1) Mass Effect 3 – Starchild
Surprised? Of course you’re not. Mass Effect 3‘s notoriously divisive ending has, by this point, been discussed to death, and despite its attempts to ‘fix’ the trilogy’s muddled closing moments, BioWare’s beloved sci-fi adventure will forever be remembered by many as ‘that stellar RPG series with the bewilderingly bad ending.’
Which is a shame, because, as the calm, rational and unfailingly objective species that we are, the only way to assess Mass Effect 3‘s quality is by ignoring its ending entirely. That’s not my own convoluted way of suggesting BioWare’s perceived failings should be swept under the rug, but judging the entirety of a trilogy’s merits on its ending is, at the very least, disrespectful.
It was never going to be an easy task, accounting for all of the choices, decisions and loose ends Commander Shepard left in his wake – hundreds, if not thousands, of permutations and eventualities would need to be acknowledged. Did your Shepard opt to put Wrex in an early grave in the first game? Did Garrus, Miranda, Legion and the rest of Shepard’s crew survive the Suicide Mission in Mass Effect 2, or did they all meet a grisly death at the hands of the Reapers and their thralls, the Collectors?
Those are but two of the changeable aspects of Mass Effect‘s narrative; accounting for them alone would take a colossal amount of development time and resources. Did BioWare perhaps bite off more than it could chew in promising every little decision would be accounted for? Undoubtedly, but it also goes without question that it deserves to be cut some slack.
Mass Effect 3‘s vanilla ending certainly isn’t good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s easy to see how it ended up that way.