Special game review: Mass Effect 3 (2012) - Pt. 3/3

[This completes my rather lengthy write-up on the flaws, virtues, and general uniqueness of the Mass Effect trilogy. Full reviews for all three games can now be conveniently looked up next to each other on the regular website, at starlingdb.org/games.]

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Technical features

Graphics

No Mass Effect game looks completely different from its predecessor, for obvious aims of continuity, but every Mass Effect game looks a little different from its predecessor, both for purely technical reasons — such as transition to an updated version of the Unreal Engine 3, powering all three parts of the trilogy — and for aesthetic ones. In the technical department, changes from Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3 were not tremendously substantial; the jump in visual quality that happened from 2007 to 2010 was notably stronger than from 2010 to 2012, and it would be difficult to convincingly argue about how the graphics of Mass Effect 3 made those of Mass Effect 2 feel «outdated». Arguably the single biggest change introduced was a major redesign in 3D model technology for the characters’ faces, making them look and move even more realistically than before; unfortunately, this was achieved at the expense of making players’ efforts at hand-crafting their custom Shepard in the previous two games go to waste — this is, for instance, what happened to my own killer Renegade FemShep upon reusing the same character code from Mass Effect 2:

Before the Reapers…

…and after.

This is actually a somewhat bigger issue than any non-ardent fan of Mass Effect might imagine: having virtually lived through the first two games with (as) the same character, being forced to accept the new rendering rules for Mass Effect 3 could almost feel like being forced to undergo obligatory plastic surgery (I remember spending quite a bit of time looking for all sorts of graphical tweaks and hacks to return «me» as I used to be, but, alas, to no avail — updated graphical engines are no joke, and not even professional modders could do much with that). But in the end you simply had to make peace with that. BioWare wanted you to believe that technical progress was still marching on with giant strides, and what a better way to do that than a complete (unnecessary) redesign of the character construction kit?

Oh well, at the very least there seems to have been near-perfect continuity between the «stock» facial models for both Male Shepard (still relying on the same old unshaven Mark Vanderloo mug) and for most of his squadmates, as well as recurring characters from the previous two games. The single biggest image change was reserved for Chief Ashley Williams — provided you kept her alive on Virmire so that she could return to your side for the final round — who, following her promotion to Lieutenant Commander, apparently decided to accompany this by adopting a more expressly «feminine» look, with longer hair and an extra layer of makeup (to better distract the Reapers in hand-to-hand combat, I guess). Although I do not mind the visual transformation as much as some of the more conservative (or, conversely, some of the more «progressive») fans, it is a little odd that Ashley was literally the only past character to undergo such a change — they could have at least made Kaidan Alenko to bleach his hair or something, in a compensatory-symmetric move — and it is hard to get rid of the thought that this was a conscious move on BioWare’s part to raise the «attractiveness» of Ashley, formerly branded as Space Racist No. 1, for the predominantly male segment of the players. (Spoiler: it didn’t really work). Personally, I always thought of Ashley as one of the most interestingly designed and meticulously written characters in the series anyway — and what hurt me more about her role in the game was not the facial redesign but the fact that, apparently, a lot of her dialog lines for Mass Effect 3 ended up on the cutting floor or bugged into non-existence, as would eventually be revealed.

As for the general visual aesthetics, Mass Effect 3 steps away from the overriding red-black-and-brown colors of the previous game (which were intended to raise a feeling of permanent «hidden danger») and returns to blue as the dominant color — in fact, Deep Blue is pretty much everywhere you go, be it the Citadel, Normandy, or any of the planets Shepard has to visit in this last round. The only exception is the iniquity den of Omega, which preserves its traditional red hue, but since it has now been turned into a direct war zone, the red colors are dusky and tattered rather than flashing in all their infernal neon glory as they used to during the station’s better days. Other than that, you have blue skies, blue armor, blue uniforms, blue shields, blue Reapers, blue asari — mixed with an occasional red such as the color of your own blood or the devastating laser beams the Reapers shoot out of their blue hides.

One might say that this brings the game closer to the original palette of Mass Effect, where blue was also the overriding color par excellence, but the blue of Mass Effect was generally lighter, warmer, and more welcoming — a sort of «cozy hospital room blue», if you will — not to mention that one of the biggest joys of the game was wheeling through all the different planetary landscapes that ranged from the same icy wintery blue to lush prairie green to deep volcanic red and beyond. In Mass Effect 3, the blue is not so much welcoming as suffocating: you cannot escape it anywhere, and ultimately it becomes symbolic of a sort of «deep freeze death» where being blasted away in the red heat of Reaper fire might actually feel welcome for a change. I’m not entirely sure of how I feel about this; on one hand, the symbolism is powerful, but on the other, Mass Effect 3 is a huge, long game, and having the same palette splashed over most of it can get wearisome. One thing you are certainly not going to remember Mass Effect 3 as is a provider of starkly contrasting, memorable visual environments.

One area in which the visual artists really let it all hang out, though, is the portrayal of «Reaper horror». To be fair, it has never been made understood what in the world motivates the Reapers, emotionless machines capable of destroying the entire galaxy with nothing but their lasers, to create all sorts of mutated monstrosities out of their captured prey — other than, perhaps, some irrational desire (can machines even have irrational desires?) to play a sadistic game of cat-and-mouse before going in for the final kill. Well, that and the understanding that Shepard and his friends must have some crazyass synthetic enemies to shoot at, because not even the craziest power combo can be enough to take out an actual Reaper. In addition to giving us some juicy pew-pew targets, though, the idea also provided Mass Effect’s visual artist team with a whole wide berth to practice their Resident Evil-influenced fantasies.

The problem with real spooky baddies in a shooter game is that you can only get properly creeped out by those during cut scenes — once in action, they’re going to be too small and you’re going to be too busy shooting or running to allocate any mental resources to getting scared shitless. (This is one of the benefits of classic Resident Evil’s survival horror mode, with the average zombie being slow on the move and in full focus much of the time). However, «Reaper horror» in the game is following you everywhere, not just in combat, and there will be a lot of opportunities to get zoned out by monstruously grotesque fusions of «meaty», lumpy organic matter with cold’n’robotic blue implants. This style works so well and results in so much first-rate ugliness that it actually has a negative impact on choosing the «green ending» for the game — no matter how much BioWare designers try to push you toward accepting the idea that the key to universal happiness is a synthesis between organic and synthetic matter, how can you actually bring yourself to getting those freaky implants after you just spent a hundred hours fighting implant-choked killing machines?

Most of these opportunities arrive with cut scenes, and, predictably, the actual number of cut scenes for you to witness now goes through the roof — almost every mission gets its fair share, though I must say that the actual cinematics of Mass Effect 3 do not impress me nearly as much as they should. A few of the vistas are quite unique and breathtaking, such as visions of the Alliance fleets burning up in space around Earth, or the above-mentioned epic fight between the Reaper and the Thresher Maw, but overall, while the technical level was certainly outstanding for 2012, all those explosions and stuff are fairly routine for the modern viewer. In general, I am much more impressed by the care lavished on Shepard’s (and his friends’) facial expressions — the sight of my Ruthless Renegade FemShep in close-up shedding the only tears of her life while watching Thane’s recorded farewell video is a far stronger emotional trigger than any of the action-oriented cut scenes.

Overall, the best thing I can say about the graphics is that they’re on the level — you don’t see too many people complaining about them in the 2020s, which is a good sign — but it is not really through eye-candy that the game achieves its goals. The visuals were tremendously important in the first game, which was all about world-building, after all; by the last part of the trilogy, no more spectacular visual introductions to the universe of Mass Effect are necessary — what matters is what you do, not what you see, and this means that voice acting is far more important for this game than pretty pictures.

Sound        

As the priorities of the Mass Effect saga in general gradually shifted from innovative world-building to Shakesperian drama and Tolkienist neo-epos, so did the music — which, from the very beginning, was every bit as important as the visuals (and sometimes more). Although the soundtrack, from the very beginning, was basically a mix of oddball futuristic electronic ambience with Wagner-meets-Williams epic orchestral bombast, you could say that the general memory of the music in Mass Effect would rather paint the soundtrack as a technophile’s wet dream — all that cruising around in the Mako through endless alien terrain sure did the job — while in Mass Effect 2, the symphonic pathos had already started the drive for extra prominence... and now Mass Effect 3 completes the job: with Jack Wall no longer involved in the soundtrack at all, and the atmosphere more frequently calling for power than solitude, the music has evolved into full-fledged space drama.

About four or five different composers were responsible for writing the score, with Sam Hulick inheriting the bulk of the duties from his previous part-time engagements; but the most famous newcomer, of course, was Clint Mansell, best known at the time for his many soundtracks to Darren Aronofsky’s movies. BioWare’s proposal to Clint was a stroke of genius — his «tiny-rays-of-light-lost-in-eternal-darkness» style, so much responsible for the overall atmosphere of Aronofsky’s bleak tales of human depravity, would be perfect for a game in which the idea of good-triumphs-over-evil comes off as either impossible or circumstantially irrelevant. That said, as far as I can tell, Mansell himself only wrote a small part of the soundtrack; in the official soundtrack, he is credited only as the sole composer of ‘Leaving Earth’ and as Hulick’s partner for ‘An End, Once And For All’ (although the two pieces are atmospherically similar enough to suggest that the main melody of the second theme is primarily Mansell’s creation as well).

Not that this ain’t sufficient, because, in this writer’s humble opinion, ‘Leaving Earth’ is easily the single greatest piece of music written in the 21st century — or, to put it in more accurate and less provocative terms, there are no other songs or instrumentals written in the past 25 years that manage to make more of an emotional impact on yours truly. Barely two minutes long — so you should hear it by all means even if you never played or intend to play the game — it carries the full weight of an epic symphony, telling the tale of the universe as we know it from start to finish: the darkness, the proverbial tiny ray of light, the nightmares, the glorious rises and achievements, the extinction and shutting down. Drawing part-time from the minimalists (the piercing little piano theme) and part-time from the neo-classicists, ‘Leaving Earth’ is equally relevant for the purposes of the game — those massive distorted horn blares representing the battle calls of the Reapers — and for, well, just about any purpose that has to do with the idea of inevitable extinction. Over the entire trilogy, no single moment hits harder and harsher than the final sustained note of the tune as the Mass Effect 3 logo materializes on the screen.

Ironically, I have seen many people expressing their admiration for the tune itself and the accompanying cinematics by saying how their visceral reaction was sheer anger, a raging desire to kick the Reapers’ asses into the next dimension. This tells us a lot about basic human psychology — and also brings to mind the classic trope of the young inexperienced gunslinger from a Western movie, you know, the one who earns himself an early grave if his older and more seasoned companion does not succeed in stopping him from some suicidal move. ‘Leaving Earth’ is not a bombastic call to arms; as a musical piece, it is a lament, a philosophical rumination on the subject of fate and transience. It does not exactly tell you to lay down your arms and surrender to the inevitable — that is not what Commander Shepard is about, anyway — but it does tell you, in no uncertain chords, that your own ray of light cannot turn the general tide of events; it can, and should, be there as part-time observer, part-time influencer, but sooner or later, it will go out, and there’s nothing you can do about it in the long run, no matter how much fuss you raise in the short one. It’s beautiful, tragic, and indescribably authentic to the core — two minutes of music in which every single note is imbued with layers of meaning. Unfortunately, as a piece of «incidental» music for a video game, its recognizability shall always be limited — even so, it’s still got millions of views on YouTube, as compared to only hundreds of thousands for most of the other compositions on the OST, and that’s gotta stand for something.

A similar, though much less harsh vibe, of sadness and acceptance permeates ‘An End, Once And For All’, the theme that plays during Shepard’s final sacrifice; two minutes of isolated piano playing (the same key of E minor, in fact, quite a few chords are the same and ‘Leaving Earth’ itself is occasionally re-quoted) followed by a rapid buildup — the buildup, representing the universe-changing consequences of Shepard’s choice, is nowhere near as interesting as the quiet piano melody, though, which once again sends out a signal of... humility? I wanted to write «our insignificance», but this is not really true: neither the game itself nor the accompanying soundtrack really propagate the idea that nothing we do ever matters — rather, it is the idea of teaching you to know when to fight against overwhelming odds and when to accept fate because there is no way you can always be stronger than the tide. It’s the kind of musical theme that agrees particularly well with Shepard’s blissful self-disintegration in the Synthesis ending, but, of course, it also works fairly well on its own. Had somebody like Harold Budd or Philip Glass released these compositions on their original LPs, they would certainly have gained much larger prominence.

The third most memorable theme from the game is arguably ‘I Was Lost Without You’ — the main romantic piece to accompany the Commander’s love life — and since it’s mostly Sam Hulick, without Mansell’s involvement, it does not quite possess the same gut punch; also, its pseudo-orchestral final movement veers on corny, perhaps intentionally so (in the game’s lore, it is supposed to be the main theme of the trashy romantic soap opera on interracial love) but still feeling a tad awkward when it accompanies the game’s most, ahem, intimate scenes. Even so, it shares the atmosphere of reclusive melancholy with Mansell’s themes, and cuts deeper than any of the «romantic» music previously scored by Wall, Hulick, and others for the first two games.

The rest of the music ranges from occasional throwbacks to the original Mass Effect (such as the harsh, jarring electronic pulses of ‘Mars’) to all sorts of bombastic-epic anthems (‘A Future For The Krogan’, which almost feels influenced by all those Celtic war motives from The Witcher; ‘The Fleets Arrive’, smartly quoting from Mass Effect’s opening theme to restore the feeling of excited hopefulness, if only for a brief while); for the most part, these are perfunctory, and their main function is to constantly remind you that you’re doing real badass, heroic stuff — here I cannot help being reminded on how most of the backing music for the big missions on Feros and Noveria in the first game had a covert-and-dangerous feel to it instead, making you feel more like a thief-in-the-night than the God of War incarnate. But that is precisely the point of Mass Effect 3: it is a game that constantly and relentlessly raises you up, only to brutally bring you down and ruthlessly remind you of your true place in the fabric of the universe in the end. Unless you’re ready to accept that, I think, you’re not really ready to experience the full impact of Mass Effect — or, for that matter, understand why its designers chose to cooperate with the composer for Requiem For A Dream rather than The Lord Of The Rings.

Concerning the voice acting, relatively little needs to be said since Mass Effect 3 remained loyal to its veterans and invited almost everybody back from their parts in the first two games — with maybe just one or two exceptions. As usual, Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale continue to shine as the respective MaleShep and FemShep, and this time around, their jobs are actually harder, because in the third game our Commander is given quite a bit of extra depth. He/she will have to deal with friends (and, potentially, lovers) dying all around in packs; suffer from nightmares; have second and third thoughts on important moral and political choices; and, at the end of the game, essentially take on the function and mission of a latter-day Jesus Christ — all in a day’s work for BioWare’s voice veterans, who rise to the task admirably. Once again, my own heart always gets stolen by Ms. Hale, who is capable of making even the most psychopathic and misanthropic Renegade Shepard come across as a loveable bastard; but even Meer, whose delivery on the whole had always been more stiff and monotonous than Hale’s, gets to break out of his shell by the end of the game, switching from the «never-forget-you’re-a-soldier, soldier!» delivery to something more human and vulnerable.

Special honors go to the only significant replacement in the game — William Salyers, who had to replace Michael Beattie as the unique voice of Mordin Solus; he did such a fine job with this that not all the players were even quick to notice the voice actor change. While Mordin does not exactly get any new layers to his personality in the game — most of his moral pains and spiritual torments had already taken place in Mass Effect 2 — it is in this game that he gets his grand hero moment, and Salyers preserves the same delicate balance between pathos, seriousness, and unintentional humor as his predecessor, and keeping up at the same insane tempo, too! God bless professional voice actors.

Of the (relatively few) fully new arrivals, a short word of support should probably be dropped for Freddie Prinze Jr. as Lt. James Vega — his job was to make us feel sympathetic for a presumably routine and boring muscle-crazy jock in an Alliance uniform, and he does his best to present his character as a human being with thoughts and feelings rather than just a heap of meat (well, okay, as a heap of meat with thoughts and feelings); by the end of the game, you might even agree to include him on the list of your intimate friends (not too intimate, though — you can only get intimate with James as a last resort in the Citadel DLC). Alix Wilton Reagan is also quite adorable as Samantha Traynor; I suppose her mission was to convincingly portray a lesbian character that all the nerdy non-lesbian players could fall in love with, and based on my own example, I suppose she carried it off splendidly. Samantha’s pre-written personality basically consists of two aspects — her curve-busting intellect and her curve-heavy sexual orientation — but Reagan can add the appropriate touches of shyness, sentimentality, and «girlishness» that ultimately make Samantha more of a human being than just a walking lesbian encyclopaedia.

Arguably the only vocal performance I would be tempted to write off as «overdone» would be the reprisal of the role of Aria T’Loak by Carrie-Ann Moss: you’re going to be hearing a lot of her if/when you take on the Omega DLC, and she somehow feels obliged to put that «tough iron bitch» imprint on pretty much every single sentence. I do realize that this is probably the way the character was written, but I’m sure that even real tough iron bitches in real life do not utter every single word as if suffering from an unending toothache or constipation. Actually, I would say that Omega could have offered Moss as Aria a chance to try to expand on her role and show us a little bit of what really goes on underneath that impregnable barrier — but neither the writers nor the actor seemed too interested, so that in the end the iron lady basically stays the iron lady, even if a suitably smart Renegade Shepard manages to finesse her a tiny bit. Then again, perhaps there is something to be said for consistency — if we can respect AC/DC for religiously staying away from romantic ballads, we could probably respect a tough-as-nails Asari mafia boss for never disclosing any additional aspects of her personality to any sorts of galactic riff-raff that she might come across while putting her business back in order.

On the whole, though, it’s useless to spend a lot of attention on such minor quibbles — this is a gigantic game with hours and hours of voice actor performances, so every once in a while there is going to be a bit of a dud here and there. The obvious general thing to note, of course, is that by now most of these roles have become second nature to the artists, and some of them, like Liara’s Ali Hillis or Garrus’ Brandon Keener, had already shown us in Mass Effect 2 how they were perfectly capable of leaving their «comfort zones» for something seriously different (with Liara transforming from the «naive young scientist» trope to the «confident badass» type, or Garrus shifting from the «reserved subordinate» to the «familiar friend» image), so in the final part of the trilogy they are not really expected to prove anything — they just jump into character straight away and give us joy through their very presence, even when they’re handled irritatingly crappy dialog on occasion.

Interface

In terms of basic game mechanics and controls, changes between Mass Effect 2 and 3 were nowhere near as drastic as between the first and second parts of the trilogy (and today, with the Legendary Edition version completely redesigning the combat interface for Mass Effect, these changes feel even more cosmetic). It seems as if the designers were pretty much convinced that they’d achieved near-perfection with these things in Mass Effect 2, and would only implement cosmetic changes so that they could have a pretext to not be accused of staleness. For instance, the HUD now accompanies the little pictures of your two active squad members with icons showing the readiness status of their most relevant powers — and hey, it didn’t do that in Mass Effect 2! That’s even more revolutionary than all the amazing innovations between iPhone 15 and iPhone 16, don’t you know?

That said, there were actually a couple of experimental decisions adopted for Mass Effect 2 that seem to have received too much negative feedback to carry over. For instance, comparing the combat interfaces of the two games shows that Mass Effect 3 has two different status bars for the state of your Shields / Barriers and that of your Health, while Mass Effect 2 only had one overlapping bar for both. This is because of an important mechanic change in the second game where both your Shields and your Health (not just the former) would automatically regenerate over time without having to use Medi-Gel — the latter, conversely, would only be saved for occasions where you had to revive your fallen squadmates. Apparently, this was deemed to be too odd — regeneration of energy shields is understandable, but health? does Shepard have krogan genes or something? — and in the third game they went back to the old Mass Effect (and general shooter) tradition of normally using health items to replenish health. Less revolution, more filling.

Another visible onscreen change is the displayed number of grenades in Shepard’s possession, but this time, the change is purely cosmetic. In the first game, you could collect grenades as a regular type of ammo, and any class of Commander Shepard could use them. For Mass Effect 2, however, the ability to use grenades was redesigned as one of the «powers» that could be unlocked for a specific class of hero, and then you’d have yourself a technically unlimited supply of flashbangs, restricted only by the time period of the cooldown upon power usage. Although one should think that this, too, is a weird take on reality, it was actually retained in Mass Effect 3, where only soldier-class players can use grenades (other than enemies, of course — and grenades are a huge annoyance in this game, as they are not simple flashbangs that blind and disorient you, but genuine killing machines, capable of one-shot ripping your hide apart on higher difficulty levels).

Unlocking and upgrading of «powers» itself, too, has been somewhat redesigned. Shepard is now allowed to level up more frequently than in the second game, and the number of possible upgrades to each power is almost twice as high as in Mass Effect 2; moreover, for the first time in the series you actually have the choice between different types of upgrades for your powers — at a certain point, the tree begins to branch out and you can decide to yourself whether, for instance, you want to concentrate more on the defensive or offensive aspect of a certain biotic or tech ability, etc. Naturally, this provides the player with more opportunities to lay down complex or unique strategies of combat, though I personally never spent too much time wrecking my brain over the right choice to make (I think paying too much attention to the defensive aspects is boring anyway; Commander Shepard should always go on the offensive, unless we’re talking a pack of Banshees, of course). The resulting system is a classic compromise case between the «extremes» of Mass Effect (where the character build-up strategy still retained quite a few traces of the classic RPG spirit) and Mass Effect 2 (where the build-up was reduced to an absolute minimum so as not to interfere with all the shooting), and I think it works reasonably well.

The basic design of the HUD which, as before, you can still bring up any time to pause combat, remains the same, and all the keyboard shortcuts have been retained, meaning that I almost never even have to bother with the HUD at all during combat sequences — all I have to do is map out my squadmates’ most important powers to number keys, and then I can have fun with my enemies by comboing them into oblivion, what with the capacity of setting up cool biotic or tech explosions triggered by the joint actions of two squad members. Throw in those nifty rolling moves that Shepard can now make to dodge enemy fire or increase his speed; the enemies’ new-found penchant for deadly grenades, meaning that it is no longer safe to continuously stay in the same cover spot; the overall increased potential of enemy AI, as teams now have genuine encircling strategies and stuff — and yes, Mass Effect 3 does everything that Mass Effect 2 did in the shoot-em-up department and more. No wonder its multiplayer feature turned out to be quite popular and endured for quite a long time (although in the end, as we all know, multiplayer modes come and go, while the single-player mode remains forever — an inescapable truth that was only too well confirmed by the removal of multiplayer mode in the Legendary Edition).

A lot of work was done to enhance the cinematic, visually-awesome aspects of combat; in addition to the aforementioned explosions, for instance, the Vanguard class gets the brand new «Nova» attack where you can literally trigger a brief biotic earthquake to devastate your enemies (a well-publicized way of winning almost every fight is a combination of Charge and Nova which literally turns Shepard into an unstoppable superforce of nature); and then there’s the new Heavy Melee attack where you use your omni-tool in close combat with flashy time-dilating effects in badass close-ups. Sometimes the effects verge on looking ridiculous, but thankfully, they never cross over into completely outrageous territory à la League Of Legends or Final Fantasy or something; in most situations, Mass Effect 3 preserves the flair of gritty realism, hard as it is to maintain it when your non-human opponents tend to morph further and further into fantastic creatures out of some Harry Potter-like  universe. (The weirdest exception, as I already wrote, is the main quest in the Citadel DLC, where your biggest challenge is actually not to be overpowered by exceptionally strong enemies, but to avoid being distracted by the incessant jokes and taunts sputtered about by your sqaudmates.)

Outside of combat, the game’s mechanics have undergone even fewer changes. Regarding Shepard’s dialog interactions with the people around him, the biggest and most important of these is the removal of the middle («neutral») option on the click wheel — in the first two games, you nearly always had the option of a Paragon (top right), Renegade (bottom right) or Neutral (middle right) response, but the latter is no longer a valid choice. This was a reasonable decision, probably based on the observation that players rarely, if ever, chose the Neutral option in the first place — because it neither gave you any boost in reputation nor resulted in any alternate / additional interesting dialog; it was, more or less, simply there so as to attenuate more sharply the two opposite ends of the morality pole. I do have to say, though, that the click wheel looks kinda lonely with that big gaping hole in the right half. Perhaps a better — though admittedly more challenging — alternative would have been to come up with some potential «rewards» for choosing the Neutral answer, for instance, the ability to gain more information on the subject from an occasional character who would otherwise be too sensitive to either the goody-two-shoes or dirty-bastard approaches. But I guess they had to cut down on something for a game as massive as this one — and don’t voice actors get their salaries on a pay-per-line basis?

Speaking of Paragon and Renegade, the morality system of the game has also been slightly revised with an extra parameter; now, in addition to the usual old mechanism of scoring additional Paragon or Renegade points upon performing certain actions, there is a new general Reputation bar filling up upon performing certain other actions and directly responsible for the availability of additional options in your future interactions with important characters. I am not entirely sure that this extra complexity was necessary; the difference between Reputation and Morality confuses some players, and ultimately, I guess, the whole thing was added so as not to lock you out too often out of the luxury of additional choices — in the first two games, if you wobbled between Paragon and Renegade decisions too often, you could have a poorly-filled bar for each by the time you reached the appropriate checkpoint and thus, for instance, would be unable to stimulate poor Saren into committing suicide. «Reputation» sort of solves that problem (roughly speaking, to force Saren to kill himself you either had to complete 20 Paragon activities or 20 Renegade activities, but now you could gain enough Reputation by completing 10 Paragon and 10 Renegade activities). But some might object, stating that you do have to work quite specifically on either your Paragon or Renegade skills/image in order to unlock Paragon / Renegade options, and that the whole Reputation thing is just an easy cop-out for players who don’t like to strategize their actions. Anyway, it’s hardly a big deal.

Navigation between the different star systems in the Milky Way largely remains the same as it used to — and a big thanks to BioWare for keeping their planetary system fully consistent across all three parts of the trilogy — but in light of the Reaper invasion, there is now an additional catch where you have to probe various star systems for hidden goodies (such as fuel, which you now need for navigation, or war assets, which you need to raise your chances of success) at the risk of being spotted by Reapers, whereupon you should quickly evacuate the premises; this turns into an additional mini-game of cat-and-mouse which, like most of Mass Effect’s mini-games, is fun for the first two or three times you try it and then becomes annoying for the rest of the experience. As for the actual planets, fortunately, you no longer have to scan them for resources — the stupid turn-the-ball-around-and-fire mechanics that took away so much precious time in Mass Effect 2 — but unfortunately, you do have to scan them for occasional goodies, which is even worse, because the goodies are hidden away in some unnamed and unmarked sector of the scanned planet and you cannot get to them other than by pure chance. Thus, you do not have to grind your way through this nearly as much as you did in the previous game, but there will still be grinding. This is something that could have been handled more intelligently — for instance, by actually solving some planet-related puzzle — but, again, the studio could not afford a more intelligent solution in this case.

Probably the most welcome application of the less-is-more principle, though, came in the form of the complete removal of the «decrypting» mini-games you had to go through to pick up resources in the first two games. Somebody at BioWare finally got it that these things were okay the first few times around, but ultimately you got sick as heck from guiding your cursor through the same moving circles of red bricks or from connecting the same pairs of circuits over and over and over. In Mass Effect 3, when you want to pick up loot, you just pick it up, and when you want to open a door with your omni-tool, you just open it. Two biggest human inventions since fire!! Thank you, BioWare, for saving our brains the time and energy so much better spent on more important tasks, like solving the three-body problem or bringing peace to the Middle East.

In general, the one conclusion I feel inclined to make about Mass Effect 3’s general interface and mechanics is that the third game is not at all about true creative thinking and daring innovation. More accurately, it is about looking back on the creative and daring experience of the first two parts and applying rational critical analysis of what was good and what was bad about them — with the ultimate goal of pleasing as many different groups of fans as possible. This is a reasonable enough approach, but the result is that the game offers few genuine surprises as far as the actual gaming process is concerned — which is not so much of a criticism as merely a statement of fact. It might, however, be one of several subtle reasons for Mass Effect 3 not getting as much credit as its predecessors — after all, game critics do like their games to offer significant jolts in the, you know, gaming aspect, rather than merely wooing them with cinematic cutscenes and intricate plots. Personally, I can forgive the stupid planet scanning system for an emotional experience like being a witness to Thane’s passing — but a lot of other people probably cannot, and might even reasonably point out that if you want those kinds of emotional experiences, read some Dickens or Dostoyevsky instead (and save yourself the trouble of probing planetary surface as an added bonus). On the other hand, who has ever seen an RPG without at least some annoyingly tedious challenges? Getting through them is the proverbial Test of Patience in the initiation rite of any wannabe gaming warrior.

One last remark about the general visual style of the interface: it marks a decisive return to the blue-dominant palette of the first game (as opposed to the somewhat more earthy-than-clinical browns-and-greens of Mass Effect 2), but, for some reason, also with an emphasis on size — everything is quite a bit bigger here, with big fat icons and click boxes and large, oversized fonts. Somehow my mind keeps jumping back to the older days of BioWare — the busy isometric clutter of Baldur’s Gate, for instance, with its tiny icons and loads and loads of text in minuscule letters — and reminding me just how much has changed in the meantime: truly and verily, each new Mass Effect game was poised more and more for «mass effect», i.e. oriented at being user-friendly for as many users as possible, including those who have, like, problems finding all those little things and boxes on their screen. I do believe they went a little overboard here, as sometimes the way the game almost literally takes your hand and walks you through its logistic challenges could almost feel offensive to the veterans; yet on the other hand, I am glad that each part of the trilogy gets its own visual and mechanical aesthetics — although, to be fair, only the original Mass Effect feels like it is fully committed to the technophile-futuristic angle. But hey, that’s fine. For a real Commander Shepard, the once exotic and unfamiliar Galaxy would start to feel more and more like his ordinary home as time went by, and so does it happen for us lowly players just as well.

Verdict: "If you’re hearing this... then there is still hope".

Finally, it’s time to bring this long-winded discussion to an end — but it’s pretty hard, if not downright impossible, to separate the concluding thoughts on Mass Effect 3 from the concluding thoughts on the trilogy in general. To stop myself from too much rambling, I’ll try to stratify and formulate them as answers to three separate questions: (a) why does Mass Effect 3 get objectively less critical respect than Mass Effect 2?; (b) is there an actual basis for calling Mass Effect the greatest video game franchise of all time, or is it merely a marketing ploy?; (c) is there an actual future for Mass Effect, or should it be relegated to museum status?

[A] The most obvious answer would be — why, because of the ending, of course. No matter how much effort somebody like me could waste on justifying the ending and even admiring the stubbornness of BioWare designers in defending it, it is clear that general gamer consensus will never accept this monumental profanation of their efforts, and that the battle cry of OUR CHOICES DID NOT MATTER!! will continue to ring over the battlefield even after the last veteran who had the (mis)fortune to play Mass Effect 3 over those fateful few early March weeks of 2012 has his ashes scattered in the wind, no longer capable of grumbling to his grandsons about how badly this game sucked even after the Extended Cut came out.

But the main mistake of the designers, in my mind, was not so much the ending as such (which, I reiterate, constitutes more of a flawed execution of a daring idea than a massive fuck-up in and out of itself) as the fact that they failed to properly prepare their customers for this kind of ending. Too much, way too much of Mass Effect 3 gets people into a triumphant gung-ho kind of mood — time and time again, Shepard and his brute force inflict so much pain on the Reapers and their involuntary Cerberus allies that the player becomes 100% convinced that simple, steady, assured victory is just around the corner and that the credits will gloriously play over family pictures of the Commander with Liara and their blue kids and a picket fence (and you forgot the dog, as Broken Sword’s Charles Cecil would say). Even the original Take Earth Back cinematic trailer left not a shred of doubt about how it would all end — Shepard pirouettes down on a Brute, smashes his ugly mug in with his mighty omni-tool, and the world at large finally takes five.

This is all highly symbolic of the single largest problem that has existed with artistic creativity since the dawn of time but has arguably never been blown so much out of proportion as it is today — the never-ending battle of compromises between popular formula and individual innovation. Of the three games in the series, the original Mass Effect was still more about the latter than the former, but by the time Mass Effect 3 came along, the franchise’s immense popularity necessitated that it adopt the blockbuster paradigm, whether the designers liked it or not. And more than any other part of the game, Mass Effect 3 wobbles between the, let’s say, «organic BioWare spirit» and «synthetic Electronic Arts algorithm». It wants to be this awesome, jaw-dropping epic kick-ass spectacle one minute and a philosophical treatise on the depths of human vanity the next one, to swamp you with completely straightforward cinematic clichés over the course of one mission and to try and invert them in bizarre ways in the very next one. It’s confused and conflicted, and I love and hate it for it — but still, love more often than hate, because it’s far better to experience artistic confusion than steady, self-assured anti-artistic formula.

In the end, though, I think that the principal reason why Mass Effect 3 always gets overridden by Mass Effect 2 on those best-of lists is because it does not succeed in once more re-inventing the Mass Effect gameplay formula. The simplest, and ultimately truest, answer is that people liked the original Mass Effect, but it was quite clunky for them to play. Then Mass Effect 2 came along, with its improved HUD and its thermal clips and its re-branded AI and its generally more linear approach, and the world (all except for grumpy old-school isometric RPG veterans) rejoiced because the new and improved formula worked so damn well. Then Mass Effect 3 came along and all it could do was fix and tighten things up without introducing any truly major changes — basically, people just got a red-on-blue installment instead of a green-on-brown one, with a few tiny bones thrown to veteran fans in the form of more weapon choices and stuff. And without that particular incentive — living out your sci-fi experience in a manner quite radically different from the previous one — the game found itself more vulnerable on all the other accounts as well.

Even so, there are things that Mass Effect 3 does better than any other part of the trilogy, and I don’t just mean the ability to explode all your enemies in a shattering blast of blue energy rocking the very foundations of the earth your biotic terror of a Vanguard stamps upon. For one thing, no other Mass Effect game brings you so many tears — as you witness digital characters that have become your closest friends sacrifice their lives for you — or so many laughs, courtesy of its Citadel DLC but also many other small things in the base game itself. No other Mass Effect game makes you feel so empowered or morally conflicted when resolving the crucial conflicts of the first two Acts. And no other Mass Effect game makes you ponder your own place in the universe as frequently as this one, provided you can occasionally detach yourself from all the adrenaline and immerse yourself more in the quiet, solitary moments of the game, most of which, I think, are actually written more carefully and thoughtfully than anything of the sort in the first two parts. For those reasons and more, I am willing to allocate exactly 33,333% of the love reserved for Mass Effect to its third instalment, without trying to set up a complicated scale to measure the correlation between its own good / bad points and those of its predecessors.

[B] Now for some famous last words. I realize I am nowhere near close to the biggest expert on video games (particularly if we mean any types of video games rather than just plot-driven ones), and even if I were, comparing Mass Effect with the likes of Super Mario Bros. would be a prime exercise in futility. But I do know a few things both about lengthy, sprawling gaming franchises, stretching all the way from King’s Quest to Assassin’s Creed and beyond — and about games whose creators took their efforts seriously, trying to elevate the medium toward heights previously occupied by literature and cinema, from the mysteries of Gabriel Knight to the satire of Grand Theft Auto — and I can honestly say that never in my sweet short life have I encountered a video game project with a better balance between AMBITION and REALIZATION than the Mass Effect trilogy. Not «perfect» — no video game that harbors even an ounce of artistic ambition will ever be perfect, for reasons that are always beyond the designers’ control — but «best possible under the circumstances».

In fact, by all logical means, an enterprise as huge as this one should have collapsed under its own sophisticated framework. After all, even if you design something genuinely monumental like the Elder Scrolls universe, there are very few things that hamper you as creator — as long as you set down the basic lore and swear a solemn oath to respect it, you’re all set, and, indeed, everything within the world of The Elder Scrolls operates as a set of largely independent vignettes, whose quality and impact only depend on the talents of those particular writers and designers who are in charge at this particular moment. But Mass Effect, through its three huge installments, tells a single — a singular — story, one that ultimately decides the fate of the entire Universe as we (still don’t) know it and has to dig a whole series of sometimes intersecting, sometimes mutually exclusive corridors to get you all the way to that decision. Not only that, but it also has to do that within the setting of a semi-realistic, semi-fantastic future that has the mind of a serious science-fiction novel and the heart of an epic big-hero-battles-dragon mythological narrative. You, the player, must believe that you find yourself at the heart of humanity’s distant (or perhaps even not-so-distant) actual future and at the same time be capable of acting like a Hercules or a Siegfried rather than, God help us, a Jens Stoltenberg, or some random Eurocommissioner. And that’s not to mention that you also must have fun all the way through. And shoot. And strategize. And enjoy the visuals and the music.

There are games that do all this on smaller scales, sure — The Witcher trilogy, for instance, which, as I already said, often finds itself compared to Mass Effect because (a) it is also a trilogy, (b) it is largely concurrent with Mass Effect chronologically, (c) some would say it does for the world of video game fantasy the same things that Mass Effect did for the world of video game sci-fi. But The Witcher is far more streamlined and limited: you do not get to create your own character, you do not get to be the middleman — more like a helpless observer — in actions that truly shift the balance of powers around you, and ultimately it’s all about the little man (albeit quite a charismatic and talented little man) surviving and getting on in a mad, mad, mad world around him. This, along with a healthy dose of cynicism, actually helps The Witcher largely avoid all the ridiculous pitfalls of Mass Effect (nothing in The Witcher even begins approaching the cringe factor of WE FIGHT OR WE DIE!!), but the bigger the gamble, the higher the risks — and the potential profits. In its crucial moments, Mass Effect wins over my heart, and this means the gamble was a success after all.

As a game, first and foremost, Mass Effect will never be on the level of a top-notch shooter like Half-Life, and it does not even try to reach the level of classic RPG sophistication for which early BioWare was so famous. To excel at Mass Effect, you neither need the quickest of reflexes nor the sharpest of brains: its combat mechanics are easy to master and its puzzles are largely solvable by a 5-year old. Occasionally, when replaying certain missions, I find myself almost offended at how little actual challenge the game offers — surely a couple actual adventure game-style puzzles, or a couple bosses who fight on the level of Dark Souls enemies wouldn’t hurt to raise the stakes a bit? But then I remind myself that everything ultimately comes in the form of trade-offs: any extra efforts BioWare would have spent on making Mass Effect more of an actual game than an «immersive multimedia experience» would most likely lead to their cutting down on the story, the branching, the atmosphere, the characters, everything that makes this RPG universe so much more alive and vibrant than pretty much any other RPG universe that came before it.

Yes, many have criticized Mass Effect for dumbing down the CRPG aesthetics in the interests of the Average Joe, and they all have good reason and perfect justification to do that (heck, I have even read angry rants about how Baldur’s Gate 2 was already a disgusting commercial sellout after the designer perfection of the original Baldur’s Gate — what’s to be said of products from the 21st century, as we move into the world of high-end production and dazzling cinematics?). But the spirit of that criticism is the same one that lives in those who criticize people for preferring Lord Of The Rings to Beowulf, or the Beatles to Thelonious Monk — «challenge» and «sophistication» are admirable and respectable parameters, but far from the only ones that matter. Mass Effect intentionally lowers its difficulty — and in doing so, opens the «nerdy» universe of CRPGs for the mass consumer, but it does so with taste and respect, making the trilogy into a perfect compromise for everybody except for the most stubborn-headed snobs out there.

In the end, if you have never played Mass Effect and are simply wondering what all the hype is about — and have followed my ramblings long enough to get to this point — let me confirm, cross-me-heart-and-hope-to-die, that not only is the hype all too well deserved, but you can actually play Mass Effect «beyond the hype». In other words, the game has plenty of unexpected twists for the player to admire without necessarily subscribing to herd mentality. Contrary to rumors, you are not forced to play your Shepard exclusively as a Paragon; you do not have to necessarily romance quirky aliens like Liara, Garrus, or Tali for the honorable sakes of interracial diversity; you do not have to be a master combatant; the only thing you do need is play all three games in their sequential order rather than going straight ahead for Mass Effect 2 like all those damn best-of lists are telling you to. Sometimes, in fact, all I want to do is just stand next to an advertising pillar on the Citadel and listen to the Elcor actor reciting lines from Hamlet and think «yeah, this one might just be worth a happy ending after all». There are plenty of hidden layers in this game that I haven’t even touched upon, despite being unable to stop myself from writing.

[C] As for the future... well, I do not know exactly how much future there is for Mass Effect, but it was nice to see, with the publishing of the Legendary Edition remasters, that it still has plenty of the present — young gamers continue to embrace the title whole-heartedly like it’s 2007 all over again; a few graphics-related quibbles aside, the trilogy has not really aged a day in ten years, which is still a pretty solid test for this kind of medium. (The only Big Artistic Compromise that the designers had to make so as to survive in the New Progressive Era was to remove the infamous close-up shots of Miranda’s buttcheeks during her conversations with the Commander — a fairly small price to pay, I’d say, for the right to retain the crown, made even smaller by the fact that loyal traditionalists, so I have heard, have already come up with an efficient mod to restore those alluring curves right back where they belonged in Mass Effect 2. «Perfect in every way», right?). The availability of all three games joined together in a single, restored and remastered, digital package means that nobody will any longer be tempted to play the games in the wrong order; that everybody will have equal access to all the DLCs, recognizing them as legitimate parts of the gaming experience; that the Extended Cut to Mass Effect 3’s ending will preemptively soften the blow for those still unhappy with the ending; and that the removal of Mass Effect 3’s Multiplayer mode will influence people to remember the game more for its epic story than its beauty as a 3rd person shooter. So it’s all good, except for the nasty EA app that goes along with the package and watches your every move (but I guess most modern gamers have already made peace with Big Brother anyway).

As for the more substantial things... well, I still have to force myself to play Mass Effect Andromeda one of these days, a game that, based on all the trailers, clips, and gameplay footage I have seen so far, feels more like a not-too-well-executed piece of second-rate fan fiction set in the Mass Effect universe. The best thing I can say about the whole thing, released back in 2017 and largely forgotten since then, is that it at least respected the ambiguous lack of a «canon ending» to Shepard’s story enough to make its writers think of a twist that allowed to set the story in an «alternate» Mass Effect universe, so that we would be able to play out a different tale with all of our favorite races without having to know whether our Commander pressed the red, blue, or green button in the end. Other than that, it was just a different game — no better or worse than the majority of average titles coming out every year — but it could not add anything to the Tale of Commander Shepard, and it did not. It was meant as either a loving gift to those who could not get enough asari sex, or as a cash grab for those who were too alarmed at the drop-off rate on Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer servers, or both. It served its purpose and it went away.

More alarming are the news of an alleged «Mass Effect 5» in the works that have circulated since 2020 and still have not died down as of 2024, even though precious little has been leaked ever since the release of the official teaser trailer. While a very small part of me aligns with the segment of the fanbase that is dying for a proper sequel, the reasonable part of me reminds that a proper sequel to Mass Effect would not only be impossible — the lack of a «canon» ending prevents such a possibility in the technical sense, unless a lot of the usual retconning is involved — but it would also be very, very undesirable. Much like with Star Wars, the story Has Been Told; it has been graced with a purpose, an inner logic, a resolution, a start, a middle, and an end. Trying to imagine another round of dark future for Commander Shepard would be even more of a retarded idea than imagining the same for Luke Skywalker. Who would we be fighting this time? The Arch-Reapers? The Super Enhanced Collectors? The great-grandson of the Illusive Man who has managed to clone Kai Leng so as to take his revenge on the Alliance? The Leviathans coming to take back Earth? (hey, actually that might work for a minute or two).

Of course, there is no need to get panicky. It is perfectly possible that BioWare, or even Electronic Arts, will finally commit some kind of commercial suicide before the new game is finished; or, more likely, will just let it marinate in development hell for a couple more years before pulling the plug. Even if it does get finished, though, the release of a crappy, useless sequel will only go so far as to tarnish the reputation of the original — for a couple of years at most, before everybody forgets about it as they did with Andromeda. And in the best case scenario (which I would assess at about, say, 10% probability), if the game gets completed and turns out to be not a direct sequel, but something less predictable, more imaginative and purposeful, well, it’ll simply be a separate story that will have to be evaluated on its own terms.

In all honesty, what I would really crave is not a sequel, or a prequel, but rather something like a revised and expanded version of the original trilogy — which is why the Legendary Edition, even if it never promised anything of the kind, has been a bit of a disappointment in the end. As far as we know, a lot of dialog for the games ended up on the cutting floor; a lot of ideas that could have made parts of the story make more sense were left out due to time and budget constraints; and most of the writers, artists, and voice actors working on the game are still alive and could reconvene aboard the Normandy on pretty short notice. From an artistic point, something like an Expanded Ultra-Legendary Edition, brushed up along those lines, would have been wonderful (the equivalent of a proper «director’s cut» for a classic movie); unfortunately, this is never going to happen because modern video game studios, particularly big ones, simply do not work that way.

Even the way they remain, though — imperfect in so many ways, ridden with plotholes, stuffed with tedious bits of grinding, occasionally clunky and glitchy — all three games, taken together, remain a monumental achievement that is highly unlikely to meet its match anytime soon, simply because that time window has closed (in fact, it is quite probable that, had Karpyshyn and Co. pitched their proposal just a couple years later, it would have already been too late) and it would likely require a complete restructuring of the current big game industry to produce something that would combine the same kind of quality with the same insane amount of ambition. The last significant gaming franchise to try out something of the sort was probably the Horizon series, launched back in 2017 with Horizon Zero Dawn, but for all the gorgeous looks and pieces of actual soul (mostly courtesy of the super-talented Ashly Burch voicing the main character) in that series, it honestly does not even begin to approach the world-building breadth or the emotional depth of Mass Effect, focusing much more on visual flash, progressive values, and the same «algorithmic» approach that lies like a blight on 99% of today’s popular artistry (as in, «people like dinosaurs» + «people like robots» + «people like blowing up stuff» > «make a game about hunting and blowing up giant robotic dinosaur machines» > PROFIT). It’s simply that games are no longer made today in the same spirit; like I already said, it’s almost a miracle that the Mass Effect trilogy could even be completed with only some very mild betrayal of the principles it originally stood for back in 2007.

Maybe some day in the future, after the actual Reapers have arrived and properly cleared up all the mess we’re so busy currently making for ourselves, what remains of humanity will be able to look back and take a proper lesson from the trilogy. In a perfect world, where depth and meaning come before flash and spectacle, where in-game dialog does not need to be dumbed down or whittled away for the mass consumer, where writers and artists have the final word as opposed to marketing consultants and are encouraged to follow their own thoughts and visions rather than constantly look back on the proverbial «what the people want», I can definitely see an opening for an ambitious action-role-playing franchise that could dethrone Mass Effect and make it look, in retrospect, like merely a stepping stone to perfection. Unfortunately, I just as definitely cannot see myself living all the way up to that day — so, for my own satisfaction, Mass Effect will have to do. It’s been a damn good ride, and I don’t expect anybody offering a more fulfilling one any time soon.