okay. so now that more time has passed and i'm not quite as unconscious as last night, i think i've gathered some of my thoughts on mass effect 3 and the series as a whole. not saying anything new, just what i've been thinking about.
i remember when mass effect came out. it was about 4.5 years ago, but it feels longer. another space rpg like kotor could only be a good thing. i wasn't expecting anything major from it though, and right at the start i started bobbing my head along to the music (without realizing it) while it built up to the introduction with the logo. and then i was hooked. it was a cool attempt at getting a 1970s/1980s scifi movie in game form, right down to the ability to add grain to the look of it. while i never really loved any one of the characters right away, it has the most memorable moments in the series for me. i remember just sitting there after beating the game, watching the credits the entire time it took for m4 part 2 to finish playing, and enjoying the victory. and i wondered how my choices would eventually affect the third game in the series, but i had faith bioware could pull it off.
mass effect 2 was not mass effect 1. someone here once said mass effect was a sci fi film and mass effect 2 was a sci fi tv show. me2 honestly feels like a collection of dlc, and the story doesn't really matter in relation to the first game. nothing happens and then it ends. the reaper threat is still out there and you've done very little to slow it down and the twists aren't exactly mindblowing (collectors = protheans is about it). to top it off, even the presentation of the game is weaker than the first. it feels like a bunch of people filled in without understanding what the first game was trying to do. you can tell by little things like the way the logo just pops on screen all jarring-like, or the lack of the faunts for the end credits. all the cinematic aspects were thrown away to make it feel more like a video game (and i'm cool with that usually, but this was meant to be an exception). despite that, i did enjoy the game a lot. the characters were a lot of fun, and i loved seeing garrus and tali back. i even loved some of the alterations to the presentation like the mission accomplished screen (which i found satisfying).
but after saving everyone on the crew, and knowing that they would be combined with my mass effect 1 crew as well as new people for mass effect 3, i was worried bioware had bitten off more than they could chew. something like shepard dying should have been the big dramatic cliffhanger for mass effect 2, and it's used at the very beginning of the game. i felt the threat of the reapers vanished during mass effect 2, so i didn't feel like they were quite as built up to as they could have been.
the most satisfying moment of the game was brokering peace between the geth and the quarians. you have the main enemies of the first game, who are also given some decent room for backstory in mass effect 2, and have the arc with them finish up in mass effect 3. it's a three-game arc that actually feels like you had some sway in making things happen.
there were other cool and well-done moments. i liked the death scenes for thane and mordin. i liked garrus being awesome. i liked facing off against a reaper with the tracking gun. i liked how the final scene on earth started with your final goodbyes, and everyone on the weakened task force being slowly whittled down to just a handful of soldiers, until it's finally a desperate sprint to the citadel beam.
i can also appreciate the scene with the illusive man mimicking the scene with saren from the first game, but i never cared about the illusive man as a villain. not sure why, but it may have something to do with his role in mass effect 2. i also don't mind the choices given at the end that let you decide how to save the galaxy, even though the endings all appear to be palette swaps of each other.
i'm not sure what went wrong, but my guess is mismanagement from electronic arts and maybe bioware itself. moving writers and designers around during an ambitious project like this was not a good idea. the ending being so simple makes me think the game was rushed to meet a certain date, because the whole point of the trilogy was to be decisions you made in the first game affecting the outcome of even the third game, assuming you stick with it. this is why the stuff with the geth and the quarians was so successful. it's like the entire team ran out of time at the end, and the game was pushed to be out in a certain quarter just to meet sales expectations.
so the most unfortunate thing about mass effect 3 is that it completely fails at the very end to live up to the ambition set forth by the original game. there are other problems i have with it, like the lack of character stuff or actual important things being done in the middle of the game. i think if there had been a huge galactic summit between the quarians, krogan, turians, asari, salarians, and humans, and you had to get support from each one of the alien factions by completing missions that had been set up in the previous games, it would have been a little better organized, and probably have kept the focus on the reapers and not cerberus through a lot of the game. oh well.