If you haven’t played it, for fucks sake, go do it now!
I’ll just get this out of the way real quick: Mass Effect 2 Is my favorite video game. Ever. Period. End of sentence. From Atari 2600 until now, I can say without question or hesitation that it is my favorite game.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that it’s a Bioware game; I have spent a lot of time, effort and emotional currency into Bioware games in the past. In return I have received hours upon hours of glorious gamely, wonderful story and engaging characters to sink my story craving brain into.
I have written in the past about how important video games have been to my life. Yet the last few years I have played barely any video games. I am struggling with modern gaming and trying to reconnect with the games I loved in the past, hoping that it will rekindle my love of gaming.
The thought of playing Mass Effect 2 again makes me excited. But, my brain will not let me skip the first just to play the second. It’s a slight hurdle, but it will be worth it. I figure I would just play through it again and see how the Legendary edition holds up, and go into the second game like the developers intended, with a character loaded from save files from the first.
So, here we are. We find ourselves on N7 Day, a fake fucking holiday dedicated to a video game, a series and a setting that has made a big impact on my life. So let’s do this shit. Here are my thoughts on the first Mass Effect game.
This will be mildly spoilery. As of posting this article the game is a few weeks shy of 18 years old, and has been released on several generations of gaming systems. You’ve had time and you’ve been warned.
Preparing for the Trilogy
So, the first thing you are hit with is designing your character: Male or Female, your last name is Shepard. This allows the game to refer to you by name without worry. Believe me, you’re badass enough, ain’t no one about to call you by your first name here.
Then you get to pic your past. Are you a spacer kid, or did you barely escape the gangs on earth before you ran off to join the military? Then you have to choose your background story. Are you some glorious fuckin hero? Or did you get shit done, losing squad mates in the process? I chose the last survivor that got shit done, because of course I did.
Your choices here change the dialog you hear, specifically in the early parts of the game, and have just enough weight to be worthwhile. Here start the choices that impact an entire trilogy of story.
More importantly though is your class. There are six to choose from: three basic classes and three hybrid classes. There is the standard Soldier who gets the heavy armor and all the guns. There is a Biotic which is the Mass Effect setting version of the space wizard using dark energy to make fuck shit up with their minds. Then there is the tech based electronics-nerd based Engineer who overloads the guns and tear down the energy shields of their target. Additionally, you can choose from a half-and-half of any two of these.
Keep in mind, that you don’t have to plan to do everything. That’s what you have companions for. The varied and interesting characters that join your party all belong to one of these class archtypes. Your squad mates can either double up on the way you like playing your character or fill in ability gaps to make sure you can take on anything.
For my replay of the trilogy I chose a femshep (female Shepard, the voice actress is fantastic) Earther who got the tough job done, but lost team members along the way; she’s a tough-as-shit Soldier, focusing on mid range gun-play with Assault Rifles. Let’s do this shit; I already know I am going mostly renegade, but, we will get to that later.
MASS EFFECT
You are immediately thrown into the command deck of a spaceship. A truly wonderful voice cast awaits. There is a mission afoot and you are introduced to the basics of this space fantasy setting. The race that died out 50k years ago, the current ruling body that uses the tech of the dead race to get around, and how humanity found some info on Mars that helped us get to the stars. Humanity at this point is just stretching their proverbial limbs out into the interstellar sea of stars, and it is mentioned that we are not thought well of by all. We’ll fucking show them. Won’t we?
We also meet an alien Spectre named Nihilus, a rogue element on the human spaceship, who doesn’t answer to our captain but also has some expectations of us. He’s evaluating our Shepard on their first mission. This throw away character wants to see us in action and we aim to show him how we get shit done.
He doesn’t get a chance to see much. Insert chaos.
What follows is a dumpster fire mission full of alien robots that attack our freshly made character, as would be expected in a roleplaying video game set in a galactic science fiction setting. In a move-the-plot toward style plot scene Nihilus unexpectedly meets another Spectre whom he recognizes as Saren. Then his brains evacuate Nihilus’s head.
While things go badly, your character does alright for themselves, shooting some bad guys, and accidentally foiling the plot of the would-be antagonist. We meet cybernetic zombies, cyclopian robots with pew-pew lasers and learn that Saren will be the less than pleasant big bad guy for the game.
Shortly thereafter, once the cutscenes and chatting is concluded on the ship you have yet to be given control of, you go to the crazy city in space known as the Citadel, created by an ancient alien race from a silly long time ago. You are finally allowed a little freedom to wander. I sat through several minutes of quality voiceover briefly describing humanity’s recent future-past, other species, the Citadel which plays a big part in the game, and the other races you have encountered by that point.
There is enough context given while playing to enjoy the game with a basic understanding, but, like many RPGs of the era, you can also dive into the “codex” of sorts to do some research. If you don’t care for the moderate dive into the setting, no worries, you can still thoroughly enjoy the game experience. But, if you fancy yourself a sci-fi fan and/or want a little more meat upon the fictional bones you are jaunting through, the codex entries are there for you to enjoy.
Great care is given to crafting an interesting collection of alien races, complete with divergent, interesting cultures. These varying cultures all have just enough resemblance to our own to be able to understand and connect with them while also feeling unique and truly alien. The world building here is amazing and there is always just enough to feel like they did a lot of work without a ton of unnecessary info dumps slowing shit down.
Quarians live upon a space bound flotilla after losing their homeworld after crafting one of the games primary antagonist of the story. Turians are militaristic and resent humanity for the war that preceded the story. Salarians are a species of tech nerds and science geeks that genetically ruined the warlike Krogan race dooming them to fight amongst themselves and others until their species dies. The token blue-skinned female aliens are the Asari, who can procreate with any species through emotional connections and make for powerful long-lived space wizards.
The citadel sequence is, as many will play out through the series, a bottleneck scene that brings the opportunity to slow down and have some dialog based encounters. You meet some ambassadors, experience some politics, and exercise the dialog loop.
This leads to the main story, where the government just doens’t want to do anything about the problem and Shepard offers to take on the cause of proving that the bad guy is actually bad. This sets you on a fairly open path: They give you a space ship to fly between solar systems and follow the story or get distracted by side quests everywhere. The ultimate goal is to hunt down some leads, find some new companions and learn more about the setting as you do side quests. As you can imagine, you eventually unravel the conspiracy, shit hits the fan and you hurtle towards a grand conclusion upon an epic set piece that both concludes the current story well and sets up the second game perfectly.
But I am not here to give a recap of the game, I’m here to tell you why its important to play the first game before you get to the second. Because the second part of the trilogy is great, amazing actually.
The Effect isn’t Perfect
In the past, when I told people that they needed to just get through this game to get to the second, I did so for several reasons. While the first Mass Effect game was a huge leap forward at the time, it wasn’t perfect by any means. Building upon the innovations that Bioware displayed in Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, the end result was a wonderful gaming experience, but the finer points were not the most pleasant all the time.
The thing that held the original game back the most was the fucking Mako, in my eyes anyway. Sure, it was a cool idea. The Normandy would drop the tank you were piloting from low orbit. The retro-jets fire and your space tank would land, ready to go. By ready, I mean drive around in a bouncy tank and seems to float about unconnected to the actual ground. You could barely hit what you tried to kill with the cannon your tank comes armed with nor could you actually get to all the places you could without a nauseating level of frustration attempting to infer which one random direction your vehicle could ascend that mountain to get to the juicy collectible morsel atop it. It’s wasn’t the worst vehicle controls I had ever experienced but it was easily the weakest and most frustrating part of the game.
The core action loop of the game was a super-basic squad-based cover shooter. Run up to a thing, push against it to “take cover” use the aim button to look around and then shoot. I didn’t realize how clunky it was until I played the second game, with the simple inclusion of a button for taking cover: no more pushing against a wall hoping you’ll stick to it instead of walking around or away from it out into the open.
Luckily when that happens you have a squad to help protect you. Squad tactics are another important part of the wicked average shooter mechanics. Of course your teammates wont’ work together unless you directly control them; they won’t combo for shit. They will randomly waste their abilities if you let them, so don’t. You can also loosely direct them around but honestly they will stand on top of the box you told them to hide behind as often as they will successfully take cover in the middle of a laser fight. Will they be helpful, yes. Will they require work, also yes.
So, Yeah. Some things don’t quite reach the heights of excellence of other aspects of the game, luckily perfection is not required for a great game. And it was a great game.
Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time to dwell on both the good and the bad, since the elevators in the game were used to “hide” the loading time. Oops, didn’t work.
In a truly meme-generatingly hilarious way, the varied and frequent elevators in the game only managed to highlight the inadequacy of the XBOX 360 at the time. That, or there is quarter-fucking-mile between each floor in the future.
There was some minor shit. It seemed like RPG stats were happening in the background since you could put your targeting reticle firmly on someones face and miss. No matter what, your class choice at the beginning determined what guns you could use through the whole shooter game, so choose wisely. The maps you drove the mako through were featureless zones of hills and mountains that you had to find your way around to find 5 or 6 points of interest, be it a crashed probe or a small base of bad guys.
Also, there are a ton of side quests. Some you get walking the Citadel, others from calls for help or random encounters, but, the vast majority of them, are entirely unrelated to the actual story. Some of them are great, others are busy work for experience and gear, and someone like me wants to clear most if not all of them for some masochistic reason. I don’t suggest this. Don’t do everything, do the companion quests and the other side missions that sound fun. The rest of them are distractions.
Many of these issues are rendered moot by the wonderful Legendary edition of the game. Not only were visuals for the first game brought up to the fidelity of the third entry in the trilogy, but care was given to other aspects of the game. The Mako doesn’t just straight up suck balls: drives and shoots better, like it actually cares what buttons your pressing. The squad mates may not be brilliant, but controlling them is much easier. Many minor gripes were also accounted for.
And those elevators, well, they all shrank, as shit loads rapidly on modern machines. So, as I said before, it was a great game and the Legendary release made it even better.
The things they did well make it all worth it
It was nearly twenty years ago that I made the first conversation decision by choosing from a list of options around a wheel of choices. You chose what you wanted to say and you were blessed with fully voiced characters and NPCs. Everyone spoke, even the random shitbags that hang around the Citadel just to make it look populated. Then, it dawned on me. I wasn’t just chooing the words my version of Shepard would say, I was making decisions about what kind of person he was.
The choices you made altered the game. Important roleplaying decisions were made, some of them were just how you treated an NPC or companion, but others would change the world in which you played. You changed the world. One way or another you were going to be the hero, but it was up to you how you got there. And who you did it with.
The list of individuals that accompany you is varied and of quality. It becomes tough, because the option to balance your combat squad often gets set aside for bringing the team mates that you love to spend your digital time with. There are two characters that stand out in the first game, and I always have at least one of them by my side.
I am just gonna get this out of the way: Wrex is a fuckin badass! Period. End of sentence. Universally accepted as truth. I could write an entire article on how amazing a character Urdot Wrex is. As a Battlemaster, Wrex combines the combat abilities of a warrior and the space magic of a biotic into a powerful companion. He doesn’t have a lot to say, but what he does say makes an impact. He had a tragic backstory, both personally and that of the Krogan race as a whole. Part way through the game, your character is forced to make a decision that could lead to having to put him down. I have never had to, but the moment is always tenuous.
Then there is Garrus. He is the ex-military turned disenfranchised space cop who is tired of doing shit by the book and getting nowhere. I love this guy. Garrus Vakarian is calm and understanding but utterly ruthless when it comes to his sense of purpose. He’s the perfect companion for a renegade run, as the ends justify the means in his mind. That’s how I tend to play my Shepard, fast and loose: get shit done. He was mid-investigation of Saren when the Spectre went rogue and Garrus joins you to help bring the bastard down.
Speaking of renegade run, there are two diametrically opposed decision making processes as you move through the game. The first is Paragon, the good guy, the space paladin, the right of wrongs and protector of the people. The other is the Renegade, who focuses on the success of the mission above all else, with less care given to consequences and collateral damage. Most people play somewhere in the middle, but you only unlock the most extreme options by acquiring a high enough rating based on your choices, one way or another.
Regardless of your alignment of such, you get the same story just with a slightly different flavor. And the Story is well thought through and engaging, and your alignment just adds the sauce of your chosen flavor. The tale the game tells is the absolute best part of the game, and the biggest reason to play through it.
In my mind, the best reason to play is the sense of weight brought to light by the story. Mass Effect starts out as a fairly normal space opera of ships, aliens and fighting robots that revolted and evolved, fighting for the Spectre that pretended to evaluate Shepard. Shepard becomes a Spectre himself, a special operative of the Citadel and send to prove that he was a traitor and eventually stop him.
Before it’s over, you determine that the robot menace, the Geth, worship Saren’s space ship as if it’s a god. A vessel known as Sovereign, which looks like a massive biomechanical octopus god. We learn that Sovereign is not really a ship but one of the Reapers, an ancient machine race that eliminated all biological life fifty-thousand years ago, including the race that left behind the tech that humanity discovered on Mars and allowed us to join the galactic community.
Dread. That’s the intention, you fight Saren and his host of Geth, make tough choices as to how to fight against the horde and make a dramatic run along the outside of the city-sized Citadel space station to get to the final fight. The fight is tough and the fleets are diminished and the ruling council may even be dead. You come to realize that Sovereign nearly destroyed the seat of civilization by itself. And there is a fleet of fucking Reapers on it’s way. An entire fleet of ancient galactic ruin. How can civilization stand up against that when it barely survived the arrival of one Reaper? It didn’t occur to me at the time, but Mass Effect is a tale of cosmic horror, of the inevitable extinction of all life based on a plan that was enacted an impossibly long time ago. Many galactic civilizations have been lost to the Reapers, what chance do we have?
The real cherry on top is the fact that your choices determine your personal version of the story. Do you save the Rachni queen or kill her to stop their potential spread across the galaxy. Do you cure the Genophage or let the Krogans continue to dwindle away to extinction. Do you save the Council or make sure the human race is in a place of power when the dust settles. You decide who your Shepard is and how the Galaxy looks after, spoiler alert, you defeat Sovreign and kinda-sorta save the day.
Does it hold up?
The short answer is: Mostly. Yeah. Not everything is perfect, but the Legendary Edition goes a long way to reducing the deficiencies.
You should play it, because, when you play Mass Effect 2 and learn that a fleet of Reapers are coming, you just can’t understand the magnitude of that information. Yeah, a bunch of things called Reapers are coming. Sure. You’re informed that its a bad thing but, you can’t truly appreciate that revelation without going through the first game. Plus, you want to import your version of the events of ME1 when you start Mass Effect 2.
It’s just better that way. See you after I play part two.
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
