Always liked that if you don't romance either of them Tali and Garrus end up together in a relationship. While Liara was largely absent in ME2 doing her own stuff Garrus and Tali have been at Sheppards side all through the trilogy and end up a mirror of Sheppard personality. Both striving to be like Shep and both ending up as leaders in their own right.
I love the Shadow Broker note that being with Shepard is holding Garrus back from realising his potential as a great leader. TBH I've always felt that having Mass Effect 2 be with Garrus as the protagonist could have been brilliant.
@@Jojje94 I think this falls firmly under the scope of "I don't trust modern Bioware not to fuck it up." I would love a good Mass Effect game too, but I just don't trust them not to brick it. The Citadel DLC was fantastic though. An entire game that just takes place on the Citadel (or Omega in the case of Archangel) with the same vibe as that DLC would be amazing. But could modern Bioware do it?
@@tortoiseoflegends4466 But it is a full potential as a "Shepard" potential, or back to his angsty ME1? Let's remember that in ME2 Garrus was after a traumatic event, angry at everything and everyone. Full Renegade or at least Paragade. Shadow Broker wasnt a token of morality either.
I love Liara saying on Thesia "it must be reacting to you Shepard cause you interacted with the beacon on Eden prime." Nah, I think it's cause there is living breathing Prothean standing next to me.
Liara spends the whole of thessia just trying to deny Javik's suggestion of the truth the last dialogues of their conversation go Javik: The asari hoarded our technology, look what ended up happening Liara : The protheans used reaper tech, look what happened to you Javik : So, you do bite. Good, save it for the Reapers Javik just knows how to talk someone down.
The omega dlc didn't begin with the fetch quest missions, those where in the vanilla game. Omega starts once you get in the car with Aria. They didn't make the beginning bad they made a bad vanilla quest and tied it into a way better one.
I like the Omega DLC, but I kind of wish the mid-arc missions had been liberating the 3 main gangs and their leaders to join Aria’s cause (though his was essentially the idea of the citadel missions). 2 gangs and you can progress, 3 gets you a better ending to the DLC, and there could have been great callbacks to Garrus’s recruitment mission in ME2.
Omega is one of the worst DLC Bioware's ever done. Everyone is out of character; Aria is acting like some dickhead, the citizens of Omega are happy-go-lucky, Talons, a Turian exclusive gang, are now inviting Krogan, humans and Batarians, you have no reason to care for the people of it and Nyreen was a waste of space that thankfully takes LTG's advice, and Petrovsky is suddenly some honorable guy and isn't indoctrinated like 99% of Cerberus at that point. The creatures introduced in the comic are a total joke. I hated every single second of it.
@@shadowrosegaming3566 First conversation with Javik after you return to the Normandy. J: The lizard people evolved? Liara: I believe they're amphibian. J:... They used to eat flies :) Liara: *Leaves*
Honestly sad that i can't witness it. Not going default shep in a review video is a sin. He's the ONE character we all found a common connection with. Making your own just seems like a bit of a slap in the face... kinda sad, since i came here to re-experience shep
@@jeremygilbert7989 I kind of disagree on that for this case. Paragon Renegade was never about more good or evil, or good consequences bad consequences. It was meant to be more Good cop or ruthless cop, either case your still a cop. The ruthless cop being more pragmatic and assertive that she should change her name and identity make sense. I'm more pissed at the obvious evil choices the game throw at us that i'm like "Who would even behave that way?"
Commander Shepard has become a legend by ending the Reaper threat. Now you can continue to build that legend through further gameplay and downloadable content.
Your overall point about "always choosing the blue or red option" makes everything else meaningful is correct, BUT you accidentally choose a really bad example to make that point because a LARGE percentage of players don't have that option unlocked during the final dialog with the illusive man. You only get that option if you selected all blue or all red in all your conversations with him in the entire game. My first playthrough, I completely missed one of them because it was hidden behind an investigate that I sloppily missed. Reading around the internet, a lot of other people ran into the same issue, and I strongly suspect a large percentage, if not a majority, of people who play the game don't have those options in the final conversation.
Having played through the entirety of the trilogy twice, I never got this dialogue option. Not once, in both an entirely renegade and paragon play through its just a bullshit game mechanic.
Same. I didn't know this. I ended up going for red on my first Illusive Man meeting and then blue on the second, so I didn't get it. Should have done the same thing I did with Saren in ME 1. Such a satisfying moment to keep hammering home the blue option so that he breaks free of the Reaper control and blows his brains out
I really wanted to best ending, so I searched everything up. It was my first time playing and despite that, I still walked clean past the red/blue thngs straight into the beam. I saw my Shepard disintegrate and I was like ''wait a second...''. I closed and reloaded that shit😂 The image will not leave my mind for a while😪
Whenever one of your videos drop its like an event to me. Where I mentally map out my day so I can listen to your video in one go. Even if I don’t always agree with all your points, you always explain yourself in a way that’s logical and entertaining that I hang off every word. I look forward to watching this and it all your future videos.
When you talk about Kai Leng needed to be in the first or second game to have an actual impact to the story, I always thought he should have been the crew member you leave behind on Virmire. They get the same treatment as you by Cerberus, but this time put in the control chip.
There's another fan fiction that suggests Jacob taking Kai Leng's place, as he's already Cerberus, already gets into pissing contests with you during ME2, and can be an outright pissy bitch if you choose another romance option.
That would've been a great choice with added replayability given the different skillsets the two choices have plus a chance for some good old talk no jutsu in the final confrontation. You would lose out on the sheer hateability of kai kemg though.
The fact that a Shepard who hasn’t romanced anyone in the entire series aside from Kelly ends up sleeping with Javik after they both get super drunk is low key fantastic
Honestly I think if the person he was chasing was in the dream was Jenkins, the first person he lost in the reaper saga it could be stronger. Then every time he crossed a tree it was another lost character, then it ended with Ashley/Kaiden it would be more impactful than tunnel kid.
Shore Leave is the true ending to ME3 and I will not hear otherwise. Also, hearing Mordin sing Amazing Grace was the perfect way to hear from him one last time.
I believe you can actually save Kelly chambers by talking to her before the attack about changing her identity, so that in this moment that Cerberus approaches her, she does not identify as Kelly Chambers. *This may have been mention already, in which case carry on
Still though, it's such a dumb ass move from her. Armed soldiers from the rogue terrorist organisation that you turned your back on ask you to confirm your identity in the middle of a coup and you say "yes". Like jesus, the line right after this makes fun of her for saying yes.
@cosmictreason2242 because after Shep leaves cerberus the illusive man kinda goes off the deep end and they start getting worse so Kelly leaves because she doesn't agree with what they're doing, at least that's from what I remember
I think andromeda might be worth covering as a sorta "what went wrong?" Kinda video. I remember being actually kinda impressed by the moment to gameplay, but i also remember tye bugs, the wonky facial animation, and saying "this choice makes no fucking sense" on multiple occasions.
having played to end the gameplay gets old its a long game in the bad way it also took the driving from me1 and made it somehow worse existing solely for transport
I think (aside from the repetitive gameplay, a reused plot "Oh the bad guys turn us into them", and the fact that the game was so broken at launch) the biggest thing that went wrong was the expectation that the Pathfinder would be another Shepard, a confident space marine. Instead we got to play as someone not ready for command who is fallible. I really enjoyed Andromeda and plan another playthrough soon
@@putowtin The first team briefing was the first and only scene in the game I liked that wasn't fuuny glitch. Seeing the contrast between Shepard and Ryder as leaders was one of the few things i liked about the game, even if the rest of the game didn't sell Ryder growth that well.
@@chronichavok9847 I would say the reason it has a hard time selling the growth is because of how open the story is. It's a lot harder to write scenes meant to show a steady character arc when you have no way of guaranteeing which order the player will do content in. The Original Trilogy keeps character development either to personal missions or ship conversations specifically for that reason.
My favorite part in the entire series is when the entire United fleet comes out of the mass relay towards Earth. It was just… perfect. All the running around to get people to put aside their differences for the greater good, all the crap Shepard had to wade through, and death he had to experience, all culminated in that moment. It brought a tear to my eye, and it still does to this day.
I think my favorite part of the Citadel DLC is that it really emphasizes what makes Shepherd special, you pull people together. The entire time the crew is acting like this is some big family trip, not them being attacked while on shore leave. and it all gets naratively capped off by the ending. you and the clone are clinging to the ramp, just moments before he was ranting about "what makes ypu so special!?", only to be answered by Shepherd's crew, your family in all but blood, saving you... while the clone's "friend" leaves him to save herself.
Citadel dlc was pure comedy which was a fun change of pace for that game. Liara calling someone a cheater for shooting while she was on a ladder for instance.
I dunno man, to me, the entire shore leave thing felt like wacky fanservice. In my opinion, they did the overall theme of the game a disservice by making a "sitcom episode". The clone plot was kinda good, tho. Not extraordinarily well executed and filled to the brim with tropes and clichés, but it made sense.
Well I don’t and I didn’t. Wrex childlike boisterous behavior and teenager like false sense of invincibility. Along with his reckless aggressive actions like when we arrived at the Salarians Homeworld. Are what strongly aided in convincing me that Eve was wrong about Wrex being an anomaly amongst Krogan men and a mutant. Because in spite of the fact that Wrex wants good for his people. He often behaves precisely like the Krogan back in the day did when interacting with other powerful and influential species. Wrex is no different from the Krogan Ambassador who caused a ruckus right before the Krogan Rebellions War. Wrex more than anyone caused me to believe that he wouldn’t be around long enough to keep a cured Genophage Krogan in check. Even when we were on Tuchanka Wrex failed to de-escalate the situation and Eve had too. And there is no way that Eve is gonna always be able to be by Wrex side to keep him from making things worse. Especially if Krogan get multiple extra-solar colony worlds! Even in Mass Effect 1 Wrex was reckless af! He told C-Sec that he was gonna assassinate Fisk. He dared C-Sec to try and arrest him. He threatens to kill Commander Shepard on Virmire in front of armed STG and Shepard’s own squad! As much as I like Wrex look. I like Wrex voice (In ME1). I like his stories. Wrex is a reckless idiot when he chooses violence over civility.
@@endershepard7117 you missed one important note. Unlike other Krogans he actually talks and open to options. In ME1 any other Krogan would just try to shoot you, he listened and agreed. In ME2 he actually forces clans to unite and stop infighting. These werent just some plans, he actually did this. In ME3. Salarian homeworld, he acted ruthless but the most valuable thing to his entire race was kidnapped by STG while theres reaper envasion going on. And even then he only threatened them, didn't shoot. Other Krogans wouldnt hold back, Wrex does and actually belives Krogans should stop wars. With Eve's help they got all chances to do it.
@@endershepard7117 L take, Wrex is still a Krogan at the end of the day. It's in his DNA to be violent, and without violence there's no way he could have united Tuchanka. But he's also one of the few Krogan that can make long term plans for the good of his species. Every time Wrex acts recklessly there is a reason for it. C-Sec is too spineless and tied up with red tape to stop him or capture him. At Virmire he sees a cure to the genophage that the Salarians are trying to destroy. Even the Salarians there say "Saren has cured the Genophage". In what world would he not be angry that everyone else is trying to destroy it? The thing he has spent centuries dreaming about curing. I think his reaction is warranted. Wrex is the best of his species because he has all.the Krogan tendencies but is able to rise above them when it really matters.
@@endershepard7117 Wrex's actions on Virmire were both justified and understandable, a cure for the thing killing his people was literally within reach, and his friend and ally, Shepard, was going to destroy it. While Wrex claimed he had given up on his people beforehand, his tone when discussing them and him getting offended/triggered when Shepard compares Humanity's history with aliens to the Krogan's betrayed his true feelings on the matter. Him threatening violence when in reach of something that could save his people is justified, and most anyone of any other species would do the same thing. The scene with Eve is not at all a mark against Wrex. The point was to give a female Krogan power and influence in her race's destiny, and Eve of all people HAD to be the one to calm down the tensions, they were doing that mission for her, not Wrex. Wrex was there to help safeguard her, in reality that entire mission was Eve and whichever Salarian you have with you's play. Wrex being threatening and hostile with representatives of other races is also understandable. The Genophage REALLY fucked up his people. Do you have any idea what it would be like to give birth to multiple children, only for all of them to die because of what an alien government did to your people? Now expand that to cover the entire Krogan race. Of course he's pissed at the other governments, he has every right to be, they brought that on themselves when they almost forcibly sterilized an entire people, regardless of their reasoning. If the Salarian government came along and sterilized our species, we would be VERY pissed, and rightly so. But the thing is, Wrex IS different. He may not like the other governments but unlike most Krogan he is fully willing to work with them if they help cure the genophage, and that is a completely reasonable request. Both he and his clan are willing to unify and work with the other clans, accept Grunt into their clan despite it going completely against tradition, and even on Virmire Wrex can be convinced to side with you provided he trusts you enough, He does not like it, but he will see your side and go along with you, asking only for Saren's head as compensation. Wrex may still be a Krogan at heart, but he has proven that he understands the Krogan MUST change if they are to survive.
@@endershepard7117 Hell, I'll side with the correct but out-numbered crowd. The Krogan don't need to have 1000 babies a year per female. They can make due with 1. The fact that they cannot is more a show of an inability to adapt than any cruelty on the Salarian or Turian Government's parts. 1000 eggs a year was the old Krogan birthrate, PER FEMALE. Of course, because "The Audience" had a 'gasm over Garrus and Wrex, they had to rail-road the story to fix something that, frankly, the Krogan don't deserve fixed.
Well...the issue is that Shepard is NOT a biotic, plain and simple. You can play the game as though he is, but he isn't. YOUR Shepard might be, but THE Shepard is not. Kaiden was turned into a biotic due to a (probably deliberate) accident with eezo. Nothing in Shepard's backstory indicates such exposure, so he isn't biotic. In games where players get to portray themselves in the role of the main character, such as KOTOR & KOTOR 2, regardless of the variety of options players of the game have to "experiment" for the sake of "replayability", there is nevertheless a particular canon characterization, and in the case of Shepard, he is a non-biotic paragon soldier, and probably a spacer war hero, maybe a colonist war hero.
So, you mentioned at the tail-end of your discussion on the Leviathan DLC that it was silly that the Reapers didn't immediately attack the Citadel and repeat what they did with the Protheans. The thing is, they were planning on it, but you stopped them. In Mass Effect 1, you learn that a small group of Prothean scientists who survived the purge traveled to the now empty Citadel and basically reprogrammed the Keepers to be immune to the Reaper's influence. Without that influence, the Reapers were unable to use the secret mass relay at the heart of the Citadel. They then attempted plan B, which was to use the Alpha Relay. You destroyed it in the Arrival DLC in Mass Effect 2. So basically, the Reapers were forced to start from the outer edges of the Galaxy and work their way in towards the Council races, instead of being able to overwhelm them all in a targeted strike at their government, like they had done for countless millennia.
That doesn't explain why they haven't rushed to capture the Citadel as the first objective. If they did, they would cut our access to FTL and Mass Relays, and stopped any chance of organizing united resistance. Instead, they cherry picked different worlds for harvest. I'll explain why. Because if the Reapers did this (as simple logic required), we would have lost already. There would be no way to leave our systems, to escape Reapers, or to gather resources from the entire Galaxy to build Crucible in a safe place. Reapers had to make a brain dead decision for this game to have any reason to exist. So basically, a plot convienience. That's it.
@@grzegorzflorek5623 The whole pulling-out-a-super-weapon-at-the-last-minute felt like a real shoehorn. We were supposed to win originally because the Reapers lost the Citadel, as well as the element of surprise.
@@grzegorzflorek5623 what are you talking about? FTL and mass relays have nothing to do with the citadel. they work perfectly fine on their own. no, it is explained that they didn't bother rushing the citadel because it wouldn't really do anything during our cycle. unlike with the protheans, who were united under one centralized empire and had all their leadership sitting in one place, therefore making the citadel a prime target, the council in this cycle doesn't really matter all that much. yeah, they make some important decisions, but at the end of the day they are just a bunch of ambassadors sitting around and arguing all day. i mean, what would attacking the council actually accomplish? nothing. humanity would still have their leadership on earth to give them orders, the asari would still have their leaders on thessia and the turians still would have their leaders on palaven, ect. us actually being a coalition of planets with a decentralised government instead of being one unified empire actually saved our butts, since, unlike with the protheans, the reaper don't have a single target to destroy to take out our entire leadership at once. they have to spread their attention between several planets, spreading out their forces in the process, which bought us just enough time. the reapers don't really have a reason to attack the citadel until they learn about its importance from cerberus.
2:33:59 slight correction. javik was dlc, yes, but he was day one dlc, meaning you could buy the dlc the day the game launched. which, apart from causing a lot of outrage, because why wouldn't you included a fully fleshed out companion in the game when he's already completely finished by launch, means the whole game was programmed with javik in mind. they didn't have to go back to adjust anything for him, as he was always meant to be there. 3:03:02 you seem slightly confused how things work here. the reapers attacked the citadel during the prothean cycle a.) because that's where their point of entrance was meant to be, which we managed to disable during me1 and b.) due to the protheans being a single unified space empire they only had one centralised government, which resided on the citadel. by taking over the citadel, the reapers could get rid off their entire leadership at once and throw the remaining planets in chaos. however, it is made clear that that wouldn't work in our cycle. in our cycle the council is more like the un. yeah, they make some important large scale decisions, but ultimately each member has their own government, that makes their own decision independent from the council. therefore the reapers can't just attack the citadel and throw the galaxy in turmoil like they did with the ptotheans, as all that would happen is that each race would simply fall back to taking orders from their own government instead. thanks to the decentralized leadership structure of this cycle, the reapers attacking the citadel would do absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, so they don't really have a reason to do so. not until they learn about the conduit once cerberus get their hands on the AI on thessia.
3:04:00 you keep asking "why didn't the reapers attack the citadel 1st" when that was the entire plot of ME1 and if not for Shepard (and Vigil before him) they wouls have warped into the Citadel and reconquered the galaxy exactly how the beat the Protheans. Vigil and Shepard just stopped them.
@@PabloYaos the Prothean scientists on Ilos that froze themselves used the Conduit to travel to the Citadel after the Reapers left at the end of their cycle. They disabled the Reaper's ability to control the Keepers and make them open up the Citadel relay to allow them to travel straight there from their Dark Space home. Sovereign is a scout Reaper that doesn't leave the Milky Way as he watches over the expansion of the species ready to signal that the next Extinction is needed. When he signalled the rest of the Reapers this time, the Citadel didn't respond & he had to get Saren and the Geth to undo the Prothean sabotage. Shepard stops him before he can do it, meaning that the Reapers have to travel the slow way and enter the galaxy from the edge. When they usually arrive, they immediately assault the Citadel and destroy whatever Galactic Government is in charge, cutting off those below from help. They use the Citadel archives to see exactly where all current spaceworthy species are located using Census records and location records and start the extinction with the upper hand so no species can fight back for too long. In Mass Effect 2, Harbinger tries to use the Collectors to create a new Reaper so they can assault the Citadel again with an advance scout, but Shepard shuts down that plan by assaulting their base.
There are a lot of plotholes in ME3 but yeah, this isn't one of them. They don't attack the citadel first because they don't have remote control over it, it's literally the point of ME1.
@@Whiteythereaper You seem to know a lot about the lore so my bad if im 2 months late But I just finished 3. Why would Cerberus and TIM resurrect Shepard and send him to stop the collectors if TIM was indoctrinated? Shepard destroying the base actively foils the Reapers plans.
The illusive man doesn't begin getting indoctrinated until after the events of me2. He uses the technology from the reaper base (Or somewhere else if you destroy it.) To start trying to find a means to control them.. inadvertently indoctrinating himself in the process.
Slight correction - at 1:06:19 you mention the Salarian Councillor being the one who tried to double-cross the Krogan. That's actually incorrect - the Salarian Dalatress, while she looks very similar, is NOT the same person as the Salarian Councilor. They really should have named these two, though.
My favorite part of the ending was that on the Xbone, Shepard's gun is still active during the cutscene so if you're spamming the trigger you can accidentally shoot one of the ending zones and the cutscenes interrupt each other.
It was like that on PS3 too. Nevermind I’m thinking of how you used to be able to shoot the gun in the cutscene where shep is getting up after getting lasered.
3:52:00 Honestly, I think the fans where not so obsessed with Shepard living (though obviously there will be some who did); however, with the endings being so dog shit even after the 'extended cut'; people wrapped up the idea that Shepard was being brainwashed by the reapers with the idea that him living shows the destroy ending is him 'escaping' indoctrination - I don't believe it was the intent of the developer, but it is fans trying to make sense of an awfully written ending - I would have been cool with Shepard dying IF the ending had been satisfying - but it really wasn't and gave no closure to anything, as well as overwriting or ignoring choices made by the players.
As a big proponent of the Indoctrination Theory as it's been dubbed, I understand that it's likely not what the devs were going for, but it makes for a great head-cannon to escape the horrible reality that we got. It also would have been legendary for its memorability and people would still rank it as one of the most impressive moments where a game fucks with its player alongside MGS and Eternal Darkness.
If I’m being honest, when I was playing ME3 back in the day, I used to like these endings for whatever reason. I liked the idea of Shepard dying in the end and, in the “extended cut” ending, having his partner (typically Kaidan or Liara) carrying on with the Normady… but now I feel kinda robbed. As for the Indoctrination Theory, I think its a cool idea and would’ve made for an interesting twist imo. I feel like ME3 just needed something different overall for an ending rather than the push-the-button style… whatever this is.
@@thegumonyourshoes The Quarian V Geth needed to be cut, as the second game fixed it perfectly; TIM and Cerb needed redo-ing; Asari part needed scrapping, worst dogshit of the series, even worse than the ending IMHO; more emphasis on each of the members. Hell even some loyalty missions for the new ones and maybe the game would have been better. The Legendary Edition should have just contained the first and second, remastered. And a maybe the 3rd being separately funded, with much MUCH more work put into it would have probably saved the series. As it stands I am completely put off of the Mass Effect games. I'm not touching anything BioWare ever again, as everyone should. Why? Because it should have been clear, long ago, that BioWare has already died, and is only being puppeteered by EA.
I do think fans wanted Shepard to live, mostly because Shepard spend 3 games in the frontlines fighting for everyone lives but by the end dies. We all wanted that "happy ending" of Shepard retiring with their LI or even getting a few years break before the next game, but we got those color coded ending and each one killed Shepard, that why destroy is the "best ending" it skip the stupid color coded ending (because Shepard is alive) and let thing open ending so they can go back to their LI or something.
Correction since you've said it several times. The salarian dalatrass and salarian councilor are two different characters, even if you let the council die in ME1. From what I understand, the councilor is not happy but in a more "not what I would have done" kind of way. The Dalatrass is the racist bully. The councilor is far more on your side than the dalatrass. Or at least, more amenable to your cause. So I never got the idea that he outright was against us. Think of it as the councilor is the Salarian President of the Citadel, and the Dalatrass is the Salarian President of their government. Both have high seats but one technically works under the other. And if you save the councilor, he is far more willing to work with humans, creating a split in the Salarian War Effort. I'm probably wrong on some details but the gist of it is there. Edit: The female councilor if you let the council die in ME1 is far more against you than the male one, probably because he has more respect for his life. She probably dislikes you for obvious reasons in ME1
The Salarian government is fucking wild to keep track of if you delve into it. The Salarian Union is actually still a feudal government, so it can be hard to track what’s what
I swear these videos are beautiful, the time and effort put into all of them are just amazing. I've been loving these long form videos and a small form every here and there in between. Thank you for making a 12hr day just flow on by
My wife played this for the first time last month and was able to make all the correct descisions and have enough reputation to not have Tali or Legion die on her own without me giving her any help or her looking up how to do it online. It makes me think she should go through it again, taking the bad options in order for her to be hurt like I was when I watched Tali jump off a cliff
Why would you want her to do that?! 😱 You said yourself it hurted, I mean, it'd make her understand better that pain but it wouldn't be the same, as she'd do that by choice and not by mistake.
Yep that's how my first playthrough went back when it came out, tali topping herself nearly made 14 year old me cry and turn it off and not play it again😂
And even when Legion was about to die, while doing something that ran the risk of killing her entire species, she still had the heart to say, "the answer to your question is 'yes'."
The worst part of the ending is the tonal shift. Mass Effect goes from autistically describing the physics behind how everything works to literal space magic. Like how exactly does everyone become an AI-organic hybrid?
There's also that dumb line from Star Kid, "even you are part synthetic", presumably due to Shepard's cybernetic implants that any Alliance soldier seemingly has, which makes me wonder if people with pacemakers or smart contact lenses are considered "synthetic" for the purposes of being violated by the Crucible. But there's also a wider language problem, because even a lab-grown fully organic limb replacement that's 100% indistinguishable from an original limb from birth would technically be synthetic. How does the Crucible even measure the state of "synthetic"? It all feels way too "gamey" in the worst illogical way, like if people had INI config files that could be opened up and checked for 1s and 0s in the appropriate profile settings. And I also wonder what kind of hippie space juice gets injected into everyone's brains in the synthesis ending to somehow end all "space racism" between organics and machines, as if the only reason for conflict between them was that one superficial difference rather than any sort of individual personality issues or politics or whatever.
What I love when watching this is all of the events that you discussed that you didn’t seem to realise were actually playing out a particular way as a consequence of your choices in the earlier games. That you just seemed to assume were a scripted part of Mass Effect 3 for everyone. I’ve never played these games, but during 2020-2022 I’ve watched my share of game playthroughs (lol). And am in awe at how many of the things from the earlier games actually did matter in this game, but that were integrated so seamlessly you’d almost never know.
Yeah. In comparison to most other, especially more modern games, your choices still mattered in big and small areas both. It may have not much on old Fallouts, but still... shows how degenerative the industry is over time.
Idk your situation and how much free time you may or may not have but I REALLY... REALLLY recommend you play through these games yourself. Watching playthroughs does not do the series justice. Trust me. Plus, if you're short on time you can B-line all 3 games within like 50 hours.
The “Cerberus side missions” are N7 missions, which were small additional content that came with the N7 edition of the original game. They’re just singleplayer missions packed into the multiplayer maps so didn’t really serve much purpose and couldn’t be too impactful due to the nature of how you unlock them
"Is Andromeda worth covering?" Yes. Absolutely. Not because it's good, but because it will almost certainly result in an entertaining, and possibly interesting, look at that dumpster fire.
I'd be interested in a "was it as bad as everyone said at the time" review, not wanting to sink 60 hours and (checks current price on Steam) oh, I guess £6 XD into finding out myself.
I'd like to see you do an Andromeda video. There's probably a good chunk of Mass Effect fans who didn't play it due to the terrible launch. I sure didn't.
@@DepressionShaman not a bad game but definetely not a great game. shit facial animations unfinished plot undeveloped villain tons of cut content its realy just unfinished (and dont forget about the racist character creation that did not allow the creation of white custom characters. even if it was later got changed)
I did not play it at launch, the modern gaming industry has trained me to wait a year or two before touching a game. I reluctantly bought the deluxe edition earlier this year on sale and I actually enjoyed it for the most part. If you expect the original trilogy, it will be disappointing. With smaller scope and troubled production, that wasn't going to happen. It is more of a smaller, shallower, somewhat unpolished ME spinoff. But even a meh or crap ME game is better than a lot of non-ME games. It managed to keep my interest through the game and at the end left me interested where it could go. There are some BS decisions in there that have limited or no real consequence, which can be simultaneously disappointing and a relief. Characters have back story, but they are not as deep or fleshed out. The faces are better than the launch images, but nothing great. The back and forth required by side quests can be mitigated by starting a bunch of quests at once and hitting the markers on the map in geographically order. I don't hate the game, but I hate thinking about what it could have been. If you can temper expectations and get it cheap, could be worth a try. If you feel it could ruin the ME story for you, you could head canon it as a cheesy movie that was released within the original ME universe. Shepard turns to Garrus: "What did you think of the Andromeda movie?" Garrus: "Needed more calibrations."
I didn't buy it at first not only because of the launch but because it was already made clear that the only dlc was going to multi-player only. I eventually picked it up in a sale, and once I'd gotten over the fact it wasn't the Normandy crew I really enjoyed it.
I disagree with the Illusive Man view that he just turned evil in the 3rd game. He was always going towards that. He wasn't a grey area guy he was always leaning towards "evil" and extremism. Cerberus started as just a black ops group that grew bigger and bigger. The thing is, is that he understood what was going on and eventually just decided it was worth going to the extreme to make sure humanity/himself won no matter the cost. Like that is where any hardcore belief eventually goes to unless you have something to check it. Illusive Man was only really checked by Shepard during the 2nd game. Cerberus in the 1st game lured soldiers to their deaths by thersher maws, experimented on captured people, killed anyone that tried to figure out what was going on. Cerberus in 2nd game, "we want to control the geth and make a super biotic by ANY means but don't go too extreme(but we will use the data later on tho *winkwink*) By their own pattern where else would Illusive Man go when faced with the eventuality that the Reapers are at our doorstep?
Yeah TIM was always going to be someone you had a reckoning with. That said...the really did him dirty in the last part. Like most of Mass Effect 3, it was pretty good...right up until you stepped into the beam.
Yeah the people who say he suddenly turned evil forget that Cerberus is essentially just the Proud Boys who became successful and powerful. They assassinated the fucking Pope!
Personal headcanon is that "Cerberus" was a project in the Alliance established shortly after First Contact - Cerberus is a 3 headed dog that guards the underworld. In a literal sense, Earth is the underworld, and Cerberus is it's guard dog; the three heads are the Alliance, the private corporate ventures, and some sort of planetary militia or 3rd party tech research group. At some point, the corporate capitalists took over surreptitiously and undermined the other ventures and the Alliance sort of forgot about it (because it was supposed to be a secret project that protected Earth assets from potential Aliens). So, Cerberus was initially a project that made sure human-centric funds staid in human projects that promoted humanity, and got so far ahead of itself that the "Illusive Man" at its head simply took control and delegated all the illegal (by Council standards) manufacturing of arms and ships and technology and formed a shadow army over time. I think ME2 would have been a much better story if Shepard was sent to the Terminus systems to investigate Cerberus rather than what we ended up with, since ME2 has so many moments of Shepard being clearly upset with Cerberus but going along with it anyway. If Hackett had asked Shepard to seek them out and the Collector plot had happened anyway, I think it would have worked a lot better to paint Shepard as the villain many characters treat him/her as in the 2nd and 3rd games. There's little reason for the Sole Survivor background, for instance, to work with Cerberus - I think that Shepard would straight up NOPE out of that situation.
Actually it's also more with the fact he post-game-2 began to dabble with reaper stuff, thus indoctrination and hence the corruption from within. Especially since it's a small, gradual thing, so by the time you might even notice a difference with yourself... you won't really care anymore by then.
That's still my canon ending. Ass relays overload, explode like supernovae, and render the galaxy a radiation-saturated debris field. It was all pointless in the end. Really go all-in on that slap to the face, full bodyweight and everything.
On the one hand, I feel like Andromeda’s flaws are pretty apparent, and have kinda been done to death at this point. On the other, I’ve always felt that there are a few redeemable aspects to the game that don’t get talked about much (though it’s definitely still not a great game). I’d definitely love to see you cover it, but I get it if others aren’t interested.
One of my favorite moments comes from Me3. If you brake up with Liara and get with Tali like Salt did, and take them both on the Geth dreadnought mission, they get super catty with each other. It's great.
Citadel has always been my favourite dlc. It was the last one released, after all the controversy over the ending, and struck me as a love letter from the devs to the series. Also, the humour is fantastic, self-referential humour is my jam, and Citadel delivers it in spades.
I've always been really conflicted about the Citadel DLC. The humor is great and it works fantastically as a standalone thing, but it just doesn't fit with the rest of the game's tone and plot. Space Hitler is committing genocide right down the metaphorical street and we're going out for sushi dinner in luxury restaurants, planning heists, and partying for shits and giggles. And it makes no sense why the reapers didn't already take over the Citadel since that's the center of galactic civilization and where 90% of all relay traffic ends up going, and the Citadel was always the first target in previous cycles.
I will say there's something about the Rannoch arc in 3 that I didn't like. In previous games, the Geth were rather unique, even for an artificial intelligence. They were a networked intelligence, one that could only achieve sentience in groups. And they were fine with that, their ultimate goal was to build a massive structure where they could live and interact together. It was a unique take on an AI that had a thought process completely different to anything organic life could imagine. But ME3 took that away, made it so that individuality was the ultimate goal, just like organics. I just think it might've been more interesting if the Geth kept this part of their society, instead of having to conform to a organic-like mindset in order to get the "best" ending for them. Maybe it could've contributed to some theme too, that even societies with such different values can get along if they would try.
*jeff golblum voice* Aaah ah, but you ah forget that the target audience for the game was American and to ah make them think of anything like a "Collective" being good for a society, that would ah be bad from a business sense (EA)
This trilogy was my life at the time, I couldn’t wait for number 3 , the day it released I got my copy and spent the next 3 days completing the game.. perfect ending played online and scanned nearly every planet. That ending tho my god did it take a hit to my love but I chose destroy as the other options were too bizarre to me.
I just started playing it 12 days ago for the first time, and I already finished it. I think the destroy ending is the best ending, especially since if you do it right, you end up surviving. The only real loss in my eyes is EDI. Not a fan of the geth
@@anthonyernst999 I find Control to be the most practical and future-proof. Destroy only kills all reapers and other robots who are in the Milky Way Galaxy and nearby to a mass relay, and you can only do it once unless you wanna risk destroying all the mass relays again and crippling galactic civilization every time you use the Crucible. But what if there are more reapers in dark space? Surely the super intelligent reapers would know better than to put all of their eggs into one basket for a single invasion since they also knew the Crucible plans existed since the previous cycle. And each cycle supposedly takes centuries to completely wipe out, so surely there's no rush for them to have 100% mobilization. With Control, you now have a reaper military force that does Shepard's bidding, such as defending the galaxy from any potential leftover reapers or other threat. Even if there are no more reapers in dark space, you still have a reaper workforce to rebuild everything and to restore order. Also, the Star Child doesn't say that Destroy kills off only robot races. He cryptically and nonsensically says "synthetic", but doesn't define what that means beyond saying that Shepard is also synthetic. Shepard merely has cybernetic implants based on their military specialization, so does that mean every implanted Alliance solder also risks dying from the Crucible? Do people with pacemakers count as "synthetic?"
I was waiting for him to find out about how "High" of a risk vanguard is as a class in ME3 so many enemies can instantly kill you in the game, it's insane
THANK YOU for bringing up the point around how ammo changed. You’re the only content creator that I know that has addressed that as it pissed me off for some strange reason.
no one mentions it cuz theres no point to why point out them obviously being embarrassed and fixing a stupid concept since no one liked it. its the main reason why ME1 has the worst combat.
🤣 God your custom dialogue was the highlight of this this video in terms of perfect humor insert. 3:51:17 had me laughing harder than it should have. This whole video was a perfect breakdown and review and I cant believe just how much work you put into it. I hope you give Andromeda some time as well. I feel it was unnecessarily dunked on way too hard and it has gotten better with time.
* ME3 is my most replayed game in the trilogy. The main reason is that the combat system is really fun. Unfortunately for you you picked the most boring class for single player with the Charge-Nova combo, playing the rest of the classes is a blast. I've only played Vanguard once and I hated it. * The Salarian deal carries much more punch if you have Wreav instead of Wrex running the show, the former is a major assholian and a dangerous leader. * I honestly don't know what Bioware were thinking with Kai Leng, the only thing that is going for him is the plot armor. * The entire London part strikes me as weak and disappointing, why are the Reapers only sending single Destroyers to the ground if it's so important? I wanted a boss fight vs Harbinger, maybe God-of-War style. * If you're playing FemShep and romancing Thane, the Citadel DLC will hit you like a truck emotionally. There will be a 4th recording and that one will be the only instance in the trilogy where you can see Shepard cry.
A mean does anyone actually play ME3 for the combat? I usually just pick infiltrator with dominance and let everyone kill each other while i just pick headshots and clean the room in seconds lol
Think you'll ever take a look at Enderal: Forgotten Stories? It's an entirely different game built off of Skyrim's engine with a new universe, story, mechanics, etc. Has it's own Steam download so you can skip the modding process.
It's hands down one of the best RPGs I've ever played story-wise. Highly recommended. Yes, some gameplay quirks due to how Skyrim operates, but man, I was bawling my eyes out in the end.
The biggest sin of Mass Effect 3 is that the overwhelming incidents pointing towards Shepard being indoctrinated over the course of the game were entirely accidental and ignored by Bioware. It makes so much more sense why Shepard cares about Snake Child to the point of nightmares, why Snake Child is the Catalyst AI's chosen form, and why the endings are all crud that makes no sense but surely definitely results in Shepard game-overing in the process.
Yep there are some great fan-fic about that, that Shepard still got indoctrinated, sure not that much like the people who worked with those 9H a day, but over the course of years it develop a little bit.
Andromeda is just one of those games I just feel sad thinking about, because when you learn about its development it just dawns on you how much lost potential we had. 5 years in development, but most of the games mechanics and story was made in the final year. The game is so half baked that if Ramsey was a game critic he'd be shouting the game was RAW. As it stands it really killed the soft reboot of a game. I actually wonder what they are gonna do now. A hard reboot? Or a continuation of ME3?
Yea my Cortez on my favorite save (Paragon femshep) lived through it. I believe also inorder to save him theres things that need to be completed in ME2.
One thing I wanted to point out in order to hopefully clear up the issue about the Geth and why they continue to fight you after freeing Legion is that even though the signal is no longer being sent out, they are still altered in some way. Legion in ME2 says that isolated groups of Geth would not become heretics until they connected to the network if the heretics had succeeded. Therefore, it’s plausible to assume that the Geth here in ME3 are operating under the signal and parameters that were most recently sent out. The signal from the Reapers is designed to ensure constant obedience.
it speaks volumes when you port a series this old to modern systems, and even with all the short comings, people still bought it, the legendary edition was a massive success, and I have a bit of hope that EA will recognise it and not do the same mistake again
This was my experience when the game first launched to a T. 85% of the game I loved except for the ending. To put it into perspective: Preordered the game day 1, did not get any of the DLC including that extra companion. I told my girlfriend at the time I’d be MIA for a few days. And I 100% completed the base game. At the end, the best moment for me was Legion’s story. And the moments in between. I’d tell my friends “Sure the ending sucked, but the journey was amazing! I don’t care that I didn’t get a million and one endings. What I got was a journey that respected each side character and relationship my Shepard had. And that’s what I needed and what I got.
Synthesis ending is much too body horror to me. The entire Mass Effect series until that moment have been about the conflict about these different species, and how incredible it was to find common ground with them and see that we're not all that different. Synthesis feels like eugenics to me, if that makes sense. The Control ending is just as bad. Even if Shepard is a Paragon how long before he loses all of his humanity and restarts the Cycle? Only Destroy feels satisfying, because it's also bittersweat. You tried to unite all these species, brokered peace between geth and quarians, and yet at the end you must become a mass murderer to finally end the cycle forever. It had nothing to do with Shepard living, but maybe that's just me.
Synthesis also doesn't make much sense in that yes now organics and synthetics are merged somehow but how would that stop some one from inventing pure synthetics int he future and then just start a new cycle (by the logic of the game that synthetics and organics can never co-exist) in the same way that happened to "earth" in the BSG reboot where some of the new cylons forget that they are synthetic/organic-hybrids and create new synthetic cylons that rebel against their makers. No to mention that it also was the path choosen by Saren. Destroy is the only path that Shepard have been on since start and is the only logical one from the 3 faulty choices. The damn start child/catalyst should however recognized that Shepard managed to create peace between the Geth and the Quarians proving it wrong that synthetics and organics cannot co-exist.
Most of the endings only makes "sense" under the framing that the indoctrination theory is canon. Synthesis is the reapers infecting Shepard with their faulty logic but Shep making the best of it and merging Synthetics and Organics in a form of forced coexistence. Control is the Reapers winning, manipulating Shepards mind to make him assume he's in control so that the Reapers can retreat and regroup now that they have captured the galaxy's greatest protector. Destroy is Shepard shaking off his indoctrination through willpower fueled by his experiences. He called out Starchild on his bullshit and chooses to destroy the Reapers to preserve life in the galaxy. Destroy also has the quirk of having Shepard "survive" in the end meaning that there is some speculation to be had on if the final chunk of the game wasn't just a reaper induced hallucination and Destroy breaks the dream.
@@jdizzy192 Now if they'd framed it like that I would have loved such a twist. That Shepard never escaped Earth during the Reaper invasion and it was all an indoctrination dream. But let's be honest...that's not what they were going for.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 That is again why the indoctrination theory makes sense. Of course the Reapers would try to trick Shepard into thinking hes killing his friends. One final fuck you before he breaks their control and actually defeats them
When it comes to Andromeda, definitely say it's worth a playthrough. I will say the story is lack luster, but what carried me through it was the gameplay on hardcore difficulty, the visuals which imo are amazing, and the side stories with the companions you meet along the way. I plan on playing it again sometime this year because I actually did have fun playing it.
The tragedy about ME3 is that they did so much right, especially in regard to the characters and companions, only to have it fall apart at the very end. Not that the game doesn't have its flaws apart from it, like you mentioned the journal is horrible compared to the other games, I mean I actually had to write stuff down on paper to remember them, without having to search for it endlessly; that you have to stand and listen to conversations in the hope it might start a side mission, instead of just talking with the NPCs and of course the way a lot of our decisions didn't really matter at all. In regard to Kai Leng, he does appear in the Mass Effect novels trilogy about Anderson. And those were published before the game.
“I don’t know how someone can go from trusting to untrusting to trusting to untrusting as quickly as this man does.” He does have the same voice actor as Carth “I can’t ever trust anyone” Onasi, that’s gotta be part of it.
I loved the wacky over the top tone of the citadel dlc, has some of the best comedic moments in the trilogy. And we got Wrex as a squad member again even if it was only briefly. I got to relive the glory days of Garrus and Wrex bantering and that almost made up for the crappy ending.
It makes me so happy to see a new video from you. I've watched all your other videos so it's like a new movie releasing into the theater of my work truck on a 4 hour drive. You're in my top 2 alongside JRose11
Andromeda is worth revisiting, and definitely came out the way it did for the same reason ME3 came out. I myself plan to revisit andromeda and give it a real chance without EA’s and Bioware’s taste fresh in my mouth.
I played it for the first time last year after picking it up on sale, I went in with low expectations but I really enjoyed it, while it was definitely lacking in a some areas the gameplay was pretty good and while the story felt somewhat underwhelming it still provided some really interesting moments and quests. While it suffered from a lot of issues on release, I didn't really notice any especially wonky animations and the main bugs I encountered I put down to poor optimization on the base PS4 - Havarl (the jungle planet) was a miserable experience and had some TES Oblivion style moments where the game basically froze to load in more of the map. Thankfully iirc that was the only place with such severe issues. It's definitely a case of missed potential and there's a lot to unpack, I'd certainly like to see what Salt makes of it.
i enjoyed it on release after all the bug fixes. like the models still look weird but i like the crew and how plucky ryder actually is since they were just scout/cop a solider like shepard. So ya feel much more out of your depth but still a strong sense of adventure and underdog feel well shepard was just action hero so everything felt like another day in the office. ya can make mistakes as ryder and it makes sense esp with all the daddy issues. the crew and story was fun and i liked switching classes on the fly. esp liked ryder and sam's relationship.
this is a tiny gripe but like, at 2:04 you can choose to say any of the almost 200 countries in the world and you choose Puerto Rico as one of them? cmon man. It's a territory
I've been waiting for this one since you did the first mass effect and the fact that its 4 hours long is more of a treat than i could have hoped for. I've loved hearing your opinions on this series and appreciate all the time and effort you put into them. Thanks for all the great content.
The Cerberus side missions were basically just there to give a story explanation for the Multiplayer aspect of the game, which was absent in the Legendary Edition. Hackett mentions sending continued strikes against the facilities in one of the earlier mission debriefings. It also *TECHINCALLY* does give you war assets, they are just incredibly minor. The little side objectives you get from overhearing people on the Citadel usually have at least 1 of those during those side missions. They give you like 5 to 10 points for the asset its related too. Like one where you have to take a Krogan Gun Battery from Cerberus, but you can find schematics for a power grid that the club on the Citadel needs which increases morale for Alliance Marines on shore leave there. I always took it as they are like side quests, not important to the main story, but there if you want them.
First time hearing of the "best" ending. I figure the only reason people consider it the best is that they project into Shepard so hard that they're traumatized by the idea of Shep dying or ascending.
@@ElecTrishian924 your probably do end up hurting Tali once she puts two and two together. The war asset to keep the crucible from killing the geth and edi is, and remember this, *_OPTIONAL, AND CAN BE MISSED_* it's not something you have to get.
Only just started to watch the video, but wanted to get this thought down because I'm not gonna remember it by the time I actually get to watch you discuss the endings: The endings just inherently couldn't work. Like, they could polish that scene with the Starchild until it sparkled like diamonds and it would still suck; because none of this is the ending to to the Mass Effect trilogy. This is not the climax to the story we've been playing through. It's the climactic conversation of a different sci-fi story surrounding the advancement of technology and the inevitability of synthetics comming into conflict with organics. Before this ending, the fact that the grand enemy of the series was essentially robots was incidental, just part of what grounds them in the sci-fi setting. The story never focused on the topics the Starchild talks about, at best we have a conflict with the Geth that isn't really the same as what the Starchild is talking about and is one sub-plot. It doesn't build up to this conversation. n fact, the stroy of the Trilogy arguably goes against the choices of the ending. That's why Shepard can't really argue against any of the points made, that's why is doesn't mesh with anything the Reapers have been saying all this time, that's why anything that adresses what has happened in the story so far is just dismissed, that's why all of the Starchild's arguments are 'In the other cycles the audience never got to see, this worked like that' and 'Just trust me, my calculations say this is the only option.'. We have the entire trilogy presenting the Control option as fruitless and impossiable with no chance to ever argue in it's favor. And yet the Illusive Man's, who we convinced to kill himself by proving the Control option isn't feasible, corpse hasn't even gone cold before the Starbrat steps up to tell us 'Oh, actually, it totally is a viable option now.'. It's an ending thrown together in five minutes to set up arbitrary as fuck choices that goes copletely against the story being told. It kind of speaks to Mass Effect 3's story as a whole (Gameplay, on the other hand, is peak for me). It's a bunch of really good and cathartic scenes that have nothing tying them together because the parts of the plot addressing the Reapers has no foundation to pull from because ME2 forgot to actually progress anything with the Reapers. As opposed to the Genophage and Quarian/Geth war that was developed prior. It's why the best parts are just the small chill character moments we get with the bro's we made along the way.
The nightmares and beating himself up and stuff does kind of have precedent with how Shep gets absolutely fed up and goes and bitches in the cargo hold after the Normandy gets grounded in ME1 but yeah it just feels out of place 90% of the time :/
Played femshep and she had a romantic relationship with thane krios. Really was excellent writing in terms of his sendoff, and the dialogue you got at the end. Also the conversation with Kaiden making dinner sounds more natural as femshep than maleshep from seeing this haha.
I'd watch a video covering Andromeda. Unfortunately it did some things right and plenty of things wrong. Some of the story writing is is decent in some places, meh in some places, and terrible in others. Some of the characters are insufferable and very poorly written with chringe dialog. The game is full of wasted potential. The combat mechanics and gun play are fine but some mobs tend to be a little bullet spongy. The driving mechanics are decent. Progression systems are decent but turn out to be grindy later. Some of the quests are good but unfortunately plenty are bad too and plenty that feel like filler. Facial animations are meme worthy. It's really a mixed bag that is a disappointment for the ME franchise and mediocre at best in general. It probably didn't help that the game took a long time Bioware had to write a bunch of code for the Frostbite engine, that EA forced them to use, that was never made for an RPG and needed a bunch of adjustments to make Andromeda.
You have 0 idea how excited I am for this man. I got Mass Effect 2 when I was like 10 thinking it was Halo and the trilogy has turned into my favorite gaming experience of all time.
my favorite part about this video is how I sometimes genuinely can't tell what's real dialogue and what you made up, especially during the shore leave sections
Mass Effect Andromeda is about as bad as the ending of Mass Effect 3, dispointing but not 100% game ruining. The combat is actually seriously enjoyable.
The fact that BioWare supposedly changed their original ending, and purpose of the Reapers, simply because they saw that some fans managed to guess it, is so god damn infuriating. Why do people do that? If a small percentage of your fans can guess the ending, that’s a good thing! That means that you left enough breadcrumbs for people to be able to appreciate the build-up, upon the reveal. That’s the whole point of reveals in storytelling, to have all the pieces fall into place, reveals that have no buildup are one of the most commonly critiqued things in fiction. You wasted so much time and effort, when EA gave you so little to begin with, just to give us what is certainly a worse ending than what you originally had with the dying stars plotline, and retroactively wasted our time with all those hints at that plot point. F*ck you BioWare, EA may have took you behind the shed before you could finish your magnum opus, but that didn’t mean you had to hand yourself first, you could have finished the main story, and then added DLC to finish what you didn’t have time for.
@@m8isb890 I think it was something along the lines of organics cause the stars to explode or smth and so that’s why the reapers have been killing the organics every once in a while to prevent the total destruction of the universe or smth like that.
Correct me if I’m wrong but shep is not on earth for a “probation period” but he’s actually on trial for destroying an entire system and 300 thousand people. He literally walks out of his room and when he gets to the hallway you can see he was in the detention center.
I'm literally going through a mass effect legendary edition playthrough and I'm at work watching your me1 video and it pops this one up! so the completionist in me is quite happy
I think the illusive man was just using biotics to puppeteer the two in the crucible. He just might had been aumented slightly hence he could control even a biotics Shepard even if for a while
Mass effect 1 was all about the mystery of the reapers and what you were up against,mass effect 2 goes all in on fleshing out your squad mates and finding out more about them so I'm ok with mass effect 3 doing the opposite and focusing much more on the reapers and how to stop them.
The War Asset system is BioWare's attempt at something I call: "Simplification". To put it bluntly, there was no way every single outcome from all previous storylines could have been accounted for in a way that let people see the specific impact of the particular outcome they had. So, BioWare set out to turn these many complicated factors into something more manageable: numbers. The problem is they went way overboard. By turning everything into nothing but their numbers, the numbers are all that matter, not the decisions they came from. An example of good simplification comes from a game I played a while back, don't remember the name: basically, there's an evil king with armies of orcs and shit, the biggest religion on the continent has been presenting itself as the great enemy to this pure evil, protector of the people, bla bla bla... Suddenly your character gains the same powers as that evil king, from basically the same source. You use this to kill the evil king and give a large part of the land he ruled to the orcs to make their own nation. This creates a ton of problems and questions for the religion, so to figure everything out they hold a religious council. During this council a lot of your past decisions, investments, etc. are taken into account to determine how each religious leader votes on each issue, in the case of the orc nation: will the church ignore them, kinda help them get started, or REALLY help them get started? After this council, the game rarely has to come back to the specific factors that determine the outcome of this vote, and just looks at the outcome of the vote itself. All those past decisions that had an effect, can now be represented by one thing: how much did the church help this new nation? By accounting for that one variable, the game indirectly accounts for all variables that went into determining that variable. So if there's some international incident and the game says: "thanks to the support from the church, the orcs managed to get the situation in their lands under control, and even send some aid to their neighbors", the player can tell that all those past decisions have effected the current situation. What I think would have been a better decision for BioWare, was to instead give the Reapers a system they control where their central AI Core is housed, and all your decisions help or hinder the attack on that system, for example: Shadow broker NOT properly handled? Pirates harass your fleet while you are on your way to the Reaper Core. Shadow broker was properly handled? Pirates join your fleet and aid in the attack. If BioWare had properly categorized all past decisions, then gave those categories specific outcomes based on the decisions made within said category, THEN used the category outcomes to determine how the attack on the Reaper Core went, I think this game could have had a far better ending.
Thanks, great video. Maybe give Andromeda a chance, it wasn't as bad as I was afraid of. I think you'll like the Krogans in it, how they're portrayed and how they factor in the story.
the whole shepard/child plotline really turned me off this game. It's entirely unbelievable that shepard has been through so much absolutely insane shit in all these games and then ONE KID DYING is what destroys his psyche. It all feels so heavy handed and like they're just trying to manipulate my emotions with a child instead of trying to tell a genuine story.
I did only play the mass effect trilogy for the first time earlier this year but I didn’t have a problem with the ending maybe because I’ve heard how bad it supposedly was my expectations were low enough that the end exceeded them but I knew going in there was never going to be a happily ever after because it wouldn’t feel right if everyone magically lived
I mean to be fair you played the extended cuts so that helps. Plus I think a happy ending would have been fine as a possible outcome, I mean it seems reasonable that in an RPG the ending can be really shitty or really good it really good based on your actions Not to mention I think that would have been a better outcome for bioware no one sits around and does like man the fact that I can save everyone at the end of mass effect two just ruined the game for man
You played it with the extended cuts. I recommend watching Angry Joe's video about the Mass Effect 3 ending. There were just SO SO SO many holes in it that it was a death of a thousand cuts, on top of the fact the devs promised the ending wouldn't be a A B C ending. Then they called lying to the playerbase with false advertisement "artistic integrity".
I agree. I never played any of the ME trilogy until the legendary edition. And I had heard about the ending being bad, but I didn't think it was, it actually made me cry. Would I have rather had a happy ending, or the ability to get a happy ending if I get enough war score - yes (and I have gotten the ending where Shepherd takes a breath). But I didn't think the ending was bad - with the extended cut.
@@doesthisunithave1soul46 it's not about happy endings for me it was the introduction of the star child and no definitive ending at the time. Dragon Age had all these slides for endings when Mass Effect didn't. Fans were fine for that for first 2 games, but not the final in the trilogy. Choices didn't feel impactful in being displayed in game ending without having to use ones imagination. I enjoyed the game the whole time up until that point.
I still like the Garus romance best. In game 2, when you first solicit him, he looks like he is mentally asking himself “am I really going to f”k an alien that isn’t an Asari? Oh god I am ok with that.” And then he shows that he has no idea what he is doing in a cute way. Until the Citadel DLC, because there he finally takes the lead, when he takes his girl out dancing. He also admitted to watch inter special porn for “research”. Which is funny
As someone who had the 2nd game as their favorite while growing up (and choosing Miranda) I felt so shafted in ME3 where they are, as you said, sidelined, or barely accounted for, and it REALLY irked me that there was so little interaction with Miranda. You said it very well in with "the second game didn't need to exist", because that is how little it actually matters.
Always liked that if you don't romance either of them Tali and Garrus end up together in a relationship. While Liara was largely absent in ME2 doing her own stuff Garrus and Tali have been at Sheppards side all through the trilogy and end up a mirror of Sheppard personality. Both striving to be like Shep and both ending up as leaders in their own right.
I love the Shadow Broker note that being with Shepard is holding Garrus back from realising his potential as a great leader. TBH I've always felt that having Mass Effect 2 be with Garrus as the protagonist could have been brilliant.
My favorite romance is definitely Tali but I feel like I'm cock blocking my best bud so I go Liara these days 🤣
@@tortoiseoflegends4466 There's so much spin-off potential in the Mass Effect universe. Garrus' days as Archangel being just one of them.
@@Jojje94 I think this falls firmly under the scope of "I don't trust modern Bioware not to fuck it up." I would love a good Mass Effect game too, but I just don't trust them not to brick it. The Citadel DLC was fantastic though. An entire game that just takes place on the Citadel (or Omega in the case of Archangel) with the same vibe as that DLC would be amazing. But could modern Bioware do it?
@@tortoiseoflegends4466 But it is a full potential as a "Shepard" potential, or back to his angsty ME1? Let's remember that in ME2 Garrus was after a traumatic event, angry at everything and everyone. Full Renegade or at least Paragade. Shadow Broker wasnt a token of morality either.
I love Liara saying on Thesia "it must be reacting to you Shepard cause you interacted with the beacon on Eden prime." Nah, I think it's cause there is living breathing Prothean standing next to me.
Yeah that’s what Javik says
Liara spends the whole of thessia just trying to deny Javik's suggestion of the truth
the last dialogues of their conversation go
Javik: The asari hoarded our technology, look what ended up happening
Liara : The protheans used reaper tech, look what happened to you
Javik : So, you do bite. Good, save it for the Reapers
Javik just knows how to talk someone down.
Only if you paid for that DLC, lol.
The omega dlc didn't begin with the fetch quest missions, those where in the vanilla game. Omega starts once you get in the car with Aria. They didn't make the beginning bad they made a bad vanilla quest and tied it into a way better one.
I like the Omega DLC, but I kind of wish the mid-arc missions had been liberating the 3 main gangs and their leaders to join Aria’s cause (though his was essentially the idea of the citadel missions). 2 gangs and you can progress, 3 gets you a better ending to the DLC, and there could have been great callbacks to Garrus’s recruitment mission in ME2.
Omega is one of the worst DLC Bioware's ever done. Everyone is out of character; Aria is acting like some dickhead, the citizens of Omega are happy-go-lucky, Talons, a Turian exclusive gang, are now inviting Krogan, humans and Batarians, you have no reason to care for the people of it and Nyreen was a waste of space that thankfully takes LTG's advice, and Petrovsky is suddenly some honorable guy and isn't indoctrinated like 99% of Cerberus at that point. The creatures introduced in the comic are a total joke. I hated every single second of it.
@@Onishiro I'm glad you wrote a long winded essay on how much you hated it, what do you want me to do about that?
@@njones52 Absolutely unfathomably based response
@@Onishiro That's gotta be the worst take I have ever seen
"they used to eat flies" that line had me laughing way more then i should
When
@@shadowrosegaming3566 First conversation with Javik after you return to the Normandy. J: The lizard people evolved? Liara: I believe they're amphibian. J:... They used to eat flies :) Liara: *Leaves*
He also later says that they used to lick their eyes with their tongues.
the smugness with how he delivers that line makes it comedy gold
*Shepard:* Illusive Man, the reapers are evil!
*Illusive Man:* From my point of view, the galaxy is evil!
That dialog has "Revenge of the Sith" vibes.
@@mihaylov131 That's where I got it from. Lol. For some reason, the dynamic between Shep and the Illusive Man reminded me of it.
Renegade control Shepard: I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire.
"Team Rocke tis blasting off again!" lol
Honestly like, both aren't wrong lol
“A fucking space ninja stole our Prothean Tamagotchi.” Best description of that mission I’ve ever heard.
Everything around Kai Leng is pure gold
Honestly sad that i can't witness it. Not going default shep in a review video is a sin.
He's the ONE character we all found a common connection with. Making your own just seems like a bit of a slap in the face... kinda sad, since i came here to re-experience shep
@@RazorsharpLT my Shep looks like Obama
fucking jetstream sam from metal gear rising revengeance steals our sentient prothean tamagotchi
@@bruhgod123 comparing kai leng to sam is a sin...
Let's call him monsoon instead...but even that might be an insult to monsoon
You can actually save Kelly Chambers by making her change her appearance and name. It's a dialogue option at some point before the Cerberus attack.
Yes. Was looking for this comment.
What I like most about this is, that convincing her to change her identity is actually a Renegade option, yet it results in a positive outcome.
Ironically it's a renegade option
@@oliviawilliams6204 Further reinforcement on how Paragon and Renegade doesn't mean shit anymore in this game
@@jeremygilbert7989 I kind of disagree on that for this case. Paragon Renegade was never about more good or evil, or good consequences bad consequences. It was meant to be more Good cop or ruthless cop, either case your still a cop. The ruthless cop being more pragmatic and assertive that she should change her name and identity make sense.
I'm more pissed at the obvious evil choices the game throw at us that i'm like "Who would even behave that way?"
Commander Shepard has become a legend by ending the Reaper threat. Now you can continue to build that legend through further gameplay and downloadable content.
Your overall point about "always choosing the blue or red option" makes everything else meaningful is correct, BUT you accidentally choose a really bad example to make that point because a LARGE percentage of players don't have that option unlocked during the final dialog with the illusive man. You only get that option if you selected all blue or all red in all your conversations with him in the entire game. My first playthrough, I completely missed one of them because it was hidden behind an investigate that I sloppily missed. Reading around the internet, a lot of other people ran into the same issue, and I strongly suspect a large percentage, if not a majority, of people who play the game don't have those options in the final conversation.
Which just underlines how bullshit this mechanic was.
Having played through the entirety of the trilogy twice, I never got this dialogue option. Not once, in both an entirely renegade and paragon play through its just a bullshit game mechanic.
Same. I didn't know this. I ended up going for red on my first Illusive Man meeting and then blue on the second, so I didn't get it.
Should have done the same thing I did with Saren in ME 1. Such a satisfying moment to keep hammering home the blue option so that he breaks free of the Reaper control and blows his brains out
I really wanted to best ending, so I searched everything up. It was my first time playing and despite that, I still walked clean past the red/blue thngs straight into the beam. I saw my Shepard disintegrate and I was like ''wait a second...''. I closed and reloaded that shit😂 The image will not leave my mind for a while😪
Whenever one of your videos drop its like an event to me. Where I mentally map out my day so I can listen to your video in one go. Even if I don’t always agree with all your points, you always explain yourself in a way that’s logical and entertaining that I hang off every word. I look forward to watching this and it all your future videos.
Couldn’t have said it better. Haven’t watched yet, but I’m planning my day around it lol
What Corevo said!
Best comment I’ve read bro. Like @Joseph Daniels couldn’t of put it into better words
simp
Word
When you talk about Kai Leng needed to be in the first or second game to have an actual impact to the story, I always thought he should have been the crew member you leave behind on Virmire. They get the same treatment as you by Cerberus, but this time put in the control chip.
There's another fan fiction that suggests Jacob taking Kai Leng's place, as he's already Cerberus, already gets into pissing contests with you during ME2, and can be an outright pissy bitch if you choose another romance option.
That would've been an excellent twist that added a lot of weight to replaying the entire trilogy.
That would've been a great choice with added replayability given the different skillsets the two choices have plus a chance for some good old talk no jutsu in the final confrontation. You would lose out on the sheer hateability of kai kemg though.
He's the antagonist of the Redemption novel.
He's awful. Even with his... Development he's stale as hell.
Imagine being so desperate to bully someone that you try to make fun of them for reading their email.
The fact that a Shepard who hasn’t romanced anyone in the entire series aside from Kelly ends up sleeping with Javik after they both get super drunk is low key fantastic
I discovered this yesterday to my absolute horror when I realized I missed the deadline for Liara's romance
@@RedheadJack can't imagine how liara would feel finding out you had a one night stand with the last living prothean
Probably jealous.
@@s0undw4v3 but of who???
@@Aerowarriershe just wants to join in
Honestly I think if the person he was chasing was in the dream was Jenkins, the first person he lost in the reaper saga it could be stronger. Then every time he crossed a tree it was another lost character, then it ended with Ashley/Kaiden it would be more impactful than tunnel kid.
Shore Leave is the true ending to ME3 and I will not hear otherwise.
Also, hearing Mordin sing Amazing Grace was the perfect way to hear from him one last time.
I know some people consider Citadel DLC to be the actual ending to the game.
And that’s a better explanation than what we got.
there is a mod for that. takes out the parts about reapers from dialogues and makes you play the dlc after the finale.
Objectively wrong opinion but okay, stay in denial.
@@ember-evergarden You must be real fun at parties.
@@ember-evergarden cope, seethe, L, ratio, excommunicated
I believe you can actually save Kelly chambers by talking to her before the attack about changing her identity, so that in this moment that Cerberus approaches her, she does not identify as Kelly Chambers.
*This may have been mention already, in which case carry on
Still though, it's such a dumb ass move from her. Armed soldiers from the rogue terrorist organisation that you turned your back on ask you to confirm your identity in the middle of a coup and you say "yes".
Like jesus, the line right after this makes fun of her for saying yes.
While that's true it doesnt make her death any less dumb lmao
I forgot to do that last time I played and felt so bad.
Haven't played the game. Why is her identity burned, so to speak? Why does cerverus want to keell her?
@cosmictreason2242 because after Shep leaves cerberus the illusive man kinda goes off the deep end and they start getting worse so Kelly leaves because she doesn't agree with what they're doing, at least that's from what I remember
I think andromeda might be worth covering as a sorta "what went wrong?" Kinda video. I remember being actually kinda impressed by the moment to gameplay, but i also remember tye bugs, the wonky facial animation, and saying "this choice makes no fucking sense" on multiple occasions.
having played to end the gameplay gets old its a long game in the bad way it also took the driving from me1 and made it somehow worse existing solely for transport
I think (aside from the repetitive gameplay, a reused plot "Oh the bad guys turn us into them", and the fact that the game was so broken at launch) the biggest thing that went wrong was the expectation that the Pathfinder would be another Shepard, a confident space marine. Instead we got to play as someone not ready for command who is fallible. I really enjoyed Andromeda and plan another playthrough soon
@@putowtin The first team briefing was the first and only scene in the game I liked that wasn't fuuny glitch. Seeing the contrast between Shepard and Ryder as leaders was one of the few things i liked about the game, even if the rest of the game didn't sell Ryder growth that well.
@@chronichavok9847 I would say the reason it has a hard time selling the growth is because of how open the story is. It's a lot harder to write scenes meant to show a steady character arc when you have no way of guaranteeing which order the player will do content in. The Original Trilogy keeps character development either to personal missions or ship conversations specifically for that reason.
...also that Krogan fight, jesus christ🗿
My favorite part in the entire series is when the entire United fleet comes out of the mass relay towards Earth. It was just… perfect. All the running around to get people to put aside their differences for the greater good, all the crap Shepard had to wade through, and death he had to experience, all culminated in that moment. It brought a tear to my eye, and it still does to this day.
"Shepherd I'm dying from space polio."
I laughed way too hard at that
I honestly saw Keprals as Space Cancer but Polio is way funnier
@@mounne13 I saw it more as Space TB since it targets their ability to absorb oxygen in their lungs.
@jeremygilbert7989 we all know that it's really space chicken pox.
I always thought Jacob disliked Shepard, he's the only companion that cheats on you. So, Shepard not giving him medigel is par for the course.
Not enough people talk about how Jacob spends the ENTIRETY of ME2 disagreeing with every decision made by Sheppard.
I think my favorite part of the Citadel DLC is that it really emphasizes what makes Shepherd special, you pull people together.
The entire time the crew is acting like this is some big family trip, not them being attacked while on shore leave.
and it all gets naratively capped off by the ending.
you and the clone are clinging to the ramp, just moments before he was ranting about "what makes ypu so special!?", only to be answered by Shepherd's crew, your family in all but blood, saving you... while the clone's "friend" leaves him to save herself.
Someone called it "Shepard's Loyalty Mission"
That’s a perfect name for it
Throwback to the ending of the second "The Mummy" movie.
Citadel dlc was pure comedy which was a fun change of pace for that game. Liara calling someone a cheater for shooting while she was on a ladder for instance.
I dunno man, to me, the entire shore leave thing felt like wacky fanservice. In my opinion, they did the overall theme of the game a disservice by making a "sitcom episode".
The clone plot was kinda good, tho. Not extraordinarily well executed and filled to the brim with tropes and clichés, but it made sense.
Wrex went from a ruthless, bad ass veteran in me1 to a jokey, fun loving grandpa who can still knock you out in me3
And I love it through and through
Well I don’t and I didn’t. Wrex childlike boisterous behavior and teenager like false sense of invincibility. Along with his reckless aggressive actions like when we arrived at the Salarians Homeworld. Are what strongly aided in convincing me that Eve was wrong about Wrex being an anomaly amongst Krogan men and a mutant.
Because in spite of the fact that Wrex wants good for his people. He often behaves precisely like the Krogan back in the day did when interacting with other powerful and influential species.
Wrex is no different from the Krogan Ambassador who caused a ruckus right before the Krogan Rebellions War. Wrex more than anyone caused me to believe that he wouldn’t be around long enough to keep a cured Genophage Krogan in check.
Even when we were on Tuchanka Wrex failed to de-escalate the situation and Eve had too. And there is no way that Eve is gonna always be able to be by Wrex side to keep him from making things worse.
Especially if Krogan get multiple extra-solar colony worlds!
Even in Mass Effect 1 Wrex was reckless af! He told C-Sec that he was gonna assassinate Fisk. He dared C-Sec to try and arrest him. He threatens to kill Commander Shepard on Virmire in front of armed STG and Shepard’s own squad!
As much as I like Wrex look. I like Wrex voice (In ME1). I like his stories. Wrex is a reckless idiot when he chooses violence over civility.
@@endershepard7117 you missed one important note.
Unlike other Krogans he actually talks and open to options. In ME1 any other Krogan would just try to shoot you, he listened and agreed.
In ME2 he actually forces clans to unite and stop infighting. These werent just some plans, he actually did this.
In ME3. Salarian homeworld, he acted ruthless but the most valuable thing to his entire race was kidnapped by STG while theres reaper envasion going on. And even then he only threatened them, didn't shoot.
Other Krogans wouldnt hold back, Wrex does and actually belives Krogans should stop wars. With Eve's help they got all chances to do it.
@@endershepard7117 L take, Wrex is still a Krogan at the end of the day. It's in his DNA to be violent, and without violence there's no way he could have united Tuchanka. But he's also one of the few Krogan that can make long term plans for the good of his species. Every time Wrex acts recklessly there is a reason for it. C-Sec is too spineless and tied up with red tape to stop him or capture him. At Virmire he sees a cure to the genophage that the Salarians are trying to destroy. Even the Salarians there say "Saren has cured the Genophage". In what world would he not be angry that everyone else is trying to destroy it? The thing he has spent centuries dreaming about curing. I think his reaction is warranted. Wrex is the best of his species because he has all.the Krogan tendencies but is able to rise above them when it really matters.
@@endershepard7117 Wrex's actions on Virmire were both justified and understandable, a cure for the thing killing his people was literally within reach, and his friend and ally, Shepard, was going to destroy it. While Wrex claimed he had given up on his people beforehand, his tone when discussing them and him getting offended/triggered when Shepard compares Humanity's history with aliens to the Krogan's betrayed his true feelings on the matter. Him threatening violence when in reach of something that could save his people is justified, and most anyone of any other species would do the same thing.
The scene with Eve is not at all a mark against Wrex. The point was to give a female Krogan power and influence in her race's destiny, and Eve of all people HAD to be the one to calm down the tensions, they were doing that mission for her, not Wrex. Wrex was there to help safeguard her, in reality that entire mission was Eve and whichever Salarian you have with you's play.
Wrex being threatening and hostile with representatives of other races is also understandable. The Genophage REALLY fucked up his people. Do you have any idea what it would be like to give birth to multiple children, only for all of them to die because of what an alien government did to your people? Now expand that to cover the entire Krogan race. Of course he's pissed at the other governments, he has every right to be, they brought that on themselves when they almost forcibly sterilized an entire people, regardless of their reasoning. If the Salarian government came along and sterilized our species, we would be VERY pissed, and rightly so.
But the thing is, Wrex IS different. He may not like the other governments but unlike most Krogan he is fully willing to work with them if they help cure the genophage, and that is a completely reasonable request. Both he and his clan are willing to unify and work with the other clans, accept Grunt into their clan despite it going completely against tradition, and even on Virmire Wrex can be convinced to side with you provided he trusts you enough, He does not like it, but he will see your side and go along with you, asking only for Saren's head as compensation. Wrex may still be a Krogan at heart, but he has proven that he understands the Krogan MUST change if they are to survive.
@@endershepard7117 Hell, I'll side with the correct but out-numbered crowd.
The Krogan don't need to have 1000 babies a year per female. They can make due with 1. The fact that they cannot is more a show of an inability to adapt than any cruelty on the Salarian or Turian Government's parts. 1000 eggs a year was the old Krogan birthrate, PER FEMALE.
Of course, because "The Audience" had a 'gasm over Garrus and Wrex, they had to rail-road the story to fix something that, frankly, the Krogan don't deserve fixed.
If you're a biotic in this game, all action cutscenes featuring Shepherd are uncanny.
Uncanny or just fucking hilariously fucked
Literally my experience in this game. I've always played biotic.
I was so confused when he pulled out the arm blade thing in one cutscene knowing my shephard could literally biotic blast people with his fists
Well...the issue is that Shepard is NOT a biotic, plain and simple. You can play the game as though he is, but he isn't. YOUR Shepard might be, but THE Shepard is not. Kaiden was turned into a biotic due to a (probably deliberate) accident with eezo. Nothing in Shepard's backstory indicates such exposure, so he isn't biotic. In games where players get to portray themselves in the role of the main character, such as KOTOR & KOTOR 2, regardless of the variety of options players of the game have to "experiment" for the sake of "replayability", there is nevertheless a particular canon characterization, and in the case of Shepard, he is a non-biotic paragon soldier, and probably a spacer war hero, maybe a colonist war hero.
@@KravMagoodaddy chill
So, you mentioned at the tail-end of your discussion on the Leviathan DLC that it was silly that the Reapers didn't immediately attack the Citadel and repeat what they did with the Protheans.
The thing is, they were planning on it, but you stopped them. In Mass Effect 1, you learn that a small group of Prothean scientists who survived the purge traveled to the now empty Citadel and basically reprogrammed the Keepers to be immune to the Reaper's influence. Without that influence, the Reapers were unable to use the secret mass relay at the heart of the Citadel.
They then attempted plan B, which was to use the Alpha Relay. You destroyed it in the Arrival DLC in Mass Effect 2. So basically, the Reapers were forced to start from the outer edges of the Galaxy and work their way in towards the Council races, instead of being able to overwhelm them all in a targeted strike at their government, like they had done for countless millennia.
👏👏👏
That doesn't explain why they haven't rushed to capture the Citadel as the first objective. If they did, they would cut our access to FTL and Mass Relays, and stopped any chance of organizing united resistance. Instead, they cherry picked different worlds for harvest. I'll explain why. Because if the Reapers did this (as simple logic required), we would have lost already. There would be no way to leave our systems, to escape Reapers, or to gather resources from the entire Galaxy to build Crucible in a safe place. Reapers had to make a brain dead decision for this game to have any reason to exist. So basically, a plot convienience. That's it.
@@grzegorzflorek5623 The whole pulling-out-a-super-weapon-at-the-last-minute felt like a real shoehorn. We were supposed to win originally because the Reapers lost the Citadel, as well as the element of surprise.
@@NostalgicGamerRickOShay Yeah, that too. That should have been explained in ME2, not at the last second...
@@grzegorzflorek5623 what are you talking about? FTL and mass relays have nothing to do with the citadel. they work perfectly fine on their own.
no, it is explained that they didn't bother rushing the citadel because it wouldn't really do anything during our cycle.
unlike with the protheans, who were united under one centralized empire and had all their leadership sitting in one place, therefore making the citadel a prime target, the council in this cycle doesn't really matter all that much. yeah, they make some important decisions, but at the end of the day they are just a bunch of ambassadors sitting around and arguing all day.
i mean, what would attacking the council actually accomplish? nothing. humanity would still have their leadership on earth to give them orders, the asari would still have their leaders on thessia and the turians still would have their leaders on palaven, ect. us actually being a coalition of planets with a decentralised government instead of being one unified empire actually saved our butts, since, unlike with the protheans, the reaper don't have a single target to destroy to take out our entire leadership at once. they have to spread their attention between several planets, spreading out their forces in the process, which bought us just enough time.
the reapers don't really have a reason to attack the citadel until they learn about its importance from cerberus.
2:33:59 slight correction. javik was dlc, yes, but he was day one dlc, meaning you could buy the dlc the day the game launched. which, apart from causing a lot of outrage, because why wouldn't you included a fully fleshed out companion in the game when he's already completely finished by launch, means the whole game was programmed with javik in mind. they didn't have to go back to adjust anything for him, as he was always meant to be there.
3:03:02 you seem slightly confused how things work here. the reapers attacked the citadel during the prothean cycle a.) because that's where their point of entrance was meant to be, which we managed to disable during me1 and b.) due to the protheans being a single unified space empire they only had one centralised government, which resided on the citadel. by taking over the citadel, the reapers could get rid off their entire leadership at once and throw the remaining planets in chaos. however, it is made clear that that wouldn't work in our cycle. in our cycle the council is more like the un. yeah, they make some important large scale decisions, but ultimately each member has their own government, that makes their own decision independent from the council. therefore the reapers can't just attack the citadel and throw the galaxy in turmoil like they did with the ptotheans, as all that would happen is that each race would simply fall back to taking orders from their own government instead. thanks to the decentralized leadership structure of this cycle, the reapers attacking the citadel would do absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, so they don't really have a reason to do so. not until they learn about the conduit once cerberus get their hands on the AI on thessia.
3:04:00 you keep asking "why didn't the reapers attack the citadel 1st" when that was the entire plot of ME1 and if not for Shepard (and Vigil before him) they wouls have warped into the Citadel and reconquered the galaxy exactly how the beat the Protheans. Vigil and Shepard just stopped them.
well they did in ME1, why not in ME3 ?
@@PabloYaos the Prothean scientists on Ilos that froze themselves used the Conduit to travel to the Citadel after the Reapers left at the end of their cycle. They disabled the Reaper's ability to control the Keepers and make them open up the Citadel relay to allow them to travel straight there from their Dark Space home. Sovereign is a scout Reaper that doesn't leave the Milky Way as he watches over the expansion of the species ready to signal that the next Extinction is needed. When he signalled the rest of the Reapers this time, the Citadel didn't respond & he had to get Saren and the Geth to undo the Prothean sabotage. Shepard stops him before he can do it, meaning that the Reapers have to travel the slow way and enter the galaxy from the edge. When they usually arrive, they immediately assault the Citadel and destroy whatever Galactic Government is in charge, cutting off those below from help. They use the Citadel archives to see exactly where all current spaceworthy species are located using Census records and location records and start the extinction with the upper hand so no species can fight back for too long.
In Mass Effect 2, Harbinger tries to use the Collectors to create a new Reaper so they can assault the Citadel again with an advance scout, but Shepard shuts down that plan by assaulting their base.
There are a lot of plotholes in ME3 but yeah, this isn't one of them. They don't attack the citadel first because they don't have remote control over it, it's literally the point of ME1.
@@Whiteythereaper You seem to know a lot about the lore so my bad if im 2 months late
But I just finished 3. Why would Cerberus and TIM resurrect Shepard and send him to stop the collectors if TIM was indoctrinated? Shepard destroying the base actively foils the Reapers plans.
The illusive man doesn't begin getting indoctrinated until after the events of me2. He uses the technology from the reaper base (Or somewhere else if you destroy it.) To start trying to find a means to control them.. inadvertently indoctrinating himself in the process.
Slight correction - at 1:06:19 you mention the Salarian Councillor being the one who tried to double-cross the Krogan. That's actually incorrect - the Salarian Dalatress, while she looks very similar, is NOT the same person as the Salarian Councilor. They really should have named these two, though.
They did name them actually:
Dalatrass = Linron, female
Councilor (saved, ME1) = Valern, male
Councilor (didn't save) = Esheel, female
Oh! Thank you! So yes, Valern/Esheel is less of a shitheel than Linron.@@PsyrenXY
@@PsyrenXYValern is still the biggest dushe of the council
Would be the Turian if it wasn’t for ME3
Grunt falling from the hospital had me dying of laughter. Best character hands down.
"I love you, Grunt."
Just press this button and say "no."
My favorite part of the ending was that on the Xbone, Shepard's gun is still active during the cutscene so if you're spamming the trigger you can accidentally shoot one of the ending zones and the cutscenes interrupt each other.
Lol really?
It was like that on PS3 too.
Nevermind I’m thinking of how you used to be able to shoot the gun in the cutscene where shep is getting up after getting lasered.
3:52:00 Honestly, I think the fans where not so obsessed with Shepard living (though obviously there will be some who did); however, with the endings being so dog shit even after the 'extended cut'; people wrapped up the idea that Shepard was being brainwashed by the reapers with the idea that him living shows the destroy ending is him 'escaping' indoctrination - I don't believe it was the intent of the developer, but it is fans trying to make sense of an awfully written ending - I would have been cool with Shepard dying IF the ending had been satisfying - but it really wasn't and gave no closure to anything, as well as overwriting or ignoring choices made by the players.
As a big proponent of the Indoctrination Theory as it's been dubbed, I understand that it's likely not what the devs were going for, but it makes for a great head-cannon to escape the horrible reality that we got. It also would have been legendary for its memorability and people would still rank it as one of the most impressive moments where a game fucks with its player alongside MGS and Eternal Darkness.
If I’m being honest, when I was playing ME3 back in the day, I used to like these endings for whatever reason. I liked the idea of Shepard dying in the end and, in the “extended cut” ending, having his partner (typically Kaidan or Liara) carrying on with the Normady… but now I feel kinda robbed.
As for the Indoctrination Theory, I think its a cool idea and would’ve made for an interesting twist imo. I feel like ME3 just needed something different overall for an ending rather than the push-the-button style… whatever this is.
@@thegumonyourshoes The Quarian V Geth needed to be cut, as the second game fixed it perfectly; TIM and Cerb needed redo-ing; Asari part needed scrapping, worst dogshit of the series, even worse than the ending IMHO; more emphasis on each of the members. Hell even some loyalty missions for the new ones and maybe the game would have been better.
The Legendary Edition should have just contained the first and second, remastered. And a maybe the 3rd being separately funded, with much MUCH more work put into it would have probably saved the series.
As it stands I am completely put off of the Mass Effect games.
I'm not touching anything BioWare ever again, as everyone should. Why? Because it should have been clear, long ago, that BioWare has already died, and is only being puppeteered by EA.
I do think fans wanted Shepard to live, mostly because Shepard spend 3 games in the frontlines fighting for everyone lives but by the end dies. We all wanted that "happy ending" of Shepard retiring with their LI or even getting a few years break before the next game, but we got those color coded ending and each one killed Shepard, that why destroy is the "best ending" it skip the stupid color coded ending (because Shepard is alive) and let thing open ending so they can go back to their LI or something.
@@ericsebena1734 "No Sehpard, you are the Raepers"
G8 ending m8
Correction since you've said it several times.
The salarian dalatrass and salarian councilor are two different characters, even if you let the council die in ME1.
From what I understand, the councilor is not happy but in a more "not what I would have done" kind of way.
The Dalatrass is the racist bully.
The councilor is far more on your side than the dalatrass. Or at least, more amenable to your cause. So I never got the idea that he outright was against us.
Think of it as the councilor is the Salarian President of the Citadel, and the Dalatrass is the Salarian President of their government. Both have high seats but one technically works under the other. And if you save the councilor, he is far more willing to work with humans, creating a split in the Salarian War Effort.
I'm probably wrong on some details but the gist of it is there.
Edit:
The female councilor if you let the council die in ME1 is far more against you than the male one, probably because he has more respect for his life. She probably dislikes you for obvious reasons in ME1
The Salarian government is fucking wild to keep track of if you delve into it. The Salarian Union is actually still a feudal government, so it can be hard to track what’s what
I swear these videos are beautiful, the time and effort put into all of them are just amazing. I've been loving these long form videos and a small form every here and there in between. Thank you for making a 12hr day just flow on by
My wife played this for the first time last month and was able to make all the correct descisions and have enough reputation to not have Tali or Legion die on her own without me giving her any help or her looking up how to do it online.
It makes me think she should go through it again, taking the bad options in order for her to be hurt like I was when I watched Tali jump off a cliff
Why would you want her to do that?! 😱 You said yourself it hurted, I mean, it'd make her understand better that pain but it wouldn't be the same, as she'd do that by choice and not by mistake.
You can't save Tali + Legion (dies anyway) unless you're importing ME2 save file
Yep that's how my first playthrough went back when it came out, tali topping herself nearly made 14 year old me cry and turn it off and not play it again😂
@@lavrentii-kolotushkin Legion always dies tho?
@@Kris-wo4pj Yes, he sacrifices himself if you don't kill him
When we needed him most, he returned.
@don't be surprised BEGONE BOT
Honestly in love with ME3. Yeah the ending wasnt really the best they could've had but the entire game is the ending, not just the last 5 minutes
"I know Tali. And thank you. Keelah se'lai."
One of, to me, the saddest moments in all media ever.
Helps that Legion is my favorite character.
that was the first time he said "I"
That one moment really made me tear up.
I honestly didn't like Legion that much until the end of that mission. He's a great character.
And even when Legion was about to die, while doing something that ran the risk of killing her entire species, she still had the heart to say, "the answer to your question is 'yes'."
the citadel dlc was so great as a long time fan. bioware gave the fans so much time with a bunch of characters we loved.
The worst part of the ending is the tonal shift. Mass Effect goes from autistically describing the physics behind how everything works to literal space magic. Like how exactly does everyone become an AI-organic hybrid?
There's also that dumb line from Star Kid, "even you are part synthetic", presumably due to Shepard's cybernetic implants that any Alliance soldier seemingly has, which makes me wonder if people with pacemakers or smart contact lenses are considered "synthetic" for the purposes of being violated by the Crucible. But there's also a wider language problem, because even a lab-grown fully organic limb replacement that's 100% indistinguishable from an original limb from birth would technically be synthetic. How does the Crucible even measure the state of "synthetic"? It all feels way too "gamey" in the worst illogical way, like if people had INI config files that could be opened up and checked for 1s and 0s in the appropriate profile settings.
And I also wonder what kind of hippie space juice gets injected into everyone's brains in the synthesis ending to somehow end all "space racism" between organics and machines, as if the only reason for conflict between them was that one superficial difference rather than any sort of individual personality issues or politics or whatever.
What I love when watching this is all of the events that you discussed that you didn’t seem to realise were actually playing out a particular way as a consequence of your choices in the earlier games. That you just seemed to assume were a scripted part of Mass Effect 3 for everyone.
I’ve never played these games, but during 2020-2022 I’ve watched my share of game playthroughs (lol). And am in awe at how many of the things from the earlier games actually did matter in this game, but that were integrated so seamlessly you’d almost never know.
Yeah. In comparison to most other, especially more modern games, your choices still mattered in big and small areas both. It may have not much on old Fallouts, but still... shows how degenerative the industry is over time.
Idk your situation and how much free time you may or may not have but I REALLY... REALLLY recommend you play through these games yourself. Watching playthroughs does not do the series justice. Trust me.
Plus, if you're short on time you can B-line all 3 games within like 50 hours.
The “Cerberus side missions” are N7 missions, which were small additional content that came with the N7 edition of the original game. They’re just singleplayer missions packed into the multiplayer maps so didn’t really serve much purpose and couldn’t be too impactful due to the nature of how you unlock them
They came with every edition of the game
@@johnwerner6445 So they did, my mistake. Just had to check my box lol. Just everything else prefixed N7 was an exclusive. Not confusing at all that 😅
"Is Andromeda worth covering?" Yes. Absolutely. Not because it's good, but because it will almost certainly result in an entertaining, and possibly interesting, look at that dumpster fire.
I'm all for a 4 hour long Andromeda review.
I'd be interested in a "was it as bad as everyone said at the time" review, not wanting to sink 60 hours and (checks current price on Steam) oh, I guess £6 XD into finding out myself.
@@TheDelinear Yeah, I recently realized I could just play it via gamepass... I might do that, but it'd be nice to hear Salt's take as well.
I'd like to see you do an Andromeda video. There's probably a good chunk of Mass Effect fans who didn't play it due to the terrible launch. I sure didn't.
Right here 🤚- I didn’t play it after player ME 1-3 as they came out
Andromeda is a great game. Seriously. Don't judge until you play it. The gaming community is made up of mostly whiny teenagers unfortunately.
@@DepressionShaman not a bad game but definetely not a great game. shit facial animations unfinished plot undeveloped villain tons of cut content its realy just unfinished (and dont forget about the racist character creation that did not allow the creation of white custom characters. even if it was later got changed)
I did not play it at launch, the modern gaming industry has trained me to wait a year or two before touching a game. I reluctantly bought the deluxe edition earlier this year on sale and I actually enjoyed it for the most part. If you expect the original trilogy, it will be disappointing. With smaller scope and troubled production, that wasn't going to happen. It is more of a smaller, shallower, somewhat unpolished ME spinoff. But even a meh or crap ME game is better than a lot of non-ME games. It managed to keep my interest through the game and at the end left me interested where it could go. There are some BS decisions in there that have limited or no real consequence, which can be simultaneously disappointing and a relief. Characters have back story, but they are not as deep or fleshed out. The faces are better than the launch images, but nothing great. The back and forth required by side quests can be mitigated by starting a bunch of quests at once and hitting the markers on the map in geographically order. I don't hate the game, but I hate thinking about what it could have been. If you can temper expectations and get it cheap, could be worth a try. If you feel it could ruin the ME story for you, you could head canon it as a cheesy movie that was released within the original ME universe. Shepard turns to Garrus: "What did you think of the Andromeda movie?" Garrus: "Needed more calibrations."
I didn't buy it at first not only because of the launch but because it was already made clear that the only dlc was going to multi-player only. I eventually picked it up in a sale, and once I'd gotten over the fact it wasn't the Normandy crew I really enjoyed it.
I disagree with the Illusive Man view that he just turned evil in the 3rd game. He was always going towards that. He wasn't a grey area guy he was always leaning towards "evil" and extremism. Cerberus started as just a black ops group that grew bigger and bigger. The thing is, is that he understood what was going on and eventually just decided it was worth going to the extreme to make sure humanity/himself won no matter the cost. Like that is where any hardcore belief eventually goes to unless you have something to check it. Illusive Man was only really checked by Shepard during the 2nd game.
Cerberus in the 1st game lured soldiers to their deaths by thersher maws, experimented on captured people, killed anyone that tried to figure out what was going on.
Cerberus in 2nd game, "we want to control the geth and make a super biotic by ANY means but don't go too extreme(but we will use the data later on tho *winkwink*)
By their own pattern where else would Illusive Man go when faced with the eventuality that the Reapers are at our doorstep?
Yeah TIM was always going to be someone you had a reckoning with. That said...the really did him dirty in the last part. Like most of Mass Effect 3, it was pretty good...right up until you stepped into the beam.
Yeah the people who say he suddenly turned evil forget that Cerberus is essentially just the Proud Boys who became successful and powerful. They assassinated the fucking Pope!
Personal headcanon is that "Cerberus" was a project in the Alliance established shortly after First Contact - Cerberus is a 3 headed dog that guards the underworld. In a literal sense, Earth is the underworld, and Cerberus is it's guard dog; the three heads are the Alliance, the private corporate ventures, and some sort of planetary militia or 3rd party tech research group. At some point, the corporate capitalists took over surreptitiously and undermined the other ventures and the Alliance sort of forgot about it (because it was supposed to be a secret project that protected Earth assets from potential Aliens). So, Cerberus was initially a project that made sure human-centric funds staid in human projects that promoted humanity, and got so far ahead of itself that the "Illusive Man" at its head simply took control and delegated all the illegal (by Council standards) manufacturing of arms and ships and technology and formed a shadow army over time.
I think ME2 would have been a much better story if Shepard was sent to the Terminus systems to investigate Cerberus rather than what we ended up with, since ME2 has so many moments of Shepard being clearly upset with Cerberus but going along with it anyway. If Hackett had asked Shepard to seek them out and the Collector plot had happened anyway, I think it would have worked a lot better to paint Shepard as the villain many characters treat him/her as in the 2nd and 3rd games. There's little reason for the Sole Survivor background, for instance, to work with Cerberus - I think that Shepard would straight up NOPE out of that situation.
Exactly. When Cerberus turned evil in ME3, my reaction wasn't shock or incredulity, it was more a 'Wow, what took you Guys so long?'
Actually it's also more with the fact he post-game-2 began to dabble with reaper stuff, thus indoctrination and hence the corruption from within. Especially since it's a small, gradual thing, so by the time you might even notice a difference with yourself... you won't really care anymore by then.
I liked how in the "unfixed" ending all the mass-relais explode and everyone dies. Very fulfilling ending.
That's still my canon ending. Ass relays overload, explode like supernovae, and render the galaxy a radiation-saturated debris field. It was all pointless in the end. Really go all-in on that slap to the face, full bodyweight and everything.
@@ElectromagNicktype shit
On the one hand, I feel like Andromeda’s flaws are pretty apparent, and have kinda been done to death at this point. On the other, I’ve always felt that there are a few redeemable aspects to the game that don’t get talked about much (though it’s definitely still not a great game).
I’d definitely love to see you cover it, but I get it if others aren’t interested.
One of my favorite moments comes from Me3. If you brake up with Liara and get with Tali like Salt did, and take them both on the Geth dreadnought mission, they get super catty with each other. It's great.
Really?
@@shadowrosegaming3566 Yeah, one of my personal favorite interactions in the series.
Citadel has always been my favourite dlc. It was the last one released, after all the controversy over the ending, and struck me as a love letter from the devs to the series. Also, the humour is fantastic, self-referential humour is my jam, and Citadel delivers it in spades.
I've always been really conflicted about the Citadel DLC. The humor is great and it works fantastically as a standalone thing, but it just doesn't fit with the rest of the game's tone and plot. Space Hitler is committing genocide right down the metaphorical street and we're going out for sushi dinner in luxury restaurants, planning heists, and partying for shits and giggles. And it makes no sense why the reapers didn't already take over the Citadel since that's the center of galactic civilization and where 90% of all relay traffic ends up going, and the Citadel was always the first target in previous cycles.
I will say there's something about the Rannoch arc in 3 that I didn't like. In previous games, the Geth were rather unique, even for an artificial intelligence. They were a networked intelligence, one that could only achieve sentience in groups. And they were fine with that, their ultimate goal was to build a massive structure where they could live and interact together. It was a unique take on an AI that had a thought process completely different to anything organic life could imagine. But ME3 took that away, made it so that individuality was the ultimate goal, just like organics.
I just think it might've been more interesting if the Geth kept this part of their society, instead of having to conform to a organic-like mindset in order to get the "best" ending for them. Maybe it could've contributed to some theme too, that even societies with such different values can get along if they would try.
*jeff golblum voice*
Aaah ah, but you ah forget that the target audience for the game was American and to ah make them think of anything like a "Collective" being good for a society, that would ah be bad from a business sense (EA)
@@couchpotato2222 Aaah ah, Individualism finds a way.
This trilogy was my life at the time, I couldn’t wait for number 3 , the day it released I got my copy and spent the next 3 days completing the game.. perfect ending played online and scanned nearly every planet.
That ending tho my god did it take a hit to my love but I chose destroy as the other options were too bizarre to me.
I just started playing it 12 days ago for the first time, and I already finished it. I think the destroy ending is the best ending, especially since if you do it right, you end up surviving. The only real loss in my eyes is EDI. Not a fan of the geth
@@anthonyernst999 I find Control to be the most practical and future-proof. Destroy only kills all reapers and other robots who are in the Milky Way Galaxy and nearby to a mass relay, and you can only do it once unless you wanna risk destroying all the mass relays again and crippling galactic civilization every time you use the Crucible. But what if there are more reapers in dark space? Surely the super intelligent reapers would know better than to put all of their eggs into one basket for a single invasion since they also knew the Crucible plans existed since the previous cycle. And each cycle supposedly takes centuries to completely wipe out, so surely there's no rush for them to have 100% mobilization. With Control, you now have a reaper military force that does Shepard's bidding, such as defending the galaxy from any potential leftover reapers or other threat. Even if there are no more reapers in dark space, you still have a reaper workforce to rebuild everything and to restore order. Also, the Star Child doesn't say that Destroy kills off only robot races. He cryptically and nonsensically says "synthetic", but doesn't define what that means beyond saying that Shepard is also synthetic. Shepard merely has cybernetic implants based on their military specialization, so does that mean every implanted Alliance solder also risks dying from the Crucible? Do people with pacemakers count as "synthetic?"
I was waiting for him to find out about how "High" of a risk vanguard is as a class in ME3 so many enemies can instantly kill you in the game, it's insane
THANK YOU for bringing up the point around how ammo changed. You’re the only content creator that I know that has addressed that as it pissed me off for some strange reason.
The ammo and combat change was what I liked least about the sequels. I despised that more than even the ending of 3.
no one mentions it cuz theres no point to why point out them obviously being embarrassed and fixing a stupid concept since no one liked it. its the main reason why ME1 has the worst combat.
🤣 God your custom dialogue was the highlight of this this video in terms of perfect humor insert. 3:51:17 had me laughing harder than it should have. This whole video was a perfect breakdown and review and I cant believe just how much work you put into it. I hope you give Andromeda some time as well. I feel it was unnecessarily dunked on way too hard and it has gotten better with time.
* ME3 is my most replayed game in the trilogy. The main reason is that the combat system is really fun. Unfortunately for you you picked the most boring class for single player with the Charge-Nova combo, playing the rest of the classes is a blast. I've only played Vanguard once and I hated it.
* The Salarian deal carries much more punch if you have Wreav instead of Wrex running the show, the former is a major assholian and a dangerous leader.
* I honestly don't know what Bioware were thinking with Kai Leng, the only thing that is going for him is the plot armor.
* The entire London part strikes me as weak and disappointing, why are the Reapers only sending single Destroyers to the ground if it's so important? I wanted a boss fight vs Harbinger, maybe God-of-War style.
* If you're playing FemShep and romancing Thane, the Citadel DLC will hit you like a truck emotionally. There will be a 4th recording and that one will be the only instance in the trilogy where you can see Shepard cry.
The combat is dogshit
I enjoyed Vanguard until there were banshees.
@@MoonJung82 Just roll back and charge again. I beat ME3 on highest diff and that worked. Calymora + meele and you're golden. No other weapons needed.
A mean does anyone actually play ME3 for the combat? I usually just pick infiltrator with dominance and let everyone kill each other while i just pick headshots and clean the room in seconds lol
Think you'll ever take a look at Enderal: Forgotten Stories?
It's an entirely different game built off of Skyrim's engine with a new universe, story, mechanics, etc.
Has it's own Steam download so you can skip the modding process.
It's hands down one of the best RPGs I've ever played story-wise. Highly recommended. Yes, some gameplay quirks due to how Skyrim operates, but man, I was bawling my eyes out in the end.
First time I played I romanced Liara, it was fun but the cuteness of romancing Tali in my second playthrough can't be beat, she's so precious...
The biggest sin of Mass Effect 3 is that the overwhelming incidents pointing towards Shepard being indoctrinated over the course of the game were entirely accidental and ignored by Bioware. It makes so much more sense why Shepard cares about Snake Child to the point of nightmares, why Snake Child is the Catalyst AI's chosen form, and why the endings are all crud that makes no sense but surely definitely results in Shepard game-overing in the process.
That would make more sense actually huh never thought that
Yep there are some great fan-fic about that, that Shepard still got indoctrinated, sure not that much like the people who worked with those 9H a day, but over the course of years it develop a little bit.
Andromeda would be a fun video from a "Was/is it actually that bad?" perspective. I actually enjoyed the game, flawed as it was, but it is LONG.
Buys shit food
Eats shit food
"I actually enjoyed that food. But it's a lot."
🤔😅😒
It was actually that bad, some of the companions were OKAY and the gameplay was fun that's literally all it has going for it
"My face is tired" - 10/10 writing
Some peoples taste is just shit
Andromeda is just one of those games I just feel sad thinking about, because when you learn about its development it just dawns on you how much lost potential we had. 5 years in development, but most of the games mechanics and story was made in the final year. The game is so half baked that if Ramsey was a game critic he'd be shouting the game was RAW.
As it stands it really killed the soft reboot of a game. I actually wonder what they are gonna do now. A hard reboot? Or a continuation of ME3?
You can still save Cortez it’s kinda difficult and tasking but you have to speak to him like 7 times
Like in general (from begging of the game to that point)or all at once?
Yea my Cortez on my favorite save (Paragon femshep) lived through it. I believe also inorder to save him theres things that need to be completed in ME2.
Which is a little difficult when he starts repairing the shuttle and moves to a hard to see spot of the cargo bay.
One thing I wanted to point out in order to hopefully clear up the issue about the Geth and why they continue to fight you after freeing Legion is that even though the signal is no longer being sent out, they are still altered in some way. Legion in ME2 says that isolated groups of Geth would not become heretics until they connected to the network if the heretics had succeeded. Therefore, it’s plausible to assume that the Geth here in ME3 are operating under the signal and parameters that were most recently sent out. The signal from the Reapers is designed to ensure constant obedience.
Javik was not inserted into the game after release. He was not only day-1 DLC, but he was literally ON THE DISK.
To be fair to Tali, she's more of a "My country/species, right or wrong" where everything else, even her morality, is second to her people
it speaks volumes when you port a series this old to modern systems, and even with all the short comings, people still bought it, the legendary edition was a massive success, and I have a bit of hope that EA will recognise it and not do the same mistake again
This was my experience when the game first launched to a T.
85% of the game I loved except for the ending.
To put it into perspective: Preordered the game day 1, did not get any of the DLC including that extra companion. I told my girlfriend at the time I’d be MIA for a few days. And I 100% completed the base game.
At the end, the best moment for me was Legion’s story. And the moments in between. I’d tell my friends “Sure the ending sucked, but the journey was amazing! I don’t care that I didn’t get a million and one endings. What I got was a journey that respected each side character and relationship my Shepard had. And that’s what I needed and what I got.
Synthesis ending is much too body horror to me. The entire Mass Effect series until that moment have been about the conflict about these different species, and how incredible it was to find common ground with them and see that we're not all that different. Synthesis feels like eugenics to me, if that makes sense.
The Control ending is just as bad. Even if Shepard is a Paragon how long before he loses all of his humanity and restarts the Cycle?
Only Destroy feels satisfying, because it's also bittersweat. You tried to unite all these species, brokered peace between geth and quarians, and yet at the end you must become a mass murderer to finally end the cycle forever. It had nothing to do with Shepard living, but maybe that's just me.
Synthesis also doesn't make much sense in that yes now organics and synthetics are merged somehow but how would that stop some one from inventing pure synthetics int he future and then just start a new cycle (by the logic of the game that synthetics and organics can never co-exist) in the same way that happened to "earth" in the BSG reboot where some of the new cylons forget that they are synthetic/organic-hybrids and create new synthetic cylons that rebel against their makers. No to mention that it also was the path choosen by Saren.
Destroy is the only path that Shepard have been on since start and is the only logical one from the 3 faulty choices. The damn start child/catalyst should however recognized that Shepard managed to create peace between the Geth and the Quarians proving it wrong that synthetics and organics cannot co-exist.
Most of the endings only makes "sense" under the framing that the indoctrination theory is canon.
Synthesis is the reapers infecting Shepard with their faulty logic but Shep making the best of it and merging Synthetics and Organics in a form of forced coexistence.
Control is the Reapers winning, manipulating Shepards mind to make him assume he's in control so that the Reapers can retreat and regroup now that they have captured the galaxy's greatest protector.
Destroy is Shepard shaking off his indoctrination through willpower fueled by his experiences. He called out Starchild on his bullshit and chooses to destroy the Reapers to preserve life in the galaxy.
Destroy also has the quirk of having Shepard "survive" in the end meaning that there is some speculation to be had on if the final chunk of the game wasn't just a reaper induced hallucination and Destroy breaks the dream.
@@jdizzy192 Now if they'd framed it like that I would have loved such a twist. That Shepard never escaped Earth during the Reaper invasion and it was all an indoctrination dream. But let's be honest...that's not what they were going for.
@@jdizzy192 Destroy also Destroys the Geth and EDI so no.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 That is again why the indoctrination theory makes sense. Of course the Reapers would try to trick Shepard into thinking hes killing his friends. One final fuck you before he breaks their control and actually defeats them
When it comes to Andromeda, definitely say it's worth a playthrough. I will say the story is lack luster, but what carried me through it was the gameplay on hardcore difficulty, the visuals which imo are amazing, and the side stories with the companions you meet along the way. I plan on playing it again sometime this year because I actually did have fun playing it.
The tragedy about ME3 is that they did so much right, especially in regard to the characters and companions, only to have it fall apart at the very end.
Not that the game doesn't have its flaws apart from it, like you mentioned the journal is horrible compared to the other games, I mean I actually had to write stuff down on paper to remember them, without having to search for it endlessly; that you have to stand and listen to conversations in the hope it might start a side mission, instead of just talking with the NPCs and of course the way a lot of our decisions didn't really matter at all.
In regard to Kai Leng, he does appear in the Mass Effect novels trilogy about Anderson. And those were published before the game.
“I don’t know how someone can go from trusting to untrusting to trusting to untrusting as quickly as this man does.”
He does have the same voice actor as Carth “I can’t ever trust anyone” Onasi, that’s gotta be part of it.
I loved the wacky over the top tone of the citadel dlc, has some of the best comedic moments in the trilogy. And we got Wrex as a squad member again even if it was only briefly. I got to relive the glory days of Garrus and Wrex bantering and that almost made up for the crappy ending.
It makes me so happy to see a new video from you. I've watched all your other videos so it's like a new movie releasing into the theater of my work truck on a 4 hour drive. You're in my top 2 alongside JRose11
God, Jrose11 has soft lips...
This is gonna make my last 4 hours of work a breeze. LETS GOOOOOOO
Indoctrination Theory should have been canonized. Trying to explain this ending as an actual ending is a fucking travesty of writing.
Tali was a sweetheart and loved her loyalty/romance line
Andromeda is worth revisiting, and definitely came out the way it did for the same reason ME3 came out. I myself plan to revisit andromeda and give it a real chance without EA’s and Bioware’s taste fresh in my mouth.
I played it for the first time last year after picking it up on sale, I went in with low expectations but I really enjoyed it, while it was definitely lacking in a some areas the gameplay was pretty good and while the story felt somewhat underwhelming it still provided some really interesting moments and quests.
While it suffered from a lot of issues on release, I didn't really notice any especially wonky animations and the main bugs I encountered I put down to poor optimization on the base PS4 - Havarl (the jungle planet) was a miserable experience and had some TES Oblivion style moments where the game basically froze to load in more of the map. Thankfully iirc that was the only place with such severe issues.
It's definitely a case of missed potential and there's a lot to unpack, I'd certainly like to see what Salt makes of it.
i enjoyed it on release after all the bug fixes. like the models still look weird but i like the crew and how plucky ryder actually is since they were just scout/cop a solider like shepard. So ya feel much more out of your depth but still a strong sense of adventure and underdog feel well shepard was just action hero so everything felt like another day in the office. ya can make mistakes as ryder and it makes sense esp with all the daddy issues. the crew and story was fun and i liked switching classes on the fly. esp liked ryder and sam's relationship.
this is a tiny gripe but like, at 2:04 you can choose to say any of the almost 200 countries in the world and you choose Puerto Rico as one of them? cmon man.
It's a territory
I've been waiting for this one since you did the first mass effect and the fact that its 4 hours long is more of a treat than i could have hoped for. I've loved hearing your opinions on this series and appreciate all the time and effort you put into them. Thanks for all the great content.
Played ME1 20 times, played ME2 40 times, played ME3 once, it ruined it.
The Cerberus side missions were basically just there to give a story explanation for the Multiplayer aspect of the game, which was absent in the Legendary Edition. Hackett mentions sending continued strikes against the facilities in one of the earlier mission debriefings. It also *TECHINCALLY* does give you war assets, they are just incredibly minor. The little side objectives you get from overhearing people on the Citadel usually have at least 1 of those during those side missions. They give you like 5 to 10 points for the asset its related too. Like one where you have to take a Krogan Gun Battery from Cerberus, but you can find schematics for a power grid that the club on the Citadel needs which increases morale for Alliance Marines on shore leave there. I always took it as they are like side quests, not important to the main story, but there if you want them.
I 100% am interested in the Salt Factory treatment of ME: Andromeda.
First time hearing of the "best" ending. I figure the only reason people consider it the best is that they project into Shepard so hard that they're traumatized by the idea of Shep dying or ascending.
Or they didn't wanna hurt Tali
@@ElecTrishian924 In the destroy ending, tali is probably more dead than shepard is by that point
@@ElecTrishian924 your probably do end up hurting Tali once she puts two and two together.
The war asset to keep the crucible from killing the geth and edi is, and remember this, *_OPTIONAL, AND CAN BE MISSED_*
it's not something you have to get.
@@Lazypackmule I just gave my theory for why people didn't want Shep to die, I didn't say they were correct
@@gagejohnathan9641 imma need this info chief
Only just started to watch the video, but wanted to get this thought down because I'm not gonna remember it by the time I actually get to watch you discuss the endings:
The endings just inherently couldn't work. Like, they could polish that scene with the Starchild until it sparkled like diamonds and it would still suck; because none of this is the ending to to the Mass Effect trilogy. This is not the climax to the story we've been playing through. It's the climactic conversation of a different sci-fi story surrounding the advancement of technology and the inevitability of synthetics comming into conflict with organics.
Before this ending, the fact that the grand enemy of the series was essentially robots was incidental, just part of what grounds them in the sci-fi setting. The story never focused on the topics the Starchild talks about, at best we have a conflict with the Geth that isn't really the same as what the Starchild is talking about and is one sub-plot. It doesn't build up to this conversation. n fact, the stroy of the Trilogy arguably goes against the choices of the ending. That's why Shepard can't really argue against any of the points made, that's why is doesn't mesh with anything the Reapers have been saying all this time, that's why anything that adresses what has happened in the story so far is just dismissed, that's why all of the Starchild's arguments are 'In the other cycles the audience never got to see, this worked like that' and 'Just trust me, my calculations say this is the only option.'.
We have the entire trilogy presenting the Control option as fruitless and impossiable with no chance to ever argue in it's favor. And yet the Illusive Man's, who we convinced to kill himself by proving the Control option isn't feasible, corpse hasn't even gone cold before the Starbrat steps up to tell us 'Oh, actually, it totally is a viable option now.'. It's an ending thrown together in five minutes to set up arbitrary as fuck choices that goes copletely against the story being told.
It kind of speaks to Mass Effect 3's story as a whole (Gameplay, on the other hand, is peak for me). It's a bunch of really good and cathartic scenes that have nothing tying them together because the parts of the plot addressing the Reapers has no foundation to pull from because ME2 forgot to actually progress anything with the Reapers. As opposed to the Genophage and Quarian/Geth war that was developed prior. It's why the best parts are just the small chill character moments we get with the bro's we made along the way.
The nightmares and beating himself up and stuff does kind of have precedent with how Shep gets absolutely fed up and goes and bitches in the cargo hold after the Normandy gets grounded in ME1 but yeah it just feels out of place 90% of the time :/
It's because Mass Effect 1 is the only game where he's an actual character with personality and not a cardboard cut out plot device
Played femshep and she had a romantic relationship with thane krios. Really was excellent writing in terms of his sendoff, and the dialogue you got at the end. Also the conversation with Kaiden making dinner sounds more natural as femshep than maleshep from seeing this haha.
I'd watch a video covering Andromeda. Unfortunately it did some things right and plenty of things wrong. Some of the story writing is is decent in some places, meh in some places, and terrible in others. Some of the characters are insufferable and very poorly written with chringe dialog.
The game is full of wasted potential. The combat mechanics and gun play are fine but some mobs tend to be a little bullet spongy. The driving mechanics are decent. Progression systems are decent but turn out to be grindy later. Some of the quests are good but unfortunately plenty are bad too and plenty that feel like filler. Facial animations are meme worthy. It's really a mixed bag that is a disappointment for the ME franchise and mediocre at best in general.
It probably didn't help that the game took a long time Bioware had to write a bunch of code for the Frostbite engine, that EA forced them to use, that was never made for an RPG and needed a bunch of adjustments to make Andromeda.
"There were three of you with guns I thought I was the distraction!"
You have 0 idea how excited I am for this man. I got Mass Effect 2 when I was like 10 thinking it was Halo and the trilogy has turned into my favorite gaming experience of all time.
my favorite part about this video is how I sometimes genuinely can't tell what's real dialogue and what you made up, especially during the shore leave sections
Mass Effect Andromeda is about as bad as the ending of Mass Effect 3, dispointing but not 100% game ruining. The combat is actually seriously enjoyable.
Andromeda combat is legit the best in the series, and I would much rather play it than go through ME3 again.
No it's not....at qll
Currently on a 3 and half hour drive back to the North from London, this is a life saver. Cheers you salty legend!!
Fitting! The last mission of ME3 is set in London!
Salty Legend sounds like a sex move.
The fact that BioWare supposedly changed their original ending, and purpose of the Reapers, simply because they saw that some fans managed to guess it, is so god damn infuriating.
Why do people do that? If a small percentage of your fans can guess the ending, that’s a good thing! That means that you left enough breadcrumbs for people to be able to appreciate the build-up, upon the reveal. That’s the whole point of reveals in storytelling, to have all the pieces fall into place, reveals that have no buildup are one of the most commonly critiqued things in fiction.
You wasted so much time and effort, when EA gave you so little to begin with, just to give us what is certainly a worse ending than what you originally had with the dying stars plotline, and retroactively wasted our time with all those hints at that plot point.
F*ck you BioWare, EA may have took you behind the shed before you could finish your magnum opus, but that didn’t mean you had to hand yourself first, you could have finished the main story, and then added DLC to finish what you didn’t have time for.
what was their original purpose?
@@m8isb890 I think it was something along the lines of organics cause the stars to explode or smth and so that’s why the reapers have been killing the organics every once in a while to prevent the total destruction of the universe or smth like that.
Bruh the original ending was absolute garbage. "reaper queen?" Like fuck off. It's so bad
Correct me if I’m wrong but shep is not on earth for a “probation period” but he’s actually on trial for destroying an entire system and 300 thousand people. He literally walks out of his room and when he gets to the hallway you can see he was in the detention center.
I'm literally going through a mass effect legendary edition playthrough and I'm at work watching your me1 video and it pops this one up! so the completionist in me is quite happy
This timing was perfect considering I finished the trilogy a week ago, hype to see how it went for you bruh
Same
I think the illusive man was just using biotics to puppeteer the two in the crucible. He just might had been aumented slightly hence he could control even a biotics Shepard even if for a while
Give Andromeda a chance, I think it's worth having a "few years later" retrospective video on it.
It's a garbage game
Mass effect 1 was all about the mystery of the reapers and what you were up against,mass effect 2 goes all in on fleshing out your squad mates and finding out more about them so I'm ok with mass effect 3 doing the opposite and focusing much more on the reapers and how to stop them.
The War Asset system is BioWare's attempt at something I call: "Simplification". To put it bluntly, there was no way every single outcome from all previous storylines could have been accounted for in a way that let people see the specific impact of the particular outcome they had. So, BioWare set out to turn these many complicated factors into something more manageable: numbers. The problem is they went way overboard. By turning everything into nothing but their numbers, the numbers are all that matter, not the decisions they came from.
An example of good simplification comes from a game I played a while back, don't remember the name: basically, there's an evil king with armies of orcs and shit, the biggest religion on the continent has been presenting itself as the great enemy to this pure evil, protector of the people, bla bla bla... Suddenly your character gains the same powers as that evil king, from basically the same source. You use this to kill the evil king and give a large part of the land he ruled to the orcs to make their own nation. This creates a ton of problems and questions for the religion, so to figure everything out they hold a religious council. During this council a lot of your past decisions, investments, etc. are taken into account to determine how each religious leader votes on each issue, in the case of the orc nation: will the church ignore them, kinda help them get started, or REALLY help them get started? After this council, the game rarely has to come back to the specific factors that determine the outcome of this vote, and just looks at the outcome of the vote itself. All those past decisions that had an effect, can now be represented by one thing: how much did the church help this new nation? By accounting for that one variable, the game indirectly accounts for all variables that went into determining that variable. So if there's some international incident and the game says: "thanks to the support from the church, the orcs managed to get the situation in their lands under control, and even send some aid to their neighbors", the player can tell that all those past decisions have effected the current situation.
What I think would have been a better decision for BioWare, was to instead give the Reapers a system they control where their central AI Core is housed, and all your decisions help or hinder the attack on that system, for example: Shadow broker NOT properly handled? Pirates harass your fleet while you are on your way to the Reaper Core. Shadow broker was properly handled? Pirates join your fleet and aid in the attack. If BioWare had properly categorized all past decisions, then gave those categories specific outcomes based on the decisions made within said category, THEN used the category outcomes to determine how the attack on the Reaper Core went, I think this game could have had a far better ending.
That other game sounds interesting. Anyone know what it is?
@@MisterHalt Did some digging in my memory, i think the title was "The ? Sovereign", don't know what it said in place of the question mark
@@jochem12jdj Did a brief Google. Would it be 'The Last Sovereign', where you play as a character called Simon?
@@MisterHalt maybe? I have no idea, don't remember too much and I played it quite a while ago
Thanks, great video. Maybe give Andromeda a chance, it wasn't as bad as I was afraid of. I think you'll like the Krogans in it, how they're portrayed and how they factor in the story.
the whole shepard/child plotline really turned me off this game. It's entirely unbelievable that shepard has been through so much absolutely insane shit in all these games and then ONE KID DYING is what destroys his psyche. It all feels so heavy handed and like they're just trying to manipulate my emotions with a child instead of trying to tell a genuine story.
I did only play the mass effect trilogy for the first time earlier this year but I didn’t have a problem with the ending maybe because I’ve heard how bad it supposedly was my expectations were low enough that the end exceeded them but I knew going in there was never going to be a happily ever after because it wouldn’t feel right if everyone magically lived
I mean to be fair you played the extended cuts so that helps. Plus I think a happy ending would have been fine as a possible outcome, I mean it seems reasonable that in an RPG the ending can be really shitty or really good it really good based on your actions
Not to mention I think that would have been a better outcome for bioware no one sits around and does like man the fact that I can save everyone at the end of mass effect two just ruined the game for man
You played it with the extended cuts. I recommend watching Angry Joe's video about the Mass Effect 3 ending. There were just SO SO SO many holes in it that it was a death of a thousand cuts, on top of the fact the devs promised the ending wouldn't be a A B C ending. Then they called lying to the playerbase with false advertisement "artistic integrity".
The extended ending changed the ending for ME 3.
I agree. I never played any of the ME trilogy until the legendary edition. And I had heard about the ending being bad, but I didn't think it was, it actually made me cry.
Would I have rather had a happy ending, or the ability to get a happy ending if I get enough war score - yes (and I have gotten the ending where Shepherd takes a breath). But I didn't think the ending was bad - with the extended cut.
@@doesthisunithave1soul46 it's not about happy endings for me it was the introduction of the star child and no definitive ending at the time. Dragon Age had all these slides for endings when Mass Effect didn't. Fans were fine for that for first 2 games, but not the final in the trilogy. Choices didn't feel impactful in being displayed in game ending without having to use ones imagination. I enjoyed the game the whole time up until that point.
I still like the Garus romance best.
In game 2, when you first solicit him, he looks like he is mentally asking himself “am I really going to f”k an alien that isn’t an Asari? Oh god I am ok with that.”
And then he shows that he has no idea what he is doing in a cute way.
Until the Citadel DLC, because there he finally takes the lead, when he takes his girl out dancing.
He also admitted to watch inter special porn for “research”. Which is funny
hes a 13 year old in spirit and its adorable
As someone who had the 2nd game as their favorite while growing up (and choosing Miranda) I felt so shafted in ME3 where they are, as you said, sidelined, or barely accounted for, and it REALLY irked me that there was so little interaction with Miranda.
You said it very well in with "the second game didn't need to exist", because that is how little it actually matters.
I think the second game was just a big setup for the third, and viewed in that light it makes it feel a bit better.