This is basically a long, somewhat elaborate rant about things that went went wrong in the last part of the Mass Effect-series. Spoilers ahead, you have been warned.
I mostly, probably fully, stand by the nature of the criticism I’ve brought here. Maybe these days I would find other words, but for the historical record, here you go.
FutureSjut
Okay. Where to start. I’m usually the last person who complains about plotholes, flat characters, shallow storywriting, scriptet events or anything, as long as there is fun involved. Just to let you know that it takes a lot to get me angry about stuff like that.
Another note: Everything which dates further back than the Proteans is credited to them, because I’m that lazy.
The minigames are gone. All gone. No more hacking, no more picking locks, nothing. Which brings the game down to “shoot people, talk to people, probably shoot at them”. I’m a fan of minigames, as long as they are well made and provide some fun and relief from shooting at people. Thats a overall-thingy, so it comes first.
Mass Effect 3. The Reapers are invading planets in the whole galaxy, and it doesn’t look good. Shepherd gets out of Alliance custody to do what he does best: kick some ass. So you get away from Earth, go to Mars, search the Prothean archives and find a superweapon which can destroy the reapers. Oh wait. It’s not that easy. You have to shoot your way through a shitload of Cerberus troops and start wondering (you do, by Word Of God) what they are doing here. Cerberus, big bad cooperation, highly xenophobic, wants to save humanity and bringt it into a leading position. You have encountered them before, in ME1 you could shut down several operations as sidequests (operation for which every ethics commitee would have you shot), and in ME2 they actually brought you back from the dead, got you a ship and a crew and told you to shoot at the Collectors. You also could shut down several Cerberus-operations for which every ethics commitee would have you shot. On spot. Several times. With a 205mm naval artillery gun.
Anyways, Cerberus are on Mars and want to stop you. They fail. Some things happening can be explained by actually intelligent staff, but others prove the opposite. The moment a civilian with no military experience or training can spot deep holes in the enemy tactics (deep holes even for an ego-shooter), something went wrong. Okay, so you have this superweapon, need to know about a certain part (the Catalyst), need to find people to build it for you, fleets to defend it, etc, etc. Let the games begin.
With a flashback. Due to the fact that Shepherd witnessed the death of a small boy when leaving earth, he has flashbacks. We’re talking about a career soldier, who has in the last two parts alone witnessed (and dealt) more destruction and death than a normal commando in two wars. Depending on your choices while character creation, he’s also the one survivor of a slaver attack on his homeworld and witnessed a whole platoon marines (HIS whole platoon marines) getting eaten by a thresher maw. I don’t know what you think about this, but I’d say this man is rather immune to flashback-inducing experiences. Even more so if you play a renegade Shepherd, or a completly nuts-Shepherd who runs around, commits genocide if he thinks he needs to, and beats down the same reporter three times in three games. Yes, you can do that, and yes, I’ve said genocide. If played right, Shepherd is directly responsible for 5 (five) genocides.
These flashbacks beat character continuity without the player’s consent and such things should not be done.
Okay. So, you’re running around the galaxy, kicking Reaper-ass, Reaper-minion-ass, Cerberus-ass, some Geth-ass and several other kinds of asses. Everything fine so far. Then you’re on Thessia, the Asari-homeworld, to get an important artifact which tells you what exactly the Catalyst is and where to find it. But wait, that would be WAY too easy, so let’s send in an old acquaintance. Kai Leng, now master assassin of Cerberus and victim of a very bad case of drama. On your first meeting (depending on the outcome of ME2), he gets his ass kicked by Thane Krios, another assassin, who is in his last months due to an incurable illness. Yes, the Grand Master Assassin of Cerberus gets beaten up by someone who needs daily medical attention. But back to the action on Thessia:
He comes in and starts mocking you. When he’s finally done, you start shooting at him. I dont know if it was a bug or if my guns where just very effective, but he didn’t move more than 2 meters in the whole fight. You shoot down his shields, he regenerates. He regenerates three times in total, never back to full, but to increasingly smaller total amounts. Okay, fine. After his third regeneration, when you could just tear that SOB to pieces, you suddenly stop shooting. He starts mocking you again, in terms of “you’ve got stronger, but not strung enough”. Young man, this epic hero kicked your ass before. Now he’s doing it again, if it weren’t for that lazy-ass writer who thought it a good idea that you don’t. He calls a gunship, blows the temple you’re in to kingdom come and leaves with your plot-relevant information. Dear BioWare-writers. I have no problem with my characters ass getting kicked by a worthy enemy who puts up a fight. Nor do I have a problem with a Big Bad showing up, blowing my objective to kingdom come, insulting me and leaving. However, I do have a problem with an incompetent foe showing up, insulting me, getting nearly killed, crying for mommy, insulting me again, AND sending me an insulting email afterwards. Either I can’t beat a foe, then I expect either a fight (one hell of a fight) before the script kicks in and saves the story, or the script to kick in directly. This was frustrating as hell. It’s BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD storywriting to let THE HERO stop shooting THE BAD GUY because THE PLOT demands it. Seriously, if Shepherd would just have emptied another magazine as soon as the fucktard started talking again, Leng would have fallen down. Be nice to your players, don’t do something like this.
You finally kill Leng in the Cerberus HQ towards the end of the game, but not without him getting up again and failing a last time to kill you. Please have competent assassins, or none at all.
Neccessary information: The Catalyst turns out to be the Citadel, the Illusive Man, suffering a bad case of indoctrination, travels to the citadel and informs the reapers. He can’t allow anyone to interfere in his plans to control the Reapers. Over Earth, the Citadel’s arms are closed, and you have to open them in order to dock the earlier mentioned Prothean weapon.
If I had known how it ends before, I’d never bought the game. I’ll give a short conclusion before the rant continues:
So, you’re back on earth, get an AA-gun down (killing your fourth fullgrown reaper), get to the field-HQ, can talk to everyone one last time, and get your orders.
“Move through the no man’s land, kill another reaper, get into the transportation beam to the citadel. Kick ass. Save galaxy. Dismiss!”
So you get your sorry ass running through no man’s land, then face the Reaper. You have to get him away from the beam, which interferes with missle guidance, and in the meantime kill a fuckton of minions. Including several Banshees. Luckily you can use the Reaper’s big fat laser against the minions, but it’s still a frustratingly hard fight. I thought “wtf, why do they make the way to the endfight en the Citadel so hard”. Well, as it turned out, this was the endfight. You make a run for the beam, everyone except you, Anderson and for some reasons your teammates get killed. You fall, wake up again to hear the fact that everyone is dead, move forward to the beam. You go to the Citadel. You have a little talk with Anderson and the Illusive Man. People get shot. The Citadel opens, the weapon docks. The usual.
But nothing happens after the device is docked, so Shepherd tries to investigate. He falls down and is literally ascended to the top of the Citadel, where he meets the boy from his flashbacks again. He tells him that he is the Catalyst, the Citadel is a part of him, and the Reapers are his. The Reapers exist to bring order to the chaos by harvesting all sufficiently develop lifeforms every 50.000 years to stop them from creating synthetic life, which would inevitably destroy all organic life. With the Prothean device in place, the cycle is no longer an option, but there are three new alternatives:
- Killing ALL synthetic life in the galaxy, including the Geth, every VI and AI, and Shepherd, who has enough implants due to his ressurection to count as sufficiently synthetic. “But the peace will not last. Some day sour children will create new synthetic life, and the chaos will begin again.”
- Gaining control over the Reapers and die in the process.
- Synthesis, aka “add your energy to the device, and all synthetic and organic life will be recombined in a new life, a new DNA”.
Option 3 is presented as the ultimate peak and goal of evolution, and every option destroys the Mass Relays.
Let’s start deconstructing.
Everybody’s dead. Nope. Your squadmates in the run for the beam, assumed KIA, can show up in the epiloque. EXTREME logic hole. Shouldn’t be that way. Must not be that way. Especially if a character bases his actions on the life or death of one this squadmates. Oh, and they don’t show up on the Citadel, even if they have survived the run. Which is a heavy breach of consistency for some characters.
You die in the end. Okay, that’s a no-brainer. To have THIS man/woman running around any longer, especially in the several-genocide-style would be non-credible. Alright, even more non-credible.
You HAVE to take a renegade-option to shoot the Illusive Man. If you don’t talk him into killing himself, you can either shoot him before he shoots Anderson, or afterwards. Doing nothing results in Critical Mission Failure, aka Good Guy Down. This could have been resolved in a better way, without the need of player interaction where the only options are “shoot someone” and “failure”.
Okay. Then: synthetic life WILL ULTIMATELY DESTROY EVERY ORGANIC LIFE, exclamation mark, new chapter on next page. I’d love to hear the story behind this claim of the crucible. But it just stands there, while the Reapers tear apart Earth. “We don’t kill the advanced species, we harvest them. They live on in the Reapers.” Seriously. But alright, if you say so. To stop the organic life from being wiped out by its own synthetic children, it has to be destroyed, no other options. The wiping is neccessary. Okay, I’ll take even this for granted without questioning it further.
So I choose my way of ending all this, move (limp, in an frustratingly slow speed, which is forced on you during the whole endgame – together with non-jumpable dialoque) to the according point of interest, and get a nice movie. Which is basically always the same, only differently coloured, and with different reactions of the reapers. Then you see the Mass Relay of the Sol-System relaying the action you’ve choosen, and the Normandy trying to escape the failing mass effect field. It’s NEVER explaind, WHY THE FUCK the Normandy even DID this FTL-jump. There is NO REASON to leave Sol. They had to get your endgame-squadmates, ABANDONING YOU, getting to the portal and doing the jump directly after the call that the final assault has failed. I don’t see any sense here.
The Mass Relays get destroyed. Every single one of them. The BACKBONE OF INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL GETS BLOWN TO PIECES! I’ve no idea how anyone of my big, multispecies battlefleet will get home. Which directly leads to biggest and most epic single failure of the game:
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Fallout is THE ultimate example of how to do it. After the game, every NSC and every location got their own private epilogue, with a shot in the movie and a few words about what has happend and what will happen to them. All depending on the players actions.
Mass Effect? Well, theres the Normandy going down, there some people getting out, credits, brief final necrologue telling you that you have become one hell of a legend.
I want to know what happend. I want to see the consequences of my actions. Did the Krogans start another war? Do the Geth stay friendly? The Rachni? Will Earth, Palaven, Thessia be rebuild? What about my teammates? My romance? Other NSC? Will Joker and EDI be the first biologic/synthetic marriage? BioWare, TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! This is the one point which ruined the whole series in my eyes. Harsh words, but that’s how it is. None of the things I’ve done has “official” consequences. None of the decisions made in any part of the series have consequences past the third part. Of course, things happen based on what you’ve done, but in the end there’s nothing. I have no motivation to walk through this game again, because nothing I do in any other way will matter in the long run. Maybe I’ll go on it with another Shepherd just for the sake of another playstyle. But that’s a BIG maybe. Same for DLC. It doesn’t make any sense to bring in DLC after this ending. Everything you do would happen a) before the showdown and b) have NO FUCKING CONSEQUENCES, BECAUSE THERE ARE NO LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES!
Long rant short: BioWare, you can do better than this. A few words for everyone who is Still Alive, as well as for the species and the main planets. It wouldn’t have been hard. It would have been much more pleasing.
Okay. That’s it. For now, I don’t see a way to improve this, and all mayor points of extreme annoyance are covered. If you’ve come this far, thanks for reading.