I'm talking to Keith David while I walk down a hallway. He's being very Keith Davidian - filling me
in on what's been happening in the game world between games, recapping some
stuff, telling me about things that are relevant to upcoming plot events, being
my black friend in videogameland in general.
Then we run into my space ex, who is kind of a space bitch, but is doing
pretty well for herself at work. She's
just been space promoted, and we left it on good terms when I saw her last, so
I'm polite, but I don't try to make a move on her. I've got a psychotic psychokinetic punk rock
space girlfriend somewhere out there waiting for me.
Then, while in front of the Leaders of the World or
something, a giant red laser lances from the eye of a descending giant robot
squid bug and boom, down goes the nominal leadership of the Alliance's
military. The game begins as Keith David
and I climb from the rubble and he hands me a gun before we descend into a
wonderfully atmospheric future city, a city that presents itself as an elegant,
new and believable future space, a place that the Dutch could have designed and
set forth as the world's climate changed and sea levels rose. We do some buddy movie stuff as I learn how
to walk and shoot and level up my character and participate in quicktime
events. It's all quite important, and
important feeling. And then stupid
things start happening.
That elegant future city is suddenly marred by a good old
HVAC ventilation unit, the kind you'd see outside of an office complex or on
the roof of an apartment building. In
the future, where gravity manipulation fields are employed to create
toothbrushes, we're apparently still using central heating and air technology
from the 1970s. Oh well, forgivable,
maybe even a high concept joke. Dumb,
sure, but I know how petty it is of me to fixate on that part of the game. Let it go, Mike.
Then something else happens.
I meet a child. The child does
things a child might do if they were playing, like hide from adults, except the
child isn't playing, he's in the middle of a city wide bombing. When I try to help him, he says a bunch of goth
stuff and then runs away from us. We're
authority figures, and he doesn't trust us apparently. I'll see this child again as I leave the
tutorial. I'll see him going to another
authority figure (apparently he just didn't like me specifically, the little
shit) and then getting into a shuttle, and then I'll see that shuttle getting
shot down.
The image of the little boy will then haunt me throughout
the game.
I am a soldier, a soldier who has ordered hundreds of people
to their death and murdered thousands of people. I've killed friends and loved ones with
decisions I've made and then moved without scars. And yet the image of a child, a child I only
met briefly, a child I saw die only in the abstract, now haunts me. There's no real relationship there, no real
backstory. There's a presumption that
the kind of war my space marine has seen has been antiseptic to an extreme,
perhaps, but I don't think I buy that.
That this child starts to haunt me is dumb. It's dumb, and this dumbness is one of Mass Effect 3's recurring motifs.
Mass Effect 3 is easily
the best Mass Effect game at actually
being a game. It's also shamelessly,
hilariously dumb, all the more so when it's compared to the first Mass Effect game, which established a
tremendous amount of universe while showing a fairly small portion of it all
told. Mass Effect 3 goes in another direction and runs with the tradition
that Mass Effect 2 started off: this
world needs to be a grand place where that things can make zero sense can and
will happen, as long as they make for a cool set piece when all is said and
done. Mass Effect 2 had me fighting ship to ship drones in The Normandy's
cargo hold, because what ship to ship drone wouldn't stop to politely fight a
bunch of tiny meat sacks while it's trying to destroy a hostile ship by ripping
out its internal systems? Mass Effect 3 has a group of invading
aliens infiltrate the galaxy and then avoid certain places because it's not
time for them to be there yet, letting their opposition hold on to their
conspicuous base of operations (located in a well known and previously
assaulted central location) because without it, the game wouldn't have a
familiar central area to come back to time and time again.
Mass Effect 3
turns on players not asking "why."
”Why does Kai Leng have shields that are stronger than the shields that
you'd see on a giant flying Reaper construct?" Better not to ask. "Why can't I kill him when I fight him
for some reason?" Because then we'd
have to figure out a different way to get you to go to this other place. "Why can my shuttle normally only carry three
people into battle when I see it carrying two or three times that number in
various cutscenes?" Because fuck
you, three is the number of characters we decided you needed to have with you
for your desperate final battles. What
kind of a commander goes into battle with more than three people? An asshole kind, that's what. "How did Cerberus acquire nearly
unlimited resources without anyone in the galaxy noticing even a
little?" STOP ASKING. Even the dumb stuff that can be
contextualized in the story (such as the behavior of the Salarians) is so
thoroughly underthought that it makes me grind my teeth.
If Mass Effect 3
didn't take itself so seriously, this wouldn't be quite so bad. But the tone of the Mass Effect games is so cloying, the story so overwrought and
"epic" in scale and scope and drama, that it really does upset
me. Partial credit is also owed to game
reviewer, who praise the writing in Mass
Effect 3 which, to me, is like praising the writing in porn. There are interesting, self-aware moments
(Garrus and Tali's relationship, if either is unromanced, is actually exceedingly
interesting) but for the most part this is writing meant to explain the
unbelievable set pieces that occupy these worlds. Of course those young female roommates are
going to fuck that oven repairman.
They're just so horny! Of course
only my team can rescue the last fertile Krogan female. We're like, the bestest soldiers ever!
It's an adolescent desire for justification more than a
story, and when you bring any kind of serious inquiry to bear on that story,
the gymnastics it requires for you to construct a sensible narrative are pretty
grand and complex. I have a friend who
firmly loves the Mass Effect games
and, when pressed on the nature of its plot holes and writing missteps, he
constructs narrative bridges and patches that the game wishes it could have come
up with and should have thought of first, because they would justify the insane
shit that keeps on happening.
From its opening bars to the final literalized deus ex
machina that closes the game (double points for being an actual machine god, Mass Effect 3) Mass Effect 3 plays off of a base desire to see cool shit
happen. In the end, this desire is so
overriding that it throws off everything else, and sensible story construction
is a distantly present, if at all present, concern for Mass Effect 3's storytellers.
The end result is a torrent of stupid shit surrounding one of the more
interesting game systems I've enjoyed to date.
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