This happened to me, also, as I alluded to upthread. I was winging my first playthrough and I thought I could pull myself out of the fire, and then… this happened.
I put down the controller and took a very long walk. Then I went back to a save from several hours before and replayed up to this point, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I’ve replayed the trilogy many times since, exploring all sorts of different permutations, but I’ve never repeated this thread.
It’s truly brutal. One of the biggest gut-punches in any story I’ve ever seen. Magnificently unforgiving.
When you get to the ultimate ending of the third game, I expect a very long (but hopefully not too divisive) relitigation of the climax, and whether or not it appropriately reflects the player’s expectation of narrative choice. For the record, I look at the game essentially as you describe in your quote above: the climax isn’t the single ending, the whole last quarter of the game is an incredible collection of many, many, many endings.
Her father is Matriarch Aethyta, the half-krogan bartender on Ilium in ME2. She’s working on the Citadel by ME3 and will explain everything if you talk to her enough.
I think I heard somewhere else you should hang around a long time and listen to them talk, but I think I walked away after only a bit. I guess they talk quite awhile about topics.
It was a very odd little sidequesty type moment. Not really a quest, just a quick reputation builder sequence.
Liara has the best arc, imo. She matures from this really idealistic academic into the fucking Shadow Broker while coming to terms with her past. And part of that past is the childish fantasy she built around the Protheons. She starts out as this person who believes that there are more powerful, wiser forces put there, and by the end she realizes that the man behind the curtain is just that. But rather than being destroyed by that, she decides if the giants in the shadows are all just people, she can be a giant, too.
There is a thing I read a while back that’s always stuck with me from I think Reddit. It was an essay written by a fan that’s essentially “Liara is the true hero of the Mass Effect Trilogy” and it goes into detail about how her actions have actually done more to help the galaxy/your quest than anyone. I love Tali and will always stan for her and she will always be my favorite, but ever since reading that I do like Liara a lot and she’s a very, VERY close second.
Also, hot take, Javik annoys the bejesus out of me and I barely ever take him anywhere. I understand what the writers were doing with him, but he’s so damn miserable and unlikable that every time he talks I just want to leave him in a ditch.
There were many moments in ME 3 where I felt genuine emotion and relatively few in ME 2. I think it’s because they show you far more moments of triumph and tragedy on-screen in ME 3, whereas in ME 2 it’s mostly restricted to characters talking about bad things that have happened in the past. (And for things like rape or child abuse, clearly those don’t belong on-screen, of course.)
Personally, I thought the character missions in ME 2 were a mixed bag. For instance, the loyalty missions for Jack, Mordin, Legion and Tali had interesting stories but the ones for Grunt, Garrus, Thane and Samara were kind of meh (although killing a thresher maw was pretty cool).
Just did a mission at the Citadel where I battled my own clone. It was actually hilarious and a lot of fun. Went through the Citadel Archives, watched history holograms. I kept hoping it would end with us shooting our way through the Normandy…and it did!
I took Tali and EDI With me the whole time and it was hilarious. EDI was great with the Normandy taken over and Tali was great while she encouraged a robot(EDI) to kill humans.
EDI is voiced by Tricia Helfer and with that effect added tot he voice, I had never noticed. She went from “Oh, look, an AI that runs the ship” to one of my favorite characters.
If you followed advice from earlier, you saved Citadel for nearly last? If that’s so, you should know that the point of no return is the attack on Cerberus HQ. Once you select that mission, you go right to the endgame. And for that mission, you’ll want your romance to accompany you.
The reason to save it for last is because there are a couple characters who show up very late in the main storyline who only appear in the Citadel DLC if you’ve reached that point. Miranda is the main one, iirc. I love Citadel because of all the over-the-top fan service, but it always feels jarring to go back to the main game because of the change in tone from the party to the desperate battle for the survival of the galaxy.
Anyways, the main way you screwed up wasn’t in doing it earlier than necessary, but in not using Wrex as a squadmate at every opportunity.
After the big “party” at my new apartment, I woke up with Javik and it is implied that we slept together. Very poor taste in my opinion. Uh, why wasn’t that Liara? I have been faithful to her the entire series.
Liara sent me an email that she had a new project she wanted to go over in my quarters. I go up there and no invite button is available. Am I supposed to go back to my Citadel apartment? It’s really weird.
I have now caved and looked up one spoiler. I want to know if Tali’s face will be shown. They CLEARLY missed the opportunity when I helped her people back on their planet.
Looks like the answer is “Nope. Only if you romance her.”
What??? It felt like a reasonable mystery to reward all of us who were good friends with her with.
