A lackluster conclusion to a beloved series. Still worthwhile, but highly flawed.
Note: There are spoilers ahead. You have been warned!
Being a Bioware game, Mass Effect's strongest qualities obviously lie with it's narrative; good writing, strong characters, and a slightly above average story. Pretty much everyone has said that Mass Effect 3's ending is crap, but the conclusion is far from the biggest fault with the game's story. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the ending is bad because the experience as a whole is rather lackluster. Let's start with the Reapers; as the final installment of the series (I really hope saying that will make it stay true), the writers tried their best to explain why these cold, heartless machines exterminate all life in the galaxy every fifty thousand years or so. This was a mistake, not because the Reapers didn't need a reason, but because any reason they could think of would feel like it had been freshly pulled out of the world's smelliest ass. The whole conflict between synthetic and organic life was flimsy, at best, especially since it came out of nowhere. Not only was there very little acknowledgment of such a conflict over the course of the entire series, they even went so far as to try and tear it apart in the second installment and with the Geth in general. Trying to provide an audience with more details about something previously under explained is almost always a bad idea. Just look at Star Wars if you need an example. Next is the little brat; the writers killed off a kid and decided that death would haunt Shepard's every dream from that point forward. Again, flimsy, because you forgot who Commander Shepard was; he was me, he was my best friend, she was my sister. Commander Shepard wasn't a character whose experiences we were watching, he was the audience. By telling us that Shepard was haunted by that child's death, you're assuming that we actually cared about some snot nosed brat that we had never seen before. Look, if you want us to care about someone you want to kill off, then we actually need to know who this person is; being a child doesn't automatically make someone a compelling character. The whole scene would have been far more effective if you had killed off Anderson instead, since we not only knew the guy, we actually cared about him. If he had died shortly before we left Earth, then you can bet I would have been strongly motivated to go right back down to kick some giant metal ass.
While the story and motivations are shallow, the characters are stronger than ever. Unlike the previous installments, you can and will run into various characters in more than one place on the tiny space ship, which makes them seem more "human" than ever before. In addition to that, they also interact with each other, JUST LIKE REAL PEOPLE! I also like how a dialogue box doesn't pop up unless there are new options; that really makes the whole process of going around and talking to everybody less tedious. As an Anthropology student, I also love most of the different species in the galaxy and the truck loads of information we are given on each one. The Geth are the most interesting, Quariens are cool, Krogan are funny, and I don't care about the others enough to actually mention them. The only race I actually hate is the Asari, simply because they are a shallow attempt to put some immature writer's sick fantasies into an otherwise fascinating world. An all female race of aliens? Good; keeps the galaxy from being a giant sausage fest, especially when we usually only see men from the other species. They can reproduce with anything? Well, that explains how they can be all female, but that just makes them sound like sluts. Long lived, with stages assigned to certain ages? Good, I guess. The first stage is devoted to stripping in a club? Sex fantasy. Seems like I'm determined to open up a can of worms in each critique; maybe I should talk about religion in the next one! He said in a sarcastic tone.
I suppose my biggest problem with Mass Effect 3 is that it's like a politician; full of empty promises he never intended to keep. Mass Effect's two hollow promises are that you get to make a lot of important choices and that every decision made over the coarse of the trilogy would have some impact in this one. For the most part, the amount of choices you can make in Mass Effect 3 is probably equal to the amount in Skyrim, with the actual process of making decisions unfortunately simple. Most of these decisions are made through dialogue choices, which makes any impact they could have had rather shallow. Spec Ops: The Line handled the ability to make decisions much better than most Bioware games I've ever played for two simple reasons. First, I actually got to make those decisions by doing something, like shooting the guy executing the civilians I want to save or shooting the angry citizens who are trying to kill me. Mass Effect 3 only really lets me decide to do something through a dialogue tree, which inevitably show up at fixed points in the plot, making my choices seem even more shallow. Second, Spec Ops didn't specifically tell me what all of my options were, giving me more control over each event. Mass Effect didn't even attempt to paint the illusion that I was making each call because of it's insistence on laying out both of my options and forcing me to decide right then and there. Although, Mass Effect 2 and 3 stand as the only games I've played that actually have well implemented quick time events and has a tolerable approach to the whole binary moral choice thing. You see, in Fable and Infamous, regardless of whether your playing as a selfless hero or a child eating villain, your goal is the same; overthrow the evil bad guy for the good of the world. In these circumstances, I really don't understand why anyone would turn to a villain who murders innocent bystanders for no reason to overthrow another villain who seems to be busy doing a whole lot of nothing. Mass Effect is more sophisticated than that because Shepard isn't good or evil; she's either a saint who values life and friendship or a violent banshee who gets results at any cost. Regardless of Shepard's methods, it makes sense that she'd have the same goal. As for the whole "every previous decision will have an impact" thing, that was just a flat out lie; the previous games have little to no affect on the events in the final installment.
As for the rest of the gameplay, it's not all that interesting; shooting from the third person perspective while peeking out of cover is about all there is to it, except when it isn't. When you're not shooting someone, you're talking to someone, and if you're not doing that either, then you're scanning planets while dodging giant space squids. Everything falls into a routine; talk to people, scan planets, run from squids, shoot things, repeat. All in all, the gameplay is functional, but dull. A giant opportunity was missed to include some space combat; since they insisted on making Reapers show up to try and kill me for scanning planets, the least they could have done was allow me to do more than just run away. Oh, and the turret sections that you forced down my throat were absolutely terrible; the extremely boring planet scanning sections from the second installment were far better than the retarded turret sections present in the third. Neither of them hold a candle to the Mako, though.
That just leaves the multiplayer, which is good, I guess. I've certainly spent more time with the multiplayer than the single player campaign, but I wish this game never had multiplayer to begin with. Yes, I'm fully aware that saying that makes me sound like a hypocrite, but I stand by my opinion; Mass Effect should not have multiplayer. This is a story driven role playing game. The multiplayer mode only distracts from the narrative, which is bad since that is what should be prominently displayed. The only reason to include a retarded, out of place multiplayer mode is to make the game as homogenized as possible to appeal to the idiot demographic. This is a bad direction for games to go; rather than trying to make each game look and play the same, each game should be looking to fill a particular niche. If I feel like playing a video game with other people, I can play Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead. I should turn to Mass Effect when I want to experience an epic space adventure, without that experience being undermined by a bunch of twats who can barely even play the game.