User blog:LilyheartsLightning/A Year in Retrospectre

When you play through a game many times over the course of a year, you make observations regarding the characters, story, and lore, whether they be humourous realizations or cases of fridge logic. These are fifty thoughts I've had while playing through the series, as a sort of retrospective on one of my favourite games of all time.

(And yes, I know that ME3 came out on the sixth, but I got it on the fifteenth of last year for my birthday. So without further ado...)


 * 1) Judging from the M-7 Lancer, the move to thermal clips really was a bad idea.
 * 2) A tool of destruction named after a spirit of creation is a lot funnier to me than it probably should be.
 * 3) It's about time that BioWare realized that film grain usually looks like a really bad case of compression artifacts.
 * 4) As soon as you step into a geth-occupied area, you're immediately presumed KIA by the quarians.
 * 5) If the geth are so advanced in terms of combat technology, why haven't they figured out that having their head be a vulnerable spot is a bad idea?
 * 6) The Protheans didn’t fail against the Reapers because of the Reapers’ overwhelming power and indoctrination.  The Protheans failed because their Avatars had powers like Slam.
 * 7) Volus kamikaze husks would have been hilarious.
 * 8) The combination of the M-13 Raptor and Disciple is now officially named “Reach and Flexibility”.
 * 9) You’d think that Cerberus would use the same glass that they use for Atlas canopies for Guardian shield “mail slots”.
 * 10) Being stepped on by a Reaper is a lot less instant-death-y than you would expect.
 * 11) The asari, turians, krogan, or salarians could win the war on their own if they’d just use the weapons their race invented.
 * 12) Ninjas will still be a) cool and b) effective in 2186.
 * 13) But not as a) cool and b) effective as terminally-ill assassins.
 * 14) You can never have too much of Vigil’s Theme.
 * 15) Shepard is well aware that nothing good ever gets done if they don't personally do it. Even if they've just been blasted by a Reaper.
 * 16) Garrus, if you like the Scorpion so much, why won’t you let me give you one.
 * 17) Overload being effective against barriers always confused me, given that they only affected shields in ME2…until it occurred to me that Overload did affect barriers in ME1.
 * 18) A grenade that causes unprotected enemies it doesn’t kill to start floating away isn’t much of a benefit when that grenade typically kills unprotected enemies instantly.
 * 19) I imagine quite a few people who romanced either Garrus or Tali started feeling guilty when they heard about Talibrations.
 * 20) The reason you rarely see female turians in the series is because they are all out being a million times more awesome than you.
 * 21) Charge-Nova spam is all fun and games until you are on the receiving end of it.
 * 22) Conrad Verner and Eve have Adrenaline Rush.
 * 23) What is it with enemy snipers and turning rapid-firing low-damage rifles into high-powered slow-firing rifles?
 * 24) Femshep/Javik should be canon.
 * 25) I wish you could convince EDI to go for Samantha instead of Joker.
 * 26) Super Metroid music fits perfectly with the Omega DLC.
 * 27) Reaper fights, on the other hand, go well with the Egg-Cerebus/Egg-Genesis boss music from Sonic the Hedgehog 2006.
 * 28) And for Citadel, the Snatcher soundtrack.
 * 29) Male!Shep’s monotone voice is kinda cool. (Especially since you can really tell when he's feeling emotional.)
 * 30) Vega’s pecs give better damage protection than his armour. Fact.
 * 31) Omega is an awesome whirlwind of Les Yay if you play as a Renegade Femshep.
 * 32) The worst thing about multiplayer is when it ruins your attempt to blow up the galaxy.
 * 33) In the future, advertisements will look like garbage.
 * 34) There's a certain irony in Shepard having a chess set as a trophy from General Petrovsky when Shepard has absolutely no idea how chess works.
 * 35) I miss shooting Husks in the crotch.
 * 36) Shepard’s taste in cutscene weapons has significantly improved since Mass Effect 2.
 * 37) No one would stand a chance against Cerberus if the only units they deployed were Combat Engineers and Guardians.
 * 38) If indoctrination makes people less competant, how come Cerberus mooks have the best enemy AI of the series?
 * 39) They should have made something funny happen in the dream scenes if you run around in a circle instead of chasing the boy.
 * 40) The best thing that the Leviathans ever did for the galaxy was Awakened Collectors.
 * 41) The only thing better than turning your shotgun into a rocket launcher is turning your anything into a rocket launcher.
 * 42) Due to my initial apphrension over the idea of volus characters in multiplayer and my reception of them once I saw their abilities and attributes, I’ve learned a valuable lesson: never doubt BioWare.  Ever.
 * 43) I like a hot chick who’s serious about her dental hygiene.
 * 44) I never cease to be impressed when Mass Effect 3 acknowledges which squadmates I took on specific missions in the previous games.
 * 45) No one does awesome callbacks to prior games like Garrus Vakarian.
 * 46) There is nothing more amusing than wearing Cerberus Phantom Armor to Priority: Cerberus Headquarters and screaming out “SYNC-KILL!” when Shepard shanks Kai Leng.
 * 47) Alternate ending fanfics tend to be truly awful and completely incompatible with the original story.
 * 48) My new headcanon alternate ending is that the Crucible never gets completed and the Reapers easily wipe out galactic civilization because Shepard couldn’t be bothered to stop slaughtering Collectors in the combat simulator with James and Zaeed.
 * 49) CURSE YOU CLAPTRAP YOU DON’T DESERVE VGA 2012 BEST CHARACTER (omitted)
 * 50) Everything noted here is proof of the Indoctrination Theory.