Summary

The Mass Effect trilogy is a series of action RPG games developed by Bioware and published by EA from 2007-2012. They were originally released for consoles, but have been re-released in 2021 as Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The series follows Commander Shepard and their crew's fight against the Reapers, the Collectors, and much more.

In Legendary Edition, we've gotten a number of graphical improvements, some gameplay changes, as well as the inclusion of all the DLC that was released over the original games' lives. I'm a big fan of the series and am excited to dive back into it. I've made the decision to play it all on Insanity difficulty (Why did you allow me to do that, viewer?). So expect death and lots of it!

Review

I think Mass Effect 3 has by far the weakest story of the 3. I don't think that's a particularly revelatory observation. In fact, I don't even really wanna go into the ending, because at a point what else is there to even say? So instead, I want to focus on why I think the overall story of 3 is not as good as 2 or 1.

This gets back to what I said in the review of ME2. Far and away the strongest element of Mass Effect is the hanging out and futzing around with interesting facades of people. Any time you're shying away from that, you're choosing to not stand on your best foot. The actual structure of ME3 is, of course, the war. And that's all nice and everything. But what the war doesn't allow you is chances to sit and talk with your little space friends. You do that yes, but every encounter is presaged with the required "Man, this war is really shit Shepard. I hate it, but I guess we gotta hit the old dusty trail and get back out there, huh?" They're always leading you back to the plot and away from them. It's frustrating. It completely misses the point. I get it, I understand. That's what's happening. We gotta defeat the reapers. But it's a self-made trap. We've written ourselves into a situation where players aren't given the opportunity to do the thing that the series is best at. It's why Citadel is so beloved. It's the finale that people wanted. All their little space friends to come together and have fun.

Links

Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXbBIoFOxaQsrknDNY9tM3YHRDrVsETma