Mass Effect 3: The Best Way To Say Goodbye To Friends

You don’t always get to say goodbye on your own terms. Most people don’t. If you stay in a place long enough, you say it over and over again. To people you knew too well. To people you wish you knew better. To people you never knew where you stood with, and then you realise you were always on the same side. Mass Effect 3 is a game about this phenomenon.

The world is ending. You can’t save it. You can fight for your corner of it, but when your choices are sacrifice or death, and sacrifice means death, there’s no choice at all. Maybe it’s better that way. Jumping is invariably better than being pushed. Mass Effect 3 is full of characters who jump, hoping that somewhere down the line a butterfly flaps its wings in Thessia, and someone else doesn’t get pushed.

The Goodbye That Was A Long Time Coming

Mass Effect 3 sets the scene from as early as the final moments of the previous instalment. Mass Effect 2, famously, ends with the suicide mission. It’s a bunch of disparate souls brought together by shared passion and personal circumstances who, despite their differences, work together for a common cause. Sure, they work for an massive corporation, but that doesn’t mean what they do is any less special or personal.

With some planning, some careful assignment of roles and responsibilities, and of course, a dazzlingly intelligent leader, they make it through. It’s a suicide mission, but no one else has to die. That’s how it can be. You fight, and you live. Maybe you even make a difference. That’s the beauty of a video game: it lets you dream. It’s a good goodbye. But it’s also the kind that gets told in the middle of the story, when you live to fight another day. Mass Effect 3 the real goodbye. The long goodbye. Goodbye to others over and over again, until it’s their turn to say it to you.

Saying Goodbye To My Granda In Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth explores love, loss, and Elvis Presley - it was the perfect game at the perfect time

Mass Effect 3 has its critics. In the context of how the game launched, the expectations placed upon it, the dilution or erasure of certain arcs, and a million other factors that don’t really fit the general metaphor I’m shooting for here, that criticism is justified. But looking back on it now, as the end of a hard-fought journey, all the little things seem even littler until you can hardly see them at all. And all the things that matter, remain. They linger with you, as things that matter do.

We All Have Different Endings

A lot of the criticism of Mass Effect 3 stems from the ending. But when I replay it, especially when I replay the whole trilogy, I don’t find myself bothered so much by the ending as I do just the fact that it’s over. This has been one of the best journeys I will ever go on, and it all came down to a simple A or B choice.

But Mass Effect 3 does not just have one ending, it’s a game of several. You could say, at its heart, it’s a game about ending. Maybe that’s why it’s on my mind. Some stories end before yours. Mordin. Thane. Depending on your choices and their ripple effects, Legion or Tali. Others keep going after you’re gone. Liara. Joker. Your trusted second in command, Garrus Vakarian, with you all the way till the end of the line.

It’s a game not just about saying goodbye, but feeling it. Understanding the weight of those syllables; on you, on the people you say it to, on the people you hear it from. Separating your story from the story. Death or sacrifice. It’s no choice at all, and the story continues either way.

There’s Shepard, of course, who must choose to assimilate with the overlords, or embark on one last suicide mission to fight them, one that doesn’t come with the narrative ejector seat previous showdowns have offered. There’s Thane, the dying man who throws himself upon the blade of a newcomer to protect those around him, and only dies faster. And there’s Mordin, who must accept death to atone for the sins of his choices. Maybe they’re all the same man.

Mordin’s death has always stuck with me the most. It’s noble, but entirely of his own ill making. It’s death, it’s sacrifice, and it’s no choice at all. He walks a path he paved himself. He doesn’t get to collect his seashells. But that’s the beauty of a video game: it lets you dream.

Taylor Swift: The End of an Era

Cast

• Taylor Swift Self
• Kameron Saunders Self - Dancer
• Amanda Balen Self - Dancer & Associate Choreographer
• Andrea Swift Self - Taylor's Mom & 13 Management