Stuff I Played: Mass Effect

Stuff I Played is where I write about games I recently played. It’s not really a review, just a short write up of my totally subjective thoughts as the formed in the days after I finished playing something.

So I finally played Mass Effect. Sometime around June of 2012 I bought an Xbox 360 just to play these games and a small smattering of other games, but since then I've only ever played Lost Odyssey and Dust: An Elysian Tail to completion. To make matters worse, in the time between me shelling out for the 360 and now most of the games I bought the system for (namely Mass Effect and Deadly Premonition) have been ported to the PS3, which I already owned. Funny how that works out…

I played Mass Effect on the recommendation of a new acquaintance. I had actually tried to play it once before, closer to the time that I had dropped the cash for the games and console, but quickly lost interest in what I was doing. See, the game opens with this really exciting mission where a ton of cool stuff goes down and then about an hour into that you arrive on the Citadel and have to convince the galactic council of everything that happened while you were there. This mostly takes the form of you kind of running in circles and chasing leads for a bit and while it really does help you become acquainted with the world of Mass Effect I never could bring myself to get excited about finding proof of something I saw happen so that I could convincing some alien jerks who don’t seem to like me very much that I’m not crazy. I still feel this way having gone through it a second time, but luckily the sequence doesn’t take all that long to complete and once you’re done the game recovers quick and gets going.

Everything once you get to leave the Citadel really does move at a nice clip. Even the extended talky bits on planets like Noveria were more engaging to me that what had preceded it on the Citadel (this is likely because the stuff on Noveria was being uncovered for the first time while the events on the Citadel felt somewhat redundant to me). I especially liked how each planet was its own little closed circle with a unique cast and story arc that helped build to the games conclusion. It helps strike a nice balance between linear and non-linear progression that is need to tell a compelling story in these kinds of games without sticking the player on a straight line from start to finish. Apparently this is kind of a Bioware thing because I also thought it was cool in Dragon Age: Origins when I played that in the way way back.

The members of your squad were all pretty cool too. I never got too interested in Ashley or Kaidan because I guess the appeal of chatting up all the different Aliens and getting to know more about their worlds and cultures was more intriguing to me than whatever the other humans on the ship felt like talking about. The world of Mass Effect feels uncommonly fleshed out for a piece of modern science fiction so getting to hear Wrex and Garrus tell me about who they are and how they become who they are and what their respective races are like was something I really enjoyed. 

The romance stuff felt kind of silly to me though. I had initially decided to go with Ashley because I couldn't figure out where Liara was on the Normandy, so after I had shifted gears to Liara I got an awkward little scene near the end of the game where the two characters decide to confront Shepherd about who he wants to be with. I thought this was pretty funny so I’ll put it in the win column.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised by Mass Effect.  Third person cover based shooters aren't the kind of games I usually play and I was REALLY bad at the combat in the beginning, but luckily the game never punished me too badly so long as I made sure to save often. By the end of the game I felt pretty awesome and could take on anything I felt like assuming I didn't act too dumb, so that was neat. As it stands, I've decided to space out the remaining games in the trilogy with an unrelated game in between them. I feel I need to give them a little breathing room so I don’t get too burnt out on the mechanics.

Currently playing: Chrono Cross