Mass Effect isn't just a series short on happy endings; it's short on good endings as well. An entire trilogy's worth of world building and decision making all leads up to this moment in which you get to decide which colour-coded anticlimax ends it all! Here you won't be deciding which option is the best, but rather which is the least garbage. You could pick the ending that arbitrarily destroys all synthetic life, whatever the hell that means. Alternatively, you could always try the ending where you suddenly die to become Skynet and control the Reapers in what totally won't result in an oppressive dictatorship. Or, if you're feeling crazy, you could magically merge "synthetic" and "organics", two types of loosely-defined living things that are somehow altered on the genetic level by this super weapon you spent the whole game building despite knowing nothing about it. Then there's a fourth option added by the DLC where the story doesn't end, and just stops. Then they tell you that everyone died. There's simply no way around it: having to choose the ending that sucks the least is a difficult way to end Shepard's story. Nearly every line, word and character feels completely irrelevant not only to the rest of the series, but also to the other parts of the ending itself. The entire sequence is bizarre, out of place, full of poor logic, and is poorly written in general. Choosing which out-of-nowhere ending to finish out on is easily the hardest decision you'll have to make in the trilogy. It's as if the writer(s) sucker punched you with a scene from a different game and expected you to just roll with it. Without the Extended Cut, there are dark implications that nearly everyone dies no matter what you do, due to the lack of any exposition whatsoever. With it, you're stuck with a very tepid ending that nothing short of a full re-release could fix. It's dire, heart wrenching, and easily the hardest choice you have to make as Commander Shepard. Then again, maybe the hardest, most heartbreaking choice of all is choosing to finish a series that wasted its potential. What was the hardest choice you had to make in the Mass Effect trilogy? Let us know in the comment section below!
Ken was born in 1994, and before the turn of the century, he was already a gamer for life, starting with Pokémon Blue Version. He has a passion for storytelling, especially in the gaming medium. Growing up on a healthy diet of JRPGs and point and click adventure games, young Kenny grew up playing Nintendo and Sony consoles, before becoming a snobby member of the PC Master Race. Nowadays, he resides in a time warp, refusing to believe the nineties ended as he fills up his Steam library with old point and clicks and cRPGs.
