FICTION | THE ENDINGS OF ME3 AND MEA
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Speaking of ending here and there, got curious what you people expected from endings for both these games, ME3 and MEA. Although some have already stated that you were cool or not with endings from ME3, I'd like you to elaborate what you expected when you started playing ME trilogy. And regarding MEA, if it ended the way you expected or if you had other things in mind? This is not supposed to be a thread of likes or don't likes, mainly a thread to point out where your expectations differed from the path taken 'officially', and that also includes when an ending may be better from what you had in mind, even if that's hard to believe for some.
I'll give my short version for now for ME3:
I first played ME2, then I bought the trilogy when ME3 already had the extended ending added, and by then, I really didn't know of any ending fuss either (by this I convey I didn't had any knowledge of it). What I read was that our choices made a great impact in the end, and so I expected them to be.
The endings left me torn between an ok feel and a lacking feel. I was not really annoyed by it, but they were pretty different from the idea I had of impacting. From an overall perspective, I concluded that the fate of a whole galaxy suffering too many drawbacks from a single person's decision felt too much forced at times, and I think that's when I settled with an ok feeling around the ending.
To resume, our current ending, the four-option one, I sort of expected that outcome to be one of the endings, ramified like that, perhaps. But I did expected other outcomes, perhaps something that would go as far as making us infiltrated some 'leading' reapers, and take them down by force, in a more direct manner than a switch to turn things on and off. I was also expecting an ending where we would evacuate as many people as possible and send them to dark space and fight reapers to the death, with a win and lose outcome. I even expected an ending where we would sort of negotiate an apparent truce. But I really expected very different situations to arise.
In ME3, choices made started to be converted in numbers of assets, mainly that, and that was not something I understood by their proposal. Certainly I don't replay ME3 or the trilogy for its ending.
And MEA version:
MEA was a bit harder to tell. The game being long and some great chunks of context appearing every now and then given it's not a direct story-telling such as the previous games, which you had a sense of where you began and where you would end. MEA was incognito all around, and ended up eventually when many questions were on hold.
I expected MEA, at the very beginning of it, to end after making our first planet viable, because that was how I understood the proposal of the game. But that was before we could actually have so many planets to tinker with. I certainly didn't expect ending with a tool such as Meridian in our hands in the end. So I'll have just to resume this post to which bigger answers I expected having by the end based on what we found in our journey: none. I think the game left enough things to occupy future content and I'm rather ok with what has been left hanging.
My main divergence between expectation and reality was how fast we happened to achieve viability and end up with something as powerful as Meridian in our care. Although I'm not sure if that's a good thing for our characters.
There, you turn. And, as usual, try to keep it civil.
