I haven't written in a while and have some games and comments pending, but I wanna finish my comment on the Mass Effect trilogy (I haven't played Andromeda anyway and I understand it should be considered apart).
The third game in the series seem to imitate a style of making series and science fiction, popular in the first decade of 2000, were things are bleak and very unbalanced, and anyone can die. Recently I finished Battlestar Galactica (I got tired at some point of the drama and had not watched it all), and certainly the style of ME3 reminded me of that.
I've talked about ME3 in the past, when it came out. It has epic moments, and there are plot points that are amazing. Curing the genophage, or making peace between geth and Quarians, both things optional and only available if you had done the right choices in previous games, felt very good and adequately epic. Apart from that, graphics are still great, more detailed now and a lot more gory, and the gameplay still holds quite well, although the downgrade of the shockwave ability done from the previous game hurts a bit, I have to say. So, the game is quite decent overall, and does delivery in some of their promises.
Where it fails, it's in other aspects. First and foremost, the fact that Earth is made as this special place that is worth saving over all the other races and planets. This is so human-centric that is annoying, and one cannot help but make easy parallelisms with colonialism and white supremacists, where there are countries "worth saving" and others that are not (like recently in Afghanistan, for example). Other races have planets that fall or get hit pretty hard, but earth is the one that seems to endure the most and also where everything needs to happen.
Then there's the fact that, while some decisions from previous games are truly explored and expanded, some others are translated into points. These points mark if you'll be able to reach the "best" possible ending or not, or if you will fail while trying. The point system feels...weak. A cheap way to translate decisions into something that affects the game. The ending of ME2 took decisions and made them matter. ME3 turns them into "+100", definitely a downgrade.
What is most grating, though, is probably how the ending has been managed, and how it turned out to be. In the end, the problem is that some race decided that any universe that has AI, will then have these AI revel against their creators and kill organic life. Which is....not true, even in the ME3 universe. As part of the game, we could make peace between the current rogue AIs and their creators, and the AIs showed they just wanted to help and coexist. So this argument is pure bullshit and undoes plenty of things inside the story. Then, I mentioned it before but the last decision about what to do about it is taken there, without considering previous ones, which is....easy, very easy, not taking any risks. An ending that changes based on one last decision has been made before and is boring, you just reload and see the different ones. ME2 did this a lot better.
What's worse in all this is that I understand this ending was the result of some boss that, instead of deciding what to do in a committee, like all the rest of the plot points of the game, decided to do whatever they wanted without external supervision from the rest of the creative team. This sounds....awfully familiar to how Game of Thrones ended, or also the creative process behind the movie Prometheus, that left plenty of bullshit too. More and more, I've seen "famous" people that did great things do shittier stuff the moment they're considered famous and don't have a support team around them that helps them streamline their good ideas, to make them really good, instead of assuming they're great and going forward with horrible stuff because no one dared to tell them they suck now. I mean, see what George Lucas did in the prequels. Check the latest movies Steven Spielberg has done, or the 4th Indiana Jones (or as we like to say, the movie that shall not be named). Check Ridley Scott, James Cameron, etc...hell, even Terry Pratchett in his latest novels where he clearly was mentally affected by Alzheimer and no one dared to tell him it wasn't that good anymore, although in this case he's quite innocent and more understandable...there's sometimes these ego trips by people that fuck stories really bad, and it's quite a shame.
Well, anyway, after all this negative comments, I have to remind that ME3 is still a great game, and I really enjoyed this replay. And I have to make a special mention to the DLC. DLC can be quite "evil", when it greatly improves the original game or adds important plot points, and I have to say, yeah, ME3 DLC is quite evil in that sense, because it's really really good and it makes up for the flaws it had quite a lot.
ME3 has 3 big DLC packages that improve the plot a lot. First, there's Leviathan, which explains the reaper's origins (interesting but maybe it was better to leave them a mystery), is quite epic and feels a bit like Abyss (the movie). Then there's Omega, which doesn't add as much but explores a bit more an "asshole" character from ME2, Aria. She's still an asshole even if she's nice with you, but you understand her better after this and the whole plot is really cool with action. Finally, there's the Citadel DLC. This one is just amazing. It's funny, intense, curious, introduces cool concepts, and has some of the greatest moments and dialogues of the series. This DLC is an apology letter to the fans of ME3 by the creative team, showing what ME3 could have been, and it's a proper send-off for the trilogy, allowing you to interact with all the people that have been part of your squad (unless they died, and then they also get a special moment for them) . I know it's paid content and I'm against it usually, but in this case it's totally worth it and amazing. Originally I didn't get it when I played for the first time, but now I did, and this really redeemed ME3, because I think ME in general shines more when it's funny and warm and properly epic, instead of when it tries to just be epic in a very limited and overdone military-style way.
And it's best left unexplained, so you can experience it if you'd like :)
