First of all, let me preface this by saying that I think that when a game presents the illusion of choice, that’s just as good as actual choice, as long as they do a convincing job. What’s important to me as a player is that I feel like I’m making important decisions that have an impact. Whether or not they actually have an impact, as measured by multiple playthroughs where you go see the other side is not really important to most player’s experiences, and it’s not important to mine.
Now, with that said, I love just the way the whole thing unfolded and the choices they folded in along the way. First there’s the Turians wanting the help of the Krogan, and the Wrex refusing to give that help until the Genophage is cured. At that point, they give you an option to voice your opposition or support for this idea. Then there’s the Salarians, who say they won’t support you if you cure the genophage, and they once again give you the option to be for or against the cure. And then as I went further down the path to the cure, they once again present the brilliant option from the Salarian ambassador: pretend that you tried your best, but don’t actually cure the genophage; that way you get Krogan support for the Turians, and you also get Salarian support. You even get multiple chances to tell Mordin and the Krogans about this Salarian offer. So it’s the layers that they added that make it so delicious a choice. When you phrase the question like you did, you’re boiling the whole issue down to curing the genophage or not, but as it’s presented to me in the game, it’s a series of layered decisions on not only whether or not I want to cure the genophage, but who I want to tell about the machinations behind the scenes and so on and so forth. Whether or not all those decisions eventually lead to the same thing happening, I don’t really care, because at the very least the illusion of choice and the importance of the decisions I’m making is very strong, and as a player I felt very empowered by the whole thing.
And compounding this whole scenario is the fact that I’m spending an adventure with two of my favorite characters, Wrex and Morden, who could have died in earlier games! So not only is there a layer of complexity to the choices as presented throughout the series of events as they unfold, there is the sense that I’m having this adventure with two great characters that might not even be alive if it weren’t for my choices earlier in the series.
Again, I thought that whole part was so brilliant precisely because my earlier choices in earlier games seemingly had big consequences and I was told (convincingly) that the choices I’d made in Mass Effect 2 led to the particular scenarios that played out. For me, reaping the rewards of my choices was very rewarding in that whole sequence of events too. Now, would I have been more frustrated if I’d not been able to save both the Quarians and the Geth? Probably. Would I be upset if I learned that no matter what you do in Mass Effect 2, you could still salvage the situation and save either or both of them? Not really, because like I said earlier, illusion of choice is just as good as actual choice, so as long as it feels to me as a player that my decisions had repercussions, then the designers did their job well. And in this case, they did.
The character resolution was very good, even for the twerps. That’s not counting the weak new characters, who were left hanging.
There was basically one weak new character in the series: the big guy you pick up on Earth at the beginning. I thought Javik was a great character, and one of the strongest in the whole series. And I liked this incarnation of EDI a lot too. And those were the three new squad mates in ME3 that weren’t in previous games, right? So I find it irritating when I hear in podcasts or discussions that the new ME3 characters aren’t very good additions. I think Javik is excellent and EDI is great too, so there’s only one character who is weak, and I don’t even remember his name, so yeah, everyone’s right about him, basically.
Plus they weren’t really left hanging necessarily. Before the final battle, I got to talk to everyone in the series who was still alive, and everyone who was going with me was willing to die on that final mission. Both Javik and EDI had come to support me and were ready to end the fight in a blaze of glory at the end. I don’t remember what the meathead guy’s final words were, so maybe he was left hanging, I don’t know.