C'mon, another "2016" titled thread? Posted in the year 2016 on a forum which discourages necroposting? Isn't that rather redundant? It's a nitpick, but I don't understand the distinction at all, and I'm wondering why you keep making it.
Adam Jensen said:
It is the last good game that Bioware has made. If Bioware didn't fuck up Mass Effect 3 so much I'd still have faith in them. But now I don't even care about what they end up making next.
I take it you won't be buying, watching anything of, or playing Andromeda at all then?
And I know this thread's about ME2 (though it feels more like a general ME thread; how can any fan ever talk about one entry in a trilogy? it is immediately and unavoidably relative to 1 and 3), so hell, PM me the reply if you wish, but how on earth do you figure ME3 was a bad game? Putting aside the last 30mins or so - because no work can be judged fairly on a tiny fraction of its content - was the core combat and powers usage worse than ME2's? Was its writing? Presentation? Or control system/inputs?
I get that people had an, er, emotive [over]reaction to ME3's conclusion, and down to simple taste there'd be many who don't find it an engaging game or story regardless. That makes sense. But for those who appreciated ME2, in particular, I find it very hard to understand how they view 3 so negatively - unless their views are being wholly skewed by the ending/s.
ME2's my favourite of the series, and it's one of my all time favourite A/RPG's, but I'd never call it a 'better' game than ME3; I feel the writing's about equal throughout the trilogy (i.e. excellent, though I'd be tempted to say it has the best, given a few key scenes - two with Javik[footnote]Who's practically Shepard's mirror, giving the mostly bland yet seemingly schizophrenic protagonist some dramatic texture she otherwise wouldn't have[/footnote] always come to mind - and the presence of the Citadel DLC), the combat's further refined and tighter from 2, and the presentational style is a further iterative improvement over ME1's famous, self-consciously 'cinematic' approach.
However, whilst I think 3's by some considerable margin the most accomplished in the series - given just how many things it does so damn well (Citadel's surely an all time stand-out of the DLC era) - for all the reasons previously given in this thread, 2's a sentimental favourite. Character narrative > plot, for me, and so ME2 was perfect in that respect; the fairly ho-hum (at
that point) 'Reaper threat' was almost entirely pushed aside, to focus on the individual trials and tribulations of a small group of characters, largely living in the seediest parts of the galaxy. It was primarily about people with motivations and traumas you could relate to, as opposed to distant, rather abstract galactic menaces.
BioWare nearly always struggle to craft genuinely good or inventive core gameplay, so ME2's by no means perfect; ME's core combat went from poor to dumb-but-fun by 3 (loadout customisation helped a lot). Still, as an example of character focused narrative and structure, I still think it stands up as one of the best of the last gen.
Hades said:
Also, I think the STUPID revelation about the Reapers retroactively ruin their presence in the trilogy as a whole. They were successful as villains because they managed to inspire dread. They no longer do and moments I thought were awesome then just lost all meaning now that I know how ''incomprehensible'' they are. The Reapers and their cronies hardly appear in ME2 so its a lot easier for the story to avoid that taint.
I felt that at the time, but ME3's Leviathan actually changed my mind. In ME2's Arrival I felt the Reapers came across as being low-rent Lovecraftian's fronted by a Bond villain... But by Leviathan? To me that retroactively made the Reapers MO across the trilogy make more sense than it'd ever done.
In ME1 the Husks, for example, just seemed like painfully lazy combat and creature design - bland stand-ins for zombies, barely justified by the lore, existing only to give you suicidal foes to gun down (and also expose the shitty ranged-to-melee/CQB transition design of ME's combat... something I don't think they ever solved). But knowing how the Leviathans monitored and influenced their vassal worlds, suddenly the whole indoctrination concept and the functional uses of other races made more sense, as opposed to just being ho-hum tools of galactic villainy.
Thematically, I also rather like that even the Reapers can barely comprehend their own raison d'etre. They live and can die, and so in truth they have not transcended anything about existence. They function outside of morality, sure, but a doorstop can do
that. I think their very mundanity makes them more interesting as far as sci-fi concepts go; space-magic runs throughout everything in the series, so to have the largest threats to sentient life be so utilitarian - yet so effective on a galactic scale - is welcome.
The
horror of the unknowable is a nice, evocative, and easy idea to flirt with, but it's not an easy thing to resolve in an epic mainstream trilogy (BioWare didn't exactly stick 3's landing, sure, but I always found the endings interesting and provocative).