Mass Effect 3: Your spell fizzles...

(kudos to anyone who gets the reference in the title, answer below)

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that I'm a very big fan of Mass Effect. So when I finally got my hands on Mass Effect 3 (ME3) after being on vacation during its release, I played the crap out of it. There isn't a lot new in ME3 so I'll just cover the main changes from ME2 and anything else pertinent.

When you start ME3 and attempt to import your character you very well may be instantly disappointed because you'll see your very first bug. Thankfully my main Shep had no problems importing. Not thankfully he's an ugly SOB. I spent around half an hour trying to make a Shep that looked like me on the original game and gave up because, well, I wanted to play the game. The result was that I spent the next two games hating how my Shep looked and just getting used to a hero who had gotten 43 lashes of the ugly stick before he joined the Alliance Navy.

About the story.

Bioware sort of glazes over Shepard breaking off from Cerberus somewhere between the end of ME2 and six months before ME3. The timeline is very sketchy. At the end of the main storyline in ME2 you tell The Illusive Man to either "fuck off" or "kindly fuck off"... then fly around in his ship doing other missions and getting paid for a while until you finally blow the shit out of the Mass Relay in the Batarian's section of the galaxy (with a giant freaking MOON) in the Arrival DLC, which is definitely after the main quest. It's understood that sometime after that, the Alliance breaks apart your team, commandeers the Normandy, and grounds/discharges Shepard because he killed billions of Batarians trying to save the universe from mass extinction.

The funny thing is that after the first two games the galactic governments are still basically saying, "Crazy old Shepard is up to his old antics!"

The game starts just as Earth is learning about the Reaper invasion. Earth is one of the first civilizations targeted, and you're on your way to talk to the heads of the Alliance government to tell them they're getting their asses kicked by Reapers. Basically Bioware's future Earth is filled with ass-faced politicians who wear bags over their heads 90% of the time and have no idea what happens outside of their office and checking account. So foreign policy hasn't changed one bit from today's USA.

Half way through the conversation the Reapers start... reaping. The opening part of ME3 is one of my favorites. It illustrates better than any other game I can remember just how weak and desperate a situation can be. Everything around you is blowing up and everything keeps going from bad to worse without being over the top (or under it). Eventually you make it to the Normandy and fly away to the Citadel to attempt to rally support to take back Earth in the same Normandy that Cerberus built and Shepard stole. True to form, bot the Normandy and Citadel have received a few cosmetic updates.

It should come as no surprise that nobody gives a Krogan fecal pellet about Earth's problems and Shep spends the next few months playing fetch missions for everyone on the Citadel. As a bonus, you've also got to contend with almost limitless Cerberus forces since the Illusive Man thinks that he can handle the Reapers by controlling them and obviously killing Shepard is a good way to make that happen. You'll do a tour of most of the other race's worlds, fighting Reaper forces, Cerberus forces, and some Geth.

Before ME3 was a lot of mystery. You were always chasing the unknown, which was a lot of fun.

ME1: What the Hell is Saren doing and how do we stop him?

ME2: What the Hell is behind the Omega 4 relay and how do we stop it?

However the plot of ME3 is somewhat... subdued.

ME3: Kill reapers and when the Hell is Shepard's sexytime?

The game play:

Pretty much identical to ME2, however you no longer carry heavy weapons. You'll find the occasional BFG conveniently lying around most boss fights, but you can't keep it and there isn't any spare ammo.

Shepard is no longer locked into class-specific weapons, but at the same time Shep can't carry an arsenal without some drawbacks. Shepard now has an arbitrary carry weight limit. It starts off around 20 or so and can go up to 70 or perhaps more for other classes (I played a vanguard). It doesn't work exactly as you would expect, though. You can carry everything you want, but the weight of the weapons in total will affect your power recharge time. Keep it under the limit and you get a bonus. Go over the limit and you're penalized up to 200% either way. Loading up with big, heavy hitting weapons will severely penalize your power recharge. But carrying no weapons isn't going to be a big help either.

The game constantly displays tips you during loading sessions, often advising you to carry a fast weapon and a slow weapon for different enemy types. Here's my advice. Always buy the SMG ultralight materials upgrades. Eventually it'll get 80% off and it's like a free weapon. They do almost no damage, but are useful if you've got Cryo Ammo for freezing a room of enemies to give you more time.

There are a LOT more guns this time around. Between the five gun types (pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles) there are probably 40 weapons total. Each weapon has stats for weight, capacity, rate of fire, damage, and accuracy. Each weapon has two slots for mods and five types of mods that affect the stats in one way or another. Furthermore, you can purchase whole weapon upgrades on the Normandy that give them minor boosts in damage, accuracy, and weight.

Your armor is about as customizable as in ME2. N7 armor gives you a 50% health boost and all the armor offers a straight up trade with other attributes, save for a few pieces that hide and extra 5%.

Characters

The squad in ME3 consists of a mostly Normandy Veterans (lots of pardoned Cerberus personnel) and a few new guys. Someone you'll meet right away is a Latino Soldier named.. well I honestly can't remember his name because he annoyed the shit out of me and I kept hoping I could get him killed (spoiler alert, I couldn't...). You'll spend a lot of time doing missions and saying, "Well hey, if you want to get on the ship, great." and getting new team members, again depending on who survived the last two games you'll have a lot of familiar faces.

You and your squad now have a more diverse powerset. In ME2 there were four powers, now there are five. There are six upgrades per power with the last three involving choices as to how you want the power to evolve. Generally the choices are tradeoffs between damage and area, health/shields and weapon/power damage, that sort of thing. Some characters can significantly effect the squad as a whole which can be very useful if you plan on letting your Shepard lack in some areas.

Grenades are back as powers now. So you can toss them until they're gone if they're available to your class. As far as the biotics and tech powers go, they're largely the same with a few exceptions, depending largely on who survived the previous games.

Squadmates remain largely useless in combat and do about 1/10th of the work Shep does until you tell them to focus on an enemy. Their mapped powers change from the primary to whatever would be more useful to the situation at hand. So if your primary mapped power is pull, but you're targeting an armored bad guy, it'll change to something that works on armor (usually).

The big difference in ME3 is now the squad hangs all over the ship interacting with each other. This can be rather entertaining as the squad will bicker with each other and recount old times. It adds a lot of depth to the characters. There is a trade off, though, there seems to be fewer conversations between Shep and the squad this time. I hope you enjoy combing each level of the ship for conversations because that's what you'll be doing between each mission.

The war

Everything you do in ME3 is to contribute to your War Assets and Galactic Readiness rating. Ultimately you're attempting to rally the entire galaxy to save Earth if possible. This involves every species to whatever extent is possible. Generally you'll do a mission or three for a race and they pledge their support during the final push.

Most of the stuff you find throughout the galaxy will contribute to this. Like finding a squadron of fighters that got lost, or finding a flag so some Turian squad's morale will be bolstered. Minor stuff like that. It all has a point value, some of it is almost insignificant, some of it is a giant help.

More on all this later.

Exploration

This will be fast. Because there is none.

Apparently from ME1 to ME3 nobody thought to build another stealth ship, because the Normandy is the only one that can come and go where it pleases. In ME3 the galaxy map gradually lets you go to almost every system from the previous games, letting you fly around to known systems to your heart's content. However the Normandy can now send out a SONAR like ping that can find things withing something like a 1 or 2 AU radius. All you're doing is looking to see if something might be on a planet or floating around in the form of wreckage. If a planet has something on it, you scan for it ME2 style and send in a probe. Unlike in ME2, probes are unlimited because you'll only ever need 20 or 30 throughout the game.

Scanning doesn't come free, through. Every time you send out that ping, an "awareness" meter will begin to fill and a few red arrows will appear on the edge of whatever system you're in. Keep scanning wantonly (sometimes just twice will do it) and the Reapers will show up on the edge of the map like some intergalactic troggles and chase you down until you leave the system. They come back every time you re-enter that system until you complete a mission, at which point they universally lose interest in you and kindly go back to whatever low traffic area of space where these god-like creatures must be looking at Reaper porn or something. Otherwise why would they NOT be hiding out at each Mass Relay? Yup, the only reason an advanced race like that would be hiding has to be porn.

Paragon/Renegade

Okay, here's where things get iffy. The good/bad, +/- scale in games has always been a strange line to walk since the ending of the game is almost universally the same aside from a few shining examples such as Jade Empire, ME1, and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (yeah, I remember it!).

Just like in the previous games you'll spend a lot of time being a nice guy or a dick. Just like in the previous games if you're nice enough or dickish enough, you'll get special conversation options that are reserved for people with enough points on either side. The problem here is that I always seemed to be able to take either choice despite the fact that my Renegadity was always over 75%. That's just how I play my main Shep. He's generally a dick but isn't stupid and bullheaded.

Whereas ME1 and 2 managed to more or less lock you into one style, ME3 gave me the option of being completely bi-polar. Shooting a hostage taker in the face and pissing on his mother's grave for effect one moment, kissing a civilian's boo-boos and brewing hot cocoa for orphans the next. You get the idea.

Trigger pulls for "bold Renegade" actions and "bold Paragon" actions are fewer and farther between than in ME2, if I'm not mistaken. And almost universally the "bold Paragon" move is to, and I kid thee not, hug someone.

Old choices/New choices

This is where ME3 really "suffers". ME3 makes an effort to have you focus in on three important stats. The Readiness Rating (a percent), War Assets (total military strength) and your Effective Military strength, which is War Assets * Readiness. The problem is that at the beginning of ME3, your total available War Assets are finite. And your Readiness rating starts off at %50. Meaning that you have to work incredibly hard for the 'best' ending(s).

The only way to affect Readiness is to play the multiplayer game (which is actually fun, but won't be reviewed) or to play minigames for your iPhone/iPad. Either way, to get your readiness rating you have to fork money over to Bioware, sortof. See, in ME3 your new copy comes with a code allowing access to the multiplayer game. If you buy it used, you need to buy a code. And the iGames aren't free, either.

The finite available War assets aren't supposed to be a problem, but they are because the sum of all your decisions throughout the ME universe will factor into the total possible points. Meaning that there is a theoretical maximum and minimum points available.

The controversy really comes from the inability to easily determine what paths would lead to the greatest success. Presumably, you should be able to play ME3 through without importing a character, and get the best ending without playing multiplayer or paying for iCrap.

How many play throughs will it take you to determine how to optimally gather galactic forces? 10? 20? 100? Each time you'd need to spend dozens of hours doing the same lame fetch missions to see if you can get your military strength to the highest possible number.

As I understand it, there are over a dozen possible endings to ME3 with the main determination being the major decision at the end of ME2. Many of the endings are remarkably similar, and none of them are very descriptive. Even so, you have a major decision on how to handle the reaper problem at the end of ME3 which can determine what happens. I wasn't happy with how things turned out.

You can look at this two ways. You can say Bioware gypped you out of a descent ending, robbing you of any sense of fulfillment, or you can say that you played out a story in the way you chose and you got what you earned.

I'm more 50/50. I think that after spending well over $200 on a series of games I'm entitled to a lot more closure if I managed to save Earth and/or the galaxy, however if I wasn't able to save anyone, well, there is no more story to tell, is there?

In conclusion
I think ME3 is a damned fine game. The missions range from defending one of the multiplayer levels from a few waves of enemies to epic battles across the face of a planet. Often I felt like the decisions I made no noticeable difference in course of the ME world. Finally, I feel that Bioware does owe its players a lot more of an ending. We've paid for it, we've earned it, and we've learned to expect it from a Bioware game. (I could and probably will devote a separate entry to address game endings)

Is it perfect? No. Is it better than ME2? Probably not. Is it better than ME1? Yes. It is simply the conclusion to ME1 and 2, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'd recommend anyone with any vested interest in Shepard's universe to play it.

Bonus: Annoyed the crap out of me

1. The reaper Troggles. Every time they enter a system they make the noise that originally terrified you. The sound effect quickly went from blood curdling rumble to annoying bass from the jackass in the rice burner outside.

2. The SPECTER firing range locked the game every single time I entered it. I'd have to save the game and restart the XBox in order to get in to test out weapons.

3. No definitive damage for any weapons. Even with the firing range you wouldn't know a weapons true abilities until you played a mission with it. The test dummies on the range weren't effective test subjects at all.

4. This one was a big annoyance. It probably should be in the main review. ME3 suffered from a good deal of deus ex machina. In many situations it's just fine because you're attempting to make things happen. But there are a few fights with a kind of hopeless boss that are infuriating. Mostly because you could easily beat the sonnofabitch if you had more time. And a lot of fights that don't end when you would expect.

Your spell fizzles

My brother and I had a game called Eamon on the Apple IIGS. It was a text based adventure and we were too young to really understand how to play it. When you tried to cast spells they would only work if you were a high enough level, otherwise they would "fizzle" and if i recall correctly, sometimes your companion would laugh at you.