The final piece of my Mass Effect Retrospective, if you are ready for nasal, stuttering rants, I dare you to watch the video!
Showing posts with label Mass Effect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mass Effect. Show all posts
Friday, July 11, 2014
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Mass Effect Retrospective - A newbie's impressions on "Mass Effect 3"
What did I just play?
No, really Bioware, what was that? Did you even want to make this game or was it a "The Dark Knight Rises" kind of deal?
Where do I even start with this?
Alright, the truth is a proper retrospective usually touches upon things like the impact of a title/series, the audience, reception, the behind-the-scenes stuff. I avoided doing all of that, because as this is my first run through the series, I wanted to focus on the games themselves.
Mass Effect 3 is of note, however. The first game was the entry that put the series on the map; personally, I highly doubt Bioware ever intended on doing more of these at the time. The second game solidified the series as one of the leading franchises of the last generation.
Neither of these games, however, were met with the same funfare that the third was. I remember people going bananas over the first E3 reveal trailer that showed Shepard taking refuge in the Big Ben, as Reapers had clouded the skies of London. By the time the game was released, it was like no other game has ever been released, ever before.
Then, the outrage. The ending, players said, sucked. It was a betrayal to their loyalty, a rush-job. They pushed to change it. I spoke against that, not because they weren't right to voice their opinions, but because many went to ridiculous lengths (down to attempting to sue EA and Bioware for false advertising). Out of some stroke of luck, they did it. Bioware went back and touched up on the ending.
This was heralded by everyone as the "power of gamers" and how much "we can accomplish". Realistically I think that's a load of crap; if Bioware were really satisfied with the ending in the first place, they wouldn't change a thing. I'm far more willing to bet they knew they rushed it and the outrage gave them the chance to make a few changes they'd liked.
Either way, the ending is the thing that's remembered in regards to Mass Effect 3. That's what everybody hated. Nobody seemed to speak of the rest of the game, outside of pointing out that "don't get us wrong, ME3 is a great game, but".
Uh, no. It's a big, bloated at times, expensive, occasionally impressive, action-packed shadow of its former self. That's what Mass Effect 3 is.
Things seemed bleak from the start for me. The game froze on the Bioware logo in the first two boots, then it just kind of stopped freezing on its own and never froze again.
Then, there was insane stuttering I couldn't even begin to explain. I thought Origin was at fault, so I tried cracking the game, but that didn't fix it. It turns out ME3 is nothing short of an attention-whore coded to remind you at all times that nothing else exists in your computer but itself. I had to shut down both AMD's Gaming Evolved app AND Steam to fix the stuttering.
The actual game didn't impress me at first either. My imported Shepard from ME2 looked absolutely nothing like the character I had made in the previous games. I redid the face to the best of my recollection. That was not an issue when importing my ME1 save onto ME2.
For some reason I loathed the menu sounds and the fonts for this game. I know it's an extremely superficial complaint, but they gave off the impression of someone polishing their work too much to make it flashy and attractive even to the last drunk zombie caveman living in the sewers underneath your city.
I don't think I'm wrong about this, as the moment the story started, my first impression was backed by terrible, godawful facial structures on every beloved character from the series; these faces were just way too detailed for the capabilities of this engine and they looked completely and utterly alien.
And then, Ashley Williams showed up and she was hot. Like, REALLY hot. I don't even like her, but they went out of their way to make her ridiculously attractive. That was an omen of bad things to come.
So, in the story, Shepard has left Cerberus shortly after beating the Collectors and has defected to the Alliance. They put her on "extended leave", until the Reapers start invading the Earth and the entire Galaxy. As the giant dubstep-laser-shooting machines destroy the planet, Anderson reinstates Shepard and tasks her with uniting all the races in the galaxy to save the Earth.
Immediately, questions start filling my mind: when did Shepard leave Cerberus and why? Why is the Normandy under Alliance control? Why am I supposed to be so very invested in Earth getting invaded, when as a player I've spent a total of zero minutes on it in this series? Why is Anderson an Admiral and Udina a Councilor, when Anderson was Council last time-- I know because I literally gave him that job in particular.
If you can't tell already, the major problem with ME3 is that the series sold out with this installment. There is not a single thing in it that doesn't exist to make the games even more mainstream than they already are.
I'm not one of the people (usually) who think that broken mechanics should stay broken, because they're "unique" and whatnot, but ME3 takes some pretty damn obvious steps toward an even larger audience. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can become an issue when the supposed improvements produce a worse product than before.
The gameplay is a very good indicator of that. Now featuring a multiplayer mode that was obviously the focus of any gameplay changes, the game has moved away from its RPG roots almost entirely and it's a full-blown shooter. I played as a Biotic Adept this time around; my Shepard got bored of doing nothing under Alliance's restrictions for all this time and decided to get implants and train her biotic abilities, to feel closer to her estranged girlfriend, Liara.
I admit, my plasmids --I mean, biotic skills-- were considerably more used (not necessarily useful) than my marskman skills in ME2, but it doesn't change the fact that the noise from the combat alone was enough to just kind of make me not want to play.
I commended ME2 for moving more toward a shooter and I'd be a hypocrite to call ME3 out for essentially doing the same thing, just one step further. In all fairness, there are some genuine improvements; enemy troops are far bigger threats this time around, they have more variety, far better AI, they use good tactics, flank you and your team easily, can hit you behind cover if you're not as well hidden as you think.
The problem is that the battles don't let up. The downside of the shooter approach is that the series has never been built for purely shooter action. Shepard can now use combat rolls, but they don't quite manage to balance out the frenetic, insane pacing of the combat. This isn't a problem in a game like Shadow Warrior, where the protagonist can take quite a bit of punishment and the controls and camera allow for good spacial awareness and coordination.
For a game like Mass Effect, that a good barrage from a turret or group of enemies can kill you in literally under two seconds, all the while even an effort to bear your surroundings is more trouble thanks to the over-the-shoulder perspective that makes it hard to reposition your character in a moment's notice before heavy damage has been inflicted, this level of insane, heavy combat that won't shut up for one cocking minute is problematic.
I died in ME3 more than I did in any of the other two games and I'm not sure I was always at fault. There are some truly wretched encounters that directly contradict the game's mechanics: a face-to-face encounter with a Reaper that consists of trying to avoid its death-laser while aiming at its weak-spot (over-the-shoulder camera and Neo-like evasions don't click), a fight with a cyborg ninja that pits you against a squad of his Cerberus buddies without any cover provided (somewhat of an issue for a COVER-BASED-SHOOTER) or the last level that pits the hardest enemies in the game in an endurance round. More on that later.
I'm also quite disappointed there are no longer any hacking mini-games at all; not even that cursor thing from the first game. Everything in ME3 involves shooting people and maybe sometimes talking to them. Then, shooting them in the face.
The story is the thing that ultimately cripples ME3, though and retroactively damages the series in general. The game focuses on dealing with the Reapers, who are still ineffective as actual villains and could've been replaced with any natural catastrophe (Twister 5: Space Dust) and the other villain is the Illusive Man. Poor Illusive Man is terrible in this game. He's indoctrinated, because god forbid an actual villain in this series is acting on their own, he gets no development, he only exists much like the Reapers as someone to be stopped because his agenda doesn't chime with Shepard's.
And hey, the Illusive Man is fucking insane and should be stopped, no argument there. But his mysterious figure was at least intriguing in Mass Effect 2. In this finale of the trilogy he only shows up to spew the same fucking rhetoric, wasting Martin Sheen who could've been out punching at least one son in the face in what would probably be the greatest boxing match in the history of this species.
The main characters are still fairly likeable and the dialogue is, for the most part, still great. It's the story that once again fails the game. There isn't any explanation for the return of the Reapers, for the full invasion and even though throughout the entire series they have been a constant, an ambiguous evil that threatened all life, the writers don't seem to want to choose whether they'll remain undefined as a metaphor or defined and given backstory as proper villains.
Mass Effect 3's story is about death, literal or metaphorical. The bulk of the game is spent on Shepard running across old faces, making hard (in theory, at least) decisions, uniting armies and being reminded that their entire civilization is about to go extinct. Friends are found, friends are lost and to Bioware's credit there are a few moments with old companions that are truly gut-wrenching; like the option to execute Padok Wiks, for example, which must be the single greatest moment in this entire series.
Mass Effect 3 bothers me, because it's not well-thought-out. I rolled my eyes when Jessica Chobot was shoe-horned into the game as a reporter (and likely the only person in the galaxy that wears a low-cut top, outside of Asari strippers) wanting to hang out in the Normandy. Even if Chobot's soulless acting didn't make me want to kill myself, I was quickly pondering the thought as EDI decided to download into a sex robot (for she is a sex bot and you kid yourselves if you think otherwise) and started dating Joker.
Then other things downright pissed me off, like Eve, the female Krogan that Bioware decided to base their crude view on gender politics on. Krogans are assholes by design, sure enough, but that entire mission was about one thing: testosterone= bad. I'm not even stretching it; female Krogans are the ones suffering from the genophage the most; they are being experimented on and only one survives. She's not even given a real name, outside of what Wiks calls her. Bioware makes the perfect victim, used and helpless. Do you feel sorry for her already?
She goes on to point out time and again how males have practically screwed up their society with all their tribal maleness and toward the end, before deploying in the final mission of the Krogan, she recounts the history of their planet, Tuchanka.
She's not hostile at any of these points toward the male Krogans, but the message gets across clearly; Krogans reached the peak of evolution so the only thing left for them was to turn against each other. Admittedly no distinction between each sex is made during that discussion, but after all the others, it's hard not to read between the lines; the lines being that men are driven by rage-filled testosterone that will always destroy them, even after they've built Utopia.
Hey, Bioware, how about you go fuck yourselves?
Alright, I admit, if you have fantasy or sci-fi worlds you can take a shot at dressing them in different ways, allow cultural diversity that adopts common conceptions of the human mind, philosophical, societal or otherwise. It's why I have absolutely no problems with the Asari Matriarchy, which has been built throughout the entire series to be the peak of organic civilization: they are all women, their kids all look like them, they've elevated fucking to an ethereal act, their commandos are legendary, they live a thousand years and they acknowledge their homeworld Thessia as the best planet in the galaxy.
The reason none of that bothers is that they don't spend their fucking days passing judgment and preaching to everyone who will listen. If the Asari represent the potential of women, that Krogan bullshit in ME3 represents Tumblr feminism; at its lightest, but Tumblr feminism nonetheless.
Which is particularly funny, when this is a series the first game of which got so much publicity for the half-a-second of human or Asari bum on-screen (FEMALE bum at that) and which added Jessica Chobot's boobs and a fucking SexBot played by BGS's Number 6 in the crew. Also, lest we forget, the fact that Eve herself as a character serves no purpose outside of being the key to unlocking the genophage cure and returning child-bearing abilities (which, under Krogan society would be elevated to obligations) to the women of her species.
This is pathetic.
Back to the game, there are far too many things that feel like design-under-duress and what works feels so disjointed to the overall narrative thread that the flaws of the campaign stand out. Curing (or not curing) the Krogan genophage was a great set of missions (despite the fucked-up societal connotations), but at no point did I feel like I had to do it to garner Krogan support. That's how the game justifies it, fair enough, but the majority of these missions (and even the N7 missions that are optional) are so much more interesting than the running plot, it's easy to lose track of the bigger picture.
As critical as I'm being of the game, I can say that in time it really did get better. As annoying as the new gameplay mechanics are, they do respond well at least. I enjoyed the sense of finality in the story and the stakes got progressively higher, adding a bit of "epic" in the game in a way that ME2 genuinely lacked.
But as you start getting into the game and enjoying the occasional moment of brilliance, the ending happens. Oh my goodness, that fucking ending.
I avoid using any DLC in my first run through games, so I only got the original ending that the game shipped with.
Yes, people, the ending is bad. It's really bad. Just not for the reasons most people claim.
I remember folks bitching about the "lack of choice" in the ending. Apparently, prior to the game's release Bioware had (stupidly) stated that the ending of the trilogy would be the culmination of the player's choices throughout all three games and -imagine that- players kind of held them up to that. They didn't deliver.
But, to be brutally honest, does it really matter? The lack of choice or the lack of reflection of previous choices isn't the real issue with the ending of this trilogy.
For all the big talk from developers and fans alike, the choices in Mass Effect are binary and, honestly, vanilla. With the exception of few moments like the masterful execution of Padok Wiks (or Mordin Solus, if he survived ME2), the series has the nasty habit of rarely making decisions count. They don't cause conflict to the player, they're just an achievement at best.
The occasional dialogue shift for role-playing or the contextual Paragon/Renegade actions are cute and all, but this shit ain't exactly sophisticated, you know? Really, tell me what exactly do you see radically different in the ending of the story if click on a different dialogue prompt or take a different path in a side-quest? Nothing of value changes.
The only time decisions matter is the finale of ME2, when the number of crew and party members that survive the Suicide Mission relies heavily on choices made earlier; not only is this self-contained within that one game and not the series, but the responsibility of the player is also neutered and one really needs to try to fuck that mission up.
No, the problem with ME3's ending is that it feels like it was written within half an hour from a teenager trying to get into the frontpage of Fanfiction.net.
The failure of the trilogy's ending isn't because of one, single thing; it's rather the combination, many smaller parts that fail to produce a whole. From a gameplay standpoint, the final mission is crap. It's the same string of fire-fights that reaches a climax with an endurance round that instantly counters any intuitive thought regarding the game's own mechanics. It's so basic in its execution, it feels like less of a climax than many other missions in this same game, some placed early in the story.
The setting also feels like a step-back. We've spent three games seeing fantastic worlds throughout the galaxy and the final mission of the final game in this trilogy ends in motherfucking London? A London that looks exactly the same as 21st Century London, a boring, familiar, far-too-Earthly setting for the final mission of a space epic. Who the hell thought this would be a good idea? The Mass Effect series takes place around the 30th Century. Did humanity kind of got bored of building stuff after we found the Mass Relays and started exploring space?
Then the game kind of stops and has Shepard barely crawl from objective to objective to have long discussions with Anderson and the Illusive Man.
The lack of a choice here isn't troubling in and on itself, but without the necessary motivation and foundations for the villains (both the Illusive Man and the Reapers) it just makes a segment that could've lasted mere minutes an overlong chore to sit through.
Ultimately, the ending's failure needs to be traced beyond ME3 and to the series in general. For all its successes, the plot of this trilogy just isn't very good. Mass Effect's strength was in the characters, which is why ME2 stands out and in that regard ME3, featuring the boldest and most conflicting moments regarding established side-characters (need I dry-hump that Padok Wiks moment again?) is a success.
We need to come to terms with the fact that ME3 was never going to have a good (as in well-written and well-plotted) ending. There are only minor fixes that could've happened and while fans can come up with more satisfactory endings, a genuinely good ending was out of the question from as far back as ME1.
Not only is the plot ill-conceived, but the running themes end up completely jumbled and the approach to them in the final encounter with the Citadel AI plays out like the efforts of an obsessive Metal Gear Solid fan trying to mimick Hideo Kojima's expository philosophizing in his games. It's awkward and honestly just a bit embarrassing.
Sorry folks, but the story is broken from the word-go and even if Bioware would've put more effort into it, the ending was never going to work.
Having said all that, I actually did end up enjoying most of ME3. The start was rocky, but eventually I was drawn into the heat of the Reaper war and the sense of urgency and finality present throughout the second and third acts of the story.
The gameplay was definitely problematic at parts, but it was mostly functional and Jennifer Hale gave her best performance in this title, making Shepard an entity on her own. Shepard is likely the least likeable character in this series (perhaps after Ashley Williams) and it's hard to sympathize with her (or him), even via all the roleplaying. Hale's performance leads the player in this game and if not for her terrific delivery, every single big decision and emotional moment that's packed into this "war to end all wars" would've sounded empty and hollow.
In the end, I didn't hate Mass Effect 3. I started out that way, but I found things to genuinely like in it. Unfortunately, I found it completely misguided, too far removed in many ways from the series that came before it and, while technically superior, I believe it to be a major step-down from Mass Effect 2 (and in some ways, the original Mass Effect as well).
Still, I will gladly play through the game again; it won't be on its own, it'll be as another run through the entire trilogy, but it won't be that installment I'll feel contractually obligated to sit through even though I hate it.
In the next piece, I'll have a final look back at my experience with the series as a whole, what I enjoyed about it, what it amounts to and what went wrong.
No, really Bioware, what was that? Did you even want to make this game or was it a "The Dark Knight Rises" kind of deal?
Where do I even start with this?
Alright, the truth is a proper retrospective usually touches upon things like the impact of a title/series, the audience, reception, the behind-the-scenes stuff. I avoided doing all of that, because as this is my first run through the series, I wanted to focus on the games themselves.
Mass Effect 3 is of note, however. The first game was the entry that put the series on the map; personally, I highly doubt Bioware ever intended on doing more of these at the time. The second game solidified the series as one of the leading franchises of the last generation.
Neither of these games, however, were met with the same funfare that the third was. I remember people going bananas over the first E3 reveal trailer that showed Shepard taking refuge in the Big Ben, as Reapers had clouded the skies of London. By the time the game was released, it was like no other game has ever been released, ever before.
Then, the outrage. The ending, players said, sucked. It was a betrayal to their loyalty, a rush-job. They pushed to change it. I spoke against that, not because they weren't right to voice their opinions, but because many went to ridiculous lengths (down to attempting to sue EA and Bioware for false advertising). Out of some stroke of luck, they did it. Bioware went back and touched up on the ending.
This was heralded by everyone as the "power of gamers" and how much "we can accomplish". Realistically I think that's a load of crap; if Bioware were really satisfied with the ending in the first place, they wouldn't change a thing. I'm far more willing to bet they knew they rushed it and the outrage gave them the chance to make a few changes they'd liked.
Either way, the ending is the thing that's remembered in regards to Mass Effect 3. That's what everybody hated. Nobody seemed to speak of the rest of the game, outside of pointing out that "don't get us wrong, ME3 is a great game, but".
Uh, no. It's a big, bloated at times, expensive, occasionally impressive, action-packed shadow of its former self. That's what Mass Effect 3 is.
Things seemed bleak from the start for me. The game froze on the Bioware logo in the first two boots, then it just kind of stopped freezing on its own and never froze again.
Then, there was insane stuttering I couldn't even begin to explain. I thought Origin was at fault, so I tried cracking the game, but that didn't fix it. It turns out ME3 is nothing short of an attention-whore coded to remind you at all times that nothing else exists in your computer but itself. I had to shut down both AMD's Gaming Evolved app AND Steam to fix the stuttering.
The actual game didn't impress me at first either. My imported Shepard from ME2 looked absolutely nothing like the character I had made in the previous games. I redid the face to the best of my recollection. That was not an issue when importing my ME1 save onto ME2.
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| Upon comparison with the other posts, she doesn't look quite as close to my original Amelia as I thought. |
For some reason I loathed the menu sounds and the fonts for this game. I know it's an extremely superficial complaint, but they gave off the impression of someone polishing their work too much to make it flashy and attractive even to the last drunk zombie caveman living in the sewers underneath your city.
I don't think I'm wrong about this, as the moment the story started, my first impression was backed by terrible, godawful facial structures on every beloved character from the series; these faces were just way too detailed for the capabilities of this engine and they looked completely and utterly alien.
And then, Ashley Williams showed up and she was hot. Like, REALLY hot. I don't even like her, but they went out of their way to make her ridiculously attractive. That was an omen of bad things to come.
So, in the story, Shepard has left Cerberus shortly after beating the Collectors and has defected to the Alliance. They put her on "extended leave", until the Reapers start invading the Earth and the entire Galaxy. As the giant dubstep-laser-shooting machines destroy the planet, Anderson reinstates Shepard and tasks her with uniting all the races in the galaxy to save the Earth.
Immediately, questions start filling my mind: when did Shepard leave Cerberus and why? Why is the Normandy under Alliance control? Why am I supposed to be so very invested in Earth getting invaded, when as a player I've spent a total of zero minutes on it in this series? Why is Anderson an Admiral and Udina a Councilor, when Anderson was Council last time-- I know because I literally gave him that job in particular.
If you can't tell already, the major problem with ME3 is that the series sold out with this installment. There is not a single thing in it that doesn't exist to make the games even more mainstream than they already are.
I'm not one of the people (usually) who think that broken mechanics should stay broken, because they're "unique" and whatnot, but ME3 takes some pretty damn obvious steps toward an even larger audience. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can become an issue when the supposed improvements produce a worse product than before.
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| The game attempts to be dark. In its efforts it becomes cheap and pretentious, down to having you dream-chase a dead little boy. |
The gameplay is a very good indicator of that. Now featuring a multiplayer mode that was obviously the focus of any gameplay changes, the game has moved away from its RPG roots almost entirely and it's a full-blown shooter. I played as a Biotic Adept this time around; my Shepard got bored of doing nothing under Alliance's restrictions for all this time and decided to get implants and train her biotic abilities, to feel closer to her estranged girlfriend, Liara.
I admit, my plasmids --I mean, biotic skills-- were considerably more used (not necessarily useful) than my marskman skills in ME2, but it doesn't change the fact that the noise from the combat alone was enough to just kind of make me not want to play.
I commended ME2 for moving more toward a shooter and I'd be a hypocrite to call ME3 out for essentially doing the same thing, just one step further. In all fairness, there are some genuine improvements; enemy troops are far bigger threats this time around, they have more variety, far better AI, they use good tactics, flank you and your team easily, can hit you behind cover if you're not as well hidden as you think.
The problem is that the battles don't let up. The downside of the shooter approach is that the series has never been built for purely shooter action. Shepard can now use combat rolls, but they don't quite manage to balance out the frenetic, insane pacing of the combat. This isn't a problem in a game like Shadow Warrior, where the protagonist can take quite a bit of punishment and the controls and camera allow for good spacial awareness and coordination.
For a game like Mass Effect, that a good barrage from a turret or group of enemies can kill you in literally under two seconds, all the while even an effort to bear your surroundings is more trouble thanks to the over-the-shoulder perspective that makes it hard to reposition your character in a moment's notice before heavy damage has been inflicted, this level of insane, heavy combat that won't shut up for one cocking minute is problematic.
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| RE: Walking animations, this is the prissiest hero of the galaxy EVER. Shimmer down, princess. |
I died in ME3 more than I did in any of the other two games and I'm not sure I was always at fault. There are some truly wretched encounters that directly contradict the game's mechanics: a face-to-face encounter with a Reaper that consists of trying to avoid its death-laser while aiming at its weak-spot (over-the-shoulder camera and Neo-like evasions don't click), a fight with a cyborg ninja that pits you against a squad of his Cerberus buddies without any cover provided (somewhat of an issue for a COVER-BASED-SHOOTER) or the last level that pits the hardest enemies in the game in an endurance round. More on that later.
I'm also quite disappointed there are no longer any hacking mini-games at all; not even that cursor thing from the first game. Everything in ME3 involves shooting people and maybe sometimes talking to them. Then, shooting them in the face.
The story is the thing that ultimately cripples ME3, though and retroactively damages the series in general. The game focuses on dealing with the Reapers, who are still ineffective as actual villains and could've been replaced with any natural catastrophe (Twister 5: Space Dust) and the other villain is the Illusive Man. Poor Illusive Man is terrible in this game. He's indoctrinated, because god forbid an actual villain in this series is acting on their own, he gets no development, he only exists much like the Reapers as someone to be stopped because his agenda doesn't chime with Shepard's.
And hey, the Illusive Man is fucking insane and should be stopped, no argument there. But his mysterious figure was at least intriguing in Mass Effect 2. In this finale of the trilogy he only shows up to spew the same fucking rhetoric, wasting Martin Sheen who could've been out punching at least one son in the face in what would probably be the greatest boxing match in the history of this species.
The main characters are still fairly likeable and the dialogue is, for the most part, still great. It's the story that once again fails the game. There isn't any explanation for the return of the Reapers, for the full invasion and even though throughout the entire series they have been a constant, an ambiguous evil that threatened all life, the writers don't seem to want to choose whether they'll remain undefined as a metaphor or defined and given backstory as proper villains.
 | |
| Even Jack has been remade into a (kinda) hottie in ME3. Nobody's safe from the massive sell-out. |
Mass Effect 3's story is about death, literal or metaphorical. The bulk of the game is spent on Shepard running across old faces, making hard (in theory, at least) decisions, uniting armies and being reminded that their entire civilization is about to go extinct. Friends are found, friends are lost and to Bioware's credit there are a few moments with old companions that are truly gut-wrenching; like the option to execute Padok Wiks, for example, which must be the single greatest moment in this entire series.
Mass Effect 3 bothers me, because it's not well-thought-out. I rolled my eyes when Jessica Chobot was shoe-horned into the game as a reporter (and likely the only person in the galaxy that wears a low-cut top, outside of Asari strippers) wanting to hang out in the Normandy. Even if Chobot's soulless acting didn't make me want to kill myself, I was quickly pondering the thought as EDI decided to download into a sex robot (for she is a sex bot and you kid yourselves if you think otherwise) and started dating Joker.
Then other things downright pissed me off, like Eve, the female Krogan that Bioware decided to base their crude view on gender politics on. Krogans are assholes by design, sure enough, but that entire mission was about one thing: testosterone= bad. I'm not even stretching it; female Krogans are the ones suffering from the genophage the most; they are being experimented on and only one survives. She's not even given a real name, outside of what Wiks calls her. Bioware makes the perfect victim, used and helpless. Do you feel sorry for her already?
She goes on to point out time and again how males have practically screwed up their society with all their tribal maleness and toward the end, before deploying in the final mission of the Krogan, she recounts the history of their planet, Tuchanka.
She's not hostile at any of these points toward the male Krogans, but the message gets across clearly; Krogans reached the peak of evolution so the only thing left for them was to turn against each other. Admittedly no distinction between each sex is made during that discussion, but after all the others, it's hard not to read between the lines; the lines being that men are driven by rage-filled testosterone that will always destroy them, even after they've built Utopia.
Hey, Bioware, how about you go fuck yourselves?
Alright, I admit, if you have fantasy or sci-fi worlds you can take a shot at dressing them in different ways, allow cultural diversity that adopts common conceptions of the human mind, philosophical, societal or otherwise. It's why I have absolutely no problems with the Asari Matriarchy, which has been built throughout the entire series to be the peak of organic civilization: they are all women, their kids all look like them, they've elevated fucking to an ethereal act, their commandos are legendary, they live a thousand years and they acknowledge their homeworld Thessia as the best planet in the galaxy.
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| No comments, it's just a funny picture. |
The reason none of that bothers is that they don't spend their fucking days passing judgment and preaching to everyone who will listen. If the Asari represent the potential of women, that Krogan bullshit in ME3 represents Tumblr feminism; at its lightest, but Tumblr feminism nonetheless.
Which is particularly funny, when this is a series the first game of which got so much publicity for the half-a-second of human or Asari bum on-screen (FEMALE bum at that) and which added Jessica Chobot's boobs and a fucking SexBot played by BGS's Number 6 in the crew. Also, lest we forget, the fact that Eve herself as a character serves no purpose outside of being the key to unlocking the genophage cure and returning child-bearing abilities (which, under Krogan society would be elevated to obligations) to the women of her species.
This is pathetic.
Back to the game, there are far too many things that feel like design-under-duress and what works feels so disjointed to the overall narrative thread that the flaws of the campaign stand out. Curing (or not curing) the Krogan genophage was a great set of missions (despite the fucked-up societal connotations), but at no point did I feel like I had to do it to garner Krogan support. That's how the game justifies it, fair enough, but the majority of these missions (and even the N7 missions that are optional) are so much more interesting than the running plot, it's easy to lose track of the bigger picture.
As critical as I'm being of the game, I can say that in time it really did get better. As annoying as the new gameplay mechanics are, they do respond well at least. I enjoyed the sense of finality in the story and the stakes got progressively higher, adding a bit of "epic" in the game in a way that ME2 genuinely lacked.
But as you start getting into the game and enjoying the occasional moment of brilliance, the ending happens. Oh my goodness, that fucking ending.
I avoid using any DLC in my first run through games, so I only got the original ending that the game shipped with.
Yes, people, the ending is bad. It's really bad. Just not for the reasons most people claim.
I remember folks bitching about the "lack of choice" in the ending. Apparently, prior to the game's release Bioware had (stupidly) stated that the ending of the trilogy would be the culmination of the player's choices throughout all three games and -imagine that- players kind of held them up to that. They didn't deliver.
But, to be brutally honest, does it really matter? The lack of choice or the lack of reflection of previous choices isn't the real issue with the ending of this trilogy.
For all the big talk from developers and fans alike, the choices in Mass Effect are binary and, honestly, vanilla. With the exception of few moments like the masterful execution of Padok Wiks (or Mordin Solus, if he survived ME2), the series has the nasty habit of rarely making decisions count. They don't cause conflict to the player, they're just an achievement at best.
The occasional dialogue shift for role-playing or the contextual Paragon/Renegade actions are cute and all, but this shit ain't exactly sophisticated, you know? Really, tell me what exactly do you see radically different in the ending of the story if click on a different dialogue prompt or take a different path in a side-quest? Nothing of value changes.
 |
| An admittedly cute nod, a memorial inside the Normandy that fills up with companions and friends that perish in the war. |
The only time decisions matter is the finale of ME2, when the number of crew and party members that survive the Suicide Mission relies heavily on choices made earlier; not only is this self-contained within that one game and not the series, but the responsibility of the player is also neutered and one really needs to try to fuck that mission up.
No, the problem with ME3's ending is that it feels like it was written within half an hour from a teenager trying to get into the frontpage of Fanfiction.net.
The failure of the trilogy's ending isn't because of one, single thing; it's rather the combination, many smaller parts that fail to produce a whole. From a gameplay standpoint, the final mission is crap. It's the same string of fire-fights that reaches a climax with an endurance round that instantly counters any intuitive thought regarding the game's own mechanics. It's so basic in its execution, it feels like less of a climax than many other missions in this same game, some placed early in the story.
The setting also feels like a step-back. We've spent three games seeing fantastic worlds throughout the galaxy and the final mission of the final game in this trilogy ends in motherfucking London? A London that looks exactly the same as 21st Century London, a boring, familiar, far-too-Earthly setting for the final mission of a space epic. Who the hell thought this would be a good idea? The Mass Effect series takes place around the 30th Century. Did humanity kind of got bored of building stuff after we found the Mass Relays and started exploring space?
Then the game kind of stops and has Shepard barely crawl from objective to objective to have long discussions with Anderson and the Illusive Man.
The lack of a choice here isn't troubling in and on itself, but without the necessary motivation and foundations for the villains (both the Illusive Man and the Reapers) it just makes a segment that could've lasted mere minutes an overlong chore to sit through.
Ultimately, the ending's failure needs to be traced beyond ME3 and to the series in general. For all its successes, the plot of this trilogy just isn't very good. Mass Effect's strength was in the characters, which is why ME2 stands out and in that regard ME3, featuring the boldest and most conflicting moments regarding established side-characters (need I dry-hump that Padok Wiks moment again?) is a success.
We need to come to terms with the fact that ME3 was never going to have a good (as in well-written and well-plotted) ending. There are only minor fixes that could've happened and while fans can come up with more satisfactory endings, a genuinely good ending was out of the question from as far back as ME1.
Not only is the plot ill-conceived, but the running themes end up completely jumbled and the approach to them in the final encounter with the Citadel AI plays out like the efforts of an obsessive Metal Gear Solid fan trying to mimick Hideo Kojima's expository philosophizing in his games. It's awkward and honestly just a bit embarrassing.
Sorry folks, but the story is broken from the word-go and even if Bioware would've put more effort into it, the ending was never going to work.
 |
| Remember when the Protheans were a mysterious, larger than life species? Never mind, they looked like Power Rangers villains all along. |
Having said all that, I actually did end up enjoying most of ME3. The start was rocky, but eventually I was drawn into the heat of the Reaper war and the sense of urgency and finality present throughout the second and third acts of the story.
The gameplay was definitely problematic at parts, but it was mostly functional and Jennifer Hale gave her best performance in this title, making Shepard an entity on her own. Shepard is likely the least likeable character in this series (perhaps after Ashley Williams) and it's hard to sympathize with her (or him), even via all the roleplaying. Hale's performance leads the player in this game and if not for her terrific delivery, every single big decision and emotional moment that's packed into this "war to end all wars" would've sounded empty and hollow.
In the end, I didn't hate Mass Effect 3. I started out that way, but I found things to genuinely like in it. Unfortunately, I found it completely misguided, too far removed in many ways from the series that came before it and, while technically superior, I believe it to be a major step-down from Mass Effect 2 (and in some ways, the original Mass Effect as well).
Still, I will gladly play through the game again; it won't be on its own, it'll be as another run through the entire trilogy, but it won't be that installment I'll feel contractually obligated to sit through even though I hate it.
In the next piece, I'll have a final look back at my experience with the series as a whole, what I enjoyed about it, what it amounts to and what went wrong.
 |
| Amelia Shepard. Fell to the Reapers, thrice hero of the galaxy, loved Liara, was kind of a bitch. |
Friday, June 20, 2014
Mass Effect Retrospective - A Newbie's Impressions of "Mass Effect 2"
As I mentioned in the first part of this brief retrospective, Mass Effect shouldn't even really qualify as the first game of a trilogy anymore, but rather the prologue to a great series. If it seems harsh, it is actually rare praise from where I'm standing; far too often I find games so ridiculously popular and yet so absolutely underwhelming that they make me pity the state of the industry and its audience (case in point, "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare", an average military shooter the aftermath of which tainted the last generation of gaming).
Bonus points if verbally abusing these games pisses off "the fans".
Mass Effect, the series, is the anomaly. The first game was a lore-wealthy, timid RPG/Shooter-hybrid that got too big for no good reason and I'm aware of the outrage over the third game (which I haven't played yet at the time of writing this), but "Mass Effect 2" is nothing short of a masterpiece. It's not just a game that improved on almost every aspect of its predecessor, it's a game that can stand on its own and do so gloriously, a sci-fi epic that offers countless hours of enjoyment and reminds one why video-games are a valid entertainment form worth defending to its most poisonous and ignorant detractors.
So where to start? Mass Effect 2 boots in the middle of the action, with a very satisfying and beautiful cinematic opening; "cinematic" is not a guarantee of success and it's sometimes a distraction (like Mass Effect knows very well), but the game instantly involves the player, cutting out the sight-seeing approach that burdened the first game.
The opening slaughters everything familiar from the first game; the Normandy blows up, companions are lost or reassigned and Shepard herself gets killed. Two years later, she's resurrected by the radical organization for human interests, Cerberus and promptly thrown back in action.
I imported my save from Mass Effect, which meant same face, but different skill-set. I decided that after being blown up and abandoned by the military Alliance, my Shepard should leave all the tech skills she picked up while an orphan on the streets of Earth and instead focus on the stealth and marksmanship that helped her survive on Akuze all those years ago.
What? I like role-playing!
One of the major things that dragged the first game down was that the gameplay was a mixed back. Mass Effect 2 realizes that despite the best of intentions and hard work, merging pure RPG with shooters doesn't work all that well when the design is split in the middle to accommodate both styles. The firefights are far more engaging this time around, skills remain and can make the difference between life and death and upgrades to armour, weapons and the Normandy itself are prominent.
Cover-based-shooting is the name of the game; not exactly an original thought for a game that spawned in the same generation as Gears of War, but definitely one that pays off in the end. Switching between weapons depending on enemies and assigning skills on a "paper-rock-scissors" fashion works very well.
Even the mini-games have been improved. One of the most baffling decisions in the first game was have a single Frogger-style mini-game for hacking, bypassing locks etc. Mass Effect 2 remains true to the spirit, but changes the form. The hacking mini-game of matching code segments is infinitely more interesting, as is matching nodes to unlock doors. Both are mind exercises, one of observation and one of memory and both are far more interesting to do than fucking about with a jittery mouse cursor.
I found the changes in space exploration more than welcome as well. No more unstable, hard to navigate Mako dropping on samey deserted space rocks for questionable rewards; having the Normandy fly around the mini-map for resources essential for upgrades and occasionally running into a side-quest is less of a painstaking task and encouraged me to explore the game's content.
Another interesting change was the way inventory is handled. The first game approached inventory in the traditional RPG fashion: talk to vendors and buy better material. The problem was that not only were you bound to find better equipment during your missions instead of buying it for ridiculous amounts of credits, but also that reviewing the available weapons and armour in your possession or in stores was an exercise in patience.
Mass Effect 2 cuts out the middle man; buy upgrades from stores or find them in missions, gather the resources and then have your ship-mates apply them. Easier to do, easier to review, easier to equip your preferred party without much micromanagement faffing about.
In terms of story and characters, I found almost everything is a step-up as well. The narrative is paced better, it expands on its lore, allows for more diverse environments and their native lifeforms and the cast of characters is greatly expanded.
Not counting DLC (which I didn't play), Shepard can have up to 10 companions on the ship and all of them are far more interesting characters than almost everyone in the first game-- that's not even counting non-essential secondary characters, like the Illusive Man, Joker, the AI EDI and random encounters while on missions.
The party characters were a major beef of mine with the original game, mainly because my point of reference for a good RPG in this day and age is interesting party members that interact well with the player character. Dragon Age Origins is my go-to title for this and now Mass Effect 2 is up there as well. It bothered me in the ME1 that interacting with most of Normandy's crew served as exposition for their respective races (like Tali and Wrex, who were likeable, but got very little development). Even characters that I found originally stock and underwhelming in the second game turned out to be hidden gems (like the complex and extremely endearing Mordin Solus).
There are many characters in Mass Effect 2 that are literally more than meets the eye, coming off stereotypical and cartoony at first, until they provide a line of dialogue or an emotional response (usually relayed via their respective "loyalty" quest missions) and all of a sudden, everyone's your favourite.
This is a major accomplishment, not just because it makes the journey more enjoyable, but also because the ending of Mass Effect 2 features a suicide mission; which, depending on choices made throughout the game, can cost anywhere from one party member to all of them and even Shepard. Yes, fuck up too much and everyone, including Shepard, dies.
I ended up losing Dr. Solus and half the crew (Kelly Chambers included) and believe me, it hurt. This is in stark contrast to the hasty and borderline senseless sacrifice of Kaiden or Ashley in the first game's mid-point on Virmire, when the Reapers are introduced.
For some reason, I absolutely adore the visuals of the game. The first game looked good as well, but character models animated a bit stiff and looked just a little bit off. Mass Effect 2 is a four-year-old game, but I'd take it over a lot more graphically demanding games of today. Facial expressions are still stiff at times, but the game is colourful enough, characters animate very well and the engine's capabilities of handling heavy action sequences and special-effect-heavy situations is impressive. It's not the technical mastery, but rather the attention to detail that makes the world of Mass Effect seem like a living, breathing universe that can immerse the player.
The sound is top-notch as well. The acting is among the best I've witnessed in a game; I thought Jennifer Hale as Shepard was good in the first game, but it turns out she was merely testing the waters. She really grows into the character in this installment, selling every aspect (Paragon and especially Renegade) with ease. If there has ever been an argument (a bad one, at that) about male players not being able to identify with a female protagonist, Hale's Shepard is the deafening response.
Lest I forget, the soundtrack quickly became one of my favourites, up there with the likes of The Elder Scrolls and Metal Gear Solid ; some music is recycled from the first game, but what isn't is better, fitting to each situation and working perfectly with the actors and the writing. The final mission's "theme" (Suicide Mission) is one I've listened to about a hundred times since finishing the game, partly because it's great on its own and party because it reminds me a bit of Doctor Who's "The Majestic Tale of a Madman In A Box".
I said in opening this piece that "Mass Effect 2" is a masterpiece and I will staunchly defend that statement as it's one I haven't made lightly; however, that statement in no way means that I consider it a flawless game. Some of the strengths of the first game I find missing in this installment, while a lot of the improvements themselves came with their downsides.
Refining the gameplay mechanics and focusing on a shooter core with RPG elements was ultimately a good idea, but depth had to be sacrificed to achieve combat flow. I rarely used more than three or four skills regularly, while passing orders on to my squad members seemed even less necessary than before. As a Marksman, my Shepard had a nice tactical cloak ability, that I only ended up using to remove myself from open fire in near-death situations.
This was a pity, because the tactical cloak is a great ability for flanking enemies and delivering critical strikes on bosses. The game never discouraged me from doing any of that, but firefights got so heavy and automated, downright basic in fact, that I never needed to "think outside the box" so to speak. Even the final boss, an armoured enemy that my sniper rifle + tactical cloak gained significant bonus against I took out with a pistol behind cover.
I was also unimpressed with the enemies. No matter what race or rank they are, they use the same tactics and come equipped the same way; some have regenerating health, some are biotics, some shielded, some armoured and some melee (especially those annoying little Husk fuckers that swarm around you). It's a long game (clocked around 26 hours with little exploration and non-essential questing) and from some point on, the enemies started feeling like interchangeable targets for practice. There's so little variety and so many firefights that I admit past the mid-point combat got just a little repetitive.
This is one of the two reasons I didn't do much in terms of non-essential questing. The other is that while I prefer the new space exploration interface to the first game's, aimless exploration is still not an attractive concept. Unlike sandbox games and open-world RPGs, there is no reward in exploration itself as it's basically clicking around on a map.
The last issue I have with the game is that while I enjoyed the writing more, mainly dialogue and characters, the main plot is still a bit on the weak side. The structural problems are eerily similar to those of the first Mass Effect; once again there is no single clear antagonist, except some dude named Harbinger that's never introduced and barely shown until the end of the game. Shepard and her crew are, once again, up against an undetermined evil that works once again for an even bigger evil; the Reapers.
The choice to shake up the entire foundation set in the first game is an odd one as well; while sound in its reasoning, it comes off like a desperate attempt to rewrite the ending of ME1, because they didn't know they would do another at the time and hadn't planned ahead.
There is not much happening in the story itself either; outside of the great introduction and the masterful ending, nothing of note happens in the middle outside the party member quests. Shepard travels to many planets and engages in many different societies during her mission, but few get fleshed out. The lore is expanded, but there are no moments of grandeur like navigating around Ilios from the first game.
This was the point that the original was saved thanks to the Protheans and the twist about Reaper technology. Unfortunately, Mass Effect 2 doesn't even feature that much. Cerberus dominates the narrative in thematic terms and sadly, despite their morally questionable methods, the focus on humanity's perseverance is far too one-sided to resonate. There is a potential villain in the face of the Illusive Man, but outside of setting the character up for the sequel, Shepard never actively disobeys an order and even if she protests to his requests, ultimately she treats him like the boss-- which in the context of the narrative also means identifying him as a good guy.
All in all, if Mass Effect was written as a trilogy from the get-go, it's obvious that the second installment is the middle of the story and thus impossible to make a point on its own.
But here's the odd thing; it's also a game that can stand on its own. The plot is weak, but there's little focus on it; the entire story regarding the Collectors feels like killing time, hunting for a MacGuffin of sorts in the face of an entire species. The characters and the dialogue are what steal the show and because of the game's intro setting the stage anew and its ending likely resulting in the protagonist's death, it's a story and a game that can be self-contained, even if just barely, without a trilogy backing them up.
So, ironically, the plot being focused around Cerberus and human interests helps in that regard, as it cuts out a lot of baggage and streamlines the experience. It's a double-edged knife, sacrificing the majestic space opera aspect in favour of a focused experience reliant on the characters.
This is where I have to go back on calling ME1 a "prologue". As I have no knowledge of the third game at the moment, cutting some stuff from the first game and including them in ME2 would produce the defining Mass Effect game. Reducing the first game on its essential lore and necessary missions would easily serve as the first act of what is now called ME2 (not much unlike the Tanker Chapters or Virtuous Mission in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 respectively) and would result in the ultimate Mass Effect experience.
Having said that, Mass Effect 2 is one of the most enjoyable games I've played, not without its flaws, but not without its meaning either; a nearly-complete experience that makes me overjoyed as a gamer and one that will make me soon revisit not just this installment, but the series in general as well.
Next time, we take a deep breath and swim underneath the tidal wave that is Mass Effect 3, the latest installment in the series, the finale to the Shepard trilogy; one of the most anticipated titles of the last generation and one that raised massive controversy that got its very developers go back to the drawing board and redo the ending AFTER the game was released.
Bonus points if verbally abusing these games pisses off "the fans".
Mass Effect, the series, is the anomaly. The first game was a lore-wealthy, timid RPG/Shooter-hybrid that got too big for no good reason and I'm aware of the outrage over the third game (which I haven't played yet at the time of writing this), but "Mass Effect 2" is nothing short of a masterpiece. It's not just a game that improved on almost every aspect of its predecessor, it's a game that can stand on its own and do so gloriously, a sci-fi epic that offers countless hours of enjoyment and reminds one why video-games are a valid entertainment form worth defending to its most poisonous and ignorant detractors.
So where to start? Mass Effect 2 boots in the middle of the action, with a very satisfying and beautiful cinematic opening; "cinematic" is not a guarantee of success and it's sometimes a distraction (like Mass Effect knows very well), but the game instantly involves the player, cutting out the sight-seeing approach that burdened the first game.
The opening slaughters everything familiar from the first game; the Normandy blows up, companions are lost or reassigned and Shepard herself gets killed. Two years later, she's resurrected by the radical organization for human interests, Cerberus and promptly thrown back in action.
I imported my save from Mass Effect, which meant same face, but different skill-set. I decided that after being blown up and abandoned by the military Alliance, my Shepard should leave all the tech skills she picked up while an orphan on the streets of Earth and instead focus on the stealth and marksmanship that helped her survive on Akuze all those years ago.
What? I like role-playing!
 |
| Amelia Shepard is back in action. The face import from ME1 is actually very accurate. |
One of the major things that dragged the first game down was that the gameplay was a mixed back. Mass Effect 2 realizes that despite the best of intentions and hard work, merging pure RPG with shooters doesn't work all that well when the design is split in the middle to accommodate both styles. The firefights are far more engaging this time around, skills remain and can make the difference between life and death and upgrades to armour, weapons and the Normandy itself are prominent.
Cover-based-shooting is the name of the game; not exactly an original thought for a game that spawned in the same generation as Gears of War, but definitely one that pays off in the end. Switching between weapons depending on enemies and assigning skills on a "paper-rock-scissors" fashion works very well.
Even the mini-games have been improved. One of the most baffling decisions in the first game was have a single Frogger-style mini-game for hacking, bypassing locks etc. Mass Effect 2 remains true to the spirit, but changes the form. The hacking mini-game of matching code segments is infinitely more interesting, as is matching nodes to unlock doors. Both are mind exercises, one of observation and one of memory and both are far more interesting to do than fucking about with a jittery mouse cursor.
I found the changes in space exploration more than welcome as well. No more unstable, hard to navigate Mako dropping on samey deserted space rocks for questionable rewards; having the Normandy fly around the mini-map for resources essential for upgrades and occasionally running into a side-quest is less of a painstaking task and encouraged me to explore the game's content.
 |
| Need better guns and armour? Mine planets for resources. |
Another interesting change was the way inventory is handled. The first game approached inventory in the traditional RPG fashion: talk to vendors and buy better material. The problem was that not only were you bound to find better equipment during your missions instead of buying it for ridiculous amounts of credits, but also that reviewing the available weapons and armour in your possession or in stores was an exercise in patience.
Mass Effect 2 cuts out the middle man; buy upgrades from stores or find them in missions, gather the resources and then have your ship-mates apply them. Easier to do, easier to review, easier to equip your preferred party without much micromanagement faffing about.
In terms of story and characters, I found almost everything is a step-up as well. The narrative is paced better, it expands on its lore, allows for more diverse environments and their native lifeforms and the cast of characters is greatly expanded.
Not counting DLC (which I didn't play), Shepard can have up to 10 companions on the ship and all of them are far more interesting characters than almost everyone in the first game-- that's not even counting non-essential secondary characters, like the Illusive Man, Joker, the AI EDI and random encounters while on missions.
The party characters were a major beef of mine with the original game, mainly because my point of reference for a good RPG in this day and age is interesting party members that interact well with the player character. Dragon Age Origins is my go-to title for this and now Mass Effect 2 is up there as well. It bothered me in the ME1 that interacting with most of Normandy's crew served as exposition for their respective races (like Tali and Wrex, who were likeable, but got very little development). Even characters that I found originally stock and underwhelming in the second game turned out to be hidden gems (like the complex and extremely endearing Mordin Solus).
 |
| I see you're exploring space! Would you like help? |
There are many characters in Mass Effect 2 that are literally more than meets the eye, coming off stereotypical and cartoony at first, until they provide a line of dialogue or an emotional response (usually relayed via their respective "loyalty" quest missions) and all of a sudden, everyone's your favourite.
This is a major accomplishment, not just because it makes the journey more enjoyable, but also because the ending of Mass Effect 2 features a suicide mission; which, depending on choices made throughout the game, can cost anywhere from one party member to all of them and even Shepard. Yes, fuck up too much and everyone, including Shepard, dies.
I ended up losing Dr. Solus and half the crew (Kelly Chambers included) and believe me, it hurt. This is in stark contrast to the hasty and borderline senseless sacrifice of Kaiden or Ashley in the first game's mid-point on Virmire, when the Reapers are introduced.
For some reason, I absolutely adore the visuals of the game. The first game looked good as well, but character models animated a bit stiff and looked just a little bit off. Mass Effect 2 is a four-year-old game, but I'd take it over a lot more graphically demanding games of today. Facial expressions are still stiff at times, but the game is colourful enough, characters animate very well and the engine's capabilities of handling heavy action sequences and special-effect-heavy situations is impressive. It's not the technical mastery, but rather the attention to detail that makes the world of Mass Effect seem like a living, breathing universe that can immerse the player.
The sound is top-notch as well. The acting is among the best I've witnessed in a game; I thought Jennifer Hale as Shepard was good in the first game, but it turns out she was merely testing the waters. She really grows into the character in this installment, selling every aspect (Paragon and especially Renegade) with ease. If there has ever been an argument (a bad one, at that) about male players not being able to identify with a female protagonist, Hale's Shepard is the deafening response.
Lest I forget, the soundtrack quickly became one of my favourites, up there with the likes of The Elder Scrolls and Metal Gear Solid ; some music is recycled from the first game, but what isn't is better, fitting to each situation and working perfectly with the actors and the writing. The final mission's "theme" (Suicide Mission) is one I've listened to about a hundred times since finishing the game, partly because it's great on its own and party because it reminds me a bit of Doctor Who's "The Majestic Tale of a Madman In A Box".
I said in opening this piece that "Mass Effect 2" is a masterpiece and I will staunchly defend that statement as it's one I haven't made lightly; however, that statement in no way means that I consider it a flawless game. Some of the strengths of the first game I find missing in this installment, while a lot of the improvements themselves came with their downsides.
Refining the gameplay mechanics and focusing on a shooter core with RPG elements was ultimately a good idea, but depth had to be sacrificed to achieve combat flow. I rarely used more than three or four skills regularly, while passing orders on to my squad members seemed even less necessary than before. As a Marksman, my Shepard had a nice tactical cloak ability, that I only ended up using to remove myself from open fire in near-death situations.
 |
| Great final act opening. Major "Serenity" flashbacks. Dammit Wash! |
This was a pity, because the tactical cloak is a great ability for flanking enemies and delivering critical strikes on bosses. The game never discouraged me from doing any of that, but firefights got so heavy and automated, downright basic in fact, that I never needed to "think outside the box" so to speak. Even the final boss, an armoured enemy that my sniper rifle + tactical cloak gained significant bonus against I took out with a pistol behind cover.
I was also unimpressed with the enemies. No matter what race or rank they are, they use the same tactics and come equipped the same way; some have regenerating health, some are biotics, some shielded, some armoured and some melee (especially those annoying little Husk fuckers that swarm around you). It's a long game (clocked around 26 hours with little exploration and non-essential questing) and from some point on, the enemies started feeling like interchangeable targets for practice. There's so little variety and so many firefights that I admit past the mid-point combat got just a little repetitive.
This is one of the two reasons I didn't do much in terms of non-essential questing. The other is that while I prefer the new space exploration interface to the first game's, aimless exploration is still not an attractive concept. Unlike sandbox games and open-world RPGs, there is no reward in exploration itself as it's basically clicking around on a map.
The last issue I have with the game is that while I enjoyed the writing more, mainly dialogue and characters, the main plot is still a bit on the weak side. The structural problems are eerily similar to those of the first Mass Effect; once again there is no single clear antagonist, except some dude named Harbinger that's never introduced and barely shown until the end of the game. Shepard and her crew are, once again, up against an undetermined evil that works once again for an even bigger evil; the Reapers.
The choice to shake up the entire foundation set in the first game is an odd one as well; while sound in its reasoning, it comes off like a desperate attempt to rewrite the ending of ME1, because they didn't know they would do another at the time and hadn't planned ahead.
There is not much happening in the story itself either; outside of the great introduction and the masterful ending, nothing of note happens in the middle outside the party member quests. Shepard travels to many planets and engages in many different societies during her mission, but few get fleshed out. The lore is expanded, but there are no moments of grandeur like navigating around Ilios from the first game.
This was the point that the original was saved thanks to the Protheans and the twist about Reaper technology. Unfortunately, Mass Effect 2 doesn't even feature that much. Cerberus dominates the narrative in thematic terms and sadly, despite their morally questionable methods, the focus on humanity's perseverance is far too one-sided to resonate. There is a potential villain in the face of the Illusive Man, but outside of setting the character up for the sequel, Shepard never actively disobeys an order and even if she protests to his requests, ultimately she treats him like the boss-- which in the context of the narrative also means identifying him as a good guy.
All in all, if Mass Effect was written as a trilogy from the get-go, it's obvious that the second installment is the middle of the story and thus impossible to make a point on its own.
But here's the odd thing; it's also a game that can stand on its own. The plot is weak, but there's little focus on it; the entire story regarding the Collectors feels like killing time, hunting for a MacGuffin of sorts in the face of an entire species. The characters and the dialogue are what steal the show and because of the game's intro setting the stage anew and its ending likely resulting in the protagonist's death, it's a story and a game that can be self-contained, even if just barely, without a trilogy backing them up.
So, ironically, the plot being focused around Cerberus and human interests helps in that regard, as it cuts out a lot of baggage and streamlines the experience. It's a double-edged knife, sacrificing the majestic space opera aspect in favour of a focused experience reliant on the characters.
This is where I have to go back on calling ME1 a "prologue". As I have no knowledge of the third game at the moment, cutting some stuff from the first game and including them in ME2 would produce the defining Mass Effect game. Reducing the first game on its essential lore and necessary missions would easily serve as the first act of what is now called ME2 (not much unlike the Tanker Chapters or Virtuous Mission in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 respectively) and would result in the ultimate Mass Effect experience.
Having said that, Mass Effect 2 is one of the most enjoyable games I've played, not without its flaws, but not without its meaning either; a nearly-complete experience that makes me overjoyed as a gamer and one that will make me soon revisit not just this installment, but the series in general as well.
Next time, we take a deep breath and swim underneath the tidal wave that is Mass Effect 3, the latest installment in the series, the finale to the Shepard trilogy; one of the most anticipated titles of the last generation and one that raised massive controversy that got its very developers go back to the drawing board and redo the ending AFTER the game was released.
 |
| "The fuck you lookin' at?" Renegade +3 |
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Mass Effect Retrospective - A newbie's impressions on "Mass Effect"
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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