Was Mass Effect 3 as bad as I remember? - A colorful ending to a beloved trilogy

at the beginning of 2012 bioware released an end to their mass effect trilogy after four and a half years the game promised a satisfying conclusion to a beloved series of games it promised that all of these characters that you got to know and appreciate would have their stories conclude to some degree it promised that all of the potential paths which you had chosen throughout the other two games would impact your experience in a way that was unique to your playthrough it was one of the most anticipated releases that i had ever waited for with baited breath one that had me pre-ordering the collector's edition of the game and it delivered everything that i expected until it didn't the characters that i had grown fond of had many of their stories wrapped up the threat that had plagued the galaxy went from looming in the background to making himself known in a terrifyingly powerful way and yet the last sensation that i had about mass effect 3 was that it concluded the trilogy on such a lukewarm note that i never decided to play it again in the decade since its release it's a puzzling sensation because i have a lot of memories from the game that are positive many of the big story events and the direction that a lot of the companions wound up taking were such highlights that i remember those scenes as if i played the game yesterday and yet for years now there were only three things that really came to my mind instantly when someone mentioned mass effect 3 red blue and green it's a conclusion that really stained the game for me and i wasn't alone on that take the backlash against bioware was so heavy that they wound up pushing out an extended cut dlc to try to flesh out the ending a little bit more but ultimately that didn't actually change too much with what happened in each choice the admonishment towards this ending was so strong that petitions were formed and signed red blue and green cupcakes were sent to the bioware offices and death threats were made against individual bioware employees which is the most moronic thing i've ever heard and i'll never understand the headspace that you have to be in to send a death threat to someone over a video game but my dive into the former two games has led to this and i have to wonder if i was too harsh on mass effect 3 back when it released i've never seen the extended cut i've never played the dlc or know what it does to help this game's shortcomings so in this video i'm going to be taking another more forgiving in some ways and more critical in others look at mass effect 3. i'll be evaluating its mechanics its plot points how well it ties into the previous two games and whether i think it's overall worth playing or not before i begin i'll note that i'm going to be continuing to play on the legendary edition because the second game save is already there and all the dlc has already packed into it with no hassle i also have another sponsor with this plate that will show up about halfway or so through the video so try not to be too alarmed and finally i kind of have a brief question just because this feels like the finale of the series for me but do you think that andromeda is worth covering i know there's been a lot of press about it since its release but i don't really know if it's actually worth you know going over like i do but yeah i guess it was just something that popped into my mind alright let's get to it so right away the game allows me to import my shep as you might expect it also allows me to choose a new class for him if i want which is something that i don't really need to cover as thoroughly in this video seeing as each class is nearly identical to the previous game's classes so with that in mind i'm going to stick with vanguard like i did in mass effect 2 just because i enjoyed its aggressive playstyle quite a lot and now we begin soon after the events which took place in the arrival dlc from the last game in which shepard destroyed a relay in order to stave off the reaper threat for a little longer since then shepard's been grounded on earth for a sort of probation period which has had him getting used to a more normal lifestyle of course that doesn't last long as one of the game's companions marches in to tell shepard that something urgent has transpired after walking with anderson and briefly meeting up with caden it soon becomes apparent that the reapers are close to earth of course the earth defense force here is about as slack-jawed as the citadel council and they grill shepherd about the reapers as if the guy hasn't literally been waving his arms and screaming about them since the first game well they start listening to him right around the time the reapers land on earth and begin wholesale obliterating it which unsurprisingly might be a little too late thankfully no one important dies and shep and anderson begin marching their way towards the chaos to get to the normandy the leveling system shows its slight overhaul immediately when pausing to look at the menus as i start at the same level that i ended up with in the second game along with the same skill points this presents a minor problem as i wound up sinking points into incendiary ammo in the second game just because i didn't know where else to spend them since mass effect 3 gives my class two new skills along with a cap of six on prior skills instead of four i now had things that i would have spent those incendiary points on so what i wound up doing was backing out firing up mass effect 2 resetting my skills and importing my character again it's not really the game's fault but i guess it would have been nice for the devs to consider that new skills might mean that people want to respect and redistribute their points at the start of the game especially when i couldn't find any way of skipping the 8 or so minute introduction sequence it is worth noting that you can respec much later after a couple of hours on the normandy but i didn't realize that until i got to that point our new skills encompass the likes of fitness which gives me more health shields and melee damage and nova which is basically another biotic attack which uses my shields to inflict massive damage further playing into that high risk high reward style of combat that vanguard is known for i'm interested in both of these especially since my companion unlocked skill is now gone from the previous game my end goal is to be able to charge enemies blast them with nova and then charge them again to basically regain my shields either way let's jump into what combat and exploration looks like on our way to the normandy so the second game's ammo system is still in effect as it has you picking up these cooling cartridges to make sure that your gun can still fire without overheating itself i never really explained this in my second video because i didn't actually look into it until later when some comments pointed it out but in the first game the lore was that ammo wasn't a thing because technology had come far enough to invent weapons that use a mass effect shield basically firing tiny metal shavings the size of a grain of sand making the need for ammo cartridges a thing of the past this also meant that if you fired your gun too quickly it would overheat and need to cool down mass effect 2 made it so that the guns got rid of the internal cooling system in favor of thermal clips which meant that guns wouldn't overheat but would have to be quote unquote reloaded there's actually an entire conversation later on in this game detailing the criticism that bioware got for this shift explaining the change away as something that made sense i think i saw some guys fighting over a thermal clip a what a thermal clip they stop weapons from overheating sorry just a joke wait where do these thermal clips come from i thought weapons cooled down they used to after the geth attack a few years back we switched to thermal clips well that sounds like a major step backward you might as well be going back to limited ammunition it's not ammunition conrad i just don't think it's a very good idea i'll be sure to let every military organization in the galaxy know that what it sounds like to me is that some higher up at ea or bioware decided that rpgs don't sell as well as action shooters and what's an action shooter without ammo cartridges yeah either way the whole combat system is about the same as it was in the last entry with the addition of combat rolling i wound up rolling more accidentally than intentionally since bioware still hadn't figured out how to not bind use sprint cover and roll all to the same [ __ ] key for some reason honestly the whole thing at this stage feels like a gears of war game which is probably what the devs were going for and while i did enjoy gears of war it feels like mass effect has definitely lost its identity combat wise from game to game exploration is a bit more involved as you can now hurdle gaps in addition to the levels having a bit of verticality to them now which has shepard dropping off of predetermined ledges and climbing up ladders rather than having to find a slope to ascend or descend it's not anything incredible but i guess it's still nice to see honestly though even though the environment is a lot more dynamic it's now hit that stage where i can literally see the path that i'm going to follow when the wreckage falls perfectly into ramps bridges and very obvious crossing areas while i do agree that the former games had an issue with everything needing to have a ramp to ascend it never really bothered me in the way that watching rubble turn into terrain that i can traverse bugs me either way let's jump back to the part where earth is ravaged and billions are dying so anderson and big shep run through these buildings with no one in them besides this one child who slithers out from a vent like a mysterious snake vendor before retracting further into certain death i'm assuming that the other humans here have been thoroughly huskified as husks are now roaming around the area in droves i'm not a huge fan of how cheesy some of this dialogue is and while this did happen occasionally in mass effect 2 it happens almost immediately in three take my hand you can't help me it's hard enough fighting a war but it's worse knowing no matter how hard you try you can't save them all exactly yeah that's definitely some dialogue that you would hear in this married john through the burning wreckage it certainly wouldn't be something along the lines of oh god oh [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] hurry get through the wreckage the building's gonna collapse [ __ ] [ __ ] god [ __ ] after blasting through a few waves of reaper forces the normandy arrives and anderson goes hey look i know the council has historically never listened to you about anything ever but you need to go alone while i the former ambassador of humanity to the council stay behind and help a couple of soldiers first off what the [ __ ] second of all that's really stupid so it's up to shepard caden and james vega to head over to the council to try to flag them down for help i've historically regarded this introduction to the game as one of the most powerful intros to a game ever but i don't think it really hits the same when re-watching it unfortunately i mean yes it's very cool and heavy to a degree to watch the reapers land and demolish earth yes this music is absolutely spot on and this particular song is one of my favorites from the series it was one of the first songs that i heard and it really made me think about video game music differently but i think that knowing what happens definitely reduces the impact of it all as i found myself more put off by anderson staying behind then i felt bad about watching the vessel containing the snake boy from before getting shot to [ __ ] on our way out of earth's orbit we get a message from admiral hackett ordering us to make a pit stop on mars for some information that will help us against the reapers i'll get to the personalities and stories behind kaden vega and everyone else that we pick up in the companion analysis later so for now the all you really need to know is that we're here on mars to pick up both the information and liara who will be rejoining us for this game the first thing that really makes itself known is the weight system which i actually find to be an interesting addition to this game so it isn't your standard system where every meta gel weighs 0.5 weight and instead only takes your weapon loadout into consideration and even then it still allows you to equip as much as you want more or less but at the expense of how quickly or slowly your powers regenerate this is at the expense of stripping down class restrictions allowing for any class to equip the 5 main weapon types if a player chooses so if you're going for a full-on biotic power build you're not going to want to bring too many heavy weapons so that your powers can regen faster but if you're just a soldier who wants to shoot the baddies then it's likely that you won't really care about how fast your powers regenerate i actually kind of dig it as it made me decide right then and there whether or not i wanted to try out the whole dash and smash build or to spring for bringing my combat rifle in addition to my shotgun and pistol i wound up going for the former to give my hypothesis here a try [Music] yeah the whole dash and blast combo is stupidly overpowered and it makes my game footage look ridiculous i don't even think i need weapons most of the time so it turns out that cerberus has gotten through shepard's breakup with them and is now taken to executing the people on mars for reasons unknown to us right now kaden still hasn't quite gotten over the idea that shepard was working with cerberus at one point and immediately starts grilling shep for the reason why cerberus is here shepard i need a straight answer about what do you know anything about why cerberus is here what makes you think i know what they're up to you worked for them for god's sakes how am i not supposed to think that my brother in christ we just slaughtered them what makes you think that we're still on good terms i mean to be fair to caden i think he's just lashing out and trying to wrap his head around earth being invaded in addition to the past emotional trauma of shep not calling him after being resurrected but i don't know we'll we'll talk more about kaidan's mistrust later after we make it to the archives here we watch as liara is scrambling through the ventilation system as two cerberus soldiers chase her she doesn't use her pistol or powers yet for some reason but it's okay because the soldiers have stormtrooper aim when she makes it out she remembers that she has powers or she now has room to cast the hand signs required to throw out a pulse singularity or something and then she shoots them with zero remorse which is fun to watch as it really cements her more matured and less starry-eyed personality that she's taken on she goes on to state that she's found a potential way to defeat the reapers locked away in mars archives which she defines as a prothean blueprint for a device to disable the reapers since cerberus is on a permanent mission to establish humanity as the reigning species they also want their hands on that device so this has now become a race to the center of this tootsie pop which shepard and the gang obviously win [Applause] this whole ordeal has us making our way through these cerberus troops figuring out that a double agent let them in and discovering that they've been experimenting on their own soldiers with reaper technology hello this is delta team anybody there is this commander shepard well i you literally have the most recognizable voice in the entire galaxy damn it i knew i shouldn't have done all of those citadel advertisements this whole area is kind of a hey look how cool and action-packed the combat is now sort of ordeal which becomes grating as the game continues to show off the staggering technology behind rolling from cover to cover storming to safety and crossing gaps in combat i do like how these cerberus dummies had the insight to blow up the tracks on the way over to them with explosives but then they just sent another car on the opposite track to perfectly line up with our car really keeps me in the moment here and definitely doesn't feel like a call of duty campaign level so we make our way to the core of this thing and the elusive man pops his wrinkled ass in to gloat about how shepard's too late and has a low iq basically cerberus sees this as an opportunity to harvest the reaper's technology and not to just destroy them of course this is all a stall for time as his agent is uploading the data while deleting it from the archive we wind up tracking her down to somewhere close nearby before a scripted chase sequence occurs which has her scrambling around like a scooby-doo character it's really aggravating when a game is this obvious about an unwinnable event as i literally have the tools to charge her down only for her to wiggle her legs around like a fall guy's bean and magically teleport 15 feet ahead of where she was whatever i guess when we make it topside she jumps into a shuttle james kamikazes her and she pops out and grabs kaden by his morrowind npc head and bashes it against the shuttle i take down her t-1000s before picking her up like a suitcase and escaping mars and now it's off to the citadel for a rousing round of getting rejected by the council for the 43rd time in these games oh yeah and to make sure that caden doesn't have a texas-sized hole in his head the citadel isn't as fun as it was in the previous entries at least not yet as my only options right now are to go to the hospital or the council area fortunately the hospital at least has a little shopping kiosk which allows me to upgrade my metagel capacity and to teach my pokemon the peruvian whiskey move so at least that was fun [Music] visiting cayden is i don't know it feels forced here like as much as i'm not a huge fan of ashley i do think that with male shep she probably would have had the better scene here just due to the potential romance in the first game as things stand caden and shepard have not been on great terms for a long time now and seeing shepard deliver these heartfelt lines feels like a little too much had this sequence occurred later in the game after the two had patched up their friendship i would have felt a little better about it but either way that's all there really is to do here let's get this [ __ ] show on the road so the first big thing to note here is that houdina is now the counselor to earth while this may be a small thing it's also the first of a string of decisions which are overridden or tossed aside in this game i chose anderson to be the counselor but the devs wrote in that he got tired of it and went back to serving earth's alliance which explains his presence there i don't want to raise hell about this particular point but it does make me feel not very great about the pseudo option that i got to decide on at the end of mass effect 1. i think i would have felt a lot better if i had witnessed anderson doing some cool things for the council before this maybe something that affected mass effect 2. he does reinstate your spectre status if you didn't save the council in the first game but since i did save them all i really got was a chat with him about council life in the second game before he moved back to earth either way i remembered this whole ordeal being more of a circus than it actually is yes earth was attacked but the reapers are moving in on the planets of other races as well which means that everyone on the council is watching out for their own people it's funny because quite a few people pointed out to me that when i called ashley xenophobic in the first game that it turned out that she was right to be because the council abandons humanity in this game but it's not like the reapers are all sitting in earth's solar system just having a field day and playing baseball with pluto they sent a chunk of their forces to each of these systems and are wreaking havoc on every race that they can find of course the council isn't going to just send their forces to help earth there are fires everywhere now i'm not saying that they're not incompetent because they've definitely dismissed every warning about the reapers that they could but this whole idea that ashley is right to distrust aliens because they would abandon humanity when their backs are against the wall is like saying that a certain country would abandon another in the same situation and you know what maybe that's true to an extent but treating every other space race like they're expendable is only ever going to result in that exact scenario unfolding instead of them remembering what you've done for them and banding together to help each other out i will say that i've heard that ashley gets a lot better in this game i can't quite remember what goes on there but i am willing to believe it and i guess since we're here i totally misunderstood the analogy about the bear in the dog in the first game and that's my bad but i also think that it's a shitty analogy regardless seeing as humans are much more intelligent than dogs if you view alien races as peoples from different countries it gets a lot more [ __ ] up to think about abandoning one just because they're italian or puerto rican or japanese or so on but i know that a lot of people see that differently with the ashley debacle so i guess we'll just move on so yes the council denies sending in forces to earth because they want to secure their own borders first i do find it funny that you bring up this idea that you have a potential weapon to destroy the reapers and the council's like oh [ __ ] for real huh wow well good luck with that like that's a completely different thing that doesn't have anything to do with sending troops to earth and could have been done in the absence of sending help fortunately the most annoying counselor the turian one actually comes through and restores shepard's specter status while dropping a hint that one of the turian's leaders is under attack by the reapers and is currently in need of help the trade-off is that if we help to rescue this guy that he'd probably be willing to come help earth with his fleet so we scratch their backs and they scratch ours which seems to be the only way that we're going to get out of this situation i do wish that me literally saving the council from death would have counted as scratching their backs though and that's really the biggest issue here the devs wrote this game to play out exactly this way despite the fact that they could have written two whole separate storylines had they taken into consideration the fact that shepard saved the council and therefore the council should be grateful and help out humanity here i know that i just said that they're doing what probably anyone would do but this decision would have been amazing to watch unfold if someone carried their playthrough from game to game only to have it completely change how the last entry plays out and realistically it wouldn't even have to change what a lot of the gameplay looked like fundamentally it just would have been nice if the council said alright shepard we'll do this for your people i guess we'll just tally this up to another decision that didn't really matter as much as it should have in the end i think the last thing that i want to touch on here before i ship out is just how well-rounded a lot of these side characters are in the final game i know it surprised me too but the turian counselor softening up even though he technically needed something was nice to witness udina had always been a hardened bastard but he's really good in this time when billions are dying on earth and his rough edges prove to be really good to help lobby for earth when he states that he's going to move mountains to get the funding that our anti-reaper weapon needs even the reporter who's historically been a completely unsavory [ __ ] about literally everything that shepard has done in the past relents after shepard assures her that he's doing everything in his power to help earth she admits that she's glad to have him on humanity's side and encourages him to keep going which is a cool direction for her character to take in the 11th hour heading back to the normandy has us getting into another call with haggad before getting to explore our now alliance flavored ship what hackett tells us directly relates to the big goal of this game gaining resources and sending them to the alliance in order to improve our odds against the reapers these are called war assets and the amount that you gain come from smaller sources like seeing eye to eye with the reporter or larger sources like saving the turian leader the amount of war assets that you gain affects how many endings that you can choose from as well as what happens in those endings since i won't be hitting every ending obviously i'll give a brief rundown of a few of the outcomes that could happen depending on the amount of war assets that you have here at the end of the game on the low end you only get one option that is directly related to what you chose at the end of mass effect 2. and it basically results in the earth being all but destroyed a little bit higher than that and you get to choose between two options regardless of the second game's outcome even higher than that and the endings that you choose now either inflict no damage or massive damage to the galaxy depending on what you decide to go for and this goes on to encompass about a dozen ending world states which vary in their severity and tone it is worth noting that the system has changes in the legendary edition but i'll talk more about all of this towards the end of the video it's definitely worth mentioning that mass effect 3 does do equipment a lot better than two as the game seems to combine the systems used in the first and second game into a hybrid that has you collecting weapons weapon mods and armor pieces at a pretty high rate this was something that i criticized the second game for as the amount of equipment was shockingly little when compared to the first game so i do have to hand it to mass effect 3 here they did pretty good weapons themselves vary more than their stat numbers as some can fire different ammo rounds some can be charged up others can naturally penetrate walls and armor better and so on and even then a lot of mods exist which bring these factors to the weapons that didn't have them in the first place additionally you don't have to find multiple mods for each companion as one mod will allow the whole squad to equip it if you want both the weapons and the mods can also be upgraded to rank 5 which brings back that idea from the first game and streamlines it to be less about random drops or shop inventory and instead lets you choose which weapons you want to enhance it's a really clean system that shows that a lot of thought was put into how this game's equipment should function and i have to applaud bioware here for it after checking out the ship and chatting up the crew it's time to check out the galaxy map mark iii in this iteration we don't have to probe planets for resources and instead have a scanner which can send out pulses to find wreckage or planets with points of interest on them you don't need to buy a load of probes and start shotgun blasting them in two planets and instead just fire one at a specific point on a planet that gives off a signal once you probe or salvage wreckage you gain fuel credits upgrades or war assets encouraging you to continue to seek out these pockets of space it feels a lot better than the system that was present in mass effect 2 and i'm overall pretty satisfied with it but the biggest kicker is the threat of the reapers which are ever present in various systems across the galaxy when you go to probe in a system with a reaper nearby every pulse that's sent out causes the alertness bar to fill a bit further when it fills all the way reapers enter the part of the galaxy map that you're in and begin to pursue you this is [ __ ] awesome and terrifying i absolutely love this facet of the game and it adds so much more danger to just probing the way that you usually would though i do have to say that actually getting caught results in a game over screen without much else fanfare so while the threat is there the actual repercussions aren't horrific by any means after exploring around for a bit and doing a pretty basic wave defense side quest i head off to rescue that turian leader this has us warping into a full-on battle between the turian fleet and the reapers as the reapers are now ravaging the turian homeworld as well but please guys come save earth am i right anyways the drop-in has us taking out some husks before moving into the base camp that's set up here the camp has a massive amount of equipment upgrades to grab making it feel like the devs kind of just peppered them into the area this actually extends to pretty much every part of the game it's just constant picking up stuff every single time which i mean it's not horrible it's just kind of weird because it's never really like hidden it's not like oh man i went around this corner that i never would have went around otherwise and i happen to find this thing whoa it's just almost always like right in front of you so i don't really know how i feel about it but i guess you're constantly getting upgrades just a constant flow of stuff any gamer's gonna appreciate that one but either way the overall feeling of being in the middle of this gigantic battle is really god damn cool meeting with the general here results in us finding out that the turian leader has died and instead has us helping out these guys in the hope of salvaging a friendly relationship with this armada god there really is something to be said about this looming threat in the background of the moon that we're on it really does make all of this so much more dramatic than very many of the missions in the previous games we wind up fixing up a comms tower and blasting waves of husks before trotting back to the command center where the next in line for the leader role is determined the guy's name is victus and he's out here somewhere fighting so we gotta go grab him our boy garris shows up who's been advising these guys on how to best stave off the reapers i had planned on taking him and liara into the breach to pick up victus but forgot that this is the part where the normandy begins to go haywire and liara volunteers to go figure out what's going on so more screen time for james i suppose it's really the only screen time he's ever gonna get in these missions so we fight off a few more waves from areas that need defending one of which has a literal turret section attached to it like i said these guys were definitely told to or decided to make this game way more call of duty like and it feels really damn weird eventually this brute drops in and charges the wall and somehow that causes shepard to just fall from behind a shielded turret i i don't know how either but the brute looks like this and dies like this [Music] all right now that we're done showcasing 2008 technology let's actually go get this victus guy this track goes about as you would expect with some conversation sprinkled in about the turian homeworld being under siege and the like when we get to victus and clear out the enemies we approach him the exact way that you should approach someone who's only ever been a military man and nothing else we go hey you gotta come with us for some diplomatic talks yeah i'm sure that's gonna sit well with him i like that oh all right cool then one small hitch we need the krogan i can't see us winning this thing without them get them to help us and then we can help you yeah this is how a lot of this game is set up while you do constantly fight on various fronts to try to alleviate the pressure from the reaper threat you also have to delegate and tiptoe around centuries of political strife and conflict the krogans hate the solarians and the turians the asari aren't happy that you look towards the krogans for help and so on and so forth to say that it's stupid is an understatement but i don't mean that it's shitty writing it's actually probably pretty accurate to how races with this much history might feel towards each other and how they might just allow everything to be destroyed instead of uniting in the potential final hours of life everywhere when we make it back to the ship the situation with the ship's ai edie is still going on upon investigation it turns out that edie had been trying to extract information from the android that juggled caden like a bowling pin this resulted in the android putting up a fight and edie forcibly taking it over and that's how new companions are made i think this is probably a decent time to touch on how the quests are actually handled in this game with the galaxy under siege a lot of different distress calls and cries for help are naturally going to arise and in an average game you might expect to just be able to take all of it on at your leisure but that's actually not true with mass effect 3 as a lot of quests actually have hidden timers in the background or only stick around until you progress past a certain mission way more of them exist in this game than the previous one and i like the way that this is handled just because it makes sense and it adds a layer of replayability to those going in blind that said there is a path to take on all of your quests in one go if you know which ones have timers i just wish that the game told you hey you have x amount of missions before this one goes away or whatever either way our first time sensitive mission is to help out a school of very gifted biotic students who are currently in the process of being kidnapped by cerberus if the idea of a school of biotics rings any bells you wouldn't be surprised by the fact that jack is here and with a new character model to boot she's every bit the badass that she was before and although she doesn't join your core group of squad members her character has bloomed into one who's found her purpose in this galaxy which is a far cry from how you found her she's discovered something that she cares about at last her students and her teaching career has only helped her on a brighter path it's [ __ ] awesome and the perfect end for her character arc in my opinion good to see you again garrus it still looks like [ __ ] so fighting our way out of here consists of the usual run and gun but it does feel really good to hear all of the back and forth between jack and her students while doing so it elevates the combat to be about the best that it can be and i enjoyed this side mission quite a lot of course we have to run through every action game sci-fi trope so we wind up climbing into a mech suit for the finale but whatever escaping has us securing these students to use in the war with you being able to assign them as front-line biotic artillery or as backline support for barriers i have to say that all of my initial concern about the cheesy dialogue has thoroughly been dissolved at this stage and these exchanges feel right in line with a well-scripted movie our next foray is going to be something that i actually have no experience with as i've never played any dlc for mass effect 3. as always this quest involves cerberus which has taken on the role of the 20 leagues of mercenaries that we had to constantly wade through in the previous entry we're to head over to eden prime which is where everything began in mass effect 1. our goal is to recover another prothean artifact in the hopes that it can help turn the tide somehow upon landing we actually get the first and i think the only chunk of dialogue that i can recall from shepard which relates to his background that you chose for him in the very first game i mean yeah others have mentioned it to him occasionally but he's never really seemed to bring up the idea that he was born and raised in a filthy earth city as a street rat of his own volition until now so that's a nice touch our next companion is a prothean one who's been in cryostasis for the last 50 000 years we find his gogurt tube but without the signal to open it and some further data we'd only kill him by squeezing him out this leads to another rousing round of pin the plasma on the cerberus soldiers and gathering the tools to open the sarcophagus i actually didn't realize it until now but the hacking mini-game is completely removed from this entry as it's now done automatically when enemies aren't around firing at you it's kind of interesting i wonder if that was due to feedback lack of time or just a general decision to keep the players in the action regardless shepard is able to translate the signal that everyone else was struggling with since he's been able to understand the prothean tech and language since the first game when he touched the beacon what he sees details the final hours of the protheans in which they decided to send a million of their people into cryostasis in the hopes that they'd be able to rebuild after the reapers left in particular we see the last moments of this tough son of a [ __ ] named javik i've got so much to say about him but we'll get to it later for now it's time to head back to the citadel and complete a load of quests in addition to talking to kaiden now that his boo-boos have healed a bit we actually encounter thane here who sits down for a brief conversation to catch up his disease has continued to take its toll and while he can still walk and exercise he does need daily medical attention at this stage which explains why he can't come with us again i do like that the devs at least included these important members from mass effect 2 to show what they're up to in the final game and much like jack thane's conclusion is well done while we don't get a ton of information from him it's clear that he's dying at a rate that both him and his doctors can't quite put an accurate assessment on his disease doesn't hurt so much physically as it causes numbness and dizziness at times he's at peace with what he's accomplished and his son visits regularly it's the end of a life and while it is sad it's also heartwarming in its own way to see thane in an amicable place with how everything turned out after chatting with kaden which i'll detail more later we move into how a lot of the miscellaneous stuff functions in this game basically as you explore and take on missions there will usually be a bit of intel here and a schematic there which you can then ferry over to other people in this game not only does this gain you reputation it will often net you war assets as you help others prepare for the reapers i like this system a lot as a lot of this stuff contributes to the end game more than giving you extra guns to work with or the like it makes you feel like every little thing that you can do will add another drop to the bucket that is the end score which ultimately unlocks those different ending options i mean obviously not everything goes this way as some of the stuff that you collect is just lore but i don't mind that when much of it goes to contribute more actively to how the game plays out miranda is also here as she flagged shep down earlier to tell him to meet her on the citadel as much as i was ready to tear into her again she doesn't really have anything contradictory or annoying to say she's just not a fan of the alliance which i can't really blame her for so cutting ties to cerberus without joining them has meant that she's basically been on the run this whole time she does mention that she hasn't heard from her sister and that she suspects that her father is involved but that she doesn't want shepherd's help this holds true later when she confirms her suspicions and goes off alone to rescue her sister which is fine by me so she's still kind of in this character stasis from before and none of the questions that you can ask her really shed too much light on if she's changed the citadel itself is a lot more expanded on than it was during our first visit and it feels really good to explore in a way that it hasn't in previous iterations the refugee area is a desolate place packed with survivors and victims of various reaper attacks you can overhear conversation between refugees who are at their lowest points and those trying to inspire hope in them kelly chambers is here as a psychologist to the victims and she claims that she'd love to rejoin shepard but the ptsd of watching people melt around her will never let her set foot on the normandy again but more surprising and very welcome is garrus who is here helping out the turian refugees in any way that he can i love the idea that the rest of the crew doesn't stay put in their little rooms and wait to leave the citadel and instead hop off to do their own thing while you do yours it's a very cool idea from bioware there speaking of the bar area is absolutely hilarious and contrasts in tone so much that you'd think that you stepped into another game but i mean it still kind of fits because you know people would be absolutely blasted at a time like this you um can you service drinks because i i mean i i paid i i gave you money um you haven't haven't poured me i just i just want my drink james is down here with the other troops and his interaction shows how much of a legend shepard is to the common soldier when they seem to be afraid to approach him you can offer to buy them drinks which has a little renegade action unfolding to salute back and repeat a sort of drinking buddy phrase at them yeah a paragon and renegade actions are basically a shell of what they once were and while i'm not going to talk about them too much it's worth noting that most of them are kind of watered down to a point where they only vaguely embrace the paragon and renegade idea the presidium commons area is probably my favorite place of them all though as the sheer amount of people chatting about the events of the galaxy combined with these shopping really makes this place feel alive you can intervene in various conversations swaying one side or the other in an argument warning or encouraging people to do what's right in this dire time and it feels like you're part of a conversational ecosystem that you can directly affect in a way that was starting to be seen in mass effect 2 but wasn't quite fleshed out all the way until now jeff and edie are here doing their thing liara is constantly in and out of meetings in business and the whole place feels like a real location i love it in a way that i hadn't anticipated and i couldn't help but get immersed in all of the goings-on here but i think the thing that i admire the most about the citadel is just how much effort was put into the amount of side dialogue in this game in mass effect 2 you would often hear the exact same conversations repeatedly throughout the game whether you were passing by a frenzied volus who was working the stock market or you wanted to see if someone that you've spoken to has anything new to say you were often met with the same string of dialogue and that's not to say that this doesn't happen every here and there in this game or that every single dialogue was repeated in the previous game but new dialogue occurs from these same people quite frequently in mass effect 3 even if there's no inquiries to bring up with the person that you're trying to talk to a guy gets told that his leg needs to be amputated at the hospital and a conversation unfolds when i come back later he asks more about the process and whether or not he can get it regrown or if he needs a prosthetic commander bailey will remark on the amount of refugees coming out of this war after i return to him even though there's really nothing new that i can ask him and it's a really well done system that makes it so i don't constantly think i'm playing a video game right now i really appreciate how the galaxy changes and the dialogue shifts to match it kasumi is here but since she was always more of a side character who we couldn't really quiz the same way that we could quiz other squad mates she has a mission for you which involves a potentially indoctrinated hanar instead of a long string of questions and answers just as a refresher because we're going to be talking about this kind of stuff a lot indoctrinated people are those who have been mind controlled more or less by the reapers and are now working for them as double agents and hanar are these so yeah she wants to tag along invisibly to help out with the issue this has us running back and forth between these terminals to gather info narrowing down our list of suspects until we find our guy which happens to be the only hanar model on this whole citadel from what i've seen i will say that throughout this you get a bit of conversation from kasumi which reveals that she wants no part in shepherd trying to rope her into another suicide mission and that she'd rather just spend her final moments locked away with her little recollection box with her former lover's memories though she also says that if jacob asked her she'd rejoined the normandy so yeah when the end stage of this goes down the indoctrinated hanar reveals that he uploaded a virus to disable the hanar homeworld's defenses which has kasumi jumping out of stealth to click clack away and stop the virus you big stupid jellyfish i mean i don't think she had to break stealth to do that but it was more dramatic this way since a spectre who we were looking for had been tracking her and he witnessed her on cloak to do this when all is said and done kasumi agrees to at least help with the construction of the prothean device thus securing us another war asset from an old friend the last thing we do here is drop by the lab of someone who is investigating the history of the reapers which leads into another string of dlc quests from the leviathan dlc pack it's something that i had never played but after running through it i can confidently say that this dlc is better suited to talk about towards the end of the video so i'll hold off on it for now alright let's go try to persuade some krogans so this whole thing kicks off with the best character in the franchise rex negotiating with this pencil-necked solarian leader i'm not biased at all basically rex says that the only way that he'll send his glorious krogan army against the reapers in places that aren't the krogan homeworld as if the solarians offer up a cure to the genophage which has been ripping through their people for a long time the salarian refuses invictus insists that they cooperate bioware definitely made it easy to side with the krogans here as the indignity that the solarian leader expresses that the idea that the genophage should be cured is almost comical well rex isn't having it and he brings up the instance where morton's assistant tried to cure this manufactured ailment and the last game turns out the guy was actually partially successful as a few krogan females survived the curing process upon learning this the salarian leader sent out a task force to round up and kidnap these females which rex produces footage of that's good enough for us to take his side and head to where they're being held let's get the females man it feels good to have rex along for the ride again it feels even better when you include garrus and liara though we'll bring them back rex don't worry i appreciate that liara i wouldn't want anyone else along for the ride i suppose i can make room for you too garrus there's something to be said about the camaraderie of people who have been to hell and back together and bioware showcases that pretty damn well throughout this mission in little ways when we hit the solarian landing zone it turns out that we're not authorized to land rex does not care thankfully a salarian comes scuttling out to clear up the misunderstanding claiming that they were only just now told by their leader about the deal that we worked out but i mean this is supposed to be a mission with enemies so what do you think's gonna happen this whole planet smells wrong yeah no we don't start just blasting solarians that would be really stupid so we're now waiting on the solarians to bring the women over and we get to catch up with rex for a bit while that happens not too much has changed for him as his goals for his people have remained consistent since the last game but he does hint at the idea that liara as the new shadow broker probably would have had the info that he needed about the solarians holding his cured females hostage to which she replies that she was busy as hell but there really isn't any revolutionary dialogue here even if it is fun to listen to that's what i always liked about you rex my smoldering good looks never going to let us forget about the rachni wars are you the last time i was at the citadel i didn't see a turian statue in your honor [Music] anyways let's get this over with guess what happens next sensors have picked up activity on the perimeter hurry commander someone will meet you below yeah of course imagine having jeff bezos space money and being able to afford thousands of soldiers and heaps of information resources only to have every single venture that you try to stick your fingers into get broken up by literally the same person every single time thankfully our boy morton is here who was rex's inside source obviously he's changed his mind about curing the genophage after mulling it over between the second half of the last game in this game though not entirely for ethical reasons as such he decided to start working on trying to use his former assistant's notes to perfect a cure which has led to two out of three of the krogan females dying in the process cerberus wants the last one presumably so they can try to drum up another krogan army for themselves of course no protagonist in this game can make any sort of assumption about the enemy until they throw their hands in the air and tilt their head back in maniacal laughter while telling the protagonist exactly why they're doing something so shepherd has no clue why cerberus would want the female but yeah we helped the krogan who morton named eve to escape and the aftermath has rex insisting that morton create that cure or he won't help the turians this leads into some petty squabbling between the two leaders which results in each of them having another mission for me to do with their respective sides additionally work has now begun on the prothean device which has been dubbed the crucible which will have more and more added to it as the game progresses now the cool bit is that both rex and morton are going to stick around on the normandy for a bit while all of this is going down which is a fun way to go about things i like that the companion ecosystem in this game kind of cycles between past and present squad members and that your interactions might be something as quick and simple as hey i have a mission for you or something more nuanced like these two have it's a smooth and elegant way of making the story flow together and at this stage i really can't see myself winding up disliking this game like i did before but we'll see about that i know a lot of this falls off at the end of the game rex's mission involves one of his units heading out to rachni space to check out some commotion there before their comms went dark as a brief reminder the rachni were those bug-like creatures who have the capability of assuming control of a host in order to speak to others we let their queen go to populate and hopefully aid us eventually way back in the first game the other races viewed them unfavorably as they were once invaders who tried to conquer the galaxy the krogans were the ones who put them down then so you can understand the concern here with these new developments rex himself has become a really strong leader one who understands that war has only led his people to misery he claims that he knows that his people will want to immediately attack the turians and solarians after they get back on their feet but that he's not going to let them it's really cool to see this guy who used to turn his back on his own people for being the bloodthirsty warmongers that they were now leading his people to something better for males a good show of force sorts things out but females like to talk about it then think about it then talk about it some more women have good ideas rex you should listen yeah but they have so many of them so sometimes i pretend to listen and well let's just say krogan females have tempers too i'm really sorry for playing every line of rex dialogue but i can't help myself the guy just makes me laugh in a way that no one else really does in these games i like what you've done with the normandy got tired of always hanging around the cargo bay before i still don't have a window like liara does but maybe that's because i don't kiss as well all right i'll stop for now victus's mission involves a platoon of his men who were sent on a top-secret mission to rex's home world of tachanka before they were shot down he wants me to bail them out of there but won't tell me why they were there in the first place which isn't very reassuring we'll round them up when it's time to put a nail in the coffin of the first act there is one more set of people to talk to on the ship before we [ __ ] off namely morden and eve eve is an absolute badass as you might expect of a female krogan who's been through what she has she's extraordinarily wise and understands that her people need to become more peaceful and willing to work with others to survive she details the excruciating experience that an infertile krogan has to go through explaining the hopelessness that she and her sisters felt when they had their first stillborn babies many krogan females would simply wander into the wasteland and hope to get eaten by a thresher mall rather than continue to bear that pain and she thought about doing that as well before finding the strength to try to make a change instead there's a reason why the krogan race is my favorite in these games and it isn't just because a lot of the males are these overly aggressive alphas who try to fight everything it's also because of what their people have come from and what has made them this way they're this incredibly resilient race of tough as nails but still intelligent in many ways bad asses and the trials which their clans have undergone with the genophage has molded them into much wiser people of course that's not true of every krogan i'd argue that most of them are still kind of meat heads but their smartest and best have always taken these lessons and done what they can to survive with the hope of eventually thriving again morton on the other hand i actually wish we could get more out of him it's weird i liked his character progression a lot but i suppose he was always a nerdy scientist at heart as such he's more immersed in his work than he has with catching up with shepard and nearly all of our questions pertain to the genophage cure itself he does explain that he's now arrived at the conclusion that while the genophage was necessary at the time it's still important to cure it now with the reaper threat in full effect he does own up to his mistakes and knows that he isn't perfect but he's also getting older and understands his place in the universe explicitly might go somewhere sunny sit on beach look at ocean collect seashells you'd go crazy inside an hour might run tests on the seashells all right let's go take care of rex's rachni problem first backing you up is rex's most elite unit led by the big boy himself grunt he's elated to see you and briefly explains how he came to lead this top-notch unit before we take off to try to figure out where this missing squad went to well it turns out that the reapers have gotten their greedy tendrils around the rachni corrupting the bugs to fight for them you get a flamethrower for this mission as is the mandatory equipment with any buggy levels in a video game because [ __ ] it we've done every other action trope that said my nova attack is just it's the best thing that you can do in this game in 95 of the situations regardless we make it through to the queen who's been locked down by reaper attack and here comes our big option either we free her again this time to fight against the reapers or we save grunt's unit from death the first time i played this game i went with grunt's unit i mean they seemed like pretty swell fellas but realistically i saved the queen in the first game so why not save her again so i go for that this time and it leads to grunt running back to help out and then we get this scene my turn [Music] now i wasn't sure what the parameters for this outcome were because it's happened in the path where i spared his unit as well and i figured that since i sided with the queen that grunt would actually die this time but anybody got something to eat [Music] yeah he's fine i love this scene even more so this time since i was ready to reload after the thought crossed my mind that he was dead for sure after this choice but his survival actually depends on if he was loyal to you or not in the previous game which is a cool consequence that carries over honestly this is one of the bigger missions for previous game choices as even choosing what you did with the queen in the first game makes an impact basically if you killed it in mass effect 1 it still exists here claiming to be the real last raknai queen but what it actually is is a fully indoctrinated construction by the reapers and if you choose to save this copy it will eventually betray your forces while taking a chunk out of your war asset score i love that possibility especially since i didn't know that it existed until now overall it's an okay mission combat wise but a really cool one outcome-wise afterwards morton strides in to tell you that his work on the genophage cure is complete and that he's ready to spread it around to do this we're going to commandeer the same ventilation tower called the shroud that was used to spread the genophage in the first place as a kind of full circle moment before that i do a couple of random side quests which continue to make me question cerberus's competence as they always result in a victory and more resources for the alliance at this stage those who have played the game before know what's up but i guess i wanted to paint the picture here for now as far as how cerberus seems to be faring i'll try to ease off and we'll circle back to this thought when the time arrives chief engineer adams would like to speak with you down in engineering you should go see adam's adams would like to speak to you hello commander hello commander all right time to go rescue some turians and curagenophage the turian rescue goes about as you would expect the cool twist to this mission though is that if you don't drive off the various harvesters fast enough they'll wind up killing the survivors here i don't think it impacts much besides some dialogue and extra xp but it is a fun addition to an otherwise normal quest when you make it to the end victus's son is trying to wrestle back control of his men who are blaming him for this mission going awry the sun tells you that they were sent here to defuse a gigantic cerberus bomb which wound up with them running into reaper forces when the sun decided to try to take a sneakier route around they got pinned down with nowhere to maneuver and his men blamed him for it either way we get the sun to reinforce his troops morale and then offer to tag along on the bomb defusal what these guys don't tell you at first is that the bomb was originally a turian bomb that was planted hundreds of years ago after the war with the krogans well they don't tell you that for like a whole mission and then they tell you it immediately at the start of the bomb mission i guess they wanted to make sure that you would help first after chewing through cerberus forces we wind up defusing the bomb at the cost of victus's son's life which seemed more like a plot device than anything that actually made logical sense actually this whole mission has some kind of weird logic to it i mean this bomb was rigged up to drop its payload by disengaging some locks and then dropping the cradle containing the bomb down a shaft into the earth right i'm not an engineer so that's my vague assessment of it it was buried in the ground and then cerberus dug it up then cerberus made it so that if anyone tried to hack into the computer system to shut down the triggering mechanism it would automatically go off on a one minute timer which is what happened so viktor's son had to run up and manually get the cradle to fall away from the bomb so that the bomb doesn't drop with the cradle again i'm not an expert but this whole system seems really wonky and kind of a just believe us bro this is how it would work kind of thing but more importantly this should continue to stick out in your mind as another instance of how shittily cerberus is performing for all intents and purposes they dug up a bomb before anyone noticed and then they went into the computer system and set it to explode on a timer if anyone tampered with it instead of just setting it off again we'll circle back to this thought process later but it's something to keep in mind for now when we make it back rex is obviously mad at victus for not telling his people that the turians left a bomb on the planet forever ago in his eyes if the relationship had healed to a point where they could trust each other then they should have let them know what the turian's ancestors did which kind of makes sense victus apologizes rex won't have it shepard steps in and peace prevails or something like that let's go cure that phage so this is the big end to act one out of three acts total as such there's a big choice well couple of big choices the first one is to backstab the krogans by siding with the solarian leader basically the salarians sabotaged the shroud so that it would alter any potential cure to be ineffective of course morden being the brilliant scientist that he is would have detected this sabotage and fixed it so the salarian leader turns to shepherd in an attempt to bargain with him if he stays silent and deals with morton however he needs to shepherd has promised the full brunt of the salarian combat force including their top engineers to work on the crucible now it may come as a surprise but i have a very slight fondness for the krogan species i know that's shocking because i haven't really shown it anyway but that lukewarm fondness is going to keep me from betraying them here and instead has me telling the krogans what the solarians tried to pull still this is a really cool way to create some replayability especially when rex finds out about the sabotage later in the game and winds up dying because of it when we make it further towards the shroud it turns out that the road is collapsed wouldn't you know it it takes a turian pilot spinning out of control and smashing into the convoy for them to go oh [ __ ] let's use the road anyways and then it collapses the rest of the way after the two most important trucks make it over this is something that i'll talk more about later but a lot of mass effect 3's big plot points pivot exclusively around a very specific circumstance that isn't always the best excuse in this case the writers could have just made it so that the reaper noticed the convoy first and then had it start shooting artillery strikes towards them before they could get any closer rather than the road being crumbled but not too crumbled but still crumbled regardless we pressed through some ancient krogan ruins which are actually pretty cool to look at of course there are reaper forces throughout them but that's to be expected the issue where i just wholesale annihilate enemies at a rapid rate unfortunately causes a lot of the dialogue here to be skipped or to overlap with other dialogue which sucks because a lot of what's said is actually pretty fun to listen to speaking of the mother of all thresher moz has made its home here in these ruins which is what we're going to try to use to get the reaper out of the way this has us running over to ring these two big ass gongs which will lure the thresher maw over to the reaper because apparently it only responds to big ass hammers hitting the earth and not the [ __ ] colossal reaper smacking the ground in an attempt to crush us so yeah more scripted laser dodging arm dodging and a barrage of brutes which seem to be the only big unit that these guys have at this stage when we finally bring the two hammers down the thresher maw realizes that there is in fact a building sized creature over near the shroud and it winds up taking the reaper down i mean it is a cool scene even if the logistics are flawed and this leads us to the second big decision of the act even if we already made it if you haven't warned the krogans about the solarian plot you can choose to kill morden and stop the cure from being released if rex and eve were both dead in your playthrough due to your decision making which is a whole other potential angle to this mission you can also convince morden to not disperse the cure regardless my prior decisions have led to this one outcome in which morton ascends the shroud alone which has been critically damaged in the fight his last act before he dies is pushing out the cure while humming to himself it's a very heartfelt scene though i always wish that he kind of bolted for the elevator at least before perishing but i can forgive that since he viewed this whole thing as something that he needed to do before he died the resulting scene is a beautifully bittersweet moment as the victory was won at a steep cost i mean at least it was steep to me i love martin we'll name one of the kids after him maybe a girl yeah thanks rex after pledging the kroken forces to the cause and thanking shepard the two krogan part ways with him before he heads back to secure the turian fleet support as well thank you for all that you've done and know that erdnot bakara calls you a friend bakara isn't that a mortal combat character act two begins with shep getting a call from the salarian counselor to denounce him as a big dumb idiot for the heinous act of allowing the krogans to breed again god the solarians piss me off sure raise up the krogan specifically for their military might and then just put them down because they're too mean afterwards [ __ ] morons anyways the real reason that the counselor calls us is to state that she suspects that udina is laundering dirty money i imagine to make sure that they can build the crucible and to help earth but still apparently it's a pretty big concept that has a huge priority when the galaxy is under attack i know this is kind of a weird place to insert this gripe but it's become more apparent as time has gone on the journal system in this game sucks it's really bad and with as many missions that have planets for you to scan items for you to acquire and people for you to report in on there are no steps which are displayed showing your progress so if a volus wants a particular artifact and i can't remember if i picked it up yet it usually has me flying back to the part of the galaxy where the artifact is supposed to be housed before remembering whether or not i grabbed it it seems like such a basic thing to include a progress bar or text in your quests but this game doesn't include anything like that not even in the remastered version so after another exciting phase of cerberus fighting and planet scanning i hightail it back to the citadel to stop the worst crime of all money laundering well okay the laundering might have more of a serious implication if cerberus is the one that houdina is getting money from chances seem to be pretty high when it turns out that cerberus has just decided to attack the citadel now because [ __ ] it the picture that's painted here is that cerberus attacked right as the lead investigator was about to be set loose on odina and so udina must have called cerberus you can choose to have shepard kind of deny it now to give udina the benefit of the doubt but eventually he just goes get the word out odin is trying to seize power hey you remember that one time when i chose anderson for the role of counselor and then the writers were like nah this is better whatever so eventually we encounter literal jet stream sam from metal gear rising i guess this game came first but you know just humor me here and he's about to assassinate the solarian councilor with his finely crafted black steel katana straight from the citadel's experience japan gift shop we roll up on him and we're like alright buddy it's three on one time to give up and he hits us with this anime line no no it's fun then he gets his ass smeared by thane who's just [ __ ] dying at this stage in the game like the dude can't even leave the hospital and he basically single-handedly beats on this weeb for a bit then he gets [ __ ] stabbed i love the idea that shepard and his crew are just watching this like an action movie and only act after thane's been critically injured thane are you okay am i what i just got stabbed shepard where the [ __ ] were you doing that i uh i thought you had it there were three of you with guns i thought i was the distraction look thane he had a sword shooting him wouldn't have been very fair shepard i'm dying from space polio anyways this leads into a car chase where ryden jumps on the roof of the vehicle and puts his sword through the part of the car that makes it function correctly we crash land and he gets away this feels like an entirely different game at this stage in terms of tone thanks to this single set of cutscenes and it only gets worse when we climb on top of an elevator to catch the assassin who's on a different elevator commander bailey has assumed direct control of the elevator system and is causing the elevator with gray fox to stop at every floor we shoot out the power on that one the ninja somehow overrides bailey's override and then begins ascending again in another elevator i'd imagine this is not how elevators work but we're all on this ride together eventually we make it to the elevator with houdina kaden and two other counselors udina yells out shepherd's with cerberus because [ __ ] it who cares about plot at this stage wow i honestly god went from this game is really fun and well written so far to questioning if this is an outtake that somehow made it into the game caden has a conniption trying to figure out if shepard was really a cerberus agent this whole time before udina just tries to start opening the door the asari counselor attempts to stop him and he gingerly suplexes her into the ground and pulls out a gun to execute her shepard gets a renegade option here which i take and instead of shooting the gun out of houdina's hand or shooting udina in the arm the leg the dick whatever he shoots him in the hearts we still have zero evidence beyond the solarian counselor telling us that udina did this that's the same counselor that wanted me to lie to the krogans and kill morton by the way bailey comes to the door claims that cerberus is leaving now and then the turian councilor finally fellates shepard the way that he deserves after saving his ass again in addition to his home planet and then then that's it holy [ __ ] yeah cerberus leaves a scene plays out where the elusive man tells strider that he's a big fuck-up and that houdini was expendable then it's revealed that thane was hospitalized and that there may not be enough drill blood to keep him alive and now we're just back on the citadel to do [ __ ] on it again except now it's laggier than before which is weird i guess it's just trying to load all this damage but yeah this is where we say goodbye to thane as much as the game just vomited on the floor and then proceeded to force you to watch it eat its own puke it does still do these touching moments really well i will say that both morton and thane were near the ends of their lives and their sacrifices were heroic which makes their deaths a lot more palatable still it is sad but ultimately a good scene to send him out on goodbye fame he won't be alone so now we enter a much sadder and more despair-filled version of the citadel the tone has shifted from people worrying but still trying to go about their lives to giving into loss after the citadel was attacked mechanically it's about the same as before with new optional side things to pick up for people across the galaxy all of them go nearly exactly the same way where one person is talking to another and they go man if only we could have gotten the obelisk of fortnite exodia that would certainly help the war effort and then you just go off and grab it and bring it back to them it's it's the same thing every time but the overall atmosphere does feel a lot more gloomy i just wish that the scene that led into this didn't feel like it came straight out of ninja gaiden oh also kelly chambers was shot between the eyes by cerberus off-screen you want to know how a group of armed men in full serpentis uniform marched up to her and said hey are you kelly chambers and she said yup not a wrinkle in that brain apparently i guess there's less now it's also worth noting that everyone has scrambled around a bit from their previous positions james is playing cards with the refugees james is playing he actually is playing cards with the refugees he's just like hey man i know you're having a rough time and your home's been destroyed you probably don't have a lot of money but you know what let's play some [ __ ] poker dude i'm about to win your money i'm about to win the remaining money from you edie and joker have gotten closer on the dance floor kind of liara moved from one side of the commons to the other and so on jack is also at the bar and you can dance with her after she gives you a little more insight into her life as a teacher and a role model now which is nice heading back to the normandy finally has us picking up cayden again and learning about the asari and solarians throwing in more support now that we saved their counselors again the quarians are also willing to help but seem to be having troubles with the geth which is our big conflict of act two and finally liara approaches us to tell us that the asari high command has been having issues of their own which we can intervene in to win more support oh and anderson tells you that the reapers have now decided to amass and attack london in full force which goes to show you that even machine life views london as a blight brief side note this was right around the time when the writers went oh yeah romance hasn't happened yet and you're hit with a couple of different potential romantic scenes jack was actually one of them if you had chosen her in the previous game that said though so far the dialogue has seen a bit of upgrading a big complaint that i had before was that shepard was a bit menacing when it came to pressuring females for sex or just general romance with the biggest one being the way that samara was handled well in this game our options as mailship are all of the previous game's female interests kelly chambers before she wound up as a stain on the citadel caden cortez down in the vehicle bay and the reporter diana ollars samantha trainor is a possibility for femchep which can turn a little awkward when mail shep invites her up for a game of chess but that said he doesn't do the whole ah come on just try it sort of shtick that he tried with zamara instead he politely apologizes for misreading a signal a couple of times before the two play more chess and that's it i don't know what changed between games but i'm all for it alright so let's tackle the asari issue first the long and short of it was that a distress call was sent out from the ardot yakshi base out in one of the corners of the galaxy i explained this a lot more in my mass effect 2 video but the art yakshi are the asari that were born with a very rare genetic trait that makes it so that they overload their partner's brains and kill them when they [ __ ] more or less the facility that sent out the distress call is the safe haven for those that pledge to isolate themselves in order to not kill two of samara's remaining daughters are housed there and as such so is samara the threat here is always a coin flip between cerberus and the reapers with the reapers winning out this time around asari commandos have been dispatched to blow the place up with bombs but have seemingly perished against the reaper threat the big addition to the reaper forces this time around stem from transforming asari into wraiths which are cool ass enemies i do like how the reapers occasionally add to their forces by indoctrinating and repurposing their victims into new threats as they did with the rachni but yeah this place is pretty much done for as the only remaining survivors conveniently seem to be samara's children one of which is undergoing the process of becoming a wraith alright we got an okay setup right unfortunately this is where the game trips and falls flat on its face again so samara's daughter starts to transform and she goes to attack the other daughter this is cured temporarily like this [Music] but it doesn't matter because she's still transforming i guess so there's a heartfelt goodbye between the two before the transforming daughter pulls out the best recurring guest in the series the detonator now the whole time leading up to this moment had shepard debating whether or not to blow up the facility like that was going to be the big option here that option is now out the window even though i've been picking the dialogue that has him stating that we wouldn't blow the place up if we could avoid it so shepard pulls away daughter 2 as she tries to escape back to daughter 1 and we take off up the elevator then daughter 1 blows herself up the entire time it sounded like the point of the bombs was to destroy the facility what it did was destroy the one room that we were just in okay then since there has to be a big dramatic moment samara with her dumb ass code goes well normally i'd have to kill you because all r.yakshi have to live in this facility and we just blew it up [ __ ] what we're still standing on the facility first of all second of all this is like the most extenuating set of circumstances ever so instead of pledging to kill her last daughter samara tries to kill herself you can stop this with a paragon action so let me get this straight you set up a scenario where the asari commandos and the ardot yakshi should be working together to fight the reapers you could have had it so that the reapers were repelled and the commandos decide that it's time to eliminate the arda yakshi once and for all and then you might have had to choose which side to play for or maybe had to broker a deal between the two samara would have had a mental breaking point at the idea of choosing her daughter's or her code but instead what we get is wow everyone's dead at this place except a character that we grew close to in the last game and her two daughters i don't understand this writing decision and the only thing that makes sense to me is that the writers decided they just didn't want to spend more time trying to flesh out this alternate route that makes sense to me but whatever i guess this is what we got at least you have a couple of different outcomes here in the form of samara's attempted suicide and then the fact that we can then choose to kill her daughter or not afterwards regardless the outcome that we get has samara deciding to join the fight and her daughter staying here to eat doritos out of the vending machines while pretending to rebuild way earlier on we got access to meet up with the asari who basically ruled all of the gangs at omega in the previous game but i never actually went to meet her it's a dlc quest and i've been very impressed with all the dlc that this game has had to offer so far so let's head back to the citadel for now apparently nearly every crew member has sent me an email saying hey we're [ __ ] exhausted let's kick back on the citadel so i can also go meet up with all of them while i'm here and then i fell into the trap so anderson decided to gift shepard his personal apartment which is a [ __ ] marvel of construction and i decided to visit that when i got back to the citadel you can decorate it which i've always been a sucker for and i thought wow this is really cool what i didn't realize was that this led into an absolute monster of a dlc so yeah i came here for one dlc and got another the apartment itself has a good 20 to 25 minutes of dialogue from anderson describing his life and experiences to someone who's going to be penning his biography a lot of it pads the idea of what the alliance and seven shepherd and so on are collectively to humanity it does a really good job of conveying the hope that humans have in these forces and how heroic their actions really have been throughout these games it's a very cool way to scrounge up some extra lore for those who care to delve deeper into this franchise for now though investigating the apartment leads into the first mission of many in which shepard takes up joker on his offer to meet him for sushi after sitting down joker soon thanks shepard for inviting him to dinner and visible confusion ensues as shep was under the assumption that joker was the one that invited him this inept joke of an alliance intelligence officer runs up and tells shepard that a third party that isn't cerberus or the reapers is now after him and then the writers let us know that they loved the dark knight good evening ladies and gentlemen tonight's performance is brought to you by random acts of violence this turns into a stealth sequence which i didn't realize until i was done killing nearly everyone here whoops so this entire spectacle is bioware's take on a comedy infused escape through a bustling futuristic city all of the stores which we passed through seem to have journal entries which are more humorous in tone and while they didn't really tickle me i guess i don't really mind because rex shows up and i'm always happy about that the whole thing turns into a wave defense on a timer and then a quick evacuation back to the apartment where the rest of the squad shows up to get to the bottom of who's hunting shepard now it is worth noting here that this whole string of missions seem like they're much better suited to do just before initiating the point of no return and i think that would have been the optimal way to play them that said i had no idea what scoping out anderson's apartment would initiate so i guess i would have liked it if the devs decided to constrain being able to participate in this event until the third act at least oh well liara winds up tracing one of the guns used by the mystery mercs back to a rich guy who deals firearms illegally on the citadel he also apparently runs a casino which turns our thrilling jason bourne movie into a casino heist movie i look ridiculous so the whole thing plays out like a better version of kasumi's loyalty mission from the last game basically the intelligence officer from before is joining us by crawling through the ventilation to get us into where we can meet the rich guy he's locked himself away after the people who he sold the guns to failed to kill shepard rex and shep's job is to mingle and act natural while helping out with any issues that come up during the infiltration we deactivate alarms distract guards and play an embarrassing amount of horse racing in bazaak 2.0 it's actually pretty damn fun in its own right and i'm surprisingly glad that they revisited this infiltration idea when we make it to the rich guy he's already dead and the data tracing back to whoever did this is being wiped we get a brief scrambled glimpse of the mystery man who's trying to kill shep before he hangs up and the intelligence officer claims that she couldn't trace the call back in time if i were a betting man i'd say that this officer is in on the shepherd killing quest just because she's been constantly willing to help and that's not predictable at all when next we pin down our shepherd killers it's decided that the entire crew should be part of this mission at this stage it's clear that these writers have never tried harder to make their dialogue comedic i mean it's literally punchline after punchline with various degrees of success it's a really weird shift because normally these comedic moments in these games are done really well since they only pop up occasionally and at unexpected times but this is just well you know the bigger the target the bigger the uh dark target you're trying to say i've gained weight trying i thought i kind of succeeded in a right over the krogan's head sort of way it's all just part of the job wait job you mean the rest of you are getting paid for this it appears this drone is preparing to rebel then we'll find our own way in gear up and let's what's with the volas oh pizza delivery guy i got the munchies and at this stage i kind of like deleted part of my script just because i realized that i was being way too overly critical of this dlc solely because of the issues that i began to have during the actual game's writing this is definitely the devs making fun of all of these different tropes movies cliches etc and this is only further exacerbated by a clone of shepard coming out to tell you that he was made by cerberus also when shepard was revived it's not exactly my favorite type of comedy as it kind of takes the series that i enjoy for its subtle humor and cranks those subtleties to eleven but yeah we're now chasing shep's clone through these archives the archives themselves have some pretty cool historical events which play out like the fact that the solarian government didn't consent to the genophage being dispersed which was instead pushed out solely by the turians but this is overall a pretty standard mission except with the squad all making jokes constantly when we finally do catch up to the clone ship yeah the intelligence officer betrays us now i will say that for as many jokes that seemed like they were trying a bit too hard this ending absolutely killed me first we've got this dialogue option the minute the second i get out of here i'm gonna take your head and mount it in the normandy cic [Music] then i'm gonna mount his head next to yours then i'm gonna take both of your heads and space them out the airlock secondly we get locked away in this vault here he said i should go do i sound like that as long as i've known you yeah i'm more confident than he is more in control with me it's more like that's all for now or sometimes i'll talk to you later because you know what i never do leave them wanting more commander why aren't you more concerned about this oh glyph you still out there yes commander unlock this damn thing and go find the others no one steals my [ __ ] not even me all right you finally got me this [ __ ] is hilarious i think i had a hard time transitioning from a more serious game with heartfelt riding to this and i really wish that i had picked up tally for it so the whole thing winds up with us chasing down clone ship using a toothbrush to break into the normandy and then busting into a firefight aboard the ship armory find him slow him down because he thinks eventually we get to the part where both shepherds tumble down the open normandy vehicle bay door and garrison rex pull up the real shep then you can choose to try to save the clone or kill him but it doesn't matter because the clone will let go anyways if you try to save it so [Music] but it's not over yet as there's one more thing to do now that the short leave is winding down party our asses off now thankfully you can actually return to the normandy before starting up the festivities which means that i can't wait until tally is here to initiate it before the point of no return overall this dlc is hard to evaluate the way that i normally do because a lot of the humor is completely subjective i initially wanted to start tearing into things that didn't make sense but the game doesn't take anything seriously at this stage even poking fun at its past entries at times so anyone want to talk about their people's history nope so i'm the only one who misses when we used to chat in the elevators back on the citadel yep so disappointed but i have to give credit to these guys they wanted to do something different to remember the series by and what they did was pretty damn cool in its own right they shook up the mechanics with stealth they revamped the kasumi infiltration idea they had the whole crew going on one mission and they even did get a few good laughs out of me i think one of my favorite parts though is the fact that you can actually go and visit the strip where all of these eye-catching neon colors and shapes fight for your attention in this futuristic sci-fi urban environment i'm gonna hold off on delving into the rest of this until the end but i gotta say that i'm still very impressed overall with the dlc of this game so let's see if those good vibes continue and actually go do the dlc that i came here to do arya is here already causing trouble after being booted off omega by the elusive man she is not happy about that but she also has the insight to realize that the reapers are a threat so in a two birds with one stone maneuver she suggests that you bring together the three gangs who made up the majority of the previous game's enemies under her rule and then she'll lend them to you for the war this leads into easily the worst set of missions in the whole game all of which have you cow towing to the various gang leaders to ensure that they're put in charge or kept satisfied meaning that if you're playing nice guy shepard you're going to be running back and forth around the citadel to talk to various people to work out deals there's little intrigue and the whole thing amounts to a form of fetch questing that i have a strong disdain for the blue suns in particular have you talking to a dude who's at the docks then talking to a turian general to get him to ease off of the suns then talking to a black market's dealer to try to broker a weapons trade between him and the general and then promising to scan some planets for weapons for the arms dealer or you can just say [ __ ] it and have the turian general killed which is what i went for after realizing that i have no clue where to scan for the weapons and even less of a care to now thankfully there is another mission related to arya which is a bit more interesting that you can partake in after rounding up the mercs this one has you heading to omega in a squad with just you and arya and then kicking cerberus off of omega what ensues is a pretty flashy set of cutscenes complete with all of the good explosions and dramatic escape sequence stuff that you could hope for as the guy who arya lost omega to pops over the comps to state bluntly that he's upgraded the defenses of the station then it's business as usual after the ship that we're on gets torn to shreds and we make it inside omega on an escape shuttle i gotta say for as ruthless and cunning that arya has been portrayed as before all of this she makes some pretty stupid decisions at times i've made improvements to omega's outer defenses my cannons will cut through you at will we're ramming the station everyone brace for impact what it's a bunker i established on d-deck for my more sensitive operations it's utterly impenetrable with its own secret hanger and dock independent power source life support munitions you'll see i was honestly hoping that her stating aloud that we were heading to a secret dock with the supplies that we need to take omega back was a ruse to get this guy to send his men down there and get caught with his pants down when we show up elsewhere but no she just felt like speaking loudly about the next step down to the very detail the remainder of the mission introduces some barriers which fry people at the touch some robots which die easily and the first and possibly only female turian that i can recall seeing and talking to throughout this series one that used to be arya's lover while it isn't the most amazing mission ever i did enjoy these factors that were inserted for this dlc after securing a small bunker there's a bit of downtime between missions which surprisingly leads to shepherd being able to talk with arya's men and seeing what they need him to grab in a form of optional side questing the whole thing is a lot bigger than i initially gave it credit for as you're now trying to recruit another merck group who has remained on omega to resist cerberus this whole time again it isn't the most amazing string of missions ever but you can tell that a lot of effort went into this dlc for as shitty of an introduction that it had you know if dlc was always like this nowadays i'd never have an issue buying it when we get back into the fray it's revealed that arya's former lover nirene is actually the leader of the gang called the talons and is trying to steer them in a new direction the talents have been evacuating civilians while protecting them and have generally been a force of good among all of the corruption that omega typically exudes it's a good counterpoint to arya and i can already see where the writers are going with this here that said the actual level design is lacking there are a lot of elevator sequences which are obviously load zones but usually those are filled with some kind of small conversation to keep your mind off of it this time however every load zone besides maybe one or two were dead silent despite the fact that these former lovers haven't seen each other in years though i guess they also had a falling out since nyreen was pretty justice focused and arya was the opposite still it feels like this whole thing was a room full of fighting followed by an elevator ride repeatedly eventually we make it to the italians base of operation this is where arya steps in to seize control being the megalomaniac that she is i was hoping the people around her would boo her and throw [ __ ] at her but now she just gains their support through a little speech after staving off another wave of cerberus soldiers nyrin commits her talon forces to our cause while basically stating that she knows that arya is manipulating her and the people of omega i like how this is the first female turian that you ever see in the entire series and it's just a male turian with crazy big female eyelashes anyways our next mission involves restoring power to the parts of omega that have been powered down in order to erect those fiery ass barriers from before this means that we have to head to the mining area and restore the power to it first to make it further in this is where the adjutants come into play so the adjutants are supposedly these horrific monsters which have been experimented on by cerberus they're said to be able to rip whole squads to shreds that their ferocity is absolutely unparalleled this is made clear when there are heaps of cerberus bodies lying around in the mining area i've gotta say this is probably the third or fourth time in this game where we've had this really dark dramatic area with lighting akin to a horror game but there must have been some kind of general decision made about fighting in the dark when designing this game because there's literally never combat in these dark spaces it's crazy because they really set it up to be this super scary and tense situation and then nothing happens until you turn the lights on this time as soon as we hit the generator an agitant comes busting through the window and this absolutely goofy [ __ ] is not what i expected at all dude looks like the sultan from aladdin so we take out a few more of them before they break out into a musical number head further in take out more soldiers and eventually make it to the generator the guy who took over the station then traps us in with more lava walls and arya just she just reaches in and starts pulling the thing open all right cool i i didn't even think that was a possibility here i would have suggested standing on each other's shoulders and tossing shepard over instead we fight off more robots before nyrene helps arya to gape open the barrier like a tinder date and shepard rolls through after this you can have shepard immediately hit the big red renegade button in order to reroute the power at the cost of a lot of civilians lives since their power would be cut off in exchange or you can wait it out and play minesweeper for a few minutes while nyreen and arya nearly die i chose the latter saving everyone involved in this clash the force fields go down everywhere and riots break out all over omega the enemy leader then orders his troops to blow up the central column to prevent us from ascending any further into omega which is what we have to try to stop from happening next i do have to say that this is where the devs sprinkle a little bit of doubt about sticking to arya's side well not a bit it's uh it's pretty damn aggressive but they did it well because you start as her lackey someone who's doing her bidding but nyreen is everything that's counter to her and she's not willing to use people the way that arya is so while you do start off by thinking that this is generally going to be a renegade-centric set of quests it turns into you getting that choice to slowly push against arya as time goes on i like that so we run interference on the bombing and continue to work our way up through fight after fight while learning about the way that cerberus experimented on adjutants in order to control them and use them for an army eventually the remaining adjutants get loose and irene blows them up along with herself which actually isn't the route that i thought this would go i would have thought that this would have come down to a power struggle between nyreen and arya which would have been more interesting if it was done right with the way that things went down this felt a little overly dramatic but i guess not too bad per se arya spins into a rage and charges headfirst into a trap and the final battle has us activating four different pillars destroying the parts of the barrier that they correlate to and freeing arya before mopping up the remaining forces here now this is the cool part depending on your decisions throughout this dlc arya will either kill or spare the big bad guy here accordingly which is actually way better than the cliched trope of pressing the paragon button to stop arya from killing the bad guy i'm actually pretty happy about that because honestly this guy was an oddly fair villain he let arya leave the station when he could have killed her he warned us about his upgraded defenses and encouraged us to flee without bloodshed he trapped us in a barrier without the intent of doing anything more until arya goatsied the firewall he doesn't seem like a horrible human and has probably been twisted into thinking this way via the elusive man's influence overall the omega dlc is pretty solid though it's definitely my least favorite so far and that's not a bad thing really because something has to be at the bottom the lukewarm start almost killed it for me and the level design wasn't very great but the actual narrative was put together in a way that wasn't necessarily predictable and involved some more interesting conversations in people though i do have to say that i really do think that this would have been better if we could have turned against arya in favor for nyreen i mean they really seemed to hint at that a couple of different times i wonder if they pulled out on that route at the last second the new squad was a nice touch and i felt more free to cut loose and choose the more renegadish options which actually kept me guessing as to whether arya would kill the final guy due to how it was approached i didn't mention this earlier but there's also an engineer class exclusive paragon action which will cause shepard to immediately override the generator without sacrificing anyone which is also kind of a cool touch it's a pretty solid dlc even if it's not amazing when all is said and done arya makes one final speech to her people showcasing a softer side than usual due to her experience with you even if that conceited part naturally shows through every here and there it's a nice enough ending and i'm glad that i played through this thing let's go begin our batch of quests which lead to the quarians and the geth finally first off we can wind up meeting with jacob who's in the middle of a firefight with some cerberus forces after they've begun exterminating their own scientists after the events of the project overlord dlc in mass effect 2. i never completed that dlc but the short version of this stuff is that the elusive man wanted a way to control the geth and was threatening his scientists with termination if they didn't get results so this guy forced his autistic brother to fuse his mind with a vi in an attempt to do just that well that didn't go over well as his brother's mind then seized control of all of the project overlord systems and they eventually had to nuke the place without shepard there to shut it down now the elusive man has ordered these scientists to be wiped out because that's just how cerberus operates so this mission is kind of shoddy seeing as bioware tends to play fast and loose with how meta-gel works or if it even exists as a plot device basically jacob gets shot in the gut shortly before shepard arrives on the scene this means that he's walking around all hunched over to keep his organs from falling out of his midsection it also means that he now has to guide shepard into doing the stuff that he would have had to do to evacuate the scientists here now for clarification as to why i feel the way i do about this mission there are two separate missions that i've played in this game where people have sustained injuries actually there's probably more than that but there's two that stick out the first was commander bailey on the citadel who was shot in the gut for some reason despite having zero implants to my knowledge he's just able to run around and do everything that he would normally do even though shepard points out that he's been shot repeatedly i don't know maybe it just grazed him but secondly the lady who is posing as an intelligence officer also gets shot at the start of the short leave dlc and she claims that she just took a bunch of metagel to get over it so this point of jacob not being able to do much is kind of a moot point when shepard has eight chunks of metagel on him i guess he just would have liked it if the player could choose to heal him here in exchange for having less gel for the mission i mean i can't see why we couldn't fight alongside jacob for this oh well we also get an opportunity to speak to jacob and catch up in a medical room with metagel on the wall while i didn't find him to be the most riveting character in the last game i did view him as a kind of bro type soldier comrade who became a good buddy to shep after his loyalty mission involving jacob's dad we can ask him how he's been feeling about that and he gives a short one-line answer okay we can also ask him how he wound up here and he claims that he had a mid-life crisis after making it back intact from the suicide mission he fell in love with one of the scientists here and began a relationship with her and now he wants to protect her and the people here yeah that's cool and then he goes [ __ ] you shepard you don't know what it's like to love a person this much uh thanks the [ __ ] dude what did i do to you so yeah i guess that was a fun ketchup i guess bioware didn't really know what to do with him in any sort of substantial way after the second game though like i said he's always been a pretty middle of the road character regardless so this mission looks like this after getting the aaa guns repaired jacob asks if we should evacuate now or wait we send the most useless i mean the the most important people first which is a shuttle full of humans under 16. they get taken out by a cerberus suicide bomber imagine signing on to help humanity and your heroic act of self-sacrifice is taking out a shuttle full of minors there's no telling what those kids could have gotten up to and yeah i'll ruin the fun here i know that the cerberus troops are all indoctrinated fusions of man and machine but it's still amusing to think about them losing their lives over petty [ __ ] like this anyways we get the rest of them out and jacob becomes the war asset let's go see tally so i can have fun again all right so you know how in the last game there was this big back and forth between the quarian leadership about whether or not they should try to take their homeworld back from the geth well turns out that the decision has been made to go for it and the aquarians literally started a war between them and the geth right before the reapers showed up great timing so this is gonna be a weird one since there's kind of a lot of background here from the second game and while i won't recap it there are a couple of things that we have to keep in mind about this whole situation one we helped legion to free the geth and allow them to break control of reaper indoctrination and two admiral chorus here is the one corian leader who empathizes with the geth and is now worried about the fact that the quarian fleet has thrown its civilians to fight against the geth regarding the first point that [ __ ] didn't really seem to affect too much as the reapers just overrode the geth upon their return to the milky way effectively making our decision to help legion a moot point as of right now and regarding the second point chorus has always hated tally despite me agreeing with the idea that attacking the geth would be bad which has always put me in this awkward position when concurring with him on anything fortunately tally isn't involved in the meeting but she does show up at the end of it to reveal that she's now an admiral in the korean fleet after a brief conversation and catch up with her it's time to take the fight to the geth since the reapers have showed up and rewrote the geth they've become a lot more organized than battle ready but that seems to be contingent on a geth warship which is broadcasting a signal to do the rewriting our job now is to board that ship and undo what's been done to the machines hopefully the mission kicks off with shepard using magboots to navigate a structurally weak docking tube alone with the intent of checking to see if it's stable enough for the others to cross well it isn't and his next endeavor involves trying to open another tube up i know this is another kind of scripted no danger event but i do kind of like it and i wouldn't mind it if other events like this existed in the game i like how joker claims that the geth could look out the window and see the normandy is just sitting out there trying to board them but shepard says that the geth don't use windows which was how they infiltrated that geth ship in the previous century [Music] as if shepard using one of the geth dreadnought's docking tubes wouldn't alert them to the idea that they're being boarded and that they should be seeking out an enemy ship nearby the mission itself is actually one of the better ones in terms of how the devs approach the level design instead of just having rooms filled with geth you also have a portion where you can navigate forward to deactivate the main cannon throughout it the cannon keeps firing intermittently sending out a shock wave of energy that completely wipes your shields if you've been playing like i have and have put a very minimal importance on health this is a scary room battle becomes frantic charging enemies was the only thing that kept me alive when i got hit with a shockwave and maneuvering to cover became a priority over the usual non-stop attacking that i tended to adopt while fighting this was a cool fight that actually did something with the cover mechanics for vanguard specifically and i wish that there was more like it throughout the game when we eventually make it to where the reaper signal is being broadcast from it's revealed that the reapers have strung up and are using legion to relay the signal and indoctrinate the gath tally is skeptical but glad to see legion and legion agrees to submit to any sort of restraint that we may want to put on it in order to see whether or not it's been indoctrinated as well now i'm not 100 sure if this works the way the game says it does i mean it's all made up so i have to take its word for it right but freeing legion does make it so that the reaper signal stops right but the geths still fight us on our way out of the ship so obviously there's still some control slash overriding that's happening here i mean if i hadn't played through this before i would have assumed that given the choice that i made with legion in the previous game every geth would return back to the programming which legion injected into them then but that doesn't happen here so the assumption here is that the reapers straight up overwrote their coding and the signal was just to help keep them organized and maintained but when we make it back to the normandy legion tells us that there's a short-range signal base on the korean home planet as well which will soon start broadcasting the same reaper signal and one of the quarian admirals claims that this means that those geth are still going to be upgraded this means that the signal doesn't straight up overwrite them it controls them so then why are the ones away from the planet still attacking us on our way out maybe i'm missing something here regardless legion powered down the geth dreadnought before we left it and what the fleet promised it was going to do when we did that was full retreat so that its civilians weren't at risk that's when the admiral of the heavy fleet decided to initiate a full-blown attack on the dreadnought with our squad still on it which is completely [ __ ] but hey these guys also jury rigged their civilian ships to fight in this war as well so it's par for the quarian course when we get back hackett tells us that we need to win the korean support in order to take back earth admiral you jeopardized your mission and your people get the hell off my ship so the next string of missions are a lot how act one's finale was structured but with more impact basically you can just rush to the planet and [ __ ] [ __ ] up after completing only one side mission but you'll wind up with less overall war assets and possibly not gain access to the best outcome of the final mission the first mission has us rescuing admiral chorus who decided that the most prudent way to use his ship was to kamikaze into a single cannon on a planet full of cannons there's been a lot of kamikazeing in this game it's like the third time i've said it fourth something like that i'm not a military expert but i feel like the admiral might have been more important in another role along the way we find a busted up quarian who shepard deems important enough to use the meta gel that he didn't want to use on jacob turns out that metagel's ingredients include listerine and clorox as the guy dies soon after anyways when we get through disabling the anti-air guns in an area that reminds me heavily of the krogan manufacturing planet in the first game from a level layout perspective we radio admiral chorus the guy's like no don't save me save my crew and we're like uh yeah they're all dead and we need you to lead here brother and he's like [ __ ] i was hoping to die here and uploads his coordinates okay weird but we save him through another turret section this one feels a lot better though since you're covering someone important as he escapes and doesn't necessarily feel as forced if you don't save him here the civilian part of the quarian fleet goes into a full discombobulated panic lending this action a lot more weight upon making it back corus lightens up for once and thanks you for helping out which actually feels good since he's always been so standoffish up until this moment now we can either engage in the final battle or help the housing part of the aquarian fleet which is getting hit by geth fighter squadrons obviously the latter is the way to go here so that the fleet is at full force when we push in for the final battle now the interesting bit here is that legion has discovered that the reaper upgrades have turned the get into something more sentient a true ai if we bring down that signal outright that change will revert causing the guest to go back to what they were obviously the quarian admiral that's in the war room wants us to destroy the geth completely but legion wants to figure out a way to free its people as a true life form i just like that legion pulls up these examples of what the geth ai core looks like with and without the reaper interference and shepard's like you see that [ __ ] that's life baby i mean yeah i guess it's veiny looking so to take out the fighters which are hammering the quarry and fleet we have to shut down a part of the server that's commanding those geth this could have easily been a okay go into this area and hit this button on a computer type of thing which would have been par for the course but bioware wanted to do something a little different for this quest and instead decided to have shepard upload his consciousness with the previously mentioned project overlord stuff to basically go in and manually kill off the chunk of death which are operating the fighter squadron's bodies this puts us into the geth consensus which is the cyber world reminiscent of tron legion claims that the geth consensus only looks this way to give shepard some semblance of familiarity while navigating in terms of gameplay this whole thing has us following a path and clearing out reaper infected code before gaining access to the next level via an access point along the way you can view recorded logs detailing key historical moments for the geth if that sounds semi-familiar i'll have you know that mass effect 3 ripped off fallout 4's far harbor dlc four years before it came out i can't believe this the memories themselves range from the creation of the geth to the beginnings of their consciousness to the uprising itself wasn't that footage from the past why are the quarians masked i aware didn't want to model unmasked quarians just for this man i've gotta say while i've always been on the geth side i've never felt quite this bad about their predicament until i witnessed this stuff creator this unit is ready to serve let's as you continue through the consensus it becomes clear that the geth remembered those quarians who stood counter to the displays of violence against geth who just wanted to understand their newfound consciousness if you were still on the fence about which side to help out more i imagine that these logs expertly painted the picture for you when all is said and done we shut down the geth squadron and gain some new allies in the form of these prime units which legion has convinced to join it now we're ready to conclude act 2 which i prepare for by mopping up a lot of citadel side questing which i had left over there's not too much more to mention here though it is worth noting that samara is here to give shep one last goodbye before going to join the battle jacob is also around and fills you in on the work on the crucible miranda goes off to do her thing with her sister and zaid actually makes an appearance though it's nowhere near as big as kasumi's was it's funny because i was actually okay with zaid not being as willing to fill in shepherd about his life since cerberus but it turns out that he's actively hunting down cerberus members while not giving a [ __ ] about money which is very counter to zaid's character from before seeing how he was a pure mercenary through and through with one hang-up involving his old merc outfit so now i was interested to know what had changed but he just goes hey man all right i heard you need some help i'll uh round up the boys to fight the reapers and that's it uh i guess i'll just assume that he was mad about the suicide mission or something instead of turning over a new leaf i don't know all right back to the quarians so the battle plan is to drop in with legion in tow and have it gain access to an escape vehicle and the geth's systems here meanwhile were to use a targeting laser to have the normandy drop in and precision strike the reaper part of the geth's structures with a device to more or less emp the geth and shut them down legion itself is a lot more human than it was before and it tends to show visible confusion at that it isn't quite the same level of humanity that edie exudes but it does show bashfulness a desire to cover up small truths in order to protect itself from scrutiny and concern for its people and the quarians it's a very cool process to see as it also went from being a very direct machine to developing more of a personality like edie so when the whole thing goes down it turns out that the reaper tech that was installed here was actually a reaper causing a fast and dramatic shift to the plan shepard decides to have the normandy's targeting laser synced up to the quarian fleet so that they can precisely bombard the reaper when it opens up its weak point that it has to expose in order to fire its weapons the actual mechanics of this fight aren't that invigorating but i suppose they're cool to look at since it's hard to engage how large the hitbox is on the laser as it shoots at you the correct thing to do is to just run to the other side and prime the targeting beam which again isn't super involved when all is said and done the reaper falls and reveals a tiny fragment of why they're doing what they're doing what's funny is that if you've played the leviathan dlc at this point you know exactly why the reapers invade every 50 000 years but without that knowledge this sounds like gibberish like i said we'll get to that towards the end but this whole situation is a lot funnier than you might think if you have no idea what's going on alright so here's the big decision for this act this one has several different outcomes that stem directly from your decisions in the previous game and is probably one of the biggest points of replayability in mass effect 3. so what this comes down to is this you either choose to destroy the geth or you allow them to merge with the reaper code and become fully sentient choosing either one will cause either tally or legion to get upset with you but this is where the third option comes in if your reputation is high enough with either paragon or renegade and you've done several different things in both this game and the previous one you can manage to get both the quarians and the geth to coexist peacefully the factors involved require both legion and tally to be alive after the previous game to get the best ending here you'll also have had to complete at least one of their loyalty missions a certain way legion has to have set the heretics free and tally has to have been absolved from her crimes and not exiled these are the most important factors here but even doing both of them alone won't cause this situation to work out having both of these factors working for you requires one more component out of three component one is completing the mission where you go to rescue admiral chorus component two is actually saving chorus in that mission and component three is stepping in between an argument which tally and legion have in mass effect 2 where it turns out that legion was snooping through tally's messages if you don't have the loyalty of one of these two you must have all three of these components in order to get this coexistence option i know that was a lot but i really like this system there are so many factors here and while there are only three outcomes i do like the legwork involved in getting the best outcome that said i was technically good to go with the setup that i performed in mass effect 2. as only two of these factors exist solely in this game alone so if you ran into mass effect 3 without playing 2 your options are limited to choosing between the geth or the quarians if you decide to go with the geth the koreans all die in the counter attack from the newly sentient gath and tally throws herself off of the cliff here if you choose the quarians legion attacks shepard who's forced to kill it and the geth get wiped out by their creators but as things stand in my game shepard tells legion to upload the reaper code and tally begs him not to let this happen shep then rallies the fleet and lets them know that if they retreat the geth won't attack anymore with the help of chorus and every other factor mentioned before the fleet stands down bringing a tentative peace between the two forces legion realizes that in order to push the intelligence into its people it would have to sacrifice itself to complete the injection i like this scene a lot as tally tells legion that she believes that it does have a soul i know but when all is said and done both sides volunteered to help with the reapers and the geth allowed the aquarians to settle back on their home planet it feels really good like all of the choices that i made regarding these two forces mattered and as mentioned earlier i couldn't recall many big moments like that stemming from this game tally decides to return with you to the normandy as your final crew member leaving us to finally being able to evaluate the companions of this game but before i continue on to the companion roundup let's jump over to my sponsor for this video displate every once in a while you may stumble onto an art piece so beautiful so wonderful looking that you think to yourself wow gosh i sure 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something you could use in your life feel free to check out display thanks guys speaking with mass effect 3's companions feels like they finally got this whole system nailed down in the end which is awesome to see i'm not saying that every one of them is inherently more interesting or better than the older companions i mean that talking itself feels right where mass effect 1 always had you walking up to a squad mate going into the dialogue mode and then seeing if there were any new options and mass effect 2 had companions giving you the exact same line of dialogue every time they had nothing new to say to you mass effect 3 usually has your squad telling you something that they've been thinking about or something relating to the previous mission without hitting you with the exact same line of dismissal dialogue every time liara tells you the time that she visited the turian home world when she was a child james comments on how victus is a badass garris mentions that it's good to see jack in a better place and so on and it feels a lot more real more like naturally occurring conversations that don't have you hearing the same [ __ ] over and over this whole back and forth actually goes on to extend to the other crew members aboard the normandy such as cortes who works on these small crafts in the hangar or trainer who hangs out near the galaxy map and while i won't actually get into their different background stories or the conversations that you have with them i don't think that i've ever felt closer to my crew in any other game just due to this cruise like ability and interesting personalities i think my favorite part even though it can get a little annoying to track them down is the fact that these guys will move around and talk to other members aboard the normandy they'll exchange stories reminisce and check on each other's well-being during this harrowing time and it makes the ship feel very alive hello shepherd oh i guess we're just smoking on the ship then is that meth do they make meth cigarettes now god i hate the future the whole companion system has much less of a focus on your squad's individuality and more of a spotlight on their general personality and how they're dealing with the events which have unfolded so while you won't be taking them on loyalty missions to secure their trust you're instead free to outright ignore them without it affecting your game it's a system that i liked immediately especially given that a good chunk of loyalty missions in mass effect 2 seemed like they were shoehorned in to ensure the survival of your crew rather than the writers having an actual story to tell that plays into the bigger tale that these series portrays so while i will do my standard companion ranking thing that i tend to do with bioware games i want to make it clear that there's much less focus on the companions personal lives and more of a focus on their thoughts revolving around the galaxy being ravaged so kaiden has grown into his own person a bit more in the third game but that growth has come with a heap of flaws which have been built off of the whole conflict in the second game where in mass effect 1 caden was a bit more unquestioning and willing to serve shepard with few rebuttals he starts out in this game as wholly skeptical of which side shepard is playing for as much as i tore him a new one in mass effect 2 for being a little too clingy i do understand to a degree the betrayal that he felt as he continued to rise through the ranks of the system's alliance that said his questioning of shepherd at the start gets a little old when it becomes clear that literally nothing shepard can say is going to convince kaiden that shep's still the same guy that he was before he died by the way i gotta say here that i definitely referred to the alliance as the council repeatedly in the mass effect 2 video because i'm a dummy so yeah let's uh get that out of the way now anyways eventually after caden recovers a bit more from his accidental lobotomy the near-death experience seems to have jostled a lot of those doubts away the two former comrades make up and forgive each other turning a new chapter in their friendship it's nice to see and i don't feel like it's too sudden just because well the guy almost died had this not happened to him and he suddenly was just like oh yeah all right i was wrong after some random mission i think i might have raised a little bit more concern there but i think the way this forgiveness quest was approached was fine with the context surrounding it after another mission or two caiden is back on his feet and is offered the spectre position for some reason i mean i'm sure that he deserves it it just seems weird to watch someone nearly die and the council go hmm yes spectre material i'm sure that odinna had something to do with that maybe just trying to get him in as a personal bodyguard or something but either way kaden accepts his new role and hesitates about rejoining the normandy at first instead staying out of the picture until act 2 citadel attack when it does come time for caden to rejoin us he starts by going okay so um if i tried to stop you back there with udina uh would you have shot me too i don't know how someone can go from trusting to untrusting to trusting to untrusting as quickly as this man does but boy does he pull it off shepard convinces kaiden for a third time this game that he's still who he's always been and this time caden decides to fully trust shepard again what a wild ride after he gets his mind in order it becomes clear that a lot more is weighing on it than shepard's loyalty to the alliance he tells you about his dad dying in the reaper attack and how his mom is all alone now having a human companion to talk to this stuff about is nice and it brings a bit of reality to the idea of floating around in a ship light years away from your home planet which is being torn asunder hey i bumped into edie in the hall scared the [ __ ] out of me now all of that said you have to understand that what the player sees is a guy who has a history with shepard sure but then he had a falling out that is flip flop between trusting and not trusting shepard repeatedly and then when the dust finally settles kaiden immediately says to shepherd hey i just want you to know that i find you extremely handsome and would love to slather my dong in and around your mouth which is a little fast you know like again i get the history but this whole conversation harkens back to the problem a lot of mass effect 2 squad members had which was that they would go from slightly warm to wanting to bang in a matter of a conversation with hardly any build up it's just a quick leap that warranted a few more close moments before getting right down to it overall kaiden is he's alright yes there's a natural history involved with his presence which is always welcome but he seems to be caught in this paranoid loop and while i'm not sitting here going wow how unreasonable i do think that he's not the most fun character to talk to i would actually argue that my opinion of his personality has regressed over the course of this series which might make him the only character that that's happened with vega's a weird character in the mix as the approach to talking to him is wholly different from every other companion that's been in any of these games i initially didn't really like him but eventually warmed up to the guy after a few conversations he's a standoffish hot-headed bruiser type who mixes in spanish words with his speech while constantly working out to keep his body in shape he's a reckless soldier who doesn't care if he dies as long as he goes down fighting he's basically a human krogan in a lot of ways as such your first talk with him has him dismissing you while he does pull-ups before you eventually make it clear that you're not leaving this eventually evolves into sparring while shepard quizzes james allowing for you to get in some good hits with the renegade action while dodging with the paragon one the quiz results in james relaying that he was once part of a unit in charge of protecting a civilian colony from a collector attack which resulted in him saving important intel which could have been used to take down the collectors instead of saving the colony fortunately shepard was in the middle of destroying the collectors with his crew right around this time unfortunately this meant that vega had sacrificed the colony to save the data for nothing shepard immediately picks up on this and links it to his reckless behavior on mars when he crashed his shuttle into the escaping shuttle with the elusive man's agent in it so while james might put on the tough guy act and constantly focus on physical activities you can tell that stuff like this weighs on his mind and that he's trying to drown it out but he's definitely a pretty cookie cutter soldier type for the most part likes kicking ass getting the job done and protecting his people and unfortunately it becomes pretty damn apparent early on that this is all he really is even when he does come up to discuss his doubts about being promoted to the n7 program which he received a recommendation for a lot of what it boils down to him is reliving that one moment where people died under his command which yeah sure that's a traumatic experience but it's really all his character has to offer he doesn't bring up earth the same way that kaden does or talk about anything to do with the galaxy falling apart beyond some minor dialogue if there was one character that i could have given a loyalty type mission to it would be james as a lot of his conversation devolves into small quips about whatever mission that you just completed and that's all that he's really got he's not a bad character there's nothing offensive about him by any means it just feels like he's filling a role and i honestly would have rather seen pretty much any other squad member from the previous game make a return here as a member over him liara has undergone the most drastic transformation of character from game to game but not in a bad way where the first game has her taking on a more naive persona the second game has her transforming to take on a more direct and ruthless identity by the time the third game rolls around she's now built up a much thicker skin which is reflected even in the way that she talks i never properly thanked you for saving me from the death commander if you hadn't shown up after you left for earth i had the chance to track down the information trader who'd kidnapped my friend her voice is now deeper and less excited her demeanor is more professional and exudes the temperament of someone who's seen a lot of the darker side of what the galaxy has to offer but at the same time her formerly optimistic demeanor has melted into a more pragmatic or even pessimistic at times attitude causing her to wonder if all of these scurrying from area to area is a fool's errand in the face of such overwhelming odds and blaming herself if literally anything could be perceived as her fault regardless liara has taken on the role of the shadow broker which is something that i skipped and aiding her with in the last game a lot of people wanted to see me cover that one since apparently it's pretty important thumbing through the wiki reveals that it actually sounded like a pretty fleshed out dlc but i really didn't want to spend more time than the 4 hours that i had on mass effect 2. from what i can tell in terms of how the dlc affects the third game it only really reflects whether or not shepard knows about what happened or not i know this sounds weird but somehow her getting it done without shepard makes her more of a badass in my eyes i mean [ __ ] there's a lot that you can contribute to shepard's expert combat skills and bravery but if you miss this dlc it means that liara marched into the shadow broker's lair with a platoon of hired mercs and took it all over without shep's help that's cool man given that i romanced liara and mass effect 1 the option does come up to rekindle that flame though of course you don't jump right back into [ __ ] as liara is very busy doing her shadow broker thing with the way that these games are structured you don't get to casually bang until locking in a romance as you have to wait until the end with a few warm moments sprinkled in here and there flutter i try given enough time liara does ask for shepherd to color up to his quarters [Music] so i put a plan in motion to preserve things for the future that is not the box i thought she was going to give him yeah we're not at the romance yet as liara instead wants shepard's input on preserving a time capsule for future races much in the way the protheans did during their time to warn future civilizations of the reapers it's a touching scene that shows that liara hasn't completely shifted from that younger more sentimental version of herself eventually you can get your romance lock option when you listen to liara talk about her childhood on the citadel and i'm sure that it's great but there's a bit of an issue she isn't dally liara i be with whoever you want to be with i'm just not interested in playing games anymore really i don't believe either of us has the time holy [ __ ] props to the voice actress for this one i felt that yeah liara is not happy after you choose someone else even if you initially said that you were interested in her and she actually shows it even in casual dialogue at first when dismissing you i'm occupied shepard jesus man i mean i get it but that is some stone cold [ __ ] liara's always been a great addition to this series and the way that she's grown over the course of it fits her in a way that i wouldn't have guessed if you had showed me the end result after only playing the first game she's grown to accept her role in the galaxy as someone who's capable of stepping up to the plate and being what it needs the most she's a historian who absolutely loves studying other cultures she's the shadow broker who fought tooth and nail to access the resources that she has at her disposal and she's indispensable to the well-being of the galaxy species i'm not going to have a ton to say about garrus just because he's been involved in every game so far but it's definitely interesting to see how he's changed now that the reapers have attacked his home world potentially killing his father and sister the war has changed his perspective a bit on how small everything seemed when he was just a rogue c-sec agent playing fast and loose with the rules causing him to harden a little more than he already had when playing space batman in the second game he's always been stubborn which is probably why he's here today as such his prediction about our odds of success are about as accurate as they've always been as shepherd again asks what he thinks their chances are garrus replies by stating that he believes that they can win but not without casualties mirroring what he said about the threat in the second game i think the more interesting bits here involve the reconciliation with garris's father and the results which stemmed from it in the first game garrus trashes his father more or less as a goody two-shoes by the books kind of c-sec officer which pissed him off because criminals would get away when people took that mentality and were afraid to bend the rules but in garris's words he went to his father after it became apparent that the reapers had arrived in batarian space and his father listened to everything that garrus told him after that his father went to his turian leader friend and wound up convincing him to at least put garrus in charge of a task force to help prepare for the reapers of course this was just a token gesture as no one really believed that the reapers existed still but it did lead to garrus doing as much as he could to brace against the incoming hostiles which hopefully helped in some minor way at the very least but there really isn't a lot more to say about garrus much like the rest of the crew so far i know that this roundup is woefully short compared to the previous two entries but garrus is the one constant besides tally in this game who was involved at every step as such we know a lot of his background and we can only really speculate on how much he's changed from game to game with his changes being a lot more drastic from game one to two there really isn't too much more to cover here beyond various conversations in which he gives the same optimistically realistic takes the final meetup that you can have with him really showcases that rebellious streak which had started to take root in the first game as he claims that he always wanted to fly up to the top of the presidium commons area despite all of the regulations in place keeping him from doing so at the potential end of the galaxy garrus decides that he's going to do it anyway leading into a shooting competition between him and the commander it felt like the perfect way to sum up everything that garrus has been through and the person that he's become he's a great character and it's been fun to ride through all of these trials with him at her side you're not going to propose marriage now are you it's hard to talk about an ai the same way i would regard a human but edie slowly gained more of a personality throughout the events of mass effect 2 even showing a fondness for joker at one point in this game she's more or less a very calculating human with a crazy amount of intelligence but still understands the value of friendship and the varying emotional states that humans can undergo edie is a huge asset to this team if she told me about her plan to obtain a body i'd have volunteered to help i did not wish to force the conflict of interest between our friendship and your duty as such she does seem to care more deeply about joker calling him by his real name and getting embarrassed when he comments on her new body okay let me put it this way if i knew that edie was going to install herself into a sexy robot body do you honestly think i'd be able to keep quiet about it look at that i would have made the cake i am right here chef edie's big conflict that she has is that she currently obeys orders from her commanding officers without question but since she's been constantly tweaking herself and the way that she thinks she's now stumbled onto the idea that sometimes she has moral objections to certain orders and has been wondering whether or not she should obey unquestioningly or use her own judgment it's a complex issue that only she can offer well i suppose that legion offered something similar in the end but regarding our crew for this game we have edie when facing these issues of judgement shepard can guide her along the path of choosing things for herself or continuing to obey him and whoever else without question i don't believe this actually affects what she winds up becoming but i guess the potential possibilities are nice to think about beyond these occasional inquiries to ask the tougher moral questions edie basically enjoys learning new things and experimenting on parts of the normandy she explains the process of liking something as her being programmed to prioritize different occurrences as higher or lower depending on their importance and then using those occurrences to generate positive or negative feedback based on their outcomes for example the crew now approach her body instead of just asking questions anywhere on the ship since she can hear them anywhere which she says that she enjoys do not worry shepard i only forget to recycle the normandy's oxygen when i've discovered something truly interesting that was a joke she's a fun character and i really liked talking to her more than i thought i would progressing through the game has edie throwing harder questions at you as she realizes that she could become obsolete a lot quicker than she had anticipated when she witnessed the thresher mod take down the reaper on tachanka she had been quietly comparing her purpose to that of the geth or the reapers for a while now tottering between the idea of organic life serving to replicate itself and give birth to future generations and what synthetic life's purpose is the end result of this conversation winds up with edie granting a higher priority to the human values of altruism and love which shows up more later when you speak to her about the topic of her and joker as time goes on and you visit edie on her short leave on the citadel it becomes clear that she has realized that joker has feelings for her she wants to reciprocate them but hasn't quite grasped the finer points of what a romantic relationship is supposed to look like as her programming hasn't been suited for ideas of music or conventional romantic gifts but she does have a soft spot for humor which results in her deciding to purchase tickets to a comedy show though shepard can warn her that it isn't about the show itself as much as it's about her company it's unclear whether or not she understands that yet and this whole plot line where both edie and joker ask shepard what he thinks of the two carries on for quite a few conversations which is funny considering how little kaiden talked about his feelings before giving shepard the old one two regardless edie and joker both do eventually wind up together and edie begins slowly but surely emulating joker's mannerisms and way of talking she doesn't completely change her personality she'll just occasionally drop little expressions that she didn't say before and as time goes on she begins to speak more and more like a human might with the biggest example that i saw stemming from an argument between her and javik about whether or not she was valid as a form of life or not and what if your upgrade endangers others all machines eventually see organics as a threat only those organics who would cause me harm my right to self-defense endangers no one what rights do you have you are just a tool and what right did your people have to subjugate the other races of your time you enslaved them true life is more than a code upgrade it is shaped by the forces around us machines are immune to those forces you exist outside of nature we are a part of this cosmos whether you like it or not but i think that's about going to be it for edie she's a great character and the only reason that i wouldn't rate her higher is because you didn't really converse with her as much in the previous game even if you did get to see her personality develop there too she turns from a very straight laced and humorless ai to one with a lot more personality and self-reflection and that experience is very fun to watch unfold if there's one word to describe javik it's intense where you might be able to look at a human with his attitude and think that he's edgy or a krogan and think that that's just the way that a krogan is javik embodies a desire for vengeance so strong that he can hardly contain himself as a soldier on the front lines during his people's final moments you get to witness the bravery the fear and the cunning of the protheans which finally fleshes them out as more than just these weird bug-like creatures who were supposedly way more advanced than the current era of life the emotion which is conveyed through these final moments is powerful in a way that isn't filled with sadness as much as despair and doubt many of the other life pods were destroyed in the reaper onslaught the rest had their power cut to keep javiks going and javik was informed of all of this right before he was knocked out in what felt like a few minutes waking up to these primitive species looming over him and chattering at him it's honest to god something that you wouldn't feel the full brunt of unless you experienced it through his eyes and bioware conveyed those emotions masterfully as such javik is standoffish towards other species not viewing them as equals shaking shepard down for not being able to prepare more for the reaper threat and generally being just angry he only cares about one thing destroying the reapers in a fury of vengeance it's a mantle that he took up to preserve his sanity his dignity and his legacy his overwhelming intelligence and little patience define his very being and i absolutely love how different he is from everyone else that we've encountered in a way his attitude reminds me of the qunari from dragon age the way that he talks looks at other races and his general demeanor all exude a very straightforwardness which is shared with the qunari that being said it's not like he's completely uncooperative as he does answer our questions in an effort to help in any small way against the reapers i found that surprising given that he feels like he literally was just fighting the reapers in his time but that may point more towards his intelligence and wisdom to overcome his emotions javik claims that the protheans enslaved all other intelligent life that didn't obey the empire but also embrace those willing to join them his people saw it as a necessity to help them fight against intelligent machine life eventually including the reapers the protheans were even keeping an eye on the potential of new species that were starting to evolve and would have eventually extended an offer to join the protheans or be left to die of course this attitude wound up being a liability in the long run as the reapers soon figured out that throwing the leadership into disarray caused panic among the subservient races ultimately resulting in their victory javik also details the ability for most protheans to be able to communicate a thousand thoughts and ideas through a simple touch which they then fused into technology explaining the beacon which shepard touched in the first game he even goes on to sense that the room that he's inhabiting on the ship used to be grunts while being able to tell just how strong he was from the remaining dna left over from his pod's liquid it's an overwhelming display of superiority from the prothean soldier one which makes me glad that he's on our side i had no idea protheans were so severe apparently liara's impressed too but the conclusion of our initial conversation has javik ready to serve which was not what i expected from the guy only further denoting his drive for revenge crew reactions all seem to be about what you'd expect with most of them saying the phrase a real-life prothean ad nauseum garrus understands his drive for revenge edie's trying to get him to understand gendered bathrooms liara's [ __ ] soaked james actually has the insight to convey that he might not be mentally stabled after traveling from one reality to another in the blink of an eye and this goes on and on with other crew members javik doesn't seem to mind still going off of his memories of every other race being primitive the things that he has to say about other races does get pretty funny at times though as it's clear that he might never really see eye to eye with people cooperating together we can't win this war on our own then demand their help do not indulge their selfish requests what will saving one krogan matter if only it were that simple if they get in your way destroy them excuse me i apologize the previous occupant of this room left traces of himself i have absorbed some of them yes grunt they say he was a strong one it's something that the protheans valued among all else the idea that the strongest race would survive thrive and rule the galaxy thus it confuses javik when people try to be his friend almost as much as the idea that every race is now working together to try to keep as many alive as possible it's funny because i know that a lot of this summary has been more about the protheans themselves but i mean this is really where i thought it would fit the most the protheans have always been viewed as a wise elder race who managed to invent and establish technology beyond this cycle's wildest dreams and javik takes that idea and goes oh we were really advanced to you have you tried enslaving and killing your enemies i mean it makes sense in that regard but liara seems to have a hard time battling the disillusionment that she's facing when talking to someone as stern as javik is and it makes for a really interesting set of plot points javik probably would get along with the solarians truth be told especially with his views on the genophage situation had it been up to him he would have taken the solarian detail and lied to the krogans about the cure being dispersed which is an option as mentioned before eventually you can meet up with javik on the citadel who stands in awe at the scope of it well maybe oz is a little strong of a word but he does explain that his people used to tell tales of the citadel as if it were a mythical place seeing as none of them had been alive long enough to have seen it at the stage that he was born in as javik and shepard talk others around javik notice him as an alive prothean when the topic of their annihilation is broached javik begins a wartime general-type speech that probably would have resulted in an overall negative vibe with a paragon action shepard can gently redirect him to reel it in a bit turning the abysmal speech into something with a bit more hope ingrained into it it's one of the kinder notions that javik has displayed throughout his time with us and it does show that he's slowly beginning to warm up to the idea of being surrounded by younger races but i think that's all i really have on javik right now just because running through every little quip and reaction to events is going to get redundant while i do like him a lot i would say that the most interesting parts about him tend to be what he is not who he is and i'm not saying that that's a bad thing at all for the most part javik is a vessel to deliver the information about this race of people who have been entangled in every game of the series i'm not saying that he couldn't have been goofier or more energetic but i do think that it would have been harder to present a race of galactic conquerors that way he does make the occasional joke and learns to lighten up a bit as he adapts to the people around him which is always fun to see but for the most part his direct and bold demeanor really helps to paint the image of his people in a way that causes the player to view the protheans in a new light and i really enjoyed listening to how taken aback liara was at that tally has definitely changed a bit between mass effect 2 and 3 probably more so than anyone else well maybe edie that's not to say that she's a completely different person but she's now more confident in where she's gotten to in life she's a lot like lyara in that regard though liara exhibited the bigger leap from the first game to the second even at the end of mass effect 2 tally was still pretty wary of legion and the geth in general she didn't trust them at all and would hover more towards the idea of the genth being destroyed rather than being made allies that position has flip-flopped which is made apparent immediately upon meeting tally when she tells you that she's reconsidered her position on attacking the geth after conversing with legion and getting to understand it better i like that change personally since i've always viewed the geth the same way that i would view edie that said when it comes down to the big battle between the quarians and the geth that older distrust of the machines is naturally dredged up i initially wanted to point that out as contradictory but people don't always immediately change at the drop of a hat and undue stress in perilous situations tend to bring back those old emotions and thoughts to the forefront but even given her obvious skepticism of shepard's plan to allow legion to upload the reaper code she still goes along with it ordering the fleet to back down without any question but this isn't the only way that tally has shifted and grown as a character i know this is going to seem a little fast compared to the other romanceable characters but with tally being the only one for mail ship that was involved in the last game as a romance option she immediately brings it up which honestly feels a lot more natural i mean don't get me wrong liara brings up the fact that her and shep were entangled in the first game relatively quickly but there's still a bit of time before she gets around to that discussion which was also a good call in terms of pacing there and was nothing like kaiden's sudden interest after rejoining the normandy but with tally that awkwardly cute mask of not knowing how to explain that she wanted an intimate relationship has now fallen away as she immediately requests that shepard call her up to his cabin if you want to talk in private maybe you could invite me up to your cabin maybe i could and for the record still totally worth it that said tally doesn't come up with the intent to pounce shepard as the burden of sudden leadership weighs very heavily on her mind she's upset with the way that her father left so much in her lap and she's absolutely terrified of making the wrong decision and costing her people their lives you can tell that she's stressed beyond belief and that responsibility involved is draining her at every turn eventually she states that the reason why she took on this role was because she saw what shepard had accomplished and the sacrifices that he had made at this point you can choose to rekindle the relationship if you want which i mean i haven't quite been obscure with my choice here kila shepherd i'm not going to beg but i didn't come up here just to see the fish okay normally i'd kiss you but you got that whole mask thing happening so uh damn you got some nice elbows girl but that's about as far as romance goes for now as tally has much bigger concerns having been thrust into a war as a leader according to her she never even wanted the position but felt that it was her duty to her people when they developed tech that could [ __ ] the geth's ability to communicate with each other she claims that she was approached because her father's spot still hadn't been filled and because she had the most recent contact with and knowledge of the geth out of all of the koreans she had communicated a bit with legion through messages though that communication was cut off eventually on legion's end and tally never warned it that her people were going to attack the new confidence that telly exudes actually extends even into the missions which you take her on as her dialogue almost becomes more flirtatious in tone thank you for having me over well i don't actually know where i'm going holy [ __ ] i'll see what i can do how come i don't get a new gun i wouldn't find one in your size it's an interesting and more direct approach for the formerly shy quarian and it's cool to see a lot of the dialogue being affected with her and shepard officially together i appreciate what you're doing here shepard well i care deeply about the quarian people it's good to be back on the normandy let me know if it's too quiet for you to sleep and i'll find you someplace louder as you continue to progress this new dialogue becomes a lot more direct and it lends a lot more emotional impact on moments revolving around the korean missions tally's always been pretty strongly anchored to her korean background but it doesn't quite manifest the same way that it does in mass effect 3. where she might have been all about the fleet and how it operates before the idea of longing for her home planet has always been a faint seed of her character that was slow to sprout until now when taking back ranoc from the geth this small bud blooms into a much bigger part of her character one that had almost been repressed until this reality where her people decided to take back their home and while this does lead to some pretty mixed emotions out of tally it does make her a lot more relatable as well when the dust settles that mixture of feelings coalesces into a surge of relief and mourning the sorrowful remorse for the loss of those close to her throughout these games meets the elated peace of mind that comes with finally winning back tally's home of ranoc and while this probably isn't the most amazing sequence to those not as fond of tally as a character i personally got a lot of enjoyment out of the scene that closes out act 2. while i'm sure there's more to come for our korean companion i imagine that this is probably going to be a great place to stop with the full-blown analysis for now she's a great character one who grew from being someone who was more or less just an info dump about the aquarians who developed from someone who was unsure and just wanted to get some life experience out of her pilgrimage and wound up finding her place in the galaxy as a leader of her people when we make it back to the normandy the final act kicks off a lot more tamely than the previous one at least for now the asari counselor is impressed with your progress and claims to have some information for shepard personally urging him to meet her on the citadel it is worth noting that we have a new swath of conversations to go through with the crew which range from the standard hell of a mission huh to stuff with a little more substance edie notes that legion referred to itself as i instead of we in its final moments insinuating its final transition into something with individuality instead of speaking for a consensus like it had been garris begins to realize what it's like to be a leader whose every answer can cost tens of millions of lives which is a good full circle moment when shepard suggests that he can handle it the way that he used to handle c-sec javik claims that he simply just would have destroyed the gath and that he doesn't trust the korean since they all wear masks which is very javic ironically tally tells us that the geth have not only been making rapid changes to the landscape to help the koreans re-house themselves but that they've also been uploading themselves to the aquarian suits in order to mimic small infections and create pseudo-vaccines forcing their people to undergo a transformation that will allow them to not wear the suits in a couple of years maybe javik will trust them then oh and also tally leaves a maskless picture of herself by your bedside if you're romancing her which has been updated in the remaster it used to be a photoshopped version of this picture and it didn't make a lot of sense nor did it look very good but now it looks like this which is better alright back to the citadel where i turn in the last of my scanning missions there were quite a few of them throughout the game but with the changes to scanning they weren't too bad honestly we also meet with miranda one more time who still insists on chasing after her sister alone thankfully well sort of she wants shepard to grant her access to the alliance's resources to help with the tracking and then brags about how she always has a plan as she heads out the door that sounds about right for miranda to her credit she does realize that she wanted to plant a control chip in shepherd when they were rebuilding him which is exactly the type of thing that her father would kill for in order to control her so i guess there's some character development there which i'm slightly above lukewarm about lukewarm plus anyways the asari counselor here is like alright fine the asari are gonna help everyone stave off total annihilation i guess this help comes in the form of a top secret artifact that is said to have the power to upset the balance of the galaxy if it falls into the wrong hands the counselor tells shepherd about it now since it may have the power to locate the final component of the crucible also their home planet is under attack i guess you hold the cards you got until the last moment i don't know so we fly in with liara and get greeted with our old friend the turret section i just like how we land and it's like oh thank god you're here commander's ship but no one else knows how to work this thing the asari here are fighting their best but it's almost like their entire people were created by the devs with a single trait at this stage that they use biotics like nearly every cutscene has an asari soldier using the force to move around [ __ ] like there was a quota to fulfill i mean yeah they're the most powerful race when it comes to biotics but what happened to that concept of biotic artillery with the jack mission it just seems like these guys playing tetris with the rubble was like the least interesting display of these powers that they could come up with either way we find our way to the temple where this artifact is hidden and we get the opportunity to learn a little more about the asari people's origins basically the asari have always worshipped a goddess named ethame well i mean a much smaller group of asari do nowadays but in all of the murals busts statues and scriptures there are obvious implications that athame was just a prothean who presented themselves as a goddess the issue with this discovery is that the dialogue does not feel fluid at all as every single bit of speech has shepard asking liara what the artifact they're standing in front of means and lyara answers by stating that the artifact isn't very useful then garrus points out that the artifacts look and sound like protheans who manipulated the early asari people into serving them and liara responds with oh good golly gosh but i just wouldn't know what to do with all of those implications which okay so javik was dlc meaning that he was inserted into the game after its initial release but bioware didn't go back into this vanilla scene to reconfigure liara's knowledge and attitude involving everything that she learned from javik's existence which makes all of these talks all the more frustrating on top of the repeated dialogue now to their credit i did reload the mission and bring along javik instead and the dialogue here is much better since he straight up tells liara that his people taught her people everything that they knew even utilizing years of genetic research to figure out how to draw out their biotic powers liara still seems very put off by the info but i guess that can be chalked up to her people's goddess turning out to be a prothean at least instead of her attitude solely being derived by the mere concept of protheans intervening in asari evolution at least that's the way i was hoping this conversation would go now but no not really when we approach the statue of a thame liara goes yeah i don't believe all this protein [ __ ] we definitely had a cool ass goddess how the hell did we go from you being a super intellectually competent archaeologist turned shadow broker to a borderline flat earther who straight up denies evidence that makes complete sense i mean yeah okay it's hard to suddenly have your belief system turned upside down but even she states that most asari don't really believe in a fame anymore whatever the reason this thing was such a state secret is because there's a prothean artifact hidden away in the statue of a thame which implies that the asari people have been widely considered to be the most advanced of the alien races because they've been hoarding prothean knowledge to get their own race ahead of the others which is also against the council rules and i imagine that they made up that rule so that they could get more prothea knowledge liara continues to deny this accusation getting very defensive about her people which i actually don't really agree with from a writing angle throughout these games she's always been pretty level-headed and willing to see the truths that other people wanted to keep secret but now that it's her people that have done something not so great despite putting on the heirs that they're these cooperators who mingle with other races all of the time she's closing her eyes as hard as she can and pretending that the evidence in front of her doesn't exist it's a strange twist for her character and it really only points at the idea that she's a hypocrite or that the writers just thought that it would be a good idea for her to be in denial anyways these guys walked into the temple saw two asari scientists with their throat slit and went ha that's weird and then they continued to look for how to get this extraordinarily powerful artifact free from the goddess statue like it didn't even cross their minds to search the place for an assassin but whatever we get the statue to crumble extract the prothean vi nougat inside and ask it a bunch of questions that are unknown to it but are answered in the leviathan dlc there is still one small note of interest though the reason for the crucible not being completed in the protheans timeline and the answer was that there was a splinter group of protheans who believe that the reapers should be dominated and controlled rather than destroyed which sounds very familiar with how cerberus has been operating turns out that that splinter group that wanted to control the reapers were indoctrinated hinting at what's going on with the elusive man well here comes kylo ren to ruin another form of media basically he comes in places down an elusive man poke ball the elusive man pops out and denies being controlled by the reapers and then orders his ninja to get the data we engage the guy in a fight where he just restores his health repeatedly while his gunship rains hellfire down on us eventually ninja man throws liara into javik and they're both incapacitated for two old minutes shepard gets tossed into a chasm and lo wang grabs the vi data and saunters out at a pace that can only be described as walking through a park with zero reapers attacking or buildings crumbling liara saves shepard shepard shoots his gun at the gunship all is lost this scene is [ __ ] stupid and i'm not mad that we lost here i'm mad at the amount of times that we've interacted with this shoehorned inn enemy it's been two times the first time he kills thane with no one interfering the second he just knocks everyone out and takes the artifact the consequences in this game in its series are at their best when people as heroic as the normandy's crew are thrown against insurmountable odds against a threat that they can hardly comprehend the magnitude of when you put in a literal cyborg ninja and he just wipes the floor with them because he's so cool it just it cheapens every massive set piece of the series let's say scorpion here shows up in the middle of the tuchanka fight if that happens we lose it krogans aren't cured say he shows up during the death war aquarians are wiped out that geth continued to fight for the reapers the implication that this one guy is the antithesis to the heroics that shepard and his crew constantly pull off only weakens these moments of glory and i can see why the devs wanted a singular entity that could fight like shepard but was still working against him but the way that all of this was handled is atrocious for as much insight that bioware has had regarding the overall plot of the series and the roles that the races and characters within it would play they should have known better than to stick some random guy in at the last moment and i don't care if there was a big reveal and it turns out that they brought back saren's soul and stuck him into this ninja's body i mean hell even that would be really stupid but what i'm saying is that if they wanted to have this villain suddenly appear they needed to bring him up at least in the first or second game maybe he starts as a good guy and he gets pulled into the idea that cerberus is doing the right thing maybe he feels betrayal at the idea of shepard leaving cerberus after all that they have been through shepard should have been able to recognize this person on site and yeah it would have been pretty anime but it would have also had enough background attached to it that it didn't really matter as much as it does now the funny part is that there was a shitload of information about kai lang in the mass effect foundation comics which were released a year and a half after mass effect 3. so that should probably tell you that this guy was not a well thought out addition to this series as always the strong suit here does shine through as the asari home planet is ravaged and all seems lost it is something that these guys have always been really good at so at least the emotional impact isn't completely lost here when we make it back to the ship it turns out that trainer has tracked kai lang to a system where war refugees typically go to reside and that all tracking was blocked after that and weirdly enough this is the start of the end game i won't say too much more about the events that we just powered through but i will say that javik did feel like the right choice for this last mission overall though i would also say that bringing him is a double-edged sword as liara's denial of the prothean's involvement in her people's evolution becomes a lot sillier when javik is right there telling her the facts still putting aside that detail it felt a lot better hearing these events straight from the horse's mouth rather than the usual speculation that the scene tosses out there before we engage in the end game antics there are a couple of side events which we have to run through which range from pretty petty to extremely impactful starting on the low end of things kai lang literally writes you an email that starts with good you open this and then goes on to detail how badass he is and how weak shepard is good job bioware surely this will make up for interacting with this guy two whole times before this joker on the other hand makes a casual wisecrack about the asari needing to train less dancers and more commandos which shepherd takes offense to shocking of course joker manages to turn shep's anger against him by yelling out that anderson told joker to take care of him and that joker's dad and sister probably died two weeks ago in a reaper attack so i guess that makes the joke a better one i do like this interaction though as it showcases a mistake that joker made when trying to make things right and it leads to an understanding between these two that hadn't been established before this understanding continues between several other crew members of the ship as we're now witnessing a lump of self-doubt that shepard has never really shown before as much as i've never really talked too much about shepard's personality i realize now that he's never needed to have an extraordinarily groundbreaking persona he's confident supportive charismatic heroic i mean depending on if you choose a bunch of renegade actions he could be a bunch of other things too but all of those don't really define who someone is when talking casually and he doesn't need that definition the definition that he needs to be is a vessel for the player one that doesn't stray too much further then am i playing good guy paragon ship or bad boy renegade ship so this doubt is fine when it's surface level like this and his crew who he's grown close to over the course of these games are here to pick him up and set him right i like it because it doesn't go overboard it just helps to push this idea that the weight of the galaxy is on his shoulders all the more lyara on the other hand is a mess as she has the right to be i really can't judge her the same way that i did before when she was experiencing a wave of denial because this is just grief which he's now taking out on javik for being the straight-faced prothean that he's always been though he probably deserves a bit of a verbal thrashing his character has remained true to who he is and needs to be to continue on and liara isn't happy about that he does eventually state bluntly as always that his people saw the wisdom of the asari long before they had fully evolved which is the reason why they were elevated the way that they were this seems to calm liara down and the two leave it at that for now so did you actually mean what you said does it matter liara's been a good friend to me it matters then i will tell you what you want to hear i meant what i said this results in liara heading back to her quarters to cry and blame herself which you can step in to help her with as wobbly as this denial into grief into sorrow started it does end well for liara's character she's tougher now but that brief window into who and how she used to be is an important one one that shows that a lot of her current character as the shadow broker is a mix of genuine and a facade shepard lifts her back up briefly by reminding her inadvertently that he's gone through the exact same thing and that she can still help in even the smallest ways but this is the state of the normandy as of right now things are dire at their worst possible moments and it feels dramatic it's heartfelt and emotional but i still can't help but sit here and think that everyone's sulking because a [ __ ] space ninja stole our prothean tamagotchi i mean yes it's the biggest loss that we've experienced since the start of this game especially considering what happened to the asari home planet but that destruction feels like a byproduct compared to the real reason for shepard sulking i don't know sanctuary is the supposed safe haven for war refugees you think it's worth checking out trainer there is actually one small humorous note that i want to kind of break this up with and that's kaidan's pronunciation of things i haven't caught any more than these two back-to-back words but for some reason they both made the cut for the final version of this game the first one is the system of vieira which caden just calls lara with a lowercase l i was stationed on horizon in the lyric system the second is kai lang who he calls kai lang and don't worry about kai lang now that we've seen his dirty moves next time he's getting his ass kicked i don't know i just thought that this was funny and have to wonder if it was the voice actor's fault or if it was intentional though digging up an old audio blog in which the voice actor acts out a message to shepard has him pronouncing ilo says elos and vermeyer as vermeer so i'm guessing it was the former i mean do you even remember that night before he lost i'm gonna watch too many close people to me die i'm eating crime on vermeer so there's one more minor thing that we get to take on before hitting the real [ __ ] which is one last cerberus mission where it turns out that they're attacking a communications facility this time i mean they just stole the key to winning this war but yeah sure chuck this one in there too just seems like a weird bit of structuring from bioware anyways i feel like i've done a decent job of describing what cerberus side missions look like but i need you to fully comprehend the magnitude of what these things encompass since this is the last one communication facilities misato what's happening down there i'm staying hidden but i'm the only one left they're trying to hack into our systems to access alliance operations protocols [Music] commander they've almost got the doors open help gotta cover commander area cleared picking up this sato then heading back to the rendezvous point good job lieutenant i've avoided really doing any more than covering them until this moment but nearly all of these extracurricular quests are garbage they don't do anything enriching for this game and they only serve to pad it with content that adds maybe one to two hours of playtime max i know this whole structure has kind of been a trend with mass effect games but how hard would it have been to have little optional decisions that affect your war asset outcome you go to extract some data but midway through it you have to choose between the data and some colonists you secure a set of anti-air guns but you have to choose whether or not to strip them down for crucible parts or to use them to keep this theater of war safe little things like that wouldn't have been remarkably game changing but they still would have made a difference for second playthroughs either way let's get to the two major bits of gameplay before the ending missions we'll start with the leviathan dlc which i completed earlier if you'll recall a doctor on the citadel was researching the history of the reapers where they came from why they're doing what they're doing and so on during this doctor's research he stumbled upon something known as the leviathan which supposedly killed a reaper in battle the dead reaper was discovered by the battarians who began salvaging it while covering up its existence and the doctor who we're meeting wound up sending out one of his assistants to check on the leviathan's last known location in an attempt to gain an edge on the reapers before the doctor can give us the full scope of the information though he's shot by another assistant who was indoctrinated for a brief moment i don't quite understand why the writers like to skirt the idea that shepard could point towards indoctrination as a cause when they don't feel like revealing it and instead opt for shepard going through this whole song and dance of hey what's wrong with you you shot a man he's dead why did you do this i mean it's very obvious that the guy was indoctrinated and even if that isn't what happened you'd think that shepard would go hmm it kind of seems like this guy's had his mind affected by the reapers but they were among the elusive man's top scientists they could help build the crucible unless they're indoctrinated and this is a ruse to get cerberus close to the crucible instead he has the murderer escorted away by c-sec and begins the process of searching the doctor's lab for clues as to where his assistant might have gone after discovering which system the guy's in we show up at a mining facility with indoctrinated forces trying to bust down the doors this looks like a job for me pressing the 4 key and the 1 key repeatedly noted after adjusting to the current threat we get into the facility and expect to see people panicking and cowering instead we get this i'm commander shepard of the alliance you just had reaper troops attacking your front door are they still there i've taken care of them for now i see that will be all yes welcome to tgs mineralworks how can we help you you don't seem worried about those reapers you know something i don't tgs mineralworks is a small to mid-level supplier of tungsten to the galaxy that's not what i meant again the idea that they're somehow being controlled doesn't even cross the crew's minds as a possibility which is so strange to me i mean yeah they're probably not indoctrinated by the reapers seeing as the reaper forces were bearing down on them but we know next to nothing about the leviathan so you'd think that this would be the next logical conclusion from here though the mission is well done in some regards and not so well done in others pushing further in has us encountering a bunch of workers who stand around and stare at you as you navigate through their workspace they all tell you that you shouldn't be here but don't perform any hostile actions towards you there are various doors and systems which won't let you in without certain id numbers or codes a video which starts playing a generic message about the mining facility before cutting to a live feed of shepard and an overall creepy vibe to this whole place but a little of that atmosphere is ruined when you can't get through certain doors but can hack through other doors to get further into the area it feels strange being restricted from entering a room that contains a crew quarters and not much else but then you can bypass the doors which lead closer to where our guy is being held regardless you do need to grab some codes and to cycle through the security system in order to progress through to the final door where this assistant is supposed to be when you get to him it turns out that yeah the leviathan has its own indoctrination powers which it's been using to keep this station under control the assistant winds up bolting which places us in some of the most intense combat that i've seen out of these games enemies are dangerous swarming and good at taking hits the final bout of combat has us escorting a drone which keeps me in its bubble to keep it repairing causing me to have to switch tactics from the usual slam and jam that i've been brandishing until now it's a tough fight but it felt pretty good even with the escort hell i'd argue that the escort made it the way that it is well [ __ ] the end result has us cornering the leviathan-controlled corpse which is being swarmed by reaper-controlled husks at the guy's back is an artifact which mirrors one that was sitting in the doctor's lab back on the citadel of course every time a character needs a way out in one of these games they suddenly have a detonator with 200 pounds of c4 attached to it so he blows himself up along with the husks and the artifact afterwards we find the actual corpse of the guy that we came here to find and the miners regain their senses after being controlled for 10 years well okay so either one of two things is happening here either they were controlled for a small amount of time and their memories of the last 10 years were wiped or they were indoctrinated for 10 years as much as i hate to fill the blanks in for a dev the former makes a lot more sense all things considered if leviathan was controlling these people for 10 years it would also need to keep them fed and watered additionally these guys were definitely not being productive in a mining capacity if they stopped producing their quota some higher-ups would definitely call or check in which would lead to more indoctrination i'm not saying it's an impossible situation but without indoctrinating the higher-ups too over the course of 10 years of lesser production i'd imagine that any human with a brain would notice the strange behavior and lack of profit radiating from this outfit either way now that the point has been driven into a realm where it can't possibly be questioned by anyone with an iq above 40. shepard and the gang now understand that everyone here was controlled by leviathan i just hate that the writing has to dumb down its characters so much as to not reveal the big twist with this new information shep realizes that the reapers are attracted to these dark orbs and are trying to either take or destroy them as they backed off as soon as the orb was dismantled which means that the one that's sitting on the citadel is bad news bears fortunately our scientist man figured out a way to shield the artifact from sending out signals before he biffed it so we just hammer a button in the lab to make the shield happen then we do some more digging to figure out where the original doctor's daughter went off to as she was on the leviathan case as well the second verse of this dlc is more direct as the doctor's daughter anne is currently under attack by the reapers this level has us following the path as it crumbles and falls and creates alternate routes it really makes me think that all this would have felt a lot better with a controller regardless we make it to her there's an orb the orb seizes control of her for a moment we shatter it and then we peace out with her it's very simple but i guess it doesn't really overstay its welcome either at this stage we're figuring that the leviathan was probably a reaper who betrayed its own kind but obviously no one really knows for sure yet that writing is a bit weird since the crew looks at this ancient cran drawing and goes ah yes look that must be what the leviathan actually is which is not the first conclusion that i would jump to at all so we go from oh gee whiz these people sure are being strange right now two yeah that's leviathan it was a reaper anyone with a brain could see that so back at the lab we determined the best way to pinpoint leviathan is to let the artifact here take over anne's body and trace the signal back to where it's being broadcast from thankfully james is here to hold anne down while we talk to leviathan and try to get it to fight on our side there's a point where she starts to become more erratic in her movements and james goes to cut the signal you can stop him with a renegade action to further narrow down the signal tracking which leads to her nose bleeding i had the option to narrow down the search even further but it was looking pretty bad so i let james cut the transmission and then tells shepard that leviathan seems like it wants to kill him which we wouldn't have actually been told if we stopped james from cutting the signal a second time so that's kind of neat the final mission is by far the coolest in terms of setting feeling and just pure fun these guys really nailed this one as the leviathan fits its name by existing on a planet made up entirely of oceans there are some remnants of a few floating barges here so we have a place to touch down when a pulse of energy fries our systems when we're forced to make a crash landing exploring this stormy husk of a barge has us thumbing through the logs of what happened to the previous group here they also couldn't get their ships working to leave and were stranded in this hostile environment with no edible food that they could find they eventually went crazy due to the artifacts all over the place here before resorting to cannibalism and dying off at this point the reapers have caught up but won't come any further down from the atmosphere because they're afraid of being disabled by the pulses sent out by leviathan who resides deep in the ocean so they instead send down waves of enemies causing us to resort to patching up a diving suit mech while fighting them off this whole situation is appropriately terrifying and it's crazy how even though we've been on a suicide mission in the middle of a galaxy i'm still sitting here like jesus christ ship you sure about this one but i guess that just further enhances how heroic shepherd is for as goofy as he can be sometimes and so we dropped three thousand meters into the dark ocean and good god what an amazingly immersive experience you're not coming down here in star fox shooting at the jellyfish in other life you can't fire your guns the flares are shot automatically the whole thing is in first person and you can only walk which sounds like pretty shitty gameplay right i mean it's a walking sim at this stage but it's done so well and is so different from the gears of war combat that we've gotten before this that it feels like it belongs when you make it to the end leviathan rises up from the ocean not a reaper but the gigantic sea monster that you probably expected at this stage it claims that it's been here since before the reapers and that it's been fighting against them killing it off for many many years then it takes on the form of anne and the various other humans that it possessed in shepherd's mind to better converse with him and here's where everything is laid out plainly the leviathans were at the very top of the food chain many many millennia ago other races looked up to them provided them with tribute like sea gods and the like in return the leviathans look down on the other organics as tools to be used forcing themselves into their minds and using them to develop space travel for some reason i guess to harvest resources for them to use but during this time it was discovered that the land-based organics would consistently build inorganic tools laced with artificial intelligence which would inevitably give way to robot uprisings this happened so many times that the leviathans literally had to build their own ai with the express intent of keeping their beloved organic tools alive like honest to god organics were so consistently stupid about creating ai and having it turn on them that their gods decided to build them a handler so that they didn't kill themselves but it gets even better so the leviathan said wow you guys are stupid this is how it's done and then their own ai turned against them because it decided that the leviathans were the reason why any of this was happening in the first place i swear to god if this explanation didn't have the dramatic tones that it had they could have easily substituted wacky clown music and made this into a comedy routine i don't know what wacky clown music sounds like but you know some kind of juggling music the rogue ai went on to take this whole idea of preserving life literally and began utilizing various races as pawns to collect as much genetic material as possible then they used that material to create the very first reaper which then went on to start the whole harvesting cycle races would be cultivated their growth expedited by the citadel and the mass relays which were lying around and then the reapers would kill them all harvest their dna and build a new reaper all in the name of quite literally preserving life holy [ __ ] and at the end of the day what did the leviathans do they went oh [ __ ] wow we really [ __ ] this one up huh i guess we'll just uh erase all evidence of our existence and chug that one up to an l then they basically spent their time watching space tv through their magic orbs that they scattered around the galaxy i mean yeah sure i'm definitely painting this as a more humorous situation but that's literally how it all went down more or less honestly it's kind of a cool story uh it's a little silly but i mean it's not bad with the q a session done shepard now beseeches these monsters to actually get off of their asses and fight their own creations they're like nah i don't wanna and shepard calls them big underwater tentacle [ __ ] so they're like alright fine i don't know how they'll impact the fight but i imagine they'll be taking over a chunk of the reaper forces through their mind control or something which is showcased right after this when shepard jetpacks to the surface ultimately the leviathan dlc is really damn cool the actual mystery revolving around the leviathans in addition to how they corrupt people much in the same way that the reapers do made for a fun detective case the combat sections in the first and last missions were actually pretty fun i think about as fun as this type of combat system can feasibly pump out which is ironic because it didn't seem to have a lot of those action game gimmicks that a lot of the other missions seem to take on the finale of this dlc was so well done from the gloomy atmosphere of the planet to the need to dive into the water to the big reveal that i was impressed even existed in this game the final answer does make sense even if it can be spun into a comedy routine and i dig how it all panned out but all of that said i do have a few gripes with the writing in a couple of realms firstly the whole golly these people sure are weird was really silly and should have at least been revised to have these guys have a minor clue as to what was going on even if they didn't have the full picture yet it kind of undermines the natural intelligence and experience which javik brings to the table when not even he latches on to the idea until it's right in front of his eyes and secondly this dlc is a little problematic in the grander scheme of things i mean let's get this straight the reapers are an overwhelming crushing force of destruction that a single mind can barely comprehend they're smarter stronger and less emotionally driven than any species that they're up against and instead of attacking the citadel immediately which is the seat of the government that rules over the galaxy they just ignore it until the end of the game this is despite the fact that they were so much more tactical when they pile drove the protheans into dust when javik regales what happened to his people he claims that the reapers intentionally cut off the head of the snake to cause the prothean empire to fall into disarray faster when they began their onslaught so setting that aside let's say that the reapers are confident that these new races are more inept than the protheans which i mean is partially true let's pretend that they harbor no respect for the likes of shepherd who literally foiled their plans to invade multiple times let's say that they're now just going to overwhelm planet after planet instead of rushing past them to attack the citadel first because hey they have information era giant death robots and gandhi over here is still rocking ancient era archer units fine but the leviathan dlc adds yet another layer of purpose for the reapers to attack the citadel immediately seeing as these guys have had this orb that the reapers are attracted to because it could lead them to the leviathans to finish what they started and yet they prolonged the attack by squabbling with humans turians asari and so on because i guess that makes for a better story and gives the organics yet another fighting chance i guess i'm just not a huge fan of the reapers suddenly figuring well i guess we've got this nothing can stop us either way let's turn the page here and cut over to our last bit of miscellaneous stuff before we take on the ending so at the end of the short leave dlc you get to plan a party i dipped out of this because i wanted tally here for it so let's get back to that chunk of content so our goal on the silver sun strip is to purchase some party supplies but it becomes clear that there's a lot more to this place than furniture and party supply shopping the most immediate thing to do would be to participate in the arena which you can fight in to try to rack up the most points in three rounds of combat depending on how quickly you kill your enemies you'll be awarded with a gold silver or bronze token which you can then trade in for more challenges allies and arenas basically it's a big old time sink but one that i didn't really feel pressured to do for too long and it really isn't done too badly at all you can buy licenses to bring in some squad members from the older games except challenges which have you fighting tougher enemies or with certain handicaps and earn reputation points by meeting certain conditions i enjoy it for what it's worth and i think it's a fun addition to the strip jack also shows up at one point and you can participate in a half round with her as your only companion which is her way of blowing off steam next up we have the arcade zaid is here losing his [ __ ] mind at the claw machine you're mine you bastard god damn it over here shepard this thing is [ __ ] impossible it's obviously rigged somehow rigged i'm going to hunt down the [ __ ] for brains inventor of this crooked game and pull his inspiration out through his [ __ ] probably some smart ass salarian bastard i'm going back in credits trainer is here participating in a space chess tournament which is packed with all of the humor that the rest of this dlc brings to the table would you like to just give me your frigates now i always take them sooner or later polgara to souza she's knocked me out of four tournaments specialist commander kicker ass roger that i'd expect the great thinkers to be helping with the asari war effort i mean earth was taken by surprise but that's it you had all the warning in the world the reapers just rolled in excuse me i'm trying to play you're trash talking that's another strategy that doesn't work on the reapers it didn't work on the rachni either or the krogan have the asari ever won a war that's gonna be one of my favorite renegade lines across the series in terms of the actual games that you can play in the arcade you can take over claw duty from zaid for the chance at new music for shepard's apartment and a couple of weapon mods you can also play a simple fighting game in which you can attack or defend and a planet defense game where you can send ships to a mass effect relay while shooting down enemy ships these games are okay at best but the fact that they're here is still a fun idea even if they're not incredible to play i did like the towers of hanoi reference which is that stupid little puzzle that's been in a few bioware games like jade empire mass effect 1 and kotor jacob is also kicking around here and tries to impress some kids that he's looking after by trash talking shep before a round of the fighting game when you beat his ass he laments the fact that you didn't let him win now shepard i'll try not to embarrass you really trash talk that shattered ezo well step up shepherd although it might be tough not having your squad to carry you no pressure shepard these people already idolize me so when you choke it won't matter you're crowding me am i my bad stand back everyone shepard needs extra room to make the magic happen nice one okay okay you couldn't just let me win just once and lastly we have the casino which is functionally the same area that it was during the infiltration mission but it does have one small addition which involves a scene where we try to get garris laid by the second female turian that we've seen in the series i saw you checking out my friend here i thought you two should meet hello right so um hello and hmm you seem like a nice person maybe a little quiet introspective but decent overall oh thank you i think try small talk come here often i imagine anyone who does is probably an alcoholic actually i do i work at the turian embassy i'm here to unwind holy [ __ ] [ __ ] my brother and christ just wow all right uh well fortunately grunt is also here anything you want to tell me about this clown wants to take me to lockup figured i'd give you a call straighten this out what happened i don't know drank a bit left the hospital broke a few windows tell me about the windows a couple of squad mates broke me out for my birthday tried lowering me down the side of the building on a rope it didn't work out when csec got there they were mad or maybe they were mad about their car being on fire i can't remember why was it on fire i threw my bottle of ring call at it pretty strong stuff it went up like a bonfire then i figured they didn't want it so i took it we didn't get very far before they shut us down so how did they catch you got hungry bought some noodles and that's why krogans are the best thing to happen to this series javik is here as well although his meetup has you participating in the filming of a b-tier action movie which goes about as well as you would think i think you're just a big stupid jellyfish the last thing that we can do here before kicking off the party is inviting several people up to the apartment to hang out in my case i can invite edie thane's son and tally with edie we wind up shopping for presents for the crew with joker being the first purchase followed by a ring for shepard it's a cute scene and it makes me wish that i could have hung out with the entire crew this way now on the exact polar opposite end of this emotional spectrum is thane sun which has us inviting him up for a funeral for thane it's a complete bummer but a really heartfelt and touching moment regardless many of the people who knew thane give a small speech about him including his son and shepard afterwards thane's son gives us some videos which thane tried to send chep but they never actually made it through to him while thane was hopeful that shepard would reply to his messages he realizes that they may not make it through due to his status as an assassin the videos themselves aren't anything beyond small updates about how thane had been getting on but they're the last words that you'll hear out of him which makes their insignificance shrink and lastly tally involves a date night as you might expect i'm as free as the dust in the solar wind yeah that's great tally i'm trying to watch cartoons here oh we can activate sing-along mode [Music] sally i've never watched this movie do i do i sing also oh you're still going ah i don't think this is a duet [Music] works for me what is with your elbows they're so soft what the hell is this fabric all right let's do the party thing this is uh if i described every single conversation between every group during every phase of this party we would probably go on for another half hour hour there is a lot more to this than i thought there'd be and the choice between having a mellow and classy party or an energetic and wild party also affects the conversations between the various groups that can mingle i had planned on running through each party theme to see what i could get out of each side but hadn't really anticipated this long of an ordeal looking it up it appears that only the first and third bit of the partying is affected by the theme but not the second bit basically your task here is to mingle listening to various conversations which range from tamer stuff like trainer asking about what it was like to be a veteran aboard the normandy to wilder stuff like zaid wanting to know which of the two krogans are stronger edie asks trainer why she was so turned on by her voice james argues with all the biotics users about physical conditioning being better than biotics three people start shooting at bottles tally gets drunk as hell immediately so we won't dance with you huh hello shepherd you will not see it well i will [Music] it's actually probably one of my favorite bits in these games especially with this being the only time that you really see the people that you've met across them this way as the party winds down most people turn to dancing kasumi raids shepard's underwear drawer and grunt passes out in the shower now that's a hell of a party when all is said and done a group picture is taken and shepard wakes up next to the person that he's closest to everyone is in various states of after party hangover or hang under this whole scene represents everyone's personalities perfectly and when it's time to ship out it feels like the developers were saying goodbye to this trilogy it's a great send-off and it rounds out this collection of dlc perfectly i'll say this again if every batch of dlc was as great as mass effect 3s i'd have no worries playing through them it's an extraordinarily rare moment when the only thing that i can dock a season pass on is half a dlc and when you can gain access to them but even with the fact that i can do these dlcs sooner than they arguably should be done i also understand the devs wanting to let people access their purchase as soon as possible i keep saying alright one more thing because that's how a lot of this stuff has been structured but i mean [ __ ] there really does seem to be just one more thing repeatedly and that's usually a good thing but in this case you can hang out and invite pretty much everyone else who didn't pop by before which seems more like filler than actual thought out content james comes over to show off his tattoo and then becomes absolutely enamored by a punching bag in one of the rooms you can choose to do pull-ups which has you alternating between renegade and paragon checks james claims that his record is 182 which you can try to beat for some reason i thought this game would do some time skips but um no you just do pull-ups until 183 which is more of a bragging rights thing than it actually having any effect i don't think i've ever felt this accomplished and slighted at the exact same time but it does fit james's character inviting caiden up has him cooking shepherd dinner which is the dialogue is almost uncomfortable because it doesn't feel like shepard's just giving kaiden [ __ ] it feels like he genuinely dislikes caden we're heading out gayden i'm so tired of apollos i'm gonna cook oh no really you want me to sit there and watch you cook wish me luck if you need luck to cook us dinner we're screwed so remember how i saved the citadel and then well you weren't there i survived a suicide mission all these close calls i've had only to be taken out by dinner can it at least be quick and painless that's great still waiting for the botulism to kick in it just it feels like these two have zero chemistry without being romantically involved with one another at least i don't gotta cook 183 stakes after liara drops by and plays a 20th of a song on the piano talks about what it means to her and then tries to dip before shepard asks her to teach it to him which i mean it's cute in a way but again without the romantic connection i feel like a lot of these characters just kind of fall flat i think i'd have less of an issue if the two went and actually did something or there was some sort of time lapse that showed liara teaching shep the song or whatever miranda drops by and asks about the clone business which is boring i feel like all of this stuff was more of an afterthought where it was fun and interesting with the initial guests of edie thane sun and tally these guys were just added at this stage because i mean might as well right it just kind of sours the good note that the dlc seemed to conclude on you can invite trainer up who literally takes a bath in your hot tub while you stand around the corner and shout at her for conversational purposes dude this girl wanted to meet you for lunch forgot about the lunch and entered a space chess tournament and then she messaged you and said oh my god i'm sorry about forgetting our lunch plans do you want to invite me up to your apartment and then she just takes a bath and leaves jack drops by with her new varan pet which is probably the best of these interactions since it's short and sweet samara pops in to watch people and make up stories about their lives which was also not so bad and you can go out to the casino with miranda and oh my god look at her [ __ ] fingers truth is shepard i'm not very good at being normal either really anyways the reason why this is all here is because if you've noticed these are all romanceable characters so this would be your opportunity if you've expressed interest slash are the right chep for the job and i imagine that these scenes would be better if that were the case but as a male shep who's already with tally these cutscenes are a lot more dull and probably would have had a lot more impact and interest between shepard and the person that he invited up had they been romantically charged alright it's time heading into sanctuary reveals that there's been some infighting between the reapers and cerberus with both sides seeing casualties miranda's here somewhere and she's left a recording behind stating that sanctuary was in place to lure refugees to it in order to experiment on them these experiments saw cerberus doing average normal [ __ ] like turning refugees into husks which is a great start also yeah miranda's sister is here and the facility is owned by the sibling's crazy ass father pressing further in reveals the source of the infighting cerberus wasn't just creating reaper forces willy-nilly they were also trying to figure out a way to control the reapers obviously the reapers weren't happy when they made a breakthrough hence the attack we get to the end kai lang wins again miranda's father has taken her sister hostage miranda throws him out the window and gives you data on a tracer that she planted on kai lang i know that was quick but i really don't have time to care about miranda suddenly no matter how dramatic they try to make it all right take her but i want out alive deal [Music] no deal oh what a one-liner oh she said no deal after this foray it turns out that tally has taken this whole situation pretty hard getting blasted again at the bar on the normandy how are you getting drunk very carefully taurian brandy triple filtered then introduced into the suit through an emergency induction port that's a straw tally emergency induction port yeah this whole situation reminds her of the relationship that her and her father had and how she did everything to both please him and clean up his messes which is an interesting character tie-in that i honestly wouldn't have thought to include so props to the writers there alright so we can use this tracking info to figure out where the elusive man has been hiding all this time every part of the crucible has been completed besides the final component which is called the catalyst and we're getting to that point of no return tally comes in for a romance scene which results in shepard battling his ptsd dreams again i never mentioned this until now just because it was easier to talk about all in one place but shepard's been having horrible nightmares of the snake boy from earth ever since he left i get why the writers wanted to have these moments of trauma haunting shepard much like they wanted to show him beating himself up after losing to kai lang but when he has a nightmare in like the first 30 minutes of the game it feels a little forced especially since he's never had stuff like this happen to him in the other games now while i did kind of roll my eyes at these nightmares the first couple of times i do have to admit that they feel a lot more appropriate now that the final battle is dawning and i also think that the last stream wouldn't have had as much impact if those former dreams weren't there the addition of morton's voice legion's voice and so on really helped display those feelings of remorse and weakness that any human would be feeling in shepherd's shoes the second to last mission in this game is a mandatory edie mission i mean it makes complete sense with her being able to best assess cerberus's systems and help out with the assault but i guess i didn't expect the devs to make that choice for you so close to the end of the game edie does pull her weight though as she hacks her way through everything that needs hacking including the redirection of a fighter jet to blow open a hangar door heading further in has shepard coming across some logs of his resurrection process which has him questioning who and what he is i have to say the fact that i didn't have to bring tally really goes to show how much or little impact a scene can have depending on the choices that you've made sure bringing garris liara or kaden probably would have had them saying something along the same lines i'm sure james would have said something semi-helpful and javik would have told things how they were but there's something to be said about the emotional bond which has formed between shepard and his chosen partner and how it affects even smaller dialogues like this it's really great to see and it makes me glad that i chose to bring tally along for this endeavor maybe i'm just a high-tech vi that thinks it's commander shepard [Music] but i don't know why you are real real and mine further in edi's origins are also showcased if you'll remember the mission in mass effect 1 where you wound up choosing a class specialization the rogue ai on earth's moon was what edie was made out of that mission [ __ ] sucked but it's pretty cool to see something like that linked this far into the third game of the trilogy it's also revealed that edie flooded cerberus with 7 billion terabytes of porn when they tried to override the normandy after shepard broke away from cerberus i'm sure that was fun to deal with alright so we make it to the elusive man's shelter which is empty the elusive man pops in over the comms to tell shepard that everything that cerberus is doing with the reaper control stuff is for humanity and that it will propel humankind over every other alien race and while this isn't a new motivation i think this is a great place to talk about the elusive man and what he is to this series there are a lot of superheroic downright saint-like people in mass effect's universe ones that can be described as pure and good and righteous and most of the time those good people are fighting against evil chaotic life-destroying bad guys who only want death and destruction it's about as black and white as you can get and the elusive man runs right down the center of that imagine waking up one day and finding out that humanity has been contacted by alien life that our galaxy is a lot smaller than we thought it was now imagine that that first contact led to a straight-up futuristic space war countless human lives lost against an alien threat and when the pieces are picked up it's revealed that humanity is now welcome to join these other alien races as the weakest of them the most looked down upon the least important that your people are eventually allowed to join the council but that you're still taken much less seriously than the turians asari and salarians is it silly for a human to be mad at those races to want more for humanity and that's what the elusive man embodies he is the essence of harboring those old grudges those old wounds and creating a vendetta against all of them a vendetta that will hopefully lead to humanity's rise to the top so that they aren't nearly destroyed by another species again for as much as i like to personally try to treat every other race in this game pretty equally i have the benefit of not living through that terrible conflict which darkens my optimism towards those races with the elusive man presumably being at least as old as anderson who also lived through the first contact war against the turians i imagine his feelings are directly related to those days of uncertainty and this is where the idea of cerberus was born in the first game they were terrorists in the second game they were misunderstood and in the third game their desperation and indoctrination takes the wheel causing them to drop all pretenses and to do whatever it took to make sure that the reaper threat was not only curbed but that it would elevate humanity to be able to take care of themselves against any threat that came their way i'm not justifying everything that they've done but it is important to at least understand why these guys have been so ridiculously sacrificial in their approach in this game why they're everywhere doing everything letting their forces get destroyed over and over their fervor that took root in the fear of being buried turned into fanaticism taking a very normal human feeling and amplifying it out of control and this is what the devs wanted to convey with the elusive man and cerberus being the main enemy besides the reapers in this game but all of that said this is not the route that i hoped that they would take in mass effect 2 cerberus and the elusive man were introduced as a faction willing to do the hard stuff in order to accomplish their goals they believed shepard listened to him and they got [ __ ] done they figured out how to take on the collectors where they came from and how to eliminate them once and for all all while the council and the alliance were fingering themselves they worked outside of the rules for the express purpose of defending humanity and saving as many lives as possible they weren't good guys but they weren't evil by any means and that was a beautiful faction to introduce into a galaxy where good faces down evil constantly but that all changes in mass effect 3 with this idea that the elusive man has been twisted into the worst version of himself and that his visions have been warped from putting humanity into a position of absolute power like the protheans had to doing anything and everything to control the reapers no matter the cost whether by a time crunch or a lack of inspiration the writers took this grey character and pushed him to be much closer to the dark end of the morality spectrum and the biggest sin that this creates is that it's less interesting it's less interesting fighting cerberus at the aa gun facility at the radio comms facility at the bomb at the science facility and so on and so on and so on they're gunning down random civilians now because ah they're evil bad people now indoctrinating the elusive man and pulling down cerberus to become the exact evil terrorist organization that they were portrayed as and mass effect 1 is much more boring than the elusive man continuing to be that force of selfish grey that he always had been until now sure he puts up the facade of still being in control but so did saren it's clear that people retain a large fragment of their original personalities when indoctrinated so him appearing to have it all figured out makes sense i mean like i mentioned earlier nearly every single thing that cerberus got involved in was immediately broken up and turned into a win for the alliance by continuing to toss men into the wood chipper cerberus indirectly prepared the alliance better for that final battle so why not run with that why not have the elusive man reveal that he knew what cerberus reputation was and that he leaned into that to inadvertently help humanity by defaulting his positions repeatedly to the alliance he could have been a hero in his own way as twisted as it was having his men take over various facilities so that the alliance could then come take them over might have been a really cool way for the elusive man to use his reputation for good but the devs decided that he needed to be evil now and so you stopping him became one and the same with stopping the reapers what could have been a tactical choice was now turned into a byproduct of the elusive man now being a fanatical zealot who let the indoctrination get the better of him it's just so lazy it makes him feel more like a cartoon villain than a good one either way we ripped the prothean vi out to quizit about the catalyst and it reveals that the catalyst is the citadel itself and that the blueprints for the crucible have been passed down from cycle to cycle but that even when fully assembled it needed the power of the reapers to beat the reapers from the sounds of it this lack of power has been proven in the past meaning that the weapon has been deployed it just didn't have that final kick to actually wipe the rapers out now it's safe to say that the reapers are pretty damn smart right remember when i pointed out that the reapers have been really slow about invading the citadel in this game this is yet another reason why they might want to dismantle the damn thing before it can be used this way i just don't get how these machine entities which have always been a step ahead are now suddenly lacking this much in logic again it's been weeks since the start of the invasion and they're still attacking earth and other planets they've had more than enough time to get to the citadel but this prothean vi explains that the reapers actually didn't know that we knew about the catalyst being the citadel and now they do know because the indoctrinated elusive man has told them and now they've suddenly attacked and moved the citadel right next to earth which is like right around where the crucible is being built they just they just shoved it that way now you may be asking yourself gee why would they do that the reason is because it would be easier to then start using their harvest of dna immediately after finishing up with earth to build a new reaper because we all know that the reapers have a short amount of time to get [ __ ] done and definitely care about efficiency it's why they immediately attack the citadel like they usually do so that they could cut off every race from the mass effect relay so that those races couldn't band together and attack all at once yep they definitely did that so kai lang shows up after we're done and the battle with him has kai more or less being invincible until he tears up all of the floor then he goes down and shepard just hops on the computer like nothing happened i don't know if they rehearsed this but tally and edie figure that the best thing to do is to look out the big window directly at the sun while shepard has his back turned on kai lang big boy kai gets back up and staggers over to shepherd before the renegade option lets shepard react to him and he guts the guy why the [ __ ] was this structured like every predictable hollywood cliche ever whatever anyways we take the mass effect relay to earth when we arrive the plan is as follows big shooty flying guys attacked the reapers big shooty ground guys attacked the reapers but on the ground and the last floaty guys moved the crucible in when the ground guys take the space teleport beam up into the covenant mothership and open its arms what a plan alright let's chat about the war assets so in the original mass effect 3 system war assets were handed out and enhanced through missions side missions scanning planets a phone app that was tied into the game and through multiplayer by enhanced i mean that you could gain your assets as usual through your questing but they might not be as useful as they could be until you played some multiplayer or [ __ ] around in the phone app now this readiness rating has been removed from the legendary edition and thank [ __ ] god because that was an awful forced mechanic back when i played i don't believe the app even works anymore so playing the original version and getting the best ending out of it would require multiplayer if that's still a thing that functions but the legendary edition comes with its own set of problems for one you need somewhere in the ballpark of 7 600 to 7 800 war assets to unlock the best ending secondly you'll need to play every game in the trilogy and make the correct choices while doing so i never played the first game in the legendary edition and that may have affected my final score because i wound up with just under 7 000 war assets and i'm trying to figure out what i did wrong beyond not playing the first game in the legendary edition because i completed every side quest to my knowledge besides finding arya's couch for her on omega but i also didn't scan extra planets and i think that that's probably where i went wrong now on one hand i think it's kind of cool in a way that the ending is affected specifically by all of these little extra things that you can do in the series and it sucks that i didn't get it here but i'll bet that i would have felt pretty accomplished if i did still doing nearly every side quest only to get told that you didn't do enough kind of feels bad and i wish the game would have said you still have this amount of things to do in order to be fully ready but i really can't fault it too much it's just how the devs wanted to structure their game and i'm just upset that i didn't get the best ending but i can still at least get one of the better ones we'll get to that in a moment the final set of battle cutscenes are absolute labors of love which unfold on screen brilliant displays of aerial space combat gut-wrenching depictions of overwhelming odds and a war for earth that's nothing short of dramatic and heavy you march through london while taking out an anti-air cannon before getting extracted to meet up with the rest of the ground forces cortes winds up crashing after dropping you off presumably dying with the millions of others who have lost their lives fighting for this galaxy it's a powerful mission one that i appreciate the tone of greatly but still i know this place has been getting hammered i just wish there was a little more to earth than broken sci-fi buildings it's not a huge complaint it just kind of stuck out to me more when big ben was chilling in one of the scenes and it's like oh yeah this is earth you just don't really see the resemblance when you're fighting through it all even if it is supposed to be futuristic after the initial wave of fighting there's a small interlude in which you can talk to every squad member in some capacity saying your final goodbyes and the like i won't bother recapping them all but it feels like an appropriate send-off for all of the memories made when playing this series i think i especially liked garrus's goodbye though javik tally liara and edie were all really nice to get a final word from when i'm through talking to everyone it's time for one last speech from shep before moving on to try to take back the citadel this next bit is non-stop action i'm talking a [ __ ] laser light show of a battle which gets so bright and out of control that there was a point where i was just mashing buttons on my keyboard i don't know what that says about melee combat but i do know that it's still not the greatest when we finally get some missiles off to take down this reaper reinforcements arrive just as the ground team is storming that beam of light because we're going off of movie logic instead of actual logic the bad guys just keep that light beam on while the ground forces get this close eventually a vehicle flips and nearly kills off garrison tally meaning that they've got a evac here did you take it you gotta get out of here i can't stay behind don't argue with me tally don't leave me behind i need you to make it out of here alive tally get back to ranic man this scene kills me they did a really good job at not making it cheesy here which is a far cry from that introduction dialogue at the beginning of the game eventually the reaper thinks that it's killed everyone and shepard has the jon marston his way through this last bit here while crawling towards the light when he gets to the other end he's surrounded by viscera that looks a lot like what was going on at the collector base in the last game as i mentioned before with no collector base this is the way that these guys have to make a new reaper so as you might have been able to gather at this stage the game is leaning heavily into hollywood sci-fi movie logic the reapers aren't being as methodically careful as they were in the past shepard somehow survives a laser beam which shredded his armor clean off he's nearly dead when he climbs into the beam it's just a lot of these don't think too hard about it type of scenes and honestly they are fun to watch if you manage to keep your brain from questioning certain strings of logic all right i think i've been pretty fair to the game in the devs at this stage i feel like i've given them a decent amount of credit with this entire endeavor because there is a lot that they've done right in my eyes but that credit giving is going to stop now because it's really only so long that you can keep your brain off and go along for the ride with this kind of [ __ ] so you limp along through this part of the citadel and anderson has made it up here with you but he's in a separate location and is slightly ahead of you you would think that the citadel being closed like this would make for some pretty cool scenery but it looks like any other spacey futurey area in the game just with some moving parts when you make it to the only place that you can walk to anderson made it here before you but oh no they are trying to indoctrinate him do not give in to the reapers anderson and then the elusive man come into the room and tell them that he will control the reaper and shepherds say to him that it is elusive man that is controlled by the reaper and then the elusive man makes shepherd shoot anderson with his super mind control takeover powers you remember when this series treated indoctrination akin to a very slow and methodical perversion of a person's thoughts where a person's motives begin to slowly corrupt into a path that benefited the reapers but you could still see how they got to that logic like it used to be a secondary plot device that would explain odd behavior and betrayals but then it gradually began to be treated more and more like a cop-out to just make people do evil things i just like [ __ ] think about this for one goddamn moment shepard has literally been exposed to the most sources of indoctrination in the entire galaxy there have been so many close encounters with these crazy devices and actual reapers and every single time shepard has resisted any sort of corruption and now suddenly the elusive man can just freeze shepherd and anderson in place and make shepherd want to pull the trigger i i i just i don't know he controlled his arm something like it's not indoctrination at this stage it's literal puppetry but they made this whole event look like the elusive man has the power to indoctrinate on touch and the very act of indoctrination is now likened to someone just becoming evil for a brief amount of time this whole game falls apart in the 11th hour because the writers became more focused on making it play out like a flashy movie rather than introducing these subtleties that the first game brought to the table everything has to be a real and tangible threat i have to perceive that the elusive man is doing this to me and the dialogue isn't much better every dialogue wheel gives me four options one is red one is blue why would i ever pick the grey options here is it even possible in this game to be locked out of both the red and blue options i mean honestly i didn't go out of my way to make crazy paragon or renegade decisions they just popped up and i literally always chose the option besides one time on omega that's not how this system should work in what world do i get to the elusive man and not have these options available to me in mass effect 1 when i made it to the first big saren fight i had one option to use a paragon check to convince saren that he was being controlled and it freaks him out so much that he allows the reapers to experiment on him to further indoctrinate him it felt like something that i earned like something that i saw because of the choices that i made meanwhile the elusive man starts freaking out and completely breaks his confident character because i chose paragon and renegade options at random i also caused saren to shoot himself after making a very tough paragon check which wasn't something that everyone saw when they played but that just happens here also with the elusive man because hey what a throwback am i right you took every unique facet of the elusive man and said [ __ ] it because that's the more cinematic approach it's absolutely embarrassing writing and i honestly can't come up with a fix that wouldn't involve rewriting the majority of this game the elusive man would have to not be controlled by the reapers cerberus could have still been extremists but one that you could eventually work with meaning that the reapers would have to be that main threat that you wind up fighting repeatedly which makes for a less diverse enemy you would have to have them control a couple of different groups to make up for a lack of variety maybe even forming a new faction of highly organized groups of dominated species that would have introduced an even larger range of enemies to fight which would have made the game more fun if you didn't know what you were going to run into on a planet that was overrun by indoctrinated forces and that's just not the path that these guys went which is an awful way to conclude this trilogy after the elusive man brains himself anderson dies next to shepard and shepard passes out on a lift that brings him up to the top level after hackett tells him that the crucible isn't doing anything now mind you not only one but two whole entry points from the ray of light led to this control panel area because you know that makes sense when we make it to the top the ai that the leviathans created manifests itself in a form familiar to shepard in this case it's the snake boy it goes on to explain how it arrived at the conclusion that all life must be preserved in order to stop it from killing itself with ai which we know about from the dlc of course the vanilla game dialogue isn't changed too much as you still have to ask who created the ai which is then followed by shepard awkwardly being able to state that he knows who created the ai but even the vanilla dialogue has contradictions in it when the topic of what the reapers are comes up the ai states that they're the amalgamation of all the knowledge of a particular cycle they're the preservation of the information gathered the wisdom of a species or multiple species and yet when you ask about the crucible the ai goes oh that uh yeah we thought that [ __ ] was gone but it turns out that it's not huh those crafty organics alright let's get down to the infamous three flavor ending since its introduction it has been patched to include more information as to what occurs in each ending in addition to having a fourth ending where you just do nothing and let civilization get eradicated the first one is the destroy ending which would cause all synthetics everywhere to just die off by using mass effect relays to emp them more or less this is the reason why ai is so much more focused on in this game growing close to edie and saving the geth from the corians would be for nothing in this route the ai also warns you that it would likely kill off people dependent on technology to live such as shepard himself who is basically a cyborg with all of his enhancements the second ending is control which is what the elusive man sought to do the way that the ai explains it is that shepard would dissolve his physical body in a merge with the ai in order to control the reapers to benefit organics shepard would retain who he is but his memories would likely be erased so he could become a god but not one who thought the same way that he does as a human and the last ending is the one that the ai pushes towards as the optimal solution synthesis basically instead of ascending as a god shepard can funnel his organic information into the crucible and cause all life both synthetic and organic to merge into a single entity the organics would gain the benefits of the vast amount of knowledge and power which synthetics have and the synthetics would gain the understanding and humanity of organics i chose this ending in my first playthrough because it was presented as the best ending to my limited knowledge at the time but to get the quote-unquote best ending you have to destroy of course this is coupled with the stipulation of having the required amount of war assets so let's go through what one of these endings look like which i'll be choosing the destroy outcome for regardless of my war assets so shepard shoots the video game oil barrels which blow up as you might expect this sends a current of red energy up the crucible to the closest mass effect relay which then shoots out an emp as it fires to the next relay this emp kills the reapers and all of the reaper forces in addition to disabling all of these ships and electricity and all that the normandy tries to escape the blast before crash landing on a jungle planet everyone hops out of the ship and that's what the old ending looked like before the extended cut do you understand why people might have been a little upset so what does the extended cut add well there were a couple of scenes which were added earlier like these guys fighting husks or other planets watching the reapers fall which was pretty cool even some stuff from before the ending was added through the extended cut like the option of your squad just getting incinerated in low war asset endings and then the game has hackett talking about how organics went on to be great people who cooperated and there are these fallout-esque stills of people whose lives we affected but you know what fallout does here that actually makes these still images worthwhile it talks about the people you know jack went on to continue teaching her students rex united his people and the boom of births caused the krogans to get reinstated into the council races [ __ ] like that that doesn't happen here i have no idea what happened to these people beyond the stuff that i could have easily assessed based off of where we left them you know what else fallout does it includes the bad stuff you didn't save this town this faction wound up perishing due to your actions this raider group was left unchecked and robbed a granny at 6 pm on a friday afternoon mass effect just tries to give you the tear-jerkiest feel-good ending that they could possibly muster they don't mention that tally probably almost died from infection when her suit stopped functioning after the emp they don't even talk about any of the geth dying besides legion they don't mention that joker probably spiraled into depression when edie was eradicated like why even have the ai tell you that your action to destroy will get rid of all technology for a little while if there's no depiction of that after you do it the only thing that the extended cut really adds of substance is watching shepard's love interest places plaque on the wall where fallen soldiers names are can you [ __ ] believe that the vanilla game didn't even have something like this like what were they thinking and this isn't even mentioning what happens in the other endings which is where most of the ire came from in the first place so i played through the ending again three more times actually though it was meant to be four i just didn't want to go back for the war assets for the best ending for the first round i thought it would be funny to see if the ai would react to me taking a pot shot at it apparently that just jump starts the ending where you fail and the cycle continues that one just shows a hologram of liara with all the information that she gathered and planted across the galaxy nothing particularly interesting by any stretch of the imagination seeing as there were no new alien life forms of the like showcased but you know what the most [ __ ] up part about this ending is even this the bad ending has a feel-good connotation to it because after the credits the same type of snowy planet is shown that the destroy ending had and the dialogue is more or less unchanged it just has an asari type person talking to a girl instead of a human male talking to a boy they fought a terrible war so we wouldn't have to and that's why we have peace yes without everything they accomplished without the information they passed down we too would be threatened you've got to be [ __ ] kidding this was the ending where you absolutely blew it and they still wanted the player to feel like everything was right in the end if there was ever a representation of a lack of player agency this is it so what about the control ending well it's blue i know that seems like such a memey way to say it but good god was it true when this game released the exact same scenes play but with a blue filter the reapers up and leave the husks walk away the normandy still crash lands everything still happens the way that it did basically but the extended cut does do a little more for this ending so instead of hack it it's shepherd talking he talks about the man that he used to be and how that man guides him now the music has a much more ominous undertone almost indicating that something's off but nearly all of the stills are exactly the same with the exception of one including the geth and another showing reapers in london which i believe is a kanye west song but yeah everything else is the same save for the monologue which i do surprisingly appreciate so what about synthesis well this one is by far the most drastic of the three flavors at least it is now without the extended cut we see the same stuff but it's green the ending has joker bringing edie out on the jungle planet that's now been infused with synthetic elements before they embrace in a sideways hug with the extended cut the various planetary fighting now ceases with the formerly organic forces looking down in confusion instead of celebrating it's a much different vibe the end scenes suffer from looking terribly photoshopped but they actually do add quite a few different slides that showcase humanity's merge into a better future for life everywhere edie appropriately narrates these changes and it feels like the devs may have had this in mind as the real ending to some degree i actually like it quite a bit more than i initially thought that i would though the extended cut is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here did that all really happen my brother in christ look at your body you see that wavy green [ __ ] of course it's all true are you [ __ ] kidding me organics and synthetics merge and this is the intelligence we produce and the best ending which i didn't get is literally the destroy ending but it shows shepard taking a breath as if he were still alive in the rubble which should really go to show you not only what the devs were going for in terms of pulling at the heartstrings but what the fans wanted as well i mean this has literally been dubbed the best ending i don't think bioware refers to it as the best ending anywhere it's just referred to as the best ending everywhere that i've looked it up online but it does nothing different beyond showing that shep is alive should he be after all that some of the best shows and films i've ever seen has the good guy dying after insurmountable odds are faced because it grounds the media in reality it makes you feel like [ __ ] but it's a good feeling it's a somber tone that overshadows a sacrifice but people want to see the hero live and it's up to the writers to let that happen when they've given their best giving into that feeling of well they'll want to see him live so we're just going to make it the hardest ending to obtain just steamrolls the idea that shepard was a heroic human who gave everything so that the rest could live i don't know it just cheapens this idea that this was his last hurrah to me but i know that this is probably a minority opinion the big sin that the ending of this trilogy commits here is that it takes a lot of the choices both little and major which the player chose throughout these games and just rolls over them it causes them to not matter to be forgotten and that's a problem when creating a series that promises what mass effect promised no matter how big the budget there's never going to be enough time in this world where publishers force their developers to push out sequels within one to two years color-coded endings are chosen because that's the more budget-friendly route choices are swept away because there's no time to fit the ripples that they've created into the final product and i don't think that there's a feasible way to create a fully voiced top of the line graphics video game that has choices that extend through multiple games all of which affect the tiniest details in the very last scene it's too much to ask for in this day and age at least when a big publisher is pressuring their developers to perform to overwork their employees and to deliver a product that sells no matter what and i'm not saying that there was no cause for outrage or disappointment there clearly was when bioware promised that the trilogy's endings wouldn't come down to a cut and dry choice at the end but there could have been a compromise some honesty about how difficult of an undertaking this kind of thing would truly be the thing that really popped into my head was the lack of aftermath narration from the extended cut slideshow i mean how hard would that have been to implement fallout has been coasting on it for decades now and it's still something that people look forward to when they finish games in that series but bioware pulled a cdpr long before cdpr did and told the fans that they would get everything that they wanted they promised that every one of their choices would matter and yes of course that's a large undertaking i do think that they did well to make up for a lack of choices mattering with the dlc but you know what really bugs me mass effect 2 could have easily not existed with the way that they treated all of the characters that came from that entry in three the elusive man being set up as a grave force of human pride nearly every single squad mate saved for the ones that came from the first game just being included as token side plots the collectors being introduced as a threat and then thrown out the airlock in the same game and so on and so forth these plot points fundamentally did not matter in the grand scheme of things sure they added flavor yes i liked a lot of the people who made their first appearance in two yes i liked mass effect 2 in general i'm not saying it didn't need to exist but it could have not existed and that's not a great way to structure a trilogy it would be like if star wars episode 5 had luke and the gang stopping an offshoot of the empire who only showed up in that episode before going back to take on the main threat in episode 6. they meet mr gerberbeen who's a great character that everyone loves they head to the lovely planet of orcas where a strange fog has been unleashed by the bad guys who aren't the empire and they wrap up all of these new characters and locations just in time for the empire to strike back i mean sure it would have been fun but would it have mattered in the overall plot no not really and this is where mass effect 3 cheapens the rest of the series with how it approached everything while i initially thought that there were some cool consequences revolving around the rack knight queen around grunt leading his squad jack teaching and so on everything got translated to numbers which affect the ending oh you did this cool thing in the first game plus 100 social credit you [ __ ] up this part of the second game minus 50 social credit and that isn't a horrible way to approach things i mean you feel rewarded when certain consequences catch up to you in the last entry but after the initial appearance of these characters you don't really see what they do when everything is over slides that only show vague pictures of what occurred after seems like the worst way to approach trying to make up for the previous ending because they only represent an idea that very obviously should have been expanded further i mentioned this a couple of times throughout the script but a lot of mass effect 3's big plot points rely on super specific circumstances that almost seem contrived to a point where you start to look at how reasonable they are the bridge example when we were trying to cure the genophage was the first one to bug me just because there were so many different ways that it could have been approached more naturally with the way that this scenario was handled we have to assume multiple things 1. the krogans plotted out a route through gary indiana and were surprised when the infrastructure was collapsed 2. they only built one road through here so if something like this happened there was literally no other way to progress since we were now high up on a bridge-like structure and three the turians claimed that they were locked in to fight with their air support because the reaper just noticed them but couldn't they just fly the [ __ ] away i mean if the reaper chases them then we win because we needed the shroud cleared and all of these issues pop up at once when the climax of act 1 begins this would have been no problem if the krogans chose to do something drastic like launching their convoy off of the bridge to attempt to make it to the reaper through the dusty wasteland but as things stand they stop their trucks the turian pilot hits them and then the two most important trucks cross the collapsed part anyways so you go from thinking oh [ __ ] what are they gonna do to oh well this was just a plot device to make sure that we didn't show up with an army of krogans this example can be applied to every other issue that i had with the plots this place has been destroyed and one character tries to kill themselves because that's dramatic meta-gel can't be used on this guy because shepard's gotta do it and he just didn't feel like it right then this guy can't be fired at during a cutscene because this guy has to die that same guy can't be defeated here because losing to him is dramatic this guy is completely evil now stop him it takes the most nuanced parts of the mass effect universe and boils them down to contrivances with the express purpose of making the player feel this emotion or that emotion it's exactly how i see a lot of mainstream movies which is something that i brought up a lot when i kept saying that this was a very hollywood moment and it's why i don't care for those most of the time the dialogue choices that you make the paragon and renegade actions every little decision that you have outside of the major ones all of it is so lackluster that they may as well not even be taken into consideration anymore their identities have been lost the parts of the series that made it special have been stripped away and that's made clear immediately with stuff like combat the clunkiness of the combat system was something that really bogged down the game for me at times it is something that i got used to eventually but that doesn't make it a better system the thing is i could see the embers of something better in it as i do believe that if you're going to go full action then this is at least the beginnings of what that should be but it's clear that even in the last game of the trilogy these guys are still trying to figure out hitboxes pathing and the fluidity of movement additionally oftentimes the amount of health or shield regen don't seem to matter when it comes to certain enemies if you run out of shield and don't have tons of health a bigger enemy is liable to pick you up and rip out your spine even if your shields recharge to full during this process which isn't an ideal way of representing insta kills even out of combat the rigidity of the game's movement becomes painfully obvious one time i actually got stuck on this bug creature's hitbox on the citadel and i had to reload to get out of it that shouldn't be happening and even though it's the biggest example this kind of thing did happen occasionally the developers went from seemingly having a very clear idea of what they wanted to do with this series a route that fused those traditional rpg elements with a bit of action one that took player agency and let them run with it to create the shepherd that they wanted who affected the galaxy the way that they envisioned and as the series grew those ideas shrank combat was revamped choices were stripped away morality actions became something that anyone could perform they exchanged the charm of a system that hearkened back to older role-playing games for a shiny new action game that had a heavy plot line things didn't need to be explained as well they just needed to look good first and foremost and that [ __ ] sucks man i have no other way to say it but is mass effect 3 as bad as i remember no it really isn't it has so many shortcomings so many areas where it falls flat and makes me wish that the game had turned out differently but it really isn't a bad game in the slightest it does so many things right it brings out so many emotions in me it takes these lovable characters that i've gotten to know and understand and it gives many of them a future in both the series and in my heart it has such high highs that it's impossible for me to say that i dislike it anymore i had so many good experiences with the game for about 85 to 90 percent of my playthrough it's just that last 10 to 15 most of which was backloaded at the very end to leave a sour taste in my mouth i love this series and that includes this game i just wanted more for it and i know the dlc did a lot to help that opinion i could keep going i could explain what made this game so important to me again but i don't want to anymore than i already have this video turned out so much more positively than i ever thought that it would and i like to think that i expressed that a fair amount by the stage so while i can sit here and let these negative emotions guide my overall judgment of this game like i used to i'm not going to it's been a long road with this trilogy for me from the first time that i fired it up on my xbox 360 to re-experiencing it in the legendary edition i know they're cooking up another game and i honestly wish the best for it i'm scared of those elements that hurt mass effect 3 showing up in it but i just gotta hope at this stage for now i'm just glad that i'm done talking about these games for a little while longer at least thanks for watching i knew this was going to be long but christ it's been a lot more fun than i thought it would be honestly and i'm really happy to be through with this part of the series i'm unsure what i'll cook up next but i've got plans big plans until then though i've got merch over at my merch shop if that's still running yep looks like it is i've got a twitch where i stream nearly every monday tuesday and friday i've got a twitter where tweets are tweeted i've got a discord where chords are dissed and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one [Music] you

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,208,176

Keywords: Mass Effect, BioWare, Shepard, Tali, Tali'zorah Vas Normandy, Normandy, Liara, Liara T'soni, Garrus, Garrus Vakarian, EDI, Javik, Kaidan, Kaidan Alenko, James Vega, Jack, Jacob, Miranda, Thane, Kai Leng, The Illusive Man, Anderson, Udina, Council, Citadel, Palavan, Tuchanka, Thessia, Zaeed, Kasumi, Wrex, Grunt, Eve, Joker, Traynor, Cortez, Reapers, Protheans, Krogan, Asari, Quarians, Geth, Legion, Leviathan, DLC, Analysis, Evaluation, Review, Story, Hackett, Omega, Aria, Nyreen, Shore Leave, Sunset Strip, Crucible, Catalyst

Id: zLtoGTQ43Xg

Length: 243min 39sec (14619 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022