So, why would some schlub on the internet try to rewrite Mass Effect, you might ask.  “Because he’s bored”, mostly.  But there’s some actual game-design philosophy reasoning behind this as well.  Mass Effect started off as a brilliant idea and a beautiful resurrection of the Space Opera, but its later instalments fell into the big publisher trap of “epic” (unsurprisingly, as unlike the first they were released after BioWare was acquired by a big publisher), sacrificing core elements of what make games great to instead pursue an inherently flawed model of sweeping cinematics and shallow gameplay.  It doesn’t have to be this way; a few tweaks to the story and some flexibility in its presentation could have yielded something truly stupendous, as the foundations for a masterful game were all present.

As I have stated before, games are not movies.  But as Movie Bob so rightly pointed out, all too often they are trying to be so.  This is why so many games fail – not financially (though many still do), perhaps not even in terms of gameplay, but the fail as stories and they fail their potential to be so much more than just movies interspersed with brief moments of interactivity.  The writers for games have spent far too much time looking at narrative elements and presentations existent in other media and aping those techniques, rather than using the game as a unique medium in itself, embracing the whole package.  Most games approach the story as a tacked-on extra to the gameplay, or treat the gameplay as a tacked-on extra to the story, with little integration.  A mastercrafted game, however, would blend both together and recognise that the gameplay mechanics can do as much to express the themes and tone of your story as anything Hollywood or millennia of literature has developed.

Film Crit Hulk reviewed Mass Effect’s final installment, concluding that the Mass Effect series had an underlying tone of fatalism.  While this might be true if one views only the cinematic elements of the game’s story, it fundamentally fails to address the part of the story expressed by the gameplay itself – an expression that completely contradicts the theme of fatalism.  Mass Effect’s gameplay speaks eloquently and extensively about the power of choice, and the effect those choices have on fate and destiny.  “No fate but what you make”, as the Terminator series put it (until it fell off the rails and decided to say “screw that, fate is immutable”, but that’s why most people don’t like the later instalments.)  In fact, for all the flaws in Mass Effect 2’s story, the one thing is still manages to deliver is the central message of choice and control over your destiny; if the player makes all the “right” choices, Shepard’s “suicide mission” can end in a success, with only very minimal casualties (to the point that you can literally manage to kill ONLY the companions you want, even if you only want to kill Miranda) – not suicide at all.  If you can defy the odds of a suicide mission and come out unscathed, where the hell does one get a central message of “fatalism”?

Well, one gets it from the ending of Mass Effect 3, obviously.  But the tonal shift is the central reason the vast majority of fans rejected it.  You can’t do that in a series.  It doesn’t work.

Mass Effect 3’s biggest failure (Mass Effect 2 managed to largely avoid this; it’s plot failed on other levels instead)  was ignoring the fact it was a game, it was a game in a series, and that series had already expressed themes for two games before it.  Mass Effect 3 tries to rob the player of choice – but it doesn’t even do a complete job of that, leaving choices in at many key moments, resulting in greatly varied experiences.  Until you get to the end, in which case your choice suddenly boils down to “what colour do you want to destroy the galaxy with?”

Mass Effect 1 ends with a choice – save the Council or let them die – that will guide the very nature of galactic politics from then on (and Mass Effect 2’s biggest failure is to ignore this choice in favour of ease of presentation and “bringing in new fans”).  Mass Effect 2 ends with a series of choices – many a culmination of choices made throughout the game – that decide the fate of your entire crew, and a far less meaningful, but still existent, choice on whether to use the enemy’s weapons against them in the future.  Mass Effect 3 has many choices throughout the gameplay that decide the fates of entire species, but then ends with a meaningless choice that is an equal opportunity destroyer, effectively invalidating every single choice made throughout the entire series.  Shepard has spent two-and-most-of-a-third games making decisions that shape the entire galaxy, and in the end the only choices available are to destroy the galaxy by Reapers (the “failure” state), by isolation, by homogeneity, or by godmind.

Mass Effect 3 is Terminator 3; no matter how much Shepard might struggle, in the end the struggle is meaningless, as fate is immutable and the future must proceed down only one single path.  The ending of both invalidates all that came before them; it doesn’t matter whether Shepard paved the way for a harmonious and unified galaxy, or one dominated by humans: in the end, the Mass Relays are destroyed, life is immutably changed, and galactic civilisation ceases to exist.  The message that the gameplay has delivered is completely invalidated by the narrative, and the result is a failure, both of story and of gameplay.  They exist at odds with one another, instead of, as a game should be, a masterful blending of the two.

One of the games oft touted as a master of story is Planescape: Torment, written by Chris Avellone.  In addition to being a fairly deep and meaningful tale about the nature of mortality, change, and humanity, it is also one of the few games that uses gameplay as part of the storytelling effect.  When you die in the game, you are not presented with a game over screen, nor are you asked to reload.  Instead, you “respawn”, a common game mechanic, but a mechanic fully justified by the story.  The Nameless One is truly immortal; nothing can kill him – at least not permanently. Every death leads to a new awakening in the Mortuary, and each time you can simply get up and walk out again, as you did in the beginning.  As the game progresses, you learn that previously, each death led to complete amnesia (a state you begin the game in) and thus a new life afterwards, but something has changed.  The Nameless One now retains his memory through death, and this causes him to take a journey of self-discovery.  Previous attempts at such were stymied by the inevitable amnesia, but the new state makes the journey – and the game – now possible.  There are even puzzles for which the solution is dying.

Tying a gameplay mechanic – respawning after death – into an actual element of the story itself is a major reason Planescape: Torment is one of the most masterful game stories ever created, and it’s a feat Mass Effect could have matched, had it simply stuck to its message of choice and consequence.