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Comments
I wasn't talking about choice, so much as that "organics and synthetics can never ever work together because I say so" garbage the thing kept spouting, which many players could have proven wrong by pointing out the window to the Geth fleet fighting alongside the organics.
Cycles...hm. I suppose that is one of the games' themes, so yes, from that perspective the ending works.
Fair enough. I should probably read the actual article, but I'm doing other stuff right now.
I'm mostly debating this because I was planning on using it as a topic for my blog at some point >.>
> IJBM: Anytime anyone mistakes Chinese people/food/culture/history as Japanese. It was funny when I was a little kid and people weren't familiar with the differences when they asked me, but now it happens so often especially on the internet I actually get depressed.
Oh gosh I know this feel
I'm not sure worse, Chinese food being associated with MSG and uncleanliness or Chinese food being mistaken for Japanese food.
Then again, one could mistake Japanese food for Chinese food and then associate that with MSG and uncleanliness. Not sure about uncleanliness, but an association with MSG would kinda make sense actually since it was a Japanese scientist who first isolated monosodium glutamate.
IJBM: I just noticed that Space Oddity is a pun.
That review went to a lot of effort to get the exact opposite of the game's message. (And also to be a condescending ass towards everyone who didn't share his opinion of the ending being 100% flawless. Yeah, people got overly angry about it, but that doesn't mean there weren't legitimate criticisms of it. I do think the ending was beautiful and artistic, and while it did fall short in some ways, I think that's more a function of how amazing and granular the rest of the series was.)
[Warning: Incoming Mass Effect tl;dr]
In the context of the games, "cycles" refers to the repeated genocide of all life in the galaxy every few thousand years. There's nothing inspiring about that, especially when you consider that no one even knows about said cycles until near the very end of them. But each cycle also includes an element that realizes what's happening and works against it--even knowing they won't personally benefit--until finally the cycle can be broken. Only then is that beautiful Buzz Aldrin voice-over possible: only then do people have inspiration and freedom.
In short, "cycles" as portrayed by the game are destructive and institutionalized. Working against them is a long, uphill battle that may not be resolved in your lifetime, but it's still of paramount importance. He almost gets this when he's talking about "Eden", but he doesn't realize that the significance of this is that it's because the cycle finally ended.
He also asserts that "choice is only the mechanic of the game and not its theme", which is...a pretty major assertion. I don't know if you can even make such a division, and if you do, you shouldn't expect people not to be upset with the dissonance.
He also fails to address one of the major problems people had with it: the thing that the starchild claimed was the main conflict was a subplot, and his assertions about it are flatly contradicted by the portion of the game dealing with it. And it just doesn't make any sense, either. Shepard gets to call him out to some extent, though, which is nice, but I don't know if that was in the original ending or only part of the extended cut.
Nope, in the original ending, Shepard just kinda stares blankly while the starchild monologues.
Well if anything the ending (which is where a story's themes are re-asserted in order to hammer them down) pretty much confirms what he means. Plus from what I've seen from Mass Effect and played, the player doesn't really have choice in terms of anything that isn't how to approach the mission or the people involved.
Sure as the games go by, this means more than "Be a (non-)dick" but still, I think it is a very important part of the games that a lot of the characters don't get a choice and are just players on a cosmic play that has been played millions of times according to the Reapers. The main cast doesn't even get to overcome that except for a certain Geth. And one character does not make a theme. Maybe a character arc. But saying that would be like saying that the Avengers is about accepting who you are because of the Hulk/Banner character arc.
Not really. I think you can enact or prevent at least three galactic genocides throughout the course of the games, for instance. Your actions also influence diplomatic relations between various civilisations, and sometimes influence who leads them. And given that your crew is at the centre of the plot, choices you make can change depending on what characters are present and how they've dealt with events thus far, which in turn alters what can happen during some plot moments.
It's certainly not entirely freeform, but that's not how life really works. An example of a game where the player is at the centre of the universe is Skyrim, but that robs it of the illusion of a real world. There are certainly a lot of things that happen in Mass Effect no matter what decisions you make, but there's also plenty of points of divergence, major and minor, weaving throughout the plot and character interactions.
And I'd definitely say choice (or consequences, or something related) is a theme in Mass Effect. Video games are perfect for carrying the theme of choice because they can provide what other mediums can't on a mechanical basis, and so often mechanics are (and should be) tied intimately to the themes. This is a major part of forward-thinking video game narrative -- the singularity between mechanic and narrative. Almost inherently, by providing something as a central mechanic, it may become a theme insofar as it relates to the plot and characters. The choices in Mass Effect certainly do, despite the mistake of adding rewards for having so many Renegade or Paragon points.
But the entire point is they do overcome that. Unlike the previous cycle, Cerberus loses. The Crucible fires, and the threat represented by the Reapers is over (unless you choose the fourth ending, but then it happens in the next cycle.
(I would totally steal your comparison about Banner's story not being the Avengers' and twist it to suit my purposes, but I already wrote the below and don't feel like altering it that much.)
Ah, great. Yeah, that's a major problem then.
In the rest of the series, Shepard calls people out on their hypocrisy and it's amazing. If someone tells you "synthetics and organics always kill each other, so what an awesome idea it is to do more killing of them instead of using all that power to stopping that from happening" and your avatar doesn't get to point out how the premise is demonstrably false and the conclusion is batshit, that's a major loss of awareness and narrative flaw (or mechanical flaw, if you prefer), even before the part where you have to ask "why is the conflicted represented by the geth and quarians suddenly more significant than (for instance) that represented by the krogans and salarians?"
Do these actions happen because you failed or succeeded at something or because you, as a character and not as a player who wants to calculate an ending you desire to see, decided for them to happen? Because that's a very big important difference.
Both, really.
Depends on which one.
How would you say that they balance out?
^^^ Usually, you choose. Whether that's calculation or gut feeling is up to the individual player -- personally, I was trying to play the most goody-two-shoesiest character possible, so I would almost always choose options that supported diplomacy and compassion over violence and coercion. Unfortunately, the difference between choices is marked out for you via colour-coding, allowing players to run with a mathematically calculated path if they so desire.
Given the reaction to Mass Effect, however? I doubt that's the case for many people. I'd say that most players get genuinely swept up in the characters enough that they end up making choices as though they existed in that particular world. I know I did.
It's mostly the latter, although sometimes choosing to do things won't have entirely predictable consequences. (I don't mean "this makes no sense, why would that happen" but more like if you lie about something, someone might find out about it and defect as a result.) There's one outcome that can't be achieved if you haven't done things precisely right up to that point, but you still get a choice in that situation.
Definitely this, though. I was also good-two-sheps for the most part, but I couldn't, say, let Helena Blake go free in the first game even though that's what the placement on the dialogue tree said was the right option.
but that wouldn't help towards a properly calculated path. At least not what I mean with calculated.
I mean, if you choose the "good" choice, for example, and you choose it because that's how you want it rather than to get some sort of benefit as a player, then it falls under what I'm saying. As you say that that's what you were doing then yeah it works.
Honestly as I've said before, I don't really care for ME and from what I've heard of the series there's a lot of overratedness when it comes to how innovative it is vs how much does it actually do right but I feel that Hulk's the sort of critic that, while impressively divisive due to the presentation (Which is most likely a product of the character rather than the writer) is still a rather smart critic and one that understands the core of narrative and storytelling and who, because of the internet's big advantages like the lack of a character or page limit or the fact, gets to display this knowledge fairly well.
Again, I wouldn't know how good or bad is ME at doing the things it supposedly tries to do. A lot of people say it's succesful so I did give it a try before my computer went the way of James Cagney in White Heat but the fact is that I didn't see anything particularly impressive. Fun. Maybe even smarter than most vidya's narratives. But marginally so and not because of a particularly though competition in the first place.
I do think the paragon/renegade system was the games' biggest flaw as a whole. On several occasions, it tries to set up a moral dilemma, but it's then forced to go "oh, and this option is good and that option is evil."
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What I meant was that I based my decisions on what was "most good" to me. Unfortunately, it's often very clear even without the colour coding, but I played as part of the world -- as did most people, I suspect.
In any case, ME is certainly overrated in some aspects, but that doesn't prevent it from being one of the best game series out there right now
Ah well.
in other news...
Galactus Is Coming To The Marvel Cinematic Universe
and yes that deserved the gigantic caps because hell yeah galactus
*puts on trollface* Wasn't he already in a movie?
Maybe he displays this in other places, but here he seems to spend more time talking about how good he is at being a critic (and if you're not good at being a critic you shouldn't be playing video games?) than being good at criticism.
I mean, his analysis of cycles is way off, because he conflates them with the three options given in the ending, which are explicitly breaks from the cycle. (Which is one of the ending's flaws too--you have the entity that represents the cycles expositing the ways to end them.) This leads to him saying that if you reject cycles, you reject life itself, which is already an odd thing to say before factoring in the context that "cycles" means "meaningless genocide".
(Also, reading the fourth ending as a way of telling the audience they suck for complaining about the ending...I know he thinks he's defending Bioware's artistic integrity, but that just makes them sound really petty when they actually had nothing but patience and humility dealing with people's complaints.)
I don't agree. It pretty much says "well, if you made it this far, maybe there is another option." Which doesn't make much sense since it conflates technological advancement with compassion, but it's at least given a vague handwavey reason.
Nope.
A gigantic black cloud was, though.
That black cloud was Gigantis, wasn't it?
Let's go with that.
Yeah, I guess that's right. (And I think it does make a certain sense: the Crucible was only possible from each generation building on the work of the last, knowing they wouldn't finish it in their lifetimes, and this cycle finally pulled it off. I don't know if you'd call that compassion, but there's a certain amount of foresight and perspective in that which seemed to be what the entity was looking for.)
Man, I actually comparatively liked ME3's ending (probably because I decided to wait til the DLC was out), but this review was so bad I'm pecking at it again out of spite. (Though I do agree the fact that Buzz Aldrin had a voiceover in the end was fantastic and needs to be appreciated more. How even did that happen.)
Yeah, but the people who showed the traits it's looking for are all dead. It killed them. The guys who actually finish it could be assholes who wouldn't have helped the next cycle for all it knows.
Haha, yeah.
eeeee.
hi cat