Furthermore, even if you accept it, why isn't this reversible? There are shape change spells in this universe after all. TOB had an ending I still think about occasionally. Well, I need only point to BG3's predecessor to counter that. That it isn't without taking the form of the enemy, that we cannot win as human beings (I include all the playable races in the term since they're all psychologically human enough) comes across to me as wilfully added to the ending to rob me of a sense of victory, based, perhaps, on the misguided notion that an ending where my victory remains undefiled has no meaning. If we are in "the realm of thought", where form arises from thought and action from intent, our intent, our determination - this classic heroic trait, amplified as it has been all the time by Orpheus innate resistance - should be enough. There is no plausible lore that implies, or even suggests, that something like this needs to be done. However, it is firmly denied at exactly this moment, where you might want to invoke it in order to come to terms with the ending, because if form truly did not matter, then there would be no need for anyone to turn into a mind flayer in the first place.Īdd to that that this makes absolutely no sense and it comes out of the blue. I would object on a philosophical level but up to this point, the game is ambiguous enough about that that you might plausibly subscribe to the notion. You might want to argue that form does not matter. The only thing that matters for this moment to feel like a defeat is that someone on your side had to do it. Lost yourself, regardless of whether it was you who underwent the transformation, regardless of whether whoever did it might have been happy about it. Thus, you have won the war, but lost yourself. Which has been, if you played that way, absolutely the point of your story. You have fought not mind flayers as such, necessarily, but certainly that which they represent within the context of this story: the forces of domination and tyranny, of mental corruption, of consumption of intelligent life - note the similarities to ME3's endings here - the forces which you have fought to keep from consuming you from the start of this story. And not just that, you had to become a very representation of it. Lost, because you had to accomodate that which you have been fighting against. In the outer world, we are on the road to victory, but in the inner world of archetypes, of symbolic representation, of magical psychology if you want, on that level which gives our stories their deeper meaning, and in the best of them, their timelessness, you have now lost. The problem arises if you prevent the Emperor from consuming Orpheus' brain, which is in my opinion, the only decision a character with any sort of functional moral compass could make, and are now presented with the "necessity" of someone having to turn into a mind flayer.Īt this point, our victory becomes a superficial one. Which gives me the opportunity to write about why that is the case. One that is, unfortunately, very familiar to me since I felt the same after finishing Mass Effect 3 back in 2013. I noticed I'm not the only one who was, after attempting to get a "good" ending, left with a nagging sense of defeat after finishing BG3 for the first time.
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