Game Anatomy: Dance Party Ending

The following post has uncensored discussions of the endings of Mass Effect 3 and Saints Row IV.  While these games are several years old, I don’t want to be an asshole.  This is your warning for spoilers.

It is very, very hard to overstate how bad the ending of Mass Effect 3 is.  It’s been done, but it’s telling that, four and a half years later, people are still mad about it, and people are still wary about how Mass Effect Andromeda will turn out, no matter how positive a response fans had to Dragon Age: Inquisition after the mess that was Dragon Age 2.  Mass Effect 3’s ending isn’t bad just because of what it did within in context of the series, although even in a vacuum, it would be possibly one of the worst endings in fiction, but it also stands as a problem that plagued video games throughout the seventh generation of video game consoles, an attempt to make the ending more “real,” less “video gamey” and an attempt at some sort of “legitimacy.”  Games abandoned what made them good, and what worked as a medium, almost en masse (a trend that Metal Gear Solid 4 hilarious lampooned before it had even gotten as bad as it would), in order to essentially look like a pale imitation of bad film, and Mass Effect 3’s ending went as bad as it did (and, actually, almost all of Priority: Earth and the Charnel House as well) was because Mac Walters and Casey Hudson were so concerned with how legitimate the game felt, and wanted to strip away the parts they felt were too video gamey.  While this did spare us from what would have been a terrible, solo, boss battle against the Illusive Man, it also meant we got the ghost child and specially colored endings.  It was not a good decision.

Saint’s Row IV spent the entire game making fun of a lot of the tropes Bioware uses in Mass Effect, whether it’s the one button romances, the silly loyalty missions or the goofy costume changes after the missions are complete.  It’s funny, with criticism mixed with praise, and it really makes the game shine when it really, really shouldn’t.  However, the ending is where they stop being nice, and it manages to ramp the game up to having one of the best endings in video games.  Not only does it completely subvert the ending of Mass Effect 3, by literally having a sociopathic criminal become the savior of the galaxy through the power of friendship, it also viciously mocks the creators, the concept of how “dark” Mass Effect got and how self important the ending felt by literally having the characters have a dance party in the penthouse from Saints Row the Third.  Then they rescue Jane Austen, because Saints Row manages to be more literary than Mass Effect 3.

Chose Pierce because most of them were Kinzie. This isn’t a family blog, but her dance is kinda sexual. Image Copyright Deep Silver and Volition, Inc.

Saints Row IV is not a game where the good guys win by default.  Despite being the most powerful woman on the planet, the Boss still gets abducted by Zinyak, the White House is destroyed, her friends are captured, and very soon after, Earth is destroyed.  There’s no getting Earth back, billions of people die and the bad guy is so ridiculously powerful, he’s almost a god.  Centuries old, possessing incomparable technology and super powers unlike anyone else has demonstrated in the series, Zinyak does not fuck around.  As tough as the Reapers sounded like, they never managed to blow up Earth (or really anything, although I guess they killed Keith David in that one, but here he gets super powers).  Zinyak has weight, he actually brings the characters to their darkest hour, taking literally everything from them when they’re at their most powerful, because whatever the Saints have in that instance, it’s nothing compared to him.  Then he blows their planet up at the end of Act 1.

In a lot of ways, this is what makes the Dance Party ending work so well.  Saints Row has never been a difficult series (and 4 might actually be the easiest in the series), but from a narrative standpoint, the Dance Party is earned.  The Boss goes from not even being able to hurt Zinayk in their first encounter to taking their revenge, taking everything away from them and, eventually, killing them.  It’s awesome, it’s one of the best final missions in the game, and when it’s over, the dance party is perfect, tying directly into the themes of the series.  This is a game about friendship, and while they can never bring Earth back, they can at least celebrate their well earned victory.

However, it’s not just a, well deserved, jab at Mass Effect, but at the industry as a whole.  Saints Row games have always been funny, but they’ve also reveled in the fact they were video games, structuring themselves in such a way as to tell their stories, which admittedly could get silly more often than it didn’t.  Still, they didn’t try to be bad movies, they knew they were video games, and they used the medium to tell the story.  It’s part of the reason why the game works as well as it does.  So, instead of going full on dark and serious like a lot of games were doing in the early 2010s, Saints Row IV goes full on hilarious and ends with the heroes getting a clean win and celebrating by dancing and unfreezing Jane Austen.  Gaming needed that in 2013, and only now does it seem that the industry might be getting the point.