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.