I finally finished it! As I've covered before, the Mass Effect series is one of the few modern video games (as defined by outputting in HD) that truly captured my imagination and genuinely impressed upon me the heights to which modern games can achieve. I beat Mass Effect in a weekend in which I literally could not put it down, and then immediately went to Gamestop and bought Mass Effect 2. Note-I NEVER do this. I am generally a very patient person and am more than willing to wait to play a game to save a few bucks on the purchase price, or wait a very long time and save a lot by buying it locally from someone selling it on offerup/craigslist/facebook. But I simply had to play Mass Effect 2, which was a bit more of a grind for me. I thought the writing was positively genius, and the characters and gameplay were much better than the original, but that some of the deeper RPG elements that I loved in the original were gutted in the sequel. My primary joy in RPGs is having flexible character development and the ability to build my character up to the level I want to control my feeling of dominance or desperation throughout, and Mass Effect 2 more or less sapped that from me entirely. But it's objectively a better game, especially if you love detailed and emotional story telling the likes of which only BioWare can bring.
I then set out on my quest to complete the trilogy, and made it the vast majority of the way through the game, stopping only due to the fact that my disc was scratched. By that point, I was admittedly a bit burnt out on the series, having already put well over 70 hours into the three games, and I was ready for a break, so I set it aside.
But then I came back with a vengeance this year, and, being a complete maniac, I decided to beat all three again. And finally, as of last night, I have seen the book closed on Commander Shepard and the Reapers.
The story is, again, fantastic. The conclusion of the story gives you a very difficult choice to make, as well as offering those choices throughout the game. It does feel like your choices are slightly less impactful this time around, but the story telling is there, so this isn't quite as bad as it seems.
You didn't really get as much chance to develop relationships with your side characters this time around, as your building of a bond with them was finished in a small handful of discussions, with no loyalty missions at the end. This was a wonderful way to not just hear from your characters, but also to spend time with each character and feel like you're really earning their loyalty, so it's pretty disappointing that the game is lacking this feature. When you did have missions of this style, they're weirdly featuring old characters from Mass Effect 2, which seems like a mistake. If you want to introduce newer characters like Vega or EDI, you should really give a chance to go in shoulder to shoulder with them to resolve some issue that they're facing in their lives. This aspect is definitely more shallow than in the brilliant Mass Effect 2.
The combat was excellent, and is the best in the series by a mile. The controls are perfect, powers are impactful, and the classes seem balanced, with a necessity to include a wide range of skills in your team. There are a ton of fun fights in the game in which to use these fun combat mechanics.
The music was great! There were a ton of good new songs, but also skillful use of themes and songs from the previous two games, to which you'll have an emotional impact by the time you've finished the first two games.
I really didn't like that there was no end boss fight to the game. It just feels like you need one to make the game pull together and give you that sense of triumph, and the game's ending was a bit lacking as a result.
By far the most frustrating aspect of the game was the game's forcing you to play multiplayer to unlock the best ending(s). I really hate multiplayer shooters, and forcing you to need to engage in this universe for upwards of 20 hours to have a chance to see the best ending was such torture that I just skipped it and did the best I could, and watched the best ending on youtube. If a multiplayer aspect to the game was included throughout the series, that would have been one thing. But to just tack it on to a game which never featured any such requirement through the first two games seemed in poor taste, like they were just desperately trying to add hours to your experience to justify a $60 purchase to the most spoiled generation of video game players who have ever existed.
The player progression was again annoying to me. You can't earn experience from killing bad guys, but just get it in chunks throughout the game for completing objectives, finding med kits, etc. For someone who likes a chance to grind, you'll definitely be hard capped to the degree you can level, which drives me crazy. The leveling system was, again, very basic compared to the genius Mass Effect, but was pretty similar to Mass Effect 2. To most people, this won't be an issue, but it makes the game feel more like a standard FPS and less like an RPG.
Mass Effect 3 is an excellent game, but it is my least favorite in the series. It lacked the excellent player progressions system from Mass Effect, and didn't quite have the same storytelling punch of Mass Effect 2. It's a good conclusion to the series, but I can't help but feel like there was more that could have been done here. I'll give it a 9.0/10.
Up next is a bizarre member of the backlog that I never seriously tried to complete as a kid, but did own and enjoy, so I'm going to try for a quick clearout to get back on pace! I'll also be doing a half-year review of my progress thus far to track how I've been doing on my goal of completing 50 games before the end of the year (spoiler: killing it).
-TRO
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