Ah, Mass Effect

As the quarantine goes on, I find myself playing more and more video games. For one, they're a natural time sink- nothing really makes the day go by like spending a breezy eight-to-ten hours plugging away in a digital world. For two, I've been playing video games since I was five-years-old, so they have a lot of emotional value to me, too. As a result, I find myself thinking on games I have a love/hate relationship with which, inevitably, gets me thinking of Mass Effect.

The Mass Effect series is a trilogy of games about you, Commander Shepard, as you jet around the galaxy trying to save it from the invasion of an ancient machine race called the Reapers. It's a space opera of the highest sort and, overall, I really love the series as a whole and how it evolved over the years.


Now, the first game, I wouldn't change at all. Your character has powers called biotics they can deploy to affect gravity and create mini-black holes, you can overload enemy shields, or shoot massive fireball shots from your shotgun just to name a few. The game has multiple character classes with their own specialties that you choose at the beginning of the game with each class getting 5-6 active powers you can use all with their own independent cooldowns- meaning, you can use as many as you want at the same time. On top of that, you have two companions with you for each mission and they have their own set of 5-6 powers with independent cooldowns. So, by the end of the game with everyone's powers fully leveled up, the combat in the game can very easily have you lifting enemies into the air, trapping them in the gravity of a mini-black hole, then throwing them against the walls of whatever building you're in or shooting them like floating fish in a barrel. Or, alternatively, you can overload their weapons so they can't shoot back as you walk up to them blasting them in the face with a shotgun.

In the last level of the game, you're forced to climb up the outside of this massive space station to get to the final boss fight, right? Part of the this climb involves you getting bull rushed by seven-foot tall robots or ridiculously tough mini-boss creatures called Krogan in tight, narrow walk ways where the only out is through. Since the game operates on Newtonian physics, if you lift them up into the air they'll just float up and up and up until they're off the readable part of the map and the game just declares them dead. It's a chaotic, horrifically unbalanced mess of a game. I love it and would change absolutely nothing.

For Mass Effect 2, Bioware decided to scale back the systems in the first installment to balance out the game play and put some sense into the combat. Mostly, I think this approach worked. Every class still has a wide variety of powers at their disposal, but you can only use one at a time. This brought a new edge of tactical thinking to the combat encounters as it became a matter of picking and choosing what powers to use in what combination at just the right time for maximum impact.

 It also cut down the laborious and repetitive inventory management in Mass Effect 1. While it was nice having a wide range of ammo-types to adapt to the enemy you were facing for maximum damage, in the first Mass Effect it would regularly get to a point where you had to open your inventory and just delete things for ten minutes at a time. In 2, Bioware made it so ammo-types were a power you could invest in just like any other and once you equipped it, that was that.

Mass Effect 2 also brought with it what is probably my favorite story of the trilogy. As far as the main quest goes, it's actually pretty short. You find who your enemies are, what they're trying to accomplish, where their base is and how to get to it over the course of five main missions not including the final assault. The meat of the game comes in the preparation, of upgrading your ship to top fighting condition and, more importantly, getting your team ready to go off on a suicide mission as you deal with all their unfinished business.

Luckily, save for one person, all the characters have rich backstories that are fascinating to dive into. One is among the last members of a wandering alien warrior class on a mission to kill her daughter. Another is an assassin suffering from a terminal illness trying to do one good thing before he passes. Two are genetically engineered to be the "perfect" example of their species who both struggle to understand what that means both in the context of their creation and how they can define themselves outside of the fact that they were literally molded to be the pinnacle of existence. Jumping around the galaxy, talking to all these people as your relationships go from stand-offish, slightly hostile, and impersonal to deeply felt bonds of people who will risk their lives for you and each other is fantastic and just thinking about it makes me want to give the game another spin.

Except, I won't. Because the parts of this game I hate, I deeply, truly, profoundly, hate. 

Partly, what drives me up a wall is how limited the options are in this game. There are five main weapon types in the game- pistol, SMG, assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle- which, without DLC, have two options each. Some classes get a bonus weapon in one category, but, even then, having the choice of three weapons in just one category unless you shill out extra cash for more is just... limiting, shall we say. Also, the upgrade options suck. Well, they would suck, but they're largely nonexistent. The only things you get are increases in overall damage or bonuses to damage done to a specific type of protection like shields or armor, but those are universal. If you want to modify how accurate they are or how give a little bonus to their head-shot damage or literally anything customizable, well, there are plenty of other games you can do that in so you may as well play those instead.

But what gets me, what really, really gets under my skin and gets to my teeth to grinding, is how the game makes you replay it on higher difficulties. Part of the experience is that you level up as you play, and, if you load up to play through on a higher difficulty, you get the benefit of already having all those skill points once you get the characters so you can level them up to their most powerful states from the jump. Well, you'd think that's what would happen, buuuuut, no. See, when you start a new play through, only you and two other characters get the full amount of experience points to fully max out their abilities. Everyone else gets a reduced amount which forces you to pigeon-hole your companions into being really good at just one thing or sort of shitty at everything. 

Playing through the upper difficulties feels like you're doing so with a hand tied behind your back, which doesn't feel like I'm overcoming a unique challenge laid out by the game as much as I'm powering my way through unnecessary hamstringing.

What sucks even more is that the game renders almost all if its cast practically useless as the difficulty progresses. Out of twelve potential companions, on Insanity- the highest difficulty- you have a viable option range of three, maybe. Four, if you stretch the definition out a bit. And when you can only take one of those viable companions out on everyone else's loyalty quest, which renders a full third of your party as dead weight, it turns what should be compelling difficulty to conquer into an arbitrary chore to get through.

 It takes a game that should be about finding unique combinations and synergy among a wide cast of characters and just throws them all out the window for a boring, twenty-two hour grind. Every time I think about trying to do the play through on Insanity again just for completionists sake, the fact that it won't be any fun at all stops me dead cold and seething for a good twenty minutes.

Game-play wise, these problems were fixed for me in Mass Effect 3. The amount of guns, armor, and upgrades were greatly expanded to really make Shepard feel like your own creation. The issue with powers was removed- you couldn't fully upgrade everything on everyone, but you got enough to make your companions flexible and adaptable for any situation you came across. This also means that any combination of companions will work on any difficulty- you're no longer shackled to just using the same people over and over and over again. The way the various biotic and tech powers interact was also expanded, giving rise to some pretty devastating combos you could trigger to lay waste to everything in sight.

Where this game screws up is the narrative. A big selling factor of the Mass Effect series during its run was choice; you as the player made the all-important story decisions that shaped the world around you and determined how the story would ultimately resolve. Or at least that's what you were told, anyway. For this game, the decision was made that certain player decisions would be overridden to bring the game into the more uniform continuity of the expanded universe of the tie-in novels and comic books.

On its own, this isn't necessarily an awful thing. But it was a sign on things to come that would ultimately cause everyone to violently turn on the game once they got to the end.

Over the course of the series, you make some monumental decisions. In the first game, you determine whether a species called the Rachni will live on or you can wipe them out of existence, forever. Multiple people comment on this over the course of the series and what it, potentially, means for the galaxy as a whole. Also in the first game, you make the decision of who will represent the human race on the galaxy overseeing Council with the other three prime alien races. Pretty much everyone picks Admiral Anderson over the other option of Ambassador Udina because Udina is a slimy little shit you wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand.

A third major choice comes from the second game, were you decide whether or not you're going to blow up the secret base the Reapers have been using to construct another one of their own made out of the liquefied remains of the entire human race. If you blow it up, the head of the terrorist organization you've been working with all game gets very upset with you for ruining his plans of getting humans a leg-up when it comes to galactic domination.

As you probably guess, all these choices are undone or cancelled out in this game. Anderson retires for reasons, the Reapers jury-rig the Rachni back into existence so they can have living artillery weapons to shoot at you, and Cerberus has all the tech they needed, including parts of the baby Reaper that you blew up, at its base anyway. All your decisions meant nothing, aren't you proud?

What's especially galling is that none of these changes were really necessary. Anderson has a special interest in you, so it makes sense he would be on Earth to lend you his support after you pulled some truly heinous and necessary shit at the end of the second game. He could have easily appointed Udina to act as an acting Councilor until he returned but that gets thrown off due to the invasion and once he's on Earth, he can't leave it or the resistance movement behind so he stays. 

This lets him be in danger on Earth, which the plot wants, while also making Udina's second act coup against Cerberus all the more palatable because his power isn't really his. So it makes sense that he'd be vulnerable to an offer of overthrowing the other Councilors to take all the power for himself in what is surely a devil's bargain that will bite him in the ass if it ever worked. Instead, what we have is the game throwing off a player decision for no real reason and having a major plot point not make any sense because the guy already has everything he'd be supposedly getting.

The Rachni issue could also be avoided if the game wanted to. There's another species in the game called the Elcor who are basically these elephant looking things who speak in hilarious monotone voices. You're told by one of the members of this species that they go into battle with cannons strapped to their back which they use to lob artillery at whatever they're fighting. This essentially fills the same role as the Rachni and as the added bonus of giving a new enemy type out of a species you don't see much of in the series.

Even the Reaper tech of Cerberus can be explained by the Reapers reaching out and manipulating the organization for their own ends. Doing things this way reinforces the later theme of the game that what's happening is part of a cycle, that what's happening has happened countless times before to innumerable species, all part of a twisted ideology of the preservation of life in Reaper form. Cerberus is just the latest of many, many distractions the Reapers have perfected in the billions of years they've been doing so its easier to harvest the species they've come for. Instead, we get a massive plot hole that's never explained in game and only briefly touched on in a comic a majority of the players never read because, why would they?

These little insults made the ending- where you're initially forced into a binary choice of controlling or destroying the Reapers- feel even more like Bioware crafted this final chapter with no care or regard for what their players did in the lead up. Maybe they felt overwhelmed; the head writer of the first two games left Bioware before the third game started, so it's possible that given all the possible ways for the game to finish, the new writer and the staff looked to find the most uniform canon they could work from, deeming the changes to player decisions as unfortunate but necessary sacrifice in the name of fuller, more complete narrative closure. To me, it's an example of a company trying to play it safe only to have it backfire in every way they were trying to avoid. 

All that said, Mass Effect is still one of my favorite pieces of media, ever. When it's firing on all cylinders, it's a great action game in a huge space opera with the best bunch of misfits to keep you company. Does it get maddeningly, hair tearing out frustrating at times? Of course. Is it still worth all the trouble? For now, yeah. If there does come a time where I just don't want to put up with all the hassles of the game, it'll still have been nice to be in its world for so long.