ME3: Hahaha. You know, I'd been encouraging my crew to hook up whenever the opportunity arose, but I totally didn't call Tali/Garrus. Occurs to me I never had them in the party together in this game, maybe I missed something.
In less significant news, game finished. For a...given value of "finished."
Game needed a "spaceghostkid is an idiot just erase him" button. Game did not provide one so I improvised. With my gun.
With regret: the writers anticipated my attempt at lateral thinking, and full of scorn at my wish to elude their carefully constructed ending scenario they chose to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy. Then the credits rolled. And overwrote my autosave so I'd have to replay the last hour of the game to see an ending that sucked even marginally less.
(I did grab the extended cut ending for what that's worth. I don't actually know what that entails, wasn't out when I YouTubed the ending way back when. Obviously irrelevant for universal armageddon ending though.)
Seriously Shepard just point out that spaceghostkid is factually wrong. Hey remember that 300-year war between robots and their creators? That's over. I talked them out of it. They're friends now. Also that chick who was shooting all your dudes with me on the way in? Hey kid she's a computer. Your thesis is disproved, cycle broken, shut your fucking face uncle fucker.
I knew in advance that all the final choices the game plainly offered you, and really everything related to the final sequence, were incredibly dumb. I didn't actually know that could happen, but clearly I should have known better than to second guess the divine wisdom of the great mind that brought us Kai Leng. Also jesus what does your rep have to be to make those final dialogue choices on the Citadel? I was like 90-95% paragon and still couldn't to it. What the hell.
ME3, I dunno. It reminds me of Return of the Jedi, you know? There's rollicking action sequences and some nice character work building off of earlier series entries and you're having all kinds of fun up until space teddy bears show up to own all the bad guys for you and now you can't believe in anything anymore. Except this time you are the one who is the space teddy bear's bitch.
It makes me sad because they did such a great job with this game for most of its run. Aside from the stuff already bitched about at length (ghostkid/Kai Leng/ending) it was a greatly enjoyable experience. Combat is cleaned up and more fun than before (too easy, but at least I can finally dodge), individual missions play well off most of your actions in the previous games, writing is solid...Which just makes ghostkid stuff even more glaring. I know there's a war on, dude, because I hear about it through everybody's personal stories every time I drop in on the Citadel. You know, I actually found myself running past some of those NPCs repeatedly just to see how everyone's little dramas turned out? And then you get back to the Citadel for the finale and everyone's dead or melted. Fuck you too, game. The non-asinine writers on this game did some good work. It really does feel like Space Suikoden for much of its run. You race all over creation solving problems to unite disparate peoples and there's a big satisfying moment near the end when you finally see everyone standing together against a common enemy, yah? And then you hit an ending seemingly calibrated for maximal discordance, disappointment, and frustration.
How something that is so satisfying for so much of its run could also stoop to such staggering depths is just kind of amazing to me.
Still, it is good to see that London still maintains telephone boxes even well into the 22nd century.
(Why doesn't Anderson have a British accent though.)
Series general stuff:
-I don't think I mentioned it before, but I actually quite like the alien designs? They're almost all humanoid in the same basic proportion as humans, which seems like a box sci-fi writers have trouble climbing out of, but they're all quite distinct and memorable. There's not more of them than you can keep track of or would be sensible and nobody's just Bumpy Forehead People. I have a strange fondness for the elcor because they can only speak in Deadpan.
-I think I have to call ME2 the best entry in the series. The antagonists' plan there was pretty dumb too, but it's the kind of dumb you can mostly handwave because hey at least this isn't the end of the story. TIM also actually worked in the context of that game (and that game only). You know you can't really trust him, but you kind of owe him for resurrecting you and he genuinely is doing work the Alliance *should* be doing. And he's smart enough to keep the worst of Cerberus's excesses out of sight while you're working for him. There was some actual tension there, whereas ME3 Cerberus just reverts to straight-up soul-raping transformations for some and sanitary liquefaction for others, not even trying to hide it anymore (where the heck does all the funding for these projects come from, anyway?) Brainwashed villain is also kind of tiresome. Stared Into Abyss/Abyss Stared Back isn't the worst angle for a villain, but it's definitely less fun than someone more ambiguous that you can actually sort of argue with.
-Javik/robogirl final party (not that ME3 really has a final battle per se). They seemed like the most appropriate partners for ultimate space robot genocide. Of course since this is ME3 my choice did not matter much.
-Girlfriend Traynor is super cute. On the character front, the returning characters matured very well across the three games. Even the fun ones felt a little sketched-in in ME1? But much more fleshed out across the sequels and I was quite attached to most by the end, particularly Tali and Garrus (my only regret about running femShep is no Tali romance). So yeah, Bioware doing fun character work, no real surprise there. It's like the one thing they're consistently good at. Garrus and Joker trading racist jokes was a highlight.
-Joker and the computer, best videogame couple or best videogame couple? (I'm actually serious here.)
