![]() ![]() When you do reach the endgame and start the long hard slog of tying the game up in a rough knot, it suddenly becomes the David Anderson story again, with the final two hours spent slogging through bombed-out London (looking like a generic war-torn military shooter environment save for the pristine red anachronistic phone booths that have been placed on every other street corner to remind you that this is indeed London) and listening to comms chatter between Anderson and his English and Scottish hard-lad lieutenants as they storm towards certain death. And you’ll be doing it while gathering war materiel for Anderson on Earth, running into Anderson’s on-again off-again lover Kahlee Sanders, even fighting a game-long nemesis character who isn’t from Shepard’s past, but from Anderson’s! You’ll have a lot of time to think about this stuff. But this is a 40-60 hour game, depending on what DLC you have installed. This makes absolutely no sense except for all the game’s characters insisting it does, and would work much better if you were given less time to think about it. Mass Effect 3 is more than happy to conflate this primary narrative arc with what the plot actually demands as Shepard’s main goal - the creation of “the Crucible,” an extremely vague superweapon that will destroy the Reapers in a single blow. Not just through the handwaved ability to have him ring Shepard up on the space phone constantly to check in, which he does - no, returning to Anderson and specifically liberating Earth is the main point of the whole game. Soon Shepard jets off into space leaving Anderson behind to nobly defend Earth as the head of the Resistance, but throughout the game Anderson looms over the proceedings. Prepare to get very tired of this little twerp. Shepard is along for the ride, most notably tied up in the very clumsy symbolism of trying and failing to save a human child from the destruction of the city. But Anderson is even more than the tutorial character: he is the one giving orders, demanding actions, doing things. This isn’t a bait-and-switch either, not of the conventional kind: no matter where else you go in the galaxy, the game is telling you that this story is going to be about Earth.Īnother warning sign in this beginning section: Admiral David Anderson, still voiced by the excellent Keith David, spends the entire thirty minute setpiece wherein the Reapers pay off all of Shepard’s warnings and sack the human capital of Vancouver attached fully to Shepard’s hip as the tutorial character. This is the first time Earth has appeared in a Mass Effect game as a place you visit or interact with (you go to the Moon in the first game, but that’s as close as you get). ![]() ![]() Six months isn’t that long, Miranda! But again: This is Earth. Multiple characters mentioning you languishing in administrative limbo, and having to move on with their lives without you. They do actually tell you how long it is if you go digging or pay attention to off-hand dialogue - it’s six months - but narratively it feels like a couple years. The first clue you’ll get that something is deeply amiss with the final installment of this trilogy is that it begins on Earth, where Shepard has spent an intentionally vague amount of time grounded since the events of the previous game. We can start with what’s wrong with Mass Effect 3 on a fundamental level up front, because the game starts with it too. A half-second after this screencap, they no longer matter. A game very arguably doesn’t need the bloat that Mass Effect 3 has, though for reasons we’ll get to in a bit I’m glad that it had it.ĭid you know the Alliance has its own three-politician Council? No? They never came up before, but don’t worry. I’ve now spent some combined 200 hours playing Mass Effect games over the past few months (with a couple rounds of technical difficulties unrelated to the games themselves near the end), so it’s perhaps understandable that I flagged a bit in finishing the fight, as it were, in the trilogy’s final entry.
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