Mass Effect 3 Finished (Spoilers)

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Whoops. Forgot to publish this dramatic conclusion to Mass Effect week.

I finished Mass Effect 3 on Friday night, March 31st, completing my play through of the original trilogy. I spent a total of 42 hours playing it, but I restarted it twice so you can probably throw 6 or 7 hours away. (And if you’re keeping tracking of days and hours played, yes I played these games a ton in March.)

Massive spoilers below.

I forgot to mention the bug where people turned their heads around backwards in ME3. If you stand behind someone and talk to them, characters sometimes turn their heads around way farther than a human neck could possibly move, and you can just feel the bones crunching. But they just keep on talking like they didn’t just show you they were possessed by demons.

I was pretty much right in my “halfway” post. Everything led up to a final conclusion that was extremely final. There could never have been a Mass Effect 4, and they made it very clear from the beginning of the game that they meant for this game to end the trilogy.

I have to admit I had trouble following the story when it got to the quarians. There were two competing factions of quarians but I couldn’t quite keep them straight, and then Legion showed up again. It was very, so I just sort of followed where the quests told me to go and tried not to make Tali angry. Legion turned out to be yet another ME2 character who didn’t survive. This time because I shot him/it. I said in my ME2 posts that I never really bonded with him/it. Plus I don’t think robots have souls. So there.

Then we went to help the asari at a temple and ran into Samara again. I didn’t care for her that much in ME2, but it was a touching little storyline here. Continuing the theme, yet another character died making a sacrifice, but it wasn’t Samara, so at least there was that. Samara almost killed herself in the name of her code, though. Fun times abound in ME3.

Then the story took us to a Cerberus base and we finally got to find out what Miranda was up to the whole time. I found it unsatisfying as a major plot moment. Miraculously, nobody died.

After that, we went into the final mission to rescue Earth. Man, if it wasn’t clear this was the End Of All Things before the end, those last interactions with your squad mates should have sealed it. Every single person said something like, “Goodbye Shepard, it’s been an honor working with you.” You had a chance to talk to just about everyone you’ve ever met in the game before. Then it was off to the final push.

I played the original ending first. I found it confusing. I wasn’t angry, like apparently most of the Internet was, just confused. I just sort of sat back and thought, “Huh, well that’s a thinker. I wonder what that was about?” I didn’t particularly like or dislike the ending. I felt it was lacking in punch, but it didn’t make me angry. I was sad that there was no more to see, but I expected it and accepted it.

I take it back, one thing did annoy me: At the very end you have to make a choice by walking to one of two places. It wasn’t super clear which one would do what. I went to the one I thought was the choice I wanted to make, but it turned out it wasn’t. But you can’t walk away and pick the other one. Your choice is locked in when you arrive at your destination. I had to re-load an auto-save so I could walk to the other choice.

Admittedly I was a tiny bit distracted during the ending, and probably missed the information that would have made it obvious which way to go. I was making supper at the time, and stove timers were going off, so I had to keep getting up while trying to listen to the cut scenes from a distance. Still, I think you should let players change their mind.

Since I knew that the Internet had lost its mind over this ending, so I went Googling to find out what their problem was. I found a Kotaku article that did a good, if totally biased and clickbaity, job of summing it up.

To be fair, the article makes some valid points. But I’ve been totally into these games, having played ME1, ME2, and ME3 all in a row, and I didn’t put together half of what that article sussed out. I never thought for a second that the whole universe got wiped out. Even after reading the Kotaku article and their completely valid reasoning for why the universe got wiped out, I still didn’t think that’s what happened. It sounded like a crazy superfan theory. I mean, obviously no epic story would ever end with, “And they all died and everything was for nothing. The end.”

Later that night I found the free “Extended Cut” DLC and replayed the ending. I made the exact same choices, and it was definitely better. I recommend installing it before you get to the end, unless you’re curious to see the difference between the original ending and the new ending.

My personal feeling is that they simply ran out of time and couldn’t polish the ending like they wanted to. They didn’t have to make that Extended Cut and it probably cost them a fair amount of money to do it (bringing back all the voice actors, etc.). I, at least, appreciate that.

It was a much better resolution, but I still have questions after the Extended Cut. The most obvious one is what the heck was the Normandy running from?? They were at Earth, so the only thing that happened there was the big discharge of energy that was Shepard assuming control of the Reaper technology (in my game). Was there Reaper technology on the Normandy? Not that I know of. Would EDI have been affected by that energy discharge? Is that why Joker was trying to avoid it? That doesn’t make any sense. No other ships were shown to be destroyed by the energy pulse. So what the heck? The Extended Cut didn’t address that.

Not that it matters, they all survived, and weren’t stranded on a random planet for no apparent reason. The Extended Cut made that perfectly clear. Everybody lived happily ever after. Except the ones who didn’t. But their sacrifices were not in vain!

There’s a little scene after the credits finish, by the way, with presumably a grandfather and a child in silhouette talking about The Shepard. It’s a nice little scene, but the child’s shadow was very off-putting because it looked like a regular-sized human outline shrunk down to child height. The arms and legs were too skinny. It looked more like a hobbit than a child. It was odd.

One last thing on animations in Mass Effect 3: The female running animation was terrible. Shepard should not be running around like a Barbie doll. Come on.

I haven’t played any other DLC and don’t plan to. Overall I’m not a huge fan of DLC. (Unless it’s for Dark Souls, then I’m a huge fan of DLC.)

I’m now moving on to Mass Effect Andromeda, which was the whole purpose of playing the trilogy.

P.S. My enjoyment of the end of Mass Effect 3 was slightly ruined for me because my roughly 6-month-old 4 TB external USB hard drive died about 3 hours from the end of the game. The drive and the game aren’t related, except that I had been recording my entire playthrough of Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 and storing the video files on that drive. They’re all gone now, unless by some miracle the drive magically starts working again some time in the future. (Even if it does, I was so bummed out that I didn’t bother recording the last 3 hours of the game, so my complete play through would be incomplete.)