LogFAQs > #956273610

Hoo boy, have I soured on this game!

IMO the central conceit just doesn't work. The stakes have to be super high and everything needs to be serious for the story they're trying to tell here, but that's not why I came to Mass Effect. I wanted to just zoom around in space with my alien friends, there's little room for that here without it coming across as out of place.

The game centres Shepard way too much, to go along with its heightened military propaganda and focus on humans/Earth. I don't really care about Earth, game! The squad is the worst in the series. The Bioware 'romance' feels as clunky and sexless as ever. The ME2 cast is largely tossed aside and wasted, sure some of them get big death moments but that's it. The characters in general are more one dimensional this time, you can pretty much boil everyone down to a basic Good or Bad. Bioware is playing favourites here more than ever before. I get that many fans loves Garrus and Tali but they have absolutely no plot reason for being on the crew lol, especially over some of the ones they chose not to include. Garrus has zero connection to the plot and Tali joins far too late to be of any real impact. Ashley/Kaidan are mediocre, given they have to fill the exact same slot in the plot regardless of their differing personalities. A lot of the minor fanservice in general feels pretty empty like they're ticking boxes, like punching that reporter for being annoying (it will never not be weird to me how this is a beloved running gag!).

The antagonists are also bad this time round. Cerberus are way worse than before, they're just generic human enemies to give us people to shoot, but they also simultaneously try to do the Saren thing again with TIM. They go the easy route with Udina, and it is absolutely ridiculous that the reapers don't have a single line of dialogue in this game after the first two. And then there's Kai Leng, of course. Locking major story beats behind DLC is also terrible (From Ashes, Leviathan).

The galaxy just feels more dry and lifeless this time. Part of this is intentional given the war, sure, but the worlds are no more than a series of shooting galleries with chest-high walls. The Citadel is like the only exception to this. Tuchanka is the best section by far (probably not if you have Wrex and Mordin dead already lol) but I don't know why people love Rannoch, it's incredibly messy. The choices from the past games usually just result in a meaningless set of numbers increasing for 'galactic readiness' or whatever. One potentially fun thing that I always remember: there's a lategame sidequest to help defend the Elcor homeworld, I was looking forward to finally seeing the Elcor and doing something off the beaten path, but the entirety of the sidequest is just a button click as you orbit the planet and then some numbers go up. That's the kind of lifelessness I mean with this entry.

I still think the ending is awful, no reason to get into all that but basically it's just a complete betrayal of the themes of the previous games. Making it all an organics v synthetics thing is... boring at best.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, there is good stuff here but the more distanced I am from this series, the worse it looks to me. They rushed this one out way too fast. 3.5/10

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Slowly becoming a Final Fantasy aficionado.