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Before you read on, this is not a post about me flaming the ME3 ending, its my opinion on what the ending is all about from a story perspective other than a gamers perspective. I will address the problem with the ending at the end, though that's not this blog's intention, avoid it if you can.
Obvious Mass Effect 3 spoilers
The Reapers
Me and my friends had a load of very interesting speculation and discussion about the Reapers. What are they, who built them, what do they want and all that jazz. With the end of ME3 I now think I realise what they are intended to be.
Reapers are a metaphor.
A metaphor for an idea that's very popular in sci-fi books, films and games. The idea that eventually intelligent life would create such advanced technology that the technology is able to turn against them, generally Robots who develop or are given artificial intelligence. They are a metaphor for our destruction, and in ME3's case, the destruction of many Alien races as well.
When you are at the ending, the Catalyst speaks to you through the image of a Child. It says that the Reapers keep organic life in check, they ensure no species ever gets so advanced that Synthetic life is able to completely overpower them and wipe all life out. The Reapers always leave the "Infant Species" alone. They are not entirely evil in a strange way, they ensure life will continue by making giant sacrifices, those sacrifices of course being annihilating whole species. They are essentially protecting less intelligent life from the advanced ones, to keep the cycle going forever. The cycle is mentioned in Mass Effect 1, by Sovereign. We assume its a Cycle of Destruction, but its not. Its the Cycle of Life. All life has the driving urge to survive, that's why everyone fights the Reapers. It is not in our nature to simply bow down because of what we might do in the future. All life would assume that we would not allow synthetic life to overpower us and that we can life forever. Its why Sovereign also says that the goal and purpose of Reapers is beyond our understanding. It defies our very existence, to allow our species to die for future species. It makes sense from a completely unemotional viewpoint, which is what the Reapers are.
However it is entirely reasonable to argue that not all intelligent life is doomed to die at the hands of its own intelligent synthetic creations. Infact I'd happily argue that point myself, but for the purpose of ME's story, that point is not up for debate. It is forced upon us, our destruction would not be a choice if we allowed synthetic life to get out of control, that's why the metaphor is done through a force of incredibly superior strength, one we should not stand any chance of defeating. Its a forced annihilation.
When we end the fight, what happens to the Reapers is unimportant. The metaphor is defeated and in doing so we lose basically all of our technology. That is the sacrifice we had to make to defeat the synthetics. The Citadel and Mass Relays all give off the huge energy pulses which appears to destroy all technology, sort of like a massive EMP pulse, as shown by the Normandy being caused to crash.
The crew emerge from the Normandy in a naturally beautiful scene. The ship is shown as a ruined wreck amongst the beauty of Nature. Life has a cycle that keeps going forever, technology does not. Hence the symbolism.
The Ending Overall
I could be totally wrong with this next part, but I get the feeling that the writers intended for the game to be like this. Decisions do not matter, the end is largely the same because there is only 1 of 2 outcomes, we die or we win, and dying makes you reload a checkpoint, heroic sacrifices aside. They may of been purposely vague with the ending because its meant to be perceived as I wrote above.
While that story idea is absolutely fantastic, there is one big big BIG problem with it.
It would work amazingly in a film, with the right acting and writing it would be amazing. But in a game that's famous for its multi-choice systems and different endings it absolutely does not. The game even has statistics in to measure how strong the military resistances will be. I spent ages doing lots of good things and making right choices to build up a huge force and to unite everyone. I'm even faced with 3 pathways right at the very end, one being lit up in blue to signify a "Good" ending, one red for the "Bad" ending, and the centre being green for neutrality. The pulse colours that blast out, as well as the colours that appear on the Reapers are coded the same way. But I was very disappointed to find out that all my hard work during the game meant nothing. That I could of gone either way at the end and the result would of been the Reapers either piss off or fall over.
The story seemed to get "too good" for the game it was in. If I'm right about it all that is.
As I said, it would make a phenomenal film, but in a multi choice game its not good at all.
Hope you enjoyed my wildly theoretical read.
- Tristran
 
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I only played the demo for ME3 and I thought it was pretty amazing. I'm definitely looking at picking this up here soon. Love reading all the information about it.
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On March 14 2012 07:33 LonelyIslands wrote:
I only played the demo for ME3 and I thought it was pretty amazing. I'm definitely looking at picking this up here soon. Love reading all the information about it.
While the ending was a bit disappointing I will say that overall the game was fun to play. The story is fantastic if I detach my mind from the gamers need for multiple endings 
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United States4991 Posts
The game itself was an amazingly awesome game. I hated the ending so much that I haven't been able to do a second playthrough yet  .
Like seriously, I would half expect that BioWare was trying to troll their fans with that end. I have no problem with the general concept of having a sacrifice ending (unless you destroy the Reapers & genocide all synthetics), but the fact that there's no possible way for a "and they all lived happily ever after" is kind of annoying for those of us who like to 100% everything and get the "best" ending (the 5000 war assets one is a bit of a farce of a "good" ending). Basically, I wanted to be able to get an ending where the Reapers are dead (or at last rendered a non-threat, but really dead seems the best way to achieve that) and the galaxy is (mostly) back where it is before - or at least, it's feasible to get there given that so many people died. With the mass effect relays gone, you're looking at thousands of years to get it back to where it was, at the least. Only a few races really had the ability to even start building the mass effect relays, and then you still need to get the other relays on the other side. It would just be mass starvation / death on some colonies that weren't self-sufficient, for example...
Also, the fact that they don't say anything about what happens to all the various things / people you interacted with afterwards is kind of galling, considering they even did that in Dragon Age. Basically they built this world / set of characters over a series of three games that you get invested in, and then at the end none of it all matters. It's like some random "The Aristocrats!" out of nowhere.
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But I don't see where does the assumption, that the synthetics will destroy their own masters when they get "too clever", come from to begin with? The whole geth x quarian conflict proved otherwise, because the geth were neutral all along, the quarians attacked them first out of fear. The same thing happened with the Reapers? They destroyed their own creators? Why? The same thing happened with them as the thing with the geths? That means they either eradicated their masters purely because of self defense or they're enemies of organic life. But then they wouldn't spare the younger races. So this doesn't add up. Also, why did the Reapers built the relays and the citadel? To create a false sense of technological advancement and a huge slaughterhouse? So wait, then, without the relays races wouldn't develop fast enough to be able to make competent AI so then Reapers wouldn't be necessary. So the reapers just fasten up the process for whatever reason, so they could kill the advanced races faster? So my theory would be, that the creator of reapers observed the whole thing all along, and they created the relays and the citadel, and waited for a race or races that is competent enough to survive a cycle. I mean, the reasining which the Reapers came with is reasonable up to a point, but there are vital questions that remain unanswered.
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It felt more empty than the Dues Ex: HR ending. In fact, I can't even remember the last good, satisfying ending in a modern RPG game, most are just sequel hooks with the "the princess is in another castle" feel. I guess neverwinter nights 1 had a good ending; it was interesting and tied up most of the loose ends.
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Great read and I was thinking some of the same thoughts as well.
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I agree that i hated the meaninglessness of the ending in relation to everything else.. but what really sucked is that the ending just came so quickly because the pacing of the game had shifted from what ME2 had.
I always jumped on important missions because waiting = bad in ME2, as was illustrated in the academy that Jack was in very early in ME3, which was a bad indicator because (afaik) nothing else in ME3 had this effect.
The suicide mission in ME2 was so sick because everything you did up to that point mattered, and there were seriously cool choices/objectives/cinematic in it, it was so well done.
The final mission in ME3 never really felt like that grand a design.
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Edit: more or less what valaki said.
You have a race of synthetics destroying organic life to stop . . . synthetics? What if the reapers are those synthetics that have risen against their masters? It seems to me that rather than maintain order, they are just trying to maintain dominance over the universe.
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On March 14 2012 10:47 valaki wrote:+ Show Spoiler +But I don't see where does the assumption, that the synthetics will destroy their own masters when they get "too clever", come from to begin with? The whole geth x quarian conflict proved otherwise, because the geth were neutral all along, the quarians attacked them first out of fear. The same thing happened with the Reapers? They destroyed their own creators? Why? The same thing happened with them as the thing with the geths? That means they either eradicated their masters purely because of self defense or they're enemies of organic life. But then they wouldn't spare the younger races. So this doesn't add up. Also, why did the Reapers built the relays and the citadel? To create a false sense of technological advancement and a huge slaughterhouse? So wait, then, without the relays races wouldn't develop fast enough to be able to make competent AI so then Reapers wouldn't be necessary. So the reapers just fasten up the process for whatever reason, so they could kill the advanced races faster? So my theory would be, that the creator of reapers observed the whole thing all along, and they created the relays and the citadel, and waited for a race or races that is competent enough to survive a cycle. I mean, the reasining which the Reapers came with is reasonable up to a point, but there are vital questions that remain unanswered.
It's like I told my friend, you won't get answers about the Reapers because there are no answers. You can't associate them to real things because they are meant to be a metaphor. A metaphor does not have to make sense, it just imposes an idea upon us (synthetic life overtaking organic life) and its way of imposing that idea is by destroying us.
You can argue using the Geth and Quarians yes, but I think the Catalysts meaning were when organic life gets much more advanced, we would start using AI more and more eventually. The Normandy was made much more powerful by an AI, and many other forms of technology would also. That combined with the desire for robots to do manual labour and even fight our wars for us would all eventually spiral out of control into an AI rebellion. That's what they assume all organic races will do anyway, perhaps its true. We don't and can't know, its just an idea, but one with logical backing. The Reapers stop the rate of advancement before Organics can reach that stage.
About your point relating to the Reapers giving us technology. Thats a good one, and while I have an answer it may well be wrong. When you speak with Sovereign he says that we develop along the path they desire. They give us the Relays and Citadel so that we all evolve around them, at least 1 race will attain superiority in Space, which I believe was the Asari, and then they should start reaching out to other races. If there is lesser developed races then they will be found and suddenly advanced to the same level. An entire Galaxy is advanced to the same level of technological advancement, almost. It would mean that they can reliably return at the same time and civilisations would be at similar technological levels each time. Yes they speed it up, but they ensure it progresses in an orderly fashion. Order to the Chaos as they repeatedly put it.
Edit: Typos.
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