So I just finished the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time since the ME3 debacle, I can conclusively say that, now the dust has settled, I am still mad. According to steam I spent 103.8 hours getting to this point. Time I will never EVER get back. I actually feel guilty, like I have fucked something up by wasting so much of my free time on this shit.Mass Effect thread, I guess.
>>4126677... but why?
>>4126677Only 100hrs? Across 3 RPGs? Yeah, that's a rip off. I don't believe you. What did you do? Speedrun the main storyline only?
>>4126677Despite the botched ending Mass Effect is one of the greatest RPG series ever made. Did you really waste your time? Just admit you had fun faggot, you played it over 100 hours. If it wasn't fun you would have dropped it a long time ago.
>>4126677>addressing the genophage>ending the quarian diaspora crisis (which ends up being a microcosm of the plot because the devs ran out of ideas)>defeating the illusive manThe correct ending is that you realize the final illusion is bullshit. They are trying to indoctrinate Shepard.The only correct ending is picking red and destroying the reapers forever, let the galaxy find a new way to FTL.The worst ending is the green synthesis one, which means the supreme ascension of the enemy.It is counterintuitive, but although the devs refused to address if the indoctrination theory is correct, they do add a little cutscene that Shepard survives at the end if you pick the red TOTAL REAPER DEATH ending.The game is a litmus test, and the final sequence with the starchild is meant to test if you can be indoctrinated.tl;dr: villain realizes they can't beat you with force alone and try to indoctrinate you with words and flashy colors, you win by doing what Anderson begs you to do, which is shooting the damn thing until it diesI replayed the series too, recently. And the signs were all over the place that the only good ending is the red kill them all.
>>4126799The first game isn't that long, I imported my save across all three games so I was over levelled and the Legendary Edition adds overpowered weapons that I used to smash through combat in 2 and 3.>>4126844I was enjoying it until I got to the end of 3, the ending made me regret playing the first two games. Even at the end of the fan service DLC the characters took a tone of "well, funs over, time for the ending." which was new to me because I never played the ME3 dlc the first time around.
>>4126844>Mass Effect is one of the greatest RPG series ever made
>>4126885One of our famous 4chan contrarians enters the thread. Okay smart guy, what do you consider a great RPG series?
>>4126844Mass Effect is amazing, you just need to either exclude the last 10 minutes of the series, or realize it is all a final ruse and just destroy the reapers.
Aside from how 3 went the closer to the end you got, the entire tone between the end of 2 and the start of 3 was unreconcilable. Throughout 2 shepard was a 90's action hero. The game even ends with a staredown between him and Harbinger. Then 3 starts, he's getting trashed and immediately goes on a PTSD arc. The whole quarian/geth war was also a main story point for the synthetic/organic dichotomy within the main story. As soon as legion got in everything pointed towards the idea that if you can fix one you can fix the other. And then all of that got thrown away. It's apparent the writing teams never talked to each other and part of that is on EA for rushing it as hard as they did.
>>4126891nta but basically the universal answer is all the best classic isometric games with a handful of first-person titles like Deus Ex and New Vegas thrown inmy personal addition would be jagged alliance 2, but I know some people like to get autistic about Deus Ex and Jagged Alliance 2 included in rpgs, which when judged for their good parts they actually completely should be included in formass effect does not fit into that club, they aimed for the shark at ME2 and just jumped it in 3. I loved ME1, felt ME2 was a retarded console downgrade in all aspects and refused to even touch ME3 after seeing how shit it really was since I was rightfully wary after how ME2 turned out.When you look it in retrospect ME2 marks time time the "good bioware" died. It was already headed in a weird direction and everything they produced after it was shit, without a single shred of hyberbole. Literally unplayable garbage made for the masses to just consume without thought or feeling.
>>4126891>One of our famous 4chanWhy don't you return to whichever gay faggot website your newfag ass came from instead of perpetuating this bizarre megapopular AAA corporation video game worship?
>>4126854>The worst ending is the green synthesis one, which means the supreme ascension of the enemy.Nah, control is by far the worst. Literally every single time in the trilogy someone tries to control the Reapers or anything related to them, they end up getting fucked the worst. Especially if you believe that Shepard is already (partially) indoctrinated, control literally just means giving humanity over to the Reapers.At least in Synthesis you get to share the victory despite losing your humanity. Control just means postponing the genocide.I agree that the destroy ending is the only good one though.
>>4126844The only "good" Mass Effect one is the first, and even that's only considered good because it came out in a time when mainstream RPGs were basically dead.The second focuses more on character building (as much as people love the ME1 companions, they barely get any room to develop in ME1), but at the same time it shits all over the lore and the game's story is some weirdly cobbled together nonsense that can be almost entirely ignored without missing a thing in regards to the trilogy's overall story arc.The third doesn't just shit on the setting's lore, it outright kills it and then makes an unfunny quip about it. It also ruins the arc of multiple characters. ME3 feels like it was made by failed writers who wanted to turn the setting into a vehicle for their "deep" themes by ignoring or subverting everything the original set out to do.ME3's ending is bad, but it's just the shit cherry on top of the entire shit sundae. A better ending couldn't have saved ME3, because it's rotten at the core.
>>4127098>New VegasStopped reading here
>>4127577you can seethe about it all you like but it's obivous why NV gets on basically any list of the best rpgs ever made if you've ever actually played the genre. It does so many things exceptionally well.The only thing I've seen people even have against NV is that weird inorganic "tranny" meme that smells like astroturfing toddies and curry.
>>4127537I don’t get picking anything other than destroyIt is the only way to break the cycleAnd you just can’t beat the reapers unless you wipe the relays as the whole relay system is a trapping mechanism. If the goal is to enable the galaxy to grow past the stagnation of civilization imposed by reaper harvests, the relays must be destroyed.
I seriously don't care about Mass Effect as a "trilogy". ME1 isn't a very good game and I've never played 3.Mass Effect 2 is a great standalone game.
>>4127655I thought 3 was the best one
>>41276873 has the smoothest gunplay of the trilogy so I understand why people prefer it, though it's still very mid compared to actual shooters. In terms of story and characters, ME3 is incredibly bad.
>>4127860Nah, 3 had the best moments in the series. Grunt sending everyone away to charge into the reaper hordes. Legion sacrificing himself to end the Geth x Quarian conflict "Does this unit have a soul?" Mordin's sacrifice to end the genophage "Had to be me. Someone else might've gotten it wrong." Your love interest tearfully struggling to reach Shepard at the end as they're pulled to the evac. Sharing Anderson's last moments half-dead together before finally ending the Reapers permanently. And so on. They might've biffed the ending, but the game was great.
>>4127645>it's obivous why NV gets on basically any list of the best rpgs ever made if you've ever actually played the genre.It is likely that I have played RPGs longer than you have been alive.>It does so many things exceptionally well.It’s a Fallout 3 partial conversion mod made by Californian leftoids that is slightly less stupid than Fallout 3. That’s all. Secondaries latched onto it. Whether many of those secondaries trooned out or not (they did) is tangential.The only ground I am willing to cede is that Big Iron is a sweet song
>>4126677At some point I binged the entire series (having previously cleared ME2 and played some of 1) and never got too invested, so I didn't really care much about the ending. I mean, the series is over, who cares.Complaints about the writing being shit overall are more valid.
>>4127881>akshualy I'm oldthe way you talk about a single player game's "secondaries" or community makes it easy to see you're either a hiveminded zoomoid or some flavour of hiveminded asian, which in turn makes any takes you have on these topics worthless since the opinions aren't your ownsecondaries fukken lmaoThe way you talk betrays the fact you have never formed your own opinions. I bet you don't even realize what I mean.
>>4127878The best moment was grunt falling out of the hospital window.
>>4127878That's exactly the problem. The game is so obsessed with one-liners and thematic flourishes that it forgets to actually tell a decent story. Very little in the game makes sense or connects to the whole in a satisfying way, and it completely disregards or rewrites anything that's established in the previous games if it gets in the way of a "badass" moment.If you care more about a cool one-liner than an overaching story, you shouldn't be making (or playing) RPGs. Bioware desperately wants to make dumb action games with "badass" setpieces that look good in highlight reels, but you can't judge their games on that merit because the gameplay is too shit to pass for an actual action game.
>>4127881you've actually never played NV have you
>>4128481>you've actually never played NV have youPlayed it when it came out, I still remember rope kid shilling it.After the twin disappointments of FO3 and NV I dropped the series and moved on.
>>4128398I disagree. Mordin's sacrifice was preceded by a very fun run through Tuchanka. The gameplay was there, arguably ME3 had the strongest in the series. And the tension was high too. Plus, that was the scene where the Thresher Maw took down a Reaper, which again, another highwater mark for the series. But as far as the story goes, even that is heavily affected. ME3 had the difficulty of telling a dozen substories on a million contingencies. Was it Wrex or Wreav there? Was the genophage successfully cured or not? Is Mordin even alive? There has to be scenes for choices two games old all reflected here. And then the choices in the game too, like siding with the Salarians or the Krogan and how that gets affected by all those preceding stories.
>>4127878>3 had the best moments in the seriesProbably the best in the rpg genre. And you may not even get all the kino on a single playthrough.
I wish we could get some games in the Mass Effect world that weren't shackled to the gameplay and stupid ending of the original trilogy.
I like all three games, writing, endings and all, but I am not as good at kvetching like the rest of you, so that's probably the reason. I am partial towards the fourth ending, where you lose and Liara places the box deep underground. But out of the three "win" endings, that are all sort of similar, I usually pick control. It's the only option that solves anything.
>>4128398Mass Effect 2 basically is an action game, just with a skill tree and an interactive story. It also has better gameplay than most Gears clones. And, if my memory is correct, Gears of War 1.
>>4128869That's what they're going to try to do with ME5.They canonize destroy ending with a time jump a hundred+ years long and then only a few large choices remain when you import a game. What is the outcome of the ME1 citadel battle with the virmire survivor, Suicide mission and crew status from ME2 with arrival DLC, Genophage status, Quarian/Geth state, Rachni, and that's about it. Smaller stories can be wiped out with the excuse of time jump and convergence, or if we're generous we get 2-3 different lines in a dialogue that do a homage to your original choice.
waste of dubs desu
>>4126677maximum erect
>>4128537Mordin followed immediately by Kai Lame on the citadel was the most violent writing and direction quality whiplash I've ever experienced. That moment left a very bad taste in my mouth and was my first inkling that something was really up with the development beyond the superficial issues.
I've never played ME3 because /v/ told me in was beyond awful
>>4129286>I've never played ME3 because /v/ told me in was beyond awfulI’ve never played ME3 because I played ME1
Regarding Mass Effect 3. I never played it because of Dragon Age 2. That was the game that convinced me to stop buying EA games.Maybe some day I'll try 3, it costs nothing on xbox 360.
>>4129293>the game that convinced me to stop buying EA gamesFor me, it was Battlefield 5
>>4129296I was little early to the party, but I think the shift to live services in the 2010s got a lot of people who weren't interested in slop to stop buying games from EA and the like.
>>4129293It's a lot better than DA2. You get some cameltoe candy at least. Ending is rushed trash, and story does hoops even before that, but gameplay is solid.
