Mass Effect

[Gold]

Eh. ME 3 has plenty of other flaws. The entire side quest structure is bizarre and inconsequential for the most part.

In general I'd say the endings are at least no longer badly edited colour shifted laziness and hang together nicely. The EC at least raises them to 'bad'.

Without picking at any particular minor nitpick or plot quibble, I can say some are pretty good now actually; I liked control rather a lot. Synthesis is still raw bullshit, though if you ignore how utterly impossible it sounds it's an interesting concept at least. EDI's 'I am alive' speech seems a weird conclusion for a series of games that have collectively already put forward the idea that synthetics are alive (though a different form of life). It seems to invalidate that message; because NOW they're alive, before they were... what?

Destroy is fine.

Refusal seems undercooked, but no surprise for something added at the last minute, so to speak.

I think my problem with ME 3 in the end comes back to the EMS thingy. The individual bits of the game are good (though I think Priority: Earth was badly constructed from start to finish and I found it grew tedious after a while), but they don't add up very well, and the vagueness of EMS doesn't help at all. I'm still baffled as to how the Citadel Defense Force (which contributed a TON of EMS) was in any way relevant to the war effort. And Shepherd the Serial Spy really felt bizarre.

Collectively I find the endings still pretty bad, but they're at least executed well now. I'm glad they did it, and it was very worth doing. What was a PR disaster is more or less settled now, and they can go on with whatever they had in mind. I still find myself with no interest in further pre-ending DLC though. I don't see what there is to do, to be honest.

I think the experiment in save file retention has been an unqualified success; though developers need to be careful about promising too much. A lot of this furor came about just because Bioware promised so much in relation to the save stuff. And they should definitely stop with the 'this is your character/story' rhetoric unless they mean it. Nobody ever complained about being guided through Final Fantasy (well, save for FF XIII).

[Charlotte]

Enough ending talk for me. It's FANART time!

Space Buddies™:

For the days when Tali's fans get EXTRA creepy:

Third-favorite scene from Shadow Broker:

Would buy this comic, long as it's 80's Alan Moore and not "Harry Potter shoots lightning out his dick" Moore:

This salarian has just encountered the Shepard Effect: As Shepard approaches, the odds of shit getting real approaches 1:1.

The argument from the ME2 bachelor scene, expanded.

Look, you knew a My Little Pony mashup was coming, so just lie back and take it

"Ah yes, Reapers"

All memes are better with Garrus: FACT.

A deleted scene from the Extended Cut:

And I'm so glad that we got less of this in Mass Effect 3:

Finally, linked for multiple files: Adventures of James Vega 1, and 2. (I was AMAZED how much I liked James Vega.)

Javik the Prothean Jerk 1 and 2, from the same website.

[Gold]

Javik is awesome. He out-renegades renegade Shepherd. It's always funny watching renegade players bitch about how mean Javik is to everyone, only to start looking awkward when you point out that he's only treating Shep the way rene-Shep treats everyone else. Easily my favourite character of the ME 3 crew. Well, Liara's my favourite still, I suppose, but Javik has newness on his side.