I'm going to go over the additions/changes all nice and chonological-like, but there's one bit that doesn't fit in nicely. Bioware lowered the EMS requirements so that people like me who don't want to
around in multiplayer or play some iPhone game or some shit to get the "best" ending. So, thanks for that. I guess.
The first major difference that I noticed came during the charge on the beam. Half-way down the hill you get tossed in to a cutscene where, depending on your EMS, your companions are either evaporated or just severely
ed up, forcing you to call the Normandy to evacuate them. This scene worked really well, with my best alien-bro dragging my blood-covered love interest up the ramp as she tried to push him away and limp back to my side. Explaining the amazing teleporting squadmates
and giving me a nice "goodbye" scene? Well done.
Not perfect, though. It's kind of weird seeing the Normandy sitting, like, 100 meters from the beam for a couple minutes. Harbinger doesn't even try to shoot at it, so maybe we should have all just tried to air drop on to the beam? And a bunch of marines come running out of the ship and they shoot their guns at nothing in particular then they run back on because... they were in the middle of a really intense game of Catan, I guess. Still, two forward versus one back.
Then you get up the beam and you have the conversation with The Illusive Man and that hasn't changed any and god
damn does that bit ever show off the weakness of the dialogue wheel. It plays out like Bioware was trying to imitate that one awesome boss fight from Planescape Torment where the real fight wasn't the fight but the conversation that preceded it, but... dialogue wheel. Always know what the right thing to say is, even if you're never certain what it is you're saying. Bleh.
Anyway, that part always struck me as really awkwardly animated. Anderson looks like he's trying to work out some sort of muscle cramp or something and god
damn Shepard, that can't be the most comfortable standing pose for anyone, ever.
Moving on up the beam, we get to the infamous "starchild". You'll recall that last time, I devoted a lot of SHAQ-FU!s to not being able to ask it any questions about the three choices it was giving me. So now we can ask questions. One question for each of them. And it's the
wrong god damn question for two of them.
But hey, there are still improvements! They actually flat-out
changed something. He doesn't mention exploding mass relays anymore, so Shepard no longer looks like an omnicidal
ing lunatic for not having any qualms about blowing them up. And when you
do pick your redgreenblue, the explosions go from "galaxy-destroying huge" to "a few small chunks break off and a big light comes out". So, there's that.
There's also something else I asked for, the option to reject all of those choices. Unfortunately, it ends up being the Milhouse van Houten of all the endings - you're basically just told that you lose, then some new stargazer says that future civilizations found Liara's beacons and won and don't forget to buy the Leviathan DLC. The other endings get some extra footage, most of it generic aliens looking happy and the fleet being told to flee (explaining the crash landing in the jungle), and the Normandy flying away from the new planet with a bunch of extra names added on to the wall of dead.
So where do we end up? One small but
extraordinarily distracting plothole gets a satisfying conclusion, albeit one that introduces a bit of new confusion. I've gone from having no
ing idea what any of my choices do to understanding half of them. And I'm no longer blowing up Earth and pretty much every other inhabited planet just by completing the game.
So that's cool, I guess.
