Almost a month has passed since I acquired the game. Yes, it took me this long to calm down, play the game again, look at it from several perspectives, read up on the indoctrination theory, rage some more, sacrifice a goat, sign petitions and throw bananas at a seemingly annoyed jellyfish. I have to admit, it took incredible effort on my part not to write a rage review right away and set fire to the rain and to BioWare. Also, I have to note here, that I am going to discuss the ending separately at the end of my rambling, since I don’t consider it to be part of the game. All in all I can say that it was a great game, the RPG and action elements were balanced nicely and the writing was superb. It is a good final game for the trilogy, even though I would bet the apple I found in the kitchen that the franchise is not done with this and we will have more games in this universe. But now, let’s dig in deeper and see what we have here.
The story
Those who played ME1+2 already know that Shepard has one thing and one thing only on his/her mind (besides banging every available guy/gal on his ship), namely destroying/stopping the Reapers which threaten our entire universe. Those who didn’t, I don’t even know why you picked up this game to begin with. That’s like watching only the last episode of Star Wars or starting with that - there is something seriously wrong with you. Anyways, until now you basically ran around shouting “Oh my GAWD, the Reapers are coming, FUUUUUU-”, but no one gave a damn. Now in ME3 the Reapers are finally here, so you can be all like “Told you so, bitches!”, but that doesn’t help the situation, since you are all going to die horribly. Unless YOU save the universe AGAIN. So, after a shitload of unskippable cinematics you go out to unite every race in the galaxy to fight the common threat, who obviously join you right away, since they all love you and you’re sexy and you know it. Haha, JK. No one really wants to help, since they all have their own little problems to deal with, which of course you need to fix, since that’s what you do. And yea, this is basically it. Oh, and you get to sleep with people.
The game
In my hangoverish, but pretty much clear-headed state, I can proudly say, that Mass Effect 3 is just... wow... Seriously, wow. Of course it is quite cheesy, but that was exactly what I was expecting from an epic story. I was mesmerized, amazed, happy and sometimes on the verge of tears. The whole war thing really came through since you could not possibly save everyone, not all of your friends, not all of the planets. You had to make freakishly hard choices, hell, you could even commit genocide! Every decision you made in the previous games came back to either hug you, love you and become a number in your war asset thingy or bite you in the ass.
Oh and don’t forget: SHINY!!!! I spent minutes drooling on my keyboard while watching the scenery. Or Liara. Did I say that out loud?
But still, not everything is rainbows, dragons and lollipops. Let’s see the parts which displeased me:
- The controls are so extremely dumbed down, I sometimes wanted to bash my head against the keyboard. When in the whole gaming history was it good to have ONE FUCKING BUTTON for everything??? I know how having universal things is nice, but that is mostly not true for games. And you can’t even change the settings to make life easier! So basically, my sexy Shepard instead of sprinting or ducking behind cover ended up rolling around like a happy puppy, made three somersaults, climbed trees and baked a bunch of cookies. It is good to have simple controls, but for the love of Cthulhu, at least give us the option to change it!
- I had a slight problem with the quest system or rather the lack thereof. It is not just aesthetically shit and totally unorganized, but doesn’t update itself at all, thus figuratively sucks donkey cock. I mean seriously, you are traveling around several billion star systems and shit, scanning planets, running from Reapers, collecting whatnot just to realize you have no idea whether you got the item you were looking for or not, because your damn journal is as helpful as sack of rotten tomatoes. At least those you can throw at people you disagree with. Not to mention that some of the things you need you can find while doing some other unrelated quest, where you might end up missing said thing, since you are busy slaughtering hordes of geth/husks/reapers/whatnot. So then you just sit there, stare at your screen, have no idea what to do with that lingering quest of that salarian bloke who didn’t even want to give you a quest, but you are one nosy fucker and eavesdropped and now you try to ignore it, but it annoys you still. It’s like an itch in an impossible place which you couldn’t even scratch even if you wanted to and since you are in public, you cannot go rubbing your back with random items and/or strangers. I ended up writing everything down on pieces of paper flying around on my desk, just to lose half of them in the mess and mix the rest up.
- It would have been a nice asset if they imported the option to skip cutscenes from ME2. You will watch them to the end on your first run, but the second and third time it might get a bit tiring. But this is really just a minor complaint, since I can always go, make some tea and check out 9gag while the reapers are shooting up Earth.
- And my last and maybe biggest butthurt is the multiplayer bullshit. I am pretty much a loner gamer, hence I am not really compatible with MMOs like WoW and shit. I did try it out, but I figured communicating with people in real life is enough of a hassle, I don’t want to have to deal with that in my games too, so I just dropped the whole thing. And here I am now, being forced basically into doing this crap. “But you can max out your points without multiplayer too!!4!4!!” Well, fuck you very much! I still have that ugly readiness rating: 50% flashing itself in front of my eyes everytime I check on my war assets, halving my efforts and annoying the shit out of me. Not to mention, that to get the best ending, you have to have 5000+ points, which means without multiplayer you need 10 000+! Are you fucking kidding me? How in the name of everything that is holy and not am I supposed to collect that much? I did try to do a completion run on my second playthrough, but thanks to the lovely quest system, I might or might not have missed some crap on the way, and even like this I was barely over 6k. I didn’t take it to the end, but there is not much left of the game and I still need at least 4k. Peachy.
Characters
Given you were so damn amazing and lovable as I was and all your squadmates survived the suicide mission, I’ve got good news for you: they will all appear! Not all of them will actually join your crew now though, but you get to hang out with them a bit, do their quest so to speak, nail them again if you want to and have them as pretty numbers in your war asset counter! Yay!
You also don’t have to have everyone possible in your team, I mean, you can tell Ashley/Kaiden to go fuck themselves and let Tali die, you heartless sonova-. But since I played with my sexy goody-two-shoes paragon Shepard, I did have them all and alive, which was nice. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside like I’ve swallowed a kitten. Even though Ashley is a bitch, but she did kinda come around. Furthermore I liked the part where you get to hook Joker up with EDI. That was fun.
There are some new characters too, though one of them rivals in personality with a potato. Yea, I’m talking about the pointless reporter bitch from battlestar or battlenet or battleship (not the Bin-al-jellybean-pastrami one who you can punch in the face) whose name I can’t be bothered to remember, but is basically Jessica Chobot or who from IGN. No wonder the game got such a high rating there. I always wanted to tell her to eat poo, but unfortunately she is also a stupid war asset, so you have to recruit her and play nice. Oh and you can also romance her with both genders, if you are into that thing. *Shivers*
We also have a monkey on steroids named James Vega, who I actually ended up liking by the end of the game. Honestly though, if it was my choice, I would’ve switched him for Mordin, Jack, Miranda or Legion anytime. I liked them better, so sue me. What I found a bit puzzling is that he is a no-romance for girls (or boys for that matter). I mean, why? If you can sleep around with Ashley/Kaiden then why not with Vega too? Or did Mr. Prince Junior disapprove of a smoochy-cheesy scene? Will he have a whole romance-DLC for himself later or what?
Javik the DLC prothean is another matter. I hated that arrogant bastard! I kept hoping for an option to kick him in the insect-bag or whatever he has. Also his quest is a joke. Really? Pay 10$ or how much for him, some fancy new outfits and a 20 minutes max quest which you release the same day as the game? Really? And don’t give me the “different developing team” bullshit, if you wanted to include it in the game, you would’ve done so.
And last but not least, we have two openly gay/lesbo characters, which means if you were playing a gay Shep, you can finally have a boys night out, if you know what I mean and as a straight guy one you can get rejected by a chick. Cortez and Traynor are kinda cute characters, I did enjoy having them around, though they didn’t play such a major role.
All in all, the character interactions are really well done, though I would have liked to have a bit more of an option to actually partake in it, like with this little wheel-thingy, but oh well. I still giggled when Joker was bugging Liara about her tentacles and felt warm and fuzzy again during the bonding scene with Garrus. The latter one was just simply epic. Well, I definitely couldn’t have done this game without him, that’s for sure.
THE LAST 10 MINUTES
As I mentioned above, I do not consider this part of the game. I will not start naming all the reasons why it sucks and is not making any sense in any way, there are really good videos and articles about it. In short: it is not logical, it goes against its own rules, it doesn’t make any sense, your decisions don’t really matter at all since whatever you do you get one ending with different colors, and BioWare should be really ashamed of itself for such bigtime false advertising. Now, putting all that aside, my main problem with the whole thing is that I want damn fucking closure. I spent 100+ hours with this trilogy and I am planning to spend even more time with it, I grew to love my sexy Shepard and my crew, I worked so hard on being all hippy and making peace wherever I went, I deserve to know what happened! And I definitely do NOT deserve a fucking DLC grandpa who is telling me to spend more money on the game which just shat in my face while singing Rebbeca Blacks’ Friday for 10 whole minutes! NO! I want an ending and for fuck’s sake, I want an option to a happy ending. Yes, I know this is childish as hell, but I don’t care. I want an ending where my Shepard is drinking beer with Garrus, talking about the old times while Liara is feeding one of the little blue children baby food. Grrrr....
Now I am not giving up on the whole thing just yet, because BioWare announced that since so many fans are unhappy, they will make a new ending. Shockingly, they still cannot see what they did wrong and act all sullen, trying to hide behind artistic freedom. Artistic freedom my ass, if you promise to cook me pasta and serve a dead rat instead, don’t be surprised if I beat you to a bloody pulp with it. Anyways, I will rest my case until the new ending comes out. Let’s just hope they won’t make things even worse.
