Special game review: Mass Effect 3 (2012) - Pt. 2/3
[This second, much smaller, part of the ME3 review, deals with the “Action” and “Atmosphere” aspects of the game; third and final part will focus on its more technical sides, as per the usual formula.]
Content evaluation [continued]
Action
As I have already mentioned, one of the major goals of Mass Effect 3 — fortunately, just one of, not the goal-to-end-all-goals — was to make it even more action-packed than its predecessors. While the action / combat mechanics of the first game, in spite of its experimental audacity, were commonly criticized for «clunkiness», Mass Effect 2 was widely praised for having «learned the lesson» and getting its shooting system more in line with other cover-based shooters. With Mass Effect 3, then, the idea was to tighten that system even further, introduce some useful improvements both to the rules of the game set up for the player and to the behavior of your AI opponents, and show the world that BioWare is no slouch when it comes to keeping up with the Joneses of action gaming.
At the same time, BioWare also heard fan complaints about how Mass Effect 2 veered too far away from the RPG aspects of the original game, meaning that players found themselves robbed of the right to make a lot of choices — for instance, the gun and armor inventory were greatly reduced, making the classic RPG fan delight of spending hours comparing the various stats, parameters, and bonuses between different types of weapons pretty much non-existent. Likewise, the number of different skills available to Shepard and members of his team had also gone down to an absolute minimum, and you could only upgrade each of them four times, with the number of XP points necessary for each upgrade accumulating in geometric progression. To many players, this seemed like no fun and a clear sign of Mass Effect «degrading» from its strategic RPG roots into a purely adrenaline-based experience — not a crime, perhaps, but just a wee bit disrespectful to the old guard, so to speak.
Subsequently, the action-related part of Mass Effect 3 becomes sort of a reasonable compromise between the older and newer fans, and, much to my surprise, one that works almost ideally for my personal taste. In fact, BioWare went even further here and offered the players (provided they start a completely new game without importing a save file from Mass Effect 2) a selection of three different modes from the very start — Action (where the conversations are greatly reduced and answers are always provided automatically, making the plot run much like in a Mortal Kombat game), Story (where combat difficulty is reduced to minimum, so that players can concentrate almost exclusively on the plot), and RPG (where all the aspects are balanced); to me, this seems like a nice, but unnecessary gesture, because even I, generally not an «action guy» in the least, think that combat in Mass Effect is a very important part of the general immersive experience, and that you cannot really properly get in the shoes of Commander Shepard without a little sweat and blood (and, honestly, combat on the lowest skill levels is a breeze in all three games).
The general ideology of the third game in the series did not change much from earlier times: most of the challenges you experience come from defeating your enemies in combat, with practically no «puzzle-like» tasks in sight (occasionally you have to find an object or two to complete an assignment, but that’s always childplay compared to fighting). The game also preserves the pacing of Mass Effect 2, where any typical mission was essentially a lengthy shoot-out, usually culminating in a mini-boss fight or two, but strategically interrupted by bits of plot where you could make some relatively important decisions along the way (to earn Paragon or Renegade points, for instance); this way, action and story find themselves in relative balance, with just a few exceptions (the Omega DLC pushes the whole thing way too far into the combat zone — but then again, it was a DLC specifically targeted at action lovers who appreciate a tough challenge, and it is really a superfluous appendage to the game that nobody needs to complete).
Speaking of combat, the base mechanics of it did not change as much from Mass Effect 2 to 3 as they did from 1 to 2: the third game saw the return of grenades as an efficient means of crowd control (that said, enemies toss grenades just as well now, and these can sometimes one-shot you even at lower difficulties, so beware!), and there’s a funny «combat roll» move now that can help you speed up or avoid getting stunlocked and swarmed by enemies, but I do not seem to recall any other major differences for Shepard on his/her own. In terms of teamwork, though, one major change is the introduction of a large number of Power Combos, where you are able to awesomely explode your enemies in a variety of ways by combining your powers with those of your squadmates — what this means is that no previous game in the series has ever made your team members that much important to you. In the first game, they could be just as much as a nuisance as support, being difficult to control (especially since you could not map out team instructions as shortcuts) and often simply ruining your line of sight with their chaotic running around. In the second game, their behavior was much improved, their powers could be mapped out for easy use, and occasionally could be combined with your own to explode enemies mid-air (so-called «Warp detonations»). In Mass Effect 3, this latter mechanics is taken up a whole level, and it’s not just some cool gimmick — in really tough and tense situations, combos like that can become the only way to survival and victory.
Another improvement concerns the guns, of which you now have a much bigger choice than in Mass Effect 2, though still smaller than in Mass Effect — but to be fair, the huge variety of Shepard’s arsenal in the first game did not really make that much of a difference, as most of the guns looked relatively alike and the differences in their stats were fairly cosmetic. Here, it is quite clear that a lot of thought went into the diversification of the arsenal. Different sniper rifles have different patterns of fire; some weird shotguns have a particularly sadistic angle (like the Krogan-designed Graal Spike Thrower); some pistols (like Scorpion) shoot proximity mines rather than regular bullets, etc. Best of all, there’s just the right amount of all those modifications so you do not feel completely overwhelmed by the variety — and you can choose if you want to spend a lot of time putting together the perfect weapon-and-armor combination for your next mission, or if you just want to chuck it and rely on your finger skills all along (and you can, though on the hardest levels of difficulty getting the essential gear can certainly help you bring your enemies down much faster).
In terms of sheer combat difficulty, Mass Effect 3 is probably the toughest game of all three — which is, after all, no surprise, because what else did you expect from a full-out Reaper assault on the galaxy? The game revels in creating new types of monstrosities with their specific challenges — where the original Mass Effect more or less introduced all of its enemies in the earliest stage of the game, so that by the end of it you were cutting through them like butter, Mass Effect 3 raises its stakes gradually, taking a cue from the likes of Half-Life or maybe even Resident Evil (considering the rather obvious element of «body horror»), with tougher and trickier opponents impeding your progress as the game progresses: Cannibals, Marauders, Brutes, and the genuine nightmare fuel of anybody playing on harder levels — Banshees, who have a nasty habit of teleporting themselves right next to you and then grabbing you helpless for an instant kill. Banshees do not appear until about halfway into the game, though, which is very late by typical Mass Effect standards.
The difficulty also increases with the transition from the base game to its DLCs, more or less the same way as it was in both Mass Effect (where the Batarians of Bring Down The Sky posed a much tougher challenge than everybody else) and Mass Effect 2 (where the fighting sequences in Arrival and Lair Of The Shadow Broker probably made you sweat far more intensely, with larger numbers of increasingly aggressive enemies). In that respect, Omega, with its new types of killer droids and mutated monsters, was at least perfectly predictable — an add-on made specially for the fans of the game’s combat system (the final fight with the Adjutants and the Cerberus gooks at the same time is pure chaotic murder, requiring very tough self-coordination on the part of the player); but I was far more surprised at the difficulty in Citadel, contrasting rather sharply with the overall humorous nature of the DLC — believe me, few things are more humiliating than dying under intense crossfire from a bunch of armed paramilitary crooks while your squadmates keep making incessant jokes at your (and each other’s) expense. One minute you’re relaxing in the best sushi restaurant on the Citadel, the next one you have to fight off a host of super-tough enemies armed only with a lousy pistol (actually, one of the toughest pistols in the game, but still, having to maneuver against heavy infantry and snipers with limited ammo and wearing a tuxedo instead of battle armor is perhaps the most difficult challenge that the Mass Effect universe can throw at you, ever).
(To be precise, the toughest fights of the game await you in the Citadel’s Armax Arena, where Commander Shepard can choose to fight holographic equivalents of pretty much all enemy types, from the simplest to the toughest ones — the craziest ones are those where you have to fight multiple copies of yourself in all possible class incarnations; you truly have not experienced Hell until you tried fighting a couple of Vanguard Shepards, Infiltrator Shepards, and Sentinel Shepards at the exact same time on Insanity level! Fortunately, all of that is completely and utterly optional even in terms of the DLC itself; but it’s so infectious that I didn’t stop myself until I found ways to cheese the battle’s outcome in my favor).
One other interesting moment here, which one might not even realize unless one stops to think about it, is that there are very few «boss fights» as such in the game — except for the rather awkward one-on-one Reaper encounter on Rannoch and one or two overpowered human opponents like Kai Leng, BioWare programmers mainly send generic opponents your way. Admittedly, BioWare have never cared all that much for unique type bosses in their games, but still, Mass Effect at least had Shepard and friends fight a hyperactive huskified Saren at the end of the game, while Mass Effect 2 offered them a grotesque monstrosity with an almost JRPG flavor to it. In comparison, the final fight sequences in Mass Effect 3, when Shepard has to break through the Reapers’ armies to reach the Crucible, may be even more difficult — but they only include the enemies you are already perfectly familiar with. This clearly intentional rejection of the «boss fight» trope is somewhat comparable to the Monty Python rejection of the «punchline», and I love it; somehow it adds a thin wisp of realism, so as to speak, into the proceedings. Who knows, maybe some people expected Shepard to really be able to wrestle a mature Reaper with his bare hands — fortunately, the game gives you no such nonsense.
Two more important innovations were probably introduced because of fan feedback. One was the removal of the «hacking» mini-games that were so persistent in the first two games whenever you needed to loot some locker or console. Moderately fun at first, they quickly became tedious, and by the time the third game came along the designers finally realised that repeating the same puzzle over and over becomes mind-numbing torture rather than stimulating challenge, so they wisely eliminated them altogether — finally, whenever Commander Shepard needs some loot, he can simply grab it, and this is good. You still have to search for all those datapads all over the place, so it’s not like it all just falls right into your hands.
Second was a complete re-working of the planet scanning system introduced in Mass Effect 2; apparently, the idea of probing various planets for useful minerals was appealing enough, but its realization, once again, soon turned into grindy tedium. Now, instead of randomly bombarding planet surface with your probes to extract stuff, you actually have to scan them for some positive identification blip, after which you extract the relevant asset — this time, usually not a generic mineral, but some particular resource that you can add to your constantly growing list of «war assets». Not that it still isn’t tedious, but at least this time around you get a unique or near-unique result each time.
All of this just goes to show that the Mass Effect 3 team was not merely milking the success of Mass Effect 2; the listed peculiarities of the game, separating it from its predecessors, show that there was still true commitment to perfecting and deepening the gaming experience. Whether it was driven first and foremost by commercial considerations or artistic ones is difficult to say (plus, when it comes to the action side of videogames, «commercial» and «artistic» are pretty hard to reliably disentangle from one another), but one thing is unquestionable: most players — myself included — found the game fun. It even becomes easier to forgive the stupid plotline about Cerberus when you see how well it has been used to provide the player with some of the best coordinated, most challenging AI enemy teamwork of its time — fighting off a squad of Cerberus mooks and centurions is no joke when you’re doing an Insanity run.
It is no wonder that Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer mode, introduced because everything had to have a multiplayer mode in 2012, was so well received and, to the best of my knowledge, still retains a bit of interest, as the servers are still up and running as of 2024, with a small but loyal community continuing to honor the memory of Commander Shepard. As somebody who has never connected to a multiplayer server even once in his life (I’m neither proud nor ashamed of the fact — it’s just that I’m a sore individualist when it comes to playing), I certainly cannot comment on the actual virtues of the multiplayer mode, but clearly it wouldn’t be as popular if the combat system weren’t polished all the way. That said, it is interesting that the multiplayer mode was not revived for the Legendary Edition: apparently, EA decided that spending fresh resources on a multiplayer option for an old remastered game would not turn a serious profit — and they are probably right.
That said, I suspect — and I can only suspect here, since I am absolutely nowhere near close to Mr.-Shoot-’Em-All and my knowledge of action gaming in the 2000s-2010s is extremely limited — that in most of its action-related aspects Mass Effect 3 is strictly a follower rather than an innovator. Having tried their hand at an original combat mechanics (with cooldown times replacing ammo boxes, etc.) with the first game and not finding a lot of fan support for it, they pretty much reverted back to commonly adopted tactics with Mass Effect 2, and the third game only solidifies that approach. This is why the «Action Mode» of the game makes particularly little sense: one simply does not play Mass Effect for the action — that would be like watching Lord Of The Rings just for the adrenaline of its combat scenes. Mass Effect is not Half-Life and it certainly isn’t Call Of Duty; it’s a game where you shoot your way through to the plot, not use the plot as a technical device to lead you up to the shooting.
Atmosphere
You do not even need to play Mass Effect 3 to know what sort of tags should be chosen to describe its general vibes. The original game, even if it had the Reaper threat already presented to you in the intro, could not really help but not be about that: its main feels were all about the breathtaking discovery of a newly synthesized universe. Taking down Saren and Sovereign always took a step back to just reveling in the sights and sounds; I bet very few players actually even made the expected mad dash after the baddies on Ilos, instead of taking their time to admire the lush vegetation, the majestic ruins, and the creepy gigantic walls lined with cryo-pods full of deceased Protheans. By the time Mass Effect 2 came along, the universe became more familiar, and you were now getting busy exploring its unsavory underbelly — learning that even all those gorgeous Asari and imposing Turians can be scummy, sleazy gangsters, and that behind every great wonder of the universe lurks a crime or a threat. The world was a dangerous place indeed, and not just because of the Reaper threat.
But as the Reapers do strike, all the here-and-now problems that humans and non-humans alike create for each other on their incessant gold drives and power trips fade into the background, as do the flamboyant reds-and-blacks of Mass Effect 2, now replaced by moodier blues-and-greens. Three emotional themes dominate the space of the third game — Terror, as the Reapers unleash their wave of total destruction that comes in multiple forms and flavors; Despair, as losses that cut closer and closer to the heart pile up around you and doubt about the usefulness of whatever you do remains a constant torment; and Epicness, as you get to feel like a True Hero every now and then — or, maybe, not so much a True Hero as a kind of «Conduit» for letting Destiny operate on the grandest scale ever witnessed in a video game. Throw in a bunch of Humor (always good to have in a situation like this) and a lot of Battle Adrenaline, and that’s Mass Effect 3 for you in a nutshell.
Let’s start with Terror, which is appropriate because that is what the game starts out with. How long do we have? — Not long. — God help us all. Once the Reapers make their move and the atmosphere moves from suspenseful premonition to total destructive chaos, the game no longer provides that feeling of deep existential dread which may have been lingering around over the first two games: the Reaper threat becomes everyday reality, in which you soon find out that both the Reapers’ mutated creations and even the Reapers themselves are not immune to damage — it’s just that it is literally impossible to kill ’em all, because no matter how many enemies you put down, the game will simply spawn new ones for you until the very end. The majority of the scenes dealing with the Reaper invasion falls under the definition of «pandemonium» rather than «terror», and this is achieved pretty well — BioWare designers know how to make you feel overwhelmed, with all sorts of stuff crashing, burning, and exploding around you, enemies swarming around from all directions, gunfire coming in with blinding, deafening, and confusing potential, and very little sense of safety even when you’re in cover.
Actual terror, though, is handled somewhat less adequately. Thus, from the likes of Steven Spielberg and other expert filmmakers BioWare have certainly learned that in order to be truly efficient, terror must be personified and individualized, so they have this little kid character in the beginning whom Shepard comes across a couple of times, then watches him as he tries to get away from the destruction in a shuttle only to be blown to bits by the Reapers a few seconds later. This feels overtly manipulative, but what’s worse is that we did not really get to establish a proper relationship with the kid in advance — there were, at most, a couple of brief sentence exchanges between him and the Commander — and the impact of that death, per se, is nowhere near as hard as it could be (although the music helps quite a bit).
Ironically, the Reaper armies fare better when it comes to generating horror rather than terror. The designers must have studied quite hard the likes of Resident Evil and other survival-horror / body-horror franchises, coming up with several types of particularly gruesome monsters created by the Reapers from various galactic species in the process of «huskifying» their bodies — and there is a particularly tense episode in the game, where Shepard investigates the situation in a secluded Asari monastery that has been chosen by the Reapers as the initial breeding ground for synthesizing Banshees, the game’s most terrifying and dangerous enemy, which can really rival any first-rate survival horror game. New players who come to this scene unprepared have really got to make sure they have no serious cardiac issues beforehand.
But one thing that really, really works this time around is BioWare’s ability to make you fall in love with your precious little «safe space» — in this case, the Normandy, of course. It is true that in the first two games, just as well, the Normandy was the only location in the Galaxy where nothing wrong could happen to you (unless the ship were abducted by the Collectors, and even that happened while Shepard was temporarily on leave); but the Galaxy itself was not completely going up in flames at the time either, and there were various hubs around it — the Citadel, Illium, even the slums of Omega — where you could feel relatively safe and relaxed as well. In Mass Effect 3, the Citadel remains as the only such hub, and even that one is filled with chaos, anxiety, and panic. Contrastively, the Normandy, plunged in the quiet, monotonous hum of its engines and in the soothing half-light of its dimmed illumination, becomes the only remaining place in the universe where you can lay your burden down, have a quiet chat or two with your loyal companions, or even just retire to the solitude of your cabin to fool around with a space hamster and meditate to the sight of fish in your aquarium (provided you have not forgotten to feed them — a typical complaint from players of Mass Effect 2 that can, fortunately, be put to rest now if you have the cash to purchase an automatic feeding machine from the markets on the Citadel).
I’m a big fan of the «safe space» concept in RPGs — the feeling of cozily cuddling down in a nice room where no filthy goblin or vampire can get through to you is perhaps the single best sensation I get from the whole experience, provided it’s done right — and no game in the franchise works with it better than Mass Effect 3. You get to decorate your cabin with all sorts of stuff salvaged from the wreckage of the galaxy; you get to have quiet, reassuring, psychologically healing conversations with your squadmates (in the previous two games, they were usually too busy unloading their own problems on you, but here it really feels like they’re there for you, in earnest); you just get to experience peace and quiet, so sharply contrasting with the total ruination observed out of the Normandy’s illuminators. This is done so well that even when there’s really nothing left to do, every now and then I kept getting this feeling of being very reluctant to leave the safety and (even somewhat Spartan) comfort of the ship to leave for yet another hell-on-Earth mission of blood, sweat, toil, and never-ending gunfire.
That said, Mass Effect 3 also offers a premium on grimness, despair, and depression. Despite Shepard’s predictable tactical triumphs on the battlefield, both against the Reapers and the back-stabbing Cerberus, the game reminds you, over and over and over again, that this is a fight he/she ultimately cannot win. Victories tend to be partial (such as when you only need to thin out the enemy’s lines a little to help extract a friend from the battlefield) or arrogantly negated by cutscenes (such as the mission on Thessia, where Kai Leng is scripted to kick your ass no matter what you do); and even within the relative safety of the Normandy, most of your companions will, at one time or another, hold conversations with you in which they shall discuss finality, mortality, and fatality (throw in babality if you’re romancing any one of them, of course). In fact, the idea that winning this fight is impossible — as opposing to, perhaps, subverting it or changing the course of history in some other hitherto unknown way — is thrown around so frequently that I am even surprised at how much people still keep craving for that «happy ending». If you did not know there was not going to be a happy ending from the game’s opening sequence, you rather naïvely underestimated the spirit of the BioWare team on the job.
There’s also plenty of death going around, of course — not generic, faceless death of the «hey, news just in about another billion casualties but who cares, right?» variety, but this time around, death that hits very close to home. In the first two games, most of the deaths around Shepard were those of baddies, and where friends were concerned, these deaths could generally be avoided — you could easily save Wrex in Mass Effect, for instance, and it did not take a total genius to have all your squadmates survive the Suicide Mission at the end of Mass Effect 2. Even very occasional inavoidable deaths of people close to you were shocking exceptions that took place offscreen — most notably, the Ashley-or-Kaiden choice on Virmire in the first game. And even if you did screw up and left some companions to die in the Collector Base, these deaths were quick, not particularly emotional, and even somewhat clichéd, almost as if telling you «don’t be such a doofus next time, dude, here’s a really silly quick scene of a good friend kicking the bucket for you, now be a good lad and reload an earlier save».
Mass Effect 3, however, does not spare your feelings in this respect — instead, it manipulates them for all they’re worth. Some of the deaths here can be avoided, such as, for instance, Grunt’s, Tali’s, or Miranda’s, but judging by the amount of soul inserted into those sequences, you’d almost think the designers intended for them to be canon (Tali’s suicide after Shepard saves the Geth at the expense of the Quarians is, for instance, breathtakingly cinematic). Some minor characters encountered along the way are given just enough screen time, dialog, and personality to endear themselves to you before being sent off to die in a blaze of glory (Turian Lieutenant Tarquin Victus, repentantly sacrificing himself for his own mistakes; Aria’s love-and-hate partner Nyreen in the Omega DLC; your own good friend and mentor Captain Anderson at the end of the game — the list could go on). And at least two send-offs here are within their own right to be included into the Golden Pantheon of Video Game Character Demises — both have managed to genuinely move me to tears, even if you realize that this is mostly done through professional craftsmanship rather than unique inspiration.
The more iconic of the two is the death of Mordin Solus, who nobly sacrifices himself to atone for having contributed to the Krogan genophage — the classic «repentant scientist» trope presented here in the most heart-wrenching way possible: what makes the scene so emotionally effective is Mordin’s generally unintentionally-humorous personality (if you spent enough time chatting up the guy in Mass Effect 2, he will be humming his rendition of Gilbert & Sullivan’s I am the very model of... right before dying), integrated perfectly into the epic setting of his final feat. The death itself is not even demanded by the plot, but it is demanded by the moral code of the universe — so that I have not even seen too many of those «why oh why did Mordin have to die?» questions around the Web; everybody seems to understand that he had to.
I must say, though, that the most fantastic thing about Mordin’s death scene is that it can be played out in two completely different, yet equally meaningful, ways. The Paragon way of going about it, as most people probably go in their playthroughs, is to have Mordin administer the genophage cure to secure the future of the Krogan nation, then happily go out in his blaze of glory — the epic Space Cowboy way of ending things, a noble death worthy of Greek mythology and Norse saga. But if you have second thoughts on letting the Krogan race get back on its feet again, you can also sabotage the cure — and, when Mordin learns about it, shoot him in the back to prevent him from restoring things back to normal. In this case, he dies a dark, tragic death, on the very threshold of atonement and salvation but lacking the chance to make the final crossing (literally so, as he metaphorically expires on the threshold of his laboratory). The drawback is that this outcome makes Shepard come across as a black-hearted Shakespearian villain rather than the savior of the galaxy — and probably the one episode in the game which makes players complain that by the time of Mass Effect 3, Renegade Shepard has completed his descent into full-out psychopath territory (though if you ask me, the ability of Renegade Shepard to bump off Shiala, the Rachni Queen, and Wrex in Mass Effect already put him/her on that path a long time ago — it’s just that none of those characters, not even Wrex, were as dear to the average player’s heart as Mordin The Adorable).
But if you focus on Mordin rather than Shepard for this issue, his chance to die like an Ascending Noble Hero or a Tragic Loser Cursed By Fate in equally logical and believable fashion is just one of those moments putting a serious-as-hell dent in Roger Ebert’s «video-games-are-not-art-since-art-does-not-have-branching-paths» theory. Both outcomes give me the feels, yet the feels are completely different dependent on the outcome, with tearful admiration as the dominant emotion for the Paragon route and ominous pity as the chief experience for the Renegade path. (In my own Renegade playthrough, I reserved the pitifully tragic ending for Padok Wiks, Mordin’s replacement, who has an interesting personality of his own, but did not get to have a character arc with as much backstory as Mordin, unfortunately, so the impact is always lessened).
The second tear-inducing scene concerns Thane, the noble-and-tormented Drell assassin, who passes away after being fatally wounded by the wretched Kai Leng while protecting you throughout the Cerberus coup. He was probably originally scripted to die from a terminal illness, with which he had been diagnosed even prior to his appearance in Mass Effect 2, but then the writers decided it would be more heart-wrenching to have him go in one last blast of glory. Again, it all has to do with how well the character was written, animated, and voiced from the very beginning: useless to just watch a small clip of Thane’s death on YouTube to get the whole impact. But the scene hits especially hard if, as female Shepard, you had romanced Thane in the previous game — as I have written in my previous review, Thane’s romance line was easily the best out of all possible choices in Mass Effect 2, since it was the only one based less on the idea of «I love you, but how am I going to find the right hole?» and more on the idea of a spiritual connection between two souls flawed and tormented in subtly similar ways. This connection — the idea that Soldier Shepard has the same kind of moral burden on her heart as Assassin Thane — is taken to its extreme in the final moments of the scene, and while some might not realize that concisely, it is one of the major factors contributing to how it never fails to bring out the tears. Shorter and less notorious than Mordin’s epic farewell, perhaps, but psychologically far more deep-reaching.
(A third commonly listed tear-jerking scene is on Rannoch, when Legion sacrifices his personality for the greater good of the Geth conclave, but Legion’s robotic voice has always ruined that one for me — or maybe I am not yet sufficiently advanced to show human feelings for an AI entity. It’s a decent scene, but that entire story arc about the Geth gaining true intelligence is just a little too sci-fi for my tastes; the Classical and Biblical connotations of Mordin’s and Thane’s lifelines give me far more of a gut punch. Some people do feel quite different about this, and that’s perfectly all right).
Finally, there’s the Epic flavor. This is the one that is always the most difficult to get right, with decades of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Yoshimi-battles-the-pink-robots daguerreotypes corrupting the primal inspirational magic of the Hero Vibe; and, in fact, I already wrote about how certain inane bits of dialog already threaten to turn the game into a flaming disaster right from the start. However, it does get better, as the game does its best to avoid corny pompous speeches and convey its sense of the epic more through music and visuals — stuff like the grandiose battle between the Reaper and the Thresher Maw, for instance, or the final «battle for London» with its utter chaos, devastation, and massive scale, both on the ground and in the airspace above Earth. While I do believe that the game is at its best in its quiet moments, relatively few things about the loud ones bring out heavy groans and facepalms. As for the game’s ending — well, I think I already wrote enough about that in the previous sections.
Perhaps, when it comes to Epic, special mention should be made of the Leviathan DLC. While its handling of the Reaper enigma remains very much open to criticism (people who say it’s genius and people who say it’s retarded both have valid points to make), it can hardly be denied that atmospherically, the whole thing is constructed to near-perfection. Starting out like some modern day Twilight Zone episode, with circumstances investigated by Shepard gradually pointing out to levels of mystery that go much deeper than the Reapers, the plot goes through elements of uneasy suspense, then throws in a touch of the usual Reaper body horror, and finally takes a big gamble with the epic conclusion — the last scene of Shepard wading underwater in a giant robot body that still turns out to be minuscule next to the original Masters of the Galaxy appearing before him in person. Shepard’s «hallucinatory» underwater interaction with the Leviathan brings on memories of the original encounter with Sovereign in Mass Effect — of the «hero meets something way beyond his size, age, and comprehension» variety — but this time around, the focus is ultimately on unraveling rather than deepening the mystery, and the prevailing vibe quickly shifts to cautious awe over raw terror. On an emotional level, it all certainly works better than the actual ending, which explains the much warmer reception that Leviathan had among the fans.
Finally, even if it could hardly be called an «essential» part of the experience, there’s Humor — handled pretty damn well, not too much of it and not too little; friendly humor, soothing humor, and plenty of dark humor, of course. There’s the usual comic relief in the form of Joker the Pilot (now usually served within his interactions with EDI the co-pilot AI, whose appropriation of a robotic female shape lays down the ground for the game’s weirdest romantic twist); Wrex and Mordin provide even more entertainment; Conrad Verner, the bumbling fanboy mascot of the series, returns to the Citadel for one final moment of inane glory; and even Ashley «She’s So Racist» Williams can be a lot of tough-girl fun, especially when she drinks her ass off and only Commander Shepard can save her from a hangover more terrible than Reaper indoctrination. Of course, Javik the Prothean still wins first place with his airlock jokes, provided you get his DLC (or just the Legendary Edition).
I truly appreciate the ratio of the humor: without any funny moments at all, the game would psychologically suffocate the player with a never-ending barrage of pathos and depression, but neither does it want to ever degrade into sheer comedy — even when characters are cracking jokes to the left and the right, they are usually relevant to the situation and do just what they’re intended to do, a.k.a. provide psychological relief from the nightmare. Maybe the game could do without a few of the inside jokes and running gags ("I’m Garrus Vakarian and this is now my favorite spot on the Citadel!" is a little too obvious), but then again, people do love those, so who am I to grumble?
The only time when humor overrides absolutely everything else is with the Citadel DLC, but as I wrote earlier, that was its very selling point — subvert the lore and poke some friendly fun at your own past, fighting cheesy fire with even more cheesy fire and reaping tons of profit. Citadel does have its serious, thoughtful, and tender moments (Shepard holding a memorial service for Thane and then reading his last video messages on the screen almost brings out the tears again), but mostly it’s all for laughs, and though the absolute majority of the jokes will only be dear to those who have memorized their Mass Effect from A to Z, this does not make them any less exquisite.
Finally, let us not forget the Romantic aspects of the game. Given the overall circumstances, romance is generally put on the backburner in the third game, and if, back in Mass Effect 2, you happened to exchange your DNA with one of your squadmates who did not get to be your companion in the sequel, that romantic line will be severely truncated to the point of non-existence (e.g. Jacob simply dumps Female Shepard) or an occasional brief encounter on the Citadel (Miranda literally gets just one quick hump in between assignments) that can border on clumsy ridiculousness (the Thane romance can hardly be taken seriously until the dude has finally passed away). However, romances with actual squadmates — Liara, Garrus, Tali, or Ashley/Kaidan as the «Virmire Survivor» — which can be sustained every now and then on board the Normandy are written and acted to the point of generating some actual feeling, and even the obligatory «final sex scene before the world ends on us» is handled with more delicacy and fewer laughs than the respective scenes in the first two games.
The best news is that, with the romantic lines already established, the emphasis in most of these interactions is not on the, ahem, «technical» aspects of the business, but rather on using the romantic relationship as a source of energy and inspiration for the infernal battles ahead — there’s always a thin melancholic wisp around most of the romantic scenes aboard the Normandy that creates just the right atmosphere. If you want, you can still cringe, giggle, or shrug, but I wouldn’t think of these reactions as «involuntarily obligatory» in the same way that it is, for instance, impossible to take the Shepard / Miranda lovemaking scene in the engine room in Mass Effect 2 seriously. In this aspect, Mass Effect 3 shows some maturity, and is inarguably the best game out of all three when it comes to depicting romance. (Or breakup, for that matter — if Shepard decides to go back to either Ashley or Liara and severs his relationship with Miranda, there’s a nicely acted moment between the two that features Yvonne Strahovski at her best).
On the whole, it is plain to see that Mass Effect 3 fully delivers on the «feels» — but also that these «feels» are light years away from where we started, as should probably be the case for any successful trilogy set in an original sci-fi or fantasy universe. By now, the focus is squarely on Big Drama rather than on World-Building, and that is really how it should be, because, in my humble opinion, world-building for its own sake is boring (that’s the biggest problem with the likes of The Elder Scrolls, who always give us these huge and meticulously elaborated universes which seem to be populated with faceless automatons) — and while I absolutely agree with Shamus Young that focusing on drama tends to have a negative impact on things like logic, reason, common sense, and causation, the fact remains that not even Shakespeare is completely guilt-free when it comes to this trade-off, much less the overpaid (or perhaps underpaid?) writers at BioWare. And for what it’s worth, on the atmospheric front Mass Effect 3 ticked off all the right checkboxes in my own soul: it made me care, it made me cry, it made me laugh, it made me fear, it made me rage, and it made me, once again, think on how much better the world could be if more of my friends were like Shepard’s squadmates and less like, say, Councilor Udina.
To be continued…