Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
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In the first game, Cerberus was a bunch of idiot mooks that you mowed down for XP. In the second game they were expanded to be this vast organization with research stations, ships, advanced technology, and the ability to build a ship more advanced than the ship that the Humans and Turians could build together. Despite this, they are still amazingly incompetent, with 99% of their victims being human and 100% of their experiments turning on them and destroying their stuff.
In the third game, Cerberus is even more ludicrously powerful. They now have an army, fleets, and military bases that dwarf the size of the human colonies we've seen. They're everywhere, they know everyone's plans, and have all the best technology.
The Reapers are attacking. Supply lines are cut. The dead and wounded are piling up. Populations are dwindling. And yet Cerberus can conscript, arm, feed, train, equip, and field this endless army, which is powerful enough to fight a war on multiple fronts and even mount an open invasion of the Citadel itself. You spend more time fighting them than you spend fighting the supposed enemy of the series.
This is to say nothing of Leng, the absurd plot-armored emo supervillain, who seems to be made of contrivances and looks like he just escaped from a school for Final Fantasy villains. (When his shields get low, he crouches in the open to become invulnerable to all damage while mooks spawn and his shields recharge. He has no business being in in a cover-based shooter that's trying this hard to be taken seriously.)
All of this is a drawn-out way of saying that by the end of the game I was just sick to death of Cerberus, and so it was agonizing to have yet another nonsense conversation with the Illusive man right on the threshold of the final encounter. I was so uninterested in him and his goals, and the guy seems to be a sort of plot-hole singularity where the gameworld bends around him until it stops making sense. I was hoping he wouldn't show up in this game. Instead he was a major focus of it. Not since Fable 2 has there been an annoying second-fiddle antagonist that so gleefully overshadowed the main villain.
