The Crucible Of War

How Mass Effect 3's narrative structure drags it down

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, Possibility Space: a Mass Effect analysis.

Mass Effect 3 is about war. This is a problem for Mass Effect 3, because it also follows a narrative arc, and wars rarely do. The cinematic, action movie nature of much of Mass Effect’s storytelling means that it typically follows the form at the broadest level. It starts by introducing the central conflict as well as the hero, her allies, and her plan. Action rises and the hero gets confident, then there’s a reverse of fortunes—Thessia, in Mass Effect 3—and finally a confrontation between both the protagonists and antagonists at the height of their powers.

Many games include wars and battles, but they’re usually much more narrowly focused than Mass Effect. Over the course of the series, the story has been established as the story of the civilized universe, with Shepard as the greatest hero of the galaxy, and the Reaper War is a galactic threat. Most shooter games have more narrowly focused stories on the special, important missions of its heroes. Mass Effect 3 takes you to the most important parts of the galaxy.

The war of Mass Effect 3 is a symbolic war. Speculative fiction allows the games to imbue the Reaper War with every possible symbolic meaning that can relevantly fit, which allows it to satisfactorily work as an all-encompassing, total war. It calls upon the symbols of good against evil, of life against death, of hope against fear, of cooperation against destruction, of invaders against resistance, of free will against indoctrination, and so on and so on.

World War II is the symbolic ideal of war in our culture. It is the largest and most destructive war in human history, as well as the most recent to involve multiple great powers against one another. It is also, in North America where BioWare resides, especially meaningful for being a pure war, where good and evil were clearly demarcated and “we” were very obviously on the side of good. Mass Effect 3 buys into those myths, treating the Reaper War as an even purer war than WWII. It utilizes small arms tactics and combined arms, with a mixture of blitzkrieg and trench warfare, while the Reapers and Cerberus gather civilians into camps and experiment on them, or just kill them en masse.

But Mass Effect 3 cannot follow the narrative structure of WWII, since its climactic battle, (at least in the European theater) was Stalingrad1 in 1942, at the halfway mark of the war and nearly three years before its end. Prior to Stalingrad, the Germans had won almost every major engagement, dominating Europe and slashing into the Soviet Union. After Stalingrad, the Germans lost most every engagement, with the Russians and then the Anglo-American alliance slowly but inexorably retaking that land.

If there is a Stalingrad at the strategic level Mass Effect 3, it’s the battle of Palaven. That’s when the Reaper blitzkrieg reached its initial high-water mark, striking at the heart of the Turian Hierarchy, the most powerful military force in the galaxy. The Turians fought to delay and pin down the Reaper forces, negating the strategic advantage of their mobility—the lack of a need for supply lines—then driving them back when they received elite reinforcements in the form of the Krogan. At Palaven, the rest of the galaxy was allowed to see that the Reaper war machine could be defeated.

This is a roughly similar trajectory to the symbolic meaning of Stalingrad, but much like Stalingrad, it takes place far too early in the story to be a narrative climax. Shepard’s connection to the “Miracle At Palaven” occurs in the first half of Mass Effect 3 as well. Thus, despite all of its symbolic connections to the “good war” of World War II, Mass Effect 3 has to take inspiration from different sources in order to satisfactorily combine Shepard’s narrative arc the its military story.

Unfortunately for the game, major wars throughout history rarely have military climaxes that also serve as narrative climaxes. The American Civil War reached its crest at Gettysburg, smack dab in the middle of war, while the Revolution was won at Saratoga (occurring in 1777, the war stopped in 1781). World War I was won by logistics far more than a single battle. At Cannae, the most famous battle of the Punic Wars, Hannibal and the Carthaginians destroyed a Roman army, in Italy…and then lost the war over a decade later.

There are a few counter-examples, but they usually have caveats. Some minor wars have climactic battles, like the Franco-Prussian War that ended at Sedan, or colonial wars where the imperial aggressor decides it’s not worth it, like the Ethiopians driving the Italians out at Adowa, or Vietnamese gaining independence at Dien Bien Phu. The Norman invasion of England was won at Hastings, but that had the caveat that King Harold was killed in battle, rendering further resistance during the succession crisis largely irrelevant. Perhaps the single greatest exception to the idea wars are rarely won at their climax is Gaugamela, the battle at which Alexander’s armies defeated the best army Darius III of Persia could raise, essentially destroying the Persian Empire.

Wars are too complicated for climactic battles to be final battles because they’re rarely perfectly symmetrical. Strategic advantages like manpower or manufacturing ability may make individual battles relatively unimportant. Nor are wars matches of Chess or Go where the sides are equal, but filled with a complex set of moving parts. Losing a battle is bad, but land can be retaken. Losing an army is worse, but usually soldiers can be replaced. There’s also a necessary element of risk aversion: putting all of one’s military eggs in a single basket is unwise, and should only be attempted out of desperation. To have both sides do that at once, to create a narrative climax? Almost unthinkable.

I’ve mentioned most of the great symbolic battles in history: Gettysburg, the high-water mark of a doomed cause; Stalingrad, the turning point where resources and intelligence turned back an unstoppable elite force ; Hastings, where a few lucky moments changed the course of history; or Cannae, where a genius in his prime utterly destroyed the armies of his enemies. But there’s another symbolic battle that I haven’t mentioned: Waterloo, the reverse of Cannae, where a military genius sees his final glorious defeat.

At Waterloo, the French Emperor and revolutionary aggressor Napoleon was defeated in his last-gasp effort to reclaim his power. His opponent and the apparent hero of the story, the Duke of Wellington, was a rising political and military star, commanding an apparently ragtag multi-national force that shockingly managed to beat the elite French army.

The Napoleonic era has come to represent the pinnacle of glorious warfare: its uniforms and flags were the most colorful, its generals’ personalities the most discussed, and its strategies and tactics the most creative, and its consequences not focused on civilian populations.

That, combined with the Anglo-centric nature of the victory, has led to Waterloo’s outsized reputation as the most symbolic battle in the English-speaking world. Napoleon’s defeat was so decisive that the term “Waterloo” has come to mean any great, final decisive defeat. The symbolic meaning of the battle is of one that’s both a narrative climax and a military climax.

Unfortunately, the symbolic narrative is far too convenient to be true: Napoleon was primarily defeated by the Russian winter during his invasion three years prior; the Grand Armée he took to Waterloo was a shell of its former self; and even had Napoleon managed to win, another army or another coalition would have toppled him soon enough.

But the symbolic power of Waterloo remains, and it motivates Mass Effect 3, to the game’s detriment. And so Shepard leads her ragtag multi-national band of misfits up against the previously nearly-unstoppable aggressors of the Reapers. Both groups are at the apparent height of their powers, triggering a winner-take-all battle, for the fate of the galaxy. Mass Effect 3 wants all the symbolic power of a Waterloo, ignoring that not even Waterloo can successfully carry that weight.

The Crucible is the mechanism by which BioWare attempts to force the military and narrative trajectories to align. Most of the game’s story issues derive from that attempt. Thus the Crucible is Mass Effect 3’s Waterloo.

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That Mass Effect 3 needed to be about the Reaper War derives nearly perfectly from the previous games . Everything in the previous narratives suggested that this war was inevitable, and that hopefully Shepard had done enough to prepare the galaxy to have a fighting chance. It’s therefore not at all a stretch for Mass Effect 3 to comprise the entirety of the Reaper War: the main invasion begins moments after the game starts; the game ends with an action that ends the war instantly.

And, since Mass Effect takes place almost entirely from Commander Shepard’s perspective, that means that Shepard has to be present at the start, at the climax, and at any crucial events. This makes a certain obvious sense—the Reaper War is Shepard’s war, Mass Effect is Shepard’s story—but it constrains the narrative’s flexibility. A reintroduction to a peaceful galaxy doesn’t exist, for example, nor does a war with an inconclusive ending. Most importantly, it negates the chance for Shepard’s narrative climax to be separated from the military climax.

For example, BioWare could have ended Mass Effect 3 with Shepard driving the Reapers away from Earth and destroying much of their fleet, without total victory achieved but with it very clear that the rest of the war would be mopping-up. Or the Reapers could have been slowly defeated over the course of the game/war, with the ending of the game a final assault to finish them off. I don’t bring these alternatives up because they would necessarily have been better plot structures, but instead because by showing their possibility, they illustrate how rigid the combined escalating narrative/war structure that BioWare used ended up being.

BioWare needed to create a story that would have Shepard’s presence at critical moments of the war make sense, while also allowing for a Waterloo. Their answer to that was the Crucible, a plot device of galactic scale.

On the Reapers’ side, the constant escalation leading toward a Waterloo is simple: characters with expertise insist throughout the game that the Reapers cannot be defeated by conventional warfare. Therefore, they’re always near the height of their power, especially as they attack every capital planet in the Mass Effect galaxy. At the very end, their possession of the Citadel and consolidation of their forces at Earth means that they’re never be more powerful.

The simplest way for the Alliance forces to also be at the peak of their power, despite constant Reaper gains at a strategic level, is to give them a superweapon. The Crucible, Shepard is told, has the power to defeat the Reapers permanently, but it needs huge amounts of time and resources to complete. Alliance strength increases according to how close the Crucible was to completion, regardless of how the Reapers succeeded or failed everywhere else in the galaxy. And Shepard, with the fastest, stealthiest ship combined with the most elite special forces, is the perfect woman to put at the center of the the process of seeking out the resources and people needed for the Crucible.

Problem is, while the Crucible is an efficient narrative solution, it isn’t actually an interesting one. It changes the focus of Shepard’s overarching quest from the politics and relationships that make up the Mass Effect games at their best, into an issue of technology and resources. And since Shepard isn’t involved in the tech, and since Mass Effect 3 isn’t a strategy game, the Crucible becomes little more than a magical symbol of progress through the game. It’s a galaxy-wide fetch quest.

Hence the side quests of Mass Effect 3 are dominated by fetching “war assets” to build and protect the Crucible, and are rarely memorable on their own (especially compared to side quests from the previous games in the series).

It’s no surprise that most of the game’s energy, best moments, and best battles take place during the main plot missions. The most memorable of those tend to take place across the first two-thirds of the game, before the Crucible takes over the story. For example, Admiral Hackett needs the Turian fleet, the Turians require Krogan ground forces, the Krogans demand a cure for the genophage, the cure exists on a Salarian world, then it’s distributed on Tuchanka. Shepard has to visit all of these locations, and negotiate and fight her way through all of the conflicts.

This is followed by the attempted coup on the Citadel, and then the Quarian/Geth confrontation at Rannoch. These are all critical moments in the war, and would be so regardless of the Crucible. After them, Crucible-based quests to find the final piece called the Catalyst take priority, and the narrative gets less interesting before totally falling apart at the very end.

The three good-to-great stories of the add-ons keep this pattern going. “Omega” focuses on Aria T’loak, an interesting but previously under-examined character, and the politics of how she runs her strategically critical space station. “Citadel” marvelously reframes the game and the entire series as a fun action-adventure romp starring a group of larger-than-life characters and their relationships. “Leviathan” is arguably the most intriguing in terms of the war narrative, as it attaches Shepard to an X-Files-like Task Force Aurora dedicated to hunting down old Reaper myths for useful connections to the current war. It’s compelling on its own, but it also suggests an alternate narrative for Mass Effect 3 where Shepard works for Aurora through much of the game.

Finally, the Crucible-based, Waterloo-wannabe narrative structure also ends up leading to some of the ending’s biggest mistakes. In addition to being the climax of the game story and the Reaper War, BioWare also felt compelled to place the game’s central mystery in the climax. The question of “Who are the Reapers and what do they want?” is only vaguely hinted at prior to Shepard’s final assault on the Citadel. The game’s writers turned the Catalyst not only into the final piece of the puzzle in winning the war, but also turned it into the cause and explanation of the war. Thus the arrival at the Catalyst, in the last 15 minutes of the games, turns into a massive exposition dump, with previously unanswered—and in some cases, unasked—questions. After an emotionally draining sequence on earth, both in terms of narrative and action, the Crucible and the Catalyst just start talking and explaining, instead of resolving or inspiring.

It may have been possible to BioWare to write a narrative for Mass Effect 3 that possessed the symbolic power of a Waterloo. But Waterloo is more symbol than reality because the structure of war rarely fits logic of storytelling. That made BioWare’s chosen task was exceedingly difficult, and they only partially succeeded by using the shortcut of the Crucible. But the Crucible took them away from Mass Effect’s narrative strengths of characters and politics, and toward less satisfying magic and mythology.

Rowan Kaiser is a freelance writer living in the Bay Area who has contributed to The A.V. Club, The American Prospect, Ars Technica, IGN, Joystiq, Kotaku, Polygon, and many more. If you’d like help or learn more, check out his Patreon. Or follow him on Twitter. He also has two kitties.