After you talk to Liara in the Cafe and she tells you about Barla Von having some info for you the next time you come back Presidium Commons, this should be done before you finish the mission to cure the genophage, you will see an Asari is now standing behind the bar of Apollo’s Cafe you can talk to her and she will admit that she is Liara’s father. After Shep has a brief conversation with her you can then go talk to Liara about her and you have to convince Liara to talk to her but once they start talking it’s pretty hilarious stuff.
Damn I missed that. Is it the same Asari as the bartender on Illium, that was a theory floating about. If it is does Claudia Black still provide the voice
Yes it’s the same Asari, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same voice actress. She still sounds the same but I didn’t go through the credits to see if it was still the same voice actress. She’s still as blunt as ever too. She kind of threatens Shepard (as any good father would), talks about Benezia’s rack (which may scar poor Liara) and tries to get Liara to talk about her sex life w/ Shepard for those who romanced Liara.
For those who didn’t get the CE of ME3 and have not bought From Ashes, despite all the controversy around it I have to say that it is worth it. The character you get is all kinds of awesome and he has some hilarious lines about all the Council races. If you take him to Thessia with you it’s almost a completely different experience from having any of the other the squaddies tag along with you and Liara.
Damn, the Battle for Earth here may be my favorite sci-fi battle ever, and I’m not even done with it yet.
The second section of defending the missile battery is freaking intense. Got swarmed by Banshees.
The Banshees are a pain but the Brutes are what really annoy me. The missions in this game are awesome, especially Tuchanka, Thessia just made me cry.
So the final boss was 4 Husks and a Marauder (after Shep got hit by the edge of the Reaper beam). Not at all what I expected.
As for the ending… I’m not really sure. All 3 choices kind of sucked. I’m willing to buy that the Mass Relays wouldn’t go supercritical when destroyed this way, since the people who made them were way smarter than we are. I kind of figured that Shep would end up having to sacrifice herself in the end when I was going into the game. Not quite sure how EDI and Garrus ended up on the Normandy since they were in the APC with me on the way to the beam.
Guess I must have missed a lot after all, even though most clusters said they were 100% (and those that didn’t only had fuel left, since I’d scanned all the planets).
I’ll need to think on the ending a bit, but in general, I don’t like how most of the ME2 characters got shifted to the background in ME2. Honestly, Jacob was the only ME2 squad member that I found less interesting than Liara, and she played a critical role in ME3.
Which ending did you pick? Because Shep doesn’t actually have to die if your EMS total is high enough. I’ve had Shep die once and live once. The Normandy crash scene actually makes no sense at all and from what I’ve gathered from others and my two completed games it seems that if you have a love interest they are always on the Normandy when it crashes and then one of the people who was in your squad at the end. Liara has been on mine both times because all of my FemShep’s romanced her.
Liara played a critical role because A) she’s the only squad mate guaranteed to be alive at the beginning of ME3 in every game no matter what B) she’s the resident Prothean expert who needs to help discover the weapon that will defeat the Reapers C) she’s the only love interest that both DudeShep and FemShep could have been romancing from the beginning and D) she’s the Shadow Broker. Most of the ME2 squad mates got shifted to the background because they could all be dead, the only returning squad mate you couldn’t kill was who ever survived Virmire, any of the rest of them could be dead for any number of people’s saves so their parts had to be either small or interchangeable with other characters.
I went with the Synthesis ending. I didn’t get the best possible ending because I didn’t know where to find more war assets and wanted to finish the game before the meetup, so I didn’t do enough multiplayer to get my EMS high enough.
And my love interest was Miranda and she didn’t show up in the last cutscene.
Yeah, I understood why they backburnered them. I just wish they hadn’t.
Oh, and I wish the whole “catching Garrus and Tali making out” bit was an actual conversation, with options on how you could respond to it. I think of Tali as Shep’s sort of “adopted” kid sister, so I would have liked a “break her heart and I break your legs” option there.
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible to get the Shep lives ending without multiplayer, but now that Datapad app is out for the iPhone I can work on my Galaxy at War readiness number when I’m not playing multiplayer. Shep only lives though if you choose the Destroy ending the other endings kill Shep no matter how high your EMS score is.
Ah, I should have corrected that to say the love interests that were squad mates this time around so if you romanced Liara, Ash, Kaidan, Garrus or Tali they would be on the Normandy after the crash.
I won’t complain because some of the appearances of the ME2 squad mates were more emotional than any moment I had with Ash and I was looking forward to having her back but the way she ragging on Shep about Cerberus got on my nerves. Mordin, Miranda, Legion, Thane, Samara and Grunt all made me cry during my first game during their brief appearances and Jack cracked me up.
I would have liked that option too, especially since Liara’s father got to threaten my FemShep when I talked to her just before I convinced Liara that she needed to talk to her dad. But I did bust out laughing when I walked in on them, it was almost as funny as Wrex busting on my FemShep for still not giving him a window by saying that he must not kiss as good as Liara.
I’m real glad all my spacebros on the Normandy were getting some. Joker, Garrus, and Shepard. Homies4life
Yes it was nice to see that Garrus and Joker weren’t left out in the cold this time. I know as FemShep I could romance Garrus but it just seems wrong to me somehow so it was nice to see that he got to hook up with Tali and I loved getting to hook EDI and Joker up.
For the record, I accept the artistic vision of the multiple endings. Evidently this is a minority opinion. 
On the other hand if future DLC transforms the existing ending into Bobby Ewing in a shower i.e. Harbinger actually indoctrinated Shepard, that would suck as a very cynical exploitation of the average player’s emotional investment… and another $10 spent. If this is to be so, up yours EA for compromising Bioware’s said artistic vision.
You knew this was coming. It’s hilarious anyway.
(ending spoilers! only play after finishing the game)
Yes it’s very artistic to apply a color filter to the same ending.
I don’t mind the endings all the much because really I can decide it ended differently and the rest of the game was so frakking good I over look the endings. I was kinda bummed that kept teasing me with those little blue babies and then crashed Liara on some unknown planet. However, if they did do DLC endings with the original endings being indoctrination of Shepard I might have to laugh and give Bioware credit for pulling off something like that if they didn’t charge folks for the DLC endings simply because of all the uproar I’ve seen over them since last week. If they charged us for them then I’d have to be angry because I already bought 2 CE’s of the game and got those kinda bad endings that I’m living with by just headcanoning the ending to not include the mysterious crashing Normandy and leaving everyone where they were when Shep started the run toward the beam.
When the shielded Maurader killed me the first time, I got “Red Dead Redemption” vibes and thought, just for a second… “Is this truly it? This is how the game ends? I die without ever making it to the Citadel?”
So really, the ending I got (Joker, Edi and my girlfriend Liara repopulate a world. Lucky guy, Joker) seemed pretty good in comparison 
My bad. I shouldn’t have mixed funny funny with serious in the same post. Sincerely, there actually is a lot of subtle detail - what some would call “texture” - to be found in each of the endings. Once you start to contrast one ending against another…
WELCOME TO THE RABBIT HOLE
Theorycrafting Hub: Indoctrination Theory; an alternative interpretation to the ending of ME3
ADD: Original Bioware thread link and why you can appreciate the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of it above. 563 pages, 14,065 replies, 152,960 views. Now that’s a hive mind.
Bioware SocialNetwork: Was the ending a hallucination?
I’m in awe of Byrie and company’s master class fanwanking. At minimum, I agree many of these details are present as thematic subtexts. I just have no idea whether these points also belong to an insidious Reaper plot by Harbinger.
“Harbinger speaks of you. You resist but you will fail… The cycle must continue. There is no alternative.” - defeated Reaper on Rannoch
As it stands right this second. The ending is a frakking travesty. If the indoctrination /theory/ proves to be true via a DLC ending it still doesn’t make this ending good. It’s so full of holes it’s ridiculous