It’s time to cap off my first ever run-through of the Mass Effect Trilogy (via the PS4 Legendary Edition) by taking a look at the controversial third entry. All I really knew is that people didn’t like the ending so they patched in new cutscenes with more context and stuff but people still weren’t generally happy, but by the time the credits rolled I didn’t mind the ending really. Well, the one I got anyway, though again that obviously has all the added stuff from after people complained… Anyway, I did find things I didn’t like about the plot and gameplay, so it’s definitely a step down from ME2 as the general consensus seems to be, so let’s take a deeper look and find out why!
Background:
Ducking from a mech (which you can steal and take control of, for the record!)
Mass Effect 3 was released on the XBOX 360, PS3 and PC on March 6th in the US and 9th in PAL regions, with a Wii U release coming later in the year on November 18th in the US and 30th in PAL regions. Due to the previous games not being on the system the Wii U version has a comic book recap of the first two games that allow you to make the key story decisions available in Mass Effect 1 and 2 so you can still “follow on” from the previous entries.
For one final time, the Legendary Edition of the Trilogy was released across the XBOX One, PS4 and PC on May 14th 2021.
Gameplay:
Well, the other two reviews have a picture of a Geth through a sniper scope in them, so may as well make it three-for-three!
Mass Effect 3 is once again an action RPG. The core gameplay remains the same in that it’s a third-person cover shooter, so you see all the action from behind your chosen Commander Shepard, male or female, as he/she fires weapons or special abilities often while crouched or backed up against a part of scenery, with the ability to order your two companions around the field as well (though I never bothered, I just let the AI get on with it) It’s a refined a bit from ME2, or so I read, honestly it feels just as sharp and fun as that did, but then I’ve never really been a shooter guy so it’s probably harder to see subtle differences. Completing main quests and side quests will grant you XP that you can use to level up not just your protagonist’s skills but also the skills of your squad mates as they all gain the same XP regardless of how often they’re actually used in missions, and this time you can upgrade and even add attachments to all the weapons in the game (and there are a fair few to unlock) but having too many equipped at once will negatively affect you, slowing down how quickly the shield that protects your health bar recharges (somehow…) You can also melee foes close-quarters but new in ME3 is a strong melee attack you can do by holding down the strike button and a few insta-kills when opponents are prone on the floor.
In terms of the RPG side of things you have the same combo of choice wheels when talking to people often with a “good” and a “bad” thing to say that will net you “Paragon” and “Renegade” points as well as QTE-like sudden button prompts that can also grant you good and bad points as well, and in the end whether your Shepard is a Paragon or a Renegade will dictate what options are available to you. Like nearly all games like this it’s very hard not to end up majority paragon, my Shepard is quick to anger when someone’s being petty while the literal fate of the entire galaxy is at stake but ended up far, far more Paragon anyway. There are also romance options that have extra dialogue options if you’ve romanced certain characters in prior games. That’s another thing actually, if you’re importing a Shepard from ME1 or 1 and 2 then choices you made in those games will have an effect here, including whole missions with characters that could’ve ended up dead in the previous game, so I’m interested is hearing what they’re like if you didn’t complete the previous game with your whole crew. As per usual for the series, there’s plenty of spoken dialogue and all of it’s well acted, thankfully.
Oh no! They’re very slowly after me… until I reach the green line, then they vanish?
The main “hook” of the game is that the galaxy is being invaded en masse by the Reapers and so the Galaxy Map, which in the previous games you can use to travel to different systems to start missions and mine resources, this time is used so you can go to the systems to start missions but also to collect War Assets to create a high EMS rating, which stands for “Effective Military Strength”. This boils down to the same firing probes into planets system from ME2 just without trying to find high levels of elements and instead just finding the right spot to fire the probe and then… firing it. The catch though is you need to find the right planet / ship wreckage by travelling around the system and “pinging” your radar until you get a hit but doing it too many times will alert the reapers and send them to your location. Sounds exciting, right? Sadly there was no consequence to this at all, they appear on the map and slowly move towards you allowing you to continue to ping your radar around, leave the system, come back in the continue until you find what you need, collect it and leave. Out of curiosity I let myself get “captured” by them only to find out you just get a Game Over screen and then reload to when you first arrived in the system, meaning again it had no real impact. It’s a shame because it was a fun idea and added to the sense that the galaxy is being invaded but at the end of the day wasn’t really anything other than a visual distraction…
Apparently there are three campaign modes of “Action”, “Story” and “RPG”, with varying levels of having to chose dialogue options and the like, but I don’t recall seeing it so whether that was carried over from my previous file or whether I saw it, read it, selected RPG and then forgot about it I can’t tell you. Also the original Mass Effect 3 included a multiplayer mode but that was entirely removed for this Legendary Edition so I can’t comment on that. Overall the actual gameplay I found extremely easy, only dying once to a giant Reaper beam and only having to revive one of my squadmates twice, so I guess the default difficulty wasn’t right for me but honestly I didn’t care, I was in it mainly for the story and characters by this point so I didn’t bother changing it. I did find a lot of the missions were just get from point A to point B shooting a bunch of people in the middle, so it was lacking in variety, that’s for sure. Some missions didn’t even have a leaving the area cutscene and felt like they were multiplayer maps with bots on… Ah well, still had fun with the gameplay at least, it was never boring anyway.
Graphics and Sound:
A good old fashioned “blasting alien eggs with a flamethrower” scene!
Much like the previous two affairs the graphics are up-scaled XBOX 360 models with modern lighting and detail added on, and it looks fine. Sure some of the animations, particularly when talking to someone are a bit stiff and the human head models look a little chunky but changing those things would go far beyond the HD re-release budget.
Sound-wise though the game still excels, especially in the already mentioned voice work department but the background music and ambiance are perfectly good as well, even if you won’t be humming any of it after the game is done.
Story:
“Wow… this place is so beautiful. Oh look, a Reaper! Oh well.”
The story picks up six months after the end of ME2, with Shepard under lockdown (or at least he was for me due to choosing to destroy the Batarian Mass Relay at the cost of millions of lives just to stop the Reapers from invading six month ago, but that was optional DLC so I’m sure ME3 would start differently depending on your choices) but he’s soon brought back onto the field by old friend Donald Anderson when Reapers begin attacking Earth. Anderson stays behind on the planet to help form a resistance while Shepard is sent back onto the Normandy to head out into space and broker a truce between all the major races of the galaxy so they can come together to fight back against the Reapers and use a super-weapon designed over several cycles to take the sentient ships out (if you’re somehow unaware at this point, the Reapers appear in the Galaxy every 50,000 years to wipe out any race that has gotten to the space-faring stage of technology and reset the galaxy so new species can rise)
To do this he/she helps the Turians rescue their leader from their own war-torn planet, helps the Krogan to cure the genophage that has stopped their females from baring hardly any children for millennia and even takes back the Quarian homeworld with them after millennia of the race travelling nomadically, apparently the now allied Geth even able to allow them to live outside their suits within months. This kind of annoyed me, there wasn’t any need to literally end all major plot points that made these races interesting within a few days of each other, makes it feel like they could’ve done this ages ago and just didn’t put the effort in or something. They certainly didn’t leave much for any sequels, that’s for sure. I mean, some of these things can also not happen depending on your choices (there’s a nasty one where you can stop Krogan from breeding at all instead of curing the genophage, effectively committing genocide…) but either way a cure for the genophage and the Quarians retaking their home from the Geth coincidentally coinciding with the Reapers invading was a bit much.
The always fun biotics… that I never used due to being a Sniper class for all three games.
Your crew initially consists of returning Asari Liara T’Soni and an extremely generic muscle-head soldier called James Vega, but soon the likes of ME 1 and 2 veterans Garrus and Tali join as well as the possibility of either Ashley or Kaiden, depending of which you saved during ME1 and if you allow them to come on board, plus a Prothean called Javik who you unfreeze after 50 or so millennia on ice (he was a DLC character originally but again Legendary Edition, so he was just there from the start for me!) The Normandy AI EDI also gets a female android body early in the story and joins as a crew member as well, to round things out. Every other previously active crew member from ME1 and 2 appear in the story and have a main or side quest where they coincidentally meet Shepard during his current mission but don’t end up joining the crew. It’s good fun though, and if any of them died during the previous two games then apparently another character with a similar background replaces them, which is fun (but I accidentally got the best ending in ME2 so I was good…)
**Story Spoilers from here to the next bolded message!**
As for the ending? Well, the united species of the galaxy are creating the mega weapon known as The Crucible but are unsure as to what the talked-about “Catalyst” is, but Shepard eventually finds a Prothean AI that can tell him but it’s stolen by our former employer and on-the-nose named villain “The Elusive Man” and his Cerberus group, specifically it was stolen by an assassin named Kai Leng. The Elusive Man wants to use the Reaper’s own tech against them and take them over, then presumably use them to dominate all other species in the galaxy but thanks to some intel from ex-Cerberus member Miranda the Earth forces track down Cerberus’ main base and assault it. There Shepard kills Leng and finds out the Catalyst is the massive Citadel space station but also that the Illusive Man has already tipped the Reapers off to this fact and they’ve taken it to Earth (of course!) and essentially “shut the doors”.
This leads to a final massive assault from the combined space navy of the galaxy (how combined depends on your EMS rating!) against the Reapers while Shepard and two crew members travel across London to a teleportation pad that can get them in the Citadel to open it up. Shepard makes it but is wounded while doing so, but still has enough in him to kill the Reaper-tech-upgraded Illusive Man, though has to watch Anderson get mortally wounded in the process. He then gets teleported to a hidden room in the Citadel where the core Reaper A.I. has a chat about how they were created by a race called the Leviathans (or if you played through the DLC story “Leviathan” Shepard mentions them by name as he met a living Leviathan in a really fun side-mission) and how they see all organic life being wiped out by synthetic life as every race creates AI-driven machines at some point when they reach a certain tech level and so the only way to save organic life is to wipe out every civilization before it can create killer A.I. life and absorb their knowledge into themselves as a new Reaper. So the Leviathans created an AI system to figure out what to do with the killer AI systems and it decided to kill everyone. Great job! Well, okay, not everyone, it allows life to regrow then add them to their gestalt AI network in the form a new Reaper when they reach a certain level, allowing new life to grow. Still not a great move…
The armada arrives!
The issue this time though is Shepard has arrived and proven that this method no longer works, so the Reaper core gives him/her a choice: destroy the Reapers along with all AI life in the galaxy but leaving the organics ripe to be killed by AI life as predicted in the future, pop into a pod and merge his mind with the Reaper AI and control the killer machines himself, or completely merge with the AI and send out a crazy green wave of energy that unites all organics and synthetics by giving them all the advanced knowledge of the countless civilizations they’ve absorbed as well as AI true sentience, creating peace throughout the galaxy (there’s also a fourth ending where you attack the AI with your gun and he just tells the Reapers to kill everyone, which then follows with a message stating that the next cycle after this one stops the Reapers instead of yours…) What choices are available and what happens when you choose them is dependant on your EMS score, but they all have pluses and minuses, some “is this really right?” grey areas, which is fun. I chose the “creating peace by essentially brainwashing the entire galaxy with knowledge that fighting amongst themselves is pointless when they can all work together” ending, which is a pretty definitive fullstop to the story, so I imagine if Mass Effect 4 really is set after 3 then that won’t be the ending that’s canonised…
**Story Spoilers from here to the next bolded message!**
Overall I enjoyed the ending sequence, though was surprised at the lack of an end boss of any description and think the trilogy as a whole was a fantastic experience that I’m kicking my past self for not jumping on earlier…
Downloadable Content:
Shepard analyses the back of Javik’s head just in case… um, they have secrets to reveal?
As mentioned there were several DLC packs for the original ME3, including the Prothean Javik and his storyline (apparently as day one DLC, which understandably didn’t go down well), a story involving retaking the Omega station from ME2 and a light-hearted story involving a stereotypical evil clone and lots of characters comically quipping for some reason (plus the story-important one called “Leviathan” I mentioned in the spoiler section that I won’t go into here)
Again though, its all just part of the Legendary Edition, so it didn’t affect me (other than it being extremely obvious when I was playing a DLC mission compared to a standard one as it always focused on a new location and had a long string of missions away from the main plotline!)
Thoughts Now:
Good thing Big Ben survived the devastation, really makes things look Londony!
As mentioned I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Mass Effect 2, neither story nor gameplay (mostly due to mission variety, or a lack-thereof) but I still enjoyed my playthough to see how the trilogy concludes, or at least how my version of it concluded. I highly recommend picking up the Legendary Edition and playing through them (even if you do one a year like I did) as its still a very fun and rewarding trilogy of games.
Hogan Reviews 