Thursday, March 29, 2012

A comprehensive list of things in Mass Effect 3 that annoyed me more than the ending

Okay, people who wanted your actions in the previous game to mean something, to make a difference, you got that. Or did you forget the Tuchanka and Rannoch missions (especially the Rannoch missions)?
1) The romance arc
I've finished Mass Effect 3 twice. Once as a female Shepard (Soldier) who dumped Kaidan in the second game for Garrus, and once as a male Shepard (Vanguard) who stayed loyal to Ashley all the way through. Now maybe it's just because Ashley doesn't even get a dialogue wheel when she gets back to the Normandy that made me find the DudeShep/Ashley arc unsatisfying. Or maybe it's because even the FemShep/Garrus arc doesn't hit enough beats, and it's considerably more fleshed out than DudeShep/Ashley.
No, seriously, the DudeShep/Ashley arc in the third game is this: "So, I worked for Cerberus and you almost shot me when Councilor Turncoat staged his little coup, are we good? Okay, cool." The FemShep/Garrus arc at least goes from what was obviously casual sex in the second game to something deeper in the third, but even so you can run through it in three conversations total, and there's no obligatory confrontation with Kaidan. After Kaidan rejoined the crew, I just left him down in the observation room and never gave him the time of day.
2) The linear plot
I mean, I get that this is a war and doomsday is here and we're all gonna die. But for the first time in the franchise, you've got to do every main story mission in a specific order (except "From Ashes," and that's DLC). And there are no random side-quests to discover by exploring the galaxy; everything is either flagged for you by Traynor or else given to you as a quest on the Citadel. Frankly, this seemed like the smallest game of the three, even though it was the longest in terms of play time.
3) The insane plot
Things happen in this game because it's the last game and so things have to happen. Everything smacks of desperation, except the things that don't. Let me explain: on the one hand, the turians are willing to help cure the genophage if it means bringing the krogan into the fight, and Councilor Backstab is willing to work with Cerberus in exchange for... something. On the other hand, the salarians and the asari are pretty content to sit back and let the other races burn. I know that the fall of Thessia is supposed to be the big sad moment, and having Liara there kind of sells it, but honestly, those elves had it coming.
So there's this thing on Benning where there are these rogue Cerberus agents, but that never comes up again. There was this thing with Dark Matter in 2 that was apparently supposed to tie into the ending and make it less of a Battlestar knockoff, but that got scrapped.
And then there's the ending. No, not the Star Child, not Those Choices, but the rest of the plot. Okay, so the Illusive Man set up a facility on Horizon to study indoctrination, so he could control the Reapers. The Reapers find out about it and gate-crash his party. Oh, and Henry Lawson is in charge of the facility, because Miranda's been reduced to a one-note character and that has to pay off somehow. But then Kai Leng is there for some reason, to do something, because he has to lead them back to the Cerberus base somehow. Then it turns out that everyone's indoctrinated and the Illusive Man told the Reapers about the Citadel so they moved it to Earth for some reason which grr argh. How about you cut the crap on Horizon, let us track Leng back to the Cerberus base from Thessia, and get a more coherent understanding of the plot at some point?
If you think I'm being too harsh, let me ask you: at what point did the Illusive Man become indoctrinated? It had to be after the Reapers hit Horizon, right? But right after that, he tells them about the Citadel. So that doesn't make sense. And why did the Reapers move the Citadel to Earth?

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Stuff: the whatever week this is edition

I don't normally comment on Cracked.com's photoplasty contests because they're stupid, classicist, or just plain incomprehensible, but #5 on this list jumped out at me.

When I was in film school, one of the instructors said that good writing is about forcing your character to choose one of two bad outcomes. Now, I'm not saying that this is a catch-all, but it seems to be pretty common, particularly in recent fiction.

Spoilers.

Battlestar Galactica: in the much-maligned ending, Lee "Fraktard" Adama tells everyone to give up their technology and live like savages in order to break the cycle. You know, the cycle that led to not one, not two, but three civilizations being nuked and the survivors trying to start over, only to do it all again? Given that the cycle repeated itself every 3,000 years or so (I'm averaging because the writers couldn't be bothered to keep the timeline straight), and the epilogue set 150,000 years after the events of the series says the cycle hasn't repeated itself yet, I'd say he won. At a hell of a cost. Y'know, like dying of dysentery.

Mass Effect 3: There's no getting around it: every single option available to Shepard at the end of this game sucks. The option I took (because my Shepard just didn't consider it a good day unless she got to blow up a mountain of stuff at the end of each game) wiped out all the Reapers, but it also killed EDI and the geth. The only other option that was available to me (because I neither saved the collector base in 2 nor played any multiplayer) would let me control the Reapers and make them leave, but I'm not going to trust a hologram, even if it is that kid, when it comes to the fate of the galaxy. (By the way, given how hard ME3 tried to ape BSG, I'm not convinced that kid was ever actually real. Maybe he was a Messenger the entire time.) The third option has you playing God and forcibly re-writing everyone's DNA. Fun times for all. But look, wasn't that what the entire franchise was about? Making the hard choices? Because, as Mordin says ad nauseam in the third game, "someone else might have gotten it wrong."

Look, I'm not trying to say these endings were perfect, because my reaction to both of them at the time was "that was crap." Just, keep an open mind.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Oh look, another permanent beta, part 2

Yeah, I've got a complaint about Mass Effect 3's ending. You know, where you fight aliens and zombies in a devastated urban environment in order to reach a location called "the Citadel." Once you're there, you're stripped of all but one of your weapons before you can confront the villain, who's allied himself with the invaders in order to improve humanity. After he's dead, there's a conversation with a nigh-omnipotent being and an explosion, followed by a distinct lack of closure. What I'm trying to say here is not that I expected more than a big choice and a quick cutscene, but that I expected more than Half-Life 2 in The Future.
Once upon a time, a video game was released and that was the end of it. Fans could either take it or leave it. But in today's day and age, video game developers have got it in their heads that they actually need to change things in a game that's already been released because the fans said so.
Honestly, StarCraft II is probably still the biggest culprit, what with the montly patches to "fix" the balance. But Mass Effect has a pretty long list itself. Who remembers Blond FemShep? Or the fallout from Deception? When was the last time that a fanbase sucessfully petitioned a video game company to change a frakking tie-in book?
The first thing that comes to my mind is "you're a bunch of spoiled whiners. Yeah, Mass Effect 3 is the original Mass Effect with better graphics and higher stakes (and no vehicle section, which makes the game seem a hell of a lot smaller),* but it's not like it's politics. It's not like it's going to make Paul Ryan shove grannies off a cliff any faster, or..."
Then the sensible part of my head kicks in and reminds me that 1) I am obsessed with politics, and 2) the Paul Ryan thing is hyperbole.
Speaking of politics, I'm splitting off the political stuff in a new blog. Possibly tomorrow. Basically whenever the next time I have a) free time and b) something to say.
Then the other part of my head kicks in and reminds me that Mass Effect 3 has multiplayer, and the DLC is essentially BioWare's cash cow for the next year.
*That's it, I'm going to do a challenge. I'll do nothing but the main story missions in 1, 2, and 3 and get back to you on how long each one takes. (Though I'll have to do 2 loyalty missions on 2 just to have a living Shepard in 3.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Mass Effect 3 critique (Defense)

Of course it was going to end this way. Harbinger was too powerful and the Illusive Man was too weak for either one to be the final boss, which is why the game doesn't really have one. But then, this chapter in particular was less a video game and more an interactive story.

Contrary to what was said in the Prosecution, there are actually only a handful of choices you can make here; whether to sabotage the genophage cure, how to end the quarian-geth war (though your options are limited based on stuff you did in 2), and what to do with the Catalyst. Everything else was set in motion by the things you did in the previous two games. Your choices are limited considerably if you scrapped the genophage cure, Tali was exiled or you didn't preserve the Collector base. And while this game is considerably more "on rails" than the previous two, and while that is a disappointment, the fact that it builds inexorably towards its climax is kind of the point.

The fate of the universe hinges on you delivering the Catalyst, so there just isn't time for the freeform exploring on the previous games. The music reinforces this: whereas it was upbeat and heroic in 2, now it's mournful and elegaic (at least the new music that was composed for this game is). The entire game feels like a slow-motion pre-emptive funeral, a bit like Doctor Who's "Logopolis." Watch the end cutscene the first time and you might go "yeah, that was kind of crap." I know I did. But then it all started to make sense. A great deal of the 82+ minutes of cutscenes in this game set the stage for Shepard's death. Mordin dies ("Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong"), Thane prays for you on his deathbed, Legion sacrifices itself to upgrade its species... with so many supporting characters making their peace with the universe, it's not at all surprising that Shepard's death is woven into the end.

It should have been obvious that there was not going to be any post-game exploration the way there was in ME2. Since this is the end of the trilogy and of Shepard's story, that means Shepard's death is on the table. But the game goes further than that. The Reaper threat is eliminated one way or another. The Mass Relays are destroyed. The world that the survivors face is a very different one than the one that existed when Shepard first set foot on Eden Prime. The entire nature of the galaxy has been changed. Shepard - our Shepard, the doomed death-seeker who was wracked with guilt - doesn't have a place in this brave new world.

By the way, a word on Shepard's new characterization. Largely that's been up to the player before now, but since this is the last game in the franchise (we hope - and I mean that in a good way, more on that later) they can take risks. I like the more realistic approach that's been taken towards Shepard's psyche ever since "Lair of the Shadow Broker."

The "synthesis" option, obviously the "golden" option since you can't get it unless you have a very high score, is the giveaway. The "nonsensical" revelation that EDI was Hannibal actually means that EDI and Shepard are linked in a greater way than is readily apparent. EDI gained self-awareness at the same time that Shepard got a class specialization. The Illusive Man put EDI and Shepard (back) together at the same time. EDI tries to become more human, while Shepard must choke back their emotional responses and become more machine simply to deal with the enormous stress on their shoulders. It's pretty much canon that the only reason Shepard survive's Harbinger's laser is because (s)he recieved so many cybernetic upgrades courtesy of Cerberus - and just in case you forgot, there was a fairly pointless scene reminding you about this half an hour ago (because Shepard apparently forgot what happened at the beginning of the second game), and the Star Child reminds you of this fact five minutes later. Meanwhile, the reason EDI doesn't turn on you and rejoin the Cerberus fold has nothing to do with logic - note that fulfilling the Illusive Man's plan is the Paragon choice - and everything to do with the fact that this machine empathizes with her crewmates. And then the only ending where Shepard might survive - the Renegade choice - is also the only one that kills EDI.

As I said, this was never a video game as much as it was an interactive piece of fiction. It hurts, gameplay-wise, and the lack of closure makes the backlash understandable. But as the third part of a story you the player had a huge hand in writing, it's not surprising that the game was heavily dedicated to closing off branches rather than opening new ones.

Okay, Star Child's explanation seems to have some holes in it. Apparently, a "hey, don't create AI or we'll swarm in here and kill you" sign wasn't ever considered. I'm not sure why Sovereign thought he needed to start the Rachni war since the quarians hadn't created the geth by that point (maybe the Rachni found a Reaper artifact and went insane). If the whole point of leaving Mass Relays around was so that organic civilizations develop their technology along the paths the Reapers want, couldn't the Reapers have just chosen a tech tree that didn't lead to artificial intelligence? (Or were the Mass Relays not part of Star Child's plan, and the Reapers built them on their own, based on the technology of the Citadel relay, in order to make their inevitable exterminations easier?)

I do like that there are still questions. I didn't want the Reapers completely stripped of all mystery, and I'm pretty happy with the explanation that we did get. My random guesses in the paragraph above are nothing compared to the fanwank gymnastics I've gone through trying to guess why Baltar doesn't eventually divulge the identity of the final Cylon on BSG. Speaking of...

People who don't like religion in their sci-fi, I'm sorry, you were just playing the wrong game. Given the memorial wall(s), the dreams about chasing a little kid around, the "cycle must be broken" vibe, the protagonist who returned from the dead only to question who (s)he really was, the fact that the clingy girl (this is an unfair characterization of both girls in question, but you know who I mean) can end up driven to suicide (shortly after setting foot on the planet she was so desperate to get to), the mutiny by a slimy politician, and the sexy robot played by Tricia Helfer... well, why don't they just bring Kasumi (a thief) up to the Normandy and let her have that conversation with Joker?

One of the saddest things that can happen to a beloved franchise is that it can be exploited by money-mad producers, a la Star Wars and Star Trek. Thankfully, we don't have that here. Like this franchise, Battlestar ended on an extremely mystical game-changer that ensured there would be no soulless sequels or further stories to tell (despite The Plan and despite the inane "Stargazer" tag at the end of ME3's credits). While I'm happy to fault the way in which they ended, I'm also very happy that they had a definitive end.

By the way, note that both franchises end on the same shot: a survivor or survivors surveying an unpopulated landscape from a hill, with the camera above and behind them. Then there's a tacked-on epilogue where two characters have a brief and completely unnecessary conversation that blows away any sense of subtlety.

Mass Effect 3 critique (Prosecution)

When the history of Mass Effect is written, fandom will incorrectly assert that the disaster that was Mass Effect: Deception was the first major chink in the armor (note to the PC police: can I still use that phrase?). Well, actually, BioWare's response to fan outcry about Deception opened a whole new floodgate, because now we've got what is quite possibly the first internet petition to change the end of a video game. Wow.

But, no. Deception was just the canary in the coal mine for everyone who loved this franchise a bit too much. The problems started well before then, and the problems with ME3's story are not limited simply to continuity errors.

In fact, the biggest problem with ME3's story is not limited simply to the third game.

Let's talk a bit about the three-act structure, because this is writing 101 here. Act one: investigation. The protagonist wants something. No, really. There's this myth that villains act, heroes react, as if heroes wouldn't be heroic if there wasn't evil to fight. Nonsense. The protagonist wants something. Maybe it's just to stop the antagonist, maybe it's fortune and glory, maybe it's a girl. Maybe he just wants to get two robots to Alderaan or a ring to Rivendell. Whatever. The protagonist wants something and sets out to get it.

Act two: complication. Something goes wrong, the protagonist is forced to adapt to new circumstances. New information is revealed. The protagonist reaches his/her lowest point at the end of this act. Maybe he finds out the villain is his father, or he's poisoned by a giant spider and captured by the bad guys. Act three: resolution. The protagonist recovers, saves the day, and lives happily ever after.

Now, the original Mass Effect (hereafter referred to as Mass Effect 1) had this structure down to an art form. Shepard wants to stop Saren, Shepard has a bad day on Virmire and gets grounded, Shepard stops a Reaper invasion and saves the galaxy. Mass Effect 2 was a bit more complicated, but the overall structure was still there. Act 1 is spent putting a team together, but it ends with a bittersweet reunion on Horizon. Act 2 is spent refining your team and earning their loyalty, but it ends with collectors attacking your ship and capturing your crew. Act 3 has you ripping them a new one.

This structure is completely absent from Mass Effect 3, replaced instead by a roller coaster of ups and downs. (SPOILERS FOLLOW.) Earth is conquered; the genophage is cured, but Mordin dies in the process; Thane gets kebabed, but you get reunited with your Virmire buddy; the geth-quarian war ends, but Legion and possibly Tali die... but then all the pathos hits after your mission to Thessia fails. Because it's Hotter and Sexier and Lighter and Funnier and Darker and Edgier all at the same time, and the tone varies dramatically from scene to scene with no overall coherence.

The doctrine of epic science fiction is that you never go to the same planet twice unless you have to, in order to make your universe look as big as possible. Unfortunately, the knock-on effect here is that you've never been to any of the planets the Reapers invade. The one time this rule is broken (and Noveria doesn't even count), Horizon looks completely different than it did in Mass Effect 2. And for all Liara's whining about Thessia being conquered, none of the ruin in the third game had the same emotional impact of running through the gutted, burning interior of the Normandy at the beginning of the second.

Now, I could go on about the deus ex machina ending, but what did you expect? The last piece of space opera that featured a galaxy-wide conflict and didn't end with magic was Deep Space Nine, which ended more than a decade ago, and even that had a mystical footnote after the main battle was over. Battlestar Galactica ends with a well-planned and intentional deus ex machina, followed by half an hour of the most contrived stupidity ever committed on that show in order to wrap up the loose threads. (on that subject, note that the most meaningful difference between BSG and ME3's endings is the amount of closure.) Doctor Who ends every season by running up the stakes so high that only magic can ever set things right again. The setup given to us by the previous two games is no different.

But why was there a trilogy in the first place? Remember, Mass Effect 2 didn't have any big plot twists in it (other than you finding out that the collectors used to be protheans, or how Reapers breed), nor did the protagonist reach their darkest point, other than the fact that Shepard died at the beginning and was promptly reconstructed. It's like the whole reason for ME2, from an overall standpoint, was to introduce Cerberus. And to re-build Shepard as partly synthetic, so that the ending would make some tiny amount of sense.

Except that Cerberus was introduced in ME1. They were a splinter group there, though, and they weren't connected to the main plot. What, you were too busy making corporations look bad? You couldn't have had Cerberus be behind the rachni or the thorian infestations? So the whole point of ME2 is to retcon Cerberus, which means that the ball was dropped all the way back in ME1.

So then we're on to ME3, and we learn the following:

-The protheans have conveniently given the protagonists everything they need to stop the Reaper invasion.

-There's an ancient artifact (whose name starts with the letter C) that everyone thinks was built by the protheans, but actually pre-dates them by quite a while.

-The Citadel is a supremely important part of the villain's plan.

If any of that sounds familiar, it means your attention span is at least six years long. Good for you. Those are all plot elements from Mass Effect 1.

But it's not all recycling. Sometimes they blatantly ignore previous information. For example, Samara tells you there are only three Ardat-Yakshi left in ME2. You kill one of them in ME2 (probably). In ME3, you find a monastery that used to be full of them. And I don't mean it used to be full of them in the distant past, I mean it used to be full of them about a week before you showed up. Go figure.

So just as Return of the Jedi was a bigger version of the same plot as Star Wars (sorry, I mean "A New Hope"), just with more stuff going on, so too is ME3 just a bigger version of ME1. But there wasn't any major revelation in ME2 to justify any of this, the way there was with Empire. In order for this series to work as a trilogy, all the factors needed to be in play by the end of ME2. Remember, no new information was introduced in Jedi, beyond the confirmation that Vader is indeed Luke's father and the whole Death Star plot recycled from the first film. In ME3, we're suddenly handed an anti-Reaper superweapon on a silver platter, and it's only our own special neuroses that prevent us from assembling it in time.

Now, I'm not trying to claim that ME3's ending would have been improved if ME2 hadn't just marked time, but let me digress for a moment here. What if ME2 had ended with the Reapers invading Earth? EA would never do that, of course, because it would have meant that ME3 had to start immediately and there was no time for any DLC (or so I thought, but then there's the "one more story" nonsense at the end of 3). What if Shepard had to sell out everything s/he stood for, and had to turn the Collector base over to the Illusive Man and his terrorist buddies? What if the game ended with the revelation that Cerberus and the Reapers were in league with each other? Shepard watches Earth burn, goes "what have I done?" and the credits roll. If you want to claim that the three-act structure works when applied to the entire Mass Effect story, then that's how ME2 should have ended.

One of my favorite parts of ME3 (and by the way, I would never dedicate this much thought to a dissection if I didn't truly love my subject matter) is this sidequest you do early in the game where you can recruit a bunch of mercenary gangs to join your grand army, but they all want favors you really shouldn't provide. It's a nice dilemma: if you actually believe in "victory at any cost," then put your money where your mouth is. That should have been a bigger part of ME2. Instead, everybody side-steps the moral implications of working with terrorists - who are constantly portrayed on-screen in a positive light, and your only negative impressions come from other people or sidequests in the first game.

The problem, of course, is that the three-act structure (introduction, complication, conclusion) could never work in a 3-part video game. Nobody's going to shell out $50 just to see how all their decisions in the first two games payed off (although if you didn't take very specific steps at certain points in ME2, you're screwed). But in addressing this issue, we're left with a second game that looks like very beautiful filler, and a third game that seems like a fancy re-hash of the first, just with a more imminent threat.

And that, ultimately, is the problem with Mass Effect 3 and the franchise as a whole.

It's been a while

All right, news:

First of all, I'm splitting TDDoDD up into two blogs. There's a reason for this, even though my output is minimal, so bear with me.

The Daily Dose of Dirty Deeds will continue as my personal blog, where I yak about Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Mass Effect, and other such trivialities. Basically everything that didn't have a "politics" tag is going to stay here.

The new blog will be political. It'll be up sometime this week, and I'll have a big announcement and link here.

I'm doing this so that you, my single viewer, don't have to be distracted by my right-wing raving whenever I can be bothered to comment on the continued deterioration of our country.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Rights, real and imagined

My best liberal friend (there's a narrow superlative) has a sticker on his laptop that decrees "health care is a human right."

Well, let's leave aside the difference between care and coverage, which all too often eludes people on both sides of the aisle. Let's talk about rights.

This will shock pretty much anyone who is under the impression that the Supreme Court can invent- I'm sorry, "interpret" new rights any old time they please, but our actual Constitutional rights come from God. Human beings, per the Declaration of Independence, are "endowed by their Creator" with these rights, and "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." In other words, our Creator gave us rights, governments are there to protect those rights, and just governments only have the powers that the governed want them to.

Our Constitution is a protection of rights, not a grant of rights. This is a key distinction. Until the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the right to legal counsel meant not that the government couldn't bar you from having a lawyer, but rather that the government had to provide you with a lawyer, our rights were protections from the government.

To put it another way; if you honestly think there's a Constitutional right to abortion, there's still no way you can compel anyone else to provide you with one. All it means is that the government can only place reasonable restrictions on your access. The right to keep and bear arms does not mean I can march down to Springfield and demand a taxpayer-funded assault rifle. The right to free speech does not mean that I get my own government-sponsored website.

Now we have an abortifacient mandate ("contraceptive" doesn't cover what this mandate does) in front of us. The government is claiming that free access to a made-up right (as if God would grant us the right to butcher the unborn in the womb) trumps an actual right - freedom of religion.

Nobody on the right, with the possible exception of one wealthy Santorum backer, is talking about outlawing contraceptives. We're talking about making people pay for their own contraceptives. Heaven forbid.

Why the hell are contraceptives even covered on health insurance? Insurance is a gamble, a bet that at some point you'll need treatment for something unexpected and expensive, like cancer. There's a pretty easy way to figure out if you're going to need contraceptives - they explained it back in middle school - and they're pretty damn cheap.

Image of the Week: Pearl Harbor and the Fog of War

  I follow a lot of naval history accounts, so this "Japanese map showing their assessment of the damage done to the United States flee...