The reviewer assumes a very critical perspective, which is not necessarily a bad thing. He points out a number of problems with Mass Effect 3, including but not only encompassing the ending. He's right when he says that Mass Effect is, in general, a space opera and most certainly not hard science fiction. What Mass Effect tries to do is touch on topics of political sci-fi, existentialism, military sci-fi, and morality, though it often fails to get all the way there.
I find myself agreeing with the review about the general quality assessment of the stroy arcs: Tuchanka and Rannoch were convincing, in spite of problems; the prologue on Earth with the sudden complete defeat of all defenses which magically survived anyway, the sudden massive military strength of Cerberus, the Cerberus invasion of the Citadel, and the entire Prioriy: Earth finale were not convincing at all.
When it comes to choice and consequence, the fact that decsicions made by the player had only cosmetic effects is disappointing. However, it's where I'm personally willing to forgive BioWare because this decision-driven system is simply not efficient in terms of game design. Maybe BioWare miscalculated here, which ultimately made the experiment fail. They probably didn't want to invest recources in developing genuinely different cutscenes, conversations, and write entirely divergent story arcs that many players would never get to see if they played through the game only once. For me that would have improved the replayability of the series, as I'm willing to play through a game a dozen times just to see all of it, especially a game like Mass Effect 1 or Dragon Age: Origins, but then again, I'm not the only type of player out there.
The conversations and lack of character interaction are big problems in Mass Effect 3. While the unique conversations with lots of animations and characters moving around and so on probably devoured a lot of development time, I have to say that there was nothing wrong with the way conversations worked in ME1. The inability to enter a dedicated conversation mode with most characters in Mass Effect 3 isolates the player from the universe, and the lack of exploratory dialogue forces the player to accept shallow relationships with the characters. (Hello, Shepard. Hello, Shepard. Hello, Shepard. No, you can't look at me from up close because the game won't allow you to. Hello, Shepard. Shepard, I love you. Really?)
Finally, yes, the ending is a massacre in all things creativity and writing. It's not artistic in any way. Artistic vision is not an excuse for a writer to create something that doesn't make any sense at all. That's called poor writing. A writers job is to craft the ending as a conclusion of the narrative, not as something that is completely detached from the same. The use of ambiguity is fine, but ambiguity should be used cleverly, as a device to achieve a certain goal in relation to the entire story. The plotholes in the ending, however, have no goal whatsoever, and the lack of information the player receives in relation to the final choice is clumsy. It's clumsy because it forces the player to construct the consequences of the ending, that which matters most in Mass Effect next to the characters (who we don't get anything conclusive about, either), all by himself. That, however, is the writer's job. Neglecting this has nothing to do with art.
Finally, Mass Effect 3 is not a bad game. But I am certain that BioWare could have done a lot better; Tuchanka and Rannoch are proof of that;major parts of Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 and the general experience of these games are proof of that. Personally, I feel that with another year of development time, Mass Effect 3 would have been the absolutely most amazing experience in gaming history--at least for me--because I think that both the people working on it and the universe they established in the previous games had the potential. Sadly, it failed at that. And it failed miserably because the ending wasn't only bad for Mass Effect 3, it was bad for the entire series.
Modifié par beyondsolo, 23 avril 2012 - 01:05 .
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have a somewhat perfect background and knowledge on the things you are about to judge. Since they have none of the above, more than "elites" they result only as snobbish pretenders to someone with a little more brain.
