GamerNode: Columns - Bringing it Home, Part Two

Bringing it Home, Part Two

Note: if you've not played to the end of Mass Effect, Grim Fandango or Gears of War 2, avoid the first three paragraphs.

My nerves are shattered. I've been guiding Commander Shepherd through Mass Effect for fifty-two hours now, and I've just seen him crushed beneath a building's structural collapse. My heart stops. Please don't tell me they're going to kill him off. I watch patiently, praying that he made it through, not just because immersion and character identification are working their magic, courtesy of Bioware: it's because I invested fifty-two damn hours into this man and I am not going to see him fall to a few pebbles after killing thousands of enemy soldiers. He rises, and I triumph.

I've been trekking across the underworld for four years. I've been living on ships, in ports, in bars, clubs, worked as a cleaner, a casino boss, and the Grim Reaper. I've finally got to the last part of my journey, but I'm worried it won't go as planned. What if all the people I saved don't get into heaven? What about Meche? Is she going to make it? If she doesn't, my protagonist will be heartbroken, if skeletons even have hearts anymore. Suddenly, we arrive, they go through into heaven, and I relax. Job well done.

Marcus and Dom are screwed to a royal degree. The Lightmass bomb is gone, the rescue helicopter crashed, Maria's dead, Cole and Baird might be as well, and a Brumak is rapidly mutating into a huge, Akira-esque monstrosity, capable of sinking any human city it wants on the planet. I'm low on ammunition, and I'm so damn close to the Hardcore difficulty achievement. My fiancé looks at me: it's not looking good, she thinks, and I mirror her thoughts, our controllers held tightly after two days of solid campaigning. Suddenly, we're taken up into a helicopter, our friends reunited with us, and we kill the monster. Lex and I high-five, and watch the credits.

I love video game endings. They're the climax of everything you've done so far: storyline, gameplay, characters. Even with trilogy games, you know you'll be granted closure of some kind when you reach the end, not to mention the curious mix of excitement and sadness finishing an enjoyable experience will elicit from you, more often than not. Achievement playthroughs are meaningless: it's only the first-time, wide-eyed attempts and successes that really reward you, emotionally and mentally.

But are they really that fulfilling? Sometimes you've got to stop and ask yourself: what do I really want from this? Closure? An achievement? Fifty alternate endings depending on how many people are left alive, whether I'm good or evil, or whether my trousers have spots or stripes? It's a tough call, and I don't envy the writers that have to work interactivity into an ending that would be otherwise simple and straightforward. Think about how logical the ending of The Da Vinci Code was, then think about how easy would it be to represent it as a Squaresoft (the better version of that company, in my opinion) RPG title.

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