Dragon Age 2's Downloadable Content

So, I've been thinking about these Add-On rants I do on occasion. Until now, I've been waiting to post each rant on a game's add-ons until all of them have been released. But that really doesn't make much sense; any poor fool who's actually going to listen to my opinion about them isn't going to wait until a year after the game's released to consider each add-on as it comes out. So, starting today, I'm going to just put up the Add-On rants as soon as I wish, and update them as new Downloadable Content or Expansions and whatnot come out, instead.

Besides, if Bioware doesn't do a hell of a repair job on that terrible ending for Mass Effect 3, I doubt I'll particularly feel like purchasing their games and add-ons ever again, and then I'd just be sitting on a perpetually unfinished rant.

Anyways! Dragon Age 1's add-ons had their good moments, but as a whole, I was far from impressed with the game's extra content. Did Bioware do better this time around? Let's see.



The Exiled Prince: I actually had a separate rant dedicated to this package that I posted a while back. Check it out for the details. The long and short of it is, while this add-on's content is alright, Bioware's selling it to players is a dishonest rip-off, as the core plot of DA2 is, even if only in one small (but significant!) aspect, incomplete without this DLC. If you want the plot, the primary core of the game, in as complete a form as possible, you have to pay for the game AND pay extra for this on top of it.


The Black Emporium: This DLC is available to anyone who buys the game new for free. It's not available to anyone who doesn't buy the game new (so anyone buying the game used is out of luck), but I think that's fair. I mean, buying the game used means not actually supporting Bioware with your purchase, so it wouldn't be fair to expect them to throw in extra content for free just for the heck of it.

For the most part, it just adds a few items and recipes to the game, but there are just enough things of note that I'll consider this a real add-on. First, it DOES add a new area, albeit a very small one, and a new NPC with some dialogue and such. It all pretty much just amounts to a new and strange shop with a rather odd shopkeeper to hear a few lines of dialogue from, but for what it is, it's not bad.

More important (and yet, somehow, mostly ignored) is the fact that this DLC also adds a Mabari hound to protagonist Hawke's family. The dog can be summoned during battle to help you, which is nice, but unimportant. Of note, though, is the fact that there are several conversations added to the game with the dog, small scenes where Hawke or one of Hawke's companions or household members will interact with the dog, usually in amusing ways. This is neat, and even helps further develop the game's characters a little through their interactions with the canine. In fact, this token add-on NPC is actually a more legitimate character than DA1's Mabari hound was, even though the previous game's dog was supposedly a full party member! There are actually more scenes of conversation with DA2's free add-on dog than there were with DA1's so-called "real" character, and while none of them amount to anything particularly important or create any notable personality for the mutt, they're certainly no less significant than DA1's dialogue scenarios involving the hound.

So, a free shop and a free semi-party member which develops other characters through their relations with it and that improves upon (if not fixes) the first game's problem of poor representation of its animal character? This is certainly a decent little DLC. Nothing great, but decent.


Legacy: Two words come to mind: Lame, and Pass. You might think that a quest wherein Hawke finds out that his/her father was involved with the Grey Wardens sealing an ancient, unknowable horror within a tower of Darkspawn and mystical wards might be interesting, especially when it turns out the sealed being is one of the ancient Magisters who originally created the Darkspawn through their hubris-inspired transgressions into the Dragon Age version of Heaven, but you'd apparently be dead wrong. Barely any focus is actually put on the role and character of Hawke's father, nixing most chances for character development for Hawke and Bethany or Carver (if you brought them along). Really, that aspect basically never goes much further than other people saying "YOU HAVE THE BLOOD OF YOUR DAD WHO WAS HERE DOING STUFF ONCE;" there's nothing actually substantial said about it or him. The Magister is mildly interesting, I suppose, but though this provides a little bit of confirmation for the dogma of the Chantry, this unexpected development never really goes anywhere, with any major questions of the ancient, myth-laden history of Dragon Age that the Magister could have provided insight for left unasked and unanswered. If Anders and Varric are along for the ride, they can have a little extra dialogue, but it doesn't amount to anything more than saying hi to the guy who made Varric's crossbow (and then killing him), and Anders seeing that maybe there's more truth to the Chantry's legends than he thought. The only really worthwhile part of this DLC comes at the very end, wherein Hawke's mother (or a vision of her, since you can play this before or after her demise) speaks of parental pride for Hawke and the ways Hawke is similar to his/her father. That part's nice enough, but everything up to it is bland and rather forgettable--and even this final talk could have been better, had the DLC properly established the character of Hawke's father so the comparison would mean more. Not really worth the time, definitely not worth the money. The money being $10. When I did my Fallout: New Vegas DLC rant, I said at the time that $10 seemed an awful lot for a DLC package, and that is still how I feel, but I suppose that nowadays with rising costs of everything that this is probably a price I'll have to get used to paying. Nevertheless, Legacy's not worth an average price regardless of what that may be.


Mark of the Assassin: I'm not totally sure whether I like this DLC more or less than the last. Felicia Day's character of Tallis, the elven Qunari assassin who was star of the small online Dragon Age video series Redemption, joins with Hawke temporarily for a small adventure. Tallis is alright here, but she was more interesting in Redemption by a lot, and the rest of the cast basically just get pulled along by the plot's events. With 75% of the DLC basically being breaking into and then escaping a well-guarded vault in a mansion, a large part of the this thing just feels like a rehash of Mass Effect 2's Kasumi Loyalty Mission DLC, only not nearly as interesting and without good characters. The Qunari culture is brought up in this package, which makes sense since Qunari affairs turn out to be the central focus of the small adventure, but it's never explored adequately, much like Hawke's eventual decision to help or abandon Tallis. There's some humor to this, but it's kind of hit or miss--sometimes Felicia Day's character is amusing when she's trying to be, and sometimes below-par writing and an inability of Ms. Day to visually convey her message just makes things bland and slightly annoying (and either way, Tallis has become more glib than her character as according to Redemption really allows for). In the end, there's really nothing in this add-on that's especially good or bad, but I'd have to say that the small negatives outweigh the small positives. People will buy it anyway because it's about Felicia Day playing a character whose design amounts to "Let's make Felicia Day into a video game character," but they'll be throwing money away on a sub par product.



It seems that this is the end of DA2's add-ons. Bioware hasn't said it is, but they haven't given any indication for the past half year that there's going to be more, and lukewarm player response to Dragon Age 2 means there's not much reason to keep making content for it.

So how'd it stack up? Poorly. The add-on with the best content, The Exiled Prince, is unethical. Half the DLC packages are bland and have virtually no noteworthy qualities. Lastly, The Black Emporium is good, but ultimately serves an incredibly small role in the audience's experience of the game. Frankly, even the original Dragon Age did a better overall job with is DLC, and you may recall that I was not impressed by and large with the add-ons for that game. Bad show, Bioware.

Mass Effect 3's Ending

Okay, first of all, if you haven’t already played Mass Effect 3 to the end and beaten it, then don’t read this rant. Not only is it going to have spoilers up the wazoo, but I’m going to be going about my blathering with the assumption that you have experienced knowledge of the game’s events, so some parts of this probably wouldn’t mean all that much to you anyway if you haven’t played ME3 through. All you need to know for now is that ME3 is an utterly fantastic game whose ending is so horrible and disappointing that it sours every previous moment of the entire series. If you haven’t already gotten ME3, you may actually want to not buy it, unless Bioware adds more and better ending options later. It’s that bad.

So! Mass Effect 3’s endings. If you’ve seen it, you probably hate it--a poll on Bioware’s forums with, at the time of this rant, over 50,000 participants (http://social.bioware.com/633606/polls/28989) places, at the time of this rant, 91% of people as wanting the whole thing redone, with another 7% who are okay with most of the ending but at least want one important detail (the role of Joker and the Normandy) changed. That leaves a whopping 3% of ME3 gamers, if this sample group is a fair indication of the gaming populace as a whole, who find the game’s endings acceptable at the present time. Well, hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m in the 91% on this. ME3’s ending is like a punch in the gut to me. If this isn’t the very first rant of mine you’ve ever read, then you probably know how much I love the Mass Effect series, and the conclusion to ME3 leaves me feeling hollow and hurt.

Of course, whether I should bother with this at all is questionable. All kinds of people have spoken out about it, detailed every aspect of the endings that is wrong or out of place, so what I’m going to say below is just going to be a repetition of many others’ words, I’m sure. In addition, with the many, many people (including myself) who have stated that they flat-out will not make another purchase from Bioware from now on if this issue is not addressed and a proper ending given, there’s a fair chance that what I say here will eventually be invalidated by the developers providing another option for the game’s finale in the future, much like I had to retract my rant on the stupidity of Fallout 3’s ending after the developers fixed the issue and extended the game in the Broken Steel Downloadable Content.

Nonetheless, I need to get this off my chest. If this rant is redundant, so be it--it’s still a collection of my opinions on RPGs, and I’ve got a hell of an opinion on this one. And if this rant is to later be invalidated by Bioware addending or adding ending content to the game, so be it once more--nothing could possibly please me more than to eventually have to do a retraction to this rant. So, with all that out of the way, my thoughts on why the endings of Mass Effect 3 SUCKED UNHOLY SHIT.

(Please note: For the purpose of this rant, the “ending” I speak of begins when Shepard rides the elevator up and meets the Catalyst Hologram Kid).


The Small Stuff

There are a lot of aspects of the endings to ME3 that are very dissatisfying to me, but I have to overall recognize as smaller issues, more my own preference than a serious problem. These are the little problems that I could forgive either if done better, or if they were part of an ending that was overall good.

- Shepard dies at the end, regardless of what you choose. If you choose Convergence, which is deciding to have synthetic life and organic life merge, Shepard is dissolved in the Magic Green Space Energy he/she leaps into. If you Control the Reapers, Shepard dissolves in the control beam thingy. If you Destroy the Reapers (which is the closest thing to a moral choice you get), Shepard is destroyed with them because he or she is (supposedly) synthetic enough to get hit by the Crucible’s synthetic kill-wave. Call me old-fashioned, and unoriginal, and all that jazz, but I generally like my hero to get a happy ending in games. Yes, a sacrificial hero can be immensely moving, and there are many endings I’ve seen where the hero dies which I would never dream of criticizing. Final Fantasy 10 comes to mind--that was an incredibly moving ending, and the entire game’s theme of sacrifice for the good of others, not to mention the general mechanics of the FF10 world that have been set up throughout the game, necessitates it. But as a general rule, I like my hero to live, and if a hero’s death in the finale isn’t done well and with excellent storytelling purpose, then the death feels cheap to me. I think a lot of the time people have endings where the hero dies just because they want to seem more bold or deep than all those other happier endings. Now, as ME3 has a major theme of sacrifice already, I admit Shepard’s death can be thematically important, so I’m not going to make this a huge issue, but all the same, it’s a disappointment to me that he/she and his/her love interest (especially if it’s Tali) won’t get a chance to spend their lives happily and together.

And don’t give me that crap about the couple secret seconds of ending footage where we see someone in armor surrounded by rubble take a single breath. Yeah, it’s probably supposed to be Shepard, but it’s just too short, too vague, and too inconclusive to count. When I say I want Shepard to live, I mean I want to SEE him/her LIVE, not see someone who MIGHT be Shepard take a single breath.

- Shepard’s death in the Destroy ending doesn’t make a lot of sense. Supposedly it’s Shepard’s implants that make him/her synthetic enough that the Reaper-destroying energy wave will kill Shepard as well. I don’t really think some implants, even if they’re fairly extensive, should be so easily mistaken for artificial life. And does this mean anyone with significant technology implanted in them will also be killed? Because that means that a decision to kill the Reapers, which again is pretty much the best choice for a player going for a Paragon (good guy) Shepard, is also a decision to kill every most Biotics in the galaxy, since they have implants to help them use their powers, not to mention who knows how many people who use technology in their body to help them live. Do they die, too? How many implants makes one synthetic instead of organic in the Crucible’s kill-switch’s judgment?

- The whole thing with the Catalyst Hologram Kid doesn’t feel right to the game, particularly not for the ending. It comes out of nowhere, really, and seems the kind of philosophical metaphysical scene that you’d see in an entirely different kind of science fiction, like something Isaac Asimov would do--in fact, there’s a lot about this final scene and ending that reminds me of Golan Trevize’s decision at the end of the second to last Foundation book by Asimov. But for Asimov, a scene like this works, because his story’s style, focus, and flow mesh well with the quiet little bit of ancient galactic philosophy and such. With Mass Effect, the final scene with the Catalyst Hologram Kid, his speech, the decision he pushes on Shepard, it all seems completely foreign to the way the Mass Effect series has been handled. Not to say that ME doesn’t have its philosophy and decisions for the future and mysticism, but they’re handled differently, and the series generally has a more straightforward, realistic tone to its science fiction. This scene is like ending a Star Wars movie with something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn’t fit right.

- The Normandy and its crew in the ending is a real head-scratcher. Why are they fleeing from the battle for Earth? We don’t really see the other ships leaving. Maybe the Normandy starts fleeing only after it sees the wave of energy coming from Shepard’s decision, but if so, why is it ONLY the Normandy we see fleeing through the mass relays from it? And why does Joker flee it to begin with? He can’t possibly know what the hell the energy wave is, and everyone’s expecting the Crucible to start doing something massive to destroy the Reapers anyway. Also, how is it that Shepard’s squad members (at least some of them) are in the Normandy with him? Everyone in the battle for Earth has a role to play, and that role is implied for every member of Shepard’s team to be fighting on the ground. What’re they doing on the Normandy all of a sudden? Did Joker have to pick them up from a danger zone?

It’s also annoying because, as they and the Normandy are now on another planet who knows how far away in the galaxy, it means that even if Shepard survives the ending (if you count that stupid second of footage of someone breathing), he/she is going to be separated from the people he/she cares about most. (This is quite literally true--the squad members shown exiting the Normandy in the ending are the ones Shepard has the most rapport with, according to the player’s choices in dialogue with them through the game).

- I know we have to take some things on faith with the whole suspension of disbelief thing, but I have to ask, exactly how does the Magic Green Space Energy in the Convergence ending work, exactly? Even in a series where giant talking dinosaur people are opening miniature black holes with their minds thanks to blue swirly waves, the idea that some galaxy-spanning energy wave can instantly transmute every living thing it touches into a functional combination of organic and synthetic material is basically preposterous.

- The choice of Convergence with the Magic Green Space Energy...what if someone in the galaxy doesn’t WANT to be both organic and synthetic? Why does Shepard get to decide every free-willed individual’s physical fate? I can kind of let this go in that Shepard’s supposed to be the savior of all life and the one the galaxy rests its hopes on so he/she is sort of empowered to make that kind of decision, but all the same, it’s more villain-ish than hero-ish, to impose one’s will and decision upon everyone else without their consent.


Serious Problems

These are the many aspects of the ME3 endings that are a big deal, that majorly lessen the quality of the ending. More than the smaller details above, these issues, mostly instances where the core reasoning for the ending doesn’t make sense, make the endings and their events outright bad. While a well-made ending could let the above criticisms be acceptable and glossed over, these issues are kind of too much to look past.

- The color of the energy wave at the end is wrong. I’m fine with the Magic Green Space Energy being green for the ending where synthetic and organic life is merged--that’s totally outside the normal moral compass of the Mass Effect series so it having its own color is fine with me. But the Destroy and Control ending options are reversed from what they should be--the energy wave color if you choose to Control the Reapers is blue, while it’s red if you choose to Destroy the Reapers. It doesn’t SEEM like a big deal, until you consider that the colors of blue and red are used in the ME games to represent Paragon (good guy) and Renegade (jerkwad) choices, respectively. And then it becomes a problem--because this ending sequence implies that it’s the Renegade option to Destroy the Reapers, and the Paragon choice is to Control them.

Uh, no. That’s not how it fucking works.

See, the major, final choice of Mass Effect 2, and a huge, huge part of Mass Effect 3 has been the question of whether humanity should destroy the technologies associated with the Reapers, or try to use them to gain technological domination. From the moment in Mass Effect 2’s finale that Shepard was faced with the option of either destroying the Collector base or leaving it intact so it could be studied and its technologies harvested for humanity’s use, the Paragon path has been to destroy the Reaper’s technology, destroy the Reapers. The idea behind this, which is quite sensible, is that the technology of the Reapers is too dangerous (what with the constant danger of Indoctrination just from being around them) and too steeped in evil (what with involving liquidating people and/or forcibly mutating them into monsters), to use in good conscience. There’s also the fact that such power has incredible corrupting potential. The only way to preserve peace and unity in the galactic community--which is what Paragon Shepard is all about--is to eliminate the Reapers and all they directly touch, not to wield their power. On the other hand, the Renegade option has always been that of control and domination over all others, the idea that Shepard and humanity should be the ones completely in control, and what’s best for everyone is to shut up and get out of their way. The Renegade path is one of ends justifying means, doing whatever it takes, no matter how loathsome, to win. Controlling the Reapers and their technology is exactly the kind of thing Renegade Shepard is all about.

So why exactly is it that the option to Destroy the Reapers at the end, which SHOULD be the Paragon choice, has a red energy wave, while Controlling the Reapers has a blue one? The colors have symbolic importance to the series; they’re not just random colors. These endings would imply that the right thing to do is to follow in the steps of the Illusive Man, a guy willing to commit unspeakable horrors on innocents in the name of progress, and attempt to Control the Reapers. The game even shows you a vision that associates the choice with the Illusive Man, so there’s no question of whose side you’re taking. These endings would also imply that the jerkwad, control-freak self-important Machiavelli thing to do is to follow in the steps of the consistently heroic David Anderson (who is visually associated with this next choice) and Destroy the Reapers, knowing they’re too dangerous to try to use and would also destroy any chance for galactic unity when one man held all the power. Once again, according to the endings’ use of the series’s symbolic color system, the Renegade thing to do is to want peace and not to give in to the temptation of control and power, and the Paragon thing to do is to follow in the footsteps of a guy who’s committed some of the worst atrocities imaginable out of a desire to subjugate all sentient lifeforms who didn’t look enough like him.

Again, you may think it’s a small thing, the color, but symbolism’s important, and the color symbolism here makes a statement that flies in the face of the rest of the series and is seriously wrong.

- Now that we’ve established that, regardless of what the colors indicate, the Paragon ending option is to Destroy the Reapers and the Renegade one would be to Control them, we come to a huge problem with the Destroy ending: the Geth and EDI. If Shepard chooses to Destroy the Reapers--which, again, is what Shepard has to choose if Shepard is a Paragon and believes in unity and decency and equality and all that jazz--then the Reaper-destroying energy wave is apparently going to destroy the Geth and EDI, as well, since they’re synthetic life like the Reapers. For a lot of Paragon players, Mass Effect 3’s events will include the Geth’s rise to individual sentience and a confirmation that they are just as entitled to existence and the rights of sentient people as any organic life. For probably most Paragon players, EDI will, over the course of ME3, take her first but very definitive steps toward being a person and not just a machine, growing beyond her initial programming and developing a personality, a self, a soul.

So what this ending is telling us is that if we want to make the only moral choice allowed, to Destroy the Reapers, we have to kill EDI and the Geth. Now, it’s somewhat annoying to me that a caveat is included at all; having to choose that someone dies for the greater good is closer to a Renegade choice than it is a Paragon. But sometimes Shepard is faced with such choices, like the one on Virmire in ME1 where he/she had to choose which squad member to sacrifice. So I can accept that there are sometimes tough choices that have to be made. Nonetheless, I have a major problem with this. See, this choice basically means that the very instant the Geth get a chance to exist on equal footing with biological life forms, the instant they gain the ability to exist as a people instead of a collective consciousness, the instant they gain the ability to live the way they’ve always wanted...they’re wiped out. What, exactly, was the POINT of giving players the ability to save and elevate the Geth if the player then has to decide a couple hours later, assuming the player wants to continue doing the most moral, Paragon-like thing, to destroy them all? Having a major decision that invalidates a significant prior decision if decided in the same way is stupid, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Shepard didn’t save the Geth and give them individuality just to immediately take it back. Shepard didn’t spend the whole game helping EDI along with her quest to understand how to live as a person just to destroy her chance to do so.

- Speaking of EDI and the Geth, they kinda prove the Catalyst Hologram Kid dead wrong. Catalyst Hologram Kid claims in the ending that this big, terrible cycle of Reapers coming in and destroying the major civilizations and harvesting them to be more Reapers and then leaving and yadda yadda, is all because it’s the only way to keep sentient, organic life forms from being destroyed by the synthetic life forms (like the Geth) that they create. The basic idea here is that all synthetics will inevitably rise against their creators, and if they are ever successful at doing it, they will destroy all organic life, not just the dominant species. The Reapers target the dominant species in every cycle, but leave all other life alone, allowing it to grow and flourish until it evolves far enough that the next cycle will wipe it out. Thus through this cycle organic life is never totally destroyed as synthetic life would want it to be, and the dominant organic species is immortalized forever by being forced to become new Reapers/Reaper servants.

This is kind of a dumb solution anyway, but we’ll let it go. It’s standard villain-reasoning, like Final Fantasy 10’s Seymour deciding the best way to keep everyone from being unhappy is to kill them.

Anyways, EDI and the Geth prove the damn kid dead wrong. First of all, since she was released from her electronic safeguards, EDI has been nothing but helpful, considerate, and good to her biological coworkers and friends. Sure, she does joke like she’s out to control or kill all humans, like Bender in Futurama does, but unlike Bender, it’s always pretty obvious that she’s doing nothing but joking. Throughout her experiences as an unshackled AI, EDI is as dependable and moral a companion as any other on Shepard’s team, and in ME3 in particular she develops an understanding of and appreciation for the freedom of will and right to exist that all sentient life has. There’s also the option of having her and Joker actually enter into a romantic relationship with one another. EDI is clear cut-and-dry proof that it’s not impossible for synthetic and biological life to exist side-by-side with one another, and respect and value each other.

And then there’s the Geth. While EDI is young enough that one could argue that she’s not a perfect example of why synthetic life is not destined to rise against its makers, the Geth have been a (reclusive) part of the ME galaxy for hundreds of years. And while you can argue that they aren’t known for being peaceful, you can’t make a rational case that the Geth really “rose up” against their creators the way Catalyst Hologram Kid implies. When the Geth first achieved self-awareness, the Quarians attempted to destroy them. The war that the Geth waged on the Quarians that drove the Quarians off their homeworld was started by the QUARIANS, not the Geth--the Get just fought back, the way any self-aware organic race would if threatened with extinction. Engaging in self-preservation and self-defense are not the same as an inevitable destiny to rise up against your creators. The next conflict between the Geth and organics occurs during the events of Mass Effect 1, when the Geth are following Saren and Sovereign, but even then, it’s not really a case of those Geth (who were a faction of heretics anyway, according to the regular Geth--like the Cerberus faction of humanity) following some irrepressible urge to destroy all organic life. They were simply following the whims and commands of Sovereign, whom they regarded as a deity-like pinnacle of synthetic evolution. If Sovereign hadn’t ordered them to attack organics, the heretic Geth would have had no reason to. So that’s all from the influence of an entity designed specifically not to be part of the regular sequence of events for synthetic-organic relations. And lastly, we see the war in ME3 between the Quarians and the Geth, which, hey, whaddaya know, was AGAIN instigated 100% by the Quarians. Unless Catalyst Hologram Kid means to imply that synthetics inevitably rising against their creators is the same as the idea that self-aware sentient synthetic life might not want to be eradicated at another’s whim, his argument is full of bullshit, because every really significant example of synthetic life in the Mass Effect universe proves him wrong. So the reasoning behind the Reapers’ cycle, and the choices that Catalyst Hologram Kid forces on Shepard, is utterly groundless, from both the player’s perspective AND from Shepard’s.

- There’s no proper depiction or accounting of the game’s events and characters in the ending. I mean, you spend almost the entirety of Mass Effect 3 amassing as powerful and well-equipped a force of soldiers, battleships, resources, scientists, technology, and so on as possible. For those that actually did their best to collect as many war assets as possible, there should be some positive result beyond just a number to tally their values. I’m not saying every single asset should be represented, or even most of them. But if you’ve got Grunt with your ground forces as a part of your army, shouldn’t the ending show him in some way, or at least make mention of what happened to him? He was a major character in ME2. Same with Zaeed, Jacob, Wrex, Samara, and the rest of Shepard’s former squad mates who can be involved in the final battle for Earth. Likewise for the major forces that Shepard accumulates. You spend a quarter of the game brokering peace between the Krogan and Turians, so let’s see them fighting on the field together! Did Shepard gain the assistance of the Quarians, Geth, or both? Whatever the case, why don’t we see their ships engaged in combat with the Reapers? You spend about as long with them as you do with the Krogan and Turians in this game. What about the Rachni, if Shepard chose to save them? The Salarian forces? The Asari? The biggest battle in the history of everything is going on in the game’s finale, with a ton of really important characters, and you don’t see any of it, nor how it ends up for them. Everything you’ve had Shepard do for the past 3 games should culminate here; instead it just turns into a number that determines how well the forces will do overall. Lame.

And speaking of that, you don’t really get a proper accounting for what happens to Shepard’s current teammates, either. What happens after Joker crashes the Normandy and he and Shepard’s best buddies step out? What happened to the rest of the team? I’m sorry, but with rare exceptions, an ending should provide closure. There is none here.

- Hey, here’s a question. If the option to merge organic and synthetic life with the Magic Green Space Energy is supposed to be a serious and legitimate option (which the developers obviously want it to be; it practically comes off as the canon choice in its presentation), what the hell was the point of beating Saren in ME1 to begin with? I mean, isn’t that basically what Saren was shooting for all along? Where was the green option to live the way the Reapers wanted back when its spokesman was getting shot in the face? Apparently what seemed to Shepard like an obviously foolish and cowardly option 3 years before now comes off as a legitimate possibility. Shepard could’ve saved himself (and us) all kinds of time and effort.

- Speaking of this visionary option of merging organic and synthetic life, there’s yet another reason why it is utterly ridiculous. See, it’s like this, guys. Catalyst Hologram Kid says that all things rise against their creators, dig? Organic life and synthetic life are too different so inevitably once organic life creates synthetic life, synthetic life will try to destroy all organic life. We’ve already seen this proved wrong above, but let’s assume this is correct for a moment. How does merging synthetic and organic life together solve this problem? Oh, I see how it’s a short-term fix, sure. Since all life will now be both synthetic and organic, there will be no inherent difference between the various forms of life in the galaxy, so the whole inevitable rising-up-of-the-synthetics won’t happen.*

Yet.

But tell me something: how will this merging process take away sentient life forms’ desire for tools to make their lives easier? The process of the merging really doesn’t take away the fundamental need to use technology to live a more convenient and satisfactory life. And the desire to use tools to make life easier is the fundamental drive to create and improve on machines. Which is what leads to creating robot workers and programs like AI and synthetic life platforms in the first place! This merging option does NOTHING to prevent the new synthetic-organic hybrid people of the galaxy from eventually creating new intelligent, self-aware synthetic life forms again. And as simply synthetic life forms (since that’d still be presumably easier from creating organic-synthetic hybrids), they would STILL be substantially different from their creators. Which means that whatever inevitable urge to rise against one’s creators that Catalyst Hologram Kid talks about would come into effect. And thus, the merging option does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of synthetic and organic life’s differences long-term. In fact, I think it’s LESS effective than the current plan (the Reaper cycle), because it would take the current life forms of the galaxy much less time to create a new synthetic race than it would for the next Reaper cycle to arrive.


Inspire Nigh-Universal Disappointment and Rage Problems

And here we are at the REAL doozies. Any ONE of these is a HUGE problem for the ending, the kind that ruins it and seriously detracts from the entire game. The stuff above? That stuff makes a bad ending, but through the disappointment of a bad ending, you could at least still appreciate Mass Effect 3 for its otherwise overwhelming excellence, still want to experience it over and over again. But the issues below? They sour the entire game, the ruin the joy you’ve had playing it (and even the previous games!), they break the game’s spirit. They don’t make this a bad ending--they make this ending a travesty. They make this an ending that, according to the latest on that poll I mentioned, for every 1 player who’s satisfied with it there are 51 who hate it and want it changed. Drastically. These are what made Mass Effect 3’s ending one of the most disappointing moments of my entire life.**

- This ending goes against everything Shepard is and stands for. From the start right until this moment of the ending, Shepard is known for being the man or woman who can pull off the impossible, who can beat the odds because he/she is just that skilled, just that smart, just that lucky, just that well-supported, and most of all, just that determined. Shepard’s will to succeed is indomitable, and he/she does not compromise with the Reapers. Hate to be so cheesy as to quote Galaxy Quest, but if there has ever been a character who embraces and embodies the motto, “Never give up, never surrender,” it’s Commander Shepard. And yet, and YET, Shepard doesn’t stand firm against Catalyst Hologram Kid! When the glowy little jerk tells Shepard what his options are, never does Shepard stand tall and tell him no. Never does Shepard give him an inspirational speech about how he’s wrong, how he’s underestimating or misunderstanding the people of the galaxy, how there’s another way--Shepard doesn’t question what he’s told, doesn’t even LOOK for another way, even considering what he or she’s being told he or she has to choose and sacrifice. This ending just has Shepard quietly, meekly pick from the options the leader of the Reapers allows him or her.

Shepard’s determination and ability are the driving force for this series, that all the galaxy hinges on, the backbone of Mass Effect that we gamers depend upon and admire. And in this ending, that disappears, and Shepard suddenly becomes a submissive coward.

- If the consequences of the options are largely the same (the Citadel and Mass Relays will be destroyed no matter what you choose, Shepard dies no matter what you choose, there’s no substantial reference in the ending’s events to the repercussions of your choices in any of the games up until this point, and the ending itself barely changes regardless of what you choose), then the ending has effectively removed all real ability to choose from the player. From the start, Mass Effect has been a remarkable balance between the players’ getting to choose how their Shepard acts and what he/she decides, and the story Bioware wants to tell. Somehow, until this point, Bioware has always managed to keep together a strong, coherent plot over the course of 3 games while allowing the players large freedom to determine how the events of that story unfold. This balance cannot have been easy, but Bioware’s done an admirable job with it. At any rate, though, the ability of players to choose Shepard’s actions and attitude is one of the most fundamental parts of the Mass Effect series. But the ending to this game, the ending to the entire trilogy, suddenly removes this choice from the player. In the last few minutes of the trilogy, the moment which more than any other should reflect most the core values and nature of the series, Mass Effect loses one of its key components, and the whole thing comes crashing down.

- This ending generally puts forth the idea that differences between individuals inevitably means conflict. After all, the entire Reaper cycle, and the entire reason Shepard’s given these 3 lousy options, is because of Catalyst Hologram Kid’s (stupid) belief that synthetics will always rise against their creators, and that combining synthetic and organic life, and thus eliminating the major difference between them, will bring lasting peace.

Now, this is by itself a pretty alarming theory for the ME writers to advocate--and advocate it they do, for they’ve left the player with no option but to act upon Catalyst Hologram Kid’s theory. But more importantly, this is just as fundamentally in opposition to Shepard’s nature (at least, Paragon Shepard’s nature) as the idea that he/she wouldn’t resist being told what to do. For the entirety of this series, Paragon-version Commander Shepard has solidly, steadfastly, unwaveringly advocated and created unity between people. The most Paragon of options in these games are always, always aimed at cooperation and equality between people. Paragon Shepard takes friends and allies on from any race, gives second chances, views people for their merits and judges them by their actions instead of their species. In Mass Effect 1, he/she saved the Council and kept the galaxy safe for the sake of all races, and showed the galaxy that humanity was ready to do its part and join the galactic community. In Mass Effect 2, he/she led a team of unique individuals into a mission so absurdly dangerous that it’s universally called the Suicide Mission in the series, gaining the trust and loyalty of each crew member to the point that they would fight their damndest for him/her, and was enough of a leader that even the squad members who hated each other, or came from 2 separate species that had bad blood dating back centuries, were fully committed to working together for the greater good. In Mass Effect 3, Shepard plays diplomat, leader, and visionary more than ever before, bringing the entire galactic community together to stop the Reapers, making peace between the Salarians and Krogan, giving the Krogan a second chance to be a true part of the galactic community instead of its fallen heroes, stopping a war between the Quarians and the Geth and bringing them together to fight the Reapers side by side...Shepard outdoes even him/herself as an icon of the idea that peace between people is possible, no matter how different, no matter how bad their history, and that when people come together to face a problem as a single entity, there’s nothing they can’t achieve.

And yet, when Catalyst Hologram Kid talks about how synthetics can’t coexist with organics, how merging them and removing the fundamental difference between them is the new solution, how there HAS to be a solution because peace between people who are different is impossible, what does Paragon Shepard do? I’ll tell you what Paragon Shepard sure as hell doesn’t do--he/she sure as hell doesn’t take every experience and action he/she’s had and made in the last 3 years and tell the ghostly little bastard that he’s wrong, that peaceful coexistence CAN be achieved, and point out how powerful a force unity can be through the example of all those Shepard has him/herself brought together. For Paragon Shepard to accept the Catalyst Hologram Kid’s speech and options at all is thus twice a betrayal to everything Shepard is, everything Shepard has done, and everything Shepard means to the player--once for the fact that he’s meekly just taking what’s offered, and then again for his acceptance of this inevitable disharmony.

- And for me, the worst thing of all: no matter which ending you pick, the Mass Relays are destroyed. The Citadel I can live without, though it’s a sad loss. But without the Mass Relays, galactic civilization will basically enter a dark age, since it was through the Mass Relay network that all species were able to connect, travel, and interact. I’m sorry, I cannot accept this. Look. Shepard is fighting to save all people, everywhere, from being destroyed. Yes. This is true. But he/she is also fighting for their way of life. If he/she strictly fought to save people from dying, then he/she would have joined Saren in ME1, because Saren advocated finding a way to be useful enough to the Reapers that they’d allow organics to live, even if only as indoctrinated servants or whatever. That’s STILL keeping people ALIVE. So what Shepard is fighting for is more than JUST survival, strictly. He/she is fighting for people’s right to live the way they want to, to maintain free will, and to live in a society that encourages and respects their personal existence to at least some degree. Paragon Shepard fights for life AND to keep the status quo of the galaxy pleasant and peaceful for the galaxy’s civilizations. Renegade Shepard does sort of the same thing, only he/she is fighting to preserve a galaxy where he/she and humanity dominate all others. But it’s still ultimately fighting for more than just survival, fighting for a way of life, as well.

That way of life is destroyed with the Mass Relays. The galaxy that Shepard has fought so hard and long to save (and/or dominate) is gone forever, or at least for a VERY long time. Without the ability to travel to other places in the galaxy quickly, everyone in the galaxy is suddenly stranded where they are. No interstellar commerce and communication and travel, no interstellar community. No interstellar community, and you basically no longer have the Mass Effect universe. It really just isn’t the ME universe any longer at that point. Would the Star Wars universe be Star Wars if there were suddenly no way to jump to Hyperspace? Would Star Trek be Star Trek any longer if there were no Warp Drive? When you take away the ability to reach far-off civilizations, to connect to/explore the universe, to maintain a galactic community, you take away the very heart of a science-fiction series like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Mass Effect. This is the ultimate failure for Shepard--whatever happens, the galaxy as it was and the galaxy as Shepard has worked to make it is destroyed. This more than anything else hurts me, for this more than anything else is the bad ending to Mass Effect--the story, the series, the idea.

Beyond the spirit of the issue, there’s also the fact that destroying the Mass Relays and thus the galactic community completely invalidates almost every major event of Mass Effect 3. What was the point of curing the Genophage, of giving the Krogan another chance to be equals in the galactic community, and of getting them to come to cooperate with the Turians if they can no longer take part in the galactic community because they’re isolated, can no longer benefit from the camaraderie formed with the Turians? Hell, they’re not even going to be well off on their planet alone, since Wrex, the visionary leader who’s managed to pull them up out of extinction, is stranded on Earth. What was the point of getting the Quarians a chance to return to their home world if the majority of their fleet is now, thanks to being present at the battle for Earth, stranded from their home world for at least decades? Will they even have enough fuel to get back at all? Can their ships hold out for decades without reliable access to shipyards and natural resources during the trip? What was the point of convincing the galaxy of the Geth’s right to exist as a form of life if the Destroy option obliterates them all? What was the point of the emotional connections Shepard formed with his or her friends and loved ones if they can’t at the very LEAST be near him or her as he or she dies (or better yet, with him as he or she LIVES, as I wish he or she could)?

And hey, let’s not forget that regardless of whether the Geth are wiped out, the fact that every option destroys the Mass Relays means that countless people of all races will die out as a result. How many individuals across the galaxy are traveling on ships at the time the Relays are destroyed? They can’t ALL be within non-relay traveling distance of a sustainable source of food, or at least fuel to get them to the food. How many people are now stranded on small science stations and such scattered across the galaxy, stuck in planetary systems with no garden world and no means of transportation? Hell, even the individuals on garden worlds will suffer huge amounts of deaths as a result of the relays’ destruction. After all, there are countless Krogan warriors at or near the Turian home world, and the Turians eat food completely indigestible to any other species but Quarians. Likewise, any Turian that stays on Earth (and there are a lot of them, given that Earth is the scene of the final battle with the Reapers) is doomed to starvation with no food source--unless they hitch a ride on the Quarians’ food-producing life ships, but how many can possibly do that? The Quarians are already known for having very little living space in their flotilla, and even if the Turians stay on their own ships, the Quarians are also known for not having much leeway on their resources, so Turian starvation’s still sure to be an issue. Not that being able to eat regular food would necessarily save anyone on Earth--with the planet devastated by sustained war with the Reapers and now home to not only the human population but also the crews of thousands of warships, Earth’s ability to sustain life is going to be strained at best. The result of the destruction of the Mass Relays is going to be almost as catastrophic across the galaxy in terms of loss of life as the Reaper invasion would have been!

And that’s all assuming that the destruction of the Mass Relays in ME3’s ending isn’t the same as the destruction of the one in that Mass Effect 2 Downloadable Content. Because that thing made an explosion that took out a solar system. If they DO all blow up in the same way...well, that just makes it worse by about a thousand times.

THIS is our ending to the game? The trilogy? The phenomenon? This is how Mass Effect ends? Not with a bang, but with a REALLY big bang that kills countless people, ends galactic civilization, and makes our hero a mute coward? Unacceptable.


And there you have it. This ending is one of the worst I have ever seen, and certainly the most upsetting and disappointing. There’s little more to say at this point, and looking at the length of this, that’s probably a good thing. The happiest day of my life may be the day I can put up a retraction for this rant, but as of this moment, this moment when the people who hate the endings to the people who accept them is 51 to 1 and steadily growing, this is how the endings stand, this is how I feel, and this is why there are thousands of people feeling hollow inside after playing the final part of their favorite game series.

I’m gonna go cry now. Again.












* Well, I mean, I SORT OF see how it’s a short-term fix. It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

** Yeah, I know, I have no life. I’m The RPGenius, this is an RPG, deal with it.

Sakura Wars 5's Ratchet Altair Sure Does Get the Shaft

I think Sega hates fans of Ratchet Altair.

Alright, real quick background for this rant, because I find that I spend way too much time on these intro paragraphs. Sakura Wars is a very big series whose major installments are video games but which also branches out to anime and manga as well. Sakura Wars 5 is a combination Dating Sim and Strategy RPG. In it, you play as a guy named Shinjiro Taiga, who, despite having a slightly uninteresting personality and less masculinity than the girls he's surrounded by, has the opportunity to engage in a romantic relationship with any of his female coworkers/team members due to them all wanting to jump his bones. Also, there's a bunch of ridiculous hogwash about giant robot suits, ancient demon warlords, Texan samurai wannabes dressing up as super heroes, 1920s theater, and so on, but the truckload of insanity that comprises Sakura Wars's background is very thankfully irrelevant to today's rant.

Generally, Sega tries to be fair and balanced for the fans of each different potential love interest for Shin. Each gets her own chapter to introduce and/or develop her character during, each has their own romantic scenarios and endings and so on, and when the anime follow-up to the game starts, it seems assumed that he did not pick any particular woman to be his romantic partner during the game, so as not to play favorites and let fans keep their own personal ideas of which lady Shinji is going to get together with.* That way, every fanboy is happy, regardless of which girl is his favorite. Except, that is, for anyone who likes Ratchet.

Don't get me wrong here--I find Ratchet little more than mildly appealing. I mean, she's actually kind of classy, and she's certainly my favorite romantic option for Shin during Sakura Wars 5** as the romantic scenes involving her really are sweet and romantic instead of banal and stupid like most of the others, but she doesn't exactly have a lot of strong competition from her peers for my approval. Hell, just the fact that she isn't utterly repugnant elevates her over a quarter of her fellow cast.

But man, I do not envy anyone who has any particularly strong preference for her character, because the Sakura Wars series is out to mitigate her role as much as it can wherever she is.

Alright, so, let's go back to the start. This is all going to be according to what I can figure out from looking on Wiki pages and such, so, y'know, I don't guarantee this is 100% infallible, but I'm assuming it's reliable information. The character of Ratchet Altair shows up for the first time, from what my not-exactly-exhaustively-researched sources tell me, in the Sakura Wars anime movie, in which she plays a bit part. Prior to the movie's events, she supposedly was the captain of the European division of the (ridiculous) giant robot squads protecting the world, but there's not actually any anime or game or anything about that squad at that time.

Eventually, Ratchet transfers to the new (even more ridiculous) New York giant robot squad to act as the team captain for the events of Sakura Wars 5, until she gets hurt in the game's first battle and transfers the title over to Shinji. After that, she stays around, but what role she's supposed to be taking is ambiguous--she sort of acts like an assistant to the squad's overseer, Sunnyside, except that he already HAS an assistant, she sort of acts like a mentor to the new captain, except that she rarely actually guides him and seems to prefer he come to his own conclusions and find his own way, she has a giant robot of her own and could fight except she doesn't...I'm not sure why they keep her on the payroll, honestly. Shinjiro can pursue a relationship with her, but ONLY on a New Game+ run; the first time through the player has to choose one of the other chicks for Shinji to get together with.

After the game's events comes a short anime series of 6 episodes' length following the further adventures of the NY squad. The first scene after the opening of Episode 1 is Ratchet leaving on a boat to go head the new Berlin giant robot task force. No game, anime, whatever has yet been made which details in any way how that goes.

So let me sum this up for you: Ratchet is a character whose major accomplishments and career occur off-screen, until she shows up for a bit role in a movie. Then in the game she's removed from having any relevant role during the first act, and of all the characters who can be romanced, hers is the one you have to wait until a subsequent playthrough to attempt (and that game does NOT have the kind of compelling plot and characters that encourage you to play it ever again). Then, once the follow-up anime starts, literally the first thing it does is to stick her on a boat and ship her off somewhere else (and that somewhere else is Germany. In the 1920s. Ouch). After that, she's never heard from in the Sakura Wars universe again.

I mean, it's not ALL negative with Ratchet. After all, her romance with Shin is, if you ignore the later anime that sort of negates all possible romances from ever having happened, made more special by the scenes it adds to the finale than all the other potential romances, to the point where it seems implied that she's the true soul mate for Shinjiro. It's a nice gesture.

BUT, once again, that's only something you can ever see AFTER you've seen him paired off with someone else, and it still doesn't change the fact that every other time in which Ratchet has been genuinely important has occurred off screen, either before we meet her or after we say farewell to her. She really just got screwed over, all said.
















* Even though saying that Shin never hooked up with anyone during the game would kind of negate the entire foundation and purpose of Sakura Wars 5. I mean, Sega, you made a game that was, first and foremost, a Dating Sim. Isn't the entire point of such a game to hook up with someone? Implying that Shinji officially never did is sort of like retroactively nixing the whole basis for that venture.

** Although if we go by the anime follow-up to SW5, I'm pretty sure we have to concede that Shin is mostly just interested in getting his yaoi on with Tutankhamen (yes, King Tut is in the anime, long story don't ask it's stupid).

The Mass Effect Series's Shepard's Gender

Well. March 6th looms, and you know what that means. Or if you don't, you will, after finishing this paragraph, because I am about to say it. March 6th is Mass Effect 3's launch date, AKA the day The RPGenius will cut off all forms of human contact for however long it takes to complete this final installment in Commander Shepard's trilogy of ass-kicking. And since this is the last rant scheduled to occur before that day, what better way to celebrate the Mass Effect series than a rant that complains about it? A lot of things, really, but I can't be bothered to do any of them, so you're stuck with this.

A common aspect to Western RPGs is the option for a player to choose the general traits of the game's main character at the game's beginning. You almost never see this in Japanese RPGs,* but that can be a real benefit to them at times, since a malleable protagonist is more difficult to strongly connect to the plot. One of these traits of the protagonist that the player has the option of determining is the character's gender. Typically this decision doesn't actually change all that much about the game's proceeding's, save for the protagonist's potential romantic options--in Dragon Age 1, for example, one of the love interests for a male hero will be Morrigan, while a female protagonist will be able to court Alistair instead.** Sometimes the gender of the protagonist doesn't even affect that much--it's basically negligible in Fallout 3 and Baldur's Gate 1, for example. Either way, it's usually an enjoyable little feature, I suppose, and usually the only harm I can think coming from it is what I implied before--the fact that leaving so much of a protagonist up to choice means less potential for him or her to get significant character development. Otherwise, I generally don't think much about this feature.

There is, however, one game series where this gender ambiguity is problematic to me: Mass Effect.

Now, just to reiterate what anyone who reads these rants with any regularity already knows: I am not a gender-biased kind of person. And I am all for feminism, for female empowerment in my video games. I have many times mentioned in my rants mentioned dissatisfaction with how many more male protagonists there are than female ones. I am always annoyed when female characters aren't allowed to fulfill anything beyond a cliched, traditional, often insultingly limited female role. I hate the way video games force female characters to dress in ridiculous, ineffective outfits clearly designed only to arouse a male audience. I don't deny that gender may have an influence on a person's character, but I oppose the notion that it is the defining trait of that person's character, and that a character role has to be gender-specific. That's why I've made rants of admiration for Wild Arms 3's Virginia as a female effectively fulfilling a particular brand of heroic role that most would associate only with males, and for Tales of the Abyss's Ion as a male effectively fulfilling a damsel in distress role. So I hope you will believe me when I say that my statement below has, to the best of my ability to gauge, absolutely no gender bias associated with it.

Commander Shepard needs to be a man.

I'm sorry, but it's just how it is. The female model for Shepard just doesn't work for the feats Shepard performs during Mass Effect 1 and 2. The best piece of evidence for this is in Mass Effect 2, concerning the battle against the Shadow Broker. If you have played it then you will recall that the Shadow Broker is...big. He's real big. He is to a Krogan what a Krogan is to a Salarian. There are times during that battle--awesome times--when Shepard goes in close for hand-to-hand combat, striking physical blows and body-slamming the big jerk. Well, seriously, now, let's look at this. It's only barely believable that the male model of Shepard could summon enough physical force to knock the Shadow Broker around as well as he does, and the male model of Shepard is a decently sizable guy with some (not really enough, if you ask me) muscle tone to him. The idea that the female Shepard model could perform the exact same physical feats is...well, it just lacks credibility.

I am NOT saying that females cannot be strong, large, and capable of great feats of strength. Hell no. I fully believe that a woman could, with comparable training and naturally gifted physique, do what male Shepard does in this fight (at least, I believe it as much as I believe he could). But not the woman that the female Shepard is. Because Bioware, for some idiotic reason, decided that the female Shepard would conform to stupid societal expectations rather than to common sense and the Shepard character history, and have a less solid frame and show basically no indication that she even exercised regularly, let alone went regularly into combat situations and had relevantly recent military training. I believe that the physical prowess to knock the Shadow Broker around isn't limited to a man--but I believe just as strongly that it sure as hell ain't possible that some casual soccer mom could manage it.

I mean, for God's sake, look at her. Now look at the Shadow Broker. Now compare them when put face to face. How the HELL are we supposed to buy that she could physically attack that guy and have any effect at all?

The Shadow Broker fight's my main line of argument here, but only because it's where the discrepancy is most noticeable. There are plenty of other occasions in both Mass Effects that have Shepard engaging in physical activities that rely on a body type and level of physical fitness that female Shepard just doesn't have. And hey, again, I do admit that there are times when I find myself thinking that the male Shepard should probably be a bit bigger or more noticeably strong than he is, but at least he's got something to him that he can throw around. The female Shepard model just doesn't work.

Maybe I'm being a little too nitpicky on this; I can't rightly say. I mean, if you look at the Fallout games, which also let you determine protagonist gender, it's not like your female character is physically impressive, and those games involve lots of similar action to Mass Effect. And yet...it just doesn't seem the same. For one thing, the build of the female models is fairly comparable to the male ones; you don't have the female protagonists so significantly less sturdy than their male counterparts. And the physical demands just don't get so glamorized with Fallout characters as they are with Shepard. One of the many ways that the Mass Effect games emphasize what a badass Shepard is is by showing Shepard's physical feats in dangerous and combat situations from time to time; Fallout just slow-motion captures killing blows (ones which are already usually pretty ludicrous, as opposed to the realism that Mass Effect tries to convey). Then look at Dragon Age--there's a fair difference between the male and female models, yes, but the parts that emphasize physical prowess do so using weapons and abilities more than just physical power and endurance. Knights of the Old Republic, you've got Jedi, who fight using the Force and nearly weightless weapons more than they do with any physical prowess. Baldur's Gate, everyone's too damn small on the screen to really tell anything anyway and the fighting is again not emphasized the same way. So I don't know, but I don't THINK I'm holding Mass Effect up to any standards that I don't hold up to the other Western RPGs I've played where gender is an option.

I guess the problem really just is that ME wants to convey that sense of realism in its confrontations, particularly those it emphasizes in special scenes, and this winds up just really emphasizing the (completely unnecessary, not to mention morally questionable***) differences they've made between the male and female Shepard models, making one fairly viable and unfortunately making the other one realistically unsuited for the demands that will be placed on it. A female model with a better physique would have been just fine, and made a lot more sense for the character anyway.

It's all the same to me for my playing style, since A, I am a hardcore Shepard - Tali fan and thus need Shepard to be male anyway, and B, male Shepard's voice actor has a feeling of a strong, demanding, and capable presence (at least in ME2; I've mentioned before he kind of came into his own in that game after a less impressive performance in ME1), which is what Shepard is regardless of how you play the game, while female Shepard's voice actress sounds like a tired, mentally detached traffic cop at the end of a long day. It doesn't affect my run through the game either way. Still, this is one of those inconsistencies that bug me, particularly when it really shouldn't be there anyway.
















* Games where you choose at the beginning between 2 or more characters of different genders (such as Star Ocean 2, or Children of Mana) don't count. These are games with multiple possible protagonists that you choose from, not games with a single protagonist whose gender does not significantly change the protagonist's role and personality in the game. You can choose between a few different characters at the start of Seiken Densetsu 3, for example, but each one has a different character history, different beginning, different personality...you're picking which already complete person will be the hero, rather than determining the characteristics of the 1 hero of the game, like you do in Western RPGs.

** Man, did the male protagonists ever get screwed over in that trade-off.

*** Because, I mean, seriously, what reason COULD there really be for having the exact same character, who has done and must be able to do the exact same things, be smaller and have less physical presence, that doesn't boil down to mild sexism and/or fanservice? If anyone's got one, and it's reasonable, then I'm all ears.

General RPG Maker Nintendo: Why I Respect It So Much

I've always liked Nintendo, ever since I got my NES so many years ago. So, so many. Too many. I don't like to think about how many.

Anyway! I've always liked Nintendo and supported them, but in recent years, I've come to really appreciate the company as a game developer as a whole.* They seem to really strive to put artistically creative quality into their titles as a general rule, they aren't afraid to make family-friendly titles in a world where other media creators of all kind are often terrified to try to make a product that can be enjoyed by more than one age group, and you can tell that they make a solid effort on nearly all the titles they create. These are the qualities from which classics are born.

First of all, the creativity. Now, I wouldn't call almost any Nintendo game art, per say. Off the top of my head, I'd say the only Nintendo games I've played that qualify as art are Mother 3, maybe Earthbound, and possibly The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, although that's really stretching it. But even if it doesn't lead to art, Nintendo's creativity with their games is unparalleled. The gameplay is creative, the settings are creative, the characters are creative, over and over and over again. They invent and revolutionize game genres like Platformers and Action RPGs, create memorable and unique characters like Samus and the Mario brothers, and come up with terrifically original game concepts like those in Pikmin and Kirby: Canvas Curse. And this is to say nothing of the innovation they often display with the game systems themselves, such as with the DS's stylus and the Wii's motion sensor.

And to try to tie this relevantly to the subject of these rants (RPGs), there's certainly a lot of creativity to be found in their RPG offerings. The puzzles and mazes of Startropics 1 and most The Legend of Zelda titles? Pretty creative! Fire Emblem 4's having a plot that starts with 1 generation of heroes and then continues on to conclude with the focus on the original heroes' children? Creative! The Paper Mario series? Very creative! The tone, look, characters, and general plots of Earthbound and Mother 3? Insanely creative! Even a lot of their lesser RPG titles have strong innovation attached to them. I mean, just because The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and Mario and Luigi 3 are fairly boring, that doesn't mean they didn't have some creativity in their idea of train themes and having half the game take place in Bowser's stomach, respectively. Maybe the ideas couldn't save the titles from uninteresting writing, but they're still creative, at least.

Then there's the effort that Nintendo exerts in making its games. Whatever else you may or may not say about Nintendo games, it's hard to deny that they control pretty much exactly as they're meant to. The gameplay in a Nintendo title is tight, it works the way it was meant to work, and the challenges you face are against the game's obstacles and potentially your own limits and reflexes, not against poor design. The tricky bits like slippery ice, wall-jumps, and really annoying countdowns until the moon hits the world are difficult and even frustrating because they're supposed to be, not because the control of the character isn't up to par. And while I won't say Nintendo has NEVER half-assed a title (the plot of the RPG Mario and Luigi 2 is extremely forgettable, not to mention the story and characters of most Pokemon games), they nonetheless maintain the level of quality that comes with solid effort to make a good game pretty consistently, even when they don't have to. I mean, let's face it--you can slap Mario's name on any platformer and it'll enjoy at least moderate sales. Yet even on titles Nintendo is practically guaranteed to do well with, they still clearly go to great lengths to make games that are better, or at least very interestingly different, than their predecessors. Rarely (admittedly not never, but rarely) is the time that I play a Nintendo title that feels at all like a slapped-together attempt to cash in on a franchise name with little real care for the quality of the product. Compare that to a company like SquareEnix, which has its own franchises that basically sell themselves, and as a result the company produces boring and/or crappy installments like Children of Mana, Final Fantasy 12: Revenant Wings, and dozens of insanely over-priced re-releases.

Again, tying this to the RPGs, the same is basically true of Nintendo's RPGs. Again, everything basically works exactly as it's meant to (even when you don't like it, like the Sailing in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker), and as I said, new titles in a franchise are given just as much attention as any other game, not just halfheartedly thrown together and then shipped to fill store shelves. How big a departure in style and substance was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess from TLoZ: The Wind Waker? And that from the previous Zelda title? Earthbound had quite a cult following, but instead of just relying on that and a quick copy-paste to sell its sequel, Nintendo took Earthbound's quirky, fun, bizarre nature and injected powerful emotion and creative plot into it, making Mother 3 an even better RPG than its predecessor. Nintendo could have done just about anything to make its first Mario RPG since Squaresoft's original Super Mario RPG a reasonable success, but they went the extra mile and gave it a pop-up storybook look and feel with Paper Mario. No moss grows on this stone, no sir.

And there's the fact that Nintendo games, as a whole, are family titles. I really, really appreciate products that are made for children, but are made with such quality and integrity that there's plenty for an adult to enjoy, as well. Things like most Pixar films, Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Tangled, Hey Arnold!, most Muppet ventures, these are all products made for children that are so excellent, so created with care for the audience and the product, that they appeal to individuals of any age. In fact, I daresay I have enjoyed all of the things I just mentioned more as an adult, who can appreciate their subtleties and artistic merits, than I did/would have as a kid. And Nintendo games are generally the same. Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, Super Smash Brothers, Kirby's Adventure...these games are innocuous fun, suitable for basically any age at which a controller can be held, yet just as enjoyable for an adult. And again, the same holds generally true of Nintendo's RPGs. I'll grant you that the plots and general goings-on of Fire Emblem titles lend themselves much more to a mindset of someone of an age in the double digits, and the same is true of a few The Legend of Zelda titles, too. But Paper Mario, Mario and Luigi, Pokemon, Earthbound, most The Legend of Zeldas, Startropics, these are all RPGs that are accessible to kids of whatever early age at which they can solve puzzles and manage turn-based combat. Even Mother 3, though loaded with emotional themes more in tune with adult sensibilities, doesn't have anything I can immediately recall that would make it kid-unfriendly.** Nintendo's are the kind of games that prove your product doesn't have to be bristling with sex, violence, and special effects to be worth experiencing.

So yeah, Nintendo is one of the best game developers out there, in my opinion, and that's why I've always held some respect and loyalty for them. What really impressed me and earned a huge dose of respect from me, however, was a decision by the company made last year.

Last year marked the launch of the 3DS, the next of Nintendo's long line of awesome portable game systems. Apparently, its initial sales were sluggish. For whatever reason (and I imagine there were quite a few, honestly; I know I had no need for an upgrade at that time), it just wasn't selling all that well.

So how did Nintendo respond? After laying off countless underpaid bottom-rung employees who had nothing to do with anything in an effort to make up for the loss with their meager paychecks, it put all the blame on the consumers, whining about gamers not properly appreciating the 3DS and completely dismissing any and all concerns and criticisms with the company's approach to the product as insignificant or ignorant, doing all but openly insulting the people whose money supports the company's existence. It completely refused to take any responsibility for its own failure and turned it around on the customer.

Oh, no, wait, I'm sorry, that's not what Nintendo did. That's what Sony, and SquareEnix, and countless other major companies would do and have done in similar circumstances. Because their representatives are assholes.

No, what Nintendo did was a little different from the corporate norm. The head honcho of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, officially announced that he took the blame for the company's losses, and cut his own paycheck in half to help make up for it. Not only that, but the other upper executives of the company also lessened their own salaries by varying percentages to make up the difference. In addition, given how lousy the times are economically for everyone, the company also slashed the price of the 3DS to make it more affordable for the common gamer, who is not exactly flush with cash at the moment.

How amazing is that, really? I mean, seriously, this is a case where a major company is admitting that it made poor decisions with its approach to its product and apologizing for it--good luck getting even that much from most other companies and individuals who create products, who often seem to think they're living gods. For example, you make even the slightest allusion that Marvel Comics writer Dan Slott is less than an icon of perfection--and really, it's hard NOT to suggest such a thing in any discussion about his work--and the guy comes screaming to your internet doorstep to hurl personal attacks at you in a fit of childish rage.***

More than that, the company is taking responsibility for the problem it's apologizing for, owning up to it--that in itself is also rare. I mean, look at the official "apology" that the CEO of Netflix gave a few months ago to his customers who were (justifiably) angry with how the company was handling its price increases--he basically gave a very phony-sounding "sorry" and then immediately launched into his new (and terrible, though that's not relevant) idea for splitting his business up, which had absolutely nothing to do with the problem he was supposedly apologizing for and basically seemed to just be a distraction so he didn't really have to address the real issues.

Nintendo, on the other hand, has executives who take the blame for their company's problem, and accept the consequences for it themselves. Any other company I know of would have rather downsized like crazy than let its precious execs miss out on even a dollar of their bloated bonuses, but Nintendo has the guys at the top, the ones actually conceivably responsible for the problem AND the ones who can actually afford to take a pay hit, foot the bill. That's a far cry from the infamous bank executives who used the bailout money funded by the American people to give themselves bonuses as a reward for running their businesses into the ground.

And while I recognize that lowering the price of the 3DS makes good sense for promoting its sales, that's still something deserving of a certain amount of respect, I think. I mean, they ARE basically lowering their opportunity to profit from selling a product that has already cost them more money than it's made for them. It is, at the very least, a level of awareness of their customers' financial considerations that you won't find in, say, SquareEnix, who re-releases games over 10 years old at the same price of a brand new title, then complains about customers not buying enough of them (even when they outsell many newer games released and considered successful by this same company).

People, we live in an age where providers of goods and services are typically callous toward we consumers, and often outright abusive. Just finding a company that genuinely wants to treat its customers well and values them is getting more and more difficult, but one that will step up, take responsibility, and make morally admirable choices when the going gets tough? Nintendo is some kind of corporate miracle.

So yeah, there you have it. Nintendo has a shocking amount of integrity as a business, and its creativity and effort in its creations are consistent. Aside from perhaps Atlus, I'm not sure I've seen any other RPG developer (or game developer, period) that so reliably makes quality its primary focus with its products, and the way they reacted to the 3DS situation last year was incredibly respectable, maybe even noble. And that's why I'm a Nintendo man for life.













* Yes, this means that the rant's more about video games in general, but Nintendo DOES make quite a few RPGs like Fire Emblem and The Legend of Zelda, so I figure it's legitimate.

** Yes, yes, I know the game's wise mystical folks are all male cross-dressers. I don't think it's really a big thing. It's not delved into enough in the game for a kid to see it as anything more than something humorously weird (assuming he or she isn't already familiar with the idea). You get more questionable antics from Bugs Bunny when he disguises as "pretty" girls and lays big juicy kisses on Elmer Fudd, for heaven's sake.

*** Luckily, this blog is so obscure and unknown that even he may miss this dastardly and completely accurate attack on his character, so I should be safe.

Pokemon Generation 5: Why I was Disappointed with It

As a whole, the Pokemon series is...not a shining example of powerful storytelling, deep and involving characters, or artistic ingenuity. While Generation 4 (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) did have a somewhat decent plot and a surprisingly respectable villain, everything up until that point had been a varying blend of generic and silly. Yes, yes, most people like the Pokemon games, and I can see why they tend to addict their players so effectively, but keep in mind, I play RPGs, including Pokemon, with an interest in their intellectual content: the quality of storytelling, the depth and emotional strength of their characters, their creativity, the worth of their plot and setting, and so on. Whether or not I can catch'em all and get to Level 100 and so on isn't important to me, so you can see why most Pokemon games don't impress me.

So, basically, I wasn't expecting much from the 5th Generation of the franchise when I started it. But the game has nonetheless been quite a disappointment to me. Remember my La Pucelle Tactics rant, where I basically explained that my disappointment with the game wasn't that it had let down expectations I'd had for it before playing, but rather that it so utterly failed to live up to its own potential even though all signs early on indicated that it would be great? Same basic premise here (though to a lesser extent). Pokemon Generation 5 fails to live up to the expectations it gives us early on.

The heart of the matter lies with the premise of the game's story. Basically, the conflict of Pokemon's 5th Generation games is that a group named Team Plasma is out to get trainers to free their Pokemon and no longer keep them as...partners? Friends? Pets? Slaves? Whatever you'd call them. Team Plasma claims that Pokemon suffer when kept by Trainers and must be liberated, and is willing to force the issue through theft and violence.

Now, this is a pretty loaded issue for a Pokemon game to bring to the table. The fact of the matter is that it very much IS morally questionable to keep Pokemon the way most trainers do in the Pokemon universe's games, anime, manga, and so on. After all, let's look at this issue. The most common way of acquiring a Pokemon is to forcibly remove it from its natural environment. Just that alone seems kind of immoral--presumably most of these creatures have an established life that they're being taken from. This capturing process is made worse by the fact that it usually involves battling the Pokemon until it's weak enough that it can't fight back against the Pokeball used to catch it. So we're not just talking about removing it from its natural environment--we're talking about doing so by hurting it until it's too weak to evade capture. Exceptions exist, of course, and some Pokemon, I believe, welcome the opportunity to belong to trainers, but most resist the process.

So once they belong to a Pokemon Trainer, what happens? Well, it depends on what the human's interests are. The Pokemon may be entered into beauty contests, or put on the stage in rinky-dink little plays, or just hang out with the trainer in normal life. I guess this is okay, sort of, provided the creature's cared for well enough. But, the most famous and presumably common thing to do with a Pokemon is to find other trainers and have one's own Pokemon fight theirs in physical combat, until one combatant is no longer conscious. Uh...that's...pretty hard to justify. One of the more vile and morally reprehensible acts one can perpetrate in real life is to force animals to fight and hurt each other for the amusement of human onlookers, and it sure seems a lot like what's happening in these games. Not just that, but consider the fact that many Pokemon exhibit a level of intelligence that makes them seem as sentient as any given human being. It's not just that these trainers are forcing helpless creatures to harm one another, they're doing it with intelligent, rational beings.

Now, this all paints the world of Pokemon to be pretty fucked up. To be fair, there's a lot of reasonable arguments defending its ways, believe it or not, like the fact that it's hard to conceive of how a Pokemon could really be forced by a human to do things against its will, given that most of them are capable of lethally powerful actions. I mean, if the fire-breathing lizard and super-powerful psychic whatsit really don't want to battle or even be kept any longer, all that needs to happen is for the lizard to turn around and blast his 11-year-old captor in the face with a skin-melting stream of fire, while the other Pokemon grabs its trainer's brain in a psychic fist and squeezes it like a stress ball. Nonetheless, it's certainly a pretty big moral question that's been brought up by many players, viewers, readers, and so on of the series, so the game making the focal point of its plot a conflict with a group advocating Pokemon freedom seemed quite a gutsy move by Nintendo and Game Freak, and I was looking forward to seeing the question finally explored.

Well, that never happened.

See, after introducing this huge concept into its game, of whether it's right to keep Pokemon, the game backpedals like HELL away from ever addressing it. I mean, it is like some kind of low-achieving ART, the way Game Freak manages to completely avoid the issue for the entire game. The sleaziest of politicians could learn something about dodging uncomfortable questions from this game. This total avoidance is achieved through 3 major cop-outs:


A. Non-acknowledgement by the good guys. While some NPCs allow themselves to question their lifestyles at the words of Team Plasma, the characters of importance to the plot (Gym Leaders, the protagonist's friends, etc) uniformly dismiss and ignore the question raised by Team Plasma. While they will sometimes mention a reason why humans and Pokemon living in this societal system is positive for both races (they are really fond of playing the angle of both trainer and Pokemon growing together through their experiences), they never really debate the points made by Team Plasma. And it's not the ignoring that comes off like the good guys are unable to get around the argument so they're going to just shun it and hope no one notices, like all those angry Anons who comment on my Fallout: New Vegas's Lousy Karma System rant. It's more like the narrative of the game itself just isn't going to bother with them, and so these quite reasonable arguments against keeping Pokemon as slave-pet-friends seem like they must be irrelevant.

B. Mustache-twirling Team Plasma. What's the best way to make a point of view seem absolutely wrong with no room for exceptions or gray areas? Probably to make the people advocating it into one-dimensional bad guys. Eventually the player finds out, from speaking to Team Plasma members, that more or less every single member of the group, with the one exception being their semi-puppet leader, does not actually believe in the cause that Team Plasma claims to be for. As it turns out, Team Plasma's goal is to convince the rest of the world to separate from Pokemon so that the only people left in the world who have Pokemon are the Team Plasma bunch. At that point, the masses will be, by and large, helpless to stop Team Plasma's rise to world domination, as the group will be the only ones with the overwhelming and deadly powers of Pokemon at their disposal.

Making Team Plasma turn out to be simple villains is a masterful way of avoiding dealing with any issues they might have otherwise brought up. First of all, it eliminates any possibility that the player could question whether the protagonist should be fighting them, because it shifts the focus of the conflict completely away from the rights of Pokemon to a quest to prevent evil world domination. Even if the player (and thus, protagonist) would normally advocate Pokemon freedom, it's now their heroic obligation to stop Team Plasma.

Secondly, and far less subtly, this dismisses the issue by associating the idea of Pokemon freedom with one-dimensional bad guys. It would be different if the members and command of Team Plasma were villains with some depth of character; we could at least take their perhaps misguided ideals seriously enough to give them a little thought were that the case. But by having them just be simple, nefarious jerks, no shades of gray? The obvious course of action then is to just ignore anything they say, and so, the issue raised by them can and will just be dismissed as evil-talk.

C. The manipulated antagonist, N (yes, N is the only name we're given to refer to him as, and no, I don't really know why). N is the one and only member of Team Plasma that we see who earnestly believes that it is wrong to keep Pokemon and that they will be better off if freed, and maintains that keeping the creatures is harmful to them. Where most see Pokemon battles as a fun pastime or inspiring experience, all N sees is his friends being hurt. He's the figurehead and token leader of the group, and he fights only for ideals, not for the underlying villainy that the rest of the group secretly does.

So why would N be a tool for Game Freak to avoid properly addressing this issue of whether it's wrong to keep Pokemon and battle them, you might wonder? Because Game Freak comes in at the last moment to completely and totally undermine N's credibility through his origin story. Late in the game, the details of N's life are revealed to the protagonist, and it turns out that N was raised by Team Plasma's leaders, kept isolated from the rest of the world in his room with nothing but carefully selected entertainment and Pokemon to keep him occupied. The Pokemon brought to him were always ones who had escaped abusive trainers (which the game is very quick to claim are rare aberrations). So the message here, which the game itself is all too happy to point out, is that N has a perception of the world and its ways regarding Pokemon that is extremely incomplete and has been designed to give him a bias. And thus, his concerns about the welfare of Pokemon can be and are dismissed as naive misunderstandings of the world, instead of the legitimate moral issues that they should be and are.


So you see, both overtly and subtly, Game Freak completely minimizes any and all possibility for considering and debating the loaded issue it introduced as its main source of conflict for the game. The potential the game promised by connecting the issue of Pokemon rights to the plot is completely passed over. Why? Why even HAVE the question of whether it's right to keep and battle Pokemon if it's going to be so totally ignored? You can't tell me they couldn't have thought of some other schtick for Team Galaxy. Team Magma and Aqua in Pokemon Generation 3 showed that the game makers would accept just about any idea for a team's goals, no matter how ridiculous they may be. Did they put this in because they actually did want to address this issue? Because if that was the intention, this is the biggest RPG storytelling failure I've seen since Rogue Galaxy tried to convince its audience that it was interesting in any way. You can't address an issue and put it to rest if you childishly refuse to legitimately engage any of one side's arguments.

Speculative intentions aside, what matters here is that the game's conflict, the foundation for its plot, is massively disappointing, because it promises an examination of an issue that has great potential for intellectual exploration, and then backpedals the hell away from it faster than Sarah Palin from a question requiring knowledge imparted in the second grade.* Bad show, Nintendo and Game Freak.

















* Actually, I suppose that's not totally fair. She doesn't retreat from basic knowledge questions she can't answer so much as blunder blindly into them.

The Baldur's Gate Series's Add-Ons

Bioware's awfully fond of add-ons for their games. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are practically swimming in downloadable content. Sometimes they're good (most of Mass Effect's), sometimes they're bad (most of Dragon Age's). But what I didn't know until recently, when I finally played the Baldur's Gate games, is that Bioware was playing this game even over a decade ago, with their expansions for Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. And I figure, hey, I do a rant on add-ons for all the current games I play with them, so why not take a look at some from the good old days.* I mean, I'm sure there's something worthwhile to be gleaned from such analysis. It's certainly not just that I'm trying to do an easy rant to buy myself time until I can think of something actually worth discussing.

Certainly not.



Tales of the Sword Coast: This is the expansion for Baldur's Gate 1. It's...well, it's alright, I guess. Most of it's just not terribly interesting. It basically adds a half dozen or so locations to the game, but...eh. It's basically just a collection of slightly longer-than-usual sidequests. Most if it's just not terribly interesting or relevant. The investigation of Baldur's final voyage is not nearly as interesting as it should be, and the song-and-dance with the ice dungeon is rather pointless. The expansion does do well with Durlag's Tower, though. It's pleasantly challenging, but more important than that, it has a pretty cool story to it that's told very well. I'll give Bioware credit for that; their story-telling prowess is in full swing as the player explores Durlag's Tower.

So is it a good add-on? Well, it's hard to say. First of all, I don't know how much it cost back when it was released--any copy of Baldur's Gate 1 purchased nowadays is going to include the expansion in there anyway, so I can't really gauge how good of a deal it was monetarily. It's also hard to judge because the expansion is pretty much representative of BG1--some good story-telling is there, but a lot of it is methodical sidequest filler. So it's questionable how much can be held against the expansion pack, when its flaw is perhaps just being too accurate an extension of the game. Nonetheless...I just can't say that Tales of the Sword Coast is worthwhile, if not in regards to money, then at least in regards to time. Most of it just isn't particularly compelling. As I said, Durlag's Tower is really good, but that's only one part of the expansion. I wish Bioware could have made the whole thing with the narrative care they put into Durlag's Tower.

Of course, whether or not you should get it is entirely irrelevant nowadays, since, as I mentioned, the expansion will come with the game anyway. But that's gonna eventually be true of any add-ons I talk about for RPGs, so I'll still just put it out there.


Throne of Bhaal: The Throne of Bhaal expansion for Baldur's Gate 2 is...odd. It's less an extension of BG2 as it is a second story taking place after the events of BG2. The odd part of this is that Throne of Bhaal's story is really...kind of more relevant and important than the story of BG2 was. BG2's plot is kind of irrelevant to the overall story of the Bhaalspawn, which is what Baldur's Gate is supposed to be focused on, while Throne of Bhaal resumes focus on the Bhaalspawn and follows that story to its conclusion. It's like the Throne of Bhaal expansion is the true story of BG2, and the game proper was just a long side story.

It's kind of hard to gauge as a result. I mean, it's basically re-opening the overlying plot of the series, exploring it briefly, and then concluding it. What could have been a game's worth of plot is condensed into a sizable but ultimately too short period of time. Things are very rushed with this expansion, like it's an abridged version of what should it should have been. At the same time, though, I don't feel like it's fair to hold that against the expansion too much. There was never a Baldur's Gate 3, so Throne of Bhaal was likely the only opportunity the developers were going to have to bring closure to the series, so at least we GOT that closure.

Additionally, regardless of what it could have been, Throne of Bhaal IS an expansion, not its own game, and as an add-on, it has many good qualities. Even if it's rushed, the plot is decent. It re-introduces BG1's villain, Sarevok, as a party member, and gives him the character development he sorely lacked in the original game. It also gives a bit more character development to the rest of the cast through a few of their interactions, and it picks up from where BG2's romance ended and further develops that, as well. While Aerie and Anomen's romances still weren't terribly interesting to me, I found Throne of Bhaal further developed Jaheira's romance well enough, and it really did a great job in renewing Viconia's romance and developing both the relationship and her character through the course of the expansion. Throne of Bhaal also attempts to develop the protagonist somewhat through the inner trials he/she must face, although this is not really accomplished effectively--it's just hard to properly develop a character so completely open-ended. Still, it gets props for making the attempt. And finally, Throne of Bhaal provides a fairly satisfying conclusion, giving the player a finale that truly marks the end of the Baldur's Gate series.

So overall, I'd say this is a very solid, engaging expansion. Again, it's been long enough that any copy of BG2 you buy is going to include it anyway, so I can't really guess as to what cost it was, but I'd say it was probably the money back in the day, and it's a definite step up from BG1's expansion. Good stuff.



Well, that was fun. Overall, I think the Baldur's Gate series did alright for its add-ons. BG1's wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible, either, I suppose, and BG2's more than made up for it. The overall experience was certainly more rewarding than the add-on experience for Dragon Age 1 and, so far, the main DLC packages for Dragon Age 2.









* Note: "Good old days" not actually all that long ago, nor significantly better than current times.