A reply to one specific Mass Effect 3 review

(Now I can't find the link to the other review. Will post when I find it.)

Before I start, I think I'd better reiterate my position on the "original" dark energy ending:

I think it's phenomenally stupid/even worse than the one we got (delete according to your opinion of the ending we got).

Understand that the dark energy ending would have gone like this: the Reapers roll through the galaxy and harvest every species that uses Mass Effect technology. They do this in order to safeguard the galaxy because Mass Effect technology is slowly destroying it. Then they leave behind Mass Effect technology for the next cycle to use, thus prompting the Reapers to roll through again. "Your technology develops along the paths we desire," as Sovereign says, so if the goal of the Reapers is to prevent the use of Mass Effect technology... why leave it lying around for other races to use?

And note that this argument does NOT necessarily confound the ending we actually got. There's nothing that suggests that AI technology is inherently tied to Mass Effect technology. So while it does mean that the title of the franchise is now a relic of an abandoned plotline, it also means that the ending isn't fantastically stupid/even more fantastically stupid (delete according to personal preference).

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's debunk the argument that Mass Effect 3 takes the story in a completely different direction. Here we go.

Organic/synthetic conflict. The author claims that this was never a theme of the franchise until the third game. This is laughably incorrect. The quarian/geth conflict existed in the first game, the geth were the principle villains of the first game, and unless I'm very much mistaken, Sovereign and the other Reapers were described as machines and synthetics throughout the first game.
Saren explicitly says that he's trying to prove that organics can be useful to the Reapers, as if this is merely an organic/synthetic conflict, and indeed there is NOTHING to hint that the geth aren't all in line with the Reapers at this point.

Now the second game introduces the geth civil war and demonstrates that the Reapers were controlling them. It is also, crucially, the point where we learn that the Reapers are partly organic.
I need to repeat that. There was NO evidence - none, nada, zip - in the original Mass Effect that the Reapers were anything other than fully synthetic. The fact that Reapers are created from the species they conquer was the Big Twist (more on that in just a second) in Mass Effect 2. In other words, the claim that an organic/synthetic conflict was invented out of whole cloth for Mass Effect 3 is complete and utter bunk.

As for why Shepard only mentions organic life when (s)he knows better at the beginning of 3? Right,
because the bureaucrats on the committee really care about the geth, don't they?

Now let's move on and talk about plot twists.

While it is true that the best-written plot twists are the ones that unfold right under your nose ("Sovereign isn't just some Reaper ship. It's an actual Reaper"), that's hardly true of, say, the most famous plot twist in science-fiction history ("No. I am your father.")

This is actually a really good comparison to make, because, as in Mass Effect, Lucas changed the story of Star Wars halfway through.  He had no idea, just to pick the two most obvious examples, that Darth Vader was Anakin's father until Empire rolled around, and he had no idea whether or not Harrison Ford would be back for Jedi (hence Han being possibly written out and Lando being created in Empire to basically fill his spot). It's certainly more rewarding to figure out this sort of thing for ourselves, before the storyteller lets you in on his big secret. (Christopher Nolan is probably the master at this, with both The Prestige and Inception cluing you in to their twists long before they're actually revealed. Steven Moffat tries to do it in Doctor Who, but his examples really tend to fall into the category of "making it too obvious.") But not every story can do that.

Now, as I've already outlined above, the organic/synthetic conflict exists in all three games. The twist here - and it comes in the middle of the most tedious mission of the most tedious arc of the entire franchise, so I don't blame you one iota for missing it - is that organics (in this case the quarians) always start it. For anyone coming to this straight from, say, Battlestar Galactica - which Sage Queen takes a potshot at in passing - this is a major twist.

"The geth drove my people into exile," Tali says at one point in 1. The heretics (under Reaper control) are spying on the good geth (if they ever got a name I forgot what it was) in 2. So actually, from the perspective of anyone who's not peering crazy deep at a dark energy buildup that's mentioned twice, the big shift from 1 and 2 to 3 is that it's organics, not synthetics, that always start trouble.

Now you're free to argue whether or not the notion that organics are always the agressors is a load of horse crap. And I'm certainly not going to argue that any of the twists in 2 or 3 are anywhere near as good as the twist in 1. (Going back to Star Wars, the revelation that Luke and Leia are siblings pales in comparison to the earlier revelation that... well, you know.)  But if you want to claim that the story suddenly shifts out from under you, well, I'm sorry but you're wrong.

And finally I want to touch on the Deus Ex Machina of the Crucible itself. (Incidentally, why is the engine called the Crucible and the focusing prism called the Catalyst? Shouldn't that be the other way around?) There's plenty of dialogue with Liara in the prologue to neatly lampshade the fact that yeah, this is a Deus Ex Machina... but until Shepard gets to Multicolored Death, nobody actually knows what the thing does.

I would go so far as to argue that it's an imperfect deconstruction of a Deus Ex Machina, given that none of the endings are as simple as "Bang, you're dead, I win," although they all come close in various ways. It still feels somewhat forced and annoying, and the choices all suck - but that's the point of good writing, to make your character choose between options that all suck.

(Am I saying the ending was good because we hated it? Hell no. Assuming you liked both of them and weren't trying to get into either of their space pants, the Ash/Kaidan choice on Virmire was a lot better. Hell, choosing to kill Wrex in 1 or watch Mordin die in 3 is one of the harder choices for me now on repeat playthroughs. When I get to the spacekid at the end, I'm all "plug me into the Reaper brain" because 1) my Shepard is a power-hungry maniac, 2) I can't bring myself to kill EDI or re-write everyone's DNA, and 3) I don't for one minute believe that Shepard can come across so many Reaper artifacts over the course of the games without getting indoctrinated, so if the Indoctrination Theory is your thing, my Shep has succumbed.)

One of the things that frustrated me about the first (and in my opinion, best) game was that it was essentially telling you that you - as a species, as a civilization - got very, very lucky. Your predecessors just happened to have sabotaged the trap at the center of the Reapers' plans, and all you have to do to win the first game is prevent the bad guy from undoing that sabotage. How is that any different from your predecessors having dumped the plans for an anti-Reaper superweapon in your lap? "Oh, one's to stop and invasion, the other's to kill all the Reapers." Academic. In both cases the Protheans do most of the prep, and all you have to do is the legwork. Like it or not, I don't see how you can like the first game and still rag on the third game's Deus Ex Machina parts.

Near the end of both 1 and 3, you get a conversation with a Prothean VI who says "the C__________ wasn't built by us." Near the end of both games you have a conversation with a hologram who says "here's how to stop the Reapers." And so this question baffles me: how come 3 is such a blatant, offensive Deus Ex Machina and 1 is not?
I'm basically done here. I disagree with almost everything Sage Queen said, basically because Sage Queen and I had very different experiences of the first two games. Hey wait, wasn't that the point of having a fully customizable character and tons of options along the way?

Post-Mass-Effect-3 blah blah

Spoilers.

First of all, they didn't half-ass it. The plot is still exactly the same, so if you didn't like the Starchild you're SOL. But assuming you didn't mind that, then your complaint was probably that not enough of the ending was fleshed out.

Rest assured that's been taken care of. As far as I can tell all your squadmates plus Hackett and Joker have new lines (although since Joker's first new lines are garbled static, I briefly assumed that they'd done what they did back in "Arrival" again, and just splatter static over stuff Seth Green had already recorded, but there is some new dialogue later on). Basically the new material explains 1) how your squadmates got off Earth (apparently somebody really upgraded the Normandy's stealth drive), 2) why Joker was running away at the end, and 3) what happened after the end.

So here's some random confessions. During my first playthrough (of the original ending), when I got to the part where Harbinger was beam-spamming me (but before I got all extra crispy), I was thinking "this is completely unrealistic." Given what that scene looks like now, with the Normandy coming in out of nowhere to pick up your squadmates and then bugger off again as opposed to, say, picking you up and launching you straight at the beam, all I can say to my past self is "you ain't seen nothing yet."

However, if I'm going to nitpick, the thing I'm going to nitpick about is the fact that we still have no idea how the hell Anderson followed Shepard up the beam. If he was that close behind, wouldn't Shepard have seen him? Also, from the dialogue, it sounds like he beat Shepard to-

Eh, let's be realistic here. Given the existing framework of the story, these extra scenes do their job of explaining what happened to everyone else. And that was the problem they could fix. So they fixed it.

As Wrex says if you destroyed Maelon's data in 2 and then warned him about the sabotage in 3, "apology accepted, Shepard."

There is one new option, interestingly. Shepard can decide that all three options suck and not pick any. This results in the Reapers completing the present cycle, followed by a different Stargazer tag.

As a sidebar, I was secretly hoping for another Battlestar Galactica reference. Pick the Synthesis ending, and you get a monologue from EDI that starts and ends with "I am alive." So there's that.

Pre-Mass-Effect-3-Extended-Cut thoughts

I started writing this before I played the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut (hereafter referred to as ME3EC, and spoilers ahoy). Basically what happened was this:

BioWare put out an incredibly awesome game called Mass Effect that was very clearly meant to be the first game in a franchise.

BioWare was bought by EA.

BioWare/EA put out Mass Effect 2, completely revamping the combat and inventory systems and making a few other changes that were mostly well-recieved.

BioWare/EA put out Mass Effect 3, which, while it had the best combat of the three games, also had way too many (unskippable) cutscenes, curiously flat characters, an extraordinarily tedious second act (and compared to certain loyalty missions in 2, that's saying something), a "normal" difficulty level that was supposed to be harder than it actually was, and an ending that let you die in a red, blue or green explosion depending on which option you took.

It was this last one that pissed off 95% of the fanbase.

And some members of that fanbase decided to take action. In what has to be the most curious form of protest ever, they started a charity drive for a better ending. It worked. EA/BioWare relented and offered us some DLC for free.

Now, I don't know what the fans were expecting. Mostly because I didn't really think that the "problems" with the ending could be fixed by a few extra cutscenes (which, I believed I might have mentioned earlier, the game was already stuffed with). I wanted a final boss, and I wanted Shepard to live.

The first was impossible given the storyline (unless they wanted to just re-hash the Saren-Husk fight from 1) and the second wouldn't really fit with the whole "victory through sacrifice" theme.
The more I thought about the ending in the month and a half since I finished the game, the more I accepted that Shepard pretty much had to die. One of my favorite pieces of fan-art features Jack (though I've seen versions with other love interests) cradling Shepard's broken body in the London ruins. That's really about all the closure I need, honestly.

The rest of it? What happens to the galaxy because of the decisions you made? That's called your legacy. Shepard doesn't get to see it on account of being, y'know, dead. I'm pretty happy to leave that open to your own interpretation.

Right, now to go play the ME3EC.

The innovation that broke the camel's back

The idea for this post originated with something Mike Stoklasa once said. If that name's not familiar, try "Mr. Plinkett."  If that name's not familiar, go to RedLetterMedia.com right now, do not pass Go, do not collect $200,000.

In his review of Star Trek (2009), he mentions that the Dominion War arc on Deep Space Nine broke the modern (24th-century) Trek franchise.  Now, as a diehard Niner I found myself in the very rare position of disagreeing with Plinkett.  The point of the Dominion War arc was to stretch Gene Roddenberry's bright shiny brave new world to its breaking point. I direct you to the episode "In the Pale Moonlight," in which Sisko sells out the Federation's principles in order to save it. 

This is not "breaking a franchise." This is merely deconstructing it. Plinkett argues that after the Dominion War, there was no way to raise the stakes even more, but that was kind of the point of the Dominion War in the first place. After Deep Space and Voyager wrapped, the franchise owners had two options. They could have another 24th-century show set in the aftermath of the Dominion War, but that would have been too close to the original premise of Deep Space - you know, the Federation kinda-sorta helping a war-torn civilization get back on its feet - to really let it stand apart.

The other option was to abandon the 24th century and go somewhere else. This is what they did, but they decided to do a prequel and the result sucked. I think that move killed the franchise a lot more than the Dominion War ever did.

Now, I saw the Plinkett reviews a while ago, so why am I only coming to this now? Because there was an article about the Nintendo Wii U that caught my eye.

See, innovation is key to any business plan. Deep Space started out as a thinly disguised copy of Babylon Five, but it really came into its own (and started laying the groundwork for That Other Show) once the Dominion War started. Voyager at least managed to be different from NextGen. Enterprise was just... well, NextGen with less tech, and supposedly less continuity to worry about, both of which were solutions to legitimate problems that cropped up repeatedly in NextGen and Deep Space. It's just that those solutions didn't work, Enterprise had its own set of problems, mostly related to the fact that it was never very good, etc etc.

Now over to the Wii. In my own humble opinion, the greatest video games of the last decade or so have been Half-Life 2, Portal, and the three Mass Effect games. I'll also mention Assassin's Creed and StarCraft II because I've gotten a lot of playtime out of both of them. Now you know what all seven of those games have in common? None of them are available for the Wii.

There are games for the Wii and its predecessor that are good. Don't get me wrong. There are Nintendo console games that are great. F-Zero GX will forever be the greatest racing game of all time (let's face it, steering with a keyboard sucks). Zelda has re-made the same game at least four times now. Super Mario Galaxy was a great step forward for that stale platformer. Super Smash Brothers is pretty much a mainstay ever since the 64 days.

But here's the thing. Nintendo substituted innovation in its games for innovation in its console design. The result is every fanboy can use a lightsaber, but you're SOL if you want a good shooter. Or an original story. Every single one of the "greatest video games of the last decade or so" I mentioned above is part of a franchise, but in a different sense than the Nintendo games. Mass Effect 3 does not have the exact same story as the original Mass Effect (well, aside from the part where the plots revolve around an ancient artifact that starts with the letter C but isn't a weapon or originally built by the Protheans like everyone thought, the games end with a mad dash towards a Conduit followed by a scene where you can get the big bad to shoot himself...)

See what I did there? I nitpicked. But every Mario game since time began has had the exact same plot: Bowser has the princess and the plumber needs to save her. Every Smash Brothers game is just the Nintendo all-stars beating each other up because they've gotten bored playing board games or golf or tennis or go-karts. The Zelda games play with the formula a bit, but it's generally true that Link and Zelda are involved, and that Ganon(dorf) is Up To Something.

The Point of No Return

Where Plinkett was right about the Dominion War arc was that it was a point of no return. Once the Dominion came screaming through the wormhole, pretty much every episode had to address it, and when they didn't, when the crew dropped everything to screw around in the holosuite, the show lagged. Gone was the peaceful future where every single problem known to man had been resolved. (In terms of drama, this was a very good thing. One of the main reasons I'm a Niner in the first place is because too much TNG is stale, boring and preachy.) But once the Dominion War started, there were simply things the show couldn't do anymore.

Same thing with the Wii. Once Nintendo introduced their motion-control lightsaber stick, they'd passed their own point of no return. To go back to a traditional console controller would be to admit defeat. But the problem is, outside developers aren't going to waste the time to make two different versions of every game.  In the past, porting games from one console to another (or from consoles to the PC) was fairly straightforward. You just mapped everything to a different button. Now instead of a console-PC divide, you have a Nintento-and-everything-else divide (again, note that Mass Effect 2 and 3 came out on every system except Nintendo's).

Now when you pass the point of no return, you generally - not always - find yourself closing more doors than you opened. You get jerkass consumers like me who would rather fight mecha-Cthulhu (and frak a rock-faced bird-thing) than swing a fake lightsaber around, which is why I own the Mass Effect games and not the Force Unleashed games. You lose outside talent. Portal, as Yahtzee said, has one of the highest meme-to-content ratios, but it also has one of the highest sucess-to-cost ratios. Opening the Mass Effect series up to the PS3 brought in a huge stream of revenue. But you can't do that with Nintendo because they've decided that "innovation" is more important than processing power.

Now to get to the meat. The video game industry is based almost entirely on Medal of Duty: Call of Honor and every other game just like it. There are enough people out there, with sufficiently large wallets, to choke down round after round of stale WWII shooters, but they're the ones who help pay the costs of making games like Mass Effect.

To drag this back into television terms, it's like having a massive story arc that slowly bleeds viewers. Eventually, you have to dumb things down and do some standalones to try to bring in new viewers and let them catch up. It makes the fans upset, but it's a necessary evil. (See the episodes 14-16 of BSG Season 3 for a prime example of this.)

I've strayed really far off topic and covered an absurd amount of ground here.  "People are a problem" is what I'm trying to say. You need to plan your innovations carefully, because they are massive, massive risks. You're probably better off not taking risks. But when you do, and your audience likes them, the payoffs can be massive.