This week I give a breakdown of why the Mass Effect 3 ending just didn’t work as a piece of fiction (as opposed to why it didn’t work logically, which we’ve been talking about for a few days now) and why I don’t think “new ending” can really fix things. The shame of it is, it’s clear that BioWare is badly missing the point. They seem to be stuck on the “fans wanted a happy ending” idea, which is going to lead them to making a different set of mistakes.
In the article, I named three elements: Affirmation, Explanation, and Closure. My point was that an ending needs to have at least one of these elements to be an “ending” and not just “a place where the story stopped being told”. These elements are the payoff at the end of the story.
Following the discussion and watching the ending again, I’ve come to the conclusion that the writers decided to leave out affirmation and closure in favor of an explanation-only ending. Okay, it’s dark, the good guys didn’t win so much as mutually annihilate the bad guys, and we don’t get to find out how things turned out for everyone else, but now we get to hear the answers to our questions. It seems like that was the plan.
An explanation ending CAN work. Heck, the murder mystery is an entire genre dedicated to explanation-based payoffs. Of course, if explanation is going to be the ONLY payoff, then it needs to be a really good explanation. A kind of, “Oh! NOW I get it!” epiphany. The Usual Suspects is a great example of this, where the final reveal brings new meaning to what the audience has already seen.
Mass Effect was manifestly unqualified for an ending based entirely on explanation. The lore is a tangled mess of conflicts and contrivances, and the only thing the central villain had going for it was “mystery”. Most people played this game because they loved the characters and the setting, not because they just couldn’t wait for the next dose of incomprehensible balderdash from The Illusive Man.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points:
Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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