Fianna Ai

Ah you're fine, I won’t ignore this, it’s not taboo or anything. Just not sure if there is a consensus, but I can try to give you my perspective on what happened. 

We were very excited with the first trailers. Had a cowboy in the sky type of vibe. It sounded like we were going to play another N7 or that an N7 was involved in the story. It became a bit more clear after a while that we weren't going to play a proved adventurer/soldier but a younger person who was named Ryder. I say this because I think every piece of the puzzle matters and expectations on this sequel were very high.

Up until the launch, everyone was really excited. Then we played it.

The game released with a few things that made people less excited:

Weird/Bad animations that looked like bugs in the game

Weird design choices: all the turians and asari have the same face in MEA which is really weird, ngl

You come from a game that told you "synthetics vs organics" is the ultimate battle but in Andromeda, you play with an AI inside your head. (Unfortunately, some of his constant comments about the hot or cold temperature on planets can’t be turned off unless you use a mod, which I recommend you do)

You only see turian, asari, krogan and salarians because another ark was lost (so no quarians, geth, volus, batarians, etc.)

People weren’t that excited about the kett / the vilain species in MEA 

BUT the angara were exciting, only at launch the only angara male member of our squad was not romanceable by male Ryder, which made people very angry and Bioware had to work on that. It was a lot of "we hear you and we will do better" from them but a bit too late for some people. Especially because...

(SPOILERS) Male Ryder can have a romance storyline with a gay crew member but said crew member is also linked to a storyline about biological imperative with a female friend, and it’s genuinely the worst tbh

As usual, lots of criticism for the human members of the squad. People couldn’t stand Liam and Cora, Cora especially because she’s a biotic and she has an unfortunate line about it that makes us believe she’s teaching Ryder what it’s like to be biotic - despite Ryder maybe being biotic themselves. Not her entire fault, more of a general issue with Bioware (I think DA games might suffer from this - you’re from one species but others lecture you as if you’re not). Still, there was a lot of negativity about her and the crew of the Tempest. Peebee, our asari squadmate, is very different from Liara. She has a strong personality, and she got a lot of hate as well.

A less serious tone that some people really appreciated but other hated.

Combat was considered either really cool, flexible, that you could personalize or lacking style/the best of the classes that we love in the trilogy.

MEA is not as linear as the trilogy. It’s not an open world either, but you can get lost doing multiple sidequests on multiple planets. So there's this feeling that...

The story might not be as strong as the trilogy

In the trilogy, you play a character who’s defending their galaxy from a dangerous enemy that threatens everyone. In MEA, you play a character who has no idea that the Reapers even exist (since the ark left before the Reaper War) and they left to basically settle into a new galaxy. But planets aren't as golden as everyone thought they were and alien species are already there. The Andromeda galaxy is their home! So MEA has this colonization/settler theme that a lot of people hated. Obviously Shepard's choices in the trilogy don't make them a perfect angel and the trilogy has a lot of flaws, but MEA's seemed worse to people and just were not as accepted.

Our choices at the end of ME3 are heavy but no real choice is picked in MEA - which could be a good point to some, but it can be a sore point to others. Especially when you take everything I already said into account: the AI in your head, the themes that changed, the lighter tone, etc.

A lore that didn't feel like it connected with the trilogy entirely, which could be offputting, with a feeling of retconning or just contradictory lore (like they were trying to 'fix' our canon lore in MEA but in a way that made it confusing).

Other points that I'm sure others might have and I'm forgetting now!

All of that was also combined, I believe, with the fact that some players wanted to re-play a version of the trilogy or wanted a protagonist that was like Shepard. But Ryder is not Shepard and Andromeda is not like the trilogy. It's legit a new galaxy, with new rules, no known entities (no Council, no Spectres, ...) and it takes some getting used to. Everyone in Andromeda wants to start over and get away from the Milky Way, it's the reason they're there.

So obviously, big changes! Some people HATED that, they felt really betrayed. Bioware also tried to fix a lot of the issues with patches, but it was too late. The hate got relentless and people were VERY dedicated to that hate. On Tumblr, it wasn’t as bad as on other sides of the Internet. I mean, I think I saw a lot of hate, but it felt more "contained" and I could also see fandom friends having the time of their life with the game... Other places online, it was really present and directed at Bioware/EA. And it got the game pretty much cancelled with no direct sequel and now a franchise that’s a bit… left to reckon with its choices.

I think Bioware didn’t really stand by the game and the choices they've made. They could have kept at it like some companies do with games (thinking about Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky), but they didn’t. Of course, we also learned later that Bioware -as always- is just terrible at managing their teams and the development of their game, MEA included. It was a nightmare for devs. Not only that but the studio suffers very much from what EA demands. So no more patches, no DLC (!!!!), which I think was a bad idea. Over time and with some fixes, people would have appreciated MEA a lot more.

Now, fandom is divided. I did a survey recently about what people consider "canon" and realized that a lot of people don't consider MEA a part of the Mass Effect canon or continuity. Which is okay, really. Disliking MEA is not a crime. But there are also people (a lot more than we might realize) who really enjoy the game. They see its flaws, but don't think the hate was that justified or fair. And I agree with them. MEA has its flaws but I believe it also has a lot to offer. There's always a lot to do, a lot to discover. New lore. The game can be really beautiful, with poignant moments, loveable characters, really fun combat, planets that look incredible. Ryder is a protagonist that I love so so much and I'm not the only one! (I hope you MEA lovers come to play during MEA Appreciation Week!!!!)

There's no denying that the glitches at launch were REALLY egregious, and there's no excuse for a product to launch with that level of issues. BUT! It's important to know that a lot of the complaint points re: glitching have been resolved at this point, so someone playing the game now won't run into that as much. On my last playthrough I had about 2 extremely minor visual glitches which disappeared on reload, and that was even running with mods. The Angara crewmate romance is now fully-voiced bisexual and the Reyes (bisexual human) romance has a resolved ending, both of these were later patches.

Also the gay human romance can be viewed through a different lens. Some people focus on the reproduction part of the storyline because his friend ASKED if he wanted to be the father to her child, and people are entitled to their take, but personally I see Gil's romance as a very affirming storyline for a gay male character in gaming. BioWare may be better than than most games/studios in this, but in gaming in general, It's so rare to see a gay man who chooses to willingly shoulder fatherhood in spite of his own lack of a male role model, and it's still not that common to see a gay character who is taking on a new phase of his life (choosing family + the additional responsiblities) by choice and not obligation, rather than being pigeonholed into the stereotypical party lifestyle. It's also an embrace of found non-traditional family (unmarried parents who are friends and possibly a gay co-parent), in a format that isn't widely acknowledged in a lot of mainstream media, especially with the regression of 2026. In fact, I can't think of any other games from major studios off the top of my head with gay co-parents.

Ryder and Shep both have a military background, and anything you headcanon about them makes next to no difference in playthrough. (iirc Shep might get s few dialogue lines difference - it's been a while since I played - but Ryder only gets a couple of lines difference depending on which Ryder you play as, since they had different specialties). They both have a very blunt military feel with straightforward masculine dialogue choices regardless of gender. This is bearable, even funny at times, but overall disappointing when we know BioWare is capable of building profiles in DA and the paragon/renegade system and just didn't do that. They were clearly tracking your choies, so they could have been implemented in a hypothetical MEA2, but like in ME1 it didn't make much difference in Game One.

The companions are a mixed bag - personally I don't like most of the ME trilogy companions all that well for friendship and I like them even less for romance with a few notable exceptions. I don't feel like you got very close to them or got to learn a lot about them as complete persons. I "feel" closer to my MEA companions as persons due to dialogue and quest content even though I only like to romance select ones out of them, and I think there is also a wider variety of romance storylines. I also find it easier to emotionally attach to MEA non-companion characters, even the non-romanceable non-companion characters (there are 3 romanceable non-companions, 5 if you count shipmates). Some people feel that way about the ME companions just because they spent more gaming hours with them, so this is just a Personal Choice thing imo.

The Kett are committing genocide in Andromeda. How is that not both chilling and (now) politically relevant? Not to give away spoilers, but the origins of the Kett have tragic implications in game, which I think would have continued to compound through the next game. But killing Kett wasn't a guilt-free shooting spree, unlike Geth or Reapers. Of course, this came out in 2017, but the upcoming 10th anniversary of this game isn't a bad time to re-evaluate how we feel about people on both sides of a genocide.

Also, MEA had a much smoother combat system than ME, it's hands-down my favorite FPS system of all time (disclaimer: speaking as someone who hates FPS, I would willingtly incorporate this system into other games and have spent 2000+ hours on it across multiple consoles).

That being said, it's true that MEA was pushed out in ~18 months' development time, so many of these storylines' scripts could have benefitted from more development. A lot of the implications about the future of life in Andromeda and some of the more esoteric elements of Angaran culture you may have to read between the lines (do Angara truly not sneeze??) and a player would honestly benefit from some media literacy, particularly if you are versed in decolonial lit, although this is far from necessary to enjoy the game.

In particular, I think that the fact that MEA is marginally less pro-military (the Initiative is a civilian org) and marginally less imperialistic may have also served to alienate the Trilogy fans. Personally, I LOVE the fact that you can't just march in and plant your flag, and you have to confront the fact that you can't just brand your name on every scrap of land you see - instead, in order to survive, it's critical that you build relationships in good faith with the indigenous species. For this reason among others, many seem to consider MEA a "Star Trek" installment in a "Star Wars" franchise, to borrow a quote from another tumblr user. (I've also heard "MEA is the scifi game to play if you loved Dragon Age" XD)

It's never made sense to me for MEA not to be considered "Canon" to the franchise when it was clearly set 600 years later in another galaxy with an entirely new group of characters, and nothing in it violates any of the original lore. Furthermore, the first hints of ME5 clearly include Angara and Jardaan, therefore deeming it "non-canon" is a headcanon itself.

MEA left a ton of fascinating and compelling mysteries behind that were never solved (The Benefactor?? The Jardaan?? Ark Keelah Si'yah was DEFINITELY going to be in the next game; more Angara planets?? A permanent colony rather than just an outpost??? Our work was not done!). Like the ME trilogy, in which any one game didn't fully stand alone, MEA would have been a magnificent first volume in a trilogy of its own, and we were all robbed of that. Some of its mysteries were resolved in the three tie-in novels (which were actually really great and I highly recommend).

MEA should have been marketed differently (not just to ME fans, who honestly weren't the ideal audience for MEA) and supported by BW but instead they spent years trying to build an "infinite planet generator" - something that is so far from BW's forte that they failed at it TWICE (once with MEA and once with Anthem) - and then abandoned it to rush this out the door, and while the writing was... good, it suffered in that they were only able to write ONE plot path, therefore rendering your alternate dialogue trees and choices irrelevant for any purposes other than role play reasons. That could have been rescued if there were a second game, but they abandoned it instead.

Also like most BioWare games, MEA suffered from hockey-stick production (staff being pulled onto another project until shortly before its released and then everyone being rushed back onto the project for crunch time work, which is a crippling production method).

As a long-time scifi fan, I also have to say the Angara are probably my favorite alien species of just about any scifi IP. They got more development in one game than almost any other ME alien in the last three. And the fact that they're so black/indigenous-coded (and voiced) makes me super leery of anyone who says they are "boring" or "bad character design" because they're narratively top notch and biologically fascinating as well.

Plus the game is literally five bucks on Steam when it's on sale, and if you don't care about achievements you can probably finish it in 60-80 hours or less.

I've been posting MEA screenshots from my recent playthrough on my bsky, so if there's any curiosity about the visual aspects of the game anyone is welcome to check those out here:

Actual bill name: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.

Purported purpose: "to protect children from being exposed to explicit material in the classroom".

How it's sold in the press: "Ban strippers and porn from classrooms!"

Actual text of the bill: Expands the meaning of "sexually explicit content" to include the words "or involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism".

Not and. Or. Meaning "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" is in and of itself enough to be classified as sexually explicit.

Step 1: Remove filters in Reflecting Pool because Obama put them in.

Step 2: Give your criminal neighbor who runs "Greenwater Services" a $20 million no-bid contract to paint the pool.

Step 3: Fill the pool with water from the Potomac River, the phosphates from which cause algae blooms.

Step 4: Freshly sealed pool and extreme heat result in a super scum event

Step 5: Direct National Park Service to dump hydrogen peroxide into the pool which causes the paint to peel.

Dress made by me, end of 2025, photographed by Casey Kerr and Rory Casey, early 2026. Modelled by Jay Katherine Amusan.