Game Review: Mass Effect 3 - Part 2 - Where Do We Go From Here?

Here's Part 1 of the review if you haven't read it. If you have, here's a link so you don't feel left out.

"LENS FLARE!"

Role-Playing - "I'll take it from here, kid."

Here's the thing I've never quite liked about Mass Effect. It claims that it's an RPG, yet there have been very few instances throughout the series where your choices actually mattered. Yeah, the Council; yeah, Wrex, but none of it really changed anything. In KotOR, you could kill off half your party and conquer the galaxy. In Fallout: New Vegas, you could destroy an entire city and take over the Mojave. In Alpha Protocol, one decision could keep you from seeing a large portion of the game (in favor of another portion).

Not to mention Shepard. I'll say it again, voiced protagonists are really not conducive to a true RPG. When your character is saying things that you wouldn't say, or doing things that you have no control of, with a voice that really isn't yours, then you're not really role-playing, are you? I've always maintained that even though the Mass Effect games are some of the best I've played in a long time, they're not proper RPGs. Which has always been a strange thing to associate with BioWare, the company who has arguably made some of the best ever.

But the beauty of Mass Effect 3 is that, very suddenly, a lot of those choices that you made in the last two games suddenly come back around where they hadn't before. It's like you were firing your gun into the air throughout ME1 and ME2, and this is the game where all those bullets fall back to earth and just mess you up.

Without having played the game a second time without an imported save, I don't know how much of the game was just coincidence and how much was an actual alteration of the game based on my decisions. But what I saw was everything coming back around; like an overblown karma simulator.

There were quests in Mass Effect 1 that seemed insignificant at the time, people I talked to maybe once or twice, and little decisions that seemed to amount to nothing. In Mass Effect 3, I was suddenly talking to these people again, seeing how my little decisions altered the course of their lives - sometimes for the better, sometimes not - and in some cases, it actually helped me out. How many series have you played where being nice to an NPC in the first game amounts to a reward in the third? Not too many. If nothing else, this is what really impressed me about the game.

The other thing I mentioned up there was the voiced protagonist. I do hesitantly support it in the Mass Effect series, if only because that's how they've always done things. (I will never support a voiced protagonist in, say, Dragon Age 2. It didn't/doesn't/won't make sense - ever.) What got me worried in the demo was that the dialogue options that you're provided are noticeably slim. That is to say, where in the last games you were typically provided a few options to respond and then some "investigate" options, here you're typically provided only two responses: with one being amicable and the other being aggressive.

This was tough to accept, but I eventually warmed up to it. What it appears BioWare did was take up all that disc space that would've been committed to Shepard's various and frequent responses, and passed it on to the other NPCs and Shepard himself. In this game, there is noticeably more dialogue coming from NPCs, and although Shepard does a lot of the talking without any input from you (which I typically don't like), it makes the whole game feel a bit more even, more cinematic. And honestly, that's what the games have always been trending toward. Immersion definitely suffers, but you feel more engaged in the story.

You'll still have to make some tough decisions, as I said before, but you won't get many decisions involving the direction of the conversation. If that was something you outright loved in the previous games, you might be disappointed here. Much more than the other games, Shepard feels like his own character here.

I'm fine with this. Mass Effect could never really figure out if it wanted to be an RPG or a cinematic action game. With Mass Effect 3, it finally finds some footing somewhere, so the overall experience is a more consistent one. It's not trying to be everything at once. Now, it's only trying to be Mass Effect, which is cool by me.

But I still won't accept this in Dragon Age. I won't and I can't. Let Mass Effect be Mass Effect. Dragon Age 3, look to Dragon Age: Origins for inspiration!

"I want to be a Reaper."

The Characters - "To Hell and Back."

What really made the game memorable was how pretty much all the characters from the last two games make a comeback - with the exception of those you killed off or got killed, of course. This wasn't like the Star Wars prequels, where somehow all the classic characters made illogical comebacks. Here, all the old characters are written back into the story with the right amount of patience and logic. You never really feel like BioWare's throwing everyone back into the mix, saying, "Look! Garrus! You fans like Garrus, right? He's here! Calibrations!"

It's done with a little more tact than that. Indeed, the characters seem to come through a lot more intensely in this game. Now that they're given more time to talk, unlike in ME2 where they'd suddenly shut up for the rest of the game after two conversations, you can really get to know everyone all over again.

And this being the end of the series and the end of all things, you see a more vulnerable bunch of characters, who see everything that they know and love coming to an end beneath the Reaper invasion. You're not the only one with their homeworld being ravaged, and you'll actually get into a number of conversations where sympathy comes into play. Suddenly, you and all these races from all walks of life share something very personal. You're all losing a home.

There's little else I can say without spoiling things, but I would say that this game has probably the best batch of characters out of any other BioWare game going all the way back to KotOR. When all is said and done, you really do feel like you're bidding real people with real lives a fond farewell. It's an amazing accomplishment for the series and for the company, especially given BioWare had every reason to completely ignore all of it. The goodbyes were all the more heartbreaking because of this.

The Ending - "Departing Known Space"

Note: Again, I'll try to keep this spoiler-free, but just in case, you might want to avoid this section if you don't want to know anything about the ending.

BioWare have said continuously that Mass Effect 3 is the end of the series, Commander Shepard's story arc, and other such things. I will say this much: they weren't lying.

This ending represents a lot of things for the Mass Effect universe. Up until now, the Reapers' greater purpose has been shrouded in mystery, as was the Illusive Man's ultimate role in everything. Why were you brought back to life? Why is the Illusive Man so obsessed with the Reapers? What are the Reapers? Why are they being such intergalactic dicks to everyone?

Most of all: How do you stop an unstoppable force that has already decimated the Council races?

All of these questions will be answered, and then some. Unlike Dragon Age 2, there's no towering billboard raised up just before the credits that reads, "Stay tuned for Mass Effect 4!" No, this is it. This is the end - in more ways than one.

But I guess the big question here, more than anything else, is whether or not the end of a trilogy that we've been following for the better part of five years lived up to expectations. Basically: Is this a satisfying end to the Mass Effect trilogy?

Well... no. It's not.

Well, why the fuck is that?!

I don't know.

You better have some answers, man! I'm playing this thing right now and I don't want to be pissed off when I finish it!

Without spoiling anything, I'll say this. The entire series has been leading up to this "final battle" between the Reapers and the allied forces that Shepard is able to unite. That final battle is one of the most magnificent and exhilarating sequences in any game that I've played. And it's only elevated by everything that's at stake. If you care for the story, for the characters, for an end to the conflict: you'll feel the fire lit under you. It's an all out war against the Reapers, and it's extraordinary.

Everything starts to resolve itself. Questions are answered. Conflicts are put to rest. A lot of people die. It all converges at this moment when you start saying to yourself, "This is it. This is the end, and that was amazing." And then you start expecting the credits to roll.

But they don't, and in the last five minutes of the game, the story makes a sudden and drastic right turn into Lost territory. It's so sudden, so out of nowhere, and so utterly devastating in terms of its implications for the universe at large, I pretty much just sat there, staring blankly at the screen asking myself, "What the fuck just happened?"

It makes no sense. It feels like BioWare outsourced the final moments to the lowest bidder and slapped it on there. Compared to the extraordinary amount of love and care that went into the other 99.9% of the game, the last 0.01% seems like hate mail. It's just impossible to reconcile what it does and what it means with the rest of the game. I wasn't expecting a happy ending or anything like that, but I certainly wasn't expecting to be mindfucked.

For me, the game ended twenty minutes earlier, when you say goodbye to everyone before the final battle. That's the ending, and it's a damned good one. The ending that BioWare throws in there at the last minute exists solely to confuse and aggravate. To make matters worse, it's horribly derivative. I won't pretend to know what the developers were thinking when they wrote that ending, but it was very likely contempt.

I know this because my first reaction when I shut off the game was, "What did I do wrong?"

In Summation - "Beyond the Point of No Return."

Despite that last minute ending, Mass Effect 3 hit all the right notes, with a single sour chord being struck at the end of the composition. Everything up until that ending, if I might say so, is absolutely brilliant. This game was made for fans of Mass Effect. Legitimate arguments can be made concerning their use of Day One DLC and their other questionable marketing tactics, but the game itself is solid. If you've followed the series thus far with much excitement, then this last chapter will just about tip you over the edge.

As far as the story and the characters are concerned, there's no going back. As such, the game retains an "all or nothing" feeling throughout. If it stumbles, it does so when it's of no consequence. If it does something terrible, it's that it tried to go out in an ambitious and unpredictable way instead of taking the responsible route.

But for all intents and purposes, this is a satisfying conclusion to the series and an interesting, new beginning for the Mass Effect universe. I have no idea where future games in the franchise will go, how they'll function, who we'll meet. If nothing else, the galaxy that Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy SR-2 leave us with is an uncertain one, born of immeasurable sacrifice and steadfast friendships, upon which all things will be built.

4.5 out of 5 Stars