Mass effect is a game series that makes me so sad. Like, the first game was good from a world building/series synopsis standpoint, ME2 made the gameplay much better while giving the franchise a much more grounded feel then the first one… and then the third one was ruined by it’s ending that took the reapers (ancient and unknowable beings from beyond the stars) and boiled them down to busted AI and tried to retroactively tell me what the themes were (while contradicting those same themes in the same game).
As to andromeda, It had problems to be sure, but I actually really liked the idea of being an explorer and colonist as opposed to just being a Bad Donkey sooper komando Manz, and If they had put greater emphasis on things like base building and colony direction I would have been super happy.
I cannot wait for the next Mass Effect. I’m glad it’s not a Andromeda sequel. We’re going back to the Milky Way.
Biggest issue I had with the series ending was that you spent the entire series making choices of where to go, how you were going to do things, who you were going to save, etc, and it made them all redundant. It simply boiled down to a “pick one” situation, where the number of choices was based on how much you did rather than how you did it.
Honestly I feel like they could have kept the whole Red-v-Green-v-Blue thing if there was only one option that had been pre-determined by all of your earlier choices. Maybe still add the “shoot the ghost-kid” option if you want to shun your “destiny”.
It still would have been a pretty “meh” ending to an otherwise epic trilogy, but it wouldn’t have thumbed its nose at the potentially hundreds of hours of playtime you’d racked up to that point. And that could easily have been enough for a lot of people.
i started mass effect 2. its even better.