Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut - A Disappointed Fan Responds

For months I've been hearing critics who decry the fans that have voiced their displeasure at the ending say 'Why are you getting so upset? It's just a game'. And not only could I not agree with this sentiment, but on many levels, I literally couldn't even understand what such a sentiment meant. It wasn't just a game. It was a world in which you were invited to project yourself: to participate in and influence. It was a reactive agent, and you were €“ Well, you were any other term than the 'Catalyst'. Or it was. I guess the final message of Mass Effect, the message its creators went to extra pains to communicate, was that yes: it was just a game. There was a structure and there were parameters, and unless you agree to the win-scenario in its absolute moral vacuum, you forfeit your right to success. Because I refused to play according to the rigid, objectionable rules that Bioware laid down in the final moments of the game, I watched a galaxy of beauty and grace annihilated, and got to acutely feel that it was all my fault. Hell, I was even told I failed by the companion tasked with cataloguing my fight for the ages. I tried to play by my rules (the rules I had been led to believe up until that point were at the heart of the experience), and was punished for it. Foolishly, I tried to hold on to the beliefs that I thought made human beings more than automatons. Critical Mission Failure. You lose. What a jerk I turned out to be. Instead I got to watch the galaxy spin on until someone else was willing to come along and push the button I couldn't. Either way, the only way life perpetuates in this narrative is through an act of fear and moral compromise. Life will go on, but the standard of that life is proved irrelevant. The principles upon which it is now founded are genocide, domination, or the arrogance of compelled mutation. Three games, all leading up to a final thesis of moral futility. And to add the final insult, it all still gets credited to 'The Shepard', even though the thought of such an eventuality literally killed her. A whimper, not a bang. Yay nihilism. And so, if Star Trek is about hope, and Firefly about defiance, and Star Wars is about the balance of good and evil (and infuriatingly stilted dialogue), and Battlestar Galactica is about cycles of self-destruction, and our capacity to alter that inevitability, then in its final moments Mass Effect reveals itself to be wholly about compromise. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to succeed? For some that's everything. How far will you compromise those 'ideals' that pushed you along the whole time? Or do you even need to sacrifice your beliefs at all? Because if you never saw Synthetics as people, then gravy. Not only does the game force this compromise upon you for victory, but it only rewards you for making a choice that gives you over to your enemy's point of view. But what I don't understand, what even now fills me with bewilderment and genuine shock, is why, if the whole theme was compromise, did they kept insisting that the central thrust of the game was 'hope'. Liara even throws the term out to future generations in the opening of her holo-log in the 'Refuse' ending. We offer you hope. ...No we don't. We hoped and failed, remember? We didn't do what apparently needed to be done. And the word hope is not just a trump card that you can slap own amidst a cavalcade of despair to pretty up the carnage. As silver linings go it's pretty flimsy. Just four little letters, more a puff of air than a declaration. It has to be attached to something. There has to be something to hope for. So why on the whole way to those final choices was everyone blathering about hope? I mean, all the 'I'll-see-you-after-this-is-all-overs' were heartbreaking enough, knowing what was to come, but to then have everyone praising Shepard for sticking to her beliefs, a litany of platitudes about how magnificent it was that she never sacrificed what defined her, how that fortitude was a beacon for the peoples of the galaxy. And what for? To be called an abject failure for continuing to stick to those beliefs when it counted most? Click "next" below to read part 5...