I’ve given up fighting about theMass Effect 3ending. With the Extended Cut,I think the Destroy ending is perfectly serviceable. Mass Effect’s ending is effective - the hero sacrifices themselves to save the galaxy, ridding it of its mightiest threat, just after taking down their corrupted enemy and joining forces with their loyalest ally. The world is saved, but our hero is lost.It’s a bittersweet finale, topped off by the final shot of our fallen warrior gasping for breath on an abandoned rock somewhere before a cut to black. It’s not the most inventive ending in the world, but it is effective. The problem is not that the ending is bad,but that there are too many of them, and that has soured people on everything involved - including The Child.
Mass Effect was held in such high regard because it made your choices matter. There were the iconic Renegade and Paragon paths that helped shape Shepard, but through grounded character writing and creative ways to interrupt cutscenes, BioWare allowed you to make the story your own - then it all came down to an A, B, or C choice. But most of Mass Effect’s choices were A, B, and C, and rarely did anyone choose the neutral B option. We’d been trained since the first game to make selections like that, but in the climax they were presented in such a bland style, and not fully explained until the choice had been made, that fans were left wanting.
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It didn’t help that the original endings were all much shorter, and it wasn’t until the Extended Cut was patched in that we were given more context on what each one represented. But thematically, only one choice makes sense: our mission is to destroy the Reapers. Synergising organic and artificial life is a fascinating concept for a series that blurs the lines as Mass Effect does, but has no place in the ending. Meanwhile, taming the Reapers, controlling them ourselves, only opens Shepard up to being corrupted as The Illusive Man was, and makes for a very selfish ending.
A much better option would have been for the player to have creative control over how Destroy plays out, both by their choices in the game so far - with ignoring or choosing certain options across missions leading to collateral damage, for example - and in individual choices in the moment. It would honour the ideals of being player-led while keeping the ending consistent with the core themes (and setting up the sequel, which seems set to follow Destroy anyway). It also would have meant more time dedicated to a single ending,leading to a less rushed narrative.
As a result of the displeasure with these endings and the ways they are presented, fans have taken a dislike to The Child, a ghostly figure who guides you to these final choices, and who has come to symbolise the unfulfilling choices that cast a shadow on the hundreds of hours we had played through up to this point.
But The Child is grossly misunderstood. As unpopular as Mass Effect 3’s ending is, its opening set-piece is one of the strongest in modern memory, offering an action packed sequence which teaches the new traversal, melee combat, and power integration, but more importantly puts Shepard and humanity immediately on the backfoot. The Reapers are no longer a vague threat in the distance or a big, bad boss to be defeated at the finale. They are here, and they are unstoppable. While trying to find a vantage point, Shepard encounters a scared little boy hiding in a vent. They try to comfort him, but are distracted by Anderson, and when we look back, he is gone. As Shepard leaves Earth, fleeing from the fighting in the name of losing the battle to win the war, we see the young boy loaded onto a ship destined for safety. As we make it out alive, we look back to see their ship shot down.
If we had fought a little longer, a little hard, would that little boy still be alive? Shepard comes face to face with the reality that they cannot save everyone. Back on the Normandy, Shepard suffers repeated nightmares of a world burning, and follows the child through these dreams. The Child comes to represent all of humanity - everyone, like the little boy, is counting on Shepard to save them. And everyone will die a fiery death if Shepard fails.
Games put heroes in traumatic situations all the time, butrarely allow their stars to process this trauma. We see characters motivated by revenge a lot but rarely are they eaten up inside by what they have seen, what they have done, and what they have failed to do. Mass Effect’s metaphor is heavy-handed, but it underlines that The Child does not represent the memory of the single child Shepard watched die, so much as the future they feel humanity is hurtling towards, and which they worry they are too weak to stop.
It continues in this fashion until the ill-fated finale, where Shepard is guided to their three choices by an AI version of The Child, known as The Catalyst. This being has the memories of the Reapers, and with it everything that has ever been wiped out by them, and is the key to the Reapers' destruction. It’s through The Catalyst that we are able to make that ending choice at all, and it directs us in the shape of The Child. When Shepard talks to The Child they aren’t talking to a single person but to the entirety of humanity, the entire concept of life distilled into a physical form.
I will grant you that it doesn’t quite work. The heavy-handedness moves into cornball territory and the AI justification adds a layer of silliness that takes away the punchiness from the grounded and relatable symbolism of Shepard seeing The Child in their dreams. But much like the rest of the game, this poor execution at the final hurdle should not diminish the storytelling power of The Child, and the credit Mass Effect 3 deserves for exploring a character’s broken psyche. The Child is not the problem. Like everything in Mass Effect 3, the ending is.
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