He is a prominent figure in several of the novels (and was a sucky, try-hard, edgelord Mary Sue-like figure there too), so it seems like one of the writers was reeeeally bad at reading the room...
Just to point it out, the Leviathan DLC came out six months after the base game (that is three months after the "extended cut"). It feels a lot more reactionary than Javik being cut as a day 1 DLC. As such, I felt some of the writing in the final exposition dump was created specifically to address some of the complains the community had with the ending. Of course, there is no way to know that for sure (I think the developers never talked about it on interviews), but I am guessing a lot of re-writing went on after the game reception and the role and importance of the Leviathan race was changed, so that what might have been, originally, a side mission with little impact on the overall story (like the Omega DLC) ended up being critical to understanding the final hours of the game.
Concerning the discussion of when to engage with the Citadel DLC, I think it's better if they do it after the ending. The DLC has a tone and writing that clashes with the urgency of the final missions, with the galaxy being in flames and people dying by the trillions. Meanwhile, Citadel has a much lighter tone and is clearly intended as a send off love letter by fans to fans of the universe. Before Andromeda was even conceptualized, this was Bioware's way of saying "we know we had our ups and downs, but we loved the journey and we loved that you went along with us". As such, I think it is a pretty fitting ending to this feature, much more fitting than the story mode ending...
@sharkosaur: I agree, mostly because the tone is very different than the rest of the game, Citadel should be left for the end of the series. I think the DLC was built as a send off to the entire franchise, not just the last game, it has a sense of celebration and one last hurrah with characters that the team (and the player) cared about a lot. As such, it has the structure of an OVA or a christmas special, in that none of it feels canon.
There are chances that not all content will be available for Alex, since decisions from here to the end could affect who shows up, at which point I think the best would be to get reactions to videos of the missing content, like they did at the end of Beast in the East.
@bludgeonparagon: I get your point but, unlike John Wick 3, the framing and the writing of Mass Effect 3 constantly tries to push Kai Leng as a really big deal... in a way, it is the same deprecation of Cerberus throughout the series: even when they are, from our perspective, pushovers that you can mow down easily, the game treats them as an increasingly powerful faction on the level of the collectors or the geth.
In 1 they are a splinter cell of human military with some radical agenda, in 2 they turned out to be this massive underground faction with access to massive resources and incredible technology like true AI, underground biotics labs and the capacity to resurrect someone after 2 years with minimum side-effects, by 3 they have so many resources that they can go toe to toe with the armies of all the other races combined, capable of invading Tuchanka, Omega, Thessia, Sur'Kesh and the Citadel, almost simultaneously.
@colmymeh: You probably blocked some of those memories, or they were so full of nothing that you didn't registered it, but you can't skip this mission, neither can you skip meeting Snake Eyes there, or later. He will return, several times...
@robpigott: I won't defend Kai Leng as a character, or Bioware's intention of selling him as a mayor antagonist and Cerberus' Sheppard. I just want to express that some people have been hating his guts for a long time before he was committed to polygons.
Ohh... Kai Leng, now Alex can start experiencing one of the reasons why this game was not as liked as the previous ones.
@robpigott: To be entirely fair, he was not *out of nowhere*. He was a prominent character in most of the Mass Effect novels (yes, I read those), and he was an insufferable edgelord on those ones too, even before he was turned into cyberninja. To the game credit, they really worked on closing every thread open out there but this smug charisma drain was something that they could have killed off screen.
Got to say, that hole discussion was one of the best tangents the podcast has had in a long time. Keep them coming, guys, and thanks for all the hard work on this time...
hermes's comments