LogFAQs > #940421072

The point I stopped at last night was the beginning of the last stretch of the game, and now I've finished Mass Effect!

All that was left to do on Ilos was drive down a long hall and get stopped at one point to talk to an ancient Prothean VI, which tells us about the history of the planet and gives us the last tools we need to stop Sovereign. It's an effectively harrowing story, really: the last surviving Protheans going into Cryonic sleep to hide, power slowly failing, and the life support systems being shot down one by one, until, when they finally emerge, it is too late for their species. I also like the idea of the Citadel being a trap. I thought that was kind of clever.

The last gameplay sequence is on the Citadel itself, and was kind of long and tedious. It's an area where the game's autosave system can really let you down, and two of my deaths resulted in a lot of lost time playing the same dull shootouts again. I had to resort to manual saves, but found that the area was so full of enemies that finding a time when the game relented to save, given that it won't let you do so in combat, was a struggle.

Bioware's main trick for ramping things up for the final area is to re-purpose enemies they designed for mako combat for the purpose of fights on foot. The main source of potential frustration is the Geth Heavy Turrets near the end, which quickly launch rockets that would kill me from full health and shields, and had enough armor of their own to survive being pumped full of laser. The solution I found was to duck behind cover in the right place, so that they would uselessly fire their rockets against the terrain, and then slowly snipe them down from long range.

Once that was finally out of the way, we had our final confrontation with Saren, and in standard WRPG tradition we talked him into suicide. Interestingly, you get Paragon points for doing that! I admit I miss the old days of 'social boss' encounters where you had to try and figure out the right dialog options logically instead of just immediately picking the ones that are highlighted in blue.

Not so standard is the fact that you have to fight him anyway, as a sort of husk that plays a little like the Geth Stalkers. Hey Bioware, I invested all those points into Charm because I wanted to skip the combat! He reminds me a bit of Infermon from the Digimon movie in this form. At least I can say this boss fight took a reasonable number of hits to go down. He also pulls the very cheap move of making us watch a cutscene mid-battle, so that his shields can regenerate over how much time it takes.

In case you're curious, I chose to save the council. It's a fairly political move, and they rewarded humanity accordingly by letting Shepard appoint a human councilor. I picked Anderson mostly on the basis that Udina is a dick. Shepard vows to continue fighting the reapers, and that's where the game ends.

I admit I'm looking forward to moving onto the second game. Hopefully it will be a little more engaging on the gameplay front.

Commander Shepard will return tomorrow, and so will I.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2