A Definitive Ranking of the Mass Effect DLC From Worst to Best
None of you care about this at all, and I don't care about that! Here's like 10k words on it anyway.
I’m replaying Mass Effect: Legendary Edition for reasons I can’t really explain (affinity for the game, a deep love of retreading familiar ground, I am sort of bored). Something I’d completely forgotten about until my replay of Mass Effect 2 is that the Legendary Edition, which bundles all three games, also bundles all of the DLC (or Downloadable content, if you’re not a ~gamer~) that the games had available, so they’re truly the complete package.
As a general rule of thumb I find DLC to be pretty hit or miss depending on the game. A lot of DLC is purely cosmetic and is often offered as a reward for pre-ordering the game — new armor, cool guns, stuff like that. Mass Effect is sort of interesting because for the most part it’s DLC are actually missions, stories, and even companions. This presents a tough balance — you obviously can’t make it so people who didn’t have access to the DLC don’t understand the game, so you need to figure out how to have an impact without it seeming strange that no one comments on said impact for the rest of the game.
For some reason, I decided to rank the DLC across the series from worst to best. Why? I don’t know, because I found it interesting to consider. What makes an additional mission fun? How much lore does DLC need to have for me to consider it impactful? And how much lore is too much lore, where you start to wonder why this isn’t just in the base game and expect that corporate greed might be the answer? These are good questions to ask. Like all DLC, Mass Effect’s can be extremely hit or miss, but I liked pausing the game to ruminate on them when I was done.
And now I shall saddle you with my long, rambling thoughts on the matter. So, here’s the list:
Sir Not-Appearing-On-This-List: Pinnacle Station, ME1
Before we get into it, I should mention that the original Mass Effect had two DLC packs, the second one being Pinnacle Station, a series of solo combat missions. Unfortunately, the source code of that DLC corrupted, which meant it couldn’t be included in the Legendary Edition. I won’t lie, it sounds pretty boring to me, but I never played it, so who can say. I won’t judge what I don’t know.
Sir Also-Not-Appearing-On-This-List: Extended Cut, ME3
Oh, Mass Effect 3. What a deeply imperfect little game. There’s a lot of lore here I won’t get into, but the basic gist of it is that Mass Effect 3 had an extremely controversial ending, that many fans felt was incomplete. The negative response to the ending was so overwhelming that the team went and wrote and animated a bunch more content and cutscenes and dialogue to clarify what happened and provide closure to players (whether it succeeds at that is a different story). This was labeled DLC and was originally advertised as free only to a specific date, but they ended up making it free forever because the ending otherwise really sucked and now just only mostly sucks. Anyway, I think this barely counts as DLC, and I never played Mass Effect 3 before it existed so the ending is just the ending to me. No score!
Sir Another-One-Not-Appearing-On-This-List: All Of the Cosmetic Stuff, ME2 and ME3
Mass Effect 2 and 3 feature cosmetic DLC, like I discussed above. I’m not going to talk about them because they are boring to me. It’s guns and armor. Who cares. The funniest one is you can get the blood dragon armor from the Dragon Age games, which really just shows what an Era Of Gaming this was for this specific studio.
Sir Not-On-This-List-Because-It-Honestly-Barely-Counts-At-All: Genesis and Genesis 2, ME2 & ME3
Genesis and Genesis 2 are interactive comics that recap the story so far, appearing at the very start of games 2 and 3, respectively. Basically, what happened is that they made a version of ME2 for the Playstation 3, but ME1 wasn’t available on the console. Figuring that meant they’d have a lot of players who skipped the first game, they introduced the comics to allow new players to get a recap on the story and decide what pivotal, game changing choices they would have made if they’d bothered to play the first game. They then repeated this for game 3. These are functionally very useful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not exactly new content, so we’re skipping them on our rankings.
Anyway: NOW, onto the ACTUAL LIST I promise.
Dead Fucking Last: Project Firewalker, ME2
Hoo boy. Mass Effect 1 became somewhat infamous for it’s terrible driving mechanics, featured heavily in the game. Mass Effect 2 smartly nixes the need to drive at all, letting you simply land on planets as needed. Until this DLC came along and was like, “what if we made driving even worse and more boring?” In all honesty, I’m not sure who this DLC is for. Even if you were a big fan of the driving mini-game, the maps in these missions are super linear, and they’re all essentially the same mission copy-pasted. You go to a world, you hover over a little glowing dot on the ground, you hold a button, you collect data, you go home. In theory some of the missions have a wrinkle (there’s one on a timer, for instance, and others require you to briefly leave the vehicle), but the core mechanics are so easy and the maps have no open world element, so there’s no real risk presented. There’s also no good reward so far as I can tell — while other DLC offers interesting character choices or story or at least cool gear, this does. . . nothing. You get an orb? I don’t know. The Legendary version of Mass Effect 1 fixed the game’s terrible driving mechanic, so it feels really noticeable here just how wonky this thing is. And again. These missions are boring! I only did them when I happened to be in the area anyway for a better, cooler mission. LAME.
Sweet But Ultimately Sort of Boring: The Normandy Crash Site, ME2
One of the great things about ME2 is how it starts: you die. Like, ripped into the vacuum of space dead. And then you’re brought back by crazy pro-human terrorists run by Literally Martin Sheen. It owns. As part of your death your original ship crashes — they remake an exact copy of it, don’t worry — and you lose a handful of mostly unnamed crewmen. This DLC offers you a solo trip to the planet the Normandy ended up on. There’s technically a mission element — grabbing the 20 dog tags of your dead crew — and there’s a few flashbacks to the way things looked before, but given you’re on a exact replica of the ship they’re not really, like, all that staggering. Most meaningful is a datapad you recover that reveals that Navigator Pressley, a maroon shirt with a handful of lines in the first game who dies to make a point here — had gone back on his anti-alien sentiments. That’s nice! And then you place a big monument. Also nice! But mostly you just walk around a big icy field reminiscing about the ship. It’s nostalgic and sweet, but it’s also sort of pointless. Sorry!
An Old Friend Returns, But the Returns are Diminishing: Lair of the Shadow Broker, ME2
Of the ME2 and ME3 DLC missions, some are more narratively important than others. I’m actually fond of most the mission quests, even the ones that aren’t massively impactful to the overarching story. A lot of them are pretty good at fleshing out the world, the stakeholders involved, and the character of Shepard, depending on how you play them. It makes them tough to rank, so I’m taking into factor two things: how much I liked the story and how much I liked playing it. So, starting at the bottom here, we have Lair of the Shadow Broker, my least favorite of these offerings. Buckle up, this one’s a bit long.
In ME1, you get six squad members you can use in pairs on missions. Only two of them return as full-time companions in game 2, however; one dies in a story event in the first game, the one you save from that mission pretty much hates you now, one goes back to his homeworld and features in some missions but not as a companion, and the last one is, well, Liara. Liara is the universal romance choice from the first game, meaning both male and female characters can romance her; she’s also the obligatory, Star Trek-esque sexy blue skinned alien lady that every story in scifi feels it needs. That she didn’t return as a companion for game 2 was a disappointment to a lot of fans, and that you can’t in any way officially continue your romance with her if you started one in the first game was downright sacrilegious to a few. So: enter Lair of the Shadow Broker, a DLC that brings Liara back as a companion, hunting down the mysterious Shadow Broker, a sort of illusive black market figure.
I’m sure for fans of Liara, this DLC is a dream. I, however, am not a fan of Liara, at least not in the first game. I’m sorry! In game 1 she’s a completely meek damsel in distress, clearly meant to offset Brash Soldier Girl Ashley as the other female love interest (Kaiden, the male love interest, has more in common with Liara than not, which is an interesting choice for a different essay). When she’s not stammering out awkward affection for Shepard based on nothing, she’s literally fainting in every single scene she’s in. Perhaps realizing this was a bit, hrm, sexist, Mass Effect 2 rewrites her from dorky scientist making goo goo eyes to ass kicking information broker, basically completely changing her personality in this DLC with no comment. And listen: I way, way prefer ME2 and especially ME3 Liara to ME1. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t feel like a natural evolution. You remember when the MCU made every character Tony Stark? It’s kind of like that. Why does Liara go from scientist to information broker? This is never really explored — they just decide it’s more fun for her to do that.
There’s a lot here that doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. For one, the game seems to presume the only reason you’d play this is because you romanced Liara — there’s tons of weird flirting shoehorned in, you bicker like an old married couple the entire time — hell, there’s even a pre-written bit where you catch her to save her over your other companion, regardless of the fact that you could have romanced them. There’s tender hugs! There’s gentle hand-holding! Some actual romances in this game don’t even get that much to do!
On top of all of that — the gameplay itself just isn’t that fun here. The first half is waves of mooks in a bad map, then an insufferable boss battle, broken up by a thankfully enjoyable (but very short) car chase sequence. The second half’s map is slightly cooler, but there’s not a lot of variation in enemy type for a battle as long as they make this. Even the end reveal of the Shadow Broker (who turns out to be a whole new type of alien) is undermined by how little it all matters in the grand scheme of the game, except to, again, rewrite Liara to be a cold, hard, badass with plenty of one-liners to say. Ultimately, there’s just not a lot here for me. I mostly find this to be a bit of padding to appease people who romanced this character.
(The best part of this DLC to me is the information you can access on your non-Liara squadmates, which fleshes them out and alternates between deeply funny and heartbreakingly sad in an instant. Reading Miranda’s dating profiles? Hilarious! Immediately clicking over to find that she’s just learned she can never have kids? Really sad! Why can’t the rest of this be that good?)
The Least Impactful Companions Award: Kasumi — Stolen Memory and Zaeed — Price of Revenge, ME2
ME2 and ME3 actually have downloadable bonus companions, a thing Bioware was fond of at the time (they also do it in the Dragon Age games). The tricky thing with a downloadable companion is that they can feel less fleshed out than those actually written into the game. You can’t make a character who is pivotal to the story something people have to pay extra for, so you have the make the characters appealing and interesting enough to be worth buying without giving them too much narrative impact. I think Mass Effect 3 is slightly better at this, which I’ll talk about later.
The ME2 companions who join you are Kasumi, a master thief, and Zaeed, a mercenary. All of the other characters you have to complete a mission to recruit, but Kasumi and Zaeed are just conversations that you run into and they join your team without fuss. Which, look, I get, you bought the DLC, but an extra mission you can’t fail would be fun, I think! They also immediately grant you access to their loyalty missions, a key mechanic in ME2. (Long story short, you need to make all of your teammates loyal if you want them to survive the mission at the end of the game, which you do by completing a side quest for them. Everyone else’s side quests take a moment to start cropping up, usually about halfway through the game.)
Kasumi and Zaeed are cool, don’t get me wrong, and Kasumi in particular has a fun power where she makes herself invisible and then melee attacks, but neither character has weight or presence in the story. You can’t even have real conversations with them on the ship; if you press the button to talk to them they’ll feed you one-liners that comment on where you are in the game, or give you some more of their personal histories, but they lack the conversation wheel mechanic all the other companions in this game have, and they never trigger a conversation cutscene where you can actually choose your answers to them the way ME3’s companion does. Their added lines in some missions are fun, and I like both of their loyalty missions (Kasumi’s mini-heist in particular is a really good time, even if it features a character with a truly distractingly strong Afrikaans accent, lol), but considering how varied and interesting the rest of the ME2 cast is, these guys feel like afterthoughts, particularly when lined up to ME3’s Javik (again, more on that later.) ME3 does fix this slightly by having them re-appear in fun little side quests, but it’s a bit too little too late, and you never get the sense that you needed them around in the first place.
A Cool Location and Not Much Else: Omega; ME3
In Mass Effect 1 you spend most of the game in Council controlled space; basically, the parts of the galaxy with a lot of government oversight and rules. Since you die and end up working for terrorists in Mass Effect 2, you end up largely playing in the more Wild West-esque Terminus Systems, which are filled with pirates and slavers and weirdly a bunch of human colonies but that’s sort of neither here nor there. Your kick off to the Termimus Systems is Omega, a Gotham-like space station run by a mobster named Aria T’Loak and several gangs of mercenaries who essentially report to her. Omega is a cool spot, but you don’t spend a huge amount of time there — you swing by to pick up two companions, and then swing back for a loyalty mission and a handful of sidequests, but that’s it. Aria, who opens with the triumphant declaration that the only law on Omega is “don’t fuck with Aria,” doesn’t do too much in the game itself and, in my opinion, largely doesn’t live up to her own bluster. Clearly recognizing a slight missed opportunity, this DLC returns you back to Omega. Aria’s been ousted by a Cerberus official, so your goals are aligned here — she wants her space station back, you want to take down Cerberus. Match made in heaven!
Given how high-stakes so much of Mass Effect 3 is (you can play this at pretty much any point in the game, including immediately after the fall of Aria’s home planet) this is sort of a refreshing breather episode. Re-taking Omega doesn’t really matter in the context of the war to anyone except Aria, who’s already agreed to help you with a merc army either way. This is mostly an excuse to return to an underutilized location from ME2.
All told, there’s a lot that’s fun here — you get two companions just for this mission, both with cool new powers that you don’t see elsewhere in the game, Omega’s streets make for an engaging map, and you meet the series first female Turian (which is sort of wild given the fact that Turian military is explicitly gender neutral and every single Turian does time in it, but, whatever). That said, this DLC is very, very long (about four hours), and I’m not sure it justifies its own length. The gameplay gets repetitive, and even though it intros a new enemy type they’re really overhyped for how much of a battle they are. And it’s all for Omega? It’s just a lot of time to insert into something this low stakes. So, yeah, it’s fun, but it’s not as fun as it could be for how much time you sink into it. Mid-tier!
Help! The Sky Is Fallen And I Can’t Get Up: Bring Down the Sky, ME1
The only surviving ME1 DLC is a new mission, and in a way it’s one of the best examples of how to include something that you don’t need to complete to finish the game, but that still feels like it has long, overarching consequences if you do complete it. Basically, the human colony of Terra Nova is in trouble — there’s an asteroid heading right towards it. It turns out the asteroid is being driven towards it, though, because a bunch of Batarians (more on those aliens later) have kidnapped the scientists doing research on a base on the asteroid, strapped rockets to it, and decided to drive it into the planet to kill everyone. Yikes!
Overall the mission here is pretty straight forward, so it’s getting a lower ranking on the gameplay end of things. You find a rocket, you fight some mooks, you disable the rocket, you do that thrice. But what I like about this mission is the end. Eventually you confront Batak, the main bad guy, and he gives you a sadistic choice — he’s rigged the station you’re in to blow up. If you stop to fight him, all of the innocent scientists die; if you choose to disarm the bombs, he gets away. And this is a choice that actually crops back up way later down the line! If you let Batak live he shows back up in Mass Effect 3, and you can even end up convincing him to be a war asset who ends up on your side! It’s a fun way to harken back to this mission, and I think it sets the stage for the way the best mission based DLCs ended up feeling consequential. Pretty good!
You Can’t Hide Bad Writing Behind Good Environments: Leviathan; ME3
Pretty early into ME3, Admiral Hackett, commander of the Human Alliance (Space) Navy and Essentially Your Boss asks you to visit a Dr. Bryson on the Citadel, who’s apparently got evidence that there was a Reaper that was once killed by something called Leviathan. Everything that could kill a Reaper is useful, so you head off to meet him, only for him to be instantly murdered by his assistant. You’re then tasked with finding a Dr. Garneau, who worked for Dr. Bryson and is apparently off finding more evidence of this so-called Leviathan. . . somewhere. Using clues from the lab, you pinpoint a location — and that’s when things get really weird, and the mission kicks off properly.
I have so many conflicted feelings about Leviathan, and the fact that it was DLC to begin with. Playing this is incredibly fun, and I love the tone it strikes — half horror, half action, all effective. But writing-wise, this leans into one of my least favorite things about Mass Effect 3, the decision to make the core of the game about cycles, and the inevitable desire of synthetic life to destroy organic life. See, The Leviathan turns out to be a member of an ancient super race — organic — that created a synthetic life, which turned into the Reapers. The first harvest was of the Leviathan(‘s species??? I’ve never grasped if Leviathan is the name of the single one or the species as a whole and I’m too lazy to google it rn), and Harbinger, the Big Bad from ME2, turned out to be the first Reaper. Leviathan basically says that this is a doomed cycle to repeat forever. Organic life will create synthetic life, and synthetic life will try to kill organic life, always and forever.
This ends up being extremely pivotal to the end game, where, unfortunately, a small child (horribly acted, of course) explains all of this to you and forces you to choose between three equally lame endings. (I told you the ending of the game was controversial). That’s why the fact that Leviathan is a DLC is so baffling to me. Without this in the game, the endgame comes out of absolutely nowhere. Even with this in the game, it’s a giant exposition dump with almost no buildup. It’s the crowning achievement of ME3’s often wonky writing — because the original ending got leaked, the creators locked themselves in a room to write the ending without talking to any of the rest of the writing team. So the ending feels rushed and disconnected from the rest of the game, and things like Leviathan were written in to provide some sort of context for the ending. AND THEN LOCKED BEHIND A PAYWALL? That’s fucking BAFFLING! I can’t imagine what the ending would have felt like if I’d ever played a version of this without this DLC. Like I said earlier, DLC story missions have to be careful — impactful enough to feel purposeful, but not so important that people who didn’t pay are lost without them. Leviathan, unfortunately, just needed to be a part of the base game, a real priority mission, because without it the already weak structure of the ending completely collapses (and with it, well. . . actually, it doesn’t get too much better, but at least it’s not completely out of left field, I guess.)
It’s a shame, too, because so much of this DLC absolutely rules, from an environmental and gameplay perspective. There’s a truly creepy mining facility filled with dead-eyed thralls who track you listlessly across the room; there’s a sea of ruined freighters brought down by Leviathan that is genuinely harrowing, and makes you feel like there’s actual stakes even though you know reasonably you can’t die here because you’re the protagonist; and the deep-sea dive for the chat with Leviathan is beautiful and eerie. Your love interest has unique dialogue, which is rare in these DLCs but makes everything feel more lived in. It’s great! It’s just a shame it’s sort of a bad exposition dump to justify a bad ending, and not a reveal that feels more built into the games prior to this.
Spooky, Scary, Sad: Overload, ME2
In my most recent play through, the story mission DLC from ME2 I tackled first was Overload, a mission where Captain Shepard is sent to figure out why a Virtual Intelligence at a Cerberus (those evil human terrorists run by Literally Martin Sheen who you work for because they brought you back from the dead) facility went wrong. The answer turns out to be “unethical human experimentation,” because that’s the answer, like, 95% of the time with Cerberus. (In the first game you learn this over and over again, but in ME2 you can barely comment on it because all those missions are optional, lol.)
This mission plays half like a horror game, with you walking hauntingly empty halls while a VI screams garbled static at you, and half pure tragedy, where you realize something awful is at the core of the thing. Gameplay wise, it’s broken into four sections — an entry bit, and three side factories. The first two areas are the weakest; by the time you get to the abandoned AI dreadnought that’s filled with unmoving, deactivated robots, the game has gone all in on the horror tone, and the things really starts to come together.
Story-wise, this is one of the less matters to the overall plot missions in the game. Like I said, since all of them are optional, they mostly don’t effect big changes, instead acting as sort of bridges between games. This one is less that, though, and more a reminder to the player that Cerberus are not the good guys, even though their objectives in this game seem sort of pure for a lot of it. And unlike LoTSB or Omega, I found it to be the perfect length. On top of that, if you play it the characters featured in it reappear in the third game, which is a nice touch. For the ME2 missions, it’s definitely not as plot-impactful as LoTSB or Arrival (more on that later), but it’s a good reminder of just why you shouldn’t like the guy bankrolling you in the second game, and the mechanics of play are pretty fun here.
It’s The End of the World As We Know It: Arrival, ME2
Okay, yes, finally I arrive at the much teased about “story important” mission DLC for ME2. The team at Bioware switched a lot between ME2 and ME3, and there’s what I would refer to as a pretty massive tone shift between the games as a result of this. ME2 ends triumphant, with your ragtag bunch of misfits having saved the day and (probably) mostly survived. Sure, war is looming, but for now you’ve won. Nothing can stop you.
ME3 starts with you, alone and under house arrest on Earth, when the Reapers attack much sooner than anticipated and kick off a giant universal genocide with a body count in the trillions.
So: how do we get here? How does the game justify disassembling your hard-assembled team, sticking you on Earth, which you literally can’t even visit in any other game, and making you, a certified war hero, into a house-arrested war criminal?
The answer is Arrival.
Arrival is a narrative bridge between ME2 and ME3, and for the most part everyone I know plays it absolutely last in ME2, after even the suicide mission (although there are some useful gear here if you play it earlier). About halfway through ME2, Admiral Hackett asks you to look into the disappearance of an old friend of his, Dr. Amanda Kenson. Kenson’s been doing deep cover research for Hackett on Reaper technology allegedly located in Batarian space, but she’s been captured and thrown into a Batarian jail. The Batarians aren’t very human friendly, and on top of that she’s apparently uncovered something pretty bad. So, time to suit up and go with her. Except, unlike literally every other mission in the game, Hackett asks you to go alone. No backup, no help — just you, Commander Shepard, on a one-person rescue mission.
Which, of course, does not go to plan. It turns out that the Reapers can use the Mass Relay in this system to invade the entire galaxy — and, oh yeah, the Reapers are exactly two days away from arriving. Uh oh! Kenson planned to launch an asteroid into it, wiping the system off the map, but got caught before she could do it. Shepard, naturally, asks to see proof before condemning 300,000 people to death. Of course, it turns out Kenson, who scoffs at Shepard’s suggestion that she could be indoctrinated (read: mind controlled by the Reapers, a thing that happens to literally everyone who comes into contact with their tech), is, in fact, fucking indoctrinated, and Shepard’s arrival has screwed everything up. She’s not planning to crash the asteroid anymore; she’s planning to let the Reapers through the gate, and Shepard stands in her way. So, naturally, she turns on Shep immediately, and you’re overwhelmed by her forces, losing your two day head start and forcing you to take matters into your own hands and crash the asteroid yourself. That means, no matter what, you have to kill 300k Batarians. Who are, you know, people — aliens, yeah, and one of Mass Effect’s out-dated, early-D&D-esque Always Chaotic Evil races, but still, they’re people. And presumably they’re not actually Always Chaotic Evil. (ME3 fixes this bad writing but having several of them be actively not evil right in front of you. Thanks ME3!)
The game doesn’t act like it’s a good choice, or you’re a good guy. Neither does the rest of the galaxy. You’re arrested for war crimes, sent to Earth, and six months later BAM. Mass Effect 3 starts.
Without Arrival, the only justification for the beginning of ME3 is that you were working with the human terrorist group Cerberus, which doesn’t really work because a bunch of people knew that when you were doing it and ultimately didn’t really care. So Arrival is actually very pivotal — it sets up why you’re where you’re at at the start of ME3. On top of that, it’s a brutal tone shift that effectively bridges the gaps between the games and strongly affects Shepard’s character by ME3. No matter how much of a diplomatic good guy you play as, you’ve killed 300k innocents. You’re pretty disillusioned. Each Mass Effect game gets darker and darker; ME1 is mostly space exploration threaded by a plot that seems to be about stopping one bad guy, but turns out to be a conspiracy; ME2 is an Ocean’s 11 esque gathering of the team, yes, but it’s also a game where you spend most of it facing certain death; ME3? ME3 is War Is Hell: The Video Game. It’s a game where you make shitty choices and all your victories feel pyrrhic. And Arrival is here to let you know exactly what you’re getting into. The good times are over, baby.
A Companion So Good He Should Have Just Been In The Game: “From Ashes,” AKA Javik, ME3
Much of Mass Effect’s lore revolves around the Protheans, an ancient species that apparently built the mass relays (allowing for high-speed space travel, which connects all the species currently active in the galaxy), the Citadel (the galactic government seat), and a bunch of other useful tech and then vanished out of nowhere 50,000 years before the start of the game. The mystery of the Protheans and what happened to them drives the game, literally kickstarting your first mission in ME1; it turns out they were wiped out by the Reapers, and the handful of hints (and, eventually, weapon) that they were able to leave behind is pretty much the only hope this cycle of civilization has at escaping the same fate.
You encounter a lot of Prothean technology, and even a Prothean VI, in the first two games, but ME3 raises the stakes with From Ashes. You hear that there’s a Prothean artifact at the colony Eden Prime (the first location you go to in game 1) and that Cerberus is going after it. When you arrive you learn it isn’t an artifact: it’s an actual Prothean. The last Prothean, left in stasis for 50k years. You wake him up, tell him everyone he has ever known is dead, and then ask him to help end the Reapers with you.
The thing is that the games, up until this point, treat the Protheans as the highlight of civilization. Smart, dedicated — hell, for years they got all the praise for stuff they didn’t even do. And then you meet one, and guess what? He’s just as much a simple minded jerk as any normal person. And his society isn’t as advanced as we might have thought — they, too, had infighting, slavery, and all sorts of terrible fuckery.
Javik is pissed, and he’s lonely, and he’s deeply imperfect, and his existence in the game changes so much. As much as I like Kasumi and Zaeed, Javik feels so much more integrated into ME3 then either of them into ME2. (It helps that the conversation mechanic of this game is different — ME2 offers conversation trees for every companion outside of Kasumi and Zaeed; ME3 has basically everyone respond with a pre-written exchange when prompted, except for a few key moments when there’s a cutscene. So while Javik has the same conversation mechanic as Kasumi and Zaeed in ME2, it doesn’t feel nearly as out of place here. And on top of that, he gets several of those cutscenes, same as everyone else, and interacts pretty readily with other companions, which never happens to anyone in ME2.) His presence on your ship feels like an actual asset in the war you’re in.
He also literally represents two sort of key themes of the game: firstly, that the Protheans lost because they assimilated society so everyone conformed and was the same; the best hope this cycle has is actually that no one can agree on anything and can’t stop fighting. Who would have thought! Secondly, he represents one half of the games basic argument on whether or not AI is inherently good or inherently evil — EDI, your synthetic unshackled ship AI is the companion who most articulates that AI can be good; Javik, conversely, never trusts them, and points out what a mistake he feels you trusting them is at every point you choose to. It makes sense to balance these two characters given the ultimate end choices.
Add to the character Ike Amadi’s simply brilliant voice performance (it’s one of the top five in the entire series for me, I think, he just manages to be so serious and so funny all at once), and you have a bonus companion who feels like they should have just written him into the main game instead of locking him behind a paywall (thanks, Legendary version!).
I’ve Had The Time Of My Life, And I Owe It All To You: Citadel, ME3
If you played these games, you knew that this was going to be at the top of the list. It’s at the top of everyone’s lists. It is the absolute crowning achievement of Mass Effect DLC, and honestly, maybe of Mass Effect 3 as a whole. Let’s get into it.
I’ve mentioned a little bit in this that the tone of Mass Effect 3 is much darker than the tone of the rest of the games. Citadel is an attempt to rectify that, sort of. It’s also a chance to get the entire gang back together, from all three games. See, in game 1, you have a squad of six people — Liara, Kaiden, Ashley, Wrex, Garrus, and Tali. In game 2, you build a team of of twelve — Miranda, Jacob, Jack, Mordin, Grunt, Samara (or her evil daughter, but that’s another story), Legion, Thane, Kasumi, Zaeed, and Garrus and Tali again. You drop back down to a smaller team again in ME3 — Liara, Garrus, and Tali all return; either Ashley or Kaiden (whoever survives game 1, spoilers), EDI, James, and Javik. Wrex, your lone non-returning squad mate from the first game, has a solid storyline in the third game; your ME2 companions, meanwhile, pop in and out of individual missions with largely minimal impact, mostly due to the fact that they can die in the ME2. If you didn’t complete their loyalty missions in that game but they survived it, a number of them die here. But for the most part, everyone who bothers with all of these games is probably going into ME3 with most of their squads alive and loyal, but nearly all of them, including potential love interests, reduced to cameo appearances in missions.
People found this frustrating. Reasonably, I’d argue — the characters in ME2 are some of the most well written in video games, and the game spends so much team harping on how important it is to build up your team and make them loyal. So to only have these fan favorites pop in for brief interludes and then vanish completely for the most part, not even bothering to write you an email? A bit silly. No full time squadmate Wrex? Also silly. The Citadel gives you a shot to finally get everyone back in a room together, for one last hurrah — a funny, fun, mission that breaks the seriously dark tone ME3 slumps into. It was written as a love letter to the series, to the fans, and to the characters, and for the most part everyone plays it just before the endgame. The Citadel is the farewell that fans wanted.
I could go into the details here, but they’re mostly moot. You’re put on mandatory shore leave, go to Anderson’s decked out apartment, and immediately get shot at by mercs. The plot coalesces, and yes, it’s a bit nonsensical (clones are involved. Not kidding!). But the nonsense here is a well deserved moment of levity in a game that is so obsessed with hammering home that war is hell that it often forgets to have a little fun, too. (ME1 and ME2 are filled with funny moments, mostly in squadmate banter, awkward flirting, and Mordin singing Gilbert and Sullivan. There are funny moments in ME3, too, but they vanish alongside Shepard’s optimism after Priority: Thessia.) Once it’s over, you get to have a bunch of mini-dates with your squad, hold a big house party, and watch everyone get really, really drunk. It’s fun!
The point of the Citadel DLC isn’t the plot. It’s not to get cool new weapons, or to learn some new lore, or even to flesh out the world. It’s the end of the game. You’ve done that already. No, the Citadel is for one thing and one thing only: to remind you what you loved about these games, and these characters, and why you bothered to sink what probably ended up being close to 100 hours of your life playing through this trilogy. There’s dates with your love interests, chats with the tank bred Krogan who’s sort of your son, goodbyes from characters who have died, a cameo from Blasto, the first Hanar Spectre, tons of jokes, and an actual, literal dance party. Yes, some of the dialogue is peak 2000s era Marvel-esque, but I find it so charming. (“The bigger the target, the bigger the, uh, target.” “The rest of you are getting paid for this?” James ordering pizza? Wrex’s inexplicable new catchphrase being “Uncle Urdnot has a present for you!” I giggled, sue me!)
It’s also, I’m not kidding, four hours long, similar to Omega, which should feel like a long time, but mostly doesn’t. Where that runtime started to drag because of the low stakes in Omega, here it’s spent making sure every character gets their moment in the spotlight, one last time.
It’s hard to overstate how warm this DLC makes me feel. As I replayed the games this time, before I got to this DLC, I actually, seriously, considered not playing the endgame of ME3, and just closing down once this finished to end on a high note. But I probably won’t, because this DLC reminded me of something else, too. Ultimately bad ending aside, I fucking love these games. For all the creaky imperfections, mind-numbing planet scanning, genuinely horrendous looking hands, and classic Bioware drinking and head shaking animations — for all the flaws, I just love them. That’s why I replayed them. And the Citadel DLC is a perfect way of remembering that. It’s a DLC so good that it keeps me coming back to this world for more. To see my friends one last time, and have a truly wonderful little dance party. I’ll drink to that.