to show for it? This.
So! Pokemon. While the RPG series sometimes has some merits, there’s no denying that the world of Pokemon and its society are one of the craziest, least sensible settings one can find in gaming, save for the occasional game that is deliberately trying to be bizarre. Why do people let children just wander aimlessly across the country, unsupervised, looking to provoke and catch creatures of immense power that could easily destroy them? If Pokemon are so easily trained, why aren’t they weaponized, given their limitless potential for destruction? How the bloody hell does a Pokeball work, and where does the technology come from in a world which is otherwise fairly comparable to ours in terms of scientific advancement? And so on and so forth. To pick apart the logical gaps in the world of Pokemon would take hours, days, weeks, pages and pages of questions, and honestly, almost all of them have been asked and mocked before dozens of times, so I’m not going to bother with it. There IS, however, one aspect of the Pokemon world that is confusingly illogical that I DON’T think has been particularly widely questioned yet, so I’m going to waste your time with it today: the safety hazards of the Pokemon Gyms.
What the HELL is going on with the Gyms of the Pokemon world? Oh, sure, plenty of them are innocuous enough. A swimming pool area for Misty’s Water-Type Gym, a forest maze for Bugsy’s Bug-Type Gym, an actual gym for Maylene’s Fighting-Type Gym, that sort of thing. They create an appropriate background environment for the theme of the Gym Leader’s specialty, and often use the layout themes to create obstacles and puzzles for the challenger to overcome before battling the Gym Leader. Decent idea, harmless enough.
But some of these places are fucking death traps. In Skyla’s Flying-Type Gym in Pokemon Generation 5, for example, challengers have to climb into and be shot out of cannons to advance forward, which is just a tragedy waiting to happen. But hey, I’ve played the Mana series. I’m accustomed to the immensely ridiculous idea of using human artillery as a means of travel. So I can certainly look beyond this.
But peeling the remains of 10-year-olds off Skyla’s walls is just the start. How about Mauville City’s Gym from Pokemon Generation 3, which has big, live tesla coils just randomly scattered around the floor, running lord knows how many millions of volts between them right out in the damn open? Good God, I know the place has an Electric-Type theme, but it seems just a little extreme to me to have a setup where any wrong step by a visitor (or trainer flunky, for that matter, they hang around awfully close to these giant electrical coils) is gonna light them up like an overclocked Christmas tree. And what about the Gym for Violet City? Yeah, no giant unguarded volt machines there, but I’m not sure incredibly narrow platforms, ones without any kind of guard rails whatsoever, suspended hundreds of feet in the air so that any challenger can have a good few moments to consider that last misstep as they plunge to their death, are much better. And hey, yeah, how about that Blackthorn City Gym? You know, the one where all the little kids hoping to win a Gym Badge are running around on platforms floating over molten fucking lava?
Normally I’d snarkily criticize the fact that several parts of the place don’t have any safety railing (and those parts are the moving platforms, even!), the way I did for Violet City’s Gym, but really, it’s a public meeting place for preteens that’s filled with lethal, boiling melted rock. I think that once you’ve got overactive ten year olds running around on rocks floating in a roiling fire sea of death just because you like the atmosphere the lava gives the place, safety railings are a moot fucking point!
By far my personal favorite for hazardous Pokemon battling environments, though, is the Icirrus City Gym. This is a Gym where the challenger has to make his/her way around the Gym by sliding uncontrollably forward over icy patches. Now, this has some potential for injury, but you’re thinking, well, that’s not nearly as dangerous as cannon travel and live electrical coils. Right? Well, see, the Gym is split into 2 separate sections, one on the left, and one on the right. What separates them? A huge, black void. It’s pretty certain for a hole to be that huge and that black, it must be a long, LONG way down. As in the fatal-several-times-over form of long, LONG way down. And how do you get from section of the Gym to the other, and back again? By running onto an icy ledge hanging out over the pit and sliding along it until you hit a ramp that sends you flying through the air to an identical icy ledge with a ramp on the other side. I don’t have a picture of this, but if you go to 3:29 in this video, you can see it in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTiGZqVYIpg
I just love the idea of this, in a sick, twisted way. All you need is for some clumsy kid or adult to accidentally step foot on that patch of ice leading to the ramp, and start sliding forward. That’s all. It’s too smooth and slick to stop yourself; the game shows clearly that one has no control of one’s momentum once on that ice. And just accidentally sliding forward means they’re going slowly--easily slow enough that they won’t have enough speed when they hit the ramp to make it to the other side. They’ll just gently be lifted into the air a foot or so, and fall to their death. No railings (AGAIN) or anything that they could grab onto to steady themselves or anything. Just an irreversible slide to their death plunge. What happens if a kid has the speed, but loses his/her balance while sliding toward that ramp? Ice is slippery, sliding momentum is tricky, accidents happen. I guess he/she just slides on the ass or side along, hits the ramp, and tumbles through the air in a flailing mess, most likely hitting the other side’s ramp end and falling into the pit. Or how about if a challenger judges the path wrong, approaches the thing at an angle? They may have the speed and balance just fine, but be irrevocably heading in a diagonal direction and miss the other side’s icy ledge altogether.
It’s one thing to be instantly electrocuted or have a second-long plunge into an immediate fiery death, but if anything goes wrong on that icy ramped ledge of death in Icirrus City, you get to watch, to know, your death as you approach it, and there’s nothing you can do. Damn, man, forget the rest, Icirrus City’s Gym is the worst of the bunch.
And so it is proven that the world of Pokemon is really pretty messed up if you look at the details. Again. For like the millionth time. But hey, at least it’s been proven in a way that, to my knowledge, hasn’t had much discussion previously, right? That’s gotta be worth something.
I’m sorry, I’ll have a real rant next time. Probably.
So! Pokemon. While the RPG series sometimes has some merits, there’s no denying that the world of Pokemon and its society are one of the craziest, least sensible settings one can find in gaming, save for the occasional game that is deliberately trying to be bizarre. Why do people let children just wander aimlessly across the country, unsupervised, looking to provoke and catch creatures of immense power that could easily destroy them? If Pokemon are so easily trained, why aren’t they weaponized, given their limitless potential for destruction? How the bloody hell does a Pokeball work, and where does the technology come from in a world which is otherwise fairly comparable to ours in terms of scientific advancement? And so on and so forth. To pick apart the logical gaps in the world of Pokemon would take hours, days, weeks, pages and pages of questions, and honestly, almost all of them have been asked and mocked before dozens of times, so I’m not going to bother with it. There IS, however, one aspect of the Pokemon world that is confusingly illogical that I DON’T think has been particularly widely questioned yet, so I’m going to waste your time with it today: the safety hazards of the Pokemon Gyms.
What the HELL is going on with the Gyms of the Pokemon world? Oh, sure, plenty of them are innocuous enough. A swimming pool area for Misty’s Water-Type Gym, a forest maze for Bugsy’s Bug-Type Gym, an actual gym for Maylene’s Fighting-Type Gym, that sort of thing. They create an appropriate background environment for the theme of the Gym Leader’s specialty, and often use the layout themes to create obstacles and puzzles for the challenger to overcome before battling the Gym Leader. Decent idea, harmless enough.
But some of these places are fucking death traps. In Skyla’s Flying-Type Gym in Pokemon Generation 5, for example, challengers have to climb into and be shot out of cannons to advance forward, which is just a tragedy waiting to happen. But hey, I’ve played the Mana series. I’m accustomed to the immensely ridiculous idea of using human artillery as a means of travel. So I can certainly look beyond this.
But peeling the remains of 10-year-olds off Skyla’s walls is just the start. How about Mauville City’s Gym from Pokemon Generation 3, which has big, live tesla coils just randomly scattered around the floor, running lord knows how many millions of volts between them right out in the damn open? Good God, I know the place has an Electric-Type theme, but it seems just a little extreme to me to have a setup where any wrong step by a visitor (or trainer flunky, for that matter, they hang around awfully close to these giant electrical coils) is gonna light them up like an overclocked Christmas tree. And what about the Gym for Violet City? Yeah, no giant unguarded volt machines there, but I’m not sure incredibly narrow platforms, ones without any kind of guard rails whatsoever, suspended hundreds of feet in the air so that any challenger can have a good few moments to consider that last misstep as they plunge to their death, are much better. And hey, yeah, how about that Blackthorn City Gym? You know, the one where all the little kids hoping to win a Gym Badge are running around on platforms floating over molten fucking lava?
Normally I’d snarkily criticize the fact that several parts of the place don’t have any safety railing (and those parts are the moving platforms, even!), the way I did for Violet City’s Gym, but really, it’s a public meeting place for preteens that’s filled with lethal, boiling melted rock. I think that once you’ve got overactive ten year olds running around on rocks floating in a roiling fire sea of death just because you like the atmosphere the lava gives the place, safety railings are a moot fucking point!
By far my personal favorite for hazardous Pokemon battling environments, though, is the Icirrus City Gym. This is a Gym where the challenger has to make his/her way around the Gym by sliding uncontrollably forward over icy patches. Now, this has some potential for injury, but you’re thinking, well, that’s not nearly as dangerous as cannon travel and live electrical coils. Right? Well, see, the Gym is split into 2 separate sections, one on the left, and one on the right. What separates them? A huge, black void. It’s pretty certain for a hole to be that huge and that black, it must be a long, LONG way down. As in the fatal-several-times-over form of long, LONG way down. And how do you get from section of the Gym to the other, and back again? By running onto an icy ledge hanging out over the pit and sliding along it until you hit a ramp that sends you flying through the air to an identical icy ledge with a ramp on the other side. I don’t have a picture of this, but if you go to 3:29 in this video, you can see it in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTiGZqVYIpg
I just love the idea of this, in a sick, twisted way. All you need is for some clumsy kid or adult to accidentally step foot on that patch of ice leading to the ramp, and start sliding forward. That’s all. It’s too smooth and slick to stop yourself; the game shows clearly that one has no control of one’s momentum once on that ice. And just accidentally sliding forward means they’re going slowly--easily slow enough that they won’t have enough speed when they hit the ramp to make it to the other side. They’ll just gently be lifted into the air a foot or so, and fall to their death. No railings (AGAIN) or anything that they could grab onto to steady themselves or anything. Just an irreversible slide to their death plunge. What happens if a kid has the speed, but loses his/her balance while sliding toward that ramp? Ice is slippery, sliding momentum is tricky, accidents happen. I guess he/she just slides on the ass or side along, hits the ramp, and tumbles through the air in a flailing mess, most likely hitting the other side’s ramp end and falling into the pit. Or how about if a challenger judges the path wrong, approaches the thing at an angle? They may have the speed and balance just fine, but be irrevocably heading in a diagonal direction and miss the other side’s icy ledge altogether.
It’s one thing to be instantly electrocuted or have a second-long plunge into an immediate fiery death, but if anything goes wrong on that icy ramped ledge of death in Icirrus City, you get to watch, to know, your death as you approach it, and there’s nothing you can do. Damn, man, forget the rest, Icirrus City’s Gym is the worst of the bunch.
And so it is proven that the world of Pokemon is really pretty messed up if you look at the details. Again. For like the millionth time. But hey, at least it’s been proven in a way that, to my knowledge, hasn’t had much discussion previously, right? That’s gotta be worth something.
I’m sorry, I’ll have a real rant next time. Probably.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Fallout: New Vegas Analysis
Much like my comparison of the Social Links in Shin Megami Tensei 3 and 4, this rant is going to basically be me delving into the thematic and subtle intellectual aspects of a game over the course of many, many paragraphs. Thus, this will probably be boring, and pointless. Ye have been warned.
Ah, the Fallout series. Truly a series of classics (if you don't count Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, at least). Creative and fun, the Fallout games fascinate me in several ways, but perhaps the most interesting thing about them is the fact that they are designed to reference and explore the history, government, society, and culture of the United States of America. Much in the way that Atlus explores religions, faith, and the spiritual in its Shin Megami Tensei series, Fallout explores Americana, and also like the SMT series, it does its intellectual exploration without any sacrifice to the games' plot, characters, or general entertainment value, which is quite a feat, I think. It's not every product that can satisfy a need for intellectual stimulation AND have enough explosions, gore, and flamethrower-wielding mutants to enthrall the standard member of the overall ignorant, shallow gaming masses.
It's always fascinating for me to play a Fallout game and enjoy its events, because each one has new themes and perspectives on many aspects of America to delve into, while also usually building off many of the previous games' work on this theme. And even though it's not exactly going to go anywhere, I thought it'd be cool to make a rant wherein I share my thoughts and interpretations of the themes and perspectives found in one of these titles.* Yes, a rant where I ramble aimlessly about things that probably shouldn't be taken quite so seriously. Try to contain your surprise.
So which game to discuss? Well, any of them will be good, but I've decided that Fallout: New Vegas will be my subject. Why? Well, since it's the newest (at the time of writing this rant, at least), the ideas I have of its meanings are freshest in my mind. I've also found its thematic material much easier to recognize and contemplate than that of the previous games. This could be because there's more of it, or simply because they made it a little more obvious this time around and a lot of the subtle content of the previous games just went over my head.
So, without further ado (because seriously, there's already been way too much), let's dig into this game's themes.
Conquest, Expansion, and Imperialism
In some ways, the theme of the expanding conqueror is really not so much a theme of the USA as it is just a theme of human society. Ambitious hordes of violent jerks were out kicking their neighbors' asses long before the first lice-ridden European explorer stumbled out of his grimy ship and onto the beach of this continent, after all. And at first glance, the violent conqueror of this game, Caesar, seems to be an acknowledgement of this--regardless of his thematic ties to the Las Vegas setting (Caesar's Palace and whatnot), he and his forces are modeled after the ancient empire-building Roman legions, European rather than American.
And yet, the connection to the US in particular is definitely there. Even if the United States isn't thought of as a militaristic conqueror in general like Rome, or Genghis Khan, or Imperialist-era Britain, the fact of the matter is that this country's continent-spanning borders are a result of violent expansion that conquered, drove out, and committed terrible acts against countless indigenous peoples of less technologically-advanced societies. It's not hard to draw a lot of parallels between what this country did to the Native Americans, the brutal conquest behind "sea to shining sea," and the general method of Fallout New Vegas’s Caesar’s Legion. After all, the Legion’s mode of operation is to crush every tribe they encounter in their imperial expansion westward, destroying each tribal individual to oppose them and assimilating those that surrender. Whether through annihilation or absorption, the Legion’s subjugation of all they encounter means the death of each tribe’s culture. No, the parallels between the Legion’s westward expansion and that of US history are not hard to draw, at all.
The other player in the imperialism-expansion issue of Fallout: New Vegas is, of course, the New California Republic. The NCR’s method of expansion has its own ties to the USA, in perhaps a more familiar way. Rather than rely on destruction and fear to spread itself, the NCR’s policies of expansion are subtle, using diplomacy, economic pressure, social and technological rewards, and political ploys to get settlements to join voluntarily. Though the NCR has, at the time of Fallout: New Vegas, the most powerful military might of any group or nation in the wastelands that we’ve yet seen in the series, they seem to generally use it to fight actual threats, not to conquer small territories. The NCR’s military strength is more an incentive than a threat to prospective members, offering protection from the various dangers of the wasteland in exchange for joining. This, of course, is similar to the way that the USA has operated with foreign policy and expansion in both modern times and earlier in its history. Territories, the later states, certain allies of ours, many of these expansions of United States influence employed the same kind of tactics that the NCR shows. Of course, most every nation and empire that’s furthered its borders has done some of this stuff, particularly in modern times, so it’s not exactly a US-only sort of thing. But then, neither was the Legion’s example of bloody culture-destruction. Even if not USA-exclusive, the parallels are still there with both the Legion and NCR’s ways of conquest and land acquisition.
Recognizing this, the fact that these 2 forces are embroiled in such a bitter war during the course of Fallout: New Vegas brings with it the interesting question of whether the conflict isn’t meant to have a higher significance regarding this theme of imperialism. Is there an intention of the game’s writers to have the conflict between the NCR and the Legion at least partially meant to be a symbolic struggle between which method of expansion and conquest is best? Perhaps the battle between direct and violent conquest, and indirect and manipulative conquest, is meant to at least pose the question of which direction America should take in world affairs. Or perhaps I’m just reading too much into it at this point.
Probably the latter.
The Role of Tribals
Tribals are an on-again, off-again thing in Fallout. Fallout 2 had a big role for them, Fallout 1 and 3 didn’t really have them at all, and Fallout Tactics used them for a little bit in the beginning and then moved along. Here in New Vegas, though, the idea is taken and given a pretty decent amount of importance and exploration.
The various tribes and their people in Fallout: New Vegas are obviously based on and meant to symbolize Native Americans,* and through them you get several examples of the ways that Native Americans have been seen in US culture. The White Legs are a vicious tribe that wants to win the favor of Caesar’s Legion, and make war on other tribes to earn respect from the Legion, which probably is a reference both to the exaggerated viciousness that cultural propaganda used to attribute to Native Americans, and to the fact that there were, at times, some tribes of Native Americans that attempted to form self-preserving alliances with colonists and settlers by attacking other tribes that were giving the colonists/settlers trouble. Much like how the Legion never had any actual intentions of treating the White Legs well (according to Ulysses, who was Caesar’s ambassador to the White Legs), I don’t think the real-life attempts to befriend the colonists/settlers ever worked out for very long.
Then there are the Sorrows, which symbolize the popular modern view of the Native Americans as spiritual, culturally-rich, and generally innocent. This direct opposite of the White Legs isn’t necessarily accurate, either, in how innocent and peaceful it depicts the Native Americans, but it’s certainly much more generally accurate of the Native Americans’ spiritual nature and worthwhile culture, at least. And even if I doubt the Sorrows’ innocence of humanity’s worse side is entirely accurate of Native American tribes of the past (they had battles for territory and so on, after all), they still had to be innocent of just how atrocious human beings could be to each other until the colonists and settlers came and gave them a first-hand demonstration.
The various other tribes in the game also are representative of different aspects attributed to and perspectives of Native Americans (whether these were factually accurate or not), like the Great Khans’ great knowledge of how to use the flora of the wasteland, the White Glove Society’s history of cannibalism,** the social significance of personal presentation that Ulysses relates in his remembrances of his tribe’s way of fashioning their hair, and so on. But in the end, all of these Fallout: New Vegas tribes’ symbolism of Native Americans comes to one issue, the same issue that it always was throughout USA history: what happens when a larger, better-equipped, and relentlessly expanding nation wants their land. That’s where the comparison between the Fallout: New Vegas tribes and the Native Americans becomes most significant.
While showing us these various parallels of Native Americans, Fallout: New Vegas also explores their ultimate fates. Sadly, and even more sadly realistically, the only time tribes in Fallout: New Vegas seem to get a happy ending (or at least, a non-bad one) is when they quietly, meekly give up their territories and move to a new place. If they stay and try to fight those that want their land and/or lives, either they’re crushed completely by their enemies, as is the case with the Legion’s subjugation of almost every tribe it encounters, or they’re mentally scarred by the conflict and lose an important part of their cultural identity, as is the case of the Sorrows if the player rallies them to fight back against the White Legs. If they try to ally themselves with the big nation interested in taking their territory for itself, whatever respect they earn will be short-lived, as is the case with the Great Khans, whose ending if they ally themselves with either the victorious NCR or the victorious Legion will lead to either being forced into a small reservation far north of any trade routes (the result of an NCR alliance), or being assimilated and having their culture destroyed (the result of a Legion alliance). And when they submit and agree to the demands of the powerful outsiders, it’s the death of their cultural identity, such as with the tribes that join the Legion, or the Families that agreed to run New Vegas for House. What happened to the Families is probably the least difficult metaphor to pick up on in this game--they gave into the will of an invader with superior firepower (House), and were absorbed into his society, giving up their culture to work his casinos and adopt a radically different social identity that he had chosen for them.
But if the tribes take the path of avoidance, migrating elsewhere to avoid the conquerors, they get the best possible endings in Fallout: New Vegas--the Great Khans avoid being crushed or forcibly displaced, and gain the time and space they need to create a proper nation for themselves, while the Sorrows, if they flee the valley instead of attempting to make war against the White Legs, find a new land where they avoid the harassment of the rest of the world while keeping their innocence. Now, you can criticize the developers for seeming to promote running from aggressors, but I don’t think that’s the right way to look at this. Unlike most of the other consequences of the player’s decisions in the Fallout series, I think this is less a case where the results are meant to show whether a course of action was right or wrong, and more just referencing how things more or less went down for the Native Americans of the territories now held by the USA. When everything is said and done, every course of action they could and did take, violent or diplomatic, did not save them from losing their lands to the colonists and settlers who kept expanding across the continent, and trying to hold their ground on the matter just resulted in violence, forced relocation, and/or cultural absorption. And that’s what Fallout: New Vegas seems to reflect--that voluntary relocation, even if it is unfair, and general avoidance are the only ways the tribal peoples could remain relatively intact as a society.
Of course, in real life, there reached a point where there really just was no place to escape to, save for some reservations scattered across the country that were generally too small and, as I understand it, economically almost worthless. But the Fallout universe at the time of Fallout: New Vegas has a long way to go before the NCR, Legion, or any other major nation-force will have the chance to expand that much, so the Sorrows and Great Khans are theoretically safe for a while, at least, if they choose to move elsewhere.
The Culture of Las Vegas
References to various icons and ideas and whatnot from USA culture and history fill most Fallout games to the brim, and Fallout: New Vegas is no exception. This one, of course, focuses largely on references to famous aspects of Las Vegas, and integral components of its culture. Now, I could sit here and list out every little thing the game uses that’s indicative of Las Vegas beyond just the necessary locations in the game, each reference and minute detail, but I have other things to do this month, and chances are you might, too, so I’m just gonna go into some of the bigger, more interesting ones.
First of all, the theme of gambling in Fallout: New Vegas is, if not terribly interesting by itself, at least worth mentioning, I think. Gambling’s traditionally had a component in the Fallout series, Fallout 1 and 2 in particular, with the games offering players a quick chance to play slot machines and...what was it, in the early games? Roulette? I think it was Roulette. You can tell how much it affected me by how familiar I am with it. But the option to gamble was there, and even represented by an upgradeable Skill for Gambling. Probably the most useless way to spend your character’s Skill Points in the entire game, of course, and I’d be mildly surprised if the number of people who chose to seriously invest their Skill Points in it instead of the other obviously more useful Skills goes as high as double digits...but it WAS there.
Still, as I’ve implied just now, gambling had practically no relevance to the games overall, so Fallout: New Vegas’s giving it importance is new and noteworthy. Most of the game’s casinos are locations of some plot relevance (notably the Families’ casinos), and the entire first Downloadable Content package for the game (a very good DLC, I might note) is based around a casino with a troubled history. There’s also Caravan, a card minigame that you can play with the majority of the game’s NPCs. This game effectively expands the influence of gambling using a deck of cards (cards being, I think, the most easily and widely recognized symbol of games of chance) beyond the casinos, out into the wasteland from one side of the game’s playable map to the other. So, as you’d suspect, the theme of gambling becomes universally major in Fallout: New Vegas.
And yet! There was one thing that confused me somewhat when I played through the game. For all the hype developers had seemed to make during the game’s creation about how major a thing the casinos’ system was, it actually did seem to have a comparatively minor part to play. I know I just said that the casinos are mostly important plot locations, but here’s the thing--while you DO have to visit them and they ARE plot-relevant, the actual act of visiting their card tables, playing the slot machines, wagering money, is actually still pretty much entirely optional. While Poker with a high Luck stat turns out to be a good way to make about 20,000 to 25,000 caps altogether, there’s really nothing in the game that compels you to sample this vaunted gambling system, no incorporation of it into the plot that I can recall. And Caravan is certainly no more important to the plot. I think of the, what, 100+ hours I put into Fallout: New Vegas, I may have played Caravan twice.
This confused me, but I think I might have the reason for it (that is, if there IS a reason, and I’m not just reading too much into it, which might be the case at any number of points in this rant). It once again reflects the culture and ideology of Las Vegas. Sure, gambling figures heavily into the image of Las Vegas, and it’s all over the place, and it’s sort of the main draw of the city as a vacation spot and American phenomenon. But at the same time, it’s not really a...mandatory component of it, is it? What I mean is, while the gambling’s there, it’s in the spotlight, and sure there are a ton of people who go to play the tables and shoot the craps and whatnot (I’m not too familiar with gambling terms; I don’t do much of it), the draw of Las Vegas, the spirit of it, is more the idea of fun, of the glamor and glitz, of a fun, crazy time of living like there’s no tomorrow. Of course, the gambling’s the most noticeable method of enacting this idea, but there are plenty of people for whom a vacation or party night in Vegas includes little to no gambling, but is nonetheless as wild and enjoyable as expected from the city. So, by hyping the gambling, by making it a present background to the entire game, but by NOT making it a strictly necessary component of Fallout: New Vegas, perhaps the developers actually were getting the idea exactly right.
Or maybe I’m reading way, way too much into this and these things never even crossed their minds. Entirely possible.
Anyway! There’s a lot of interesting cultural stuff to find in this game that’s worth thinking about, like how powerful and vitally necessary electrical power is to Las Vegas (and by extension, our modern lifestyle) as an entity, which is shown by the fact that the battle for control of the New Vegas area in the game is fought not over the actual location itself, but the dam that can power it and much more, or the power of entertainment as an opiate of the masses, shown in the way that House manages to protect his belongings from the vastly superior power of the NCR simply by making his strip of New Vegas an indispensible provider of entertainment for NCR’s citizens and soldiers. But for now, I think the last bit of cultural insight I’d like to get into is the character of Mr. House in Fallout: New Vegas.
Now while you can link Mr. House to a lot of pop culture characters in several ways, I think it’s fairly safe to say that he is primarily based on the character of Charles Foster Kane, from the legendary film Citizen Kane. His appearance, his vocal tones and method of speech, the relentless pursuit of power and the strange, manipulative methods thereof, the whole thing with the snow globes, it’s all pretty obvious. But why have one of the most important figures in the plot (possibly THE most important) of a game focused around Las Vegas be an homage to Kane? Kane didn’t have anything to do with Las Vegas, or even Nevada in general, in the film, not that I can recall. I mean, like I’ve said, the Fallout games are littered with references to American culture, so I could just take this as another of those and leave it at that, but House’s importance to the game’s events, and role as the one calling the shots of the actual New Vegas, puts him in a position where he has to have some serious symbolic significance or else be entirely inconsistent with the game’s storytelling methods.
And as it turns out, I’m pretty sure that there is, in fact, a lot about the character of Kane that makes him an excellent choice to base Mr. House on. First of all, on the surface level, it definitely works; you need someone with brutal cunning and understanding of manipulative human interaction to work with the position that House has in the game. More importantly, however, in many ways, Kane embodies quite a lot of aspects of the Las Vegas culture and mentality. First of all, the opulence. The extreme extravagance of Kane’s lifestyle, shown best by his famous man-made paradise Xanadu, certainly has similarities to the extreme extravagance of Las Vegas. Kane has great wealth, and he happily spends it in huge quantities on his whims, clearly caring far less for holding onto his wealth than for having as noticeable a good time as possible. That’s more or less a part of the idea of Las Vegas--throw caution to the wind, don’t worry about what it costs you, just live in the moment and have a great time.
There’s also the matter of Kane’s unflagging ambition. Charles Foster Kane is ambitious to a fault, seeking ever to rise higher, to have more. He’ll sacrifice his money, his marriage, his integrity, and his public standing, anything and everything for his ambitions--ambitions which he never does achieve, losing the election. But then, it’s hard to say whether his ambition could ever have been satisfied to start with. For men like Kane, sometimes there’s nothing but the ambition, never satisfied with what they achieve, living only to pursue the next carrot dangling in front of them. And that’s why his ambition makes him a great model for the character of Mr. House, owner and iconic figure of New Vegas. As I said above, gambling is not necessarily a required part of Las Vegas, but it’s the inseparable iconic concept of the city, and the ambitious Kane actually is very much like a compulsive gambler. He never knows when to quit, when to either be satisfied with what he has or to cut his losses and leave the game, always pursuing the next goal no matter what it costs him--much like the compulsive gambler forever chases the jackpot, heedless of what he’s lost and what he’s gained so far. And as it almost always does with the gambler, the obsession ruins Kane--he puts too much on the line, won’t back down, and in the end, not only loses what he wanted but also everything he had. Yes, Kane is, indeed, an excellent character to base the owner, caretaker, and symbolic figure of New Vegas upon.
The Significance of Roads
Much, much more than in any previous Fallout game, the tattered remains of major roads and highways play a significant role in Fallout: New Vegas, and the fact that their role is made significant is in itself a significant thing. Unlike other Fallout games, which are almost entirely open-ended in most aspects of exploration and plot, Fallout: New Vegas, while not lacking plenty of optional exploration, has definite paths to follow, at least for the first major part of its plot--in order to get to New Vegas, where the game’s story really starts to come together and become important, you pretty much HAVE to follow 1 road or another; there are insurmountable mountainous barriers that prevent you from just cutting across the middle of the map to reach it. While plenty of off-road exploration is available, this means that part of the game is pretty linear as you simply follow the highway path to your destination. Furthermore, the final, climactic Lonesome Road DLC for the game is (unsurprisingly, given the name) a very linear journey which greatly focuses on the symbolism and nature of roads, and the people who travel them. It’s actually very cool, and reasonably thought-provoking.
I’m not going to rehash what Lonesome Road tells us, but I do want to touch on this theme of roads and give it further relevance through relation. I think that one reason why the concept of the road was included with such thematic importance in Fallout: New Vegas is that roads have more cultural importance to the USA than perhaps to any other nation in the world, save the historical conquests of Rome.*** I mean, to be sure, roads and the transit they allow are inextricably important parts of human society and history no matter where you go, sure, but more than ever for America. For the formative centuries of the United States, exploration and expansion across the continent was a major driving force in every aspect of the US’s society--its economy, its national and international policies, its culture, its people, its mentality, these were all heavily influenced the USA’s constant drive to expand to the other end of the continent, to “tame” the wilderness. While the trailblazers and settlers did this exploration, the paths they created to be followed by the rest of the country’s society, the roads that their labors allowed for are their true legacy. As a monument provides tangible representation of intangibles of the mind or past, so the road sits as the monument to America’s significant history of exploration and expansion.
The road is also significant to the United States culture that the Fallout series likes to represent and analyze in that the USA’s size made the road all the more essential to its function. Sure, roads are important in any developed country, and have lots of historical impact anywhere you go, but I feel that they’re just not the same to a smaller country, like a European nation, or Japan. It’s hard to explain, but I feel that the greater size of the USA means that the roads across it become all the more essential, I think, as ways to connect its people and varying cultural identities together.
Economically, the history the USA is yet again tied with the idea of the road, the set line for transportation over distances. How enormous an impact did the setting down of railroads and pavement have upon our economic history? One of the richest men in history, Andrew Carnegie, made his fortune from the creation of nation-spanning railroads. The effects on the USA’s economic and cultural history from Carnegie alone is probably incalculable, and that’s just the influence of the road felt through one person.
You can see how culturally significant the road is to the United States just by observing some of our popular culture of the last century or so. I mean, I don’t profess to be too knowledgeable about foreign film industries, but just how many movies focusing on the experience of being on the open road are there that haven’t been set in the USA? Or at least made by and for Americans. If the concepts of the cross-country road trip, the Sunday drive, and the lone drive down an empty road in some kind of vague and not particularly sensible attempt at either confronting your inner demons or trying to outrun them, did not originate from America, then it’s at least made the most use of them, I would think. And that’s to say nothing of the cultural significance of a road’s foot traffic.
Again, I know a lot of the historical and thematic impact of the road is global, not just American, but even if roads have great significance to other cultures as well,*** one can’t deny that they’re a huge part of the United States, having played an immeasurable role in this country’s history. I like that even in the middle of its other, grander references and insights, Fallout: New Vegas takes the time to examine and recognize the nature of something so simple as a road, and its integral role in shaping our society.
And that’s it for now. Are there more themes and representations in Fallout: New Vegas to contemplate than the ones I’ve listed? Indisputably. But I think that’s a fair chunk of text right there, and I can always continue to speculate later if there’s an interest. What was the point of all this? Not entirely sure, I guess, but it was interesting to think about, and with any luck, I’ve at least impressed upon you that the Fallout series is more than just an artistically cool and fun post-apocalypse adventure series, that there’s a lot of insightful ingenuity that goes into the games’ settings, plots, and characters. Or perhaps I’ve just impressed upon you the idea that I can read way too much into these games and find depth where none was intended. Entirely possible, I suppose, but I really do think that Fallout games are more than just the awesome RPGs they are on the surface, that they’re also incredibly thought-provoking and intelligent, and I believe Fallout: New Vegas is a great example of this.
Also, just a heads-up: This rant took me a very long time to write, so I'm gonna take a month off from ranting to refill my rant backlog, get a few more rants done and on the back burner for when I need'em. Sorry! But there's like almost 200 other rants here you can peruse in the meantime if you like.
* I’m going to say right now that I have little more than an everyday knowledge of Native Americans’ culture and history, and the details of the United States’ long and extremely nasty history of conflict with them. I think that cursory knowledge is all one really needs for interpreting the Fallout: New Vegas stuff fairly well, but all the same, I apologize if I speak in offensive ignorance at any time here.
** To avoid controversy, I’d like to remind you that I specifically implied that these things were not necessarily true. While there is, to my understanding, some debate over exactly how inaccurate this is, the idea that Native Americans were cannibals is a prejudiced piece of propaganda that persisted for a particularly long period of the past. Lousy though it may be, labeling Native Americans as cannibals has long been a perception of the national culture that Fallout attempts to depict.
*** Yet another thematic connection to Rome to be found in Fallout: New Vegas. Interesting, that.
Ah, the Fallout series. Truly a series of classics (if you don't count Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, at least). Creative and fun, the Fallout games fascinate me in several ways, but perhaps the most interesting thing about them is the fact that they are designed to reference and explore the history, government, society, and culture of the United States of America. Much in the way that Atlus explores religions, faith, and the spiritual in its Shin Megami Tensei series, Fallout explores Americana, and also like the SMT series, it does its intellectual exploration without any sacrifice to the games' plot, characters, or general entertainment value, which is quite a feat, I think. It's not every product that can satisfy a need for intellectual stimulation AND have enough explosions, gore, and flamethrower-wielding mutants to enthrall the standard member of the overall ignorant, shallow gaming masses.
It's always fascinating for me to play a Fallout game and enjoy its events, because each one has new themes and perspectives on many aspects of America to delve into, while also usually building off many of the previous games' work on this theme. And even though it's not exactly going to go anywhere, I thought it'd be cool to make a rant wherein I share my thoughts and interpretations of the themes and perspectives found in one of these titles.* Yes, a rant where I ramble aimlessly about things that probably shouldn't be taken quite so seriously. Try to contain your surprise.
So which game to discuss? Well, any of them will be good, but I've decided that Fallout: New Vegas will be my subject. Why? Well, since it's the newest (at the time of writing this rant, at least), the ideas I have of its meanings are freshest in my mind. I've also found its thematic material much easier to recognize and contemplate than that of the previous games. This could be because there's more of it, or simply because they made it a little more obvious this time around and a lot of the subtle content of the previous games just went over my head.
So, without further ado (because seriously, there's already been way too much), let's dig into this game's themes.
Conquest, Expansion, and Imperialism
In some ways, the theme of the expanding conqueror is really not so much a theme of the USA as it is just a theme of human society. Ambitious hordes of violent jerks were out kicking their neighbors' asses long before the first lice-ridden European explorer stumbled out of his grimy ship and onto the beach of this continent, after all. And at first glance, the violent conqueror of this game, Caesar, seems to be an acknowledgement of this--regardless of his thematic ties to the Las Vegas setting (Caesar's Palace and whatnot), he and his forces are modeled after the ancient empire-building Roman legions, European rather than American.
And yet, the connection to the US in particular is definitely there. Even if the United States isn't thought of as a militaristic conqueror in general like Rome, or Genghis Khan, or Imperialist-era Britain, the fact of the matter is that this country's continent-spanning borders are a result of violent expansion that conquered, drove out, and committed terrible acts against countless indigenous peoples of less technologically-advanced societies. It's not hard to draw a lot of parallels between what this country did to the Native Americans, the brutal conquest behind "sea to shining sea," and the general method of Fallout New Vegas’s Caesar’s Legion. After all, the Legion’s mode of operation is to crush every tribe they encounter in their imperial expansion westward, destroying each tribal individual to oppose them and assimilating those that surrender. Whether through annihilation or absorption, the Legion’s subjugation of all they encounter means the death of each tribe’s culture. No, the parallels between the Legion’s westward expansion and that of US history are not hard to draw, at all.
The other player in the imperialism-expansion issue of Fallout: New Vegas is, of course, the New California Republic. The NCR’s method of expansion has its own ties to the USA, in perhaps a more familiar way. Rather than rely on destruction and fear to spread itself, the NCR’s policies of expansion are subtle, using diplomacy, economic pressure, social and technological rewards, and political ploys to get settlements to join voluntarily. Though the NCR has, at the time of Fallout: New Vegas, the most powerful military might of any group or nation in the wastelands that we’ve yet seen in the series, they seem to generally use it to fight actual threats, not to conquer small territories. The NCR’s military strength is more an incentive than a threat to prospective members, offering protection from the various dangers of the wasteland in exchange for joining. This, of course, is similar to the way that the USA has operated with foreign policy and expansion in both modern times and earlier in its history. Territories, the later states, certain allies of ours, many of these expansions of United States influence employed the same kind of tactics that the NCR shows. Of course, most every nation and empire that’s furthered its borders has done some of this stuff, particularly in modern times, so it’s not exactly a US-only sort of thing. But then, neither was the Legion’s example of bloody culture-destruction. Even if not USA-exclusive, the parallels are still there with both the Legion and NCR’s ways of conquest and land acquisition.
Recognizing this, the fact that these 2 forces are embroiled in such a bitter war during the course of Fallout: New Vegas brings with it the interesting question of whether the conflict isn’t meant to have a higher significance regarding this theme of imperialism. Is there an intention of the game’s writers to have the conflict between the NCR and the Legion at least partially meant to be a symbolic struggle between which method of expansion and conquest is best? Perhaps the battle between direct and violent conquest, and indirect and manipulative conquest, is meant to at least pose the question of which direction America should take in world affairs. Or perhaps I’m just reading too much into it at this point.
Probably the latter.
The Role of Tribals
Tribals are an on-again, off-again thing in Fallout. Fallout 2 had a big role for them, Fallout 1 and 3 didn’t really have them at all, and Fallout Tactics used them for a little bit in the beginning and then moved along. Here in New Vegas, though, the idea is taken and given a pretty decent amount of importance and exploration.
The various tribes and their people in Fallout: New Vegas are obviously based on and meant to symbolize Native Americans,* and through them you get several examples of the ways that Native Americans have been seen in US culture. The White Legs are a vicious tribe that wants to win the favor of Caesar’s Legion, and make war on other tribes to earn respect from the Legion, which probably is a reference both to the exaggerated viciousness that cultural propaganda used to attribute to Native Americans, and to the fact that there were, at times, some tribes of Native Americans that attempted to form self-preserving alliances with colonists and settlers by attacking other tribes that were giving the colonists/settlers trouble. Much like how the Legion never had any actual intentions of treating the White Legs well (according to Ulysses, who was Caesar’s ambassador to the White Legs), I don’t think the real-life attempts to befriend the colonists/settlers ever worked out for very long.
Then there are the Sorrows, which symbolize the popular modern view of the Native Americans as spiritual, culturally-rich, and generally innocent. This direct opposite of the White Legs isn’t necessarily accurate, either, in how innocent and peaceful it depicts the Native Americans, but it’s certainly much more generally accurate of the Native Americans’ spiritual nature and worthwhile culture, at least. And even if I doubt the Sorrows’ innocence of humanity’s worse side is entirely accurate of Native American tribes of the past (they had battles for territory and so on, after all), they still had to be innocent of just how atrocious human beings could be to each other until the colonists and settlers came and gave them a first-hand demonstration.
The various other tribes in the game also are representative of different aspects attributed to and perspectives of Native Americans (whether these were factually accurate or not), like the Great Khans’ great knowledge of how to use the flora of the wasteland, the White Glove Society’s history of cannibalism,** the social significance of personal presentation that Ulysses relates in his remembrances of his tribe’s way of fashioning their hair, and so on. But in the end, all of these Fallout: New Vegas tribes’ symbolism of Native Americans comes to one issue, the same issue that it always was throughout USA history: what happens when a larger, better-equipped, and relentlessly expanding nation wants their land. That’s where the comparison between the Fallout: New Vegas tribes and the Native Americans becomes most significant.
While showing us these various parallels of Native Americans, Fallout: New Vegas also explores their ultimate fates. Sadly, and even more sadly realistically, the only time tribes in Fallout: New Vegas seem to get a happy ending (or at least, a non-bad one) is when they quietly, meekly give up their territories and move to a new place. If they stay and try to fight those that want their land and/or lives, either they’re crushed completely by their enemies, as is the case with the Legion’s subjugation of almost every tribe it encounters, or they’re mentally scarred by the conflict and lose an important part of their cultural identity, as is the case of the Sorrows if the player rallies them to fight back against the White Legs. If they try to ally themselves with the big nation interested in taking their territory for itself, whatever respect they earn will be short-lived, as is the case with the Great Khans, whose ending if they ally themselves with either the victorious NCR or the victorious Legion will lead to either being forced into a small reservation far north of any trade routes (the result of an NCR alliance), or being assimilated and having their culture destroyed (the result of a Legion alliance). And when they submit and agree to the demands of the powerful outsiders, it’s the death of their cultural identity, such as with the tribes that join the Legion, or the Families that agreed to run New Vegas for House. What happened to the Families is probably the least difficult metaphor to pick up on in this game--they gave into the will of an invader with superior firepower (House), and were absorbed into his society, giving up their culture to work his casinos and adopt a radically different social identity that he had chosen for them.
But if the tribes take the path of avoidance, migrating elsewhere to avoid the conquerors, they get the best possible endings in Fallout: New Vegas--the Great Khans avoid being crushed or forcibly displaced, and gain the time and space they need to create a proper nation for themselves, while the Sorrows, if they flee the valley instead of attempting to make war against the White Legs, find a new land where they avoid the harassment of the rest of the world while keeping their innocence. Now, you can criticize the developers for seeming to promote running from aggressors, but I don’t think that’s the right way to look at this. Unlike most of the other consequences of the player’s decisions in the Fallout series, I think this is less a case where the results are meant to show whether a course of action was right or wrong, and more just referencing how things more or less went down for the Native Americans of the territories now held by the USA. When everything is said and done, every course of action they could and did take, violent or diplomatic, did not save them from losing their lands to the colonists and settlers who kept expanding across the continent, and trying to hold their ground on the matter just resulted in violence, forced relocation, and/or cultural absorption. And that’s what Fallout: New Vegas seems to reflect--that voluntary relocation, even if it is unfair, and general avoidance are the only ways the tribal peoples could remain relatively intact as a society.
Of course, in real life, there reached a point where there really just was no place to escape to, save for some reservations scattered across the country that were generally too small and, as I understand it, economically almost worthless. But the Fallout universe at the time of Fallout: New Vegas has a long way to go before the NCR, Legion, or any other major nation-force will have the chance to expand that much, so the Sorrows and Great Khans are theoretically safe for a while, at least, if they choose to move elsewhere.
The Culture of Las Vegas
References to various icons and ideas and whatnot from USA culture and history fill most Fallout games to the brim, and Fallout: New Vegas is no exception. This one, of course, focuses largely on references to famous aspects of Las Vegas, and integral components of its culture. Now, I could sit here and list out every little thing the game uses that’s indicative of Las Vegas beyond just the necessary locations in the game, each reference and minute detail, but I have other things to do this month, and chances are you might, too, so I’m just gonna go into some of the bigger, more interesting ones.
First of all, the theme of gambling in Fallout: New Vegas is, if not terribly interesting by itself, at least worth mentioning, I think. Gambling’s traditionally had a component in the Fallout series, Fallout 1 and 2 in particular, with the games offering players a quick chance to play slot machines and...what was it, in the early games? Roulette? I think it was Roulette. You can tell how much it affected me by how familiar I am with it. But the option to gamble was there, and even represented by an upgradeable Skill for Gambling. Probably the most useless way to spend your character’s Skill Points in the entire game, of course, and I’d be mildly surprised if the number of people who chose to seriously invest their Skill Points in it instead of the other obviously more useful Skills goes as high as double digits...but it WAS there.
Still, as I’ve implied just now, gambling had practically no relevance to the games overall, so Fallout: New Vegas’s giving it importance is new and noteworthy. Most of the game’s casinos are locations of some plot relevance (notably the Families’ casinos), and the entire first Downloadable Content package for the game (a very good DLC, I might note) is based around a casino with a troubled history. There’s also Caravan, a card minigame that you can play with the majority of the game’s NPCs. This game effectively expands the influence of gambling using a deck of cards (cards being, I think, the most easily and widely recognized symbol of games of chance) beyond the casinos, out into the wasteland from one side of the game’s playable map to the other. So, as you’d suspect, the theme of gambling becomes universally major in Fallout: New Vegas.
And yet! There was one thing that confused me somewhat when I played through the game. For all the hype developers had seemed to make during the game’s creation about how major a thing the casinos’ system was, it actually did seem to have a comparatively minor part to play. I know I just said that the casinos are mostly important plot locations, but here’s the thing--while you DO have to visit them and they ARE plot-relevant, the actual act of visiting their card tables, playing the slot machines, wagering money, is actually still pretty much entirely optional. While Poker with a high Luck stat turns out to be a good way to make about 20,000 to 25,000 caps altogether, there’s really nothing in the game that compels you to sample this vaunted gambling system, no incorporation of it into the plot that I can recall. And Caravan is certainly no more important to the plot. I think of the, what, 100+ hours I put into Fallout: New Vegas, I may have played Caravan twice.
This confused me, but I think I might have the reason for it (that is, if there IS a reason, and I’m not just reading too much into it, which might be the case at any number of points in this rant). It once again reflects the culture and ideology of Las Vegas. Sure, gambling figures heavily into the image of Las Vegas, and it’s all over the place, and it’s sort of the main draw of the city as a vacation spot and American phenomenon. But at the same time, it’s not really a...mandatory component of it, is it? What I mean is, while the gambling’s there, it’s in the spotlight, and sure there are a ton of people who go to play the tables and shoot the craps and whatnot (I’m not too familiar with gambling terms; I don’t do much of it), the draw of Las Vegas, the spirit of it, is more the idea of fun, of the glamor and glitz, of a fun, crazy time of living like there’s no tomorrow. Of course, the gambling’s the most noticeable method of enacting this idea, but there are plenty of people for whom a vacation or party night in Vegas includes little to no gambling, but is nonetheless as wild and enjoyable as expected from the city. So, by hyping the gambling, by making it a present background to the entire game, but by NOT making it a strictly necessary component of Fallout: New Vegas, perhaps the developers actually were getting the idea exactly right.
Or maybe I’m reading way, way too much into this and these things never even crossed their minds. Entirely possible.
Anyway! There’s a lot of interesting cultural stuff to find in this game that’s worth thinking about, like how powerful and vitally necessary electrical power is to Las Vegas (and by extension, our modern lifestyle) as an entity, which is shown by the fact that the battle for control of the New Vegas area in the game is fought not over the actual location itself, but the dam that can power it and much more, or the power of entertainment as an opiate of the masses, shown in the way that House manages to protect his belongings from the vastly superior power of the NCR simply by making his strip of New Vegas an indispensible provider of entertainment for NCR’s citizens and soldiers. But for now, I think the last bit of cultural insight I’d like to get into is the character of Mr. House in Fallout: New Vegas.
Now while you can link Mr. House to a lot of pop culture characters in several ways, I think it’s fairly safe to say that he is primarily based on the character of Charles Foster Kane, from the legendary film Citizen Kane. His appearance, his vocal tones and method of speech, the relentless pursuit of power and the strange, manipulative methods thereof, the whole thing with the snow globes, it’s all pretty obvious. But why have one of the most important figures in the plot (possibly THE most important) of a game focused around Las Vegas be an homage to Kane? Kane didn’t have anything to do with Las Vegas, or even Nevada in general, in the film, not that I can recall. I mean, like I’ve said, the Fallout games are littered with references to American culture, so I could just take this as another of those and leave it at that, but House’s importance to the game’s events, and role as the one calling the shots of the actual New Vegas, puts him in a position where he has to have some serious symbolic significance or else be entirely inconsistent with the game’s storytelling methods.
And as it turns out, I’m pretty sure that there is, in fact, a lot about the character of Kane that makes him an excellent choice to base Mr. House on. First of all, on the surface level, it definitely works; you need someone with brutal cunning and understanding of manipulative human interaction to work with the position that House has in the game. More importantly, however, in many ways, Kane embodies quite a lot of aspects of the Las Vegas culture and mentality. First of all, the opulence. The extreme extravagance of Kane’s lifestyle, shown best by his famous man-made paradise Xanadu, certainly has similarities to the extreme extravagance of Las Vegas. Kane has great wealth, and he happily spends it in huge quantities on his whims, clearly caring far less for holding onto his wealth than for having as noticeable a good time as possible. That’s more or less a part of the idea of Las Vegas--throw caution to the wind, don’t worry about what it costs you, just live in the moment and have a great time.
There’s also the matter of Kane’s unflagging ambition. Charles Foster Kane is ambitious to a fault, seeking ever to rise higher, to have more. He’ll sacrifice his money, his marriage, his integrity, and his public standing, anything and everything for his ambitions--ambitions which he never does achieve, losing the election. But then, it’s hard to say whether his ambition could ever have been satisfied to start with. For men like Kane, sometimes there’s nothing but the ambition, never satisfied with what they achieve, living only to pursue the next carrot dangling in front of them. And that’s why his ambition makes him a great model for the character of Mr. House, owner and iconic figure of New Vegas. As I said above, gambling is not necessarily a required part of Las Vegas, but it’s the inseparable iconic concept of the city, and the ambitious Kane actually is very much like a compulsive gambler. He never knows when to quit, when to either be satisfied with what he has or to cut his losses and leave the game, always pursuing the next goal no matter what it costs him--much like the compulsive gambler forever chases the jackpot, heedless of what he’s lost and what he’s gained so far. And as it almost always does with the gambler, the obsession ruins Kane--he puts too much on the line, won’t back down, and in the end, not only loses what he wanted but also everything he had. Yes, Kane is, indeed, an excellent character to base the owner, caretaker, and symbolic figure of New Vegas upon.
The Significance of Roads
Much, much more than in any previous Fallout game, the tattered remains of major roads and highways play a significant role in Fallout: New Vegas, and the fact that their role is made significant is in itself a significant thing. Unlike other Fallout games, which are almost entirely open-ended in most aspects of exploration and plot, Fallout: New Vegas, while not lacking plenty of optional exploration, has definite paths to follow, at least for the first major part of its plot--in order to get to New Vegas, where the game’s story really starts to come together and become important, you pretty much HAVE to follow 1 road or another; there are insurmountable mountainous barriers that prevent you from just cutting across the middle of the map to reach it. While plenty of off-road exploration is available, this means that part of the game is pretty linear as you simply follow the highway path to your destination. Furthermore, the final, climactic Lonesome Road DLC for the game is (unsurprisingly, given the name) a very linear journey which greatly focuses on the symbolism and nature of roads, and the people who travel them. It’s actually very cool, and reasonably thought-provoking.
I’m not going to rehash what Lonesome Road tells us, but I do want to touch on this theme of roads and give it further relevance through relation. I think that one reason why the concept of the road was included with such thematic importance in Fallout: New Vegas is that roads have more cultural importance to the USA than perhaps to any other nation in the world, save the historical conquests of Rome.*** I mean, to be sure, roads and the transit they allow are inextricably important parts of human society and history no matter where you go, sure, but more than ever for America. For the formative centuries of the United States, exploration and expansion across the continent was a major driving force in every aspect of the US’s society--its economy, its national and international policies, its culture, its people, its mentality, these were all heavily influenced the USA’s constant drive to expand to the other end of the continent, to “tame” the wilderness. While the trailblazers and settlers did this exploration, the paths they created to be followed by the rest of the country’s society, the roads that their labors allowed for are their true legacy. As a monument provides tangible representation of intangibles of the mind or past, so the road sits as the monument to America’s significant history of exploration and expansion.
The road is also significant to the United States culture that the Fallout series likes to represent and analyze in that the USA’s size made the road all the more essential to its function. Sure, roads are important in any developed country, and have lots of historical impact anywhere you go, but I feel that they’re just not the same to a smaller country, like a European nation, or Japan. It’s hard to explain, but I feel that the greater size of the USA means that the roads across it become all the more essential, I think, as ways to connect its people and varying cultural identities together.
Economically, the history the USA is yet again tied with the idea of the road, the set line for transportation over distances. How enormous an impact did the setting down of railroads and pavement have upon our economic history? One of the richest men in history, Andrew Carnegie, made his fortune from the creation of nation-spanning railroads. The effects on the USA’s economic and cultural history from Carnegie alone is probably incalculable, and that’s just the influence of the road felt through one person.
You can see how culturally significant the road is to the United States just by observing some of our popular culture of the last century or so. I mean, I don’t profess to be too knowledgeable about foreign film industries, but just how many movies focusing on the experience of being on the open road are there that haven’t been set in the USA? Or at least made by and for Americans. If the concepts of the cross-country road trip, the Sunday drive, and the lone drive down an empty road in some kind of vague and not particularly sensible attempt at either confronting your inner demons or trying to outrun them, did not originate from America, then it’s at least made the most use of them, I would think. And that’s to say nothing of the cultural significance of a road’s foot traffic.
Again, I know a lot of the historical and thematic impact of the road is global, not just American, but even if roads have great significance to other cultures as well,*** one can’t deny that they’re a huge part of the United States, having played an immeasurable role in this country’s history. I like that even in the middle of its other, grander references and insights, Fallout: New Vegas takes the time to examine and recognize the nature of something so simple as a road, and its integral role in shaping our society.
And that’s it for now. Are there more themes and representations in Fallout: New Vegas to contemplate than the ones I’ve listed? Indisputably. But I think that’s a fair chunk of text right there, and I can always continue to speculate later if there’s an interest. What was the point of all this? Not entirely sure, I guess, but it was interesting to think about, and with any luck, I’ve at least impressed upon you that the Fallout series is more than just an artistically cool and fun post-apocalypse adventure series, that there’s a lot of insightful ingenuity that goes into the games’ settings, plots, and characters. Or perhaps I’ve just impressed upon you the idea that I can read way too much into these games and find depth where none was intended. Entirely possible, I suppose, but I really do think that Fallout games are more than just the awesome RPGs they are on the surface, that they’re also incredibly thought-provoking and intelligent, and I believe Fallout: New Vegas is a great example of this.
Also, just a heads-up: This rant took me a very long time to write, so I'm gonna take a month off from ranting to refill my rant backlog, get a few more rants done and on the back burner for when I need'em. Sorry! But there's like almost 200 other rants here you can peruse in the meantime if you like.
* I’m going to say right now that I have little more than an everyday knowledge of Native Americans’ culture and history, and the details of the United States’ long and extremely nasty history of conflict with them. I think that cursory knowledge is all one really needs for interpreting the Fallout: New Vegas stuff fairly well, but all the same, I apologize if I speak in offensive ignorance at any time here.
** To avoid controversy, I’d like to remind you that I specifically implied that these things were not necessarily true. While there is, to my understanding, some debate over exactly how inaccurate this is, the idea that Native Americans were cannibals is a prejudiced piece of propaganda that persisted for a particularly long period of the past. Lousy though it may be, labeling Native Americans as cannibals has long been a perception of the national culture that Fallout attempts to depict.
*** Yet another thematic connection to Rome to be found in Fallout: New Vegas. Interesting, that.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Breath of Fire 2's Dragon Tear
You know what was a pretty neat idea? Breath of Fire 2’s Dragon Tear. This was the little accessory that showed up with every important character’s dialogue and showed through its color the way the person felt toward you. Kinda like a mood ring, if mood rings were in RPGs, and actually worked at all. The idea’s a good one, giving the player a better understanding of their character’s approval of the protagonist’s decisions, allowing for a way of tracking characters’ reactions to the protagonist’s actions and words as dialogue occurs, and acting as a lie detector by exposing how an NPC really feels, regardless of what he or she is saying--all while being much more aesthetically pleasing than just a message saying someone’s approval has gone up/down, or something like that, as you get in later games like Dragon Age 1.
You know what was a pretty useless idea? Breath of Fire 2’s Dragon Tear. What exactly is the point of having this indicator of how you’re doing in a character’s eyes in a game that offers no player interaction? I mean, there is almost no part of the game wherein the player has any ability to influence the plot or character interactions. It’s a completely linear story, and the protagonist rarely actually responds to anyone in dialogue--and on those rare occasions, whatever the player chooses to have the protagonist Ryu say in response doesn’t really change anything. So if almost every emotional response the NPCs and party members are going to have is unchangeably scripted, why bother to let the player track it? The game’s dialogue is usually pretty straightforward; we don’t really need the Dragon Tear to clarify much.
There’s also the fact that the emotional rating of characters never actually makes a difference, except for a single, extremely tiny moment of the game, which has nothing to do with the plot’s events anyway.* Aside from that one moment, nothing ever changes due to the Dragon Tear rating. Whether the Dragon Tear says a party member loves or hates the protagonist, they’ll say the same lines of dialogue, and they’ll take the same actions in the plot. If it makes the slightest difference in battle performance whether your teammate likes Ryu or thinks he’s scum, I’ve certainly never noticed it, and I’ve played the game through like a dozen times.** No change to the game’s dialogue, to the actions of its cast, to the events of its course, or to the specifics of its conclusion, can be effected by the emotion measured by the Dragon Tear. And like I said, NPCs’ actions and attitudes can’t be influenced by any choice on the player’s part. What little the player can do to affect the mood of the people of the world is of no consequence.
Even as a passive storytelling tool, the Dragon Tear actually doesn’t work all that well. Like I said, the dialogue isn’t all that ambiguous for the most part (bad translation moments aside), so it’s not really needed for emotional clarification, and there were times, I seem to recall, when the emotional reading it was giving didn’t even seem to quite match up with the character’s words, actions, and personality, anyway.
Really, the Dragon Tear is very puzzling to me. From one perspective, it’s a terrific idea, years ahead of its time, something I wish would be implemented in many of today’s RPGs. It would be really nice if we saw it, or something like it, on screen during character interactions in games like Dragon Age 1 and 2, or Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 and 4, games where there’s a plot-significant approval rating to major characters that can be bettered or worsened by the protagonist’s actions and dialogue. It’d be so much nicer than just a little message denoting the approval points you’ve picked up, or a rinky-dink little sound effect, which is what we get for the aforementioned games. And yet, this idea ahead of its time has NOTHING to do with the kind of game it was made for! The linear, forward Breath of Fire 2 is a completely different RPG from the kind that could in any way make actual use of the idea behind the Dragon Tear. It’s like a neat idea for a game got lost and accidentally entered the head of a completely different game’s developer.
* Basically, if you sweet-talk a resident of your town enough, he’ll teach you the Missile spell instead of something less powerful. This is IF you chose to acquire him for the town at all, of course.
** Look, I only had so many games as a kid, okay? I played ALL my SNES RPGs at least a few times.
You know what was a pretty useless idea? Breath of Fire 2’s Dragon Tear. What exactly is the point of having this indicator of how you’re doing in a character’s eyes in a game that offers no player interaction? I mean, there is almost no part of the game wherein the player has any ability to influence the plot or character interactions. It’s a completely linear story, and the protagonist rarely actually responds to anyone in dialogue--and on those rare occasions, whatever the player chooses to have the protagonist Ryu say in response doesn’t really change anything. So if almost every emotional response the NPCs and party members are going to have is unchangeably scripted, why bother to let the player track it? The game’s dialogue is usually pretty straightforward; we don’t really need the Dragon Tear to clarify much.
There’s also the fact that the emotional rating of characters never actually makes a difference, except for a single, extremely tiny moment of the game, which has nothing to do with the plot’s events anyway.* Aside from that one moment, nothing ever changes due to the Dragon Tear rating. Whether the Dragon Tear says a party member loves or hates the protagonist, they’ll say the same lines of dialogue, and they’ll take the same actions in the plot. If it makes the slightest difference in battle performance whether your teammate likes Ryu or thinks he’s scum, I’ve certainly never noticed it, and I’ve played the game through like a dozen times.** No change to the game’s dialogue, to the actions of its cast, to the events of its course, or to the specifics of its conclusion, can be effected by the emotion measured by the Dragon Tear. And like I said, NPCs’ actions and attitudes can’t be influenced by any choice on the player’s part. What little the player can do to affect the mood of the people of the world is of no consequence.
Even as a passive storytelling tool, the Dragon Tear actually doesn’t work all that well. Like I said, the dialogue isn’t all that ambiguous for the most part (bad translation moments aside), so it’s not really needed for emotional clarification, and there were times, I seem to recall, when the emotional reading it was giving didn’t even seem to quite match up with the character’s words, actions, and personality, anyway.
Really, the Dragon Tear is very puzzling to me. From one perspective, it’s a terrific idea, years ahead of its time, something I wish would be implemented in many of today’s RPGs. It would be really nice if we saw it, or something like it, on screen during character interactions in games like Dragon Age 1 and 2, or Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 and 4, games where there’s a plot-significant approval rating to major characters that can be bettered or worsened by the protagonist’s actions and dialogue. It’d be so much nicer than just a little message denoting the approval points you’ve picked up, or a rinky-dink little sound effect, which is what we get for the aforementioned games. And yet, this idea ahead of its time has NOTHING to do with the kind of game it was made for! The linear, forward Breath of Fire 2 is a completely different RPG from the kind that could in any way make actual use of the idea behind the Dragon Tear. It’s like a neat idea for a game got lost and accidentally entered the head of a completely different game’s developer.
* Basically, if you sweet-talk a resident of your town enough, he’ll teach you the Missile spell instead of something less powerful. This is IF you chose to acquire him for the town at all, of course.
** Look, I only had so many games as a kid, okay? I played ALL my SNES RPGs at least a few times.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Bastion
Well, guys, last year I played my first Independent RPG, Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch,* and I really enjoyed it. In fact, I’d like to say, again, that you should definitely think about buying it. It’s only $9 now, and it’s quite a hoot. Also, the only way I’m going to see its story continued is if it makes enough cash to warrant a sequel, so go and buy it. Now!
This year, I’ve played my second Indy RPG, Bastion, at the suggestion of my longtime chum Queelez. And I liked it, and since it’s another Indy RPG and thus could definitely use the support of even so tiny a group as my readership, I figured I should do a rant on it just as I did for MLRotB.
So! What do you say about Bastion? A lot, if you’re a long-winded word bag like me. First things first. You can find the game’s homepage here. You’ll find there what options you have as far as acquiring the game. It’s only $15, which these days is, what, the cost of lunch for a couple days? There’s even a free playable demo, so you can make sure you won’t outright hate it before you commit to purchasing it.
Bastion is a very artsy action-RPG that culturally grounds itself in a Wild West mentality while...um, while really not being Wild West-ish at all. It’s hard to explain. The music, the plot progression, the narration, a significant foundation to its world, they all have clear inspiration in the old Wild West ideals, culture, and history, but at the same time, the world is its own, with a plethora of interesting ideas and exotic locales that you can’t really attribute to the Wild West (at least, not that I can really see). There’s also a bit of Steampunk mixed in there, although I’ve always had some trouble distinguishing Steampunk from Wild West anyway, so where the one ends and the other begins I couldn’t really tell you. It all comes together very well, though, and creates a world that is new, different, and interesting, and yet at the same cool and engaging in a comfortable, familiar way. There’s also a highly unusual element mixed in here--that of the post apocalypse. Now granted, you see a lot of stuff that’s post apocalypse, but to my knowledge, you don’t often get a post apocalyptic scenario combined with a Wild-West-Steampunk-and-also-quite-original venture very often, so that adds one more interesting aspect to it.
The story of the game is quite neat, being overall quite simple (but not pedestrian), but told in a pleasingly complex and involved way. At times the plot’s revelations are overt, and at other times they’re quite subtle and require you to put 2 and 2 together, but either way, the story’s execution is quite good, going at exactly the right pace throughout, with just enough layers that you’ll be interested in at least one replay just to pick up on any of the subtle details and connections you missed. There’s a lot of good underlying themes in Bastion, too, particularly about the follies of mistrust and hostility between peoples of different cultures, which of course ties back in with the Wild West themes, since the (usually poor) relations with Native Americans figures heavily in Wild West culture. Finally, Bastion’s conclusion is satisfying and appropriate (regardless of which ending you choose), which, after the insufferable travesty that the recent Mass Effect 3’s ending was, is something I have lately come to appreciate more than ever before.
The voice acting for the game is quite good. Now, normally, you wouldn’t see me mention this so quickly in a rant like this--after going over the story, my next stop would be the characters, since those 2 aspects are more or less always the most important aspects of an RPG (and most other things). But in Bastion, the voice acting is intrinsically tied to its plot, as 99% of the game’s plot, characters, themes, history, and so on are told through the voice of one narrator. When everything your creative venture is is narrated by a single person throughout the venture’s entirety, you better darn well be sure you get a fine voice actor to do the job. Bastion’s Logan Cunningham is just that voice actor. Onto his vocal shoulders falls the hefty job of providing every narrative detail of Bastion’s considerable story and setting, and he’s definitely got the tone, the talk, and the talent for the role. His voice fits his character and the game’s world perfectly, and you’ll be eager to hear every line from start to finish from him.
Character-wise, Bastion is both good and bad. Its few characters have their histories fleshed out pretty well in the optional dream sequences, which is good (except for Rucks, annoyingly; his dream sequence is just about fleshing out and recalling the world of Bastion). In the actual present of the game, though, only Zulf gets any real character development (most of it subtle and understated, but it’s good stuff all the same), with Zia maybe getting a tiny bit as well. Rucks’s character isn’t really explored at all, and while the Kid (Bastion’s protagonist) has a dream sequence that gives him a back story, there’s almost no personality given to him or his interactions with the other characters. It ultimately goes back to my problem with Silent Protagonists in general; the Kid becomes little more than an automaton, albeit one with impressive exploits that Rucks reports. Still, it’s all done quite artfully, so in this case a Silent Protagonist really is not a serious problem like it is in most other RPGs, and overall the cast of Bastion is decent.
The details of the game are pretty much all positive to report on, too. The music for Bastion is perfect for setting its tone from one part to the next (which is important to a game with as much atmosphere as Bastion), and a lot of the tunes are by themselves pretty cool. Graphically it takes a little getting used to at first, but it’s not a big deal, even if you assume visuals to have any significance in an RPG to start with. Which I don’t. The art for the game is stylized and pleasing, coordinating well with and helping to set the tone of Bastion. Finally, the gameplay has reasonable complexity governing it, allowing for a fair amount of customization to one’s style of play, but ultimately is pleasantly simple and straightforward.
Bastion’s not perfect, I suppose. It’s pretty short, clocking in at about 10 hours from start to finish, and unfortunately, it does leave one wanting more. That’s not to say it feels rushed, or incomplete, or anything of the sort--it tells its story at its own pace, and accomplishes everything it sets out to do in that regard. Still, it wouldn’t have taken much to keep it going just a bit longer--1 or 2 extra missions thrown in that failed to yield the sought-after Cores or Fragments (plot doohickeys) could have extended the game’s life by another hour or so, and that time could have been filled with a bit more development of and interactions between the main characters. The brevity of Bastion is helped a bit by its strong replay value, but even then, you’ll probably acquire and experience pretty much everything you want by the end of the second playthrough, and of course that second playthrough will take much less time than the first did, so you still won’t have spent much more time on the entire game as you might on a Fallout DLC of less price. That, and the fact that I wish there were more character development are probably the game’s only flaws.
But really, as I said, the character development issue is still positive overall for Bastion, and so what if it’s short? Is a game’s worth measured by its length or its content? You can spend 50 to 60 hours playing La Pucelle Tactics, or Final Fantasy 8, or Star Ocean 2, and that sure as hell doesn’t make any of them better than Bastion. Hell, I would’ve preferred it if those games were a great deal shorter; it would have meant fewer hours of boredom and/or torment.
Overall, Bastion’s an artsy game, an interesting game, a thoughtful game, and a solid, all-around good game. My tiny forays into the world of Independent RPGs has been very encouraging so far, and if this genre has any more gems like Bastion, I’m going to enjoy my further explorations of it. I thank Queelez for recommending it to me, and I’m forwarding that recommendation to anyone and everyone who reads this blog. Go give Bastion a shot; I think you’ll like it.
* Assuming you don’t count Kingdom of Loathing. Which I guess DOES sort of count, but that’s more like an Independent MMORPG, and here I’m just talking about your regular RPGs.
This year, I’ve played my second Indy RPG, Bastion, at the suggestion of my longtime chum Queelez. And I liked it, and since it’s another Indy RPG and thus could definitely use the support of even so tiny a group as my readership, I figured I should do a rant on it just as I did for MLRotB.
So! What do you say about Bastion? A lot, if you’re a long-winded word bag like me. First things first. You can find the game’s homepage here. You’ll find there what options you have as far as acquiring the game. It’s only $15, which these days is, what, the cost of lunch for a couple days? There’s even a free playable demo, so you can make sure you won’t outright hate it before you commit to purchasing it.
Bastion is a very artsy action-RPG that culturally grounds itself in a Wild West mentality while...um, while really not being Wild West-ish at all. It’s hard to explain. The music, the plot progression, the narration, a significant foundation to its world, they all have clear inspiration in the old Wild West ideals, culture, and history, but at the same time, the world is its own, with a plethora of interesting ideas and exotic locales that you can’t really attribute to the Wild West (at least, not that I can really see). There’s also a bit of Steampunk mixed in there, although I’ve always had some trouble distinguishing Steampunk from Wild West anyway, so where the one ends and the other begins I couldn’t really tell you. It all comes together very well, though, and creates a world that is new, different, and interesting, and yet at the same cool and engaging in a comfortable, familiar way. There’s also a highly unusual element mixed in here--that of the post apocalypse. Now granted, you see a lot of stuff that’s post apocalypse, but to my knowledge, you don’t often get a post apocalyptic scenario combined with a Wild-West-Steampunk-and-also-quite-original venture very often, so that adds one more interesting aspect to it.
The story of the game is quite neat, being overall quite simple (but not pedestrian), but told in a pleasingly complex and involved way. At times the plot’s revelations are overt, and at other times they’re quite subtle and require you to put 2 and 2 together, but either way, the story’s execution is quite good, going at exactly the right pace throughout, with just enough layers that you’ll be interested in at least one replay just to pick up on any of the subtle details and connections you missed. There’s a lot of good underlying themes in Bastion, too, particularly about the follies of mistrust and hostility between peoples of different cultures, which of course ties back in with the Wild West themes, since the (usually poor) relations with Native Americans figures heavily in Wild West culture. Finally, Bastion’s conclusion is satisfying and appropriate (regardless of which ending you choose), which, after the insufferable travesty that the recent Mass Effect 3’s ending was, is something I have lately come to appreciate more than ever before.
The voice acting for the game is quite good. Now, normally, you wouldn’t see me mention this so quickly in a rant like this--after going over the story, my next stop would be the characters, since those 2 aspects are more or less always the most important aspects of an RPG (and most other things). But in Bastion, the voice acting is intrinsically tied to its plot, as 99% of the game’s plot, characters, themes, history, and so on are told through the voice of one narrator. When everything your creative venture is is narrated by a single person throughout the venture’s entirety, you better darn well be sure you get a fine voice actor to do the job. Bastion’s Logan Cunningham is just that voice actor. Onto his vocal shoulders falls the hefty job of providing every narrative detail of Bastion’s considerable story and setting, and he’s definitely got the tone, the talk, and the talent for the role. His voice fits his character and the game’s world perfectly, and you’ll be eager to hear every line from start to finish from him.
Character-wise, Bastion is both good and bad. Its few characters have their histories fleshed out pretty well in the optional dream sequences, which is good (except for Rucks, annoyingly; his dream sequence is just about fleshing out and recalling the world of Bastion). In the actual present of the game, though, only Zulf gets any real character development (most of it subtle and understated, but it’s good stuff all the same), with Zia maybe getting a tiny bit as well. Rucks’s character isn’t really explored at all, and while the Kid (Bastion’s protagonist) has a dream sequence that gives him a back story, there’s almost no personality given to him or his interactions with the other characters. It ultimately goes back to my problem with Silent Protagonists in general; the Kid becomes little more than an automaton, albeit one with impressive exploits that Rucks reports. Still, it’s all done quite artfully, so in this case a Silent Protagonist really is not a serious problem like it is in most other RPGs, and overall the cast of Bastion is decent.
The details of the game are pretty much all positive to report on, too. The music for Bastion is perfect for setting its tone from one part to the next (which is important to a game with as much atmosphere as Bastion), and a lot of the tunes are by themselves pretty cool. Graphically it takes a little getting used to at first, but it’s not a big deal, even if you assume visuals to have any significance in an RPG to start with. Which I don’t. The art for the game is stylized and pleasing, coordinating well with and helping to set the tone of Bastion. Finally, the gameplay has reasonable complexity governing it, allowing for a fair amount of customization to one’s style of play, but ultimately is pleasantly simple and straightforward.
Bastion’s not perfect, I suppose. It’s pretty short, clocking in at about 10 hours from start to finish, and unfortunately, it does leave one wanting more. That’s not to say it feels rushed, or incomplete, or anything of the sort--it tells its story at its own pace, and accomplishes everything it sets out to do in that regard. Still, it wouldn’t have taken much to keep it going just a bit longer--1 or 2 extra missions thrown in that failed to yield the sought-after Cores or Fragments (plot doohickeys) could have extended the game’s life by another hour or so, and that time could have been filled with a bit more development of and interactions between the main characters. The brevity of Bastion is helped a bit by its strong replay value, but even then, you’ll probably acquire and experience pretty much everything you want by the end of the second playthrough, and of course that second playthrough will take much less time than the first did, so you still won’t have spent much more time on the entire game as you might on a Fallout DLC of less price. That, and the fact that I wish there were more character development are probably the game’s only flaws.
But really, as I said, the character development issue is still positive overall for Bastion, and so what if it’s short? Is a game’s worth measured by its length or its content? You can spend 50 to 60 hours playing La Pucelle Tactics, or Final Fantasy 8, or Star Ocean 2, and that sure as hell doesn’t make any of them better than Bastion. Hell, I would’ve preferred it if those games were a great deal shorter; it would have meant fewer hours of boredom and/or torment.
Overall, Bastion’s an artsy game, an interesting game, a thoughtful game, and a solid, all-around good game. My tiny forays into the world of Independent RPGs has been very encouraging so far, and if this genre has any more gems like Bastion, I’m going to enjoy my further explorations of it. I thank Queelez for recommending it to me, and I’m forwarding that recommendation to anyone and everyone who reads this blog. Go give Bastion a shot; I think you’ll like it.
* Assuming you don’t count Kingdom of Loathing. Which I guess DOES sort of count, but that’s more like an Independent MMORPG, and here I’m just talking about your regular RPGs.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
The Fire Emblem Series's Wyvern Riders
Considering that I'm The RPGenius and that Fire Emblem is an RPG series of over 10 titles' length, I've had surprisingly little experience with the series. Many years ago, I played the fan-translated FE4, and last year I checked out FE7 and FE9. This year I've played the remake of FE1, but that still equates to less than half of the series I've gotten to, and unlike the Shin Megami Tensei games, which I only discovered about 3 years ago, I've known about Fire Emblem for close to a decade. Dunno why this is; they seem fairly decent so far. At any rate, it is thus that I say, before diving into this rant, that I know comparatively little about the series as a whole, and perhaps this issue IS addressed at some point, and I'm just out of the loop...although I somewhat doubt that whatever explanation there might have been made for it would stand up to much scrutiny. Nonetheless, here is my issue of the 10-day-periodical-rant-period:
Why the bloody devil do the Fire Emblem Wyvern Riders never use the damn dragons they're sitting on for offense?
Think about this. The Wyvern Rider, AKA Dracoknight unit in a Fire Emblem game is basically a person holding a spear and riding on the back of a wyvern, a special kind of dragon. They're very handy units due to being able to fly over obstacles, much like the Pegasus Knight units in the game. Unlike the Pegasus Knights, however, these are people who are riding a freaking DRAGON. You know--the mythical beast coated with thick scales, equipped with terrible razor-sharp iron claws, and armed to the teeth with teeth? Very sharp ones? Exactly why is it that the Wyvern Rider only takes advantage of the creature's back and wings, and not the rest of the wyvern's assets? I mean, sure, the spear is a powerful, versatile, and far-reaching weapon, and hey, all power to the dragon-riding grunt that wants to skewer enemies with it. But wouldn't it be a far more effective strategy to add to the spear's poking powers a huge, fang-filled maw powered by impossibly strong jaws? Because it IS sorta, y'know, RIGHT THERE.
I mean, it's not like with the Pegasus Knights in the games. I think it'd be a pretty useful and sensible thing to have the pegasus take advantage of being gifted with flight and hooves, and kick enemies as it swoops in for the rider's sword or spear attack. But I'm not really going to argue about that, because horses are not usually all that bloodthirsty a species, and one could reasonably assume that just adding wings to them wouldn't change that. Training a pegasus steed to join in the battle and make its own attacks wouldn't be any more feasible than training a regular ridden horse to do so, and to my knowledge, even war horses were never trained in such a way.
But a wyvern? The concept of biting something really hard to make it die is not exactly a foreign idea to a member of the dragon family. If it were, their mouths would look a little less like a nightmarish killing machine. You don't have to work especially hard to convince a wyvern to attack anything threatening in front of it. The behavior and tools are already there. The only issue might be training the vicious scaled death-maker to STOP doing so at some point, and we know that one's no problem, since apparently the Wyvern Riders have managed to get the monsters not to attack anything at all.
I dunno. I'm sure I'm just nitpicking again, but it seems inefficient, not to mention silly, to have a creature designed specifically to attack and kill anything it wants with impunity, to take it into battle, and then use it as little more than a flying chair.
Why the bloody devil do the Fire Emblem Wyvern Riders never use the damn dragons they're sitting on for offense?
Think about this. The Wyvern Rider, AKA Dracoknight unit in a Fire Emblem game is basically a person holding a spear and riding on the back of a wyvern, a special kind of dragon. They're very handy units due to being able to fly over obstacles, much like the Pegasus Knight units in the game. Unlike the Pegasus Knights, however, these are people who are riding a freaking DRAGON. You know--the mythical beast coated with thick scales, equipped with terrible razor-sharp iron claws, and armed to the teeth with teeth? Very sharp ones? Exactly why is it that the Wyvern Rider only takes advantage of the creature's back and wings, and not the rest of the wyvern's assets? I mean, sure, the spear is a powerful, versatile, and far-reaching weapon, and hey, all power to the dragon-riding grunt that wants to skewer enemies with it. But wouldn't it be a far more effective strategy to add to the spear's poking powers a huge, fang-filled maw powered by impossibly strong jaws? Because it IS sorta, y'know, RIGHT THERE.
I mean, it's not like with the Pegasus Knights in the games. I think it'd be a pretty useful and sensible thing to have the pegasus take advantage of being gifted with flight and hooves, and kick enemies as it swoops in for the rider's sword or spear attack. But I'm not really going to argue about that, because horses are not usually all that bloodthirsty a species, and one could reasonably assume that just adding wings to them wouldn't change that. Training a pegasus steed to join in the battle and make its own attacks wouldn't be any more feasible than training a regular ridden horse to do so, and to my knowledge, even war horses were never trained in such a way.
But a wyvern? The concept of biting something really hard to make it die is not exactly a foreign idea to a member of the dragon family. If it were, their mouths would look a little less like a nightmarish killing machine. You don't have to work especially hard to convince a wyvern to attack anything threatening in front of it. The behavior and tools are already there. The only issue might be training the vicious scaled death-maker to STOP doing so at some point, and we know that one's no problem, since apparently the Wyvern Riders have managed to get the monsters not to attack anything at all.
I dunno. I'm sure I'm just nitpicking again, but it seems inefficient, not to mention silly, to have a creature designed specifically to attack and kill anything it wants with impunity, to take it into battle, and then use it as little more than a flying chair.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Dragon Age 2's Downloadable Content
So, I've been thinking about these Add-On rants I do on occasion. Until now, I've been waiting to post each rant on a game's add-ons until all of them have been released. But that really doesn't make much sense; any poor fool who's actually going to listen to my opinion about them isn't going to wait until a year after the game's released to consider each add-on as it comes out. So, starting today, I'm going to just put up the Add-On rants as soon as I wish, and update them as new Downloadable Content or Expansions and whatnot come out, instead.
Besides, if Bioware doesn't do a hell of a repair job on that terrible ending for Mass Effect 3, I doubt I'll particularly feel like purchasing their games and add-ons ever again, and then I'd just be sitting on a perpetually unfinished rant.
Anyways! Dragon Age 1's add-ons had their good moments, but as a whole, I was far from impressed with the game's extra content. Did Bioware do better this time around? Let's see.
The Exiled Prince: I actually had a separate rant dedicated to this package that I posted a while back. Check it out for the details. The long and short of it is, while this add-on's content is alright, Bioware's selling it to players is a dishonest rip-off, as the core plot of DA2 is, even if only in one small (but significant!) aspect, incomplete without this DLC. If you want the plot, the primary core of the game, in as complete a form as possible, you have to pay for the game AND pay extra for this on top of it.
The Black Emporium: This DLC is available to anyone who buys the game new for free. It's not available to anyone who doesn't buy the game new (so anyone buying the game used is out of luck), but I think that's fair. I mean, buying the game used means not actually supporting Bioware with your purchase, so it wouldn't be fair to expect them to throw in extra content for free just for the heck of it.
For the most part, it just adds a few items and recipes to the game, but there are just enough things of note that I'll consider this a real add-on. First, it DOES add a new area, albeit a very small one, and a new NPC with some dialogue and such. It all pretty much just amounts to a new and strange shop with a rather odd shopkeeper to hear a few lines of dialogue from, but for what it is, it's not bad.
More important (and yet, somehow, mostly ignored) is the fact that this DLC also adds a Mabari hound to protagonist Hawke's family. The dog can be summoned during battle to help you, which is nice, but unimportant. Of note, though, is the fact that there are several conversations added to the game with the dog, small scenes where Hawke or one of Hawke's companions or household members will interact with the dog, usually in amusing ways. This is neat, and even helps further develop the game's characters a little through their interactions with the canine. In fact, this token add-on NPC is actually a more legitimate character than DA1's Mabari hound was, even though the previous game's dog was supposedly a full party member! There are actually more scenes of conversation with DA2's free add-on dog than there were with DA1's so-called "real" character, and while none of them amount to anything particularly important or create any notable personality for the mutt, they're certainly no less significant than DA1's dialogue scenarios involving the hound.
So, a free shop and a free semi-party member which develops other characters through their relations with it and that improves upon (if not fixes) the first game's problem of poor representation of its animal character? This is certainly a decent little DLC. Nothing great, but decent.
Legacy: Two words come to mind: Lame, and Pass. You might think that a quest wherein Hawke finds out that his/her father was involved with the Grey Wardens sealing an ancient, unknowable horror within a tower of Darkspawn and mystical wards might be interesting, especially when it turns out the sealed being is one of the ancient Magisters who originally created the Darkspawn through their hubris-inspired transgressions into the Dragon Age version of Heaven, but you'd apparently be dead wrong. Barely any focus is actually put on the role and character of Hawke's father, nixing most chances for character development for Hawke and Bethany or Carver (if you brought them along). Really, that aspect basically never goes much further than other people saying "YOU HAVE THE BLOOD OF YOUR DAD WHO WAS HERE DOING STUFF ONCE;" there's nothing actually substantial said about it or him. The Magister is mildly interesting, I suppose, but though this provides a little bit of confirmation for the dogma of the Chantry, this unexpected development never really goes anywhere, with any major questions of the ancient, myth-laden history of Dragon Age that the Magister could have provided insight for left unasked and unanswered. If Anders and Varric are along for the ride, they can have a little extra dialogue, but it doesn't amount to anything more than saying hi to the guy who made Varric's crossbow (and then killing him), and Anders seeing that maybe there's more truth to the Chantry's legends than he thought. The only really worthwhile part of this DLC comes at the very end, wherein Hawke's mother (or a vision of her, since you can play this before or after her demise) speaks of parental pride for Hawke and the ways Hawke is similar to his/her father. That part's nice enough, but everything up to it is bland and rather forgettable--and even this final talk could have been better, had the DLC properly established the character of Hawke's father so the comparison would mean more. Not really worth the time, definitely not worth the money. The money being $10. When I did my Fallout: New Vegas DLC rant, I said at the time that $10 seemed an awful lot for a DLC package, and that is still how I feel, but I suppose that nowadays with rising costs of everything that this is probably a price I'll have to get used to paying. Nevertheless, Legacy's not worth an average price regardless of what that may be.
Mark of the Assassin: I'm not totally sure whether I like this DLC more or less than the last. Felicia Day's character of Tallis, the elven Qunari assassin who was star of the small online Dragon Age video series Redemption, joins with Hawke temporarily for a small adventure. Tallis is alright here, but she was more interesting in Redemption by a lot, and the rest of the cast basically just get pulled along by the plot's events. With 75% of the DLC basically being breaking into and then escaping a well-guarded vault in a mansion, a large part of the this thing just feels like a rehash of Mass Effect 2's Kasumi Loyalty Mission DLC, only not nearly as interesting and without good characters. The Qunari culture is brought up in this package, which makes sense since Qunari affairs turn out to be the central focus of the small adventure, but it's never explored adequately, much like Hawke's eventual decision to help or abandon Tallis. There's some humor to this, but it's kind of hit or miss--sometimes Felicia Day's character is amusing when she's trying to be, and sometimes below-par writing and an inability of Ms. Day to visually convey her message just makes things bland and slightly annoying (and either way, Tallis has become more glib than her character as according to Redemption really allows for). In the end, there's really nothing in this add-on that's especially good or bad, but I'd have to say that the small negatives outweigh the small positives. People will buy it anyway because it's about Felicia Day playing a character whose design amounts to "Let's make Felicia Day into a video game character," but they'll be throwing money away on a sub par product.
It seems that this is the end of DA2's add-ons. Bioware hasn't said it is, but they haven't given any indication for the past half year that there's going to be more, and lukewarm player response to Dragon Age 2 means there's not much reason to keep making content for it.
So how'd it stack up? Poorly. The add-on with the best content, The Exiled Prince, is unethical. Half the DLC packages are bland and have virtually no noteworthy qualities. Lastly, The Black Emporium is good, but ultimately serves an incredibly small role in the audience's experience of the game. Frankly, even the original Dragon Age did a better overall job with is DLC, and you may recall that I was not impressed by and large with the add-ons for that game. Bad show, Bioware.
Besides, if Bioware doesn't do a hell of a repair job on that terrible ending for Mass Effect 3, I doubt I'll particularly feel like purchasing their games and add-ons ever again, and then I'd just be sitting on a perpetually unfinished rant.
Anyways! Dragon Age 1's add-ons had their good moments, but as a whole, I was far from impressed with the game's extra content. Did Bioware do better this time around? Let's see.
The Exiled Prince: I actually had a separate rant dedicated to this package that I posted a while back. Check it out for the details. The long and short of it is, while this add-on's content is alright, Bioware's selling it to players is a dishonest rip-off, as the core plot of DA2 is, even if only in one small (but significant!) aspect, incomplete without this DLC. If you want the plot, the primary core of the game, in as complete a form as possible, you have to pay for the game AND pay extra for this on top of it.
The Black Emporium: This DLC is available to anyone who buys the game new for free. It's not available to anyone who doesn't buy the game new (so anyone buying the game used is out of luck), but I think that's fair. I mean, buying the game used means not actually supporting Bioware with your purchase, so it wouldn't be fair to expect them to throw in extra content for free just for the heck of it.
For the most part, it just adds a few items and recipes to the game, but there are just enough things of note that I'll consider this a real add-on. First, it DOES add a new area, albeit a very small one, and a new NPC with some dialogue and such. It all pretty much just amounts to a new and strange shop with a rather odd shopkeeper to hear a few lines of dialogue from, but for what it is, it's not bad.
More important (and yet, somehow, mostly ignored) is the fact that this DLC also adds a Mabari hound to protagonist Hawke's family. The dog can be summoned during battle to help you, which is nice, but unimportant. Of note, though, is the fact that there are several conversations added to the game with the dog, small scenes where Hawke or one of Hawke's companions or household members will interact with the dog, usually in amusing ways. This is neat, and even helps further develop the game's characters a little through their interactions with the canine. In fact, this token add-on NPC is actually a more legitimate character than DA1's Mabari hound was, even though the previous game's dog was supposedly a full party member! There are actually more scenes of conversation with DA2's free add-on dog than there were with DA1's so-called "real" character, and while none of them amount to anything particularly important or create any notable personality for the mutt, they're certainly no less significant than DA1's dialogue scenarios involving the hound.
So, a free shop and a free semi-party member which develops other characters through their relations with it and that improves upon (if not fixes) the first game's problem of poor representation of its animal character? This is certainly a decent little DLC. Nothing great, but decent.
Legacy: Two words come to mind: Lame, and Pass. You might think that a quest wherein Hawke finds out that his/her father was involved with the Grey Wardens sealing an ancient, unknowable horror within a tower of Darkspawn and mystical wards might be interesting, especially when it turns out the sealed being is one of the ancient Magisters who originally created the Darkspawn through their hubris-inspired transgressions into the Dragon Age version of Heaven, but you'd apparently be dead wrong. Barely any focus is actually put on the role and character of Hawke's father, nixing most chances for character development for Hawke and Bethany or Carver (if you brought them along). Really, that aspect basically never goes much further than other people saying "YOU HAVE THE BLOOD OF YOUR DAD WHO WAS HERE DOING STUFF ONCE;" there's nothing actually substantial said about it or him. The Magister is mildly interesting, I suppose, but though this provides a little bit of confirmation for the dogma of the Chantry, this unexpected development never really goes anywhere, with any major questions of the ancient, myth-laden history of Dragon Age that the Magister could have provided insight for left unasked and unanswered. If Anders and Varric are along for the ride, they can have a little extra dialogue, but it doesn't amount to anything more than saying hi to the guy who made Varric's crossbow (and then killing him), and Anders seeing that maybe there's more truth to the Chantry's legends than he thought. The only really worthwhile part of this DLC comes at the very end, wherein Hawke's mother (or a vision of her, since you can play this before or after her demise) speaks of parental pride for Hawke and the ways Hawke is similar to his/her father. That part's nice enough, but everything up to it is bland and rather forgettable--and even this final talk could have been better, had the DLC properly established the character of Hawke's father so the comparison would mean more. Not really worth the time, definitely not worth the money. The money being $10. When I did my Fallout: New Vegas DLC rant, I said at the time that $10 seemed an awful lot for a DLC package, and that is still how I feel, but I suppose that nowadays with rising costs of everything that this is probably a price I'll have to get used to paying. Nevertheless, Legacy's not worth an average price regardless of what that may be.
Mark of the Assassin: I'm not totally sure whether I like this DLC more or less than the last. Felicia Day's character of Tallis, the elven Qunari assassin who was star of the small online Dragon Age video series Redemption, joins with Hawke temporarily for a small adventure. Tallis is alright here, but she was more interesting in Redemption by a lot, and the rest of the cast basically just get pulled along by the plot's events. With 75% of the DLC basically being breaking into and then escaping a well-guarded vault in a mansion, a large part of the this thing just feels like a rehash of Mass Effect 2's Kasumi Loyalty Mission DLC, only not nearly as interesting and without good characters. The Qunari culture is brought up in this package, which makes sense since Qunari affairs turn out to be the central focus of the small adventure, but it's never explored adequately, much like Hawke's eventual decision to help or abandon Tallis. There's some humor to this, but it's kind of hit or miss--sometimes Felicia Day's character is amusing when she's trying to be, and sometimes below-par writing and an inability of Ms. Day to visually convey her message just makes things bland and slightly annoying (and either way, Tallis has become more glib than her character as according to Redemption really allows for). In the end, there's really nothing in this add-on that's especially good or bad, but I'd have to say that the small negatives outweigh the small positives. People will buy it anyway because it's about Felicia Day playing a character whose design amounts to "Let's make Felicia Day into a video game character," but they'll be throwing money away on a sub par product.
It seems that this is the end of DA2's add-ons. Bioware hasn't said it is, but they haven't given any indication for the past half year that there's going to be more, and lukewarm player response to Dragon Age 2 means there's not much reason to keep making content for it.
So how'd it stack up? Poorly. The add-on with the best content, The Exiled Prince, is unethical. Half the DLC packages are bland and have virtually no noteworthy qualities. Lastly, The Black Emporium is good, but ultimately serves an incredibly small role in the audience's experience of the game. Frankly, even the original Dragon Age did a better overall job with is DLC, and you may recall that I was not impressed by and large with the add-ons for that game. Bad show, Bioware.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Mass Effect 3's Ending
Okay, first of all, if you haven’t already played Mass Effect 3 to the end and beaten it, then don’t read this rant. Not only is it going to have spoilers up the wazoo, but I’m going to be going about my blathering with the assumption that you have experienced knowledge of the game’s events, so some parts of this probably wouldn’t mean all that much to you anyway if you haven’t played ME3 through. All you need to know for now is that ME3 is an utterly fantastic game whose ending is so horrible and disappointing that it sours every previous moment of the entire series. If you haven’t already gotten ME3, you may actually want to not buy it, unless Bioware adds more and better ending options later. It’s that bad.
So! Mass Effect 3’s endings. If you’ve seen it, you probably hate it--a poll on Bioware’s forums with, at the time of this rant, over 50,000 participants (http://social.bioware.com/633606/polls/28989) places, at the time of this rant, 91% of people as wanting the whole thing redone, with another 7% who are okay with most of the ending but at least want one important detail (the role of Joker and the Normandy) changed. That leaves a whopping 3% of ME3 gamers, if this sample group is a fair indication of the gaming populace as a whole, who find the game’s endings acceptable at the present time. Well, hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m in the 91% on this. ME3’s ending is like a punch in the gut to me. If this isn’t the very first rant of mine you’ve ever read, then you probably know how much I love the Mass Effect series, and the conclusion to ME3 leaves me feeling hollow and hurt.
Of course, whether I should bother with this at all is questionable. All kinds of people have spoken out about it, detailed every aspect of the endings that is wrong or out of place, so what I’m going to say below is just going to be a repetition of many others’ words, I’m sure. In addition, with the many, many people (including myself) who have stated that they flat-out will not make another purchase from Bioware from now on if this issue is not addressed and a proper ending given, there’s a fair chance that what I say here will eventually be invalidated by the developers providing another option for the game’s finale in the future, much like I had to retract my rant on the stupidity of Fallout 3’s ending after the developers fixed the issue and extended the game in the Broken Steel Downloadable Content.
Nonetheless, I need to get this off my chest. If this rant is redundant, so be it--it’s still a collection of my opinions on RPGs, and I’ve got a hell of an opinion on this one. And if this rant is to later be invalidated by Bioware addending or adding ending content to the game, so be it once more--nothing could possibly please me more than to eventually have to do a retraction to this rant. So, with all that out of the way, my thoughts on why the endings of Mass Effect 3 SUCKED UNHOLY SHIT.
(Please note: For the purpose of this rant, the “ending” I speak of begins when Shepard rides the elevator up and meets the Catalyst Hologram Kid).
The Small Stuff
There are a lot of aspects of the endings to ME3 that are very dissatisfying to me, but I have to overall recognize as smaller issues, more my own preference than a serious problem. These are the little problems that I could forgive either if done better, or if they were part of an ending that was overall good.
- Shepard dies at the end, regardless of what you choose. If you choose Convergence, which is deciding to have synthetic life and organic life merge, Shepard is dissolved in the Magic Green Space Energy he/she leaps into. If you Control the Reapers, Shepard dissolves in the control beam thingy. If you Destroy the Reapers (which is the closest thing to a moral choice you get), Shepard is destroyed with them because he or she is (supposedly) synthetic enough to get hit by the Crucible’s synthetic kill-wave. Call me old-fashioned, and unoriginal, and all that jazz, but I generally like my hero to get a happy ending in games. Yes, a sacrificial hero can be immensely moving, and there are many endings I’ve seen where the hero dies which I would never dream of criticizing. Final Fantasy 10 comes to mind--that was an incredibly moving ending, and the entire game’s theme of sacrifice for the good of others, not to mention the general mechanics of the FF10 world that have been set up throughout the game, necessitates it. But as a general rule, I like my hero to live, and if a hero’s death in the finale isn’t done well and with excellent storytelling purpose, then the death feels cheap to me. I think a lot of the time people have endings where the hero dies just because they want to seem more bold or deep than all those other happier endings. Now, as ME3 has a major theme of sacrifice already, I admit Shepard’s death can be thematically important, so I’m not going to make this a huge issue, but all the same, it’s a disappointment to me that he/she and his/her love interest (especially if it’s Tali) won’t get a chance to spend their lives happily and together.
And don’t give me that crap about the couple secret seconds of ending footage where we see someone in armor surrounded by rubble take a single breath. Yeah, it’s probably supposed to be Shepard, but it’s just too short, too vague, and too inconclusive to count. When I say I want Shepard to live, I mean I want to SEE him/her LIVE, not see someone who MIGHT be Shepard take a single breath.
- Shepard’s death in the Destroy ending doesn’t make a lot of sense. Supposedly it’s Shepard’s implants that make him/her synthetic enough that the Reaper-destroying energy wave will kill Shepard as well. I don’t really think some implants, even if they’re fairly extensive, should be so easily mistaken for artificial life. And does this mean anyone with significant technology implanted in them will also be killed? Because that means that a decision to kill the Reapers, which again is pretty much the best choice for a player going for a Paragon (good guy) Shepard, is also a decision to kill every most Biotics in the galaxy, since they have implants to help them use their powers, not to mention who knows how many people who use technology in their body to help them live. Do they die, too? How many implants makes one synthetic instead of organic in the Crucible’s kill-switch’s judgment?
- The whole thing with the Catalyst Hologram Kid doesn’t feel right to the game, particularly not for the ending. It comes out of nowhere, really, and seems the kind of philosophical metaphysical scene that you’d see in an entirely different kind of science fiction, like something Isaac Asimov would do--in fact, there’s a lot about this final scene and ending that reminds me of Golan Trevize’s decision at the end of the second to last Foundation book by Asimov. But for Asimov, a scene like this works, because his story’s style, focus, and flow mesh well with the quiet little bit of ancient galactic philosophy and such. With Mass Effect, the final scene with the Catalyst Hologram Kid, his speech, the decision he pushes on Shepard, it all seems completely foreign to the way the Mass Effect series has been handled. Not to say that ME doesn’t have its philosophy and decisions for the future and mysticism, but they’re handled differently, and the series generally has a more straightforward, realistic tone to its science fiction. This scene is like ending a Star Wars movie with something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn’t fit right.
- The Normandy and its crew in the ending is a real head-scratcher. Why are they fleeing from the battle for Earth? We don’t really see the other ships leaving. Maybe the Normandy starts fleeing only after it sees the wave of energy coming from Shepard’s decision, but if so, why is it ONLY the Normandy we see fleeing through the mass relays from it? And why does Joker flee it to begin with? He can’t possibly know what the hell the energy wave is, and everyone’s expecting the Crucible to start doing something massive to destroy the Reapers anyway. Also, how is it that Shepard’s squad members (at least some of them) are in the Normandy with him? Everyone in the battle for Earth has a role to play, and that role is implied for every member of Shepard’s team to be fighting on the ground. What’re they doing on the Normandy all of a sudden? Did Joker have to pick them up from a danger zone?
It’s also annoying because, as they and the Normandy are now on another planet who knows how far away in the galaxy, it means that even if Shepard survives the ending (if you count that stupid second of footage of someone breathing), he/she is going to be separated from the people he/she cares about most. (This is quite literally true--the squad members shown exiting the Normandy in the ending are the ones Shepard has the most rapport with, according to the player’s choices in dialogue with them through the game).
- I know we have to take some things on faith with the whole suspension of disbelief thing, but I have to ask, exactly how does the Magic Green Space Energy in the Convergence ending work, exactly? Even in a series where giant talking dinosaur people are opening miniature black holes with their minds thanks to blue swirly waves, the idea that some galaxy-spanning energy wave can instantly transmute every living thing it touches into a functional combination of organic and synthetic material is basically preposterous.
- The choice of Convergence with the Magic Green Space Energy...what if someone in the galaxy doesn’t WANT to be both organic and synthetic? Why does Shepard get to decide every free-willed individual’s physical fate? I can kind of let this go in that Shepard’s supposed to be the savior of all life and the one the galaxy rests its hopes on so he/she is sort of empowered to make that kind of decision, but all the same, it’s more villain-ish than hero-ish, to impose one’s will and decision upon everyone else without their consent.
Serious Problems
These are the many aspects of the ME3 endings that are a big deal, that majorly lessen the quality of the ending. More than the smaller details above, these issues, mostly instances where the core reasoning for the ending doesn’t make sense, make the endings and their events outright bad. While a well-made ending could let the above criticisms be acceptable and glossed over, these issues are kind of too much to look past.
- The color of the energy wave at the end is wrong. I’m fine with the Magic Green Space Energy being green for the ending where synthetic and organic life is merged--that’s totally outside the normal moral compass of the Mass Effect series so it having its own color is fine with me. But the Destroy and Control ending options are reversed from what they should be--the energy wave color if you choose to Control the Reapers is blue, while it’s red if you choose to Destroy the Reapers. It doesn’t SEEM like a big deal, until you consider that the colors of blue and red are used in the ME games to represent Paragon (good guy) and Renegade (jerkwad) choices, respectively. And then it becomes a problem--because this ending sequence implies that it’s the Renegade option to Destroy the Reapers, and the Paragon choice is to Control them.
Uh, no. That’s not how it fucking works.
See, the major, final choice of Mass Effect 2, and a huge, huge part of Mass Effect 3 has been the question of whether humanity should destroy the technologies associated with the Reapers, or try to use them to gain technological domination. From the moment in Mass Effect 2’s finale that Shepard was faced with the option of either destroying the Collector base or leaving it intact so it could be studied and its technologies harvested for humanity’s use, the Paragon path has been to destroy the Reaper’s technology, destroy the Reapers. The idea behind this, which is quite sensible, is that the technology of the Reapers is too dangerous (what with the constant danger of Indoctrination just from being around them) and too steeped in evil (what with involving liquidating people and/or forcibly mutating them into monsters), to use in good conscience. There’s also the fact that such power has incredible corrupting potential. The only way to preserve peace and unity in the galactic community--which is what Paragon Shepard is all about--is to eliminate the Reapers and all they directly touch, not to wield their power. On the other hand, the Renegade option has always been that of control and domination over all others, the idea that Shepard and humanity should be the ones completely in control, and what’s best for everyone is to shut up and get out of their way. The Renegade path is one of ends justifying means, doing whatever it takes, no matter how loathsome, to win. Controlling the Reapers and their technology is exactly the kind of thing Renegade Shepard is all about.
So why exactly is it that the option to Destroy the Reapers at the end, which SHOULD be the Paragon choice, has a red energy wave, while Controlling the Reapers has a blue one? The colors have symbolic importance to the series; they’re not just random colors. These endings would imply that the right thing to do is to follow in the steps of the Illusive Man, a guy willing to commit unspeakable horrors on innocents in the name of progress, and attempt to Control the Reapers. The game even shows you a vision that associates the choice with the Illusive Man, so there’s no question of whose side you’re taking. These endings would also imply that the jerkwad, control-freak self-important Machiavelli thing to do is to follow in the steps of the consistently heroic David Anderson (who is visually associated with this next choice) and Destroy the Reapers, knowing they’re too dangerous to try to use and would also destroy any chance for galactic unity when one man held all the power. Once again, according to the endings’ use of the series’s symbolic color system, the Renegade thing to do is to want peace and not to give in to the temptation of control and power, and the Paragon thing to do is to follow in the footsteps of a guy who’s committed some of the worst atrocities imaginable out of a desire to subjugate all sentient lifeforms who didn’t look enough like him.
Again, you may think it’s a small thing, the color, but symbolism’s important, and the color symbolism here makes a statement that flies in the face of the rest of the series and is seriously wrong.
- Now that we’ve established that, regardless of what the colors indicate, the Paragon ending option is to Destroy the Reapers and the Renegade one would be to Control them, we come to a huge problem with the Destroy ending: the Geth and EDI. If Shepard chooses to Destroy the Reapers--which, again, is what Shepard has to choose if Shepard is a Paragon and believes in unity and decency and equality and all that jazz--then the Reaper-destroying energy wave is apparently going to destroy the Geth and EDI, as well, since they’re synthetic life like the Reapers. For a lot of Paragon players, Mass Effect 3’s events will include the Geth’s rise to individual sentience and a confirmation that they are just as entitled to existence and the rights of sentient people as any organic life. For probably most Paragon players, EDI will, over the course of ME3, take her first but very definitive steps toward being a person and not just a machine, growing beyond her initial programming and developing a personality, a self, a soul.
So what this ending is telling us is that if we want to make the only moral choice allowed, to Destroy the Reapers, we have to kill EDI and the Geth. Now, it’s somewhat annoying to me that a caveat is included at all; having to choose that someone dies for the greater good is closer to a Renegade choice than it is a Paragon. But sometimes Shepard is faced with such choices, like the one on Virmire in ME1 where he/she had to choose which squad member to sacrifice. So I can accept that there are sometimes tough choices that have to be made. Nonetheless, I have a major problem with this. See, this choice basically means that the very instant the Geth get a chance to exist on equal footing with biological life forms, the instant they gain the ability to exist as a people instead of a collective consciousness, the instant they gain the ability to live the way they’ve always wanted...they’re wiped out. What, exactly, was the POINT of giving players the ability to save and elevate the Geth if the player then has to decide a couple hours later, assuming the player wants to continue doing the most moral, Paragon-like thing, to destroy them all? Having a major decision that invalidates a significant prior decision if decided in the same way is stupid, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Shepard didn’t save the Geth and give them individuality just to immediately take it back. Shepard didn’t spend the whole game helping EDI along with her quest to understand how to live as a person just to destroy her chance to do so.
- Speaking of EDI and the Geth, they kinda prove the Catalyst Hologram Kid dead wrong. Catalyst Hologram Kid claims in the ending that this big, terrible cycle of Reapers coming in and destroying the major civilizations and harvesting them to be more Reapers and then leaving and yadda yadda, is all because it’s the only way to keep sentient, organic life forms from being destroyed by the synthetic life forms (like the Geth) that they create. The basic idea here is that all synthetics will inevitably rise against their creators, and if they are ever successful at doing it, they will destroy all organic life, not just the dominant species. The Reapers target the dominant species in every cycle, but leave all other life alone, allowing it to grow and flourish until it evolves far enough that the next cycle will wipe it out. Thus through this cycle organic life is never totally destroyed as synthetic life would want it to be, and the dominant organic species is immortalized forever by being forced to become new Reapers/Reaper servants.
This is kind of a dumb solution anyway, but we’ll let it go. It’s standard villain-reasoning, like Final Fantasy 10’s Seymour deciding the best way to keep everyone from being unhappy is to kill them.
Anyways, EDI and the Geth prove the damn kid dead wrong. First of all, since she was released from her electronic safeguards, EDI has been nothing but helpful, considerate, and good to her biological coworkers and friends. Sure, she does joke like she’s out to control or kill all humans, like Bender in Futurama does, but unlike Bender, it’s always pretty obvious that she’s doing nothing but joking. Throughout her experiences as an unshackled AI, EDI is as dependable and moral a companion as any other on Shepard’s team, and in ME3 in particular she develops an understanding of and appreciation for the freedom of will and right to exist that all sentient life has. There’s also the option of having her and Joker actually enter into a romantic relationship with one another. EDI is clear cut-and-dry proof that it’s not impossible for synthetic and biological life to exist side-by-side with one another, and respect and value each other.
And then there’s the Geth. While EDI is young enough that one could argue that she’s not a perfect example of why synthetic life is not destined to rise against its makers, the Geth have been a (reclusive) part of the ME galaxy for hundreds of years. And while you can argue that they aren’t known for being peaceful, you can’t make a rational case that the Geth really “rose up” against their creators the way Catalyst Hologram Kid implies. When the Geth first achieved self-awareness, the Quarians attempted to destroy them. The war that the Geth waged on the Quarians that drove the Quarians off their homeworld was started by the QUARIANS, not the Geth--the Get just fought back, the way any self-aware organic race would if threatened with extinction. Engaging in self-preservation and self-defense are not the same as an inevitable destiny to rise up against your creators. The next conflict between the Geth and organics occurs during the events of Mass Effect 1, when the Geth are following Saren and Sovereign, but even then, it’s not really a case of those Geth (who were a faction of heretics anyway, according to the regular Geth--like the Cerberus faction of humanity) following some irrepressible urge to destroy all organic life. They were simply following the whims and commands of Sovereign, whom they regarded as a deity-like pinnacle of synthetic evolution. If Sovereign hadn’t ordered them to attack organics, the heretic Geth would have had no reason to. So that’s all from the influence of an entity designed specifically not to be part of the regular sequence of events for synthetic-organic relations. And lastly, we see the war in ME3 between the Quarians and the Geth, which, hey, whaddaya know, was AGAIN instigated 100% by the Quarians. Unless Catalyst Hologram Kid means to imply that synthetics inevitably rising against their creators is the same as the idea that self-aware sentient synthetic life might not want to be eradicated at another’s whim, his argument is full of bullshit, because every really significant example of synthetic life in the Mass Effect universe proves him wrong. So the reasoning behind the Reapers’ cycle, and the choices that Catalyst Hologram Kid forces on Shepard, is utterly groundless, from both the player’s perspective AND from Shepard’s.
- There’s no proper depiction or accounting of the game’s events and characters in the ending. I mean, you spend almost the entirety of Mass Effect 3 amassing as powerful and well-equipped a force of soldiers, battleships, resources, scientists, technology, and so on as possible. For those that actually did their best to collect as many war assets as possible, there should be some positive result beyond just a number to tally their values. I’m not saying every single asset should be represented, or even most of them. But if you’ve got Grunt with your ground forces as a part of your army, shouldn’t the ending show him in some way, or at least make mention of what happened to him? He was a major character in ME2. Same with Zaeed, Jacob, Wrex, Samara, and the rest of Shepard’s former squad mates who can be involved in the final battle for Earth. Likewise for the major forces that Shepard accumulates. You spend a quarter of the game brokering peace between the Krogan and Turians, so let’s see them fighting on the field together! Did Shepard gain the assistance of the Quarians, Geth, or both? Whatever the case, why don’t we see their ships engaged in combat with the Reapers? You spend about as long with them as you do with the Krogan and Turians in this game. What about the Rachni, if Shepard chose to save them? The Salarian forces? The Asari? The biggest battle in the history of everything is going on in the game’s finale, with a ton of really important characters, and you don’t see any of it, nor how it ends up for them. Everything you’ve had Shepard do for the past 3 games should culminate here; instead it just turns into a number that determines how well the forces will do overall. Lame.
And speaking of that, you don’t really get a proper accounting for what happens to Shepard’s current teammates, either. What happens after Joker crashes the Normandy and he and Shepard’s best buddies step out? What happened to the rest of the team? I’m sorry, but with rare exceptions, an ending should provide closure. There is none here.
- Hey, here’s a question. If the option to merge organic and synthetic life with the Magic Green Space Energy is supposed to be a serious and legitimate option (which the developers obviously want it to be; it practically comes off as the canon choice in its presentation), what the hell was the point of beating Saren in ME1 to begin with? I mean, isn’t that basically what Saren was shooting for all along? Where was the green option to live the way the Reapers wanted back when its spokesman was getting shot in the face? Apparently what seemed to Shepard like an obviously foolish and cowardly option 3 years before now comes off as a legitimate possibility. Shepard could’ve saved himself (and us) all kinds of time and effort.
- Speaking of this visionary option of merging organic and synthetic life, there’s yet another reason why it is utterly ridiculous. See, it’s like this, guys. Catalyst Hologram Kid says that all things rise against their creators, dig? Organic life and synthetic life are too different so inevitably once organic life creates synthetic life, synthetic life will try to destroy all organic life. We’ve already seen this proved wrong above, but let’s assume this is correct for a moment. How does merging synthetic and organic life together solve this problem? Oh, I see how it’s a short-term fix, sure. Since all life will now be both synthetic and organic, there will be no inherent difference between the various forms of life in the galaxy, so the whole inevitable rising-up-of-the-synthetics won’t happen.*
Yet.
But tell me something: how will this merging process take away sentient life forms’ desire for tools to make their lives easier? The process of the merging really doesn’t take away the fundamental need to use technology to live a more convenient and satisfactory life. And the desire to use tools to make life easier is the fundamental drive to create and improve on machines. Which is what leads to creating robot workers and programs like AI and synthetic life platforms in the first place! This merging option does NOTHING to prevent the new synthetic-organic hybrid people of the galaxy from eventually creating new intelligent, self-aware synthetic life forms again. And as simply synthetic life forms (since that’d still be presumably easier from creating organic-synthetic hybrids), they would STILL be substantially different from their creators. Which means that whatever inevitable urge to rise against one’s creators that Catalyst Hologram Kid talks about would come into effect. And thus, the merging option does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of synthetic and organic life’s differences long-term. In fact, I think it’s LESS effective than the current plan (the Reaper cycle), because it would take the current life forms of the galaxy much less time to create a new synthetic race than it would for the next Reaper cycle to arrive.
Inspire Nigh-Universal Disappointment and Rage Problems
And here we are at the REAL doozies. Any ONE of these is a HUGE problem for the ending, the kind that ruins it and seriously detracts from the entire game. The stuff above? That stuff makes a bad ending, but through the disappointment of a bad ending, you could at least still appreciate Mass Effect 3 for its otherwise overwhelming excellence, still want to experience it over and over again. But the issues below? They sour the entire game, the ruin the joy you’ve had playing it (and even the previous games!), they break the game’s spirit. They don’t make this a bad ending--they make this ending a travesty. They make this an ending that, according to the latest on that poll I mentioned, for every 1 player who’s satisfied with it there are 51 who hate it and want it changed. Drastically. These are what made Mass Effect 3’s ending one of the most disappointing moments of my entire life.**
- This ending goes against everything Shepard is and stands for. From the start right until this moment of the ending, Shepard is known for being the man or woman who can pull off the impossible, who can beat the odds because he/she is just that skilled, just that smart, just that lucky, just that well-supported, and most of all, just that determined. Shepard’s will to succeed is indomitable, and he/she does not compromise with the Reapers. Hate to be so cheesy as to quote Galaxy Quest, but if there has ever been a character who embraces and embodies the motto, “Never give up, never surrender,” it’s Commander Shepard. And yet, and YET, Shepard doesn’t stand firm against Catalyst Hologram Kid! When the glowy little jerk tells Shepard what his options are, never does Shepard stand tall and tell him no. Never does Shepard give him an inspirational speech about how he’s wrong, how he’s underestimating or misunderstanding the people of the galaxy, how there’s another way--Shepard doesn’t question what he’s told, doesn’t even LOOK for another way, even considering what he or she’s being told he or she has to choose and sacrifice. This ending just has Shepard quietly, meekly pick from the options the leader of the Reapers allows him or her.
Shepard’s determination and ability are the driving force for this series, that all the galaxy hinges on, the backbone of Mass Effect that we gamers depend upon and admire. And in this ending, that disappears, and Shepard suddenly becomes a submissive coward.
- If the consequences of the options are largely the same (the Citadel and Mass Relays will be destroyed no matter what you choose, Shepard dies no matter what you choose, there’s no substantial reference in the ending’s events to the repercussions of your choices in any of the games up until this point, and the ending itself barely changes regardless of what you choose), then the ending has effectively removed all real ability to choose from the player. From the start, Mass Effect has been a remarkable balance between the players’ getting to choose how their Shepard acts and what he/she decides, and the story Bioware wants to tell. Somehow, until this point, Bioware has always managed to keep together a strong, coherent plot over the course of 3 games while allowing the players large freedom to determine how the events of that story unfold. This balance cannot have been easy, but Bioware’s done an admirable job with it. At any rate, though, the ability of players to choose Shepard’s actions and attitude is one of the most fundamental parts of the Mass Effect series. But the ending to this game, the ending to the entire trilogy, suddenly removes this choice from the player. In the last few minutes of the trilogy, the moment which more than any other should reflect most the core values and nature of the series, Mass Effect loses one of its key components, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
- This ending generally puts forth the idea that differences between individuals inevitably means conflict. After all, the entire Reaper cycle, and the entire reason Shepard’s given these 3 lousy options, is because of Catalyst Hologram Kid’s (stupid) belief that synthetics will always rise against their creators, and that combining synthetic and organic life, and thus eliminating the major difference between them, will bring lasting peace.
Now, this is by itself a pretty alarming theory for the ME writers to advocate--and advocate it they do, for they’ve left the player with no option but to act upon Catalyst Hologram Kid’s theory. But more importantly, this is just as fundamentally in opposition to Shepard’s nature (at least, Paragon Shepard’s nature) as the idea that he/she wouldn’t resist being told what to do. For the entirety of this series, Paragon-version Commander Shepard has solidly, steadfastly, unwaveringly advocated and created unity between people. The most Paragon of options in these games are always, always aimed at cooperation and equality between people. Paragon Shepard takes friends and allies on from any race, gives second chances, views people for their merits and judges them by their actions instead of their species. In Mass Effect 1, he/she saved the Council and kept the galaxy safe for the sake of all races, and showed the galaxy that humanity was ready to do its part and join the galactic community. In Mass Effect 2, he/she led a team of unique individuals into a mission so absurdly dangerous that it’s universally called the Suicide Mission in the series, gaining the trust and loyalty of each crew member to the point that they would fight their damndest for him/her, and was enough of a leader that even the squad members who hated each other, or came from 2 separate species that had bad blood dating back centuries, were fully committed to working together for the greater good. In Mass Effect 3, Shepard plays diplomat, leader, and visionary more than ever before, bringing the entire galactic community together to stop the Reapers, making peace between the Salarians and Krogan, giving the Krogan a second chance to be a true part of the galactic community instead of its fallen heroes, stopping a war between the Quarians and the Geth and bringing them together to fight the Reapers side by side...Shepard outdoes even him/herself as an icon of the idea that peace between people is possible, no matter how different, no matter how bad their history, and that when people come together to face a problem as a single entity, there’s nothing they can’t achieve.
And yet, when Catalyst Hologram Kid talks about how synthetics can’t coexist with organics, how merging them and removing the fundamental difference between them is the new solution, how there HAS to be a solution because peace between people who are different is impossible, what does Paragon Shepard do? I’ll tell you what Paragon Shepard sure as hell doesn’t do--he/she sure as hell doesn’t take every experience and action he/she’s had and made in the last 3 years and tell the ghostly little bastard that he’s wrong, that peaceful coexistence CAN be achieved, and point out how powerful a force unity can be through the example of all those Shepard has him/herself brought together. For Paragon Shepard to accept the Catalyst Hologram Kid’s speech and options at all is thus twice a betrayal to everything Shepard is, everything Shepard has done, and everything Shepard means to the player--once for the fact that he’s meekly just taking what’s offered, and then again for his acceptance of this inevitable disharmony.
- And for me, the worst thing of all: no matter which ending you pick, the Mass Relays are destroyed. The Citadel I can live without, though it’s a sad loss. But without the Mass Relays, galactic civilization will basically enter a dark age, since it was through the Mass Relay network that all species were able to connect, travel, and interact. I’m sorry, I cannot accept this. Look. Shepard is fighting to save all people, everywhere, from being destroyed. Yes. This is true. But he/she is also fighting for their way of life. If he/she strictly fought to save people from dying, then he/she would have joined Saren in ME1, because Saren advocated finding a way to be useful enough to the Reapers that they’d allow organics to live, even if only as indoctrinated servants or whatever. That’s STILL keeping people ALIVE. So what Shepard is fighting for is more than JUST survival, strictly. He/she is fighting for people’s right to live the way they want to, to maintain free will, and to live in a society that encourages and respects their personal existence to at least some degree. Paragon Shepard fights for life AND to keep the status quo of the galaxy pleasant and peaceful for the galaxy’s civilizations. Renegade Shepard does sort of the same thing, only he/she is fighting to preserve a galaxy where he/she and humanity dominate all others. But it’s still ultimately fighting for more than just survival, fighting for a way of life, as well.
That way of life is destroyed with the Mass Relays. The galaxy that Shepard has fought so hard and long to save (and/or dominate) is gone forever, or at least for a VERY long time. Without the ability to travel to other places in the galaxy quickly, everyone in the galaxy is suddenly stranded where they are. No interstellar commerce and communication and travel, no interstellar community. No interstellar community, and you basically no longer have the Mass Effect universe. It really just isn’t the ME universe any longer at that point. Would the Star Wars universe be Star Wars if there were suddenly no way to jump to Hyperspace? Would Star Trek be Star Trek any longer if there were no Warp Drive? When you take away the ability to reach far-off civilizations, to connect to/explore the universe, to maintain a galactic community, you take away the very heart of a science-fiction series like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Mass Effect. This is the ultimate failure for Shepard--whatever happens, the galaxy as it was and the galaxy as Shepard has worked to make it is destroyed. This more than anything else hurts me, for this more than anything else is the bad ending to Mass Effect--the story, the series, the idea.
Beyond the spirit of the issue, there’s also the fact that destroying the Mass Relays and thus the galactic community completely invalidates almost every major event of Mass Effect 3. What was the point of curing the Genophage, of giving the Krogan another chance to be equals in the galactic community, and of getting them to come to cooperate with the Turians if they can no longer take part in the galactic community because they’re isolated, can no longer benefit from the camaraderie formed with the Turians? Hell, they’re not even going to be well off on their planet alone, since Wrex, the visionary leader who’s managed to pull them up out of extinction, is stranded on Earth. What was the point of getting the Quarians a chance to return to their home world if the majority of their fleet is now, thanks to being present at the battle for Earth, stranded from their home world for at least decades? Will they even have enough fuel to get back at all? Can their ships hold out for decades without reliable access to shipyards and natural resources during the trip? What was the point of convincing the galaxy of the Geth’s right to exist as a form of life if the Destroy option obliterates them all? What was the point of the emotional connections Shepard formed with his or her friends and loved ones if they can’t at the very LEAST be near him or her as he or she dies (or better yet, with him as he or she LIVES, as I wish he or she could)?
And hey, let’s not forget that regardless of whether the Geth are wiped out, the fact that every option destroys the Mass Relays means that countless people of all races will die out as a result. How many individuals across the galaxy are traveling on ships at the time the Relays are destroyed? They can’t ALL be within non-relay traveling distance of a sustainable source of food, or at least fuel to get them to the food. How many people are now stranded on small science stations and such scattered across the galaxy, stuck in planetary systems with no garden world and no means of transportation? Hell, even the individuals on garden worlds will suffer huge amounts of deaths as a result of the relays’ destruction. After all, there are countless Krogan warriors at or near the Turian home world, and the Turians eat food completely indigestible to any other species but Quarians. Likewise, any Turian that stays on Earth (and there are a lot of them, given that Earth is the scene of the final battle with the Reapers) is doomed to starvation with no food source--unless they hitch a ride on the Quarians’ food-producing life ships, but how many can possibly do that? The Quarians are already known for having very little living space in their flotilla, and even if the Turians stay on their own ships, the Quarians are also known for not having much leeway on their resources, so Turian starvation’s still sure to be an issue. Not that being able to eat regular food would necessarily save anyone on Earth--with the planet devastated by sustained war with the Reapers and now home to not only the human population but also the crews of thousands of warships, Earth’s ability to sustain life is going to be strained at best. The result of the destruction of the Mass Relays is going to be almost as catastrophic across the galaxy in terms of loss of life as the Reaper invasion would have been!
And that’s all assuming that the destruction of the Mass Relays in ME3’s ending isn’t the same as the destruction of the one in that Mass Effect 2 Downloadable Content. Because that thing made an explosion that took out a solar system. If they DO all blow up in the same way...well, that just makes it worse by about a thousand times.
THIS is our ending to the game? The trilogy? The phenomenon? This is how Mass Effect ends? Not with a bang, but with a REALLY big bang that kills countless people, ends galactic civilization, and makes our hero a mute coward? Unacceptable.
And there you have it. This ending is one of the worst I have ever seen, and certainly the most upsetting and disappointing. There’s little more to say at this point, and looking at the length of this, that’s probably a good thing. The happiest day of my life may be the day I can put up a retraction for this rant, but as of this moment, this moment when the people who hate the endings to the people who accept them is 51 to 1 and steadily growing, this is how the endings stand, this is how I feel, and this is why there are thousands of people feeling hollow inside after playing the final part of their favorite game series.
I’m gonna go cry now. Again.
* Well, I mean, I SORT OF see how it’s a short-term fix. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
** Yeah, I know, I have no life. I’m The RPGenius, this is an RPG, deal with it.
So! Mass Effect 3’s endings. If you’ve seen it, you probably hate it--a poll on Bioware’s forums with, at the time of this rant, over 50,000 participants (http://social.bioware.com/633606/polls/28989) places, at the time of this rant, 91% of people as wanting the whole thing redone, with another 7% who are okay with most of the ending but at least want one important detail (the role of Joker and the Normandy) changed. That leaves a whopping 3% of ME3 gamers, if this sample group is a fair indication of the gaming populace as a whole, who find the game’s endings acceptable at the present time. Well, hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m in the 91% on this. ME3’s ending is like a punch in the gut to me. If this isn’t the very first rant of mine you’ve ever read, then you probably know how much I love the Mass Effect series, and the conclusion to ME3 leaves me feeling hollow and hurt.
Of course, whether I should bother with this at all is questionable. All kinds of people have spoken out about it, detailed every aspect of the endings that is wrong or out of place, so what I’m going to say below is just going to be a repetition of many others’ words, I’m sure. In addition, with the many, many people (including myself) who have stated that they flat-out will not make another purchase from Bioware from now on if this issue is not addressed and a proper ending given, there’s a fair chance that what I say here will eventually be invalidated by the developers providing another option for the game’s finale in the future, much like I had to retract my rant on the stupidity of Fallout 3’s ending after the developers fixed the issue and extended the game in the Broken Steel Downloadable Content.
Nonetheless, I need to get this off my chest. If this rant is redundant, so be it--it’s still a collection of my opinions on RPGs, and I’ve got a hell of an opinion on this one. And if this rant is to later be invalidated by Bioware addending or adding ending content to the game, so be it once more--nothing could possibly please me more than to eventually have to do a retraction to this rant. So, with all that out of the way, my thoughts on why the endings of Mass Effect 3 SUCKED UNHOLY SHIT.
(Please note: For the purpose of this rant, the “ending” I speak of begins when Shepard rides the elevator up and meets the Catalyst Hologram Kid).
The Small Stuff
There are a lot of aspects of the endings to ME3 that are very dissatisfying to me, but I have to overall recognize as smaller issues, more my own preference than a serious problem. These are the little problems that I could forgive either if done better, or if they were part of an ending that was overall good.
- Shepard dies at the end, regardless of what you choose. If you choose Convergence, which is deciding to have synthetic life and organic life merge, Shepard is dissolved in the Magic Green Space Energy he/she leaps into. If you Control the Reapers, Shepard dissolves in the control beam thingy. If you Destroy the Reapers (which is the closest thing to a moral choice you get), Shepard is destroyed with them because he or she is (supposedly) synthetic enough to get hit by the Crucible’s synthetic kill-wave. Call me old-fashioned, and unoriginal, and all that jazz, but I generally like my hero to get a happy ending in games. Yes, a sacrificial hero can be immensely moving, and there are many endings I’ve seen where the hero dies which I would never dream of criticizing. Final Fantasy 10 comes to mind--that was an incredibly moving ending, and the entire game’s theme of sacrifice for the good of others, not to mention the general mechanics of the FF10 world that have been set up throughout the game, necessitates it. But as a general rule, I like my hero to live, and if a hero’s death in the finale isn’t done well and with excellent storytelling purpose, then the death feels cheap to me. I think a lot of the time people have endings where the hero dies just because they want to seem more bold or deep than all those other happier endings. Now, as ME3 has a major theme of sacrifice already, I admit Shepard’s death can be thematically important, so I’m not going to make this a huge issue, but all the same, it’s a disappointment to me that he/she and his/her love interest (especially if it’s Tali) won’t get a chance to spend their lives happily and together.
And don’t give me that crap about the couple secret seconds of ending footage where we see someone in armor surrounded by rubble take a single breath. Yeah, it’s probably supposed to be Shepard, but it’s just too short, too vague, and too inconclusive to count. When I say I want Shepard to live, I mean I want to SEE him/her LIVE, not see someone who MIGHT be Shepard take a single breath.
- Shepard’s death in the Destroy ending doesn’t make a lot of sense. Supposedly it’s Shepard’s implants that make him/her synthetic enough that the Reaper-destroying energy wave will kill Shepard as well. I don’t really think some implants, even if they’re fairly extensive, should be so easily mistaken for artificial life. And does this mean anyone with significant technology implanted in them will also be killed? Because that means that a decision to kill the Reapers, which again is pretty much the best choice for a player going for a Paragon (good guy) Shepard, is also a decision to kill every most Biotics in the galaxy, since they have implants to help them use their powers, not to mention who knows how many people who use technology in their body to help them live. Do they die, too? How many implants makes one synthetic instead of organic in the Crucible’s kill-switch’s judgment?
- The whole thing with the Catalyst Hologram Kid doesn’t feel right to the game, particularly not for the ending. It comes out of nowhere, really, and seems the kind of philosophical metaphysical scene that you’d see in an entirely different kind of science fiction, like something Isaac Asimov would do--in fact, there’s a lot about this final scene and ending that reminds me of Golan Trevize’s decision at the end of the second to last Foundation book by Asimov. But for Asimov, a scene like this works, because his story’s style, focus, and flow mesh well with the quiet little bit of ancient galactic philosophy and such. With Mass Effect, the final scene with the Catalyst Hologram Kid, his speech, the decision he pushes on Shepard, it all seems completely foreign to the way the Mass Effect series has been handled. Not to say that ME doesn’t have its philosophy and decisions for the future and mysticism, but they’re handled differently, and the series generally has a more straightforward, realistic tone to its science fiction. This scene is like ending a Star Wars movie with something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn’t fit right.
- The Normandy and its crew in the ending is a real head-scratcher. Why are they fleeing from the battle for Earth? We don’t really see the other ships leaving. Maybe the Normandy starts fleeing only after it sees the wave of energy coming from Shepard’s decision, but if so, why is it ONLY the Normandy we see fleeing through the mass relays from it? And why does Joker flee it to begin with? He can’t possibly know what the hell the energy wave is, and everyone’s expecting the Crucible to start doing something massive to destroy the Reapers anyway. Also, how is it that Shepard’s squad members (at least some of them) are in the Normandy with him? Everyone in the battle for Earth has a role to play, and that role is implied for every member of Shepard’s team to be fighting on the ground. What’re they doing on the Normandy all of a sudden? Did Joker have to pick them up from a danger zone?
It’s also annoying because, as they and the Normandy are now on another planet who knows how far away in the galaxy, it means that even if Shepard survives the ending (if you count that stupid second of footage of someone breathing), he/she is going to be separated from the people he/she cares about most. (This is quite literally true--the squad members shown exiting the Normandy in the ending are the ones Shepard has the most rapport with, according to the player’s choices in dialogue with them through the game).
- I know we have to take some things on faith with the whole suspension of disbelief thing, but I have to ask, exactly how does the Magic Green Space Energy in the Convergence ending work, exactly? Even in a series where giant talking dinosaur people are opening miniature black holes with their minds thanks to blue swirly waves, the idea that some galaxy-spanning energy wave can instantly transmute every living thing it touches into a functional combination of organic and synthetic material is basically preposterous.
- The choice of Convergence with the Magic Green Space Energy...what if someone in the galaxy doesn’t WANT to be both organic and synthetic? Why does Shepard get to decide every free-willed individual’s physical fate? I can kind of let this go in that Shepard’s supposed to be the savior of all life and the one the galaxy rests its hopes on so he/she is sort of empowered to make that kind of decision, but all the same, it’s more villain-ish than hero-ish, to impose one’s will and decision upon everyone else without their consent.
Serious Problems
These are the many aspects of the ME3 endings that are a big deal, that majorly lessen the quality of the ending. More than the smaller details above, these issues, mostly instances where the core reasoning for the ending doesn’t make sense, make the endings and their events outright bad. While a well-made ending could let the above criticisms be acceptable and glossed over, these issues are kind of too much to look past.
- The color of the energy wave at the end is wrong. I’m fine with the Magic Green Space Energy being green for the ending where synthetic and organic life is merged--that’s totally outside the normal moral compass of the Mass Effect series so it having its own color is fine with me. But the Destroy and Control ending options are reversed from what they should be--the energy wave color if you choose to Control the Reapers is blue, while it’s red if you choose to Destroy the Reapers. It doesn’t SEEM like a big deal, until you consider that the colors of blue and red are used in the ME games to represent Paragon (good guy) and Renegade (jerkwad) choices, respectively. And then it becomes a problem--because this ending sequence implies that it’s the Renegade option to Destroy the Reapers, and the Paragon choice is to Control them.
Uh, no. That’s not how it fucking works.
See, the major, final choice of Mass Effect 2, and a huge, huge part of Mass Effect 3 has been the question of whether humanity should destroy the technologies associated with the Reapers, or try to use them to gain technological domination. From the moment in Mass Effect 2’s finale that Shepard was faced with the option of either destroying the Collector base or leaving it intact so it could be studied and its technologies harvested for humanity’s use, the Paragon path has been to destroy the Reaper’s technology, destroy the Reapers. The idea behind this, which is quite sensible, is that the technology of the Reapers is too dangerous (what with the constant danger of Indoctrination just from being around them) and too steeped in evil (what with involving liquidating people and/or forcibly mutating them into monsters), to use in good conscience. There’s also the fact that such power has incredible corrupting potential. The only way to preserve peace and unity in the galactic community--which is what Paragon Shepard is all about--is to eliminate the Reapers and all they directly touch, not to wield their power. On the other hand, the Renegade option has always been that of control and domination over all others, the idea that Shepard and humanity should be the ones completely in control, and what’s best for everyone is to shut up and get out of their way. The Renegade path is one of ends justifying means, doing whatever it takes, no matter how loathsome, to win. Controlling the Reapers and their technology is exactly the kind of thing Renegade Shepard is all about.
So why exactly is it that the option to Destroy the Reapers at the end, which SHOULD be the Paragon choice, has a red energy wave, while Controlling the Reapers has a blue one? The colors have symbolic importance to the series; they’re not just random colors. These endings would imply that the right thing to do is to follow in the steps of the Illusive Man, a guy willing to commit unspeakable horrors on innocents in the name of progress, and attempt to Control the Reapers. The game even shows you a vision that associates the choice with the Illusive Man, so there’s no question of whose side you’re taking. These endings would also imply that the jerkwad, control-freak self-important Machiavelli thing to do is to follow in the steps of the consistently heroic David Anderson (who is visually associated with this next choice) and Destroy the Reapers, knowing they’re too dangerous to try to use and would also destroy any chance for galactic unity when one man held all the power. Once again, according to the endings’ use of the series’s symbolic color system, the Renegade thing to do is to want peace and not to give in to the temptation of control and power, and the Paragon thing to do is to follow in the footsteps of a guy who’s committed some of the worst atrocities imaginable out of a desire to subjugate all sentient lifeforms who didn’t look enough like him.
Again, you may think it’s a small thing, the color, but symbolism’s important, and the color symbolism here makes a statement that flies in the face of the rest of the series and is seriously wrong.
- Now that we’ve established that, regardless of what the colors indicate, the Paragon ending option is to Destroy the Reapers and the Renegade one would be to Control them, we come to a huge problem with the Destroy ending: the Geth and EDI. If Shepard chooses to Destroy the Reapers--which, again, is what Shepard has to choose if Shepard is a Paragon and believes in unity and decency and equality and all that jazz--then the Reaper-destroying energy wave is apparently going to destroy the Geth and EDI, as well, since they’re synthetic life like the Reapers. For a lot of Paragon players, Mass Effect 3’s events will include the Geth’s rise to individual sentience and a confirmation that they are just as entitled to existence and the rights of sentient people as any organic life. For probably most Paragon players, EDI will, over the course of ME3, take her first but very definitive steps toward being a person and not just a machine, growing beyond her initial programming and developing a personality, a self, a soul.
So what this ending is telling us is that if we want to make the only moral choice allowed, to Destroy the Reapers, we have to kill EDI and the Geth. Now, it’s somewhat annoying to me that a caveat is included at all; having to choose that someone dies for the greater good is closer to a Renegade choice than it is a Paragon. But sometimes Shepard is faced with such choices, like the one on Virmire in ME1 where he/she had to choose which squad member to sacrifice. So I can accept that there are sometimes tough choices that have to be made. Nonetheless, I have a major problem with this. See, this choice basically means that the very instant the Geth get a chance to exist on equal footing with biological life forms, the instant they gain the ability to exist as a people instead of a collective consciousness, the instant they gain the ability to live the way they’ve always wanted...they’re wiped out. What, exactly, was the POINT of giving players the ability to save and elevate the Geth if the player then has to decide a couple hours later, assuming the player wants to continue doing the most moral, Paragon-like thing, to destroy them all? Having a major decision that invalidates a significant prior decision if decided in the same way is stupid, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Shepard didn’t save the Geth and give them individuality just to immediately take it back. Shepard didn’t spend the whole game helping EDI along with her quest to understand how to live as a person just to destroy her chance to do so.
- Speaking of EDI and the Geth, they kinda prove the Catalyst Hologram Kid dead wrong. Catalyst Hologram Kid claims in the ending that this big, terrible cycle of Reapers coming in and destroying the major civilizations and harvesting them to be more Reapers and then leaving and yadda yadda, is all because it’s the only way to keep sentient, organic life forms from being destroyed by the synthetic life forms (like the Geth) that they create. The basic idea here is that all synthetics will inevitably rise against their creators, and if they are ever successful at doing it, they will destroy all organic life, not just the dominant species. The Reapers target the dominant species in every cycle, but leave all other life alone, allowing it to grow and flourish until it evolves far enough that the next cycle will wipe it out. Thus through this cycle organic life is never totally destroyed as synthetic life would want it to be, and the dominant organic species is immortalized forever by being forced to become new Reapers/Reaper servants.
This is kind of a dumb solution anyway, but we’ll let it go. It’s standard villain-reasoning, like Final Fantasy 10’s Seymour deciding the best way to keep everyone from being unhappy is to kill them.
Anyways, EDI and the Geth prove the damn kid dead wrong. First of all, since she was released from her electronic safeguards, EDI has been nothing but helpful, considerate, and good to her biological coworkers and friends. Sure, she does joke like she’s out to control or kill all humans, like Bender in Futurama does, but unlike Bender, it’s always pretty obvious that she’s doing nothing but joking. Throughout her experiences as an unshackled AI, EDI is as dependable and moral a companion as any other on Shepard’s team, and in ME3 in particular she develops an understanding of and appreciation for the freedom of will and right to exist that all sentient life has. There’s also the option of having her and Joker actually enter into a romantic relationship with one another. EDI is clear cut-and-dry proof that it’s not impossible for synthetic and biological life to exist side-by-side with one another, and respect and value each other.
And then there’s the Geth. While EDI is young enough that one could argue that she’s not a perfect example of why synthetic life is not destined to rise against its makers, the Geth have been a (reclusive) part of the ME galaxy for hundreds of years. And while you can argue that they aren’t known for being peaceful, you can’t make a rational case that the Geth really “rose up” against their creators the way Catalyst Hologram Kid implies. When the Geth first achieved self-awareness, the Quarians attempted to destroy them. The war that the Geth waged on the Quarians that drove the Quarians off their homeworld was started by the QUARIANS, not the Geth--the Get just fought back, the way any self-aware organic race would if threatened with extinction. Engaging in self-preservation and self-defense are not the same as an inevitable destiny to rise up against your creators. The next conflict between the Geth and organics occurs during the events of Mass Effect 1, when the Geth are following Saren and Sovereign, but even then, it’s not really a case of those Geth (who were a faction of heretics anyway, according to the regular Geth--like the Cerberus faction of humanity) following some irrepressible urge to destroy all organic life. They were simply following the whims and commands of Sovereign, whom they regarded as a deity-like pinnacle of synthetic evolution. If Sovereign hadn’t ordered them to attack organics, the heretic Geth would have had no reason to. So that’s all from the influence of an entity designed specifically not to be part of the regular sequence of events for synthetic-organic relations. And lastly, we see the war in ME3 between the Quarians and the Geth, which, hey, whaddaya know, was AGAIN instigated 100% by the Quarians. Unless Catalyst Hologram Kid means to imply that synthetics inevitably rising against their creators is the same as the idea that self-aware sentient synthetic life might not want to be eradicated at another’s whim, his argument is full of bullshit, because every really significant example of synthetic life in the Mass Effect universe proves him wrong. So the reasoning behind the Reapers’ cycle, and the choices that Catalyst Hologram Kid forces on Shepard, is utterly groundless, from both the player’s perspective AND from Shepard’s.
- There’s no proper depiction or accounting of the game’s events and characters in the ending. I mean, you spend almost the entirety of Mass Effect 3 amassing as powerful and well-equipped a force of soldiers, battleships, resources, scientists, technology, and so on as possible. For those that actually did their best to collect as many war assets as possible, there should be some positive result beyond just a number to tally their values. I’m not saying every single asset should be represented, or even most of them. But if you’ve got Grunt with your ground forces as a part of your army, shouldn’t the ending show him in some way, or at least make mention of what happened to him? He was a major character in ME2. Same with Zaeed, Jacob, Wrex, Samara, and the rest of Shepard’s former squad mates who can be involved in the final battle for Earth. Likewise for the major forces that Shepard accumulates. You spend a quarter of the game brokering peace between the Krogan and Turians, so let’s see them fighting on the field together! Did Shepard gain the assistance of the Quarians, Geth, or both? Whatever the case, why don’t we see their ships engaged in combat with the Reapers? You spend about as long with them as you do with the Krogan and Turians in this game. What about the Rachni, if Shepard chose to save them? The Salarian forces? The Asari? The biggest battle in the history of everything is going on in the game’s finale, with a ton of really important characters, and you don’t see any of it, nor how it ends up for them. Everything you’ve had Shepard do for the past 3 games should culminate here; instead it just turns into a number that determines how well the forces will do overall. Lame.
And speaking of that, you don’t really get a proper accounting for what happens to Shepard’s current teammates, either. What happens after Joker crashes the Normandy and he and Shepard’s best buddies step out? What happened to the rest of the team? I’m sorry, but with rare exceptions, an ending should provide closure. There is none here.
- Hey, here’s a question. If the option to merge organic and synthetic life with the Magic Green Space Energy is supposed to be a serious and legitimate option (which the developers obviously want it to be; it practically comes off as the canon choice in its presentation), what the hell was the point of beating Saren in ME1 to begin with? I mean, isn’t that basically what Saren was shooting for all along? Where was the green option to live the way the Reapers wanted back when its spokesman was getting shot in the face? Apparently what seemed to Shepard like an obviously foolish and cowardly option 3 years before now comes off as a legitimate possibility. Shepard could’ve saved himself (and us) all kinds of time and effort.
- Speaking of this visionary option of merging organic and synthetic life, there’s yet another reason why it is utterly ridiculous. See, it’s like this, guys. Catalyst Hologram Kid says that all things rise against their creators, dig? Organic life and synthetic life are too different so inevitably once organic life creates synthetic life, synthetic life will try to destroy all organic life. We’ve already seen this proved wrong above, but let’s assume this is correct for a moment. How does merging synthetic and organic life together solve this problem? Oh, I see how it’s a short-term fix, sure. Since all life will now be both synthetic and organic, there will be no inherent difference between the various forms of life in the galaxy, so the whole inevitable rising-up-of-the-synthetics won’t happen.*
Yet.
But tell me something: how will this merging process take away sentient life forms’ desire for tools to make their lives easier? The process of the merging really doesn’t take away the fundamental need to use technology to live a more convenient and satisfactory life. And the desire to use tools to make life easier is the fundamental drive to create and improve on machines. Which is what leads to creating robot workers and programs like AI and synthetic life platforms in the first place! This merging option does NOTHING to prevent the new synthetic-organic hybrid people of the galaxy from eventually creating new intelligent, self-aware synthetic life forms again. And as simply synthetic life forms (since that’d still be presumably easier from creating organic-synthetic hybrids), they would STILL be substantially different from their creators. Which means that whatever inevitable urge to rise against one’s creators that Catalyst Hologram Kid talks about would come into effect. And thus, the merging option does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of synthetic and organic life’s differences long-term. In fact, I think it’s LESS effective than the current plan (the Reaper cycle), because it would take the current life forms of the galaxy much less time to create a new synthetic race than it would for the next Reaper cycle to arrive.
Inspire Nigh-Universal Disappointment and Rage Problems
And here we are at the REAL doozies. Any ONE of these is a HUGE problem for the ending, the kind that ruins it and seriously detracts from the entire game. The stuff above? That stuff makes a bad ending, but through the disappointment of a bad ending, you could at least still appreciate Mass Effect 3 for its otherwise overwhelming excellence, still want to experience it over and over again. But the issues below? They sour the entire game, the ruin the joy you’ve had playing it (and even the previous games!), they break the game’s spirit. They don’t make this a bad ending--they make this ending a travesty. They make this an ending that, according to the latest on that poll I mentioned, for every 1 player who’s satisfied with it there are 51 who hate it and want it changed. Drastically. These are what made Mass Effect 3’s ending one of the most disappointing moments of my entire life.**
- This ending goes against everything Shepard is and stands for. From the start right until this moment of the ending, Shepard is known for being the man or woman who can pull off the impossible, who can beat the odds because he/she is just that skilled, just that smart, just that lucky, just that well-supported, and most of all, just that determined. Shepard’s will to succeed is indomitable, and he/she does not compromise with the Reapers. Hate to be so cheesy as to quote Galaxy Quest, but if there has ever been a character who embraces and embodies the motto, “Never give up, never surrender,” it’s Commander Shepard. And yet, and YET, Shepard doesn’t stand firm against Catalyst Hologram Kid! When the glowy little jerk tells Shepard what his options are, never does Shepard stand tall and tell him no. Never does Shepard give him an inspirational speech about how he’s wrong, how he’s underestimating or misunderstanding the people of the galaxy, how there’s another way--Shepard doesn’t question what he’s told, doesn’t even LOOK for another way, even considering what he or she’s being told he or she has to choose and sacrifice. This ending just has Shepard quietly, meekly pick from the options the leader of the Reapers allows him or her.
Shepard’s determination and ability are the driving force for this series, that all the galaxy hinges on, the backbone of Mass Effect that we gamers depend upon and admire. And in this ending, that disappears, and Shepard suddenly becomes a submissive coward.
- If the consequences of the options are largely the same (the Citadel and Mass Relays will be destroyed no matter what you choose, Shepard dies no matter what you choose, there’s no substantial reference in the ending’s events to the repercussions of your choices in any of the games up until this point, and the ending itself barely changes regardless of what you choose), then the ending has effectively removed all real ability to choose from the player. From the start, Mass Effect has been a remarkable balance between the players’ getting to choose how their Shepard acts and what he/she decides, and the story Bioware wants to tell. Somehow, until this point, Bioware has always managed to keep together a strong, coherent plot over the course of 3 games while allowing the players large freedom to determine how the events of that story unfold. This balance cannot have been easy, but Bioware’s done an admirable job with it. At any rate, though, the ability of players to choose Shepard’s actions and attitude is one of the most fundamental parts of the Mass Effect series. But the ending to this game, the ending to the entire trilogy, suddenly removes this choice from the player. In the last few minutes of the trilogy, the moment which more than any other should reflect most the core values and nature of the series, Mass Effect loses one of its key components, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
- This ending generally puts forth the idea that differences between individuals inevitably means conflict. After all, the entire Reaper cycle, and the entire reason Shepard’s given these 3 lousy options, is because of Catalyst Hologram Kid’s (stupid) belief that synthetics will always rise against their creators, and that combining synthetic and organic life, and thus eliminating the major difference between them, will bring lasting peace.
Now, this is by itself a pretty alarming theory for the ME writers to advocate--and advocate it they do, for they’ve left the player with no option but to act upon Catalyst Hologram Kid’s theory. But more importantly, this is just as fundamentally in opposition to Shepard’s nature (at least, Paragon Shepard’s nature) as the idea that he/she wouldn’t resist being told what to do. For the entirety of this series, Paragon-version Commander Shepard has solidly, steadfastly, unwaveringly advocated and created unity between people. The most Paragon of options in these games are always, always aimed at cooperation and equality between people. Paragon Shepard takes friends and allies on from any race, gives second chances, views people for their merits and judges them by their actions instead of their species. In Mass Effect 1, he/she saved the Council and kept the galaxy safe for the sake of all races, and showed the galaxy that humanity was ready to do its part and join the galactic community. In Mass Effect 2, he/she led a team of unique individuals into a mission so absurdly dangerous that it’s universally called the Suicide Mission in the series, gaining the trust and loyalty of each crew member to the point that they would fight their damndest for him/her, and was enough of a leader that even the squad members who hated each other, or came from 2 separate species that had bad blood dating back centuries, were fully committed to working together for the greater good. In Mass Effect 3, Shepard plays diplomat, leader, and visionary more than ever before, bringing the entire galactic community together to stop the Reapers, making peace between the Salarians and Krogan, giving the Krogan a second chance to be a true part of the galactic community instead of its fallen heroes, stopping a war between the Quarians and the Geth and bringing them together to fight the Reapers side by side...Shepard outdoes even him/herself as an icon of the idea that peace between people is possible, no matter how different, no matter how bad their history, and that when people come together to face a problem as a single entity, there’s nothing they can’t achieve.
And yet, when Catalyst Hologram Kid talks about how synthetics can’t coexist with organics, how merging them and removing the fundamental difference between them is the new solution, how there HAS to be a solution because peace between people who are different is impossible, what does Paragon Shepard do? I’ll tell you what Paragon Shepard sure as hell doesn’t do--he/she sure as hell doesn’t take every experience and action he/she’s had and made in the last 3 years and tell the ghostly little bastard that he’s wrong, that peaceful coexistence CAN be achieved, and point out how powerful a force unity can be through the example of all those Shepard has him/herself brought together. For Paragon Shepard to accept the Catalyst Hologram Kid’s speech and options at all is thus twice a betrayal to everything Shepard is, everything Shepard has done, and everything Shepard means to the player--once for the fact that he’s meekly just taking what’s offered, and then again for his acceptance of this inevitable disharmony.
- And for me, the worst thing of all: no matter which ending you pick, the Mass Relays are destroyed. The Citadel I can live without, though it’s a sad loss. But without the Mass Relays, galactic civilization will basically enter a dark age, since it was through the Mass Relay network that all species were able to connect, travel, and interact. I’m sorry, I cannot accept this. Look. Shepard is fighting to save all people, everywhere, from being destroyed. Yes. This is true. But he/she is also fighting for their way of life. If he/she strictly fought to save people from dying, then he/she would have joined Saren in ME1, because Saren advocated finding a way to be useful enough to the Reapers that they’d allow organics to live, even if only as indoctrinated servants or whatever. That’s STILL keeping people ALIVE. So what Shepard is fighting for is more than JUST survival, strictly. He/she is fighting for people’s right to live the way they want to, to maintain free will, and to live in a society that encourages and respects their personal existence to at least some degree. Paragon Shepard fights for life AND to keep the status quo of the galaxy pleasant and peaceful for the galaxy’s civilizations. Renegade Shepard does sort of the same thing, only he/she is fighting to preserve a galaxy where he/she and humanity dominate all others. But it’s still ultimately fighting for more than just survival, fighting for a way of life, as well.
That way of life is destroyed with the Mass Relays. The galaxy that Shepard has fought so hard and long to save (and/or dominate) is gone forever, or at least for a VERY long time. Without the ability to travel to other places in the galaxy quickly, everyone in the galaxy is suddenly stranded where they are. No interstellar commerce and communication and travel, no interstellar community. No interstellar community, and you basically no longer have the Mass Effect universe. It really just isn’t the ME universe any longer at that point. Would the Star Wars universe be Star Wars if there were suddenly no way to jump to Hyperspace? Would Star Trek be Star Trek any longer if there were no Warp Drive? When you take away the ability to reach far-off civilizations, to connect to/explore the universe, to maintain a galactic community, you take away the very heart of a science-fiction series like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Mass Effect. This is the ultimate failure for Shepard--whatever happens, the galaxy as it was and the galaxy as Shepard has worked to make it is destroyed. This more than anything else hurts me, for this more than anything else is the bad ending to Mass Effect--the story, the series, the idea.
Beyond the spirit of the issue, there’s also the fact that destroying the Mass Relays and thus the galactic community completely invalidates almost every major event of Mass Effect 3. What was the point of curing the Genophage, of giving the Krogan another chance to be equals in the galactic community, and of getting them to come to cooperate with the Turians if they can no longer take part in the galactic community because they’re isolated, can no longer benefit from the camaraderie formed with the Turians? Hell, they’re not even going to be well off on their planet alone, since Wrex, the visionary leader who’s managed to pull them up out of extinction, is stranded on Earth. What was the point of getting the Quarians a chance to return to their home world if the majority of their fleet is now, thanks to being present at the battle for Earth, stranded from their home world for at least decades? Will they even have enough fuel to get back at all? Can their ships hold out for decades without reliable access to shipyards and natural resources during the trip? What was the point of convincing the galaxy of the Geth’s right to exist as a form of life if the Destroy option obliterates them all? What was the point of the emotional connections Shepard formed with his or her friends and loved ones if they can’t at the very LEAST be near him or her as he or she dies (or better yet, with him as he or she LIVES, as I wish he or she could)?
And hey, let’s not forget that regardless of whether the Geth are wiped out, the fact that every option destroys the Mass Relays means that countless people of all races will die out as a result. How many individuals across the galaxy are traveling on ships at the time the Relays are destroyed? They can’t ALL be within non-relay traveling distance of a sustainable source of food, or at least fuel to get them to the food. How many people are now stranded on small science stations and such scattered across the galaxy, stuck in planetary systems with no garden world and no means of transportation? Hell, even the individuals on garden worlds will suffer huge amounts of deaths as a result of the relays’ destruction. After all, there are countless Krogan warriors at or near the Turian home world, and the Turians eat food completely indigestible to any other species but Quarians. Likewise, any Turian that stays on Earth (and there are a lot of them, given that Earth is the scene of the final battle with the Reapers) is doomed to starvation with no food source--unless they hitch a ride on the Quarians’ food-producing life ships, but how many can possibly do that? The Quarians are already known for having very little living space in their flotilla, and even if the Turians stay on their own ships, the Quarians are also known for not having much leeway on their resources, so Turian starvation’s still sure to be an issue. Not that being able to eat regular food would necessarily save anyone on Earth--with the planet devastated by sustained war with the Reapers and now home to not only the human population but also the crews of thousands of warships, Earth’s ability to sustain life is going to be strained at best. The result of the destruction of the Mass Relays is going to be almost as catastrophic across the galaxy in terms of loss of life as the Reaper invasion would have been!
And that’s all assuming that the destruction of the Mass Relays in ME3’s ending isn’t the same as the destruction of the one in that Mass Effect 2 Downloadable Content. Because that thing made an explosion that took out a solar system. If they DO all blow up in the same way...well, that just makes it worse by about a thousand times.
THIS is our ending to the game? The trilogy? The phenomenon? This is how Mass Effect ends? Not with a bang, but with a REALLY big bang that kills countless people, ends galactic civilization, and makes our hero a mute coward? Unacceptable.
And there you have it. This ending is one of the worst I have ever seen, and certainly the most upsetting and disappointing. There’s little more to say at this point, and looking at the length of this, that’s probably a good thing. The happiest day of my life may be the day I can put up a retraction for this rant, but as of this moment, this moment when the people who hate the endings to the people who accept them is 51 to 1 and steadily growing, this is how the endings stand, this is how I feel, and this is why there are thousands of people feeling hollow inside after playing the final part of their favorite game series.
I’m gonna go cry now. Again.
* Well, I mean, I SORT OF see how it’s a short-term fix. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
** Yeah, I know, I have no life. I’m The RPGenius, this is an RPG, deal with it.
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