[Henry Fool]

Originally Posted by photon

Spoiler!

I like the idea of things going on at a high level and the people having little idea of what it is, but having to deal with the consequences (the movie Signs for example). I always enjoy sci-fi like that, where at the end nothing was what it appeared to be and stuff was going on that no one expected.

I don't think it was inconsistent with the whole series; I thought they hinted at it enough during the whole game that I wasn't completely surprised by it. I thought the whole deus ex machina nature of the Crucible (we're building this but we don't know what it does) through the whole game foreshadowed it. Conversations with the Reaper and the Prothean VI made it more clear.

Was it perfect? Maybe they could have ramped up to that end more slowly I guess, at some point shift Shep's focus from the war effort to the cycle maybe (maybe at the detriment to the war effort and everyone gets mad), but I'm not sure if that would have been better, just different.

I think it partly boils down to what kind of fiction and sci-fi people like, and it might boil down to the kind of character people see Shepard as.

Spoiler!

I agree about that ambiguous nature of the Crucible. It seemed to me that apart from the general weariness and guilt over leaving Earth behind, there was some other nagging thought at the back of Shepard's mind. They were building something they didn't understand. They were fighting a conventional war against something they didn't understand. And the world had already been lost.

I hear complaints about the "star child" and it's hard to discern how much of it is genuine criticism and how much is simply angry rhetoric. The fact that the Catalyst was self-aware was a revelation but not what I would call bad writing. The larger design had already been hinted at on Thessia and they didn't know what they had built in the Crucible and what the Catalyst really was. The fact that it chose to speak to Shepard in the child's form is beside the point. It could have been any form.

It's not like what he tells Shepard is anything radically new either. The child just explains their motivation, tells her that their solution won't work any longer, and presents the options for ways to change the situation.

I chose the synthesis ending and my immediate emotional reaction to it was very strong. The crucible introduced a third option that was excluded before. There was the destroy option, the red one, represented by Anderson; and there was the control option, the blue one, represented by the Illusive Man. This echoes the binary choice that the game's moral system was based on. Those two are basically the options given to Shepard in ME2 when he has to decide about the rogue Geth. The green option is not middle ground, it's something genuinely different, and it ends the cycle as Shepard is absorbed into the machine's energy. I thought it was very fitting.

I understand that people might not feel satisfied on a concrete narrative level. Questions about what happens to other people are left unaswered. But to me it's Shepard's story: she is gone and we're left with what she knows, or what she hopes will happen, which is that life continues. We don't get to join the crew again because Shepard doesn't. It's a hollow feeling but appropriate.

So life gets to go on without the threat from the Reapers. Even though the relays are gone and the civilizations are cut off from each other, they get to build their own destinies without outside control. I think it's also fitting that the relays that made it all possible and which were used as a tool of control are destroyed in the end.

It's not an ending that blew my mind on some theoretical level, but it's natural enough. By the time Shepard gets to the final place, she basically has nothing left, she's broken, whatever life she ever had is gone. It works on an emotional level. It feels like a real death. You really feel the horrible fact that she'll never get to see the people she cares about again. She won't know what happened to any of them. All she knows is that she can make some kind of desperate final decision with absolutely no guarantees.