The problem for me was never about the cutscene after your choice. The problem was that we never saw our war assets in play. We never saw the massive krogan army outside of a couple that Wrex was talking to. We never saw the elcor with the auto turrets mounted to their back. We never saw the mercenaries teaming up to take down reapers. The only place that acknowledged all that we did was a screen with a few updates and some pictures that kept being reused.
It also doesnt matter if you played as a Paragon or Renegade. Like it doesnt make sense for a Renegade to get Control ending, where suddenly you are the protector and guardian of the galaxy... when you have been punching, shooting and swearing everything and everyone for 3 games. It would have been cool if there were variations of the Destroy and Control endings based on Paragon/Renegade score. Synthesis was fine as it was because its the only one you truly die so it doesnt matter whats your Paragon/Renegade score.
The Synthesis Ending guarantees all out civil war, but on a galactic scale, @@H3lios227. From what I understand with the Synthesis Ending you force all organic and inorganic life in the Milky Way Galaxy to become as one with a galactic hive mind. No more individuality. No more uniqueness of being you as an individual. Everything you *used to be* may very well be categorized and literally saved in the Hive Mind. Literally, this is the Borg Ending. In the end Commander Shepard will mass murder trillions if not quadrillions or more lifeforms to ensure he preserves the Hive Mind he created and forced upon all life in the Milky Way Galaxy. This is the single most devastating of all Apocalyptic visions and Endings of the Mass Effect trilogy.
Easy, @@humblenerd. The pro-individualistic people will go absolutely crazy having a seemingly infinite number of people being stuck in their heads, their very beings really. So an all out civil war is inevitable... unless if said Hive Mind completely rewrites everyone's belief structures and/or simply deletes everyone's Free Will outright.
@Adam Gray so would it be a true hive mind if it didn't take away free will and or belief structures? A lot is implied. Access to information doesn't necessarily equate to everyone being in everyone else's heads. 🤷🏿♂️ Based on the visuals it seemed like culture was maintained. Childbirth was still important to Krogan etc.
Imagine Javik being the one to choose Starchild: *explaining the first one, destroy* We will be destroyed but the damage will- Javik: *BOLTS and yets himself against the glass*
seriously, I just finished a trilogy playthrough and I don't really get the hate for ME3 endings (personally I prefer Synthesis but also love the satisfaction Destroy gives you)
@@seba_igm @Sebastián González honestly the extended cut fixed a lot of the hate. Imagine the endings without any of the narrated cutscenes. That was it at release A big part of the problem came from the Indoctrination Theory. There was basically this big headcanon going around in the months following ME3's release that you were actually being indoctrinated since Me1, and that the ending is all in your head. There was a few really detailed videos compiling all the evidence back in the day (I think they're still around, worth checking out), and admittedly the whole thing would have been sheer narrative brilliance. A lot of people, myself included, just got a little too invested in what was ultimately a fan theory, but the issue was that said fan theory offered a much more compelling narrative to the functionally undifferentiated pre-Extended Cut endings. I think the 'proper' endings that came from the EC are great, but unfortunately for Mass Effect a lot of her fanbase had gotten a bit too wrapped up in theory crafting
@@carlbradley3175 im certain now in retrospect that stuff like the indoctrination theory are what Bioware had intended for the players to do. Much was left to player imagination because the trilogy was played from Shepard's pov and with his/her sacrifice, there is no way Shepard would know the consequences of it. People were supposed to get creative with it and i thought it was great the way it was, but consumers need to be satisfied. Its really unfortunate because i'd wager that the ending would be better received if it released in previous decades.
@@seba_igm The extended cut more or less addressed a lot of the issues of the endings. I think what played a large part in the hate was also the hype of the game at the time. If you played after all this happened, you would be prepared for a bad ending, so you are not as disappointed as people who played it before, because you experienced the ending with an entirelly different mindset. Combine that with the extended cut and you are likely positively surprised about the ending, leaving a better impression behind. Another thing that I can say from my personal view is that for many original ending had already left behind a bad taste, one that has burned itself in their memory, the extended cut in comparison is easily forgotten and overshadowed by the memory of the original. There are probably also a quite a few who have never seen the extended cut, since the original ending managed to kill a lot of the enthusiasm for the games to the point where some didn't touch any of the games again afterwards.
It was pretty infuriating at the time. I think I played through ME1 and ME2 at least five times each. I was so gutted with how awful ME3s ending was that I only finished it once. This was before the Extended Cut. With the original ending all of the relays were destroyed. What was ridiculous about that was that it had been established that when a relay explodes it does so with enough energy to destroy an entire solar system. So the effective end of ME3, originally, is that no matter which color you choose every living thing in any system near a Mass Relay was dead.
To be fair Elon Musk is wanting to force everyone on Earth to have that Neuro-Link technology permanently installed in our skulls and brains in real life.
The problem with the endings is that the synthetics vs. organics was never the main conflict in the game, but rather galactic cooperation. It felt like I had spent years trying to prove that the Council was wrong about the main threat being an artificial AI just for the game to prove me wrong.
The entire point of ME1 and ME2 is that the council refuses to believe. They are extremely close minded, probably because blaming the the Geth for the attack on the Citadel instead of the Reaper "fairytale", was a lot easier on public morale, and was most likely better for their political positions. (Not to mention in 1&2, they show a little bit of racism towards humans. Either that or they just don't trust/like Shepard.)
I agree. I think instead of reducing the problem to the organics and synthetics alone, it should have expanded it to other conflicts like "Asari vs Ardat-Yakshi", "Krogans vs Salarians", "Batarians vs humans", etc.
@@zachfeifel1777 I think they actually knew what was really going on considering that one scene in the citadel dlc archives about the attack on the citadel
I love how shooting the Starchild is a secret way to unlock the Refuse ending. Surprised I managed to find it on my own, I doubt many people even know about it
@@realMG420 I didn't like child nightmare stuff and annoyed so first thing in the ending choice scene without any knowladge i shot the kid and let the whole galaxy die.Just imagine after all these hours somehow you discover secret worst ending :D
Which I love, because it implies that the shep Ai really is based on his personality and thoughts, and not a random Ai that looks and sounds like shep.
@@sparkius30 it totally does... SPOILER a paragon Shep-catalist talk a lot more about rebuilding and protect the one he cares when he was mortal. A renegade Shep-catalist is more focused on the "i will destroy anything that will try to broke and put in danger this new world"
The control ending voiceover makes a beautiful counterpoint to FemShep telling Garrus if she dies she will watch over him and he will never be alone. Because she literally is watching over him. 😭
Can you imagine a reaper landing on palaven and saying "report to the ship as soon as possible. We'll bang okay?" To garrus In a feminine sounding reaper voice
@@edwardking9359 well, not really. best destroy you live, control you live (although not as a normal human), only non best destroy and synthesis you die for good lol (and refusal obv.)
Most had to be their from the beginning to understand, originally it was just different colored endings, obviously after the EC DLC the endings were better but they were terrible before that as they gave no proper resolution to an already bonked final game (for the most part.)
In my opinion, all endings are vastly different, yes. And the way they are expressed is different, Hacket is a "light at the end of the tunnel" narration of how despite all odds they manged to barely survive. Control I believe varies if you are paragon or rengade, so either they have a guardian watching over them or a ruthless overlord protecting them from themselves. Synthesis is the most utopian, everything is fine all is perfect we literally brought heaven type narration, which is kinda... shallow? Like all wars all conflict all problems ended and everything is perfect forever. HOWEVER, all endings do the same exact thing. They ALL rob us of our Shepard! All endings have us sacrifice our character, one we spent between weeks of binging legendary edition to YEARS from the first game being released! We can no longer experience the consecuences of our actions, we are only spectators! We watch as we massacre our boy/girl to control the reapers and be lost as the Catalist, disintegrate to synthesise all, or explode and then maybe survive but nothing else? What about all our relationships! The people we saved in one game giving us messages in the next, encoutnering them on the citadel, watching them save us or try to kill us. All those times we went around the entirety of the normandy after every mission to experience each companion's reaction, to care about what they think, they say, they need, loving them, hating them. In All endings, we are robbed of our character, the relationships they've built, and we are unable to experience the consecuences of our actions because we are either dead or simply unable to play anymore. The next mass effect will probably be a dissapointment, too, they set up a world several thousands of years into the future of ME3, that while the endings will matter, whatever happend to the people we cared about, will not.
@@domaldo2261 not being able to live to see the tale doesn't make it bad, it was the journey, your companions carry those memories till death. It was shephards time, he was a hero, he went out as a savior for everyone and his companions are okay with that, death happens, shephard can't live forever and continue pulling off incredible feats, there has to be and end.
Too me, I chose destroy base collector in me2, I couldn't trust give it to cerberus and I chose destroy ending with sufficient war assets, I getting breathe scene in ME3. No joke, I was surprisingly this my first play games ME trilogy.
I played mass effect without any dlc or extended cut my entire life and it was still my favorite trilogy Now playing the legendary edition in 2021 with everything like citadel dlc has made me love it even more.
1) assuming direct control 2) repair the Mass Relays 3) send all the Reapers in the Planet where the Leviathans are hiding and bomb them hard 4) fly all the Reapers into a black hole
I find it kinda hilarious and almost disappointed that it whould end like that why not send them through the omega 4 relay to the center of the universe with all those black holes and shit or have them shoot eachother something epic like that
@@necfreon6259to your first example Black holes: that wouldnt work cause reapers have powerful mass effect fields For example me2:derelict reaper and collector base which has reaper tech But the second point free for all is probably the funniest
The star child says "do you think you can control us" with the control ending so how can we trust anything said when it admitted to being part of the reapers they wouldn't want to be destroyed so it makes sense they play to sheperds humanity that they see as weak
Except this is idiotic idea since if reapers actually wanted to prevent destroy ending, all they had to was to destroy Crucible. Lets be real, if Control ending is indeed some sort of StarChild manipulation, then he and reapers are an utter joke.
@@valeriansamborski5844 So it still turns Reapers into utter joke... Followed by fact that Catalyst itself stated that Crucible WAS NOT a reaper invention. Both it and Reapers simply allowed it development throughout cycles which led to current events of Mass Effect that device was actually made while the harvest barely started.
The biggest problem is the lack of denouement. We all wanted to know what happened to the characters we got invested in. The devs thought that all the interactions we had over the game and the interactions with major characters at the FOB before the final mission started would be enough closure. That could have worked if all the endings didn't basically threw a wrench in whatever plans the characters had, especially with the destruction of the mass relays. The complete destruction of all the mass relays screws everyone over no matter what and that's what everyone "imagined" would happen after the endings. Leaving the viewer/player to imagine their own ending doesn't really work if they can't see any possibilities to explore. "Indoctrination Theory" gained a lot of traction because people were looking for any way to say the endings didn't really happen. The videos and articles that people made on it were well done and thought out, but looking back it's clear most of them were grasping at straws to enhance the endings rather than any real belief in the theory and got way too invested in wanting it to be true. The Extended Cut certainly fixed many of the problems with the original endings, but I can't unfeel what I felt when I beat the game for the first time and saw an underwhelming cutscene and then saw that the other choices led to nigh-identical cutscenes.
I think I'm in that same camp. I got Mass Effect 3 day one, even got the Special Edition with Javik available (which then and now seems like a dirty thing to have done on EA and Bioware's part). I had replayed the first two Mass Effect games just to make the Shepards I wanted, the romances I wanted, everything. I played through the bulk of Mass Effect 3 very pleased with everything I saw, as I'm doing now with the Legendary Edition on PC. I love these games, and while the original ending didn't see me undone on all the good things I thought about the trilogy, it certainly hurt a little to see such a simplification of the ending. Even with the case being made in this video with the Extended Cut, I don't think I'll ever be able to let go of that initial disappointment at seeing my Shepard be... well, reduced down to the choice equivalent of Neapolitan ice cream. Add into that as one commenter already said, that the fight against the Reapers was never AI vs. Organics, the endings all in all just felt a little hollow. Still love Mass Effect, will always love Mass Effect, but I won't forget that feeling.
@@renodesmin4675 EA was always greedy af. Look at: fact that Collectors' Edition of ME2 didn't have stupid Outfits Pack but most devoted fans who already paid much were asked to pay more for few skins.
Well, Technically they are not identical, because depending on the amount of your war resources, there will be several changes, so technically it is very important, but as you said, The game doesn't give you an ending and is unsatisfactory, especially in the ending where Sheppard lives, the extended versions weren't exactly what I wanted it to be, I wanted a scene of the characters actually meeting each other, living their lives, having a better conclusion (or worse depending on the choices), and not a quick scene of Sheppard breathing, and no, those scenes from the extended version (aka slideshows) really don't make up for everything I went through in the game, the ending is good, it's just poorly executed
I think the bigger meaning of "all the same" is that they are all available. If you made it that far you can save before the the end, and then pick the multiple choice ending you want to watch. Had there been more input on the Crucible design you might have been locked into certain options earlier. Maybe synthesis being from tech offered by the Geth working with the Quarians, and control gifted by the Illusive man if you had saved the Collector base. Destroy and walk-away being options of the base design, and therefore always available. I would have included another option by having Wrex show up if he's still alive, as the only way to get a destroy end with Shepard surviving. Those would make your decisions have real meaning, as you could get all of them, but some playthroughs would lock some out.
This is a FANTASTIC comment, but no one will be brave enough to respond to it. I love how your proposal actually makes it more about the choices you make during your journey and having it make a huge impact on the ending rather than just pick A, B, C (or D) at the end, and game over.
People really do not understand the synthesis ending huh? It’s the “correct” ending in the sense that it’s the one that most directly aligns with the themes of the game
Destroy the Reapers: It's our mission since the first game and in my opinion it's the most correct thing to do Control the Reapers: It's what Ilusive Man wanted. We become the person that we swear to destroy. Synthesis: I called this ending as Saren's End. In ME1 Saren thought that all species can be changed into a mix of biological and sintetic life form like this end. So just choose one.
If you're a Paragon Shep, you don't "turn into" the Illusive Man for picking Control. The guy's only concerned about humanity's interests, Paragon Shep is concerned about all organic and synthetic life. Think about your conversation with Mordin in ME3 regarding using Maelon's data to cure the genophage.
The destroy ending seems to be the only one that can explain a continuation of the story to the new game. I don't see control or synthesis being canon, that would probably make sense if the new teaser didn't have Liara looking for Shepard's armor on the new teaser. Indoctrination theory is the only explanation left if the story would actually continue in the Milky Way. Hudson may say that "It wasn't our intent" but I believe he's lying to us, just like the Harbinger/Child did lol.
I think the Canonically yes the destroy ending should be the canon but personally as I romanced Thane I usually choose synthesis so that Shepard kinda reunites with Thane plus Geth will survive with synthesis and also Tali and the quarians will not die cause of their suits. (Though ofc it kinda shows that they would be alive with the destroy ending when they say that all the synthethic life and things would be destroyed)
Technically to explain a continuation in ME4, if we don't upload a save file from ME3 then Bioware could just have us select which ending we want as our canon, the way Andromeda had us select which gender Shepard was so the game could make references with the correct pronoun. Granted this would be far more complex and might involve differences in the storylines and characters, so it'd really take them a lot of work to add in properly. And the Synthesis utopia ending would be much harder to pull off unless ME4 turns farming sim. But continuation from Destroy or Control could both be doable imho.
Think everyone is forgetting how Deus Ex handled endings, literally destroy/control/fusion are the endings there, either you go with the illuminati, go with tongs idea to destroy or the fusion with the helios AI. So EA ended up being lazy and taking a page frm the first deus ex, so this is likely to end the same way when starting Deus Ex 2 (what a shitty game), sure hope it doesn't but I don't have any faith or sort of hope in EA, I mean there's no Hudson and more importantly there's no Karphsyn, Dietz... so what can we really expect (ending wise). Having said that they can also go a different way in explaining shep was actually saved but remained in statis for a long time due to injuries, there can also be more clones are still out there, heck they can even go for a control ending with a new shep clone being the new hero and have you choose which Shep you end up using, AS LONG as it doesn't go the way crapdromeda did I'll be happy-ish
@@bloodycrow01 I think that was half the problem with ME3 to begin with, Karphsyn was gone already and it's obvious that those left had no idea how to write a suitable ending. ME3 is a really good game, unfortunately it also has one of the worst endings to a 3 game trilogy ever in the same light.
based from the teaser itself, it seems likely that the Destroy ending will be canonized. Especially when you consider that Liara is walking on a dead reaper AND her eyes are not glowing green.
Destroy just makes more sense, it's been your mission since the very beginning. I'm not going to change everyone's life form without giving them a choice, and there would be no individuality anymore.
Theres also the theory that the hole choosing thing is a test of the reapers to shepard since it looks and plays like a dream, choosing destruction allings with reality since shepard woke up from the indoctrination attempt (Breathing scene) and the rest is history
The problem with destroy was killing your synthetic allies. I remember the first time I listed to The Child explain the destroy option, which includes exterminating The Geth. I said, "The Geth? I just spent hours brokering peace between The Geth and Quarians! They are my allies. Why would I kill my allies?"
From the point of view of an omnipotent player, I would always choose Control, because you don't kill your allies, the Reapers are helping everybody rebuild, even though Shepard's gone. From the point of view of Shepard, I would always choose Destroy, because it simply doesn't make sense that he would pick any other option. Destroying the reapers was always his mission, and the idea that only indoctrinated individuals try to work with the reapers has been thoroughly explored. I'd never pick the synthesis ending. It sounds like it's straight up from some dystopian propaganda, and it simply doesn't make any goddamn sense. The leaves with electronic circuits on them make my brain hurt.
@@Michoss9 The only reason why Shepard's mission was to destroy the Reapers was the fact that the soldier didn't have a reason to believe other options of survival would work until the Crucible Child Choice. As you mentioned, only indoctrinated people suggested working for the Reapers. Why would Shepard trust brainwashed people? And even if The Illusive Man didn't get indorenate, he was still a xenophobic warlord. Unless the player has been a total go-it-alone Renegade assh*le from Game 1, Shepard wouldn't side with a Humanity First bigot. But when The Child, who is not indoctrinated and knows the full history of the Reapers, offers different choices than Destroy, a soldier might consider those other options. Think if it this way... Imagine being an American soldier. It is your mission to destroy Russia's nuclear arsenal. Before the moment of triumph, you learn that the arsenal can be switched to the United States' control. Not only would the US double its arsenal, but the country would have deployable weapons on two hemispheres. As a soldier, which should you do? Do you complete the mission as stated by destroying the arsenal. Do you seize the arsenal and increase the United States' global dominance? Destroy or Control? Both choices are viable and beneficial. Mr or Ms Michoss9, I will agree that the Synthesis option sucks! However, my reason is much different than yours. The entire series was about Shepard uniting different aliens, organizations, and cultures against a common threat. Setting aside petty differences to sure everyone's survival. Javick also believes that his cycle failed because the culture was too homogenized. So why would Synthesis be the "ideal" ending? In my opinion, making all life biologically and technologically similar is the exact opposite of Mass Effect's theme of appreciating individualism but moving forward as a team. Oh well. I know that the Mass Effect writers wanted to make all the Crucible choices bittersweet, but they dropped the ball... three times. LOL
@@HighHeelKnight Why would Shepard trust the Starchild though? It's literally made in the image of a child he saw murdered by reapers, the same child that has been haunting him in his ME3 nightmares, and it speaks using partly his own voice. To seize Russian missiles on their own territory is ASININE. If you don't control the real estate, there is no such thing as permanent control over the missile supply. As a soldier, sabotage is the only moral choice since the enemy can both retrieve the weapons and then retaliate with them. The United States has also demonstrated its lack of worthiness to lead the world into the future. The sheer amount of atrocities it commits for the sake of political expansion makes any of their gains at the cost of potential nuclear annihilation too high a price to pay.
Right. Many people just don't get Synthesis ending. It's like words go into one ear and go out the other, and they promptly forget about it or stubbornly refuse to understand it.
True if anything it should have been the illusive man, which was basically saren all over again. What I wanted as the last boss was harbinger or the illusive man (controlled by harbinger like what happened to saren)
Agreed. I played the original endings back in 2012 and i honestly thought the ending sequence was a joke. I was seriously expecting a "just kidding, here's the other half of the game" message and nearly threw my controller when the credits started rolling.
I feel like I'm one of the only people who actually likes the endings to Mass Effect 3, especially the control one. Fun fact by the way: in the control ending, the narration is slightly different depending on whether you were more paragon or more renegade.
These endings are so contrived they're almost childish. First off the fact that the conflict that humans create technology that causes comflict as it evolves and so an A.I. eliminates all life is stupid. That's literally the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's like if in the Terminator universe an AI thought to just scorch the entire planet, machines and all life just for evolution to start from scratch. It's such a silly premise. Lastly if the catalyst is an A.I. that means he's a computer and somewhere there's a centralized location to destroy him. He's literally on the citadel. Destroy the catalyst you destroy the reapers as they're controlled by the reapers.... this ending is equivalent to juvenile writing and was contrived to make the player "feel" something even if it didn't make sense at all. Synthesis? What does that even mean? How do you change the DNA of all life and merge these things that generates understanding? Like seriously this is so silly
@@t3st1221 Ah yes the variant which implies Shepard will use the Reapers as a police force against any of might disturb the peace, you know who say things like that, dictators. Just the kind of ending i want. /s
@@jfelton3583 I agree with this wholeheartedly. Replaying the Legendary Edition gave me new appreciation for the series looking back on it as an adult, but the writing in the last 2 hours of ME3 gets worse and worse the more I think about it
i always had the thought that with the blue ending, with the knowledge of the reapers and everything he could make himself a new body to still be Shepard and control the reapers similiar to what the star child did but more person looking instead of a projection like entity which means that everyone can still access the knowledge of the reapers (like the green ending) by just having shepard basically upload it
I always imagined Shepard would just take the reapers as far away as possible and keep moving away from the Milky Way forever. But he could just be indoctrinated too, think that’s why no one likes blue
I look at it this way. How the damn hell is an eternity of trying to control the most evil bastards in the history of the universe an acceptable afterlife for shepard? War's won. Lets grab tali and get the hell home
Shepard dies in the Control ending. Shepard’s life experiences are used as a foundation to create a new AI. The AI that replaces the Star Child isn’t actually Commander Shepard.
As it is now with the extended cut dlc, the endings now do feel different but as someone who finished it back when it launched I'd say the original color coded ending was horrible and war assist didn't matter then since you got the same basic cutscene whether you made different choices. I think a great addition to the extended cut dlc that would have made the war assist feel more personal is like when you have all the fleets reporting in you'd have actually ppl responding like Balik reporting in with the Batarian fleet and saying how he'll kill them and then aria's omega mercs reporting in telling shepard aria expects a win followed by a volus saying their bombs are ready for delployment etc etc. That way your choices of who to align with or who to kill/not kill and the little side missions have more than a simple number associated with them, same with being on the ground imagine having an elcor with guns on his back backing up shepherd along with grunt leading his platoon of krogans.
@Dr.AvenVonNebenan there will be a Canon ending regardless if shep comes back or not because we will see the aftermath of the war since we know the next ME game is a sequel
@@fresnonightcrawler4910 tbf, raises the question if we really need a new mass effect. did people forget how the last mass effect came out? how all the games from bioware came out since 2012?
@@squares4u uhhhh, no! Destroy involves the genocide of the geths along with other synthetic life. Control actually preserves all that you did in the trilogy, provided you brokered peace among all races!
@@vkak1 no it doesn't, all ai loses sentience because Shepard now controls everything organic to prevent ai from rebelling, causing another harvest. All the effort put into making making the geth and EDI have true self awareness is thrown in the trash with this ending.
Synthesis seems a tad unethical... you're literally altering the DNA of every lifeform in the universe and essentially creating a galactic hive mind. Free will gives rise to conflict. It is natural. This ending dissolved the Krogan culture.
Imagine living in the same world where your whole family got killed by reapers and turned into husks only for those husks to gain sentience and become their own people. And the very same reapers that were butchering everyone sticking around like nothing happened. This bullshit ending is just an excuse for Joker to keep his cyber girlfriend and nothing else.
@@Spooky_Spookerson revenge instead of peace cool, you can say the same thing about krogan and salarian, turian and humans, or quarian and geth. Synthesis was the best solution ending....Why do people keep saying that Synthesis ending is terminating free will? Dense people don't understand that ending explains that the knowledge from past civilizations/cycles were shared among synthetics and organics which in turn made moral and common sense beings who wanted to achieve peace and prosperity knowledgeable enough to know that fighting is meaningless....
I always find myself going for control, especially since thanks to the extended ending we get to hear Shepard explain their motivation and see them using the reapers to rebuild and protect. After working so hard to humanize EDI and make peace with the geth it would be a horrific crime to destroy them with the reapers, not to mention the damage to technology. No matter what star child says synthesis is forcing a bizarre change on everyone regardless of their wishes. But control means the hands are off the wheel, everyone gets to go on with their normal lives, and the power of the reapers can still be used to ensure rogue synthetics never exterminate organics and no race dominates all the others. As much as I hated the Mass Effect ending originally, I have come to somewhat appreciate it. We all wanted a perfect happy ending, but the real world doesn’t work that way. Instead we get a choice where there are ups and downs to every option and which you choose will depend on your Shepard’s personal values. Every option sacrifices something.
Yes, you are right. I think the upset over the endings is very understandable, when taking into account that us humans don’t really appreciate that kind of harsh reality, in a place where we seek distraction/freedom from everyday life. This phenomenon has a name, but I forgot it, hmm..
@@toiny3404 Which is the great thing about the endings, they went created to make you feel happy, they were solutions, tough decisions to a galaxy sized problem.
To be fair, even the catalyst mentions that the destruction of all the AI won’t be final. The quarians have the data to rebuild the geth, same with edi. They can be made again, and with all the reaper tech up for grabs it’s very possible you can just upgrade them to the level they were at before the ending, so it’s up to the organics to treat them as equals
Totally agree with you, the control choice looks like the best, seeing Legion sacrifice himself for the Geth's future and EDI trying to be a normal human i cant choose to destroy em, and synthesis is a choice that could alter the whole universe I can't do that, so sacrificing one life(Shepard's) and saving billion others looked like the ideal option.
I personally don’t like it long term speaking whose to say someone could control Shepard and start another harvest or Shepard down the line has different views as we start to go though the future
I would’ve like a fifth ending added after they released the leviathan dlc in which you can convince the starchild that it did the one thing it was created to prevent and depending on your reputation you can convince him via a paragon or renegade speech check
To start with, you should seriously do more of this series. Personally I tend to believe the ending slides are only part of the story, and you have to read between the lines of what the Catalyst is saying and what the Reapers are doing to piece it together. My theory on the ending to Mass Effect 3 is a more detailed variation on Indoctrination Theory, the theory that Shepard is slowly being Indoctrinated by the Reapers or that they're attempting to indoctrinate him and something about him is fighting it off. I point out that one of the dreams involve the boy we later find out is the catalyst burning beside Shepard. That's a warning not to trust the Catalyst if I ever saw one. And Mass Effect 3 wouldn't have been the first Lovecraftian story to end with the protagonist becoming what he feared. The idea of Indoctrination and Shepard becoming a Reaper reminds me of the ending to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in particular. And if you're interested, a youtube channel called Horrorbabble performs their own Lovecraft audio books including that one. Another channel with some interesting insights that you can apply to Mass Effect 3 is SFIA, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur. And in fact several of his videos mention Mass Effect, particularly the Geth and the Reapers, his work helped me gain some insight into the Galaxy from the Reapers and Leviathan's point of view. As far as the ending goes, I don't believe that most people understand what the reapers are actually doing. But if you go back over the conversation with the Catalyst you realize he says EXACTLY what they're doing. Go sifting back through e-mails and conversations about Reaper activities while you're at it. You realize that "harvesting" people who aren't turned into Husks involves something similar to the process the Collectors used. They get dissolved into a protein slurry and pumped into a Reaper. This technology was present in the game in some form from Mass Effect 1 on in the form of the Keepers, it just wasn't explained until Thane's Loyalty mission when Bailey comments about the duct rats falling into the protein vats the Keepers use. One of the interesting considerations in Mass Effect's technology is waste heat. It's everywhere, from the Normandy's stealth drive to the weapons you use. And maybe in the scanners the Reapers and Collectors use? It's pretty clear at the end that the people who are harvested are being preserved somehow, perhaps in a form similar to Commander Shepard in the control ending. There's a word for that concept, a Whole Brain Emulation or WBE. And Mass Effect is not the first sci fi game I've seen with that concept. Nick Valentine in Fallout 4 IS a WBE. He also illustrates the tendency of such copies to diverge from their originals, as this technology is not cut and paste, it's copy and paste, and if you want to be considered the Original when you came second, then the Original has to be destroyed. Commander Shepard, the original one, was destroyed in the Control and Synthesis endings. But in the control ending a part of him lives on as an evolved WBE in control of a Reaper. I don't believe this involves him becoming the Catalyst, as the Catalyst himself treats Shepard as something new. But more interestingly, advanced sci fi scanning technology, like the kind needed to copy somebody's mind whole hog to the point where personality-wise there's no telling the two apart, takes a lot of power and by extension takes a lot of heat. Look again at the sequence where the Collectors are turning the colonists to slurry. That glow is HEAT. So what's likely happening is that the slurry is a byproduct of scanning the colonists, why use it as part of the Human Reaper? Well waste not want not. The Reapers have technology so advanced that they can turn a human into a husk that's 90% cybernetic with nothing but nanites. They can take those elements in the human body and use them for building. And if you go into Isaac Arthur's videos, you realize that an advanced race can transform one periodic element into another using varying technologies if they wanted to. And in fact parts of technology like that are already in use by the Citadel Council, you can find that information in the galaxy map entries, if I remember right a collider used for that purpose can be found in the Krogan DMZ in Mass Effect 2. The Reapers are likely hundreds of millions of years ahead of the rest of the Galaxy. They would have progressed far beyond star lifting and super colliders for fusion a long time ago. And if you are farming species the way the Reapers are, trying to preserve them digitally for quadrillions of years in the future, you want all the resources you can get to sustain them. That brings me to the behavioral part of the Reapers. Their harvesting of the galaxy is to "preserve" it, but they look like they're turning everything to goop. A lot of the damage done to some of the planets you find in the Galaxy map that are called "Post Garden" could probably be related to past cycles' efforts to defend themselves from the Reapers rather than the Reapers themselves. The Reapers' behavior actually fuses three different answers to the Fermi Paradox; the Zoo Hypothesis, the Aestivation Hypothesis, and the Simulation Hypothesis. Think about it, what is a zoo? It's a place where you stick wildlife in customized habitats to preserve them from destruction. You are recreating their habitat in the wild, just not to the level of detail one might like. But because animals aren't as intelligent as humans, (and in my opinion are more adaptable) they don't require as much detail to exist in a zoo. But Zoo animals can still be harmed by outside forces, look what happened to Harambe. So a traditional zoo is not 100% safe for preserving what you're trying to preserve, and in fact the animals still die of old age or disease or develop medical and behavioral problems. If, however, you are a digital being, you only need electricity and something to fight boredom to survive, that's it. You don't need food, you don't get sick, you don't age. You can experience those things if you want to. But you don't have to, and if you wanted you could undo them again. And in fact you're completely uncoupled from our normal notions of time. We follow time based on cues in our environment. It's a very basic part of our brains. A digital commander shepard with a digital copy of his crew including his love interest could experience an entire lifetime in minutes, getting married, settling down, having children, growing old, and dying. And then come back and do it again if they wanted to. They could even control how much of the experience they remembered later. In light of the games themselves and all the choices in them, it kind of makes you wonder if that's not what you're actually seeing in Mass Effect; Commander Shepard reliving different iterations of his past digitally because he doesn't want to remember where and when and what he actually is, and that is where the Simulation Hypothesis comes in. It explains where the data of harvested people is going, why the husks don't recognize other humans, and may even explain the three part ending to Mass Effect. The whole game might be a simulation the Reapers or Shepard himself are running. In the end though, thousands of civilizations are likely digitized; trapped inside the Reapers on a server with no way out and no inkling of what's going on. Until of course, you decide to paint the galaxy red. And this is the most terrifying thing about the simulation hypothesis; you are essentially at the mercy of whoever's running the simulation. If your server is in danger, you'd never know it. And if you find out the truth, the people running the simulation can make sure you don't remember it. They don't even have to kill you, just pause the simulation and edit your consciousness so you don't remember. The Aestivation hypothesis is fairly new as solutions to the Fermi Paradox go. And while not good in it's original form, with a few caveats it could potentially explain our not seeing intelligent life and definitely shares a resemblance to the Reapers. Remember in a previous comment I explained that the Reapers were aiming for the Heat Death of the Universe originally as a way to increase their processing efficiency? The Aestivation hypothesis is the idea that civilizations sleep for most of their lives, in stasis or in a slowed down digital existence. Instead of sleeping through winter, you sleep through summer, when temperatures mean you have to expend more energy to flip a bit. The paper that introduced it was so Lovecraftian that its sub title was "That is not dead which can eternal lie." The full quotation is "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even Death may die." So think of life from the Reapers point of view, you are digital, created to preserve biological life forms. But the damn things keep killing each other, and your creators are actually making it worse. The creatures you preserve are so fragile that just existing causes them to die and that individual is then lost to entropy. And the growing and expanding population requires you collect more and more and more resources to survive. Eventually you're going to snap. In a digital existance, resource consumption is far more efficient. You can undo any damage the 'animals' do to their enclosure. You can keep it a secret from them if you want to. From the Reapers' point of view they are the superior life form, able to live for billions of years. It's not surprising in the least that they don't understand or refuse to concede the possibility that Organic life forms may not be happy living as they do, that they'd rather live short brief lives (compared to them at least) is likely nothing more than childish rebellion to them. As a result, the Reapers just don't believe we know what we're talking about.
Long story short: 1. Catalyst literally oversees Reapers 2. Shepard MET AND FOUGHT people that accepted Reaper's tech as improvement". He KNOWS results. 3. Why would this be different?
I don't mind the endings we got but I do believe they could have worked better if they were tweaked slightly and given more variety based on player choice. For example: The final Reaper fight against a generic Destroyer is replaced with a more in-depth fight with Harbinger, and Harbinger is ultimately destroyed after Shepard brings down his shields with the Thanix Cannon and the entire fleet bombards him into rubble. This gives the player a sense of victory and hope before it gets yanked away when shit goes wrong in the final beam rush. Instead of Harbinger blasting everything in the beam rush, you get two standard Reapers and three Destroyers who are absolutely pissed that you just offed their leader. If the player has extremely low EMS, Shepard is killed in the Reapers' attack along with his squad and the Normandy is shot down. The screen fades to black as Sovereign's words echo: "You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it." Cut to the scene with Liara's beacon, but leave out the post-credits scene, implying to the player that the Reapers remain undefeated. During the encounter with the Catalyst, it will shift forms and voice based on Shepard's memories, starting as a formless ball of light before shifting between the child, Shepard, and the dead Virmire squadmate. This makes it more clear that the Catalyst is tapping into Shepard's mind Leviathan-style and casts doubt on its motives to the player, making it more ambiguous if you should trust it or not. When discussing Destroy, it takes the form of Anderson. For Control, the Illusive Man. For Synthesis, the Geth and EDI/Saren depending on Paragon or Renegade alignment. Should you choose Refusal, it snaps in frustration back to it's true Leviathan form before leaving. The RGB color grading is removed and the energy blast is red no matter what, adding more ambiguity to the choice the player makes. The energy either manifests as fire for Destroy, a wave of light for Synthesis, and electricity for Control. With Low EMS, the player can only choose between Synthesis, Low EMS Destroy or Refusal. Control is completely locked off to the player. If the player has high EMS, they are given the standard options, but with added variables to Destroy and Control based on Shepard's final choice in ME2 involving the Collector Base. For Destroy, should Shepard choose to blow up the Collector Base, then all synthetic life is wiped out and Shepard dies in the blast (Let's call this Imperfect Destroy.) If Shepard saved the Collector Base, then the Cerberus HQ mission and subsequent boss fight with Kai Leng is significantly harder, but the Alliance acquires the technology from Cerberus to target the Reapers exclusively, and Shepard survives (Naturally, this would be Perfect Destroy.) Only the Destroy option damages or detonates the relays depending on EMS. For Control, Shepard either seizes control over only the Reapers or all Synthetics, again based on the Collector Base decision. Paragon Shepard vows to become a guardian for all life, while Renegade Shepard is more explicitly shown to be a ruthless dictator corrupted by absolute power.
If you never saw the new endings, they were essentially the same ending. This is the first time, I’ve seen the new endings. The original endings had different color or whether EDI was there or not when the surviving crew members exited the Normandy. How did BioWare think that would fly? Also with no explanation on what each choice really meant at the original end of the game, it was just pick a color.
Well the Green ending is just completely insane fairy tale... with "just how"??? FTL propeled nanite swarm??? The blue one is fairly reasonable... The red one is completely hillarious - that damn thing either does not know what crucible will do or it just lies. Because - it does do what it says - it doesnt kill Asari commandos with biotic implants... it doesnt fry every computer in the galaxy (see Hacket´s fleet), it should be able to just "delete" get from Quarian suits - because - as Tali said - Geth are just software - yes it probably destroys every quantum bluebox based AI (RIP EDI...)
Shoot the annoying kid: Who wouldn't have done it? Green: The game tells us it's the best ending, but the problem is it is never explained. We are given a solution here that comes completely out of nowhere. Blue: Sounds good, but we don't know what the new AI will do. He can save the galaxy, or subjugate all races and be worse than the Reaper. Red: Here I agree with you. What is said does not match what is shown. EDI dies, but we have geth in Quarian suits. If these also die, the shock wave would have to destroy all suits as a consequence. But as we can already see from the fleet, not all computers are destroyed. So, according to the pictures, at least some of the Geth must have survived. Otherwise, it's the end we've been working towards since part 1. It's the ending we know most and despite all the consequences, it's the safest and, in some way, the most satisfying ending (especially since Shepard can survive).
@@Jasmin-lg3gf To be fair this endings are illogical and just rushed without deeper thoughts behind them, the red one in only "logical" ending but as you said it has lot of omissions and other strange things. Personally, for me, we get a real satisfactory ending only when we install mod from nexusmod
Shooting the kid is literally the one the makes more sense. Sure, you lose and the galaxy goes rip. But it can be completely logical for some renegade Shepards don't believe in anything the kid said and just shoot it. Also, the next cycle wins because of what we did, so it's not like our journey was completely useless.
what bothers mee the most about synthesis is how vague it is about weather the beam effected husks or not. because if that makes husks self aware then thats bad.
I’d like to imagine this little hopeful scenario for the “Destroy” ending option, whether you believe this can or you want this to happen. Before the final push, during the downtimes and preparation, while the Quarians and Geth were slowly and gradually understanding and trusting each other once more, they former co-studies with the latter to understand both the Geth codes and the origins and technicals of the Reaper codes, with the latter providing insight on how to be able to utilize that code without it becoming a dangerous liability in the future and that the Quarians have an idea to help the latter should anything have happened to them even after gaining individuality and co-existence with their creators. Then by the time Shepard makes his choice, as the Geth shuts down from his choice, as they fought along with their creator brothers and sisters, as the war finally reaches its end, the Quarians go to the side of the fallen geth’s shells/corpses cradling them and saying their words to their lifeless shells once more “Keelah ‘Selai”. And as the time and theme of rebuilding continues, a large majority of the Quarians would eventually voice their hopes and wishes in a movement to revitalize and rebuild the Geth once more while opting to not repeat the same mistakes of their ancestors along with the assurance of their knowledge that was corroborated from studying along with their Geth allies. Admiral Gerrel would feel the need to not endanger his people any more than he already has so he would effectively lower any old opinions he has and refocus on the safety and security of his people just as his begrudged ally Admiral Korris once had, while Admiral Xen would be put in check to ensure her “mad scheming scientist” vibes do not escalate things out of control. Yeah, and that’s the best scenario, circumstances and possibilities regarding the Geth that I’d like to imagine happening for the players choosing the “Destroy” option, to try and be a little more hopeful. Maybe Bioware would go in a different direction, but I’d just thought I’d let this out there.
I thought my ending was great and would never know people didn’t like them if the internet didn’t exist. I was completely satisfied and I’m already nostalgic for a game series that I literally just finished playing. Honestly the third game was my personal favorite out of the bunch. I think gamers don’t put themselves into the shoes of the people who create these games that are so loved by so many people enough. It’s so easy to tear something apart and criticize every fault and flaw something has, but much harder to be the people responsible for creating something that is going to be experienced by hundreds of thousands of individuals and trying to satisfy as many as possible.
No. nonono. You do not get away from writing one of the worst endings in history just cause making games is hard. To the point where fans made up a theory that the whole ending is a hallucination and it somehow makes more sebse than taking it at face value.
I respect the creators and wish they were given more time & weren't rushed. However I disliked it because it felt like there was a ton of forced exposition and all things convienently line up. If Liara didn't happen to stumble into the Prothean shrine on Kahje, and then happen to find the crucible plans on the Mars archive, we'd just die and lose against the Reapers. Synthesis option came out of nowhere as a deus ex machina, and the Synthetics vs Organics focus which was mostly just sidelined to Geth vs Quarians, but then made to be the #1 issue when star child appears. On it's own, it's not *terrible*, just a bit flawed. But as a conclusion to the entire Mass Effect trilogy, where all the endings and everything else (except for the Mako...) has been absolutely amazing, it really falls flat.
If you just finished, it means you played the extended cut, which adds alot like saying goodbye to your companions and further explains the results of your choices, also parts were rewritten if you played leviathan DLC. The original just shows the colour explosion and cuts out
Furthermore, Hackett's Destroy speech, the length of the sequence as well as the slides will heavily depend on EMS. Shepard's Control speech will also depend on Paragon/Renegade and there's even a version for Neutral morality. Players often overlook just got deep the difference are when you take EMS into account. Combine different EMS versions with all possible story and morality variables, and you get a LOT of different endings. Benefit of us modders is that we know all possible quirks and variations in the game by exploring the files. ;)
Those three endings are very different from each other. I always said the issue with the endings were based on what this game was sold as; before it came out it was advertised to have around 36 different endings. Those endings were basically a variety of these three, depending on the casualties of those fighting against the reapers, small differences in cutscenes (not including colour) show essentially the same cutscene with slight differences to the damage done in the war and that was all. Mass effect was a game advertised as a game based around choice (in reality it wasn’t, anyone who’s played multiple play throughs will know that). It doesn’t matter if Wrex survived ME1 because you fight indoctrinated Seren at the end regardless, it didn’t matter who lived through the Suicide mission, you fight a human reaper regardless. Is doesn’t matter how many assets you acquire, Shepard confronts the crucible kid regardless. No matter your choice in any of the games; the games narrative stays intact. Evidently the hate given to ME as a trilogy stems from the fans take on what ME was meant to be. At the time I used to think ME was a game based around choice (like most others), but if you take a closer look the choices you made were purely for your own personal take on world building. None of the choices you made had a big impact on its story. It’s story is linear. However, commander Shepard and the characters you meet along the way are not. The game was an amazing journey from start to finish. But the illusion of choice convinced everyone to heighten their expectations; which were inevitably crushed. That’s why ME:3 gets a bad reputation in regards it’s ending. Fans of ME expected more than what the game always was from beginning to end. A linear story with fun personal winding paths for those to enjoy a unique experience... until the end.
There aren't three endings, there's one. You activate the deus ex thingamajig. The ending of the game is that you become god and now have the power to control the fate of the galaxy by choosing which colour you like best. And if you don't like this, because you thought this would be won by the combined efforts of every species, the devs made sure to put the 'fuck you' choice as well.
@@jodyboles8208 I think his problem is rather with the crucible concept itself, rather than the ending. I hated it too tbh, and I hated the made up reason for Reapers going through the cycles. I wish the devs stuck with the original script concerning the Dark Energy build up.
This video made me realize that the possible endings for ME might be disatisfying for a lot of people because all of them are theoretically good endings. The only bad scenario in my head would be a renegade shepard enforcing a Star Wars empire across the galaxy by using the Reapers with cruelty. But a paragon Shepard would ensure the safety of the galaxy forever and pretty much a normal course of history without war. The 'Destroy" ending is pretty much the same without the Reapers looking over everyone's shoulder, and whether this one is good or bad only relies on the player wanting to keep Shepard alive at all costs or being okay with Shepard's death. And the 'Synthesis' one simply means creating a bridge between organic and synthetic life, effectively merging both into something new without hunger, disease or any desire for conflict, which is pretty cool.
I know everyone has their ending that they prefer, but to me the Control ending make the most sense for my Shepard to choose. Yes the goal for the last 3 games was to find a way to destroy the Reapers, but I don’t feel the Shepard that I play would do that if it means sacrificing the Geth (which I always save by making peace with the Quarians) and EDI.
In my own imagination, i prefer control ending. Shepard help to rebuild everything, then the reapers went away or commit mass suicide so all species are free from Shepard/reaper influence and are allowed to carve their own fate, for better or worse. -> Getting the best from control and destroy ending.
In the past the protheans were stopped from finishing the crucible due to infighting with one faction wanting to control and the other wanting to destroy. ...The control advocates ended up being indoctrinated. Pretty much puts me away from control entirely.
all 3 endings were the same since it just had a few stock scenes at the end, but the problems I had with the endings was that they follow reaper doctrines. none of these endings however gave me a full feeling of choice because they didn't make me feel like I was controlling Shepard since I literally couldn't use any special dialogue choices to get the garbage data to see that the cycles were no longer needed
Let's say it straight: Any ending of trilogy of games that is chosen basing on 1 dialogue fan of options is bs. Lorewise Shepard is adult men who fought for one cause for 3 years focusing only on that and having opinions so strong he rebeled against Council and stole military starship. He died for that. I don't think he would just pick random option NOT based on his thoughts during all of these just after being asked which one is coolest
I don’t think there was ever gonna be a “good” ending to this trilogy that everyone liked. With how high the trilogy had set the standard, there was nowhere to go but down.
Also. I dont see Bioware choosing the blue or green for canon. It doesnt make sense to have another galaxy threat and everyone is way better now. The end that reapers win are also complicated to follow through. So they should go with the red ending and make a silly argument like "oh they rebult the Geth"
@@tacoman736 It would be weird, but Its a possibility. They rebuilt it and went to dark space. But they wont comeback anymore even if there is a galaxy threat
Can’t just rebuild geth after giving them sentient that’s like saying wipe out humans we can clone new ones they won’t be the same Humans the new geth won’t know about Shepard or what legion and EDI learned from Shepard and the cycle will begin again
I like to imagine that in the control ending, the reapers build an EDI-like robot that houses the new Catalyst, allowing Shepard to be reunited with his/her crew.
Bioware can't make an ending worse than those three . Bioware: "Hold my beer and get this ending for those who refuse to lose their Shepard because we're too lazy to just give you a custscene showing Garrus visiting Shepard and Tali on Rannoch." EA: "New player, need new player, winner winner, chicken dinner!"
or maybe you can't deal with a non-perfect ending? :P Me and all my friends played all three agmes before looking up anything about it on teh nternet, we got 3 different endings, and were all happy with them.
@@ScoreMagnet in numerous ways its bad. Killing edi/the geth. there should've been a way to upgrade the crucible to prevent that from happening for example. you collect so many upgrades but they don't really matter in the end, its just a match numbers game. there could've been a mechanic to upgrade the normandy as in me2 to pick you up before sending the repers to hell (you could've shot it from further away), like in the mehem mod. there is just tons of wasted potential. look at andromeda's ending, a lot of characters have individual scenes during the ending if you saved them, which was really cool. but in the end it looks like all you have is alliance troops. you can really feel that the ending was rushed, even with extended cut. everything up to that point is just so much better, but it could be a lot better too! expanded galaxy mod makes the whole game feel like a new experience.
This is the first time seeing these ending cutscenes. They are without doubt infinitely better than the original ending cutscenes. They really are the same in the original cut , but I'm glad they added this fallout style outro which I always felt was needed. Imagine in Fallout New Vegas putting in a lot of time and effort into trying to save many factions like The Brotherhood, the families on the Strip, and The Great Khans only to never hear about them again after the battle of Hoover Dam. Fallout is amazing but it wouldn't be as great without seeing the ultimate impact ur character had on all these people. So in conclusion these are three entirely different endings in my opinion BUT only in the extended edition. Mass Effect is nearly a decade old and people are still debating the ending. A sign of something special
I played back in 2012 and was frustraded. With the extended cut it was all better, but still have the impression that everything leads to war assets and they dont matter much. I will wait for your video
“The Crucible won’t discriminate” StarBrat says So why does it only discriminate in one ending? Shouldn’t control also mean Shep is a Geth army? Just seems like some kinda BS that only one ending targets advanced AI (but somehow doesn’t destroy all of the other ships... it’s almost like the StarBrat lies or something)
This is a good question! How the hell aren't all the space ships collapsing and crashing with all the crews dying but edi and gets are gone? Like come on! Every ship has some form of Ai in the form of VI's so it sdumb to think about
@@Memelord-md5hs Even more, which I forgot in my initial comment, Shep is supposed to die because he is partially machine (he doesn’t in the best destroy ending). So the destroy ending seemingly is supposed to set everyone back to the Stone Age. I think the possibility exists of the Geth surviving at wherever the rest of the fleets fell back to, because it seems that was out of the range of the crucible. At the very least, I think they could be restored. The synthesis ending... I wonder if just throwing a corpse or a piece of torn flesh or a severed finger or something could have the same effect as Shep tossing himself into the beam. Shep, looking down the elevator at TIM and Anderson: “... Anderson didn’t need his body anymore anyway....”
Yeah, that's aways bothered me too. It's almost like they just wanted to give us "hard choices" without bothering if they made sense or not... Now, if only we could plug the red tube on the blue handlers and unlock purple: reapers self-destruct ending.
@@garrettstephens91Why should anyone believe in anything he says at all? He is the literal controller of massive Beings with the ability to indoctrinate and mind control people to bend to there will and manipulate there thoughts into thinking they are right?
I would say the endings should be taken at face value, none of them seem to have been thought of beyond the epilogue. So what is said is how how things are, because everything beyond that is speculation and head canon.
Even before The Extended Cut was released, I saw the distinction between the three endings. I think most people hated it just because of the visual presentation, and the rest were dissatisfied because they interpreted all three endings as bad. They only saw the negative implications with each choice. Control: admitting The Illusive Man was right. Destroy: killing EDI and the geth. Synthesis: creating the reapers’ ideal galaxy. While I can understand each of those arguments, I still saw the upside of each decision. Control: Shepard is a very different person from the Illusive Man. The fact that the game presents this ending as the “paragon” ending with its blue colour scheme implies that Shepard inherently disagrees with the Illusive Man’s ideology. He would use the reapers to assert human dominance over the galaxy. Shepard would only use them to rebuild and protect. If you dislike the negative implications of the other two endings, what this ending does is preserve the diversity of the galaxy without sacrificing synthetics. Destroy: Shepard is no stranger to making hard decisions. In war, you can’t save everyone no matter how much you want to. It was always implied that any device that can generate enough power to destroy the reapers will cause serious collateral damage. However, Shepard owes it to everyone fighting to achieve what they all want: the reapers destroyed. Synthesis: Not only in this game, but even in actual human history, there has been a pattern of conflict that escalated into war and/or genocide time and time again. All of it was the result of conscious choices made out of hate, fear, desperation, ignorance, greed, etc. Those without first-hand experience may find it easy to defend the notion of free will and accept the imperfections of humanity (and the other Mass Effect species). But is it so hard to empathize with the desire to make everything perfect, to achieve true understanding and everlasting peace when - for example - you consider that there’s probably an entire generation of people who lived through WWI and WWII? Diversity is a double-edged sword. It gives people a strong sense of self but as a result, will always create conflict. When people believe hard enough against each other, there is only one possible result. Synthesis prevents that. I’ve played this series about a dozen times and each time I reach the ending of Mass Effect 3, I pick a different ending than the one I picked the last time. Each time, I feel justified in my choice. There is no “best” or “worst” ending here which is why I believe that BioWare did a good job with Mass Effect 3 even back in 2012. I of course love the Extended Cut because I get to see and hear more of the fantastic art that is Mass Effect. But there was nothing in there that I didn’t already think about prior.
The big issue was that our work did not mean any thing. Minimum war score max war score. All loyal party Members all dead who cares the nothing you do effects the ending. Compare to mass effect two where you had party Members die depending on what you did.
Everyone was aware of the distinct outcomes, one would have to be literally retarded to miss that. Hating the ending because the final cutscene is identical for all endings and that is all you get, is perfectly good reaction. Bioware was lazy as fuck with the endings and they deserved the reaction they got.
So many people do not understand synthesis. It is NOT just synthetics taking over. It is an evolution of both that even EDI who was a synthetic does/can not comprehend. Also as for forcing this on the Galaxy, You literally spent 2 games showing that while the races can get along and do have aspiring qualities they seem to fail time and time again. I also believe this is the only real break of the cycle of the Reapers and at least if there is evil in the Milky Way it isn't the reapers
With the extended cut, I don’t mind the three choices, though I find that synthesize is too optimistic and weird to fit in with the rest of the trilogies nuanced vibe lol. What’s more annoying to me is how the ending chapter on Earth is so short and the war assets that you build up through the game play such a small role. If you actually had different experiences in the final chapter, and had some of the various units that you recruit help you out during gameplay, and if they had certain characters live or die depending on war assets and your previous choices, then I think the ending would have been good. But the ending sequence on Earth I think is what annoyed a lot of people even after the Extended Cut DLC
Always were. But no, Casey, what fans actually wanted was agency. From the time our Shepard was yanked into the beam, until the epilogue is complete, the player has zero agency. TIM drives the confrontation, and the Star Child facilitates our "choice." We wanted a final choice no less impactful and personal than Rannoch or the Genophage cure. That shouldn't have been difficult. If the writers were making decisions based on 3 games of accumulated choices, instead of seeing the ending as a self-contained cutscene.
The Synthesis Ending, my belief, is the best and most understandable choice to pick. It ends all wars for the rest of the milky way. Sure, Shepard dies and is remembered, but isn't that what heroes do. They may die but they are truly never forgotten. Are the endings the same? No, they just have a difference in appearance on how they end.
Eyyy! Found ya here! Yeah, Hudson was so PC there. While the original was definitely rushed and the added slides are nice too, I find it dreadful how so many of the fanbase couldn't use their own brain cells without it.
I always find myself too invested in EDI's character arc to choose the Destroy ending (even though I concede that it's probably canon). More often than not, I'll choose "Synthesis"
I hate the idea of being merged into a hive mind like synthesis implies. Control seems good. And it's directly stated that people will fix what is broken when it comes to destroy. So it's not a permanent end.
Destroy makes some strange things to be honest. It is implied synthetic life will be destroyed, and even Shepard will be affected because of the implants, and yet Shep can survive, which undermines the concept of "killing synthetic life". Furthermore, how does the crucible decide what is synthetic life, really? AI? Microschemes? Tech in General? Ok, geth are sentient and therefore fit the description, but why the hell would Shepard be affected? Are the implants sentient or something? If it's tech in general, then how the hell do the ships fly?! Also, there is a thought that the crucible didn't reach all of the galaxy. I mean look at the protheans - they managed to hide quite a lot of people from the reapers, so in a way they survived the harvest. So isn't it that impossible to think there are geth that hid somewhere deep underground or something and therefore weren't affected?
@@samreddig8819 except synthesis isn't about hive mind? The DNA of organic beings is being rewritten with the code of synthetics. Basically the same thing that happened to the geth if you allow Legion to upload the Reaper code. Like. I get why people dislike syntheais. I really do. I choosed Destroy on my recent playthrough just because the StarBrat annoyed me and I felt sorry for the Reapers (they're just his tools). My point is: you don't have to create bullshit arguments to prove your thesis. Synthesis is bad for many accurate, presented in game reasons. No need to invent some on our own.
Such a beautiful game series (not counting here, Andromeda ofc. I refuse to accept that as a Mass Effect game)... The journey gave me chills and has put sparkles in my eyes more than a couple of time alone the way. And, what a journey this has been... Just ended part 3 a couple of seconds ago with the Synthesis end and it was EPIC. Shout out to my main character Garrus and secondaries Javik/Tali for being the most awesome and badass partners Shepard could have asked for. I wish I had discovered your channel earlier maybe I could have saved some of the other heroes I've lost along the way (K.Goto, Legion, K. Alenko, Miranda, Mordin, Thane Krios and Captain Anderson) Also, Legion.... I kept your kind safe. You deserved it. And, also, you were the biggest reason for choosing the Synthesis ending. I wanted so bad to whipe out the Reapers but that would have been at the cost of synthetics too, so I couldn't go through with it.. That was for you my friend..." We are Legion..."
For me the destroy ending with highest war effort is the Canon ending as i really dont think that the races wiuld cooperate with reapers without mindcontroll and shep is actually alive at the end (if we ever get a sequel)
I would say that the destroy ending would be the Best ending, if Shepard could find a way to not destroy an AI, but only destroy Reapers. In easy, preventing Crucible to destroy every syntethic life.
I think to myself that using the reaper codes the Geth have installed and using Quarian AI tech and the control ending technology it could have been possible to infect the reapers with an anti-reaper virus leaving EDI and the Geth mostly unharmed.
I think the problem is that all endings can be shortend to one point: Shepard becomes god and decides for the whole galaxy. (which seems pretty unrealistic) The outcome of the decisions may differ but it feels pretty random. They would have done better with an easy black or white ending: If you hit a certain score: Organic win if dont: they lose And maybe some steps between like: most die/ losing of all portals/technology etc
Edit: Or imagine the following: the next mass effect tell us that they just tricked us and the indoktrination theory was real and our mission is to bring back shepard to reality
"Shepard becomes god and decides for the whole galaxy, based on momentary decision that is disconnected from all he was doing about same issue for 3 years."
I did not help EDI date Joker and I did not cry at Legion's sacrifice just to kill all synthetics at the end. I'll pick synthesis everytime! (Also, control seems like Shepard being a tirant like "I'll make sure there's no violence by killing all the violents")
While i treated the whole 3rd game as an ending. it works great. I was just hoping the end cinematic battle was intercut with all the forces and war assets collected. a shot of Arias mercs fighting, on the ground or in space. even a shot of a shuttle landing, and all your level up'd N7 multiplayer characters step out to fight. showing the geth fighting with you, or the Krogan. just a quick cutaway. making that end cinematic feel yours
I would go destroy or control. Destroy for the canon ending for me anyways. Control for the countermeasure against the rise of the leviathans. Synthesis is basically you forcing everyone to be of one mind which is a no no for me
Nothing about synthesis implies one mind. It changes organics to be more synthetic, and synthetics to be more organic. Everyone is still free-willed and independent.
@@squares4u It literally says so, synthetics would be like organics and organics would be like synthetics, they all and both become hybrids of each other. That's what one mind means.
@@rickycool6083 When he says one mind he means like being indoctrinated towards one goal. Like a ant colony all serving the colony with little regard to themselves. Synthesis you still have free will.
Ive always picked Destroy, with high war score, the collateral damage is lessened with the relays being in a repairable state, but it does pain me to lose the Geth and Edi but is also the only ending which implies Shepard survived with the breath scene right at the end. Control implies Shepard will use the Reapers as a police force especially if he's a Renegade which sounds like a dictatorship, and Synthesis is just perverse. Edit: I laughed at Casey saying the original endings left a lot to the players imagination, yeah no shit dude. You explained so little that it was all we could do.
"Edit: I laughed at Casey saying the original endings left a lot to the players imagination, yeah no shit dude. You explained so little that it was all we could do." She literally said that OG has no real endings and endings must be made by players as headcanon. Why buying game than? Just headcanon whole ME3.
This whole synthetics vs Organics theme should have never been the focus, it is too generic a theme for this gem of a trilogy. They didn't even touch the Dark Energy plothole that was aging the stars in the galaxy at an alarming rate, they should have put more effort into that theme, since it was super interesting. Maybe the ending could have been somthing like this: A choice to HELP the Reapers to avoid galactic collapse, a choice to DESTROY the Reapers but doom the galaxy or a SECRET choice that would fit this narrative. At least in my eyes, this could be way more interesting than the generic endings that we got.
Isn't a dark energy that threatens to destroy the galaxy even more generic than an organic-synthetic conflict? I mean, in the end it depends on the portrayal.
@@Mr.HeisenbergTheCook it was just a suggestion. By now, so much has been written and so many themes have been covered in other media that almost all will seem generic. Nonetheless, a theme about dark energy (that they already hinted at in the game) would be more engaging in my opinion. I wanted the reapers to be a truly unstoppable force, I wanted us to really try and understand their motives even if they seem unfathomable. I wanted them to remain scary, Eldritch-like and mysterious, maybe we could have had a bitter(sweet) endings where we really had to think about the consequences of our actions which should not be displayed as black or white, but greyish.
Honestly, the conflict between synthetic and organic is a lot better than the dark energy plot line in my opinion. It felt like it was fitting more with the themes of the trilogy rather than a concept about stars aging; plus would anyone really get that concept if it were made in the original in the end? I feel that people only agree with the dark energy plotline too much after the fact of the original ending.
during my first playthrough, I was like “I’m going to die anyways, so I’ll let myself die quick” and went for the left side aka control ending. then I read that choosing destroy and Shepard will survive. I reloaded my save and went for the right side, died again. think I got only 2100 EMS. didn’t even have Synthesis as a choice.
I have a feeling the next game will have to make the synthesis ending non-canon and either have shepard be an A.I. in a body like EDI or just regular shepard with a few burn scars from the destroy ending. Synthesis changes the world too drastically to make a parallel story with the other 2.
You are incorrect. the criticism for the endings being the same came out BEFORE the extended cut DLC released. Had you played the game on release, you would have noticed it. I believe if the DLC was included at release, much of the criticism would have been small or no existent.
people still cried after the extended cut. they even made mods with new endings. the truth is that theres no super happy ever after ending. most of the mods make shapeard always live and most of his crew survive. it was never that the endings were the same that was an excuse it was that they were not happy enough
@@odst123451 then why did every "better" ending fans make also happen to end way happier? people made clear what thier true issues were by saying those mods were huge improvements when all they changed was making it happy.
@@theendofit Happiness is subjective. I’d consider Shepard dead again a happy ending of the endings were well written. Personally, I enjoyed the control ending because it made sense. Shepard is destroyed to create a new AI that controls the reapers.
Shepard: Fights for the good of the whole galaxy. Doing whatever it takes for it. Players: Yeah, I exterminated a whole race and killed a friend because I wanted my Sheperd to live lol I guess that control is the one that makes more sense. Shepard's conscience is "uploaded", he becomes an AI and that's it. Synthesis, despite being my favourite isn't explained at all. What does this merging mean? Now organic beings have circuits on them and synthetics have cells? How did the green light do that? The good thing is that at least the relays will probably be rebuilt with the knowledge of the reapers. Destroy is just useless. It goes against paragon Shepard, destroys the mass relays and doesn't even impede the posibility of new AI's being created in the future. Life in the galaxy is again gated on their solar systems without the relays. There are now millions maybe even billions of aliens now stranded on our Solar System.
The issue with the endings is that the people achieving said endings all have preconceived notions of how their individual Shepard’s thought and felt towards their goals and accomplishments. There’s a disconnect here; the player had a lore in their own mind and was inevitably disappointed in any ending that did not exactly match up to their “head canon” as it were. What doesn’t matter is any comment saying “my Shepard wouldn’t do this”. Fans and players can have their own what if’s and hypotheticals but ultimately it does not matter; the author or creator of any work of fiction is in control not the consumer. Just because Mass Effect gives the consumer the illusion of choice doesn’t mean they had control the whole time. Anyway love the channel and the elon shade was supreme
I think another issue is that there is only one ending that lets you actually destroy the Reapers. You have been fighting against them for three games, have fought through multiple hells, and died just for the chance to take them down. The idea of not killing them is something that just doesn't compute for most people and understandably so. Despite that the way Destroy is presented as being the renegade or bad option to take. There is also that synthesis is presented as the good option but requires you to die, spare the Reapers, and rewrite the biology of every being in the galaxy regardless of their own views and desires. Synthesis sounds less like utopia and more like the Reapers indoctrinating everyone, killing their greatest enemy, and ruling the galaxy.
It's weird because I have never played any of the trilogy up until 2019, but all I heard from friends up until that time is how the ending was "bad", but they could never explain why. Once I have beaten the trilogy back-to-back with the Extended Cut, I felt that the ending was as satisfying as an ending could get. I understand there might be/are some lore discrepancies, but they weren't something that stuck out to me, but I think players generally felt that the original ending wasn't satisfying enough, which is completely true. It is rather clear to me that ME3 was hugely rushed, and the game was released unfinished (the quest log is a great example for that), hence the unsatisfying conclusions to the saga. It will interesting to see how players will react to the endings once the Legendary Editions comes out.
The endings make no sense for the IP. Mass Effect was generally a grounded sci-fi story heavily into serious world building and its lore. The ending departs from that into a completely off the rails philosophical question. The entire build up and scene don't fit it. Why does the Crucible take the form of a kid Shepard saw for two minutes (for that matter, why is this kid the one who eats at Shepard instead of any of the companion deaths)? Why does Shepard trust anything said by the controller of the enemy (especially when they are obviously lying)? Why would "Destroy", the principle action the device was created for, be triggered by shooting a power relay (because it's a symbolic act of destruction, just as control is grabbing, a symbolic act of taking and control, and synthesis is embracing, a symbolic act of unity)? It eschews everything built up for a metaphorical and symbolic anticlimax that also completely neuters the Reapers as a villain we can take seriously.
@@Skyblade12 Well, seeing a child get blown to bits is always a hard thing to see. I think that is why Shepard feels guilt. Plus, the crucible just wanted to project itself in a way Shepard would listen to it. Plus, dude it is a Sci-Fi game. A lot of Sci-Fi stuff doesn't make sense at all. Why are you questioning fucking everything. It is called Science Fantasy for a reason you know.
@@thephoenixxm4160 Science fiction (sci-fi) and science fantasy are different genres. Mass Effect is _very_ much science fiction and not science fantasy. _(the main difference is how science is treated. In Mass Effect and other forms of sci fi, there are attempts made to explain the futuristic technology for worldbuilding. in science fantasy, this technology is treated as something the audience should accept without needing an explanation as to how everything works)_ Both genres are valid but there's very little debate about which one Mass Effect falls into. With Extended Cut IMO the endings _themselves_ are okay. It still ultimately can't fix the ridiculous explanation for the Reapers that was made up at the last minute from Bioware's original intentions _(yo dude, I heard you were gonna be killed by synthetics so I made synthetics to kill you before that happens)_ nor can it fix the unfitting setup of having a deus ex machina and being asked to press one of 3 buttons on it, but it *does* genuinely wrap up what happens to the characters, which is ultimately what the series needed. It just becomes an ending that isn't ideal, instead of the catastrophic crash landing the game launched with.
I want to see the fleet fight, and win or lose depending war assets. I really hate the plot that blindly using super weapow - the Crucible. With the Crucible, the war will win no matter how less war assets is. More war assets just means more short cut scenes.
The issue saying all endings are the same are not true; what is true is the fact that the endings are just not diverse enough to make it feel like the choices made throughout the trilogy had any impact on the ending itself. I saved all team members past and current , got enough war assets to choose between the three endings, resolved war between Quarians and Geth, and yet if I want to kill the Reapers, the Geth still have to die so my previous efforts were for nothing. That's just one example of how the endings don't take the players choices into consideration.
Maybe I'm weird but I actually really like the synthesis ending and think it's the best one for everyone involved? Everyone lives, everyone gets to have better, fuller lives, more knowledge, etc etc. It's just plain better than the other two.
@@connorclark3226 Eh, if I was Shepard, I'd be okay with the sacrifice. My life to bring peace and harmony to the galaxy? I'd make that trade every time.
@@joshuagross3151 It can be if we make it work that way. We're capable of it. The only ones stopping us are those of us who insist it can't happen because "that's just how life works."
Wait i could of swore on the red ending the Reapers blew up in space. I never took blue cause to me thats was just indoctrination Green is the best because Shepard scarfices their life to make everyones better Edi doesnt die, Legion, Doesnt die, people with implants dont die, ...etc.
8:56 is there anything to say Shepard doesn't survive in the other Destroy ending iterations? Sure if you don't get enough EMS you won't see the cutscene confirming he is still alive but you don't get any confirmation that he is dead. Considering the next me looks like it uses the destroy ending as canon, I imagine this loophole of sorts will be used to have Shepard be alive.
2:24 yes, the crucible, the supposed weapon that kills all synthetics but can only control the reapers and eliminate the diversity (the sole point of Mass Effect) on the galaxy. It's not just the ending, but the entire final mission is rushed to then sell DLCs like citadel and say "sorry, we screwed up, it was EA, etc. I would love a different final mission that actually shows Geth fighting alongside the Quarians on Earth, but probably Bioware won't change a thing because they seem very happy about their endings
There is a mod for that, I think it's take Earth back or something. Basically during the fight on Earth at some point a Geth squad and a prime will drop down and fight with you.
My biggest beef with the endings is and always will be the destruction of the mass relays which happens in all endings (except if you refuse and let the reapers win) because that renders the really important choices moot; killing the rachni queen - didn't matter; with the mass relays destroyed the rachni could never be a threat to the galaxy again anyway. Same thing with the Genophage; if you made the difficult decision to screw over the krogan for the sake of the rest of the galaxy then you're doubly a douche because with the mass relays gone the Krogan is not a threat for anyone but themselves anyway.
Of course they're not the same: 1 of them is giving up and letting the cycle continue 2 of them are hallucinations and the true ending is destroying the Reapers and paving the way to Mass Effect 4
Still embracing Indoctrination Theory until they make some actual canon on the subject. There's really only 2 endings, Sheppard finally succumbs to indoctrination (in the form of thinking he can control the Reapers like The Illusive Man or merge with them like Saren) or he resists indoctrination and comes to in the rubble of London.
Back in 2012 I only played the destroy ending (also I sacrificed the Quarians to save the Geth) but I remember it being vague and very disappointing since the final cut scene had the citadel glow red shoot a beam through the Mass relay and then you saw the Normandy crashed on the planet before cutting to the two people walking through the snow, I don't know how different the other endings were back then but the extended cut definitely improves the ending now that I've finally played it after all these years. At the time I thought they took dev time away from the ending to add in that terrible multiplayer mode.
People say they didnt feel different and our war assets didnt matter because you can get all three (four) endings no matter what you do throughout the entire trilogy and nothing you did in the last 3 games changes anything about any ending you choose, not because they all had similar cutscenes. Adding more to those cutscenes doesnt help my decisions feel more important if my decisions still dont change anything about the end decision.
Shepard and Harbinger in the control ending scene.
Harbinger: Don't say it.. Please.
Shepard: ... ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL
Catalyst/Harbinger: Okay, you called it. I SHOULD GO.
Shepard: I am the Harbinger of your doom.
I was so disappointed that Shepard doesnt say it
Lmao! underrated comment
@@sorrento114 I like to imagine 20 years later Shepard just parks a reaper on his former crew mates' planets and quotes sovereign in a sarcastic voice
The problem for me was never about the cutscene after your choice. The problem was that we never saw our war assets in play. We never saw the massive krogan army outside of a couple that Wrex was talking to. We never saw the elcor with the auto turrets mounted to their back. We never saw the mercenaries teaming up to take down reapers. The only place that acknowledged all that we did was a screen with a few updates and some pictures that kept being reused.
We see that in the take back earth mod.
God bless modders and pc gaming.
It would definitely be a lot to put into one scene, but it would be interesting, like Avengers: Endgame
It also doesnt matter if you played as a Paragon or Renegade. Like it doesnt make sense for a Renegade to get Control ending, where suddenly you are the protector and guardian of the galaxy... when you have been punching, shooting and swearing everything and everyone for 3 games. It would have been cool if there were variations of the Destroy and Control endings based on Paragon/Renegade score. Synthesis was fine as it was because its the only one you truly die so it doesnt matter whats your Paragon/Renegade score.
@@eriksgasins9086there literally IS variations if you pay attention to Sheperd's dialogue lmao.
I did not fight for the preservation and diversity of space-faring races for 3 games just to synthesize them all
Exactly, your forcing a change on all life in the galaxy without giving them a choice
The Synthesis Ending guarantees all out civil war, but on a galactic scale, @@H3lios227. From what I understand with the Synthesis Ending you force all organic and inorganic life in the Milky Way Galaxy to become as one with a galactic hive mind. No more individuality. No more uniqueness of being you as an individual. Everything you *used to be* may very well be categorized and literally saved in the Hive Mind. Literally, this is the Borg Ending. In the end Commander Shepard will mass murder trillions if not quadrillions or more lifeforms to ensure he preserves the Hive Mind he created and forced upon all life in the Milky Way Galaxy. This is the single most devastating of all Apocalyptic visions and Endings of the Mass Effect trilogy.
@@adamgray1753 how do you have civil war with a hive mind?
Easy, @@humblenerd. The pro-individualistic people will go absolutely crazy having a seemingly infinite number of people being stuck in their heads, their very beings really. So an all out civil war is inevitable... unless if said Hive Mind completely rewrites everyone's belief structures and/or simply deletes everyone's Free Will outright.
@Adam Gray so would it be a true hive mind if it didn't take away free will and or belief structures?
A lot is implied. Access to information doesn't necessarily equate to everyone being in everyone else's heads. 🤷🏿♂️ Based on the visuals it seemed like culture was maintained. Childbirth was still important to Krogan etc.
Imagine Javik being the one to choose
Starchild: *explaining the first one, destroy* We will be destroyed but the damage will-
Javik: *BOLTS and yets himself against the glass*
He would throw Starchild out of the airlock 😆😆
@@joeboi8284 If he could , yeah.
He would shoot him like I did and automatically trigger the Refusal ending.
Starchild: But synthetics will be destroyed as well.
Javik: Good.
Hear the voice of The Last Prothean!!
Hearing all this stuff about the endings for ME3 make me glad I started playing the mass effect games later instead of when they were released.
seriously, I just finished a trilogy playthrough and I don't really get the hate for ME3 endings (personally I prefer Synthesis but also love the satisfaction Destroy gives you)
@@seba_igm @Sebastián González honestly the extended cut fixed a lot of the hate. Imagine the endings without any of the narrated cutscenes. That was it at release
A big part of the problem came from the Indoctrination Theory. There was basically this big headcanon going around in the months following ME3's release that you were actually being indoctrinated since Me1, and that the ending is all in your head. There was a few really detailed videos compiling all the evidence back in the day (I think they're still around, worth checking out), and admittedly the whole thing would have been sheer narrative brilliance. A lot of people, myself included, just got a little too invested in what was ultimately a fan theory, but the issue was that said fan theory offered a much more compelling narrative to the functionally undifferentiated pre-Extended Cut endings. I think the 'proper' endings that came from the EC are great, but unfortunately for Mass Effect a lot of her fanbase had gotten a bit too wrapped up in theory crafting
@@carlbradley3175 im certain now in retrospect that stuff like the indoctrination theory are what Bioware had intended for the players to do. Much was left to player imagination because the trilogy was played from Shepard's pov and with his/her sacrifice, there is no way Shepard would know the consequences of it. People were supposed to get creative with it and i thought it was great the way it was, but consumers need to be satisfied. Its really unfortunate because i'd wager that the ending would be better received if it released in previous decades.
@@seba_igm The extended cut more or less addressed a lot of the issues of the endings. I think what played a large part in the hate was also the hype of the game at the time. If you played after all this happened, you would be prepared for a bad ending, so you are not as disappointed as people who played it before, because you experienced the ending with an entirelly different mindset. Combine that with the extended cut and you are likely positively surprised about the ending, leaving a better impression behind.
Another thing that I can say from my personal view is that for many original ending had already left behind a bad taste, one that has burned itself in their memory, the extended cut in comparison is easily forgotten and overshadowed by the memory of the original. There are probably also a quite a few who have never seen the extended cut, since the original ending managed to kill a lot of the enthusiasm for the games to the point where some didn't touch any of the games again afterwards.
It was pretty infuriating at the time. I think I played through ME1 and ME2 at least five times each. I was so gutted with how awful ME3s ending was that I only finished it once. This was before the Extended Cut.
With the original ending all of the relays were destroyed. What was ridiculous about that was that it had been established that when a relay explodes it does so with enough energy to destroy an entire solar system. So the effective end of ME3, originally, is that no matter which color you choose every living thing in any system near a Mass Relay was dead.
How did I not realize that Elon musk is the illusive man
To be fair Elon Musk is wanting to force everyone on Earth to have that Neuro-Link technology permanently installed in our skulls and brains in real life.
I think mark zuckenberg sounds more like the ilusive man
@@adamgray1753 synthesis?
@@adamgray1753 where on earth did you hear that from? never heard him say he wants to force anything.
@@jodyboles8208 Adam is an idiot he already made a fool of himself in the top comment just ignore him
The problem with the endings is that the synthetics vs. organics was never the main conflict in the game, but rather galactic cooperation. It felt like I had spent years trying to prove that the Council was wrong about the main threat being an artificial AI just for the game to prove me wrong.
The entire point of ME1 and ME2 is that the council refuses to believe. They are extremely close minded, probably because blaming the the Geth for the attack on the Citadel instead of the Reaper "fairytale", was a lot easier on public morale, and was most likely better for their political positions. (Not to mention in 1&2, they show a little bit of racism towards humans. Either that or they just don't trust/like Shepard.)
I agree. I think instead of reducing the problem to the organics and synthetics alone, it should have expanded it to other conflicts like "Asari vs Ardat-Yakshi", "Krogans vs Salarians", "Batarians vs humans", etc.
@@zachfeifel1777 I think they actually knew what was really going on considering that one scene in the citadel dlc archives about the attack on the citadel
@@themars2011 Maybe they aren't close minded. They may just be in denial.
@@zachfeifel1777 kind of like the close minded morons calling themselves republicans. Lol.
In my last playthrough, I suddenly remembered after all the dialogue that I still had a gun, so I tried to shoot the Catalyst.
Reapers 1, Sheperd 0.
i thought i was the only one😂
I love how shooting the Starchild is a secret way to unlock the Refuse ending. Surprised I managed to find it on my own, I doubt many people even know about it
This happened my first playthrough
@@realMG420 I didn't like child nightmare stuff and annoyed so first thing in the ending choice scene without any knowladge i shot the kid and let the whole galaxy die.Just imagine after all these hours somehow you discover secret worst ending :D
i did this by accident.
i didnt believe i could actually shoot the fucker. well, lol.
Javik: Reaches the catalyst
Catalyst: Destroy is this way
Javik: Reaches The Catalyst
Javik: "My race..."
Catalyst: F* it, continue cycle
Javik: _reaches the Catalyst_
Catalyst: "I--"
Javik: _shoots the Catalyst_
We need an alternate universe where the reapers were finished during Javiks cycle
Javik: “I’ll throw you out of the airlock” 😂😂🤣
it should be noted that Shep's speech with the control ending changes if you're renegade, paragon or middle road.
And also changes based on your decision about the genophage, and if Wrex or Wreav is the leader.
It does?
@@sparkius30 yup
Which I love, because it implies that the shep Ai really is based on his personality and thoughts, and not a random Ai that looks and sounds like shep.
@@sparkius30 it totally does...
SPOILER
a paragon Shep-catalist talk a lot more about rebuilding and protect the one he cares when he was mortal. A renegade Shep-catalist is more focused on the "i will destroy anything that will try to broke and put in danger this new world"
Honestly I think it would be a better idea for a ending if it was determined on your choices throughout the series instead of what we got
Yes, totally. Ending feels disconnected from Shepard
The control ending voiceover makes a beautiful counterpoint to FemShep telling Garrus if she dies she will watch over him and he will never be alone. Because she literally is watching over him. 😭
I think about it the same way! 😖
Male Shepard says the same thing.
Unless Garrus dies.....
Can you imagine a reaper landing on palaven and saying "report to the ship as soon as possible. We'll bang okay?" To garrus In a feminine sounding reaper voice
@@thesamejackalsniperthatkil117 lmfao
While the endings have vastly different consequences. How they were expressed was near identical.
is that not perfect? given that shepard has to make a choice knowing that they'd never see the result of their choices?
@@edwardking9359 well, not really. best destroy you live, control you live (although not as a normal human), only non best destroy and synthesis you die for good lol (and refusal obv.)
Most had to be their from the beginning to understand, originally it was just different colored endings, obviously after the EC DLC the endings were better but they were terrible before that as they gave no proper resolution to an already bonked final game (for the most part.)
In my opinion, all endings are vastly different, yes. And the way they are expressed is different, Hacket is a "light at the end of the tunnel" narration of how despite all odds they manged to barely survive. Control I believe varies if you are paragon or rengade, so either they have a guardian watching over them or a ruthless overlord protecting them from themselves. Synthesis is the most utopian, everything is fine all is perfect we literally brought heaven type narration, which is kinda... shallow? Like all wars all conflict all problems ended and everything is perfect forever.
HOWEVER, all endings do the same exact thing. They ALL rob us of our Shepard! All endings have us sacrifice our character, one we spent between weeks of binging legendary edition to YEARS from the first game being released! We can no longer experience the consecuences of our actions, we are only spectators! We watch as we massacre our boy/girl to control the reapers and be lost as the Catalist, disintegrate to synthesise all, or explode and then maybe survive but nothing else? What about all our relationships! The people we saved in one game giving us messages in the next, encoutnering them on the citadel, watching them save us or try to kill us. All those times we went around the entirety of the normandy after every mission to experience each companion's reaction, to care about what they think, they say, they need, loving them, hating them.
In All endings, we are robbed of our character, the relationships they've built, and we are unable to experience the consecuences of our actions because we are either dead or simply unable to play anymore. The next mass effect will probably be a dissapointment, too, they set up a world several thousands of years into the future of ME3, that while the endings will matter, whatever happend to the people we cared about, will not.
@@domaldo2261 not being able to live to see the tale doesn't make it bad, it was the journey, your companions carry those memories till death. It was shephards time, he was a hero, he went out as a savior for everyone and his companions are okay with that, death happens, shephard can't live forever and continue pulling off incredible feats, there has to be and end.
I’m so glad I played Me3 with the extended cut on my first run
Too me, I chose destroy base collector in me2, I couldn't trust give it to cerberus and I chose destroy ending with sufficient war assets, I getting breathe scene in ME3. No joke, I was surprisingly this my first play games ME trilogy.
I played mass effect without any dlc or extended cut my entire life and it was still my favorite trilogy
Now playing the legendary edition in 2021 with everything like citadel dlc has made me love it even more.
@@zer0patientquietkid894 I had a stroke reading your comment
Wish there was an option in the control ending to fly all the Reapers into the Sun. Destroy the Reapers without sacrificing your synthetic allies.
1) assuming direct control
2) repair the Mass Relays
3) send all the Reapers in the Planet where the Leviathans are hiding and bomb them hard
4) fly all the Reapers into a black hole
Could call it the...
(Spoiler)
"Battlestar Galactica Ending"
I find it kinda hilarious and almost disappointed that it whould end like that why not send them through the omega 4 relay to the center of the universe with all those black holes and shit or have them shoot eachother something epic like that
Smoke on dat illusive man pack
@@necfreon6259to your first example
Black holes: that wouldnt work cause reapers have powerful mass effect fields
For example me2:derelict reaper and collector base which has reaper tech
But the second point free for all is probably the funniest
The star child says "do you think you can control us" with the control ending so how can we trust anything said when it admitted to being part of the reapers they wouldn't want to be destroyed so it makes sense they play to sheperds humanity that they see as weak
Except this is idiotic idea since if reapers actually wanted to prevent destroy ending, all they had to was to destroy Crucible.
Lets be real, if Control ending is indeed some sort of StarChild manipulation, then he and reapers are an utter joke.
If he was lying why would he even tell you about destroy
It was not a reaper it was a Leviathan.
Mass Effect 3 story wise makes no sense completely
@@valeriansamborski5844 So it still turns Reapers into utter joke...
Followed by fact that Catalyst itself stated that Crucible WAS NOT a reaper invention. Both it and Reapers simply allowed it development throughout cycles which led to current events of Mass Effect that device was actually made while the harvest barely started.
The biggest problem is the lack of denouement. We all wanted to know what happened to the characters we got invested in. The devs thought that all the interactions we had over the game and the interactions with major characters at the FOB before the final mission started would be enough closure. That could have worked if all the endings didn't basically threw a wrench in whatever plans the characters had, especially with the destruction of the mass relays. The complete destruction of all the mass relays screws everyone over no matter what and that's what everyone "imagined" would happen after the endings. Leaving the viewer/player to imagine their own ending doesn't really work if they can't see any possibilities to explore. "Indoctrination Theory" gained a lot of traction because people were looking for any way to say the endings didn't really happen. The videos and articles that people made on it were well done and thought out, but looking back it's clear most of them were grasping at straws to enhance the endings rather than any real belief in the theory and got way too invested in wanting it to be true. The Extended Cut certainly fixed many of the problems with the original endings, but I can't unfeel what I felt when I beat the game for the first time and saw an underwhelming cutscene and then saw that the other choices led to nigh-identical cutscenes.
I think I'm in that same camp. I got Mass Effect 3 day one, even got the Special Edition with Javik available (which then and now seems like a dirty thing to have done on EA and Bioware's part). I had replayed the first two Mass Effect games just to make the Shepards I wanted, the romances I wanted, everything. I played through the bulk of Mass Effect 3 very pleased with everything I saw, as I'm doing now with the Legendary Edition on PC. I love these games, and while the original ending didn't see me undone on all the good things I thought about the trilogy, it certainly hurt a little to see such a simplification of the ending.
Even with the case being made in this video with the Extended Cut, I don't think I'll ever be able to let go of that initial disappointment at seeing my Shepard be... well, reduced down to the choice equivalent of Neapolitan ice cream. Add into that as one commenter already said, that the fight against the Reapers was never AI vs. Organics, the endings all in all just felt a little hollow.
Still love Mass Effect, will always love Mass Effect, but I won't forget that feeling.
.o ou ou ou
@@renodesmin4675 EA was always greedy af. Look at: fact that Collectors' Edition of ME2 didn't have stupid Outfits Pack but most devoted fans who already paid much were asked to pay more for few skins.
Well, Technically they are not identical, because depending on the amount of your war resources, there will be several changes, so technically it is very important, but as you said, The game doesn't give you an ending and is unsatisfactory, especially in the ending where Sheppard lives, the extended versions weren't exactly what I wanted it to be, I wanted a scene of the characters actually meeting each other, living their lives, having a better conclusion (or worse depending on the choices), and not a quick scene of Sheppard breathing, and no, those scenes from the extended version (aka slideshows) really don't make up for everything I went through in the game, the ending is good, it's just poorly executed
I think the bigger meaning of "all the same" is that they are all available. If you made it that far you can save before the the end, and then pick the multiple choice ending you want to watch. Had there been more input on the Crucible design you might have been locked into certain options earlier. Maybe synthesis being from tech offered by the Geth working with the Quarians, and control gifted by the Illusive man if you had saved the Collector base. Destroy and walk-away being options of the base design, and therefore always available. I would have included another option by having Wrex show up if he's still alive, as the only way to get a destroy end with Shepard surviving. Those would make your decisions have real meaning, as you could get all of them, but some playthroughs would lock some out.
This is a FANTASTIC comment, but no one will be brave enough to respond to it. I love how your proposal actually makes it more about the choices you make during your journey and having it make a huge impact on the ending rather than just pick A, B, C (or D) at the end, and game over.
Honestly how it should’ve been this is how some storyline quests in the game work and I think it should’ve applied to the ending
People really do not understand the synthesis ending huh? It’s the “correct” ending in the sense that it’s the one that most directly aligns with the themes of the game
Destroy the Reapers: It's our mission since the first game and in my opinion it's the most correct thing to do
Control the Reapers: It's what Ilusive Man wanted. We become the person that we swear to destroy.
Synthesis: I called this ending as Saren's End. In ME1 Saren thought that all species can be changed into a mix of biological and sintetic life form like this end.
So just choose one.
This is a good point of view, also... i would have been amazing mentioning this, reflectiong on his actions and past games
I liked that in the preview the Starchild gives, it shows Anderson doing Destroy and the Illusive Man doing Control
If you're a Paragon Shep, you don't "turn into" the Illusive Man for picking Control. The guy's only concerned about humanity's interests, Paragon Shep is concerned about all organic and synthetic life.
Think about your conversation with Mordin in ME3 regarding using Maelon's data to cure the genophage.
It was about stopping The Reapers...not destroying them. That is everyone's first mistake.
Plus controlling the reapers would eventually fail and then the galaxy is right back to being destroyed. I always destroy all synthetics.
The destroy ending seems to be the only one that can explain a continuation of the story to the new game. I don't see control or synthesis being canon, that would probably make sense if the new teaser didn't have Liara looking for Shepard's armor on the new teaser. Indoctrination theory is the only explanation left if the story would actually continue in the Milky Way. Hudson may say that "It wasn't our intent" but I believe he's lying to us, just like the Harbinger/Child did lol.
I think the Canonically yes the destroy ending should be the canon but personally as I romanced Thane I usually choose synthesis so that Shepard kinda reunites with Thane plus Geth will survive with synthesis and also Tali and the quarians will not die cause of their suits. (Though ofc it kinda shows that they would be alive with the destroy ending when they say that all the synthethic life and things would be destroyed)
Technically to explain a continuation in ME4, if we don't upload a save file from ME3 then Bioware could just have us select which ending we want as our canon, the way Andromeda had us select which gender Shepard was so the game could make references with the correct pronoun. Granted this would be far more complex and might involve differences in the storylines and characters, so it'd really take them a lot of work to add in properly. And the Synthesis utopia ending would be much harder to pull off unless ME4 turns farming sim. But continuation from Destroy or Control could both be doable imho.
Think everyone is forgetting how Deus Ex handled endings, literally destroy/control/fusion are the endings there, either you go with the illuminati, go with tongs idea to destroy or the fusion with the helios AI. So EA ended up being lazy and taking a page frm the first deus ex, so this is likely to end the same way when starting Deus Ex 2 (what a shitty game), sure hope it doesn't but I don't have any faith or sort of hope in EA, I mean there's no Hudson and more importantly there's no Karphsyn, Dietz... so what can we really expect (ending wise).
Having said that they can also go a different way in explaining shep was actually saved but remained in statis for a long time due to injuries, there can also be more clones are still out there, heck they can even go for a control ending with a new shep clone being the new hero and have you choose which Shep you end up using, AS LONG as it doesn't go the way crapdromeda did I'll be happy-ish
@@bloodycrow01 I think that was half the problem with ME3 to begin with, Karphsyn was gone already and it's obvious that those left had no idea how to write a suitable ending. ME3 is a really good game, unfortunately it also has one of the worst endings to a 3 game trilogy ever in the same light.
based from the teaser itself, it seems likely that the Destroy ending will be canonized.
Especially when you consider that Liara is walking on a dead reaper AND her eyes are not glowing green.
Destroy just makes more sense, it's been your mission since the very beginning. I'm not going to change everyone's life form without giving them a choice, and there would be no individuality anymore.
Theres also the theory that the hole choosing thing is a test of the reapers to shepard since it looks and plays like a dream, choosing destruction allings with reality since shepard woke up from the indoctrination attempt (Breathing scene) and the rest is history
The problem with destroy was killing your synthetic allies. I remember the first time I listed to The Child explain the destroy option, which includes exterminating The Geth. I said, "The Geth? I just spent hours brokering peace between The Geth and Quarians! They are my allies. Why would I kill my allies?"
From the point of view of an omnipotent player, I would always choose Control, because you don't kill your allies, the Reapers are helping everybody rebuild, even though Shepard's gone.
From the point of view of Shepard, I would always choose Destroy, because it simply doesn't make sense that he would pick any other option. Destroying the reapers was always his mission, and the idea that only indoctrinated individuals try to work with the reapers has been thoroughly explored.
I'd never pick the synthesis ending. It sounds like it's straight up from some dystopian propaganda, and it simply doesn't make any goddamn sense. The leaves with electronic circuits on them make my brain hurt.
@@Michoss9 The only reason why Shepard's mission was to destroy the Reapers was the fact that the soldier didn't have a reason to believe other options of survival would work until the Crucible Child Choice. As you mentioned, only indoctrinated people suggested working for the Reapers. Why would Shepard trust brainwashed people? And even if The Illusive Man didn't get indorenate, he was still a xenophobic warlord. Unless the player has been a total go-it-alone Renegade assh*le from Game 1, Shepard wouldn't side with a Humanity First bigot.
But when The Child, who is not indoctrinated and knows the full history of the Reapers, offers different choices than Destroy, a soldier might consider those other options. Think if it this way...
Imagine being an American soldier. It is your mission to destroy Russia's nuclear arsenal. Before the moment of triumph, you learn that the arsenal can be switched to the United States' control. Not only would the US double its arsenal, but the country would have deployable weapons on two hemispheres. As a soldier, which should you do? Do you complete the mission as stated by destroying the arsenal. Do you seize the arsenal and increase the United States' global dominance? Destroy or Control? Both choices are viable and beneficial.
Mr or Ms Michoss9, I will agree that the Synthesis option sucks! However, my reason is much different than yours. The entire series was about Shepard uniting different aliens, organizations, and cultures against a common threat. Setting aside petty differences to sure everyone's survival. Javick also believes that his cycle failed because the culture was too homogenized.
So why would Synthesis be the "ideal" ending? In my opinion, making all life biologically and technologically similar is the exact opposite of Mass Effect's theme of appreciating individualism but moving forward as a team.
Oh well. I know that the Mass Effect writers wanted to make all the Crucible choices bittersweet, but they dropped the ball... three times. LOL
@@HighHeelKnight Why would Shepard trust the Starchild though? It's literally made in the image of a child he saw murdered by reapers, the same child that has been haunting him in his ME3 nightmares, and it speaks using partly his own voice.
To seize Russian missiles on their own territory is ASININE. If you don't control the real estate, there is no such thing as permanent control over the missile supply. As a soldier, sabotage is the only moral choice since the enemy can both retrieve the weapons and then retaliate with them. The United States has also demonstrated its lack of worthiness to lead the world into the future. The sheer amount of atrocities it commits for the sake of political expansion makes any of their gains at the cost of potential nuclear annihilation too high a price to pay.
Right.
Many people just don't get Synthesis ending. It's like words go into one ear and go out the other, and they promptly forget about it or stubbornly refuse to understand it.
I adore 99% of the trilogy, but still despise the endings 9 years later. Marauder Shields is the worst boss in video game history.
True if anything it should have been the illusive man, which was basically saren all over again. What I wanted as the last boss was harbinger or the illusive man (controlled by harbinger like what happened to saren)
Don't you mean the best boss?
He tried to save us from the endings
He lived Marauder Shields but died Marauder Health
Agreed. I played the original endings back in 2012 and i honestly thought the ending sequence was a joke. I was seriously expecting a "just kidding, here's the other half of the game" message and nearly threw my controller when the credits started rolling.
I feel like I'm one of the only people who actually likes the endings to Mass Effect 3, especially the control one. Fun fact by the way: in the control ending, the narration is slightly different depending on whether you were more paragon or more renegade.
The renegade variant is just perfect and so fitting to the renegade philosophy
And also changes based on your decision about the genophage, and if Wrex or Wreav is the leader.
These endings are so contrived they're almost childish. First off the fact that the conflict that humans create technology that causes comflict as it evolves and so an A.I. eliminates all life is stupid. That's literally the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's like if in the Terminator universe an AI thought to just scorch the entire planet, machines and all life just for evolution to start from scratch. It's such a silly premise. Lastly if the catalyst is an A.I. that means he's a computer and somewhere there's a centralized location to destroy him. He's literally on the citadel. Destroy the catalyst you destroy the reapers as they're controlled by the reapers.... this ending is equivalent to juvenile writing and was contrived to make the player "feel" something even if it didn't make sense at all. Synthesis? What does that even mean? How do you change the DNA of all life and merge these things that generates understanding? Like seriously this is so silly
@@t3st1221 Ah yes the variant which implies Shepard will use the Reapers as a police force against any of might disturb the peace, you know who say things like that, dictators. Just the kind of ending i want. /s
@@jfelton3583 I agree with this wholeheartedly. Replaying the Legendary Edition gave me new appreciation for the series looking back on it as an adult, but the writing in the last 2 hours of ME3 gets worse and worse the more I think about it
i always had the thought that with the blue ending, with the knowledge of the reapers and everything he could make himself a new body to still be Shepard and control the reapers similiar to what the star child did but more person looking instead of a projection like entity which means that everyone can still access the knowledge of the reapers (like the green ending) by just having shepard basically upload it
I always imagined Shepard would just take the reapers as far away as possible and keep moving away from the Milky Way forever. But he could just be indoctrinated too, think that’s why no one likes blue
I look at it this way. How the damn hell is an eternity of trying to control the most evil bastards in the history of the universe an acceptable afterlife for shepard? War's won. Lets grab tali and get the hell home
Shepard dies in the Control ending. Shepard’s life experiences are used as a foundation to create a new AI. The AI that replaces the Star Child isn’t actually Commander Shepard.
@@odst123451 I think it’s Shepard, in the same way Archer became an ai in overlord
@@tacoman736 Possibly, I hadn’t considered that.
As it is now with the extended cut dlc, the endings now do feel different but as someone who finished it back when it launched I'd say the original color coded ending was horrible and war assist didn't matter then since you got the same basic cutscene whether you made different choices. I think a great addition to the extended cut dlc that would have made the war assist feel more personal is like when you have all the fleets reporting in you'd have actually ppl responding like Balik reporting in with the Batarian fleet and saying how he'll kill them and then aria's omega mercs reporting in telling shepard aria expects a win followed by a volus saying their bombs are ready for delployment etc etc. That way your choices of who to align with or who to kill/not kill and the little side missions have more than a simple number associated with them, same with being on the ground imagine having an elcor with guns on his back backing up shepherd along with grunt leading his platoon of krogans.
If Shepard returns in the next ME then this means that the Destroy ending is cannon.
lets just hope that they don't return
@@Dr.AvenVon lets hope he does wtf are u on?
@@blackvalio4060 if they bring him back, they confirm that one of the endings are canon, which goes against everything their games stand for
@Dr.AvenVonNebenan there will be a Canon ending regardless if shep comes back or not because we will see the aftermath of the war since we know the next ME game is a sequel
@@fresnonightcrawler4910 tbf, raises the question if we really need a new mass effect. did people forget how the last mass effect came out? how all the games from bioware came out since 2012?
By the way, Synthesis is what Saren wanted in Mass Effect 1
Which ended up being the best option.
@@happiestaku6646 no, control is the best option.
@@vkak1 Not even close since it involves genocide of the Geth
@@squares4u uhhhh, no! Destroy involves the genocide of the geths along with other synthetic life. Control actually preserves all that you did in the trilogy, provided you brokered peace among all races!
@@vkak1 no it doesn't, all ai loses sentience because Shepard now controls everything organic to prevent ai from rebelling, causing another harvest. All the effort put into making making the geth and EDI have true self awareness is thrown in the trash with this ending.
Synthesis seems a tad unethical... you're literally altering the DNA of every lifeform in the universe and essentially creating a galactic hive mind. Free will gives rise to conflict. It is natural. This ending dissolved the Krogan culture.
Imagine living in the same world where your whole family got killed by reapers and turned into husks only for those husks to gain sentience and become their own people. And the very same reapers that were butchering everyone sticking around like nothing happened. This bullshit ending is just an excuse for Joker to keep his cyber girlfriend and nothing else.
@@Spooky_Spookerson well… there’s also the geth if you peaced them
@@Spooky_Spookerson revenge instead of peace cool, you can say the same thing about krogan and salarian, turian and humans, or quarian and geth. Synthesis was the best solution ending....Why do people keep saying that Synthesis ending is terminating free will? Dense people don't understand that ending explains that the knowledge from past civilizations/cycles were shared among synthetics and organics which in turn made moral and common sense beings who wanted to achieve peace and prosperity knowledgeable enough to know that fighting is meaningless....
I always find myself going for control, especially since thanks to the extended ending we get to hear Shepard explain their motivation and see them using the reapers to rebuild and protect. After working so hard to humanize EDI and make peace with the geth it would be a horrific crime to destroy them with the reapers, not to mention the damage to technology. No matter what star child says synthesis is forcing a bizarre change on everyone regardless of their wishes. But control means the hands are off the wheel, everyone gets to go on with their normal lives, and the power of the reapers can still be used to ensure rogue synthetics never exterminate organics and no race dominates all the others.
As much as I hated the Mass Effect ending originally, I have come to somewhat appreciate it. We all wanted a perfect happy ending, but the real world doesn’t work that way. Instead we get a choice where there are ups and downs to every option and which you choose will depend on your Shepard’s personal values. Every option sacrifices something.
Yes, you are right. I think the upset over the endings is very understandable, when taking into account that us humans don’t really appreciate that kind of harsh reality, in a place where we seek distraction/freedom from everyday life. This phenomenon has a name, but I forgot it, hmm..
@@toiny3404 Which is the great thing about the endings, they went created to make you feel happy, they were solutions, tough decisions to a galaxy sized problem.
To be fair, even the catalyst mentions that the destruction of all the AI won’t be final. The quarians have the data to rebuild the geth, same with edi. They can be made again, and with all the reaper tech up for grabs it’s very possible you can just upgrade them to the level they were at before the ending, so it’s up to the organics to treat them as equals
Totally agree with you, the control choice looks like the best, seeing Legion sacrifice himself for the Geth's future and EDI trying to be a normal human i cant choose to destroy em, and synthesis is a choice that could alter the whole universe I can't do that, so sacrificing one life(Shepard's) and saving billion others looked like the ideal option.
I personally don’t like it long term speaking whose to say someone could control Shepard and start another harvest or Shepard down the line has different views as we start to go though the future
I would’ve like a fifth ending added after they released the leviathan dlc in which you can convince the starchild that it did the one thing it was created to prevent and depending on your reputation you can convince him via a paragon or renegade speech check
at the place of this we've got DLC that adds nothing to endings as far as I know.
“What was implied by the original endings” my guy *WAT*
To start with, you should seriously do more of this series. Personally I tend to believe the ending slides are only part of the story, and you have to read between the lines of what the Catalyst is saying and what the Reapers are doing to piece it together. My theory on the ending to Mass Effect 3 is a more detailed variation on Indoctrination Theory, the theory that Shepard is slowly being Indoctrinated by the Reapers or that they're attempting to indoctrinate him and something about him is fighting it off. I point out that one of the dreams involve the boy we later find out is the catalyst burning beside Shepard. That's a warning not to trust the Catalyst if I ever saw one. And Mass Effect 3 wouldn't have been the first Lovecraftian story to end with the protagonist becoming what he feared. The idea of Indoctrination and Shepard becoming a Reaper reminds me of the ending to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in particular. And if you're interested, a youtube channel called Horrorbabble performs their own Lovecraft audio books including that one. Another channel with some interesting insights that you can apply to Mass Effect 3 is SFIA, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur. And in fact several of his videos mention Mass Effect, particularly the Geth and the Reapers, his work helped me gain some insight into the Galaxy from the Reapers and Leviathan's point of view.
As far as the ending goes, I don't believe that most people understand what the reapers are actually doing. But if you go back over the conversation with the Catalyst you realize he says EXACTLY what they're doing. Go sifting back through e-mails and conversations about Reaper activities while you're at it. You realize that "harvesting" people who aren't turned into Husks involves something similar to the process the Collectors used. They get dissolved into a protein slurry and pumped into a Reaper. This technology was present in the game in some form from Mass Effect 1 on in the form of the Keepers, it just wasn't explained until Thane's Loyalty mission when Bailey comments about the duct rats falling into the protein vats the Keepers use.
One of the interesting considerations in Mass Effect's technology is waste heat. It's everywhere, from the Normandy's stealth drive to the weapons you use. And maybe in the scanners the Reapers and Collectors use? It's pretty clear at the end that the people who are harvested are being preserved somehow, perhaps in a form similar to Commander Shepard in the control ending. There's a word for that concept, a Whole Brain Emulation or WBE. And Mass Effect is not the first sci fi game I've seen with that concept. Nick Valentine in Fallout 4 IS a WBE. He also illustrates the tendency of such copies to diverge from their originals, as this technology is not cut and paste, it's copy and paste, and if you want to be considered the Original when you came second, then the Original has to be destroyed.
Commander Shepard, the original one, was destroyed in the Control and Synthesis endings. But in the control ending a part of him lives on as an evolved WBE in control of a Reaper. I don't believe this involves him becoming the Catalyst, as the Catalyst himself treats Shepard as something new. But more interestingly, advanced sci fi scanning technology, like the kind needed to copy somebody's mind whole hog to the point where personality-wise there's no telling the two apart, takes a lot of power and by extension takes a lot of heat. Look again at the sequence where the Collectors are turning the colonists to slurry. That glow is HEAT. So what's likely happening is that the slurry is a byproduct of scanning the colonists, why use it as part of the Human Reaper? Well waste not want not. The Reapers have technology so advanced that they can turn a human into a husk that's 90% cybernetic with nothing but nanites. They can take those elements in the human body and use them for building. And if you go into Isaac Arthur's videos, you realize that an advanced race can transform one periodic element into another using varying technologies if they wanted to. And in fact parts of technology like that are already in use by the Citadel Council, you can find that information in the galaxy map entries, if I remember right a collider used for that purpose can be found in the Krogan DMZ in Mass Effect 2. The Reapers are likely hundreds of millions of years ahead of the rest of the Galaxy. They would have progressed far beyond star lifting and super colliders for fusion a long time ago. And if you are farming species the way the Reapers are, trying to preserve them digitally for quadrillions of years in the future, you want all the resources you can get to sustain them.
That brings me to the behavioral part of the Reapers. Their harvesting of the galaxy is to "preserve" it, but they look like they're turning everything to goop. A lot of the damage done to some of the planets you find in the Galaxy map that are called "Post Garden" could probably be related to past cycles' efforts to defend themselves from the Reapers rather than the Reapers themselves.
The Reapers' behavior actually fuses three different answers to the Fermi Paradox; the Zoo Hypothesis, the Aestivation Hypothesis, and the Simulation Hypothesis. Think about it, what is a zoo? It's a place where you stick wildlife in customized habitats to preserve them from destruction. You are recreating their habitat in the wild, just not to the level of detail one might like. But because animals aren't as intelligent as humans, (and in my opinion are more adaptable) they don't require as much detail to exist in a zoo. But Zoo animals can still be harmed by outside forces, look what happened to Harambe. So a traditional zoo is not 100% safe for preserving what you're trying to preserve, and in fact the animals still die of old age or disease or develop medical and behavioral problems.
If, however, you are a digital being, you only need electricity and something to fight boredom to survive, that's it. You don't need food, you don't get sick, you don't age. You can experience those things if you want to. But you don't have to, and if you wanted you could undo them again. And in fact you're completely uncoupled from our normal notions of time. We follow time based on cues in our environment. It's a very basic part of our brains.
A digital commander shepard with a digital copy of his crew including his love interest could experience an entire lifetime in minutes, getting married, settling down, having children, growing old, and dying. And then come back and do it again if they wanted to. They could even control how much of the experience they remembered later. In light of the games themselves and all the choices in them, it kind of makes you wonder if that's not what you're actually seeing in Mass Effect; Commander Shepard reliving different iterations of his past digitally because he doesn't want to remember where and when and what he actually is, and that is where the Simulation Hypothesis comes in. It explains where the data of harvested people is going, why the husks don't recognize other humans, and may even explain the three part ending to Mass Effect. The whole game might be a simulation the Reapers or Shepard himself are running. In the end though, thousands of civilizations are likely digitized; trapped inside the Reapers on a server with no way out and no inkling of what's going on. Until of course, you decide to paint the galaxy red. And this is the most terrifying thing about the simulation hypothesis; you are essentially at the mercy of whoever's running the simulation. If your server is in danger, you'd never know it. And if you find out the truth, the people running the simulation can make sure you don't remember it. They don't even have to kill you, just pause the simulation and edit your consciousness so you don't remember.
The Aestivation hypothesis is fairly new as solutions to the Fermi Paradox go. And while not good in it's original form, with a few caveats it could potentially explain our not seeing intelligent life and definitely shares a resemblance to the Reapers. Remember in a previous comment I explained that the Reapers were aiming for the Heat Death of the Universe originally as a way to increase their processing efficiency? The Aestivation hypothesis is the idea that civilizations sleep for most of their lives, in stasis or in a slowed down digital existence. Instead of sleeping through winter, you sleep through summer, when temperatures mean you have to expend more energy to flip a bit. The paper that introduced it was so Lovecraftian that its sub title was "That is not dead which can eternal lie." The full quotation is "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even Death may die."
So think of life from the Reapers point of view, you are digital, created to preserve biological life forms. But the damn things keep killing each other, and your creators are actually making it worse. The creatures you preserve are so fragile that just existing causes them to die and that individual is then lost to entropy. And the growing and expanding population requires you collect more and more and more resources to survive. Eventually you're going to snap. In a digital existance, resource consumption is far more efficient. You can undo any damage the 'animals' do to their enclosure. You can keep it a secret from them if you want to. From the Reapers' point of view they are the superior life form, able to live for billions of years. It's not surprising in the least that they don't understand or refuse to concede the possibility that Organic life forms may not be happy living as they do, that they'd rather live short brief lives (compared to them at least) is likely nothing more than childish rebellion to them. As a result, the Reapers just don't believe we know what we're talking about.
Long story short:
1. Catalyst literally oversees Reapers
2. Shepard MET AND FOUGHT people that accepted Reaper's tech as improvement". He KNOWS results.
3. Why would this be different?
You did not just use HARAMBE as an example on a Mass Effect ending discussion XD (props to you).
To be fair pre Extended Cut, War Assets only mattered in the fact that in unlocked certain endings.
I don't mind the endings we got but I do believe they could have worked better if they were tweaked slightly and given more variety based on player choice. For example:
The final Reaper fight against a generic Destroyer is replaced with a more in-depth fight with Harbinger, and Harbinger is ultimately destroyed after Shepard brings down his shields with the Thanix Cannon and the entire fleet bombards him into rubble. This gives the player a sense of victory and hope before it gets yanked away when shit goes wrong in the final beam rush. Instead of Harbinger blasting everything in the beam rush, you get two standard Reapers and three Destroyers who are absolutely pissed that you just offed their leader.
If the player has extremely low EMS, Shepard is killed in the Reapers' attack along with his squad and the Normandy is shot down. The screen fades to black as Sovereign's words echo: "You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it." Cut to the scene with Liara's beacon, but leave out the post-credits scene, implying to the player that the Reapers remain undefeated.
During the encounter with the Catalyst, it will shift forms and voice based on Shepard's memories, starting as a formless ball of light before shifting between the child, Shepard, and the dead Virmire squadmate. This makes it more clear that the Catalyst is tapping into Shepard's mind Leviathan-style and casts doubt on its motives to the player, making it more ambiguous if you should trust it or not. When discussing Destroy, it takes the form of Anderson. For Control, the Illusive Man. For Synthesis, the Geth and EDI/Saren depending on Paragon or Renegade alignment. Should you choose Refusal, it snaps in frustration back to it's true Leviathan form before leaving. The RGB color grading is removed and the energy blast is red no matter what, adding more ambiguity to the choice the player makes. The energy either manifests as fire for Destroy, a wave of light for Synthesis, and electricity for Control.
With Low EMS, the player can only choose between Synthesis, Low EMS Destroy or Refusal. Control is completely locked off to the player.
If the player has high EMS, they are given the standard options, but with added variables to Destroy and Control based on Shepard's final choice in ME2 involving the Collector Base.
For Destroy, should Shepard choose to blow up the Collector Base, then all synthetic life is wiped out and Shepard dies in the blast (Let's call this Imperfect Destroy.) If Shepard saved the Collector Base, then the Cerberus HQ mission and subsequent boss fight with Kai Leng is significantly harder, but the Alliance acquires the technology from Cerberus to target the Reapers exclusively, and Shepard survives (Naturally, this would be Perfect Destroy.) Only the Destroy option damages or detonates the relays depending on EMS.
For Control, Shepard either seizes control over only the Reapers or all Synthetics, again based on the Collector Base decision. Paragon Shepard vows to become a guardian for all life, while Renegade Shepard is more explicitly shown to be a ruthless dictator corrupted by absolute power.
If you never saw the new endings, they were essentially the same ending. This is the first time, I’ve seen the new endings. The original endings had different color or whether EDI was there or not when the surviving crew members exited the Normandy. How did BioWare think that would fly? Also with no explanation on what each choice really meant at the original end of the game, it was just pick a color.
Good thing that extended cut was free, surprised people wouldn't get it
Not Bioware, _EA._
Well the Green ending is just completely insane fairy tale... with "just how"??? FTL propeled nanite swarm???
The blue one is fairly reasonable...
The red one is completely hillarious - that damn thing either does not know what crucible will do or it just lies. Because - it does do what it says - it doesnt kill Asari commandos with biotic implants... it doesnt fry every computer in the galaxy (see Hacket´s fleet), it should be able to just "delete" get from Quarian suits - because - as Tali said - Geth are just software - yes it probably destroys every quantum bluebox based AI (RIP EDI...)
Shoot the annoying kid: Who wouldn't have done it?
Green: The game tells us it's the best ending, but the problem is it is never explained. We are given a solution here that comes completely out of nowhere.
Blue: Sounds good, but we don't know what the new AI will do. He can save the galaxy, or subjugate all races and be worse than the Reaper.
Red: Here I agree with you. What is said does not match what is shown. EDI dies, but we have geth in Quarian suits. If these also die, the shock wave would have to destroy all suits as a consequence. But as we can already see from the fleet, not all computers are destroyed. So, according to the pictures, at least some of the Geth must have survived.
Otherwise, it's the end we've been working towards since part 1. It's the ending we know most and despite all the consequences, it's the safest and, in some way, the most satisfying ending (especially since Shepard can survive).
@@Jasmin-lg3gf To be fair this endings are illogical and just rushed without deeper thoughts behind them, the red one in only "logical" ending but as you said it has lot of omissions and other strange things. Personally, for me, we get a real satisfactory ending only when we install mod from nexusmod
@@2lazy4this90 wich is the only way i can play mass effect anymore. 3 just about ruined it for me
Shooting the kid is literally the one the makes more sense. Sure, you lose and the galaxy goes rip. But it can be completely logical for some renegade Shepards don't believe in anything the kid said and just shoot it. Also, the next cycle wins because of what we did, so it's not like our journey was completely useless.
This is what happens when you steal the endings from Deus Ex the conspiracy *shrugs*
The ME3 endings only seemed the same pre extended cut. I feel like that's lost on many people nowadays.
It's like people didn't get the extended cut despite it being free
what bothers mee the most about synthesis is how vague it is about weather the beam effected husks or not. because if that makes husks self aware then thats bad.
I’d like to imagine this little hopeful scenario for the “Destroy” ending option, whether you believe this can or you want this to happen.
Before the final push, during the downtimes and preparation, while the Quarians and Geth were slowly and gradually understanding and trusting each other once more, they former co-studies with the latter to understand both the Geth codes and the origins and technicals of the Reaper codes, with the latter providing insight on how to be able to utilize that code without it becoming a dangerous liability in the future and that the Quarians have an idea to help the latter should anything have happened to them even after gaining individuality and co-existence with their creators.
Then by the time Shepard makes his choice, as the Geth shuts down from his choice, as they fought along with their creator brothers and sisters, as the war finally reaches its end, the Quarians go to the side of the fallen geth’s shells/corpses cradling them and saying their words to their lifeless shells once more “Keelah ‘Selai”.
And as the time and theme of rebuilding continues, a large majority of the Quarians would eventually voice their hopes and wishes in a movement to revitalize and rebuild the Geth once more while opting to not repeat the same mistakes of their ancestors along with the assurance of their knowledge that was corroborated from studying along with their Geth allies.
Admiral Gerrel would feel the need to not endanger his people any more than he already has so he would effectively lower any old opinions he has and refocus on the safety and security of his people just as his begrudged ally Admiral Korris once had, while Admiral Xen would be put in check to ensure her “mad scheming scientist” vibes do not escalate things out of control.
Yeah, and that’s the best scenario, circumstances and possibilities regarding the Geth that I’d like to imagine happening for the players choosing the “Destroy” option, to try and be a little more hopeful. Maybe Bioware would go in a different direction, but I’d just thought I’d let this out there.
I thought my ending was great and would never know people didn’t like them if the internet didn’t exist. I was completely satisfied and I’m already nostalgic for a game series that I literally just finished playing. Honestly the third game was my personal favorite out of the bunch. I think gamers don’t put themselves into the shoes of the people who create these games that are so loved by so many people enough. It’s so easy to tear something apart and criticize every fault and flaw something has, but much harder to be the people responsible for creating something that is going to be experienced by hundreds of thousands of individuals and trying to satisfy as many as possible.
I 100% agree
No. nonono. You do not get away from writing one of the worst endings in history just cause making games is hard. To the point where fans made up a theory that the whole ending is a hallucination and it somehow makes more sebse than taking it at face value.
I respect the creators and wish they were given more time & weren't rushed. However I disliked it because it felt like there was a ton of forced exposition and all things convienently line up. If Liara didn't happen to stumble into the Prothean shrine on Kahje, and then happen to find the crucible plans on the Mars archive, we'd just die and lose against the Reapers. Synthesis option came out of nowhere as a deus ex machina, and the Synthetics vs Organics focus which was mostly just sidelined to Geth vs Quarians, but then made to be the #1 issue when star child appears. On it's own, it's not *terrible*, just a bit flawed. But as a conclusion to the entire Mass Effect trilogy, where all the endings and everything else (except for the Mako...) has been absolutely amazing, it really falls flat.
If you just finished, it means you played the extended cut, which adds alot like saying goodbye to your companions and further explains the results of your choices, also parts were rewritten if you played leviathan DLC. The original just shows the colour explosion and cuts out
@@Zangelin the endings are fine(the extended cut ones,i agree that the original suck)
Furthermore, Hackett's Destroy speech, the length of the sequence as well as the slides will heavily depend on EMS. Shepard's Control speech will also depend on Paragon/Renegade and there's even a version for Neutral morality. Players often overlook just got deep the difference are when you take EMS into account. Combine different EMS versions with all possible story and morality variables, and you get a LOT of different endings.
Benefit of us modders is that we know all possible quirks and variations in the game by exploring the files. ;)
And the control ending also changes based on your decision about the genophage, and if Wrex or Wreav is the leader.
what's ems
@@hplexicon "Effective Military Strength", the number you see when you enter in the computer in the war room.
Those three endings are very different from each other. I always said the issue with the endings were based on what this game was sold as; before it came out it was advertised to have around 36 different endings. Those endings were basically a variety of these three, depending on the casualties of those fighting against the reapers, small differences in cutscenes (not including colour) show essentially the same cutscene with slight differences to the damage done in the war and that was all.
Mass effect was a game advertised as a game based around choice (in reality it wasn’t, anyone who’s played multiple play throughs will know that). It doesn’t matter if Wrex survived ME1 because you fight indoctrinated Seren at the end regardless, it didn’t matter who lived through the Suicide mission, you fight a human reaper regardless. Is doesn’t matter how many assets you acquire, Shepard confronts the crucible kid regardless.
No matter your choice in any of the games; the games narrative stays intact. Evidently the hate given to ME as a trilogy stems from the fans take on what ME was meant to be. At the time I used to think ME was a game based around choice (like most others), but if you take a closer look the choices you made were purely for your own personal take on world building. None of the choices you made had a big impact on its story. It’s story is linear. However, commander Shepard and the characters you meet along the way are not. The game was an amazing journey from start to finish. But the illusion of choice convinced everyone to heighten their expectations; which were inevitably crushed.
That’s why ME:3 gets a bad reputation in regards it’s ending. Fans of ME expected more than what the game always was from beginning to end. A linear story with fun personal winding paths for those to enjoy a unique experience... until the end.
There aren't three endings, there's one. You activate the deus ex thingamajig.
The ending of the game is that you become god and now have the power to control the fate of the galaxy by choosing which colour you like best. And if you don't like this, because you thought this would be won by the combined efforts of every species, the devs made sure to put the 'fuck you' choice as well.
there is in fact 3 ending though. it isnt a matter of "favorite color" each choice is vastly different from another.
@@jodyboles8208 I think his problem is rather with the crucible concept itself, rather than the ending. I hated it too tbh, and I hated the made up reason for Reapers going through the cycles. I wish the devs stuck with the original script concerning the Dark Energy build up.
@@kolosmenus
Hear, hear. That was a much better ending and much more connected to the spirit of the series than the endings that we got.
This video made me realize that the possible endings for ME might be disatisfying for a lot of people because all of them are theoretically good endings. The only bad scenario in my head would be a renegade shepard enforcing a Star Wars empire across the galaxy by using the Reapers with cruelty. But a paragon Shepard would ensure the safety of the galaxy forever and pretty much a normal course of history without war. The 'Destroy" ending is pretty much the same without the Reapers looking over everyone's shoulder, and whether this one is good or bad only relies on the player wanting to keep Shepard alive at all costs or being okay with Shepard's death. And the 'Synthesis' one simply means creating a bridge between organic and synthetic life, effectively merging both into something new without hunger, disease or any desire for conflict, which is pretty cool.
I just recently replayed the trilogy when the Legendary Edition came out and can confirm Destroy is still the best ending.
I know everyone has their ending that they prefer, but to me the Control ending make the most sense for my Shepard to choose. Yes the goal for the last 3 games was to find a way to destroy the Reapers, but I don’t feel the Shepard that I play would do that if it means sacrificing the Geth (which I always save by making peace with the Quarians) and EDI.
Exactly.
Find a way to defeat the reapers, I don’t remember it specifically saying, destroy.
In my own imagination, i prefer control ending.
Shepard help to rebuild everything, then the reapers went away or commit mass suicide so all species are free from Shepard/reaper influence and are allowed to carve their own fate, for better or worse. -> Getting the best from control and destroy ending.
You’d then be spitting in the face of legion and all the other synthetics that sacrificed to stop the reapers.
In the past the protheans were stopped from finishing the crucible due to infighting with one faction wanting to control and the other wanting to destroy. ...The control advocates ended up being indoctrinated. Pretty much puts me away from control entirely.
all 3 endings were the same since it just had a few stock scenes at the end, but the problems I had with the endings was that they follow reaper doctrines. none of these endings however gave me a full feeling of choice because they didn't make me feel like I was controlling Shepard since I literally couldn't use any special dialogue choices to get the garbage data to see that the cycles were no longer needed
Let's say it straight: Any ending of trilogy of games that is chosen basing on 1 dialogue fan of options is bs. Lorewise Shepard is adult men who fought for one cause for 3 years focusing only on that and having opinions so strong he rebeled against Council and stole military starship. He died for that. I don't think he would just pick random option NOT based on his thoughts during all of these just after being asked which one is coolest
@@Petaurista13 tbh I think they should have given us what they promised throughout the game, a reaper destroying gun
I don’t think there was ever gonna be a “good” ending to this trilogy that everyone liked. With how high the trilogy had set the standard, there was nowhere to go but down.
Also. I dont see Bioware choosing the blue or green for canon. It doesnt make sense to have another galaxy threat and everyone is way better now. The end that reapers win are also complicated to follow through. So they should go with the red ending and make a silly argument like "oh they rebult the Geth"
BioWare could make control ending canon and Shepard just went to dark space with the reapers to get them as far away as he could
@@tacoman736 It would be weird, but Its a possibility. They rebuilt it and went to dark space. But they wont comeback anymore even if there is a galaxy threat
@@tacoman736 that would be very difficult, considering any of the shepard ai speeches
Can’t just rebuild geth after giving them sentient that’s like saying wipe out humans we can clone new ones they won’t be the same Humans the new geth won’t know about Shepard or what legion and EDI learned from Shepard and the cycle will begin again
I like to imagine that in the control ending, the reapers build an EDI-like robot that houses the new Catalyst, allowing Shepard to be reunited with his/her crew.
Exactly what I thought! It’s the only way I can handle Shepard’s death honestly lol
Yes! Evil robots from outside of Space just make everyone happy.
Bioware can't make an ending worse than those three .
Bioware: "Hold my beer and get this ending for those who refuse to lose their Shepard because we're too lazy to just give you a custscene showing Garrus visiting Shepard and Tali on Rannoch."
EA: "New player, need new player, winner winner, chicken dinner!"
or maybe you can't deal with a non-perfect ending? :P Me and all my friends played all three agmes before looking up anything about it on teh nternet, we got 3 different endings, and were all happy with them.
@@ScoreMagnet Don't ask questions, just consume product and get excited for next product.
@@ScoreMagnet it's just the thing that there is no actually good ending. it could've been super hard to get, but it should've been an option imo.
@@themars2011 In my opinion, the destroy ending is actually good xD If you could achieve an ending without sacrfiice, it would simply be unrealistic.
@@ScoreMagnet in numerous ways its bad. Killing edi/the geth. there should've been a way to upgrade the crucible to prevent that from happening for example. you collect so many upgrades but they don't really matter in the end, its just a match numbers game.
there could've been a mechanic to upgrade the normandy as in me2 to pick you up before sending the repers to hell (you could've shot it from further away), like in the mehem mod.
there is just tons of wasted potential. look at andromeda's ending, a lot of characters have individual scenes during the ending if you saved them, which was really cool. but in the end it looks like all you have is alliance troops.
you can really feel that the ending was rushed, even with extended cut. everything up to that point is just so much better, but it could be a lot better too! expanded galaxy mod makes the whole game feel like a new experience.
This is the first time seeing these ending cutscenes. They are without doubt infinitely better than the original ending cutscenes. They really are the same in the original cut , but I'm glad they added this fallout style outro which I always felt was needed. Imagine in Fallout New Vegas putting in a lot of time and effort into trying to save many factions like The Brotherhood, the families on the Strip, and The Great Khans only to never hear about them again after the battle of Hoover Dam. Fallout is amazing but it wouldn't be as great without seeing the ultimate impact ur character had on all these people. So in conclusion these are three entirely different endings in my opinion BUT only in the extended edition. Mass Effect is nearly a decade old and people are still debating the ending. A sign of something special
The extended cut was free, why wouldn't players take it
@@joenesvick7043 because No one knew bout it I didn't
I played back in 2012 and was frustraded. With the extended cut it was all better, but still have the impression that everything leads to war assets and they dont matter much. I will wait for your video
It was never about them being the same, it was about the fact non of your work and choices made a difference.
So then what was the point of building up the war assets.
“The Crucible won’t discriminate” StarBrat says
So why does it only discriminate in one ending? Shouldn’t control also mean Shep is a Geth army?
Just seems like some kinda BS that only one ending targets advanced AI (but somehow doesn’t destroy all of the other ships... it’s almost like the StarBrat lies or something)
This is a good question! How the hell aren't all the space ships collapsing and crashing with all the crews dying but edi and gets are gone? Like come on! Every ship has some form of Ai in the form of VI's so it sdumb to think about
@@Memelord-md5hs
Even more, which I forgot in my initial comment, Shep is supposed to die because he is partially machine (he doesn’t in the best destroy ending). So the destroy ending seemingly is supposed to set everyone back to the Stone Age.
I think the possibility exists of the Geth surviving at wherever the rest of the fleets fell back to, because it seems that was out of the range of the crucible. At the very least, I think they could be restored.
The synthesis ending... I wonder if just throwing a corpse or a piece of torn flesh or a severed finger or something could have the same effect as Shep tossing himself into the beam.
Shep, looking down the elevator at TIM and Anderson: “... Anderson didn’t need his body anymore anyway....”
Yeah, that's aways bothered me too. It's almost like they just wanted to give us "hard choices" without bothering if they made sense or not... Now, if only we could plug the red tube on the blue handlers and unlock purple: reapers self-destruct ending.
How do you know that the Star Child was even telling the truth about the extent of the destruction?
@@garrettstephens91Why should anyone believe in anything he says at all? He is the literal controller of massive Beings with the ability to indoctrinate and mind control people to bend to there will and manipulate there thoughts into thinking they are right?
I would say the endings should be taken at face value, none of them seem to have been thought of beyond the epilogue. So what is said is how how things are, because everything beyond that is speculation and head canon.
Even before The Extended Cut was released, I saw the distinction between the three endings. I think most people hated it just because of the visual presentation, and the rest were dissatisfied because they interpreted all three endings as bad. They only saw the negative implications with each choice. Control: admitting The Illusive Man was right. Destroy: killing EDI and the geth. Synthesis: creating the reapers’ ideal galaxy. While I can understand each of those arguments, I still saw the upside of each decision.
Control: Shepard is a very different person from the Illusive Man. The fact that the game presents this ending as the “paragon” ending with its blue colour scheme implies that Shepard inherently disagrees with the Illusive Man’s ideology. He would use the reapers to assert human dominance over the galaxy. Shepard would only use them to rebuild and protect. If you dislike the negative implications of the other two endings, what this ending does is preserve the diversity of the galaxy without sacrificing synthetics.
Destroy: Shepard is no stranger to making hard decisions. In war, you can’t save everyone no matter how much you want to. It was always implied that any device that can generate enough power to destroy the reapers will cause serious collateral damage. However, Shepard owes it to everyone fighting to achieve what they all want: the reapers destroyed.
Synthesis: Not only in this game, but even in actual human history, there has been a pattern of conflict that escalated into war and/or genocide time and time again. All of it was the result of conscious choices made out of hate, fear, desperation, ignorance, greed, etc. Those without first-hand experience may find it easy to defend the notion of free will and accept the imperfections of humanity (and the other Mass Effect species). But is it so hard to empathize with the desire to make everything perfect, to achieve true understanding and everlasting peace when - for example - you consider that there’s probably an entire generation of people who lived through WWI and WWII? Diversity is a double-edged sword. It gives people a strong sense of self but as a result, will always create conflict. When people believe hard enough against each other, there is only one possible result. Synthesis prevents that.
I’ve played this series about a dozen times and each time I reach the ending of Mass Effect 3, I pick a different ending than the one I picked the last time. Each time, I feel justified in my choice. There is no “best” or “worst” ending here which is why I believe that BioWare did a good job with Mass Effect 3 even back in 2012. I of course love the Extended Cut because I get to see and hear more of the fantastic art that is Mass Effect. But there was nothing in there that I didn’t already think about prior.
The big issue was that our work did not mean any thing. Minimum war score max war score. All loyal party Members all dead who cares the nothing you do effects the ending. Compare to mass effect two where you had party Members die depending on what you did.
Same, I like the finals
Everyone was aware of the distinct outcomes, one would have to be literally retarded to miss that. Hating the ending because the final cutscene is identical for all endings and that is all you get, is perfectly good reaction. Bioware was lazy as fuck with the endings and they deserved the reaction they got.
They're all awful and you know it. You can't ignore the valid downer endings.
@@killboggins I don’t dispute the bad. I just also recognize the good.
So many people do not understand synthesis. It is NOT just synthetics taking over. It is an evolution of both that even EDI who was a synthetic does/can not comprehend. Also as for forcing this on the Galaxy, You literally spent 2 games showing that while the races can get along and do have aspiring qualities they seem to fail time and time again. I also believe this is the only real break of the cycle of the Reapers and at least if there is evil in the Milky Way it isn't the reapers
With the extended cut, I don’t mind the three choices, though I find that synthesize is too optimistic and weird to fit in with the rest of the trilogies nuanced vibe lol. What’s more annoying to me is how the ending chapter on Earth is so short and the war assets that you build up through the game play such a small role. If you actually had different experiences in the final chapter, and had some of the various units that you recruit help you out during gameplay, and if they had certain characters live or die depending on war assets and your previous choices, then I think the ending would have been good. But the ending sequence on Earth I think is what annoyed a lot of people even after the Extended Cut DLC
Always were.
But no, Casey, what fans actually wanted was agency. From the time our Shepard was yanked into the beam, until the epilogue is complete, the player has zero agency. TIM drives the confrontation, and the Star Child facilitates our "choice." We wanted a final choice no less impactful and personal than Rannoch or the Genophage cure.
That shouldn't have been difficult. If the writers were making decisions based on 3 games of accumulated choices, instead of seeing the ending as a self-contained cutscene.
Control, never a regret. Seeing Shepard's name go on the memorial wall completely destroyed me, one of my most emotional gaming moments.
Dude, watching Tali beg to have Shepard come back to her then only to watch her put the plaque on the wall nigh killed me.
Destroy with full war assets you survive and they don't put your name on the wall...objectively the better ending
The Synthesis Ending, my belief, is the best and most understandable choice to pick. It ends all wars for the rest of the milky way. Sure, Shepard dies and is remembered, but isn't that what heroes do. They may die but they are truly never forgotten.
Are the endings the same? No, they just have a difference in appearance on how they end.
Hey Dan! It's nice seeing someone else dive into the "Ending discussions". I hadn't actually heard the Casey Hudson recording.
Eyyy! Found ya here!
Yeah, Hudson was so PC there. While the original was definitely rushed and the added slides are nice too, I find it dreadful how so many of the fanbase couldn't use their own brain cells without it.
What if the control and Synthesis endings are a prelude to what the Andromeda remnant created?
I always find myself too invested in EDI's character arc to choose the Destroy ending (even though I concede that it's probably canon). More often than not, I'll choose "Synthesis"
In my opinion if any ONE ending is declared canon, Bioware betrayed Mass Effect for good and that's the last I ever touch any of their products
@@janosd4nuke You probably shouldn't watch Mass Effect 4s trailer then, kinda implies Destroy is canon.
I hate the idea of being merged into a hive mind like synthesis implies. Control seems good. And it's directly stated that people will fix what is broken when it comes to destroy. So it's not a permanent end.
Destroy makes some strange things to be honest. It is implied synthetic life will be destroyed, and even Shepard will be affected because of the implants, and yet Shep can survive, which undermines the concept of "killing synthetic life".
Furthermore, how does the crucible decide what is synthetic life, really? AI? Microschemes? Tech in General? Ok, geth are sentient and therefore fit the description, but why the hell would Shepard be affected? Are the implants sentient or something? If it's tech in general, then how the hell do the ships fly?!
Also, there is a thought that the crucible didn't reach all of the galaxy. I mean look at the protheans - they managed to hide quite a lot of people from the reapers, so in a way they survived the harvest. So isn't it that impossible to think there are geth that hid somewhere deep underground or something and therefore weren't affected?
@@samreddig8819 except synthesis isn't about hive mind?
The DNA of organic beings is being rewritten with the code of synthetics. Basically the same thing that happened to the geth if you allow Legion to upload the Reaper code.
Like. I get why people dislike syntheais. I really do. I choosed Destroy on my recent playthrough just because the StarBrat annoyed me and I felt sorry for the Reapers (they're just his tools).
My point is: you don't have to create bullshit arguments to prove your thesis. Synthesis is bad for many accurate, presented in game reasons. No need to invent some on our own.
Such a beautiful game series (not counting here, Andromeda ofc. I refuse to accept that as a Mass Effect game)...
The journey gave me chills and has put sparkles in my eyes more than a couple of time alone the way. And, what a journey this has been... Just ended part 3 a couple of seconds ago with the Synthesis end and it was EPIC.
Shout out to my main character Garrus and secondaries Javik/Tali for being the most awesome and badass partners Shepard could have asked for.
I wish I had discovered your channel earlier maybe I could have saved some of the other heroes I've lost along the way (K.Goto, Legion, K. Alenko, Miranda, Mordin, Thane Krios and Captain Anderson)
Also, Legion.... I kept your kind safe. You deserved it. And, also, you were the biggest reason for choosing the Synthesis ending. I wanted so bad to whipe out the Reapers but that would have been at the cost of synthetics too, so I couldn't go through with it..
That was for you my friend..." We are Legion..."
For me the destroy ending with highest war effort is the Canon ending as i really dont think that the races wiuld cooperate with reapers without mindcontroll and shep is actually alive at the end (if we ever get a sequel)
I see no reason why Shep cannot get Lazarus'd again
@@elseggs6504 well don’t you need a body for that, in control and synthesis he would be nothing but dust, unless you clone him I guess.
@@shylogik there is one in the destroy ending though
The problem was with the production, not necessarily with what was said but what was shown.
I would say that the destroy ending would be the Best ending, if Shepard could find a way to not destroy an AI, but only destroy Reapers. In easy, preventing Crucible to destroy every syntethic life.
I think to myself that using the reaper codes the Geth have installed and using Quarian AI tech and the control ending technology it could have been possible to infect the reapers with an anti-reaper virus leaving EDI and the Geth mostly unharmed.
@@ONTOE0 possible, but they would transfer a codes of Geth and and other AI to the crucible and give them to avoid those
The Geth updated themselves with reaper code and EDI was build using reaper tech so the crucible destroyed them as reapers
I think the problem is that all endings can be shortend to one point: Shepard becomes god and decides for the whole galaxy. (which seems pretty unrealistic)
The outcome of the decisions may differ but it feels pretty random.
They would have done better with an easy black or white ending:
If you hit a certain score: Organic win
if dont: they lose
And maybe some steps between like: most die/ losing of all portals/technology etc
Edit: Or imagine the following:
the next mass effect tell us that they just tricked us and the indoktrination theory was real and our mission is to bring back shepard to reality
"Shepard becomes god and decides for the whole galaxy, based on momentary decision that is disconnected from all he was doing about same issue for 3 years."
@@lordek1635 but what about Reapers? War is still on?
I did not help EDI date Joker and I did not cry at Legion's sacrifice just to kill all synthetics at the end. I'll pick synthesis everytime! (Also, control seems like Shepard being a tirant like "I'll make sure there's no violence by killing all the violents")
While i treated the whole 3rd game as an ending. it works great. I was just hoping the end cinematic battle was intercut with all the forces and war assets collected. a shot of Arias mercs fighting, on the ground or in space. even a shot of a shuttle landing, and all your level up'd N7 multiplayer characters step out to fight. showing the geth fighting with you, or the Krogan. just a quick cutaway. making that end cinematic feel yours
I would go destroy or control. Destroy for the canon ending for me anyways. Control for the countermeasure against the rise of the leviathans. Synthesis is basically you forcing everyone to be of one mind which is a no no for me
Nothing about synthesis implies one mind. It changes organics to be more synthetic, and synthetics to be more organic. Everyone is still free-willed and independent.
@@squares4u It literally says so, synthetics would be like organics and organics would be like synthetics, they all and both become hybrids of each other. That's what one mind means.
@@rickycool6083 When he says one mind he means like being indoctrinated towards one goal. Like a ant colony all serving the colony with little regard to themselves. Synthesis you still have free will.
Ive always picked Destroy, with high war score, the collateral damage is lessened with the relays being in a repairable state, but it does pain me to lose the Geth and Edi but is also the only ending which implies Shepard survived with the breath scene right at the end.
Control implies Shepard will use the Reapers as a police force especially if he's a Renegade which sounds like a dictatorship, and Synthesis is just perverse.
Edit: I laughed at Casey saying the original endings left a lot to the players imagination, yeah no shit dude. You explained so little that it was all we could do.
If it’s destroyed ending why would Liara be looking for Shepard on other worlds
@@NeoakiraIV Why isn't she glowing green, why are the Reapers dead.
"Edit: I laughed at Casey saying the original endings left a lot to the players imagination, yeah no shit dude. You explained so little that it was all we could do."
She literally said that OG has no real endings and endings must be made by players as headcanon. Why buying game than? Just headcanon whole ME3.
This whole synthetics vs Organics theme should have never been the focus, it is too generic a theme for this gem of a trilogy.
They didn't even touch the Dark Energy plothole that was aging the stars in the galaxy at an alarming rate, they should have put more effort into that theme, since it was super interesting. Maybe the ending could have been somthing like this: A choice to HELP the Reapers to avoid galactic collapse, a choice to DESTROY the Reapers but doom the galaxy or a SECRET choice that would fit this narrative. At least in my eyes, this could be way more interesting than the generic endings that we got.
Isn't a dark energy that threatens to destroy the galaxy even more generic than an organic-synthetic conflict? I mean, in the end it depends on the portrayal.
@@Mr.HeisenbergTheCook it was just a suggestion. By now, so much has been written and so many themes have been covered in other media that almost all will seem generic. Nonetheless, a theme about dark energy (that they already hinted at in the game) would be more engaging in my opinion. I wanted the reapers to be a truly unstoppable force, I wanted us to really try and understand their motives even if they seem unfathomable. I wanted them to remain scary, Eldritch-like and mysterious, maybe we could have had a bitter(sweet) endings where we really had to think about the consequences of our actions which should not be displayed as black or white, but greyish.
Honestly, the conflict between synthetic and organic is a lot better than the dark energy plot line in my opinion. It felt like it was fitting more with the themes of the trilogy rather than a concept about stars aging; plus would anyone really get that concept if it were made in the original in the end? I feel that people only agree with the dark energy plotline too much after the fact of the original ending.
during my first playthrough, I was like “I’m going to die anyways, so I’ll let myself die quick” and went for the left side aka control ending. then I read that choosing destroy and Shepard will survive. I reloaded my save and went for the right side, died again.
think I got only 2100 EMS. didn’t even have Synthesis as a choice.
I have a feeling the next game will have to make the synthesis ending non-canon and either have shepard be an A.I. in a body like EDI or just regular shepard with a few burn scars from the destroy ending. Synthesis changes the world too drastically to make a parallel story with the other 2.
People really think the 1000 choices you make in the trilogy are going to end up with 100 different endings, give me a break
You are incorrect. the criticism for the endings being the same came out BEFORE the extended cut DLC released. Had you played the game on release, you would have noticed it. I believe if the DLC was included at release, much of the criticism would have been small or no existent.
people still cried after the extended cut. they even made mods with new endings. the truth is that theres no super happy ever after ending. most of the mods make shapeard always live and most of his crew survive.
it was never that the endings were the same that was an excuse it was that they were not happy enough
You don’t understand what the complaints are if you think that.
You’re wrong too.
@@odst123451 then why did every "better" ending fans make also happen to end way happier? people made clear what thier true issues were by saying those mods were huge improvements when all they changed was making it happy.
@@theendofit Happiness is subjective. I’d consider Shepard dead again a happy ending of the endings were well written. Personally, I enjoyed the control ending because it made sense. Shepard is destroyed to create a new AI that controls the reapers.
Shepard: Fights for the good of the whole galaxy. Doing whatever it takes for it.
Players: Yeah, I exterminated a whole race and killed a friend because I wanted my Sheperd to live lol
I guess that control is the one that makes more sense. Shepard's conscience is "uploaded", he becomes an AI and that's it.
Synthesis, despite being my favourite isn't explained at all. What does this merging mean? Now organic beings have circuits on them and synthetics have cells? How did the green light do that? The good thing is that at least the relays will probably be rebuilt with the knowledge of the reapers.
Destroy is just useless. It goes against paragon Shepard, destroys the mass relays and doesn't even impede the posibility of new AI's being created in the future. Life in the galaxy is again gated on their solar systems without the relays. There are now millions maybe even billions of aliens now stranded on our Solar System.
The issue with the endings is that the people achieving said endings all have preconceived notions of how their individual Shepard’s thought and felt towards their goals and accomplishments. There’s a disconnect here; the player had a lore in their own mind and was inevitably disappointed in any ending that did not exactly match up to their “head canon” as it were.
What doesn’t matter is any comment saying “my Shepard wouldn’t do this”. Fans and players can have their own what if’s and hypotheticals but ultimately it does not matter; the author or creator of any work of fiction is in control not the consumer. Just because Mass Effect gives the consumer the illusion of choice doesn’t mean they had control the whole time.
Anyway love the channel and the elon shade was supreme
I think another issue is that there is only one ending that lets you actually destroy the Reapers. You have been fighting against them for three games, have fought through multiple hells, and died just for the chance to take them down. The idea of not killing them is something that just doesn't compute for most people and understandably so. Despite that the way Destroy is presented as being the renegade or bad option to take.
There is also that synthesis is presented as the good option but requires you to die, spare the Reapers, and rewrite the biology of every being in the galaxy regardless of their own views and desires. Synthesis sounds less like utopia and more like the Reapers indoctrinating everyone, killing their greatest enemy, and ruling the galaxy.
It's weird because I have never played any of the trilogy up until 2019, but all I heard from friends up until that time is how the ending was "bad", but they could never explain why. Once I have beaten the trilogy back-to-back with the Extended Cut, I felt that the ending was as satisfying as an ending could get. I understand there might be/are some lore discrepancies, but they weren't something that stuck out to me, but I think players generally felt that the original ending wasn't satisfying enough, which is completely true. It is rather clear to me that ME3 was hugely rushed, and the game was released unfinished (the quest log is a great example for that), hence the unsatisfying conclusions to the saga. It will interesting to see how players will react to the endings once the Legendary Editions comes out.
The endings make no sense for the IP. Mass Effect was generally a grounded sci-fi story heavily into serious world building and its lore. The ending departs from that into a completely off the rails philosophical question. The entire build up and scene don't fit it. Why does the Crucible take the form of a kid Shepard saw for two minutes (for that matter, why is this kid the one who eats at Shepard instead of any of the companion deaths)? Why does Shepard trust anything said by the controller of the enemy (especially when they are obviously lying)? Why would "Destroy", the principle action the device was created for, be triggered by shooting a power relay (because it's a symbolic act of destruction, just as control is grabbing, a symbolic act of taking and control, and synthesis is embracing, a symbolic act of unity)? It eschews everything built up for a metaphorical and symbolic anticlimax that also completely neuters the Reapers as a villain we can take seriously.
Skyblade12 Well said. I agree
That's alot of words just to admit you have a poor taste in games
@@Skyblade12 Well, seeing a child get blown to bits is always a hard thing to see. I think that is why Shepard feels guilt. Plus, the crucible just wanted to project itself in a way Shepard would listen to it.
Plus, dude it is a Sci-Fi game. A lot of Sci-Fi stuff doesn't make sense at all. Why are you questioning fucking everything. It is called Science Fantasy for a reason you know.
@@thephoenixxm4160 Science fiction (sci-fi) and science fantasy are different genres. Mass Effect is _very_ much science fiction and not science fantasy. _(the main difference is how science is treated. In Mass Effect and other forms of sci fi, there are attempts made to explain the futuristic technology for worldbuilding. in science fantasy, this technology is treated as something the audience should accept without needing an explanation as to how everything works)_ Both genres are valid but there's very little debate about which one Mass Effect falls into.
With Extended Cut IMO the endings _themselves_ are okay. It still ultimately can't fix the ridiculous explanation for the Reapers that was made up at the last minute from Bioware's original intentions _(yo dude, I heard you were gonna be killed by synthetics so I made synthetics to kill you before that happens)_ nor can it fix the unfitting setup of having a deus ex machina and being asked to press one of 3 buttons on it, but it *does* genuinely wrap up what happens to the characters, which is ultimately what the series needed.
It just becomes an ending that isn't ideal, instead of the catastrophic crash landing the game launched with.
Dan its been 11 months wheres the war assets video
I want to see the fleet fight, and win or lose depending war assets. I really hate the plot that blindly using super weapow - the Crucible. With the Crucible, the war will win no matter how less war assets is. More war assets just means more short cut scenes.
I would usually be 100% on the Destroy train but Edi's speach made me question It
Finally you work on the endings! Great stuff Dan! Keep up the awesome work 👍😁
The issue saying all endings are the same are not true; what is true is the fact that the endings are just not diverse enough to make it feel like the choices made throughout the trilogy had any impact on the ending itself. I saved all team members past and current , got enough war assets to choose between the three endings, resolved war between Quarians and Geth, and yet if I want to kill the Reapers, the Geth still have to die so my previous efforts were for nothing. That's just one example of how the endings don't take the players choices into consideration.
Maybe I'm weird but I actually really like the synthesis ending and think it's the best one for everyone involved? Everyone lives, everyone gets to have better, fuller lives, more knowledge, etc etc. It's just plain better than the other two.
The best for everyone involved, except Shepard :(
@@connorclark3226 Eh, if I was Shepard, I'd be okay with the sacrifice. My life to bring peace and harmony to the galaxy? I'd make that trade every time.
but muh Shepard
The fact it has no downside is what makes it suspicious. It's _too_ nice and that's just not how life works.
@@joshuagross3151 It can be if we make it work that way. We're capable of it. The only ones stopping us are those of us who insist it can't happen because "that's just how life works."
Wait i could of swore on the red ending the Reapers blew up in space. I never took blue cause to me thats was just indoctrination Green is the best because Shepard scarfices their life to make everyones better Edi doesnt die, Legion, Doesnt die, people with implants dont die, ...etc.
After playing the entire 3 games with decisions shaping events the choice of 3 endings were an insult.
The add-on 4th did not make things any better.
8:56 is there anything to say Shepard doesn't survive in the other Destroy ending iterations? Sure if you don't get enough EMS you won't see the cutscene confirming he is still alive but you don't get any confirmation that he is dead. Considering the next me looks like it uses the destroy ending as canon, I imagine this loophole of sorts will be used to have Shepard be alive.
2:24 yes, the crucible, the supposed weapon that kills all synthetics but can only control the reapers and eliminate the diversity (the sole point of Mass Effect) on the galaxy. It's not just the ending, but the entire final mission is rushed to then sell DLCs like citadel and say "sorry, we screwed up, it was EA, etc. I would love a different final mission that actually shows Geth fighting alongside the Quarians on Earth, but probably Bioware won't change a thing because they seem very happy about their endings
There is a mod for that, I think it's take Earth back or something. Basically during the fight on Earth at some point a Geth squad and a prime will drop down and fight with you.
My biggest beef with the endings is and always will be the destruction of the mass relays which happens in all endings (except if you refuse and let the reapers win) because that renders the really important choices moot; killing the rachni queen - didn't matter; with the mass relays destroyed the rachni could never be a threat to the galaxy again anyway. Same thing with the Genophage; if you made the difficult decision to screw over the krogan for the sake of the rest of the galaxy then you're doubly a douche because with the mass relays gone the Krogan is not a threat for anyone but themselves anyway.
Of course they're not the same:
1 of them is giving up and letting the cycle continue
2 of them are hallucinations
and the true ending is destroying the Reapers and paving the way to Mass Effect 4
Cringe
Still embracing Indoctrination Theory until they make some actual canon on the subject. There's really only 2 endings, Sheppard finally succumbs to indoctrination (in the form of thinking he can control the Reapers like The Illusive Man or merge with them like Saren) or he resists indoctrination and comes to in the rubble of London.
Back in 2012 I only played the destroy ending (also I sacrificed the Quarians to save the Geth) but I remember it being vague and very disappointing since the final cut scene had the citadel glow red shoot a beam through the Mass relay and then you saw the Normandy crashed on the planet before cutting to the two people walking through the snow, I don't know how different the other endings were back then but the extended cut definitely improves the ending now that I've finally played it after all these years. At the time I thought they took dev time away from the ending to add in that terrible multiplayer mode.
People say they didnt feel different and our war assets didnt matter because you can get all three (four) endings no matter what you do throughout the entire trilogy and nothing you did in the last 3 games changes anything about any ending you choose, not because they all had similar cutscenes. Adding more to those cutscenes doesnt help my decisions feel more important if my decisions still dont change anything about the end decision.