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 one place long enough, you'll say it over and over. 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 realize you were always on the same side. Mass Effect 3 is a game about this phenomenon.

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

Goodbye that was a long time coming

Mass-Effect-Legendary-Edition-Suicide Mission[1]

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

With a little planning, some careful assignment of roles and responsibilities, and of course a dazzlingly intelligent leader, they manage. It's a suicide mission, but no one else needs to die. So 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 goodbye. But it is also the kind of thing that is told in the middle of history, when you live to fight another day. Mass Effect 3 the real goodbye. The long goodbye. Say goodbye to others over and over, until it's their turn to say it to you.

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

We all have different endings

Much of the criticism of Mass Effect 3 stems from the ending. But when I replay it, especially when I replay the entire trilogy, I don't feel so bothered by the ending because I just do the fact that it's over. This has been one of the best trips I will ever go on, and it all came down to a simple A or B choice.

But Mass Effect 3 doesn't just have one ending, it's a game with several. You could say that it's basically a game about running out. Maybe that's why I'm thinking about it. Some stories end before yours. Murder. Thane. Depending on your choices and their ripple effects, Legion or Tali. Others carry on when you're gone. Liara. Joker. Your trusty second-in-command, Garrus Vakarian, with you all the way to the end of the line.

It's a game that's not just about saying goodbye, but feeling it. Understand the importance of these syllables; on you, on the people you say it to, on the people you hear it from. Differentiates your story from the story. Death or sacrifice. There is 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 a final suicide mission to fight them, one that doesn't come with the narrative ejection seat that previous installments have offered. There's Thane, the dying man who throws himself over the blade of a newcomer to protect those around him, and only dies faster. And there is Mordin, who must accept death to atone for the sins of his choices. Maybe they are all the same man.

Mordin's death has always stuck with me the most. It is noble, but entirely of his own evil. It is death, it is sacrifice, and it is not a choice at all. He walks a path that he himself paved. He must not collect his seashells. But that's the beauty of a video game: it lets you dream.