Gaming certainly has a canon, and it would be silly to claim it doesn't, but
Mass Effect 3's ending poses some interesting questions about the way it works compared to other mediums. How often do you think an album, a film, or a painting only makes it into the canon after an extensive re-working, even of only one element of the whole work? How often does it even make any difference whatsoever? Sure, I can think of examples where it has made at least a slight difference - Iggy Pop's remaster of
Raw Power,
Apocalypse Now Redux, perhaps
Blade Runner,
Anton Bruckner's symphonies - but if you stack any list of examples you could conjure up against the mountains and mountains of expanded reissues and digital remasters that clutter the market every year, it will only ever be a tiny fraction of a percentage that matter at all. Yet gaming seems at odds with this idea of revisions being irrelevant - how can a canon account for DLC, for mods, and for all the various different types and scales of remakes and remasters, from hobbyist fan restorations to huge budget full-blown overhauls? And how can it account for the controversy surrounding ME3's original ending and the revised ending Bioware later released?
I first completed
Mass Effect 3 on PS3 in June 2013, so I automatically got the expanded ending. In fact, I knew basically nothing about the original ending or the controversy around it; after enjoying
Mass Effect 2 so much, I went out of my way to avoid spoilers. And when I eventually saw the ending I chose, about 70 hours of gameplay after first entering the series, I thought my ending was basically perfect for the series, for the journey I went on, for the characters I'd met and the relationships I'd built with them. So, as far as final impressions go, I ended up with a vastly different experience to somebody that bought this on release day. Odd one to countenance with the game's legacy, isn't it? In 2023, after so many patches and ports and reissues, you would have to assume that most people who've played this didn't even see the very thing that gave the game a negative reception in the first place, and yet that reputation has persisted anyway, with this still often singled out as the weakest of the original trilogy despite all its obvious strengths. First impressions are still king in gaming, it would seem. But is that really the best way to approach gaming, when it has individual works that evolve over time in a way completely unlike any other medium?
In any case, speaking of all those obvious strengths, I would place
Mass Effect 3 as being very, very, very slightly better than its predecessor, but really, the margin is tiny enough to be insignificant. The major strength of the series is still the characters, and while ME3, by very nature of being a sequel to a game largely structured around starting and establishing personal relationships, doesn't introduce as many new people (and one of the newbies, Diana Allers, is dreadful - what a disappointment she is next to the cavalcade of strong, compelling female characters the ME universe throws at you), it does great things with the ones you already know. The newly unshackled EDI adds a lot of much-appreciated character and humour and her burgeoning relationship with Joker is very sweet, there's a real sense of tenderness in the way that
either Ashley or Kaiden is reintroduced to the story, Jack's newfound sense of purpose in life is a fine development, the previously under-utilised Aria is given much more room to breathe by the Omega DLC, and some of the back-and-forth banter you can stumble upon Garrus having with the likes of James and Tali is good fun.
Mass Effect 2 was huge in scale on its own and I did worry a little about a sequel's ability to fill me in on all the people I cared about without making the game some 100 hour long monstrosity, and yet, despite feeling quite concise for a space opera (it took me about 5 hours less to complete this game than its predecessor, on a harder difficulty), it addresses almost everything I could think of. My only real complaint on this front is that I'd have liked a little more of Kasumi, but that complaint is cancelled out by the way it ties up some of those these loose ends in ways that are better than I could ever have imagined.
The final scenes on Rannoch in particular, with peace being brokered between the quarians and the geth and Tali briefly removing her mask to breathe in her homeword's air, are especially brilliant; that might be the most memorable thing in the entire trilogy for me.The most significant change, and the thing that pushed ME3 above ME2 for me, is the pacing. There are parts of this game that are breathless, moving from one set-piece to another with barely a moment to take stock and keep up; it feels like there is a cleaner delineation between the action and the plot here that allows the former to shine brighter. At times my most recent playthrough reminded me of
Avengers: Infinity War, a film I like so much specifically because it is completely devoted to action and instant entertainment at the expense of everything else. The increase in scope and intensity of the action sequences is apparent almost immediately with the Reaper attack on Earth that sets the game's wheels into motion, and the energy of that section appears again regularly throughout - and as much as I loved
Mass Effect 2, I'm not sure anything in it could be described as exhilarating in the way this game's key action sequences are.
Much of ME3 outside of all this is kept as-is; the combat and the RPG elements have been improved but ultimately not changed too much, and the storyline simply builds to the same conclusion it was always going to, with Shepherd's final showdown with the Reapers taking centre stage. The most noticeable gameplay change is actually in the planet scanning, a minor gameplay element anyway; even the loyalty missions of ME2 are replaced nearly like-for-like with missions that allow you to build up 'war assets' - taking time out to do a favour for the Krogans means that they join you in your final fight, for instance; again, the number of these you build up dictates how good your ending can be. This is all fine, though - ME2 was a fantastic game, so why fix it if it ain't broke? It's the same story, the same universe, and largely the same characters, but when you're dealing with a story, universe, and cast as great as
Mass Effect, that's more than enough to make it one of the best games around.
(Is it a spoiler to say you get to relish in killing this annoying dork whose been antagonizing you all game?)