It's gotten easier to examine the final installment of the Mass Effect trilogy as the years have gone by. The outrage over its extraordinarily unsatisfying ending has subsided over the years, and the emotional impact of such a gut-punch has quieted. By no means is the ending "good" or "well written," which is a shame for a series that actually had some pretty great writing, but five years later, it's much easier to look at the game as a whole, without that vested interest in "what comes next." Of course, for many fans, even the reactionary "extended cut" or the fan-service "Citadel" DLC couldn't make up for the hurt. Still, it's less raw at this point.
Taken as a whole, Mass Effect 3 might be the most complete package as an individual game. It's emotionally-driven, with the central protagonist actually appearing human for a change. The campaign is slathered in the fictional politics of this fantasy/sci-fi world. Alliance building makes for a surprisingly strong campaign. Some would argue that it all feels silly given the scale of the Reaper War, but without the diplomacy, you'd be left with something that basically functions as just Gears of War in space. It would not be unreasonable to argue that overall, it has the most interesting single-player campaign in the trilogy.
Granted, one cannot simply list the story of the individual game out of its context in the series. Being the final act, it does not stand on its own. The bulk of it relies on what came before, as it should. This makes some of those narrative missteps feel even bigger as a result. Within the context of Mass Effect 3 alone, you get situations like on Utukku. The mission in which you stumble upon a giant rachni queen is actually a pretty solid one. By no means is it a bad mission. The basic plot itself isn't inherently bad. A rachni queen has been captured by Reaper forces and is being forced to pump out an army of offspring that they will use as shock troopers. Great! Good story! One problem, though: it kind of betrays what happened in the first Mass Effect. More subtly, if you chose to save the rachni queen in the first game, it is unsatisfying to see that she is, once again, being used as a tool to breed an army of enemies you must mow down. More overtly, if you killed the rachni queen back on Noveria, the developers just plop a new rachni queen in her place. So what does it matter if you saved or killed her?
Even elements like Udina being made Councilor because Anderson was needed in the military as an admiral with the Reaper invasion betray that. Not every choice has to matter in a video game - indeed most choices in most games don't ultimately matter - but why give us such a meaningless one to make if you are just going to reset it two games later anyway?
That is the primary problem with Mass Effect 3. Because the missions have to be the same, regardless of what decisions you've made or whether you've played as a renegade or paragon, the game has to do a number of resets. These are the big narrative missteps within the final game. What's worse is that they even undermine decisions you make explicitly within this one game alone at the end. You can spend so much of your playthrough opening the door for a geth/quarian union, but then if you destroy the Reapers, you kill all the geth, so who cares? Mass Effect isn't one of those games that presents choice in the game as a means to speak toward the general idea of choice as illusions in life. Rather, it just feels like BioWare maybe didn't know exactly how to handle all of the branches they left open through these decisions, and opted to close it up in the easiest, but least rewarding ways for the players.
The ending is, without question, pretty terrible. That itself could be a separate essay, but suffice it to say that it actually makes little sense. It undermines everything the trilogy had been going for up to that point. It presents you with a few terrible choices, in which none are actually satisfactory. It feels like a lose-lose scenario. Even the extended cut doesn't actually fix the root of these problems. Not that artists should necessarily ever be obligated to explain their work, but I would be genuinely interested to hear lead writer Casey Hudson explain what he was thinking with his ending. It's such a hot mess that it's hard to know what he was actually even going for.
The narrative problems are some of the biggest problems with the game, but the rest of it is actually pretty great. The leveling system is still inferior to Mass Effect, but they found a happy medium between that and the overly simple Mass Effect 2 system. The cast is pretty great, even if it might take a little time to warm up to James Vega. The time for learning of new characters is over, so the fact that there's ultimately only one potential new character (and unfortunately, a DLC character that adds quite a bit to the game - another creative decision that was pretty awful). The soundtrack is as good as ever. Combat is smoother, which is good given the game occurs in the outbreak of a full scale galactic war. Powers are more fun to use, and even level designs are a bit more interesting. The stuff on Tuchanka, for example, is among the best levels in the series. There are cheesy moments that shouldn't exist, like the strange dream sequences, but they hardly break anything in the game. Otherwise, the emotional beats are actually stronger in Mass Effect 3 than either of its preceding installments.
As an individual package, it might very well be the best and most complete of the bunch. Unfortunately, it also just cannot be viewed through that isolationist lens. In the context of the trilogy - serving as a conclusion - it fails to deliver in the end. Inevitably, the checks that Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 wrote were not ones that Mass Effect 3 could entirely cash. It doesn't completely fail, but its ending is easily one of the most unsatisfactory endings in video games.
On a final note: one thing that is kind of interesting about the ending is colors of that final sequence when the Normandy crashes. Throughout the entire trilogy, the universe is mostly made up of blue and red hues. This echos the paragon/renegade morality system of the series, which also gets deployed from Mass Effect (where you're the hero of the Alliance, so everything is blue) to Mass Effect 2 (where you're working with the splinter group Cerberus and deemed an outsider, so everything is red). Mass Effect 3 generally works with both colors again. Once the Reapers are destroyed, however, the game momentarily abandons that color scheme. Joker and a few crew mates step off the Normandy onto a world filled with green. It's one of the few times another color gets to dominate the screen. There are some aspects to the ending that are worth noting in a positive manner. It's still, however, a lot of nonsense that makes little or no sense.
Does the ending completely ruin the franchise? Certainly, some fans argue it does. I am not one of them. You won't hear me say that the ending is good, but it didn't really change my opinion of the previous 100+ hours I had spent playing. They are still good games that have a lot to offer, design flaws and all. Still, one should steal themselves for that empty feeling at the conclusion, given there's little rewarding about it.
REDUCTIVE RATING: Solid Game.
Available On: XBox 360, PS3, PC, Wii U
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