Mass Effect 3 – Galaxy-sized messiah complex

#SF #videogames

Weaving the threads from its two predecessors together, Mass Effect 3 brings the trilogy to an an epic conclusion. As war erupts across the galaxy and sentient life fights for survival, the game brilliantly reflects the stakes in its narrative and pacing. Mass Effect 1 was a spy thriller and Mass Effect 2 a heist movie, but Mass Effect 3 is the disaster film. With the Reapers (sentient AI that exterminate all advanced organic life every 50,000 years or so) swarming across the galaxy and conquering Earth before the game even properly begins, Mass Effect 3 sets a frenetic pace from its opening salvos, and rarely gives you time to catch your breath. You escape Earth to be sent to Mars, then to the Citadel (the galactic capital) to ask for aid, only to immediately divert to the home planet of another species which is also under Reaper assault. The pace does let up somewhat as you get further into the game and the number of sidequests proliferates, but I was easily 10 hours in before it felt like I had any opportunity to choose what to do next, rather than running from one disaster to another. Combined with the significant and effective use of cutscenes, the dramatic pace and the cinematic feel of the game are seriously improved.

Much rests on the shoulders of Commander Shepard, and hence the player, as they are sent off to rally a reluctant galaxy to humanity’s aid. This is a marked departure from Mass Effect 1 and 2, where the player was the hero of their own story, but those stories were embedded in a greater galactic whole. Not so in Mass Effect 3. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that Commander Shephard is the fulcrum on which the entire war effort moves, and without whom no successful action can be taken. Heroes holding the fate of the known world in their hands is a story as old as Achilles, but where the known world is a galaxy of trillions engaged in a collective struggle for surival, positing that only one person can be its saviour plays dangerously with our willing suspension of disbelief. All games have to make the player feel important enough to entice them to continue playing, but Mass Effect 3 does so excessively, diminishing both the potential of its worldbuilding and the emotional pay-off we might feel on its completion.

Compared to its two predecessors, Mass Effect 3 operates on a grand scale. As the war continuous, you travel to parts of the galaxy referred to but never visited in the previous games, including the homeworlds of all of the key species. As you return to the Citadel, increasing numbers of refugees, injured and casualties make tangible the impacts of the ongoing war, with news updates from distant fronts and defeats adding to the sense of impending doom. And the game makes this personal, with key NPCs from previous games joining the lists of those KIA.

Those casualties are part of a thread woven through Mass Effect 3 that reflects on the decisions, actions and friendships you made along the way. Assuming you carried forward your character from Mass Effect 1 and 2, you discover how your actions influenced people, and how they perceive the person you have become. There is a deliberate, and generally successful, effort here to humanize Commander Shepard and to make the player connect with them as more than a mute protagonist carrying a gun around. This representation of ‘Commander Shepard, the person’ is an essential counterpoint to core thread of ‘Commander Shepard, the saviour’, and without it the narrative would have collapsed in on itself under the weight of its own messiah complex.

Mass Effect 3 is an excellent example of the ‘protagonist problem’ as proposed by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton. Their original essay is available via Uncanny Magazine and I strongly recommend giving it a read. What Palmer and Walton diagnose is an unhealthy overabundance of stories that centre a protagonist, someone without whom the story cannot progress, and the effect that has on our collective imagination. As with any systemic condition, any individual instance is never in and of itself the problem. It is the aggregated impact of a multitude of individual instances that creates the systemic effect, but I think Mass Effect 3 is an instance worth highlighting. Both because of the extreme level to which it takes its ‘protagonismos’, and the game’s own struggle with how to parse this.

The endgame of Mass Effect 3 is predicated on the notion that only Commander Shepard can save the galaxy. This is the inevitable culmination of a narrative arc that makes our character central to every major action during the Reaper War. Nothing moves without Commander Shepard. Alliances are forged, interstellar disputes dating back to a time when most humans would barely travel a few kilometers by cart are settled, ancient artefacts are uncovered, but only by Commander Shepard. We are told there is an entire galaxy out there engaged in a fight for its very existence, but for all that we can tell, they might as well all be playing Space Invaders.

And it is not just the key missions or diplomatic interventions that rely wholly on Commander Shepard. While you are busy saving the galaxy, the game offers a plethora of side-quests. So while you are trying to make peace between a race of synthetics and their creators who have been at war for centuries, you have to make a brief detour to pick up some fossils or acquire some encryption keys, because you overheard a random NPC express a desire for these. All of this feeds into a game mechanic where you acquire ‘assets’ to help you in the final assault on the Reapers, with a higher asset score securing a better outcome. Both your main missions and the side quests contribute to this, in a way that can often feel somewhat uncalibrated, as individual NPCs rate equally to entire squadrons of warships. But what it comes down to is this: only Commander Shepard can make the number go up.

Mass Effect 3 does try to undercut this overwhelming focus on its protagonist with humorous self-reflection and greater investment in your companions. Your allies make frequent references to your inability to dance or complete any mission without causing extensive property damage. As you walk around your spaceship, you can overhear your allies have conversations with one another, unlike in either of the previous games. The game works hard to create the impression of a world outside Commander Shepard, where people have experiences not mediated by you. But it cannot help itself, and still makes the ultimate fate of your companions at the end of the game dependant on whether you engaged them in conversation at crucial points or not. It is Commander Shepard: Galactic saviour, courier, and therapist.

Some degree of protagonismos is of course unavoidable in an action-RPG or first-person-shooter (FPS) where you inhabit your character. A videogame has to give you the power to act in the world, and for it to be compelling those actions must be meaningful. But it is not necessary to make the entire universe revolve around the player. I am reminded of Half-life, featuring perhaps the most famous mute protagonist, where despite your centrality to the plot it is clear that things happen in the world that are unaffected by your actions, and that you are only one of many heroes sent to deal with the game’s core threat. You just happen to be the only one who succeeds. Or Citizen Sleeper, a game where your actions make small but meaningful change to a community at the edge of civilisation. Or Subnautica, a game based entirely on surviving a natural environment that is fundamentally indifferent to your existence. Or Helldivers, where you are indistinguishable Starship Trooper #588102, until you are killed and become indistinguishable Starship Trooper #588103. Even the original Mass Effect itself was more grounded in the limited role it had you play in a wider galactic context.

None of this makes Mass Effect 3 a bad game. On the contrary, I regard it as the best of the trilogy, keeping the best parts of its predecessors while discarding the worst. The combat is fluid and challenging but not frustrating. The story is great and excellently paced. The annoying minigames have been removed. The morality system is still there, but feels better calibrated than in Mass Effect 2. And evident care and attention has been given to deepening the relationships between the player and their companions. But in the end the game simply tries to do too much. It cannot restrain itself. Even its attempts at self-deprecating humour or humanising reflection still end up having life-or-death consequences. So strongly does the game desire to make the player feel consequential, that it makes you into a black hole for everyone else’s agency.

Of course it is fun, and flattering, to be the hero, but as Palmer and Walton remind us, no actual conflict or problem depends so critically on the actions of only one person to resolve it. By making the player so central to everything that takes place, Mass Effect 3 diminishes the world it has created and makes its universe feel oddly empty. It feels like a play with only one actor, on a stage otherwise filled with lifeless props. Its culmination in an act of self-sacrifice that ushers in a new galactic era is the antithesis of One Battle After Another’s recognition that we all make our contribution to an intergenerational struggle for justice that may never really end.

Palmer and Walton persuasively argue that a surfeit of protagonismos in our cultural environment can disempower those of us who do not identify as heroes, and cause reckless arrogance in those who do. At a time when so many of us feel a distinct lack of power in our lives, there is great attractiveness to an escapist fantasy in which we, and we alone, can solve an entire universe’s problems. Yet Mass Effect 3’s very excess of heroic agency leaves us feeling smaller and more depleted when it is game over. At that time, it is worth remembering that instead of cosmic heroism, it can be the small acts of kindness that save the world.

Notes & suggestions

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