Review - Mass Effect 3

The Good
+ It's Mass Effect
+ Best gameplay of the series
+ A startling and powerful conclusion to the series

The Bad
- Lots of controversy around the ending
- Lack of Jack Wall composing the score

Spoiler Danger
Very Little


OK, so let's get this out of the way first. Yes, Mass Effect 3 has been out for about a year. No, I have not written about it since complaining about the ending (here). Much has happened in the ME3 universe since I last spoke about it. We got new, extended endings with a completely new possible ending path, we got the Leviathan DLC which further expanded on the ending, and the Omega DLC came out, which I have yet to play.

So, I've had a lot of time to think over the game, and play it again, beginning to end, and a lot about my tune has changed. Namely: this is the best video game I've played. Ever. Period.

I've loooooong been a fan of Bioware games, a love affair that started when I bought Jade Empire. I've purchased every single game of theirs since, and despite some stumbles (Dragon Age 2 comes to mind), I've never failed to enjoy their games. For me, Mass Effect 3 was their crowning achievement, and it managed to hit all the right notes.

Sure, I had my qualms with the ending at first, but everything else about the game was really extraordinary. The gameplay was incredibly tight - it seemed to be an amalgamation of everything BioWare had learned about Mass Effect combat all rolled into one very entertaining package. The cover system was nearly perfect, the gunplay was awesome, the evolution of the powers from the second game was great. And so on. Perhaps my favorite change was the fairly dramatic lowering of the power cool downs which allowed especially power-focused classes to really start spamming them. One of my (many, many) Shepard characters was an Adept, the class that is supposed to focus primarily on biotic powers. In the previous iterations of the game, I really felt that I was a gunslinger of sorts, relying on my pistol with some biotic backup. Mass Effect 3 finally had me using my biotics more than my gun, and the sharp change in the gameplay and strategies offered by that character was truly refreshing.

The music was... good. I hesitate to call it great, because it wasn't exactly great. Much of it was recycled from Jack Wall's score for Mass Effect 2. I can't be sure if this was because of time constraints or if they just found his music so perfect a fit for the environment, but either way, there was a lot of ME2 music in ME3. The new stuff, all composed by a very talented team of folks who handled much of the DLC for ME2, ranges from pretty good to awe inspiring. Clint Mansell was brought on board for some of the score, something I talked about in an earlier post. Despite my general excitement around that, he really only contributed some piano work to a few of the songs. Now don't get me wrong, the score was definitely good by most standards - they did an excellent job of capturing the sad desolation of Earth for example, but I can't help but play the "what if?" game. Given the absolutely perfect soundtrack for ME2, I can't help it. Jack Wall perfectly captures the emotion, desperation, and ultimate victory of the suicide mission in ME2 (if you don't get chills watching the suicide mission movies, I have no words for you), and I often find myself wondering how he would have musically captured the devastation of earth.

All that being said, the last moments on earth in the prologue for ME3 are just stunning - one of the greatest moments in the series - and the score for that part is absolutely spot on. Thank you, Clint Mansell.

Now let's circle back around to the story. Ah, the story. For 3 games, this has been the driving motivation behind playing these games. The conversations, the character arcs, the impacts of your decisions - all of these things contribute to the ultimate backlash against the ending. I'm quite positive that there have been few games of this or any other generation that have inspired the amount of passion and imagination it fans. The way BioWare crafted the story and the characters and the decisions really made people feel like they were in control of the future of the galaxy, that they were Commander Shepard, and that they knew Garrus and Liara and the rest of the cast. I spent many, many hours pouring over the forums for this game and reading about the backlash against BioWare for this game. Once you rule out the drivel of "I hate this now" and "you ruined everything" and "I want my money back" you really start to see a pattern emerge. People were hurt because what the ending was and how it was portrayed betrayed their passion for the game and the world they had created for themselves.

Let's get one thing straight here - the Mass Effect story is a space opera unlike anything I've seen in years. Over the course of three games, we have covered so much territory, advanced the species of the universe in countless ways, and gotten to know some very endearing friends along the way. Mass Effect 3 takes on the daunting task of closing every single character arc the first two games opened (and even some new ones that are introduced in ME3 itself). The core missions in the game are not just about advancing the galactic story, they are also about advancing the deeply personal character stories that we've come to love over the series. Some of these stories are humorous, some are painful, all are brilliantly executed. I have so many fond memories of these missions - walking Palaven's moon, staring out across not only the Reapers on the moon, but the destruction of Palaven itself. The amazing conclusion to the Krogan storyline. The Geth, the Quarians, the Council.... all of it was memorable, and all of it was powerful.

And my favorite moment in the game: shooting with Garrus on the Citadel. The moment, the conversation, the simple but emotionally-weighty choice - this is gaming perfection.

Then there was the ending. Which I hated at first. Now I love it.

Part of this was the fact that I truly believe the Leviathan DLC should have been included in the original release of the game. This part of the game did so much to alleviate the almost nonsensical information dump at the end of the boxed game that it seems weird that it didn't make it into the shipped product. Having beaten the game once, and thus having experience with what was coming, playing Leviathan on my second play through was a lightbulb in my brain. I could feel the various pieces falling into place, and as I progressed through the content, a new picture of the ending began to emerge, one that was staggering in its implications, and the revelations, quite simply, turned my opinion of what I thought the ending was upside down. As everything fell into place, I started to understand the scope of what the Reaper threat was, how large, and how important. By the time that I finished the mission, I was was positively elated that I got to experience something so novel and so epic.

The extended cut DLC provided some still shots of the immediate consequences of your saga-long decisions, but for me the understanding of the origin of the Reapers and their ultimate purpose was so overwhelming that the little extra cut scenes didn't matter at all.

It dawned on me a month or so later that there was another issue gnawing at the community, and that one I'd like to take a moment to address. What did my choices matter? What happens to all those people later? BioWare doesn't tell me.

And I'm going to tell you that that's a great thing!

Let's face it - there were hundreds of decisions, big and small, that each player made throughout the series of games. There is no conceivable way that BioWare can accurately address all of them in an ending. So, what did they do?

All along, one of Mass Effect's greatest draws was its ability to engage players on a very "imagination" level. We all imagined that we were Commander Shepard, we all imagined that we were changing the fate of the entire galaxy, and we all had the perfect ending imagined in our heads. So, instead of shoving some canned ending down our throats, they left the ending wide open, allowing us to interject our own versions. The choices presented at the end of the game are all logical outcomes to the present storyline, and we can factor our final choice into the ending we had envisioned. We all had them, and now we are free to continue to see them.

And that is powerful storytelling.

Score: 10/10

PS - I'm a bit shocked and appalled at myself for my earlier criticisms. I am usually a huge fan of open-ended closures like that. I think at the time I really wanted BioWare to tell me how each character continued after the end of the game, but I came to realize that I already knew what happened to all of them.