Part 50: Kissing our Butts goodbye

Kissing our Butts goodbye

Well, we did it. We made it to the end of the trilogy, at least as far as official canon goes.

We wake up an indeterminate time after taking Harbinger's laser to the face and manage to v e r y s l o w l y stagger our way to the beam. Onboard the Citadel it's a chunky salsa of corpses. Anderson also made it up and we separately make it to the control panel where we can open the arms. But then TIM shows up looking rather and somehow now has the power to indoctrinate us so we shoot Anderson. Then it's a repeat of the final standoff with Saren. If you didn't take all those side options at every point in the game then you have to fight him. But we did and so he blows his reaperized head off. Then we pres butan and wait. The scene between Shep and Anderson is very good. If you're a ManShep then he tells you that you would have been a good father. Then Anderson takes a little nap and we try to as well but get rudely interrupted by Hackett. The macguffin isn't working right. Then we pass out and take an elevator to The Ends Are Bad.

As if I didn't have reason enough to hate that fucking kid he's now the avatar of the AI for the Reapers. The Catalyst takes the form of a child and acts like one. This might've had some emotional impact if they had your squadmate that died on Virmire instead but we get a kid we saw for 10 seconds before getting blown up. Starkid is a terrible hamfisted attempt to make an emotional connection and we've been forced to suffer his presence since the first dream sequence. We're given the choice to destroy, control, or make soup. Synthesis is so gross and un-thought out that other than doing it once to see what happened I never choose it. We came to the Citadel to chew bubblegum and kick ass and being out of gum we take the latter option. Bye bye Starkid you insufferable little fuck. Then there's a big ol' explosion and cosmic farts kill everything Reaper and if we were to take SK's word for it, everything with a microchip in it. Which clearly isn't the case. Joker apparently got drunk and crash landed on some planet with two moons. How this is related to anything I have no fucking idea. Why? Did every other ship in that fleet also crash land? Where did they go? And at the end because we had a good war score we get to see Shep ain't dead after all, though being stranded in zero atmo under several tons of debris would probably do the trick eventually. ROLL CREDITS. The little cutscene at the end would be cuter if it wasn't voiced by that same fucking kid, and they didn't just rescale an adult model for him. Like, look at how goddamn tiny his head is. I guess in the far future microcephaly is a constant threat. It was cool of them to get Buzz Aldrin, though you can tell he isn't a VA. Also the end splash changed, originally it was "Thanks for playing to the end, go buy DLC!" which didn't really soothe any ruffled feathers after the last 20 minutes of shit you were forced to endure.

If you didn't play ME3 when it was released it's kind of hard to understand how much shit got flung regarding the ending(s). I mean, it sucks. 2 dudes locked themselves in a room and pooped out an ending. There are a couple of good parts but otherwise it's total garbage. Whatever you spent 3 games doing doesn't matter in the fucking slightest. I mentioned in the OP that a week before the game was released, Casey Hudson had the balls to say in an interview that it wasn't just going to be one of a couple possible endings but that all your choices made over the course of the series would make your ending special and unique. Yeah, no. You get RGB choices. Destroy probably makes the most sense, though intellectually (if such a term can be used in this case) I find Control the most intriguing. Pre-EC it didn't make a fucking difference, really, as you got the colored cutscene and then it went to credits. That was it. The EC added the voiceovers and does at least reflect some of your decisions. It will show things like if you cured the genophage or not, the Quarian/Geth situation, basically the galaxy as you left it. Control is narrated by Shepard, and depending on whether you were a paragon or renegade the flavor changes. A good Shep talks about rebuilding and watching over people, a renegade basically becomes cuttlefish Hitler. Synthesis, the idiot fucker ending originally ended with Joker's hat being sentient. Now EDI gives the recap and gets Pinocchio'd.

Entire encyclopedias have been written about the endings and why they're shitty. Starkid tries to talk you out of Destroy by telling you all your robit friends will die, but then in the same breath goes on to say that nothing will be lost and everything can be fixed. EDI appears on the deathboard because originally she would get out of the ship with Joker even if you picked Destroy. Also like petulant children, Walters and Hudson made it so if you wait too long to do anything (the "I won't choose the shit you're offering" dialogue option) you get a game over. You also get a game over (well everyone dies, same thing) if you shoot Starkid which is what most people wanted to do after the first playthrough. The EC also caused some stupidity like the Normandy landing in front of Harbie to pick up your teammates. Now hardcore BW fans are all nuts and Hudson and Walters got death threats, which is absolutely fucking bonkers. Hudson actually quit after the fiasco and went to work for (I think) Respawn. But he's back now and notably staying under the radar. Walters kept trucking along and got dragged into working on Andromeda after it became a disaster, but he's also kept a low profile. If maybe they'd ran their ideas past other people, if maybe they weren't so up their own asses, we might've gotten an ending that was if not happy, at least satisfying. Instead we all got to gurgle down a fecal smoothie tinted with primary colors. I actually kind of had to gird my loins to do this episode, as it's really hard to do anything other than devolve into yelling different variations of FUCK YOU EAT SHIT. I kind of did this anyway.

Now, we're not quite done. We still have the Citadel DLC to do which is how Shepard's story really ends.