The only other notable change to the Legendary Edition (among a handful of minor tweaks) is that BioWare has toned down the cutscene camera’s gratuitous focus on womens’ butts a bit. However, it does seem to go against the spirit of the “Legendary Edition” to leave out such a significant chunk of what Mass Effect 3 originally was. Granted, I never did like how I felt obligated to grind out points in multiplayer to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything in my single-player campaign – that felt like a coercive means of making people participate in a mode they might not be interested in – and the multiplayer was always a sideshow to the huge RPG. You’ll still get to run through a few of its missions with your AI squadmates at least once as side missions, but otherwise it’s entirely gone. Rest assured, watching numerous full-blown Reapers strut their high-definition stuff as they wreak havoc across a battlefield does feel like a great payoff to two games’ worth of buildup for this race of sentient war machines.Īlso, the Legendary Edition is strictly single-player the entire co-op multiplayer horde mode has been removed. Only a few things stand out as stiffly animated or chunkily low resolution (like Admiral Anderson’s weird armored baseball cap, for instance), and although you can still expect a fair number of animation glitches, I never hit anything more severe than that. I still remember being taken aback by the horribly smeared textures on uniforms in the opening scene when I first played on PC in 2012, but here they’re sharp as can be in 4K, right down to the medals on chests.

It looks roughly the same as Mass Effect 2’s Legendary version, holding up nicely thanks to its improved textures and more detailed models. Its final moments may not quite stick the landing, but just about everything up to that point is stellar.Īs far as the remastering goes, Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition has seen the fewest changes of the Legendary trilogy. Is it the best Mass Effect? No, not quite – as I said the first time I played it, Mass Effect has followed the same pattern as Star Wars: the original trilogy’s second episode was the high point and the third, while still very strong and visually impressive, didn’t quite stack up (and everything after was questionable at best). But the bulk of its 50+ hours are the same, and on the whole it’s as much of a gut-punching, head-scratching continuation of the trilogy as ever.

Granted, the endings were revised to be both clearer and a bit more nuanced since – and they still aren’t all that good.

Having finished Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition, it’s hard to fathom why this excellent action role-playing game was quite so controversial when it came out in 2012.

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