The Mass Effect series is undoubtedly one of those that defined the previous generation of gaming. In a landscape plagued by shovelware and mindless shooters ripping off either HALO or Call of Duty, legendary RPG developer Bioware returned at the forefront and rightfully made quite an impact on the entire gaming audience.
Well, the entire gaming audience, except me.
I don't know what it was that turned me off. I tried playing through that first title in the series as far back as 2008, when it came out. I've owned the game on Steam for the longest time and really did my best to like it. It had all the right stuff; it was beautiful, cinematic, very well-acted, a science fiction story with a larger than life plot and presentation. It was right up my alley.
But in around five efforts to play through the game for more than five hours, I'd get bored and abandon it altogether.
This isn't a first for me; I've had similar experience with CD Projekt's "The Witcher" (the first game) and for somewhat different reasons (slow, isometric camera angle didn't work for me, it was NOT well-acted) I hated it. But I did finally devote over 50 hours on The Witcher earlier this year and I ended up loving it.
So, why not finally do the same for Mass Effect, especially since I now own the entire trilogy and it's long overdue for a marathon playthrough?
The good news is I finally made it; I have successfully finished Mass Effect after about 25 hours of flying around space murdering things (mainly aliens). The bad news is that, unlike The Witcher, I didn't end up loving it.
The bright spot is that I never hated the first Mass Effect, it just left me indifferent. I appreciated what it as trying to do and lauded its successes, but everyone seemed so head-over-heels in love with it I just couldn't see why. I still can't.
Here is what's done very right: gorgeous art direction, rich lore, fantastic voice acting (especially the female version of protagonist Commander Shepard, portrayed by Jennifer Hale).
Here's what caused the divide for me: I couldn't get involved in any of it as a player and could only hope to be somewhat impressed as a neutral observer.
First and foremost, the problem comes from the gameplay. Mass Effect is a game that flirts with shooters, flirts with RPGs, but can't decide which genre it wants to shag and have subgenre babies with. I've tried playing soldiers and marksmen, but the latest playthrough was with an Engineer; well, while it was the various abilities that saved the day (both my tech abilities and the Biotic abilities of my squad), for the most part I still just ended up shooting things.
That's not to say that there isn't depth, but there's so much that feels automated and yet lacking the refinement for simple shooter action. Ultimately, I felt uninvolved in most combat situations.
The other problem came directly from the writing. The pacing and the characters of Mass Effect are, in the very least, rushed. There's meat there; depending on your role-playing capacity, your Commander Shepard can be a great character and most of the supporting cast are likable (except Ashley; screw that stereotypical moron).
Unfortunately, the way the story is paced, there's very little actually happening to get invested. There is an overall sense of urgency, but a lot of the early game feels like a prologue until you become a Spectre and then the plot kind of fast-forwards. I did most important side-quests I ran across, I explored and I regularly chatted up my crew members and yet, I couldn't get emotionally invested in them.
The gameplay rears its ugly head in this as well, as you rarely get attached to your other two party members that compose your squad. Balance matters, but there's very little micromanagement and not enough playful banter. Most of the time, they just follow you around and they're pretty good at holding their own.
In Bioware's other game, "Dragon Age: Origins", the main reason I got attached to the NPC party members was less that I was chatting them up in camp after debriefing and more that I had to manage them during an attack and got to see first-hand how vital they were to the mission. I cared for them in ways that I didn't for the Mass Effect cast, even though I liked this one as well.
When I had to sacrifice a teammate half-way-through the story (Kaiden Alenko was my lamb to the writer god), yeah it was sad because that moment was handled well, but I barely knew the guy, even though by that point, I knew everything about the guy.
The failure of character writing on Mass Effect is transparent when it comes to the antagonist, in that there isn't one. Early on two antagonists are revealed; Matriarch Benezia, who gets offed very early and Saren. The wasted potential on Saren is almost sad in itself.
Saren is revealed half-way-through the game to be a puppet himself. He is quickly replaced by Sovereign, a Reaper. Being a mechanical lifeform intent on genocide for reasons never explained, Sovereign isn't so much an antagonist as he is just the personification of the larger than life evil that represents the Reapers. It's a constant threat throughout the series, but for that one game, the danger they pose is mostly communicated through dialogue, not action.
That leaves Saren, who never does anything. The tragedy of the character is obvious in his death, when Sovereign transforms him into a Husk; a zombie of sorts, a shadow of his glorious former self, incapable of independent thought or action, merely a beast. This is great, as it's the final transformation of a well-respected agent of the galactic council that submitted to the whims of an unseen, incomprehensible force without a fight. He turned from an individual hero that fought for peace and stability to a false god's pawn.
Saren's final form is the embodiment of his weakness, someone who succumbed to fear and delusions of grandeur, someone who would rationalize the most despicable actions in the name of the "big picture". The metaphor makes the character truly tragic, especially considering the parallels with the very concept of religion.
But that tragedy is severely undermined, because as an audience we spend very little time with Saren. We get bits and pieces of him, we know very little of his backstory and we never get to know him as an individual character, separate from his role as Sovereign's tool.
It's hard to have a good story without a good antagonist and many of the characters in Mass Effect suffer similar fates.
But you can relax now, Mass Effect fans aiming at my jugular, for not all hope is lost! For all its missteps I did end up enjoying the game, because the story, the actual plot, is great!
Yeah, it's a little derivative in parts, but who cares? It's classic sci-fi epic, with good twists and turns and rich, interesting lore. The elusive Protheans are the driving force of all that's good in the entire game, as they are the backbone of every threat Shepard has to face and every goal she has to achieve. The mystery surrounding them isn't just titillating, it causes awe. When toward the end you're made to cross one of their cities and talk to their last-functioning Virtual Intelligence system, it's a glorious, haunting moment that sets the stage for the entire series.
There are very many themes in the story and the theme of empires rising and falling due to legendary outside forces (personified by the Reapers in Mass Effect's narrative) is a great cautionary tale for the ages, almost a modern, sci-fi retelling of the myth of Atlantis.
I guess what I'm saying is, Mass Effect was a good game that got ridiculously huge for no reason that I can comprehend. But I'm also saying that in the end I enjoyed it. It just seems a lot less than what I've been led to believe. Perhaps the fans and the press talked it up a little too much for me.
In the end what remains in my mind is this: from where I stand, Mass Effect isn't so much the first chapter, but rather the prologue of the story spread across three games. There's a lot of things that don't work, but what does is setting up the stage for its huge successors. It's the Assassin's Creed, to Assassin's Creed 2, the Metal Gear to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake; a rough foundation of basic ideas providing the foundation for glorious successors to stand on.
And while under other circumstances this would be an intense criticism on my part, considering what it led to, I'm giving it as a compliment.
Next time, we'll have a look at the second title; when things got bigger, better and the series arguably reached its peak.
Well, the entire gaming audience, except me.
I don't know what it was that turned me off. I tried playing through that first title in the series as far back as 2008, when it came out. I've owned the game on Steam for the longest time and really did my best to like it. It had all the right stuff; it was beautiful, cinematic, very well-acted, a science fiction story with a larger than life plot and presentation. It was right up my alley.
But in around five efforts to play through the game for more than five hours, I'd get bored and abandon it altogether.
This isn't a first for me; I've had similar experience with CD Projekt's "The Witcher" (the first game) and for somewhat different reasons (slow, isometric camera angle didn't work for me, it was NOT well-acted) I hated it. But I did finally devote over 50 hours on The Witcher earlier this year and I ended up loving it.
So, why not finally do the same for Mass Effect, especially since I now own the entire trilogy and it's long overdue for a marathon playthrough?
The good news is I finally made it; I have successfully finished Mass Effect after about 25 hours of flying around space murdering things (mainly aliens). The bad news is that, unlike The Witcher, I didn't end up loving it.
The bright spot is that I never hated the first Mass Effect, it just left me indifferent. I appreciated what it as trying to do and lauded its successes, but everyone seemed so head-over-heels in love with it I just couldn't see why. I still can't.
Here is what's done very right: gorgeous art direction, rich lore, fantastic voice acting (especially the female version of protagonist Commander Shepard, portrayed by Jennifer Hale).
 |
| Lacking RPG micromanagement, clunky 3rd person shooter controls. |
First and foremost, the problem comes from the gameplay. Mass Effect is a game that flirts with shooters, flirts with RPGs, but can't decide which genre it wants to shag and have subgenre babies with. I've tried playing soldiers and marksmen, but the latest playthrough was with an Engineer; well, while it was the various abilities that saved the day (both my tech abilities and the Biotic abilities of my squad), for the most part I still just ended up shooting things.
That's not to say that there isn't depth, but there's so much that feels automated and yet lacking the refinement for simple shooter action. Ultimately, I felt uninvolved in most combat situations.
The other problem came directly from the writing. The pacing and the characters of Mass Effect are, in the very least, rushed. There's meat there; depending on your role-playing capacity, your Commander Shepard can be a great character and most of the supporting cast are likable (except Ashley; screw that stereotypical moron).
Unfortunately, the way the story is paced, there's very little actually happening to get invested. There is an overall sense of urgency, but a lot of the early game feels like a prologue until you become a Spectre and then the plot kind of fast-forwards. I did most important side-quests I ran across, I explored and I regularly chatted up my crew members and yet, I couldn't get emotionally invested in them.
The gameplay rears its ugly head in this as well, as you rarely get attached to your other two party members that compose your squad. Balance matters, but there's very little micromanagement and not enough playful banter. Most of the time, they just follow you around and they're pretty good at holding their own.
In Bioware's other game, "Dragon Age: Origins", the main reason I got attached to the NPC party members was less that I was chatting them up in camp after debriefing and more that I had to manage them during an attack and got to see first-hand how vital they were to the mission. I cared for them in ways that I didn't for the Mass Effect cast, even though I liked this one as well.
When I had to sacrifice a teammate half-way-through the story (Kaiden Alenko was my lamb to the writer god), yeah it was sad because that moment was handled well, but I barely knew the guy, even though by that point, I knew everything about the guy.
 |
| Gorgeous game is still gorgeous seven years later. Yes, it's been SEVEN years since the first Mass Effect. You can get depressed now. |
The failure of character writing on Mass Effect is transparent when it comes to the antagonist, in that there isn't one. Early on two antagonists are revealed; Matriarch Benezia, who gets offed very early and Saren. The wasted potential on Saren is almost sad in itself.
Saren is revealed half-way-through the game to be a puppet himself. He is quickly replaced by Sovereign, a Reaper. Being a mechanical lifeform intent on genocide for reasons never explained, Sovereign isn't so much an antagonist as he is just the personification of the larger than life evil that represents the Reapers. It's a constant threat throughout the series, but for that one game, the danger they pose is mostly communicated through dialogue, not action.
That leaves Saren, who never does anything. The tragedy of the character is obvious in his death, when Sovereign transforms him into a Husk; a zombie of sorts, a shadow of his glorious former self, incapable of independent thought or action, merely a beast. This is great, as it's the final transformation of a well-respected agent of the galactic council that submitted to the whims of an unseen, incomprehensible force without a fight. He turned from an individual hero that fought for peace and stability to a false god's pawn.
Saren's final form is the embodiment of his weakness, someone who succumbed to fear and delusions of grandeur, someone who would rationalize the most despicable actions in the name of the "big picture". The metaphor makes the character truly tragic, especially considering the parallels with the very concept of religion.
But that tragedy is severely undermined, because as an audience we spend very little time with Saren. We get bits and pieces of him, we know very little of his backstory and we never get to know him as an individual character, separate from his role as Sovereign's tool.
It's hard to have a good story without a good antagonist and many of the characters in Mass Effect suffer similar fates.
 |
| Once the Council's top agent, now a mindless zombie for a mechanical race. So much potential, so wasted. |
Yeah, it's a little derivative in parts, but who cares? It's classic sci-fi epic, with good twists and turns and rich, interesting lore. The elusive Protheans are the driving force of all that's good in the entire game, as they are the backbone of every threat Shepard has to face and every goal she has to achieve. The mystery surrounding them isn't just titillating, it causes awe. When toward the end you're made to cross one of their cities and talk to their last-functioning Virtual Intelligence system, it's a glorious, haunting moment that sets the stage for the entire series.
There are very many themes in the story and the theme of empires rising and falling due to legendary outside forces (personified by the Reapers in Mass Effect's narrative) is a great cautionary tale for the ages, almost a modern, sci-fi retelling of the myth of Atlantis.
I guess what I'm saying is, Mass Effect was a good game that got ridiculously huge for no reason that I can comprehend. But I'm also saying that in the end I enjoyed it. It just seems a lot less than what I've been led to believe. Perhaps the fans and the press talked it up a little too much for me.
In the end what remains in my mind is this: from where I stand, Mass Effect isn't so much the first chapter, but rather the prologue of the story spread across three games. There's a lot of things that don't work, but what does is setting up the stage for its huge successors. It's the Assassin's Creed, to Assassin's Creed 2, the Metal Gear to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake; a rough foundation of basic ideas providing the foundation for glorious successors to stand on.
And while under other circumstances this would be an intense criticism on my part, considering what it led to, I'm giving it as a compliment.
Next time, we'll have a look at the second title; when things got bigger, better and the series arguably reached its peak.
 |
| Amelia Sheppard will return after these messages. |
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