It’s N7 day EA’s attempt at manufacturing a special day for their sci fi series Mass Effect, trying and failing to replicate the success of Star Wars day (May the 4th be with you). They didn’t manage to pull off that level of recognition and with Andromeda seemingly killing the series I doubt it ever will, but since I have such love for the Mass Effect trilogy let’s talk about the high and lows of the controversial Mass Effect 3.
Let’s kick things off by talking about what everyone goes to a Bioware RPG for; the online multiplayer. To be fair while the first was an RPG with shooter controls by 3 it became much more a shooter focused combat system with RPG elements so a multiplayer option is not that strange especially as they wisely kept it as PvE with their own horde mode. It’s a pretty fun horde mode helped due to the variety of character choices with many combinations of class and race that steadily grew over its life, but here is the first big problem with it you’ve got to unlock these via loot boxes that you can of course buy with microtransations. Free to play elements are always a frustration for e and it’s even worse when in a full price game, Mass Effect 3’s was pretty bad to the extent that you’d have to get multiple copies of weapons to level them up and make them effective.
Another big new element affecting the multiplayer are the new enemies to fight, there’s a good mix of them to make it interesting the problem is that they include instakill moves. The problem with these is that they work against the RPG elements of the game, a big tanky build designed to take lots of damage will die just as quickly as a glass cannon build, add in possible lag for online that can see you magnetized back into an instakill attack you avoided and you have a recipe for frustration. Despite the frustrating elements I did spend a lot of time in this mode, but obviously what most people were there for was the single player.
Putting aside the big controversial part for now I actually quite enjoyed the story, part of that is probably that I had the unique perspective of not having my choices carried forward due to switching platform. If you’d been playing since the first game you can have all the “right” choices carried into this game, if you haven’t done this you’ve got to face some real consequences. The biggest example of this is the conclusion of the Quarian vs Geth storyline. My choice ended up being either to allow the genocide of the Geth or cause the death of the Quarian fleet, I chose the latter and this caused you party member (Since the first game) Tali to remove her mask and kill herself (side note: this should have been where they did the Quarian face reveal), it was incredibly impactful and will stay with me, and I could have totally missed this and saved both if I had my choices from the previous game.
One a more positive note one of my favourite moments was going on a bro date with Garrus on the Citadel to wind down before the final battle. These kind of character conclusion events are where the game really excelled but also highlights one of the big issues with the game. In Mass Effect 2 one of the main objectives was building up your crew, for various reasons most of these people don’t come back to the crew for this game instead having their own story missions with them as NPCs to wrap things up. The problem is that your crew haven’t been replaced, races like Salarian and Krogan that have had party members in previous games are absent and there’s only one new party member race but they were only available as day one paid for DLC, the party diversity is a real step back.
Ok it’s finally tile to address the elephant in the room, the ending was pretty lame. All the choices over the trilogy led to picking one of three colours for a blast that will defeat the reapers, but what if that’s not what really happened? The indoctrination theory was the idea that this choice was a lie as Shepard was being mind controlled by the Reapers. I think this fan idea would have been great as part of the story but it doesn’t work as an ending, you’d need a follow up part where you break out of their control and have a final showdown with the Reapers.
Bioware themselves tried to fix things themselves with some free ending DLC, it added more scenes at the end to explain what happened to the other characters, but the addition that interested me most was a new possible ending. If you instead shoot the star child that gives the usual ending choice then no coloured blast is triggered so the Reapers win, but in the next cycle the warning message Liara made containing everything you’ve learnt in your fight against the Reapers, this message is found early enough to all this new cycle to win and survive. It’s not as personally tied to your own choices so I imagine a lot of people would still be disappointed if this was the default ending but it’s exactly the kind of ending I like, not a happy ending where everything works out despite impossible odds but still containing hope for what will happen afterwards.
Well that was Mass Effect 3, it’s strange to look back now in a post Andromeda world and realise people thought this would be the most controversial Mass Effect, innocent times.
The David E Gamery 