As a video game, Mass Effect 3 is a 9/10. The gameplay is fun and entertaining. Almost everything I loved about the first two games got better, and almost everything I disliked was removed or improved.

But being a 9/10 video game isn’t anything special. Both of the recent Batman games are a 9/10. Every game in the Assassin’s Creed series is a 9/10.

What makes Mass Effect special is that it is a true work of art. And what makes the ending hurt so much is that it discards everything I felt the writers and artists were trying to communicate throughout the entire series.

Take a look at this mural:

The first time I saw this piece, before I knew anything about it, I had a sense of what it was about. The artist had encoded a message into it: these people were not happy, they were suffering, there was some kind of battle and they had lost.

I am not an art student, nor am I an art snob, so when I learned that this mural was Picasso’s depiction of Guernica, a town in Spain that had been carpet-bombed by the Germans during World War II, I felt vindicated – I had successfully decoded the intended message, to some degree.

This encoding and decoding process is important, it is a hallmark of great art. It’s there in the Picasso and I thought it was present in Mass Effect.

At the beginning of the second game, as the Normandy is being destroyed, Shepard plows through what’s left of the ship to save Joker who is refusing to abandon his post. As Shepard moves from the interior of the ship, where consoles are exploding and fires are raging, to a section of the ship that is exposed to space, the musical score fades to silence and an eerie stillness overcomes you.

There is nothing compelling about the gameplay at this moment – you are pushing the W key on your keyboard, moving Shepard forward. What stands out is the artistry, the feeling that is communicated by the people who crafted that experience.

And while this is an exceptional moment, it really isn’t what makes Mass Effect special.

What makes Mass Effect stand out is the interactive storytelling, which Bioware has transformed from a clever gameplay mechanic into its own medium, a new kind of canvas, which has more in common with a piece of installation art than its digital counterparts.

Consider the renegade interactions with Tali and Legion at the end of the Rannoch mission in Mass Effect 3.

The player in this instance decided to save the Quarians at the expense of the Geth – but is forced to watch Legion die has he is stabbed in the back by Tali. The player pushes a button to fire each shot into Legion. He is made to listen as Legion asks if he has a soul, and he can hear the guilt in Tali’s voice as she answers.

I believe the artists and writers have encoded a message into Mass Effect: free will exists, it is the defining characteristic of life, and all life has value. Depending on your choices the delivery will change, but the message is there, and it is the player’s interaction that gives that message weight.

And that message is repeated, over and over, throughout all three games of the series, in more examples than I could list.

That is, until the end.

This message, that I perceived to exist as I watched Benezia die, as I watched Saren commit suicide, as I destroyed the Collector base, as I encouraged EDI and Joker, as I reconciled the Geth and the Quarians – that message is completely and utterly disintegrated as I am forced into one of three endings that each in some way go against everything I’ve learned so far.

The synthesis ending completely negates free will by imposing this new genetic structure on all life whether they want it or not. The control ending suffers from the same fault – the idea of imposing Shepard’s will onto the Reapers is counter to his previously stated goals.

The destruction ending, which I believe is the cannon ending, as it is the only one in which Shepard lives, is possibly the worst ending of all, from a logical standpoint. Destroying EDI and the Geth goes against everything I felt the game was trying to teach me about the value of life. And forget about the Geth – how many people will die as a result of all technology being destroyed?

I want Ray Muzyka to understand exactly why the ending to Mass Effect is so upsetting: there was no moment of vindication.

Imagine contemplating that mural above for hundreds of hours. You’ve payed hundreds of dollars to sit in front of it. After all of this time, all of that money, when you think you have finally figured it out, someone comes along and says, “Oh, that’s not a Picasso, that’s a Pollock. He made it by filling his ass up with paint and shitting onto the canvas – isn’t it pretty?”

The message that Mass Effect leaves us with in the last five minutes opposes everything we’ve learned so far: free will is a lie, there is no choice, and nothing matters in the end. Do what that machine tells you to do.

This is incredibly depressing, and it’s something I don’t want to believe – I disagree with it, and that’s where my hate for these endings comes from.

I would have rather seen Shepard tell the machines to fuck off and shoot himself in the head than walk down one of those paths.