Mass Effect - Mass Garbage

Yeah, I am behind. Bite me.

Mass Effect the perennial Western RPG experience of 2007 (or they would have you believe) was supposed to be a game changer. It was supposed to usher in a new breed of "path" choosing or create endless scenarios for the player to experience hence the name Mass Effect. I do not understand the hype that this game pulled, I do not understand its legion of devout followers, I do not understand how this game escapes the endless hate that Final Fantasy 7 receives daily. This game is honestly terrible in nearly every way possible. Let's review.

Battle System:

If I can praise Mass Effect on one thing it would be the battle system...but I won't. Honestly this was the most tolerable aspect of the game, but also the least praised among fans. The battle system is simple run and gun 3rd person perspective action. You get 4 types of guns Pistol, Machine Gun, Sniper, Shotgun and infinite ammo for everything. The pistol is immediately worthless because you have infinite rounds of Machine Gun ammo and it usually does more damage per shot anyway. The shotgun is very situational and there's few instances where it's useful over the machine gun. The sniper rifle is also VERY situational as 90% of the game takes place in tiny hallways. So...effectively you get one weapon, the machine gun.

You get powers to utilize if you go the Bio route but...really almost no one plays the game like this. Literally they did a statistic on this and only 20% of players EVER opted to go anything but the soldier class. Besides your AI partners normally make for better Bio attackers anyway.

What makes the battle system terrible though is how stupidly easy it is. The AI is dumb as a log, sometimes they don't move or do anything and you can just stand there and shoot them all day. Your partners AI is also stupid and often they'll rush into battle without your say and die immediately. But that's ok because the game is so easy you don't need them. Really no normal enemies ever present a challenge. If you find cover they will never pursue you, they rarely deal effective damage, and your machine gun is accurate enough to pick off all offenders in the area with efficiency. On top of that you have skills that make you even stronger with shield boosting and an ability to just keep shooting and never stop.

The only time you can ever die is when the game decides to be an ass monkey and glitch you. I fought a boss battle who had Bio powers and I was winning consistently, but two times in a row she lifted me and tossed me in some unmanageable area where I could not escape. The character cannot jump, or warp out or anything so I had to reset this BOTH times. The last time I just ran away into a more open area just so the game wouldn't glitch me out again. Wonderful programming.

The most laughably easy parts of the game is when you're in your vehicle. That thing is deadly. You get infinite rocket shots and it nearly always kills everything in one hit...Oh and by the way I played this game on PC, so mouse control improves my accuracy 100%.

Item Management:

I figured I would take a moment on how awful the item management in this game is. I must admit for a long time in the game I was pretty lost on how to use the item screen effectively...then I realized there just wasn't a good way to use it effectively at all. When trying to replace weapons you have collected with better ones it becomes a tedious chore. The menu does not organize what you've collected in some sort of manageable order like most attack or most accuracy, so you have to select EVERY weapon you pick up and compare it to the ONE character you have selected. You have to do this for ALL three characters and that's just one of four weapons. And you pick up a fuck ton of weapons in this game. It's rare you actually get a better one though. But it's consistently annoying to see worse weapons all the time.

What I hate most about this is you have a limited inventory. Eventually you have to delete out or (reduce to omni-gel) every shitty item you get. The worst part though is every time you go to pick up a new item all it shows you is the name of it...So how am I supposed to psychically know if the Avenger 6 is better or worse than the Waveblaster 7? Oh, and my inventory is full right? So I have to go to the inventory, delete something, pick the weapon back up and....oops, it's shit... Waste of time! I hate it so hard.

Music:

There is none...that's what's wrong...

Ok to be fair the music flares up now and then during battle, or maybe on the way to battle but it has a Batman Arkham Asylum problem where it basically hardly ever shows up. But unlike Batman even when it does show up it's not even any good. I was physically startled to hear music in the end credits.

Story:

This is what everyone praises...somehow. I do not understand how this aspect of the game gets praise. The story hardly exists, it's barely there and it's full of holes. Alright, so you are a veteran space marine of some kind moving up the ranks. You go out on a mission with this creepy guy named Saren and presumably he dies in the mission (I think it's been a while since I did the first mission). Later it's discovered he's alive and is the cause of a bunch of evil shit, namely searching out these beacons of untold cosmic horror. No really, your main character touches one of these things and he is imparted the wisdom of untold cosmic horror and the entire game is you figuring out what those images mean...

So you're tasked with having to find and kill Saren and discover why he's being all evil...and what the untold horror is. The main game is about 7 missions long and it takes roughly 10 hours to do it all. Not only can I call this the shortest RPG of all time, but I don't think it even qualifies as one. Oh, but you have 30 to 40 meaningless sidequests to partake in...they can shove it!

***Spoilers***

You track down and kill Saren and stop his evil plan of unleashing the evil machine things. Seriously, that's it. There's an evil band of "unstoppable machines" that live on the outer edge of the galaxy who's sole purpose it is to wipe out all living things in that galaxy and then retreat into hibernation waiting to do it all again. Oh and they are called "reapers," lol get it, do ya get it? But you stop them from even coming through the warp gate thing Saren was trying to open in the first place, so the entire story boils down to you killing one dude. Ok, there is ONE Reaper that remains in the galaxy as a sentry of sorts named Sovereign. But he's a pussy bitch and dies in a cutscene.

So WHY are they unstoppable? The game never says why. It makes no sense as we clearly see one of them go down like a pussy bitch. In Halo their alien thing that wipes out all life makes sense. The Flood is just infinite, they never stop coming. Makes sense why they whoop ass. For a cliche' story like this where machines wipe everything out, this has to be the worst one I have ever heard. It never even plays out, you learn nothing. And at the VERY end your main character says "We have to get ready, the Reapers are coming!" HOW are they coming exactly?? I just fucked up their sentry and closed the gate allowing them access in. How pray-tell are they coming? Did the sentry even have a chance to give word to the other reapers to come? I don't think he did. THIS MAKES NO SENSE!

Game over....

Fuck you game.

Characters:

I saved this for last because I wanted to discuss the "choices" aspect of the game too. First the characters. You get two interchangeable speciesist (racist) human characters male and female. The game lets you decide which one to kill off later but it's meaningless as they're both basically the exact same. Then you get an assortment of alien characters. A spock-like female alien who's super intelligent yet socially awkward (you get to bang her). An alien chick out to check out and collect a bunch of alien technology. You literally hear nothing from this bitch after you get her. I honestly forgot she existed after a while. And two other alien guys one who has a dark brand of justice and the other who's way more down to earth.

Ultimately none of them really matter. The spock alien and one of the humans are the only characters the story likes to focus on, but it's terribly rare. So how is there ANY character development in this game at all? Your character likes to play 100 questions, that's how! He will ask literally anything and everything in this game and respond with your brand of neutral, good, or evil responses. What you say means nothing at all in the end. Nothing changes. In quests your wordy options just decides whether you kill everyone or you don't. In either case the missions get solved one way or another.

But for the character development I couldn't be more annoyed playing 100 questions. What's your favorite shoe? Where do alien babies come from? Do you have a story to tell? He literally asks that once I swear to god. "Do you have a story to tell?" I expected the response to be, "Well Bioware decided that I don't...nope just a worthless NPC right here. Sorry to disappoint." HOW is this good character development? I get the same shit reading the manual which gives the summary on the characters in any other RPG.

What irritates me most of all is your character is described as a seasoned veteran who has been on many other worldly missions right? Ok then why is he asking EVERY alien he comes across about their culture, history, backgrounds, what they do at the Citadel, what is the Citadel, on and on and on. He knows dick! Seasoned veteran? No, seasoned retard.

I get it's for the player's benefit but then WHY have the story make him out to be some weathered warrior if that's the case? Just let him be a newbie so we can be a newbie with him. It detracts from the game when I set out on a mission supposed to be Mr. Know-it-all and I don't know a damn thing about anything. I half expected him to ask a few aliens how they breathe...though he does ask the Spock-chick how they breed (seriously) so I guess that's close enough. And you get a long winded explanation of how they fucking breed with any species they come across...in DETAIL. It's so lame it hurts.

Choices:

Didn't know I'd go on that long about characters so I separated this. I'll make this brief. Choices in this game don't mean dick. You get essentially two of them. Which human do you want to kill and if you want the good ending or bad ending. Other choices in the game boil down to you ending conflicts in either violence or peaceful talks. Sometimes the choices you pick don't make any damn sense and I'll use the last one as a prime example.

Somehow, I was good through the WHOLE fucking game and I managed to pick the evil ending! How I managed to do this I can only leave up to the idiot programmers. The choice is either 1. To protect the Citadel Council (politicians that undermine you at every opportunity in the game) at all costs. Or 2. Kill the reaper as fast as humanly possible to, I believed, save more lives. The evil ending was 2? HOW, WHY??? The council are assholes, worthless alien beings who hate the fuck out of you. Why would I risk more lives to save a group of politicians? WHY? So I didn't, and now I'm evil. OK GAME WHATEVER YOU SAY.

But that's it! Where's this "Mass Effect" they spoke of? Where's the branching paths? For a game with ONLY 7 goddamn main missions you'd THINK they could have made 5 more assuming you made rippling choices in earlier missions actually causing a...oh I dunno... a BRANCHING path!? Of course not.

Conclusion:

The whole game reeks of laziness to me. Why call it Mass Effect, tout the ability to branch out and change things when you never honestly change anything meaningful ever? A game with only 7 or so main missions never even gets time to develop itself. I remember when the game began and I was appointed to kill Saren. Seemed simple enough honestly. I really assumed that would be mission one and then I'd learn all about the evil machine things and fight them. But no the ENTIRE game was just me going to kill ONE evil dude, who by the way was never evil in the first place. Nooooo he's just under mind control! *gasp!* So you never even fight anything worthy of being called a villain in the first place. Lovely.

I got Mass Effect 2 sitting on the back burner and I'll get to it...in 3 years or so I imagine.

*going to take a Mass Poop now*

JRPG's vs Western RPG's

A recent article by legendary Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune discusses the current troubles of the Japanese market and its place in the state of the gaming industry today struck a cord with me and inspired this little piece. Keiji expresses his worries about how Japanese game designers go about making games, and he is worried they are making them "too Japanese." His fear is that Japanese developers are being left behind and are not appealing to all markets as Western developers are innovating and captivating the gaming audience at large.

Keiji's worries are well warranted as these days Western developers have pretty much taken over the gaming industry from Japan on a software level. Games like Halo, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Grand Theft Auto are more household names than Mega Man or Final Fantasy. While the Japanese aren't doing terribly, there is reason to worry.

But the question I guess is, what are Western developers doing right to capture this audience? What are Japanese developers doing wrong? Well the answer is more convoluted, long and boring for this article so instead I wanted to focus on Japanese RPG's and Western RPG's. We'll see the innovation and failures of both.

Western RPG Success:

1. Reaping the Rewards

What games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Oblivion, and to an extreme degree World of Warcraft do very well is create a slew of "fetch quests" for the player. I call this a success because the human mind loves to be constantly rewarded and quickly. Look no further than the success of Pop Cap games like Bejeweled. These Western RPG's are chalk full of tiny fetch quests and maybe 8 main quests. The idea is to get the player to keep playing and reaping small rewards. And they will too.

While I absolutely hate this fact, that's just how people are. They will praise a game like Mass Effect as such a wonderful game when it only has maybe 6 main quests and 30 to 40 little side quests each being no different than the last. Despite the complete lack of attention to the game's story, oh but those 30 to 40 mini quests were just so damn wonderful...

I used to be one of those people. I would play Diablo 2 at all hours of the night simply killing Mephisto over and over and over, hoping to get some magical awesome item. What's worse is after I collected everything Mephisto could possibly drop...I kept doing it. Why would I do this? The addiction of seeing my rewards is why. I'm glad I asked myself this. I haven't touched the game to this day.

2. "Path" choosing

One thing classic JRPG's never did, or never even attempted was giving the player choices. Western RPG's have pretty much always done this, even back in the days of old point and click games. While I still feel these path options are weak at best, only Western developers are actually trying it. People seem to love it too even if the differences are absolutely negligible like Mass Effect. Fallout 3 and Oblivion do better jobs at this though, and you can actually kill off important characters if you want, and even level entire cities. That's about the best I think this "path" choosing will ever hope to get.

The closest JRPG's ever get to this idea is multiple endings. A lot of JRPG's have multiple endings, but how you acquire them never made any damn sense. Most of the time you had to do random things like find the secret sword, or not pay attention to certain character in the main story, or don't die x amount of times, or DO die x amount of times. Western RPG's multiple paths and endings always made sense. Killed the female lead because of a bad choice? Ok bad ending. JRPG logic was more like, didn't buy the female lead flowers at the beginning of the game? Well she turned evil now and burned down the mana tree, too bad for you.

3. Action

Western developers have taken note, turn based combat isn't fun anymore. Or at the very least, those games don't sell well anymore. I can't name any Western RPG that employs turn based combat. Every one of them now is either first person combat or some hybrid of pausing the game to choose a set of actions which will play out as you watch. Everything happens in real time with these games though and that has been a huge success for Western RPG's. I can't tell you how many times I have heard the complaint of turn based systems and how it ruins the "realism."

Japanese RPG's: What they still do well:

1. Story/Pacing

In most cases, JRPG's still have a better handle on character development and spacing out when to employ story elements in their games. I hear the argument all the time that JRPG's only use cookie cutter characters, long swords, emo heroes, bla bla and so on. And while that is largely true, that isn't where my argument comes from, and that has nothing to do with the technical aspect of how a story is presented. For instance, western games like Mass Effect and Fallout 3 spend a lot of time...ignoring the story they set up entirely. Just flat out ignoring it until maybe mid-game and of course the end. But there is usually 10 hour periods where the story doesn't even rear its little head.

That's what Japanese RPG's do far better, they keep the player involved with the plot. They keep up the pace set from the start and characters are constantly evolving and interacting. And of course there are many JRPG's that don't abide by this, but I can't name a single Western RPG that does this at all.

2. Characters

I still believe this is a reason JRPG's are still purchased today. Generally speaking Japanese characters are simply more interesting. Western RPG's are way too into "creating your own character" so they never end up being interesting...ever. From Mass Effect to Oblivion and Fallout 3 the main character of the game is horribly boring and flat. Chrono Trigger's silent protagonist had more character in his little sprite animations than nearly all Western RPG main characters combined.

But what of side characters? Well this is where the argument just becomes opinionated, but I honestly feel there is no difference between the two. I think Western RPG's tend to do a better job at hiding their archetype characters whereas JRPG's shove them in your face. But either way, both genres employ tried and true character types which always results in a band of unlikely heroes out to save whatever it might be.

3. Music

Ok, this one might be heavily opinionated but I can't hum a tune of any Western RPG I have ever played. Oblivion came the closest to having interesting music but it doesn't hold a candle to any JRPG. I honestly feel Japanese developers care about the music score in their RPG's and I feel that is very important to set the mood of the game. Playing through all of Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and many other Western RPG's I barely remember hearing any music at all. I can't see how JRPG's could lose this category at all.

The only issue with this category is I do not believe sales are affected positively or negatively on a good musical score. I do think it gives a boost to the story and atmosphere though so perhaps on some level that helps. I know I have purchased a few RPG's because Yasunori Mitsuda has done the score or Nobuo Uematsu, but I'm sure I am in a small minority.

Conclusion:

It is painfully clear that the successes of Western RPG's outweigh what JRPG's still do well. What also hurts is JRPG's lack of innovation. For American gamers anyway, JRPG's are all the same. They all have save the world plots with character archetypes, big swords, goofy hair, inane convoluted storytelling, and overly complex battle systems. This is where Keiji is worried, lack of evolution. Western developers have discovered what works and what doesn't whereas Japanese developers are still stuck in believing a good RPG for instance absolutely needs a young spunky annoying female character that doesn't wear much clothing.

This is what Keiji is warning about and he is right. Final Fantasy 13 may still have sold rather well, but not nearly as well as it should have. It did noticeably poor in Japan which is a little startling. But it was a bad game through and through. It didn't even do what JRPG's do well either. What is funny is the game was trying to be progressive and captivate a wider audience, but instead all it did was slap the face of hardcore fans by being dumbed down, and ignored by people who still don't care about the series. It pleased no one ultimately.

Personal Thoughts:

I still prefer JRPG's, and I really want to disagree with Keiji. While I understand JRPG's need to be less Japanese to sell well in the states, that is what I enjoy about them. If they can just be themselves and not force in newfangled ideas that they think will work we won't get FF13 ever again. What came of their experimentation was neither Japanese nor Western, it was just plain awful.

What I hope doesn't happen is for JRPG's to stop being JRPG's all together. I can see it happening too. The last thing I want is for every RPG to make me go on meaningless fetch quests for 30 hours and then tell me why the bad guy is evil at the very end of the game so I can kill him...(Mass Effect)

*Stay tuned for a Mass Effect review...I really want to rip that game a new one*