Mass Effect 3 Ending Deemed Accurately Advertised

Metal Gear Solid has its political intrigue, Assassin's Creed its immense attention to detail and awesome what the fuck moments, and even Final Fantasy has its moments as an effective world based story. But none of them compare to the grandeur of the Mass Effect franchise. Well, at least not yet.

Mass Effect 3 must have been the most riveting and intense game I have played to date. Every single piece of this game was masterfully done. Any of us who are fans of the series know this already, so I won't go into detail on just how awesome it was, in that respect. But everyone has their own feelings on the ending. I still haven't bothered to play it again because I want to replay Mass Effect 2 (and subsequently make my choices for the first one in that silly interactive comic) as a Paragon Female, and a Renegade Male. All I know is that if you just play it from the basic character they give you at the beginning of 3, the game can be pretty lack luster, and I'll leave it at that.

One thing I do know that the ending to the game was severely polarizing. I personally liked it. Granted, it initially kind of pissed me off when I thought of the final cut scene as the big ending scene that other big titles have, but then I realized that almost half of Mass Effect 3 is an ending leading up to the climax that is the battle in London, and everything after that is the denouement. What I didn't like was that you couldn't see the aftermath of the individual characters' stories. I know it's from Shepard's perspective, but it's the same reason why the ending to The Hunger Games trilogy was so dissatisfying. We had no closure. Maybe that's because they plan on continuing the story of one of the main characters who don't have to die, like Liara or Garrus, but that would mean a pretty loose connection to this trilogy.

Anyways, some people were so pissed off by the ending that they filed complaints. Plenty of the internet reviewers I like to watch were seething with hatred for the ending. And to be honest, I can see where they were coming from. The ending, the way it is now before the DLC comes out to extend it, feels like a limb has been cut off. And us, as the player, still feel that ghost limb, like we can move it, but when we look it's not there. It just ended, a stump of a story, so to speak.

Basically there's a point right at the end of the game where you can make one of three choices, and they effect the universe as a whole. These choices are posited to you by a God-like being, who in my opinion both needed to be elaborated on more for us who were playing the game, but also made sense how little he was seen from Shepard's point of view. To be fair though, from a writing point of view, the player character couldn't associate any weight to any of those decisions unless they played through the whole game and felt what was the right choice, for them.

In any case, many of those who played the game felt the need to protest the ending, and how it was advertised. The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)claimed that player decisions "completely shape your experience and outcome," and "drive powerful outcomes, including relationships with key characters, the fate of entire civilizations, and even radically different ending scenarios." What I read here pretty much coincides with how I took the writing in the game. It seems that the ASA agrees. The Better Business Bureau, however, actually did state that the ending was falsely advertised, but, like I've pretty much said before, the 'ending' is all up for interpretation.

In any case the Extended Cut DLC will be coming out soon, and fans will have something to either cheer for or gripe about all over again.

Original story posted by Gamespot.