Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut; the Good the Bad and the Ugly

By BatRastered — June 27, 2012
Tags: blog dlc

Bioware has finally released the extended cut of the Mass Effect 3 ending. What's different? Did it fix anything? Should you care? Read on!

Spoiler Alert!

Yeah, if you haven't finished ME3 by now, you probably don't care, so here we go...

First the Good:

I had a couple of big problems continuity-wise with the original ending. Namely, I had James on my squad at the end, and then he somehow shows up on the Normandy when it crash lands on another planet. Speaking of which, when did the Normandy start to run away from Earth?

Well, those two problems were fixed in the new ending... a sequence where your squad mates take a hit at the end and get "evac" by the Normandy. It doesn't make much sense narratively as you are supposed to be pushing towards the beam "at all costs" and here Shepard stops, reverses direction and waits for his friend Jimmy to get picked up by the Normandy... but at least it explains HOW they got on the Normandy. Later, once the crucible is ready to fire, we get an additional scene where Joker (and the rest of the fleet) is ordered to retreat and does so hesitantly. Only a couple of seconds of screen time there, but it filled that hole nicely.

The Mass Relays no longer explode, but are merely "damaged". This is good because as ME's own story says, blowing up a relay would destroy the star system, so having them blow up in the original ending seemingly doomed the galaxy.

The epilogs, all three of them, let you know what happened to the galaxy after your choice was made. This was a big oversight by the original endings and is wrapped up, three different ways by the new ending.

There is a new, fourth option, if you decide that Shepard should be able to do what she wants and not be pigeon holed into these choices.... Check it out here:

Okay... onto the Bad:

As I mentioned above, the evac scene, while it filled a continuity plot hole, didn't make any sense in a do-or-die "at all costs" battle scene.

The three different epilogs were all still scenes (not animated) and were the same (with some minor color modifications) for all three choices, just the voice over was different.

Now the crashed Normandy takes off again at the end... WTF? Why have it crash in the first place? Similarly, the reapers that flee the planet (depending on your choice) now come back to help rebuild... they just took off and landed again, LOL. This goes to show how confusing the original ending was.

Finally, the Ugly

The star-kid ghost thing is still there, and still makes very little sense, and the green, blue, or red space magic explosions still don't really explain what's happening.

The new cut scenes glitched up on me a couple of times, freezing one image on the screen while others played over top of it.

Overall, I'm glad they decided to release this dlc... especially as it's FREE. It actually feels like an ending now despite still having some issues. That said, it's not really worth your time to download this and replay the ending sequence just to see one of the endings... just youtube 'em. If you're playing through again (to do the opposite paragon/renegade track or side quests you missed) it's worth having this downloaded so you'll see a full ending.

Mass Effect 3

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Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut; the Good the Bad and the Ugly

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